Augh! When signing up for the online world ‘Second Life‘, you have to pick your avatar’s last name from a predefined list. Why – who knows? Bad experience right from the start. I signed up months ago to check the service out, created an avatar, flew around a bit, got bored with it rapidly, and left. Whatever last name I was forced to pick from a list has been long since forgotten. Something vaguely Slavic-sounding.
Today, I wanted to go see past market data on the Lindex currency exchange, to test out my hypothesis that all online worlds are subject to steady devaluation of the currency as the money supply increases. To my surprise, a login is required to see market data. Strange – real currency exchanges are open to the public. Okay, so I go to the log-in page. It asks for my Second Life last name. Uh-oh.
I look around for the ‘forgot my last name?’ link. There isn’t one. Great. The ‘forgot my password?’ link is useless – I know what my password is, and it still wants my Second Life last name. I go to the online help docs. Good, a ‘Problems logging in‘ link. I click on it. It asks me to log in.
Let that sink in. The ‘I can’t login’ page requires you to log in.
Okay, you win, I give up – I’ll go somewhere else.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
When I signed up, I got an email “Welcome to Second Life” that contained my username. If you don’t have that, you could try emailing support@secondlife.com .
True both times. But I shouldn’t *have* to do either of those things. There are some basics of online customer service that are just, well, basic.
“I signed up months ago to check the service out, created an avatar, flew around a bit, got bored with it rapidly, and left.”
Funny, I did the same thing. Then did it a few more times, because I wanted to understand a bit more about this fairly popular game. I don’t get it.
Maybe if I was a programmer and enjoyed building items or skins or widgets I could sell in the game, and then build a mansion or something, that would be interesting? Didn’t seem like the point though. Maybe someone can enlighten me on what I’m missing….even outside of the usability issues you pointed out seems to me they are missing the ball.
Too bad really because they’ve obviously spent a ton of time on the software and visually, they’ve done a good job IMO.
Don’t you just love the forex currency trading ads on the right
Greg – The last name thing annoyed me too. I wanted to choose my own last name but it seems like that was only a feature for those who got in earlier
(??)
John writes: “Maybe someone can enlighten me on what I’m missing”
We just started a group (V)irtual (TO) (R)eality blog called VTOR which plans to answer thes questions and many others. Everybody in our group is new to SL so we are recording our newbie notes and experiences along the way as we try to show the crossover business aspects as we learn and experience them. We also intentionally chose an experimental blog platform to launch this new blog, but may use our own server later.
In answer to your question Greg about the $Linden currency, it actually has gone up in value over the last month, see converting $L to $USD entry here: http://www.blogcharm.com/vtor/4534/First+experience+converting+%24Linden+to+%24USD+to+pay+tier+fees.html
Argh, sorry that my way too long link screwed up your blog formatting. That was really only meant for you, Greg, not the rest.
TD: I take a pretty easygoing view of things when it comes to formatting – don’t worry about it. Many thanks for the link. I will take a closer look later.
I am curious about the exchange rate increase since in theory giving away money for free weekly should be dropping, not increasing the rates. Could be another factor countering this that I don’t know about. Or maybe just an effect caused by a large transaction in a not yet completely liquid market? (Actual investigation will have to wait until after work.)
Yes your theory is correct, but there are definitely mitigating factors. For example, they recently eliminated referral fees for free (AKA basic) members (they used to give $1,000L), see here: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=84713
So now the only referral fees you get paid on are new *paid* members, which is probably how it should have been to begin with anyway. Too easy to game the system with extra free avatar accounts.
Also they axed the Developer Incentives program effective in March and a rumor is brewing that dwell might someday (soon?) be impacted.
So Linden Labs are definitely taking steps to maintain or increase the value of $Linden and making it harder for $L farming to occur.
Since many of our group are interested in running crossover businesses we are of course very curious in how the economics of SL work.
Oops again. Just realized that you will need your SL login for that forum link too
Here is the relevant text of their message quote from Jeska Linden: “Effective today [1/27/2006 12:21 PST], we will be eliminating the $L1000 bonus for Basic Referrals.
The reasoning behind this move is twofold:
1. With the move to a Free model and the elimination of the credit card requirement, it has become increasingly difficult to justify economically
2. There has been a profusion of Referral-farming in recent weeks and we wish to eliminate the negative effect this may have on the L$ market value.”;
There is an entire forum area (powered by vBulletin) which deals with economics. Some pretty wild postings happen there. Some SL Residents are very passionate about maintaining the integrity of the $L.
Ok, my last post on this and then I’ll shut up in the oomments here (more on our VTOR blog). Seems like I misread the graph data, my bad, the $L has in fact depreciated somewhet in the last 30 days. $1USD would buy $270L a month ago. Today it will buy $281L, so it has gotten a little worse.
Since that basic referral change was initiated a week ago, it will be interesting to see if that value goes back the other way. I think if you add that plus the developer incentives going away, you’ll end up with a positive impact on the $Linden.
Hey, I don’t mind active commenters.
The economics forum at Second Life sounds interesting enough that I may have to break down and harrass them for my last name.
Hard to judge what’s got the most effect on the Linden. The whole concept of ‘dwell’ sounds a little iffy to me.
But yeah, if I were making a living off of Second Life, maintaining the value of the currency would be my top priority.
“dwell” is pretty straight forward.
They make money from subscribers. So they want more subscribers. If people build places in the game where people congregate, have a good time, and tell other people that they have to play SL so they can go to this “place” — then more people will sign up for an account.
So it would seem to me, that a good bussiness model would be to set aside a percentage of the monthly subscription fees to encourage people to build “destination” locations in the game. Real world cities do something similiar by providing city funding, or low interest loans to bussinesses that help increase tourest spending.
So if they set aside %2 of the monthly subscription fees (say $10,000 USD for arguments sake.) And you’ve got 140K users, that each spend a 50hrs online (on average) in a month, for 7,000,000 user hours. A way of reasonably rewarding people that build destination properties, would be if your property had 10,000 user hours this month you would get .14% of the $10,000 dwell budget (or $14USD / L$4,000)
Now I’m just guessing a lot of numbers there, but both the concept and the potential reward for both Linden and Users is straight forward.
Good Destination == More Subscribers
Good Destination == $USD for users creating those locations
I’m a visiter in the Second Life world and I’m really hoping to do some building in the future. That’s what the point is for me. I want a place to test out my design skills. I’m not that impressed with the atmosphere so far. It is all junked up in most places. I wish there was a Second Life tour guide or some kind of review of places site. I have wasted a lot of time flying around looking for good stuff. You have to give Linden Labs credit for the free memberships. If you want to look at their site just get a new account. It is really easy to set up.
I did the same thing that you did. Flew around for a bit, then got bored and left. I really don’t get the point either, although I do enjoy making Garrett’s outfit and putting it on a girl^^.
That and it takes far too long for me to build up any kind of cash, so I don’t even bother anymore.
Well, back to my little hidey-hole to play video games…
SL’s first use is as a chat world. Like IRC. People who join worlds in order to do “quests” or “combat” get frustrated fast in SL, because they don’t know how to find the SL combat areas, and they don’t know how to set their own goals.
When visiting SL for the first time, think of it as a chatroom, instead of another venue for shooting things. Next step up from that is deciding what you want to use the platform for. I first used it for chat/social. Then I used it for visual exploration (waterfalls, forests, caves, graveyards, zen gardens etc). Then I used it for building (creating my own toys, houses, neighborhoods, cities). These days I mostly use it for commercial purposes (running stores, malls, selling products).
When people write in forums that they tried SL and it was boring, it always reminds me of my mom. When we were little kids and would whine about being bored (in spite of being in a houseful of toys), Mom would say “this world isn’t boring — YOU’re being boring.”