The First Hour in Second Life
M Linden, the new CEO is apparently revisting the "first hour" issue for newbies, since that's where they lose so many people. And small wonder. The Lindens as they are don't really want to keep them. When they are ready to change from within, then they will retain customers. They aren't changed from within yet. That is the Tao of Linden. In order to change, you must change. The grid monkeys don't want more people, they will create too much of a load. Billing has enough to do. Community Lindens are busy trying to tamp down and control the upstarts that they have now, without need for fresh challenges, and so on. When the Lindens really want people and really change, they will find the rest follows.
Meanwhile, few can resist trying to stick their oar in on this subject, and I'm no different.
1. Степ да степ кругом. So the first thing that has to be changed as I've said a million times is the orientation islands. See the Russian steppe? They have to look like that. Flat. Not International House of Pancake Island flat. But, flattish. With the rolling hill and tree part happening way up in the distance. No tiny landing area where people land on your head, that is SO annoying psychologically even though your little avatar head shouldn't feel anything. Making people land on that weird Myst-like scene only gets them Pysted. Falling down winding paths. Veering off cliffs. Falling into canals. Banging their heads on the temple ceiling in order to finally see the "teleport the hell out of here" sign. Good Lord! Make it stop! So, make people land on a lag-free, non-challenging geographical landscape that doesn't make it hard to move forward.
2. Billboards. Yes, I've said this a million and three times, too. Stop the aversion to commerce, the insanity about ugly ads, when tasteful, normal, fun billboards, kiosks and signs of all types can be made and *rented out for tier payments* or auctioned or lotteried off or auction or SOMETHING that not only help solve the dearth of useful ad space (ad farms are a water-water-everywhere-but-not-a-drop-to-drink problem) but be useful and fun to newbies. Click on this club and learn to dance! Click on this island and find your dream home! Click on this class in session now! Click on that live music! Click on this newbie skills island! Click on that hocky game! Etc. Let residents with venues they are willing to have accept newbies buy the ads and help the problem the normal way, with the market. Let them essentially rent the newbie stream in part if they can handle it. Like I said, this is *internal change*, Lindens. Commerce, capitalism, sales, advertisements = good. Communism, admonitions, forced labour, re-education camps, propaganda, freebies = bad. That means no select resident stores and their lame freebies, keep it out, let them buy advertising the normal way.
3. Solve appearance fear quickly. The biggest problem people can face is fear of looking like a newbie and not figuring out how to get appearance to work. It is AWFULLY clunky at first especially the hair. Have boards the instantly drop outfits on you the second you click. Here's where residents wanting to shine should be giving freebies or renting space and the Lindens should rotate through literally hundreds of outfits a week through some automatic system, it would be fun. They can always change quickly.
4. Stop sequestering newbies *and* allowing the welcome areas turn into hangouts for asocialized lamerz and griefers. End orientation as a sanitized de-licing quarantined experience like immigrants getting off the ship in the 1890s. Let them mix normally in public places they've selected off the billboards, or in the welcome areas, but have Lindens (not resident made police or deputized mentors) police the areas and not be hesitant to break up hang-out groups filling up infohubs with infestations of idiocy. A no loitering/obstructing new user experience concept should be developed and implemented just as much as it needs to be to set the tone. People forming large hang-out groups to block up welcome areas and heckling, harassing, and nuisance-casing newbies need to be told firmly to move along.
This isn't putting SWAT teams to take away users' rights blah blah. It's preventing an obvious tragedy of the commons problem that has grown only worse with liberal guilt paralysis and heeding the ravings of extremists like Laetizia. Welcome areas are for adaptation of newbies, not homeless oldbies to hang out. You notice they never go to new areas when they become available. It's like the problem of chatting in a group. If you make a special chat group and tell everyone "Get out of the rentals group, but go chat in the chat group," they won't. Why? Because they seek not rights, and aren't sincere about socializing which they could be doing in nicer and less laggy locations, they just want *attention*. Break their ties and get them moving.
Newbies began to be quarantined because the Lindens couldn't face their hippie liberal guilty consciences and flick stupid griefers off the server as needed by a simple, TOS-specific concept: "Community Stands No. 6: Disturbing the peace". You don't get to stand in the middle of Grand Central Square and shout "motherfuckas" on a spamming device a million times or run a sound clip of somebody screaming and Bat Man a million times, so why would you get to do this in SL? You don't. Stop fussing. Flick from server.
5. Now, for what you DO NOT inflict on people in the first hour:
o vehicles -- nobody should have to be forced to learn how to drive anything or try to ride things because they don't work, are hard, especially to get seated in, and don't show SL at its best
o weapons
o prim facts, prim sizes/shapes, prim mechanics, building, scripting, texturing -- these are all 10-percenter skills irrelevant to the broad masses, ditch them for specialized islands and classes -- end the sandbox effect totally, it only leads that 10 percent who do arrive to annoy the rest
o HUDs -- stupid, geeky idea. People have enough time trying to figure out the screen, especially if they are not gamers, leave them alone, don't make them have to pull buggy and slow-loading and confusing junk on their heads
o puzzles -- please, nobody should have to remember words, click on things and interact with them, or have special little geeky learning experiences or have to buy anything in that first hour -- it's just too stupid and clunky -- leave your games at the door please, gamer geeks, you're not helping to retain people in *this* world
What you DO need to offer:
o how to move -- big giant video or billboard (video may not work for people at first, so billboard preferable) showing walk and fly -- if people can have the fun of flying early on, they may get to like virtuality
o how to talk to others - many people stand in mute silence, or get engrossed in fixing appearance, because they don't get the message very early on to right-click on somebody else and select IM, or go to the left hand lower corner of your game screen and CHAT.
o how to click on things and get notecards or listen to chat -- some of the things in the orientation environment will work this way -- it's not ideal, as it would be better if everthing just chatted when clicked with more space than "talk script" gives you or notecard-giver can achieve, given the nerfing of the UI that happened whereby you are asked if you really want to get that notecard, which makes some people scared to click -- people need to be told to click on everything, and press KEEP if an info card
o how to SEARCH -- if they are going to want to look for other people or events or activities on the event list they may have specifically come to see, they need to get to this immediately. Search can be hard at first because the button isn't visible. Move it to the top center on the next UI and be done wit it. Frankly, one of the biggest mistakes, psychologically, I think the Lindens made was when they changed the FIND button to the SEARCH button so that people could no longer come with an expectation of FIND, but instead got more cluttery returns on a geeky SEARCH than ever before.
o how to buy things and move things out of inventory to the world, and send them to other people
I think that's more than enough for the first hour, I'd even pare it down. Nobody needs to be told to press F1 to get a knowledge base that may lag them out. Nobody needs to be told useless facts and shown giant maps of SL that they can't focus on.
It seems to me if there is a way to make the first log-on default to 64 and all the lowest and dumbest settings for visibility, there could then be a lesson at the end of the runway that says, here, want to have greater visibility? try this...and then walk through steps like local lighting, etc.
No one should have to be pawing through the innards of their UI in order to try to move because they don't have the right or a low-end graphics card.
Do you need mentors? well, not really. I think you can have all the helpers and mentors at the places at the other end of the billboards clicked on, with the portal scripts, that open up a map and take you to the place where the landmark you put in the prim goes to. Orientation island shouldn't have floor walkers, it should have cops, and these cops should be in uniform, and be Lindens.
I agree with your analysis 100%.
As for appearances, why have those default avatars at all? I know it will probably hurt someone's feelings to know that nobody wants the results of their work but thats just how it is. There are plenty of free avatar kits that now include the Eloh skins and decent hair and clothes. Why not accept the demise of the nerdy little avatars nobody wants and allow people to select from billboards what they want and walk them through putting it on?
As for people hanging around these areas, unless they are a certified instructor present and instructing there is no reason for anyone but new residents to be present. Deal with this in a mature fashion. I.e.; you can't enter if you are over a week old unless you are an instructor (no not mentors that program has ethics problems rendering it the wrong solution).
As for the bizarre behavior of LL in general... I think its time to make salary compensation be tied to performance and customer satisfaction. If the residents of SL are losing money then so should the staff and executives of LL. Want results? Tie compensation to performance. This, of course, means the easily gamed love machine has to go along with the "tao".
When the easy ride is over the deadwood will leave and go getters willing to work for their money and really care about the product will replace them.
Posted by: Ann Otoole | May 11, 2008 at 03:35 AM
Another complementary approach to "The first hour issue" is to provide a virtual guide to every newbie. These guides could help people use SL, discover interesting places, and meet other people.
That's what we are developing at BraveNewBot with 24/7 available bots (http://www.bravenewbot.com).
Imagine replacing most written billboards by embodied interaction with a virtual receptionist or salesman. Imagine using bots to do resident surveys inworld with questionaries. Bots may provide a better way to orientate users as well, using prior knowledge of the world, statistics and surveys to give the right tip to he right resident.
Posted by: Henri Morlaye | May 11, 2008 at 05:28 AM
Good post. I'm glad M is thinking about the "first hour" problem (do you have a URL for where he said that?); Orientation Island is really hideous these days. (Is there still a temple? I remember that from my first OI experience in 2006, but last time I ran an alt through the awful new OI I don't remember seeing one.)
Henri: Is there any reason to think that embedding a new-user-help program in a pretend person is really helpful in any way? In my limited experience, things that look like people but have nothing behind them but some Eliza loop are offputting and annoying. An Eerie Valley problem...
Posted by: Dale Innis | May 11, 2008 at 10:50 AM
No, I hate the idea of bots as greeters. They do a terrible job where they are deployed now in world, usually in the form of some
follow-fairy chasing you around the store and asking you if you need help and telling you to click to see stuff etc. Banish the little buggers, I say.
You need live human beings to interact with, with sense and empathy. And no should be infantilized and made to feel so helpful that they get "their own personal guide", real or artificial. The key is to help people over the first half hour-hour to get them empowered to do things on their own to build up their confidence, not make them forever reliant on AI or "live helpers".
Endorsing bots like this endorses the entire bot concept, which I refuse to do. There are no good bots at this time. They are all exploitative and insensitive and oppressive. I think fears of them or beliefs that they are everywhere are vastly exaggerated -- I just don't see them in the large numbers claimed -- but I think the basic premise that bots need to be regulated is a very sound one. The laissez-faire exploitative attitude that both Lindens and their pets are showing to this now is outrageous and HARRIBLE -- it's so typical of their arrogance and insensitivity, and why we really need to fear people like them taking over. It's not bots you have to fear -- it's their arrogant, oppressive, insensitive handlers.
Tekkies like to pretend bots are somehow mere tools, mere good science in operation bringing good things to life like General Electric. But bots are visible, tangible manifestions of *bad* will -- the selfish overreaching will of tekkies trying to control other people -- the few trying to control the many for their own selfish purposes.
Social media is supposed to be about many to many and forming groups and networks with openness and ease, not having a few Pinkies and Brains run everything against people's will and seeding bots everywhere. They don't get to identify "the good" in such a unilateral and selfish way.
Bots should be marked as such and purchased/licensed so that they do not become resource hogs. By forcing people to pay more for them as they use resources, we can end this bot-herding that drives up traffic falsely or drains down camping or just plain harasses people like war.
Bots are stupid. They're like that dumb girl on Virgin Mobile or that even dumber one on Verizon that pretends she understands your speech, and keeps saying in fake-natural mode "I'm sorry...could you repeat that?" until finally your scream of OPERATOR! OPERATOR!!!1 or CUSTOMER CARE REPRESENTATIVE!!!!!!!! gets you out of the retarded loop. AI is not developed enough to inflict it on real people in a setting like this.
The other fake thing about all this Linden stuff -- and some of the would-be helpers -- is the idea of "exploration," that people are there to behave like Indiana Jones or T.H. Lawrence. Oh, I think *some* are -- the more already-educated and intelligent and adapted people. My infohub work is devoted to that next tier of people now willing to go to the next level to learn how to set up a group, buy land, earn money, make a shop, etc.
But for the orientation, I think exploration has to be simplified. People do not want to be labelled tourists, stick out like tourists, and be told to put on sunscreen and pith helmets and go explore.
In fact, quite a few are there merely to explore finding a mate, or if they are librarians, trying to find the conference their boss is making them go to. They aren't interested in flying around looking at Chichinitza replications -- yet. It's too overwhelming.
Dale, I don't have a URL but it's somewhere in the interviews with him perhaps on Virtual News or some place, Google it.
As far as I know there is still a temple as you land, but you can opt to go to Help Island from Orientation Island where there is no temple. Perhaps they've changed it, but no matter, my point still holds in spades, and there's no need to be deliberately needling and contrarian -- you are not a valid interlocutor, and need to study up that "don't be a dick" page again on the Internet. The Lindens DO force people to go to Miramare now, most likely the better to sell their Bay City lots.
And there people face walls and canals to fall into and buildings to bang on to -- I've heard complaints. I think the idea that everybody is just dying to go be an extra on the set of West Side Story is another one of the geek myths.
I have an old city setting myself, and I myself fret about this issue, and try to figure out -- is it better to have them land in a relatively small square where they will at least talk to each other? Or place them in a huge plaza where they may not talk to each other? So I opted for the former. The stairs are not steep and are wide so they don't fall off at first.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 11, 2008 at 12:02 PM
Another point maybe worth discussion: when I brought up the horrors of OI last on Twitter, someone pointed out that there are lots of *other* first-hour experiences, based on the third-party-created portals that people can choose to come in through. I don't know the details of them, but maybe to some extent the Lindens are looking at having the first-hour experience created by others? Don't know if I think this would be a good or a bad thing...
Posted by: Dale Innis | May 11, 2008 at 12:29 PM
#1 issue:
A "home" with a little privacy.
True, it's anathema to the land market, but basically, leaving orientation island basically puts you out onto the virtual street.
Yep, there's all of society down there, rich builds, people with friends... and you, homeless new you... with a new user experience of... homelessness and lack of any direction! Oh, and you are not even yourself yet, and you have no privacy... great start! I remember "hiding" at cloud altitude and trying to fix my avatar.
There have been some disastrous, Shermerville-style experiments that almost worked. Very noble in concept, but still too complex. Basically new people need just a little spot, no prim allotment - where they can go and work on "being themselves" and explore from this most simplistic of bases.
Infohubs are still too homeless-y.
How will this work? Well, obviously no one can deed even a zero prim apartment to every new signup that typically vanishes.
Maybe they need to click 'keep my new player apartment for another week' or something; or 'sign me back in there, I've got nothing and it's been a year' sort of thing.
I could see twenty-thirty sims of minimally-furnished single room apartments doing the job; pffft, give them 15 prims or something while at it.
Once familiar with even a minimal home, they will make friends with their 'generation' in the close quarters, and move on soon enough.
Massive, massive retention boost right there. If there were a logistically easy way to do it, I just might offer it myself.
Posted by: Desmond Shang | May 11, 2008 at 02:42 PM
That's a great idea, Desmond. I wish again that the Lindens would let the free market take care of that. Many of us have either very low-cost or free newbie homes, but they need constant advertising to read the newbies.
I am very conscious of that need for little houses or booths for changing because people really do get self-conscious as if they were in Filene's Basement, so I do have houses with rooms on the infohub I manage, and the enterprising can also fly up to towers where there is more privacy.
But I've always thought that if every premium logged you on instantly to a little yard and house you could really rock.
Ann, I'm thinking that when the newbie just lands fresh on that non-accessible Orientation Island, it would be good to keep that open only to the newbies themselvse arriving and Lindens. I would keep out all these mentors and volunteers, too. I'd completely get rid of Help Island though, the one that is still a sequestered pen. I think it's stupid, a time suck for any help thrown at it, a needless quarantine, ineffective, an merely a corral to hold newbies in to expose them to the mentors' own content they wish to sell, the freebie outfits, houses, and socializing into commerce circles. I would substitute all of that with more normal venues that the newbie himself picks off the big billboards, like, go to this club, go to this concert, go to this fun medieval forest, whatever.
But I wouldn't keep them locked up anywhere else. And I'd be open to having even that initial landing pad be open if on the sign-up sheet you had a wider and clearer array of choices of venues than what is now the case.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 11, 2008 at 04:08 PM
I recently gave birth to an alt (with a confusingly similar name... Tammi Honig... say hi if you see her wandering around!) at the ben & Jerry's birthing area. They have made the birting experience very simple, maybe too smiple. You pick up a Ben & Jerry's T shirt and a not-too-terrible skin and off you go. Took about 3 minutes to get her looking semi-acceptable.
The basically stick to teaching you 4 things... how to say something in chat, how to buy something (for zero linden), how to use the appearance sliders, and how to tint your skin (which actually is not too useful in Real Second Life because most skins are non-modify.)
Posted by: Tammy Nowotny | May 11, 2008 at 04:50 PM
And why the need for police on the OI? Because people are creating new accounts and taking up residence on OI to spam their stuff and try to brainwash new arrivals. People that do this should be analyzed to see what other accounts they are associated with and all of those accounts dealt with in a clear cut manner that makes it really stupid to attempt to reside on any OI.
So there is a need for police in the OIs and welcome areas. but police/people can be bought off. so who will police them? LL does not exactly have a solid track record with ethics.
Posted by: Ann Otoole | May 11, 2008 at 06:16 PM
@ Ann, if the SL "police" are well paid and are Lindens, then the chances of corruption will be nill. Yes, "well paid" is subjective, I agree.
I think that Orientation Island and Help Island do need policing---BUT NOT BY AN ORGANIZED POLICE FORCE. LL can, and does, monitor these islands anonymously and much more effectively than a uniformed force could.
Posted by: | May 12, 2008 at 01:18 AM
The above comment (@ Ann) without the signature is mine, Razrcut Brooks. It seems that if I do not type my comment within a very short time span, the comment gets posted without my name-even though I am signed into TypeKey.
Posted by: Razrcut Brooks | May 12, 2008 at 01:23 AM
I agree that the first hour should be simple but it should not be so simple that we do not address more than what I call "the rudimentary five" - chat, movement, search, appearance and vehicles.
I'd prefer to see vehicles eliminated from the first hour in favor of just teaching residents how to sit and stand up. It is a very quick and easy lesson that we do not teach at all.
There are a few others that we absolutely SHOULD teach and I will not go into all of them here. But, I will put it to you to think through some of the more common tasks that you take for granted each day. As simple as these tasks may seem to you as a seasoned resident, think about the impact that NOT knowing them has on a new resident that is anxious to explore but somewhat bewildered.
I will post one example here for you to consider. I will skip over probably the most obvious example of something that we do not teach which is "opening a box" and touch on "highlighting transparent". This is important to teach when you consider that many residents are going to rush to purchase some of the objects referred to with disdain above.. guns, personal attachments, etc. That is the reality of the situation and sanitizing that reality is where part of the failure in the orientation process occurs.
A resident that purchases a gun or other attachment that has the capability to become transparent is quite often shocked that the item they have just purchased has gone missing and they cannot find it. Put yourself in their shoes. Surely they think to themselves,"I am in a strange environment that I can still barely navigate and I have just debated with myself over spending real money to buy virtual money in order to buy a virtual product; a product that I now cannot find and cannot use because I have lost it and have no idea where it went. By the same token, my real money went along with it. This environment may not be for me. I think I will log out and never come back".
There is nothing far-fetched about that scenario. You know it happens and I know it happens. It is a situation that can be addressed quickly and easily. It is a three minute lesson at most. So why don't we teach it at the get go?
Another large part of the failure in redesigning the orientation process is bringing in persons that know absolutely nothing about that process to fix it. Go to the people that know! Go to the people that answer these questions over and over and over again each day! It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if a question with a very simple answer is asked persistently over the course of 4-5 years that it is a question that should be addressed with a quick lesson at orientation.
How do I dance/How do I stop dancing? Go to the people that used to man the LiveHelp channel and ask them how many times a day THAT question shot across the screen! Why are we still dependent upon volunteers to answer such a question when it can be slapped on a prim, read and understood in nothing flat?
I can go on with examples and I will, but not here. I will work to find them a home in the orientation process somehow because killing that learning curve benefits all residents.
On the issue of persons creating alts to spam the OIs, I must say that I have never seen a case where that is not dealt with swiftly and I am on the OIs A LOT. The Lindens do a damn fine job there.
I agree with Ann that the content of the SPAM should be reviewed and the benefactor be subject to review. Only if it is found that the accounts are in cahoots should any action be taken against another account.
I also agree with Prokofy that the OIs should be easy to navigate. There should be no challenge posed by terrain until you are asked to fly.
There is nothing wrong with advertisements on the OIs but I think those advertisements should be tasteful and non-obtrusive. They should not be so flashy and busy that they disrupt the orienation process. They should not "push" a product or service at anyone, rather they should be welcoming and encouraging. Whether in a virtual world or not, kindness and manners go a long way. I do not see anything wrong with those advertisements offering an experience for new residents as Prokofy suggested but I think that any landmarks to those areas should be delivered via some sort of delay in order to allow the resident to finish the orientation lessons.
Advertisements should (must) be placed on rotation to avoid any sort of favoritism and advertisers should be reviewed to make sure their businesses are welcoming to new residents and that good communication and customer service are to be expected. That is not too much to ask.
Of course, in order to make that system fair, a real live person must monitor it. It is not something that we can automate. We are deeply entrenched in the computer age but that does not mean that we should shun the fact that computers are stupid until we tell them what to do and there are some things we can't teach them to do because they just aren't smart enough yet. We cannot expect to obtain useful data from asking a computer who is making a solid effort in providing good customer service. Numbers add up to nothing where that is concerned. So what you do to get around that is place a warm butt in a soft chair to take care of things and make the process better, brighter and successful.
Throw a few bucks at real people to build the community. It is important. New residents when welcomed and encouraged properly rent our land, buy our clothes and furniture, become interested in our art, become inspired to improve their education and enroll in a class. They find likeminded residents to discuss their griefs and illnesses with. They find strength and use that newfound strength to uplift others. They bring their imaginations and skills with them and challenge us with new creations and ideas... and they do it all without borders or boundaries. It doesn't matter if you are black, green, blue or white, a furry, a dragon or a human.. fat, tall, skinny or short, in a wheelchair, on a walker, visually impaired or deaf. You are alive and somewhere in your imagination lives all of your hopes, dreams and aspirations. Everyone you meet, regardless of education or background and whether you get along with them or not has those wonderful things inside them. This is one of the most valuable lessons a person can realize and it should be within this realization that we welcome new residents. They matter.
Posted by: Dirk Talamasca | May 12, 2008 at 05:24 AM
Dirk,
Truth in advertising for you here, and an explanation for some of your self-serving comments: you run Orientation Station, which is one of the privileged stations that is on the splash screen now, so that as part of the inner winners' circle willing to suck up to Lindens and run the gauntlet of making APIs and registering APIs, you have essentially gotten cut into the newbie stream for free.
As I've noted before, it's important that the Lindens end that system of insiderism and favouritism, and just make a normal registration system that any company can sign up for by fitting a grid of basic criteria, and either buy, or go into a rotation queue, for that precious spot.
I don't know if you have ever visited the infohub I have developed, part of the old resident-developed hubs that came not from currying favour, but by resisting the Lindens destruction of the telehub system, and insisting on some kind of viable replacement, if not a buyout. I opted not to take the buyouts many telehub malls took, but instead, ended up submitting a proposal which was eventually accepted for redevelopment.
In the first few steps of the instructions I have, you find "sit down" as the basic concept. I am constantly trying to refine everything I do in business and at this infohub from the perspective of how hard it is to do SL, not from the comfortable oldbies perspective.
As for opening boxes, well, sure, we all know that's important. But a lot of products now don't need dragging out of inventory and going into edit mode as they used to so it's not an immediate first-hour skill -- this can be debated, and your mileage may differ.
As for highlight transparent, I totally disagree about the weapons. There is a misleading concept that there is some sizeable population of weapons users in SL. There isn't. Rather, there is a very determined and aggressive minority of *scripters* and *geeks* making and selling weapons as businesses who wish to keep this perspective alive and of course keep the gun trade alive.
The overwhelming majority of the population isn't interested in using weapons, playing war games, or -- especially! -- being bothered by the gun freaks.
As for highlight transparent, that is a skill needed at times to place your bits, sure. However, that's an example of what I mean by guiding people to venues where they acquire the skills they need precisely because they are hugely motivated by wanting to do something. So when they get to the prim dick store, the manufacturer of the prim dick will help them figure out highlight transparent on the spot or in instructions or in customer service WHEN they are ready to hear it because suddenly, it's very practical. They are NOT ready to hear it in the first hour.
I could get them ready to hear it by having graphic displays, but the infohubs are PG.
Vehicles are utterly stupid. Utterly.
I totally disagree with this infantilizing and pre-digesting food for newbies implied in "saving newbies" from advertising. Nobody "saves' the newbies to New York City from the advertisements in Grand Central Station. Please. These people coming into SL are merely other sophisticated adults like yourself with high-end computers and DSL lines and disposable time. They are vastly adapted to having ads pushed at them from their high-chair days. They are fully capable of looking over offerings and clicking or not, and not being forced to follow some idiot social engineer's script for orientation happening first.
I guarantee you will have a higher retention rate if you simply put out signs with options that people can easily chose and click on. In fact, I notice other worlds have none of the preciousness and qualms about this that SL does.
The signs can be purchased or rotated, but I hesitate to demand "tasteful" because I know with the NPR Net Nannies that run LL, any incitement to further be "tasteful" than they already are means nothing but Sesame Street would ever be advertised.
Taking care of newbies is hard work. People's eyes are bigger than their stomachs on this at times. I don't think there are an overwhelming number of people willing to advertise on OI or HI to get the newbie windfall.
But I do think this has to be pried loose from the LL FIC circle or retention will continue to be abysmal.
This means that anyone who wants to take care of newbies and has space, time, and staff should not be required to jump through the API hoop -- that should be optional.
EVERYTHING now hinges on a very fussy, very controlling, very hysterically power-controlling person or persons and their script on OI. I've talked about this many, many times.
Currently, this script is run on the tekkie-wiki "randomizer" concept, plus the tekkie-FICy -- "send to my friends" concept -- the Miramare portal script.
What happens when you press on the board with the option to leave HI, you are randomly delivered a landmark to one of probably a hundred venues by now (I haven't counted them all -- there are at least 40 I believe). My infohub is among them as are other resident hubs.
That means that due to the laws of random generation, the same infohub can be generated 20 times in a row; other infohubs may never generate at all that day. A cursory look at traffic any day of the week will show the effect of this idiocy. Traffic is partly a function of how much people want to come back to their home point, but it's also a function of this idiot script.
When I complained over and over about this, because it was not load balancing and seemed stupid, because it wasn't dynamic and responding to real time loads, either, I was told by Blue Linden, well, we don't have time to change this and script this.
So as I've explained before, I asked Ordinal Malaprop if she could take the existing randomizing and portal scripts that we had too in the infohub and somehow make them serialize. She helpfully did this in like an hour. I dubbed this the Optimal Newbie Serializer or some such vaunted impressive-sounding name and put it in a pretty prim and set the perms open and send it to Blue. Whereupon he lauded it but never did anything with it because Torley, or Philip, or whoever the dog in the manger is on that script out there, simply wouldn't hear of it!
I gather that the Lindens do not have the technical capacity (this seems impossible, but I'm told this) to load balance dynamically by having a system that observers all welcome sims and assigns newbies on the basis of what space is available *for those opting to leave help island for the mainland*, i.e. chosing an action inworld and getting a response.
This seems amazingly weird to me, given that those coming in are dynamically assigned and load balanced to hundreds of numbered OIs -- are they not?
So...what's up? perhaps Economic Mip or someone could explain.
So several things are possible, simple, and cost free to improve the "get off help island" experience:
1. Make a serializer script that goes through a list of landmarks, not randomly, to avoid load imbalance
2. Add to that list of landmarks any venue willing to meet a few simple criteria (either open 24/7, staff, willingess to help newbies OR regularly-maintained self-paced tutorials as in existing infohubs)
3. Check occasionally through random testing, user surveys, alt walkthroughs etc how they are doing.
I agree that live people need to be put into the system, but I think the venues should take care of that in a free market, and there should be far less use of the mentors system -- it doesn't work, is corrupt, and inept.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 12, 2008 at 10:09 AM
I mean, obviously, for number one:
*Make the decision to USE the existing serializer script or one like it to serialize through the list of venues.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 12, 2008 at 10:14 AM
By the way, as I've also said numerous times, before the Lindens added the Miramare fete board, Mirare routinely had the least traffic. That's because people just didn't like the sterile urban setting it landed them in.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 12, 2008 at 10:15 AM
My candidate for basic skill that contributes to a good experience is camera control by using Alt + left mouse button.
Every person I have ever helped learn camera control has been very appreciative. As if they could fly freely but never realized it. It makes life easier.
If you see a new person walking from texture to texture and waiting for them to resolve into something recognizable, do that person a big favor and help them learn Alt Zoom.
Posted by: Corcosman Voom | May 12, 2008 at 04:27 PM
Well, the positive side is that M is looking into this. It's a start. How exactly he's doing that remains a mystery; I hope that at least he looks into two things: how other platforms deal with the issue, and how some 3rd party sites in SL get things right (even if they might not be perfect!).
I agree with all your points (in fact, they're pretty much the types of guidelines that were being used for "private" OIs, although a little less emphasis was placed on signs and boards — which can load slowly to be readable — and a bit more on chat, which, as you so correctly point out, is far more important than what LL offers at the current OIs) except, of course, for one: who will deal with the greeting?
Currently, Linden Lab has no budget to have an army of a few hundreds Liaisons (even low-paid ones) to attend to all the OIs, 24/7, and speaking 30 or 40 different languages. They've crowdsourced the community for that. Oh, sure, from the thousands of Mentors around, only a few hundreds actually do some regular work, and they're humans as well, and as prone to fall for the drama as anyone else. They're neither better nor worse than any other resident; they just get the special "license to talk first to newbies" granted by LL. And there is, indeed, some control; just not 24/7, and not all cases can be dealt with efficiently.
There is also a huge difference between "small" environments (ie. less than a million registered users) and the huge horde of mainstream users that register for SL. I'm quite limited in the number of virtual worlds I can connect to, but here are some that worked on my Mac:
MOOVE: like Desmond suggested, you start on your own home and can play around, first by tweaking your avatar (it works rather well!) and secondly by exploring your own home. There are no greeters, no "path" to walk, no people to interact with. In fact, the few times I've been around in MOOVE I never saw anyone else! But the interface is quick to learn and you do a pretty good job of playing around — in your own home.
vSide: it has the advantage that it's incredibly limited in terms of what you can do anyway. There is no real notion of "orientation". You can only do a few things: chat/emote, walk around, buy things on shops, listen to music. You're dropped in the middle of the action without any kind of orientation whatsoever. The interface is easy enough to understand how it works, and there are always lots of people around to ask for questions. I never saw a vSide representative; people just help each other, usually happily chatting. There is not much to see anyway.
IMVU: This is a virtual environment where the focus is totally on chatting and buying clothes. Creating your avatar is as easy as creating a Yahoo avatar (and as fun), and when you're dropped in-world, someone is randomly pinged to do some chatting with you. I understand that if you chat for about 15 minutes, you get some "points" which will advance you towards a higher "level". So everybody's a mentor, because of those "points". The chatting cannot be completely irrelevant or superficial, or the newbie will simply disconnect before the 15 minutes are over. So you have to cleverly engage them to make them be in-world for at least those 15 minutes. And the major things can be learned in that time — at least chatting, emoting, and buying clothes are pretty much covered. Again, there is no "elite force of Mentors" — anyone can greet newbies for some "points", and it's not unusual for you to teleport (or whatever the equivalent in IMVU is) the newbie to "your place" to continue chatting there.
A Tale in the Desert: This is a very small MMORPG with some building ability. I was attracted to it because it supported the Mac (yay!) and because it featured something very cool: a certain level of "democracy". At some stage in your virtual life, you can start getting support from other players to change the rules and ask the developers for some feature changes. Getting support is not easy (or the rules would change every day!), and it requires several months of gameplay to reach that point. In fact, things take too long to learn. It's a game; and like many games, the "orientation island" takes several hours to complete. After four hours, with lots of help with local Mentors (yes, they have them as well), I still didn't manage to complete the orientation, so I gave up — although the "democratic" concepts are very appealing to me, it seems that it requires far too long to progress along the game to come to the interesting parts.
ActiveWorlds (at least some of them) have a pretty much SL-esque orientation area. There are lots of ads around — for both in-world things and real world ones. Orientation is also provided by other users who have a special status and special "powers" (like booting you out if you mention Second Life!). I never tried it for very long, though, so I can't remember how easy it was to figure out. The "mentors" can be quite annoying, but I'm sure there are a few nice people around as well :)
I don't remember if there was any orientation in There.com (and I can't use it any longer anyway), and both Kaneva and Twinity never loaded for me, so I'm afraid I'm quite limited in the experiences I made.
In none of these platforms you have company reps doing the orientation.
So, back to SL. It's clear that the current model does not work — if it worked at all! Having seen at least three generations of OIs/WAs, I can only see them becoming worse and worse over time — but, on the other hand, people are much nastier these days than they were back in 2004 ;) I agree that there is no "perfect" solution, but some things would definitely help: a SL set to the minimum settings, for instance, would go a long way to fight lag. I like both the idea of "flatland" and getting your own home when logging in for the first time. Engagement with other users — through chat — should come as early as possible in the orientation. If there is nobody around, you should at least learn how to chat to activate devices. A HUD-based experience simply doesn't work. I'd welcome a hired workforce to do the orientation, but that's impossible for LL to sustain in terms of budget — the best they can do is to encourage more third parties to launch their own orientation areas (and have them pay for their helpers!). There is also a huge difference in expectations. An university researcher, a lawyer attending a conference, a student coming for ESL classes — all these require completely different orientations, and most certainly they have no patience to deal with drama and griefers from people who have too much time free and a nasty attitude. There is also the issue of the casual user — people should get the basics of SL in 15 minutes, not an hour — and it's really pointless to "force" them to learn how to build in their orientation. You pointed out very correctly that only 10% of all users might have some interest in creating content — and these will definitely have a lot of time to do that after orientation. There is no point in showing what SL does *worst* — like weapons, vehicles, and other similar things that are used by such a minority of specialised users that it's insane to burden the newbies with that.
In my mind, all orientation should always be a clever mix of self-orientation and interaction with the fellow newbies (if there are any around), with a way to call for some help from "veterans", if needed. Most people that log in to SL can pretty much figure out things on their own, they don't need so much hand-holding as LL thinks they need — specially when dealing with the average SL user's age slot, which is 30+, not 13+ like on some games.
Posted by: Gwyneth Llewelyn | May 13, 2008 at 02:41 AM
rofl, Gwyn, do the ActiveWorlds greeters really boot people who mention SL? Inferiority complex much? :)
Posted by: Dale Innis | May 13, 2008 at 09:03 AM
Gwyn, you and your apologetics for the Lindens!
You don't need an army -- and budget for an army -- of Lindens covering 100s of welcome areas. That's absurd. Any good security system knows how to create the sense of presence and ubiquity without having necessarily to lay the boots on the ground -- through circuit riding, through strategic coverage of hot spots, through demonstrative arrests of typically chronic problems and police blotter coverage, through blogging -- there are lots of communications devices that just aren't used. The police blotter is hidden; the Lindens never, ever, ever EVER blog about how they are doing with solving griefing problems and what works and doesn't work. They believe if they don't talk about griefing, they won't incite it; at this point, this is so naive and stupid as to be criminally evil in and of itself. Any big city and its newspapers have crime desks and reports on crime. "Broken windows" community policing has to be instituted, and it has to be treated more like the country/city it is, instead of pretending it's a software package with endless customer service call-ups. Once that psychological barrier is crossed, and the hippie stuff with NPR listening Lindens hanging around and goofing with the regs themselves in the WAs ends, and some clear-cut messages are sent, we will see less of this nonsense.
Mentors are ridiculous, self-serving, corrupt, and ineffective and should be dismantled. Only people who own land and have businesses and non-profits willing to take care of newbies should be functioning in this field, through market advertising.
Ten Lindens circuit-riding and acquiring a spine and communicating better would be a hell of a lot more policing than we have now, which is zero, or stupidness.
The Lindens have to replace Michael Linden who is half off the job of heading the G-team and straighten up in the saddle here.
Both AW and There have ordinary, everyday, Grand Central or JFK or for that matter Milano or Moscow or Mumbai like billboards. The excuse that they don't rez is silly, as you can use 256 textures or just grey colour with black (I don't know why this works better than white to rez but it does so I use it).
I'd get rid of those awful mods that AW has, who are worse than the mentors, with the same privileged, inbred, arbitrary sort of awfulness -- only more so, judging from their forums and blogs.
Gwyn, until the Lindens are willing to rent/sell/rotate the splash screen, the sign-up screen, the OIs, we will not have third parties functionally take this over -- they can't when they can't have normal access to the newbie stream. Right now, we have a half-assed system where special friends of the Lindens willing to make APIs, never rotated (it's been on L-word forever at the top)
Oh, unless they DID pay the Lindens for that spot -- in which case that's fine, but let's publicize the numbers and make them an open ad-purchasing system that others can apply for normally as with any media.
Yes, it's worse than ever. Worse than 2003, when newbies ran a gauntlet of Lindens and oldbies who taunted and ridiculed them as they came through a corral; worse than 2004, when you stumbled endlessly in the Myst-like build and then banged your head endlessly on structures in Waterhead and Ahern.
Linden geek boys and girls are building the weapons and vehicles bullshit and steering to their suburban California's dystopain dram of urban distress. They need to move this concept to merely one of many themed WAs and simplify the original entries far more with the very basic of basics and without imposed HUDs, etc.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 13, 2008 at 10:49 AM
The mention of Sesame Street sparked something... hrm...
SL needs the equivalent of Sesame Street for new users. Educational, engaging, entertaining, and interesting.
Torley's close to it, but it's still not rock-bottom-simple or organized by subject yet.
With all these educators in-world and more coming by the minute, I'm waiting for the moment when one of them reveals an *effective* SL teaching tool/bootcamp/whatever.
Posted by: Crap Mariner | May 13, 2008 at 11:05 AM
Torley's tutorials have too many colours, too many captions, too many arrows, it's just too geeky, like an enthusistic geek determined to dumb it down but just making it too geeky.
The L-word movies work better, but all of them are too long.
I still think that animation is just underused everywhere. Surely animated objects could be used in combination with prims to demonstrate things more.
Like a board with a picture of your inventory. An animation that takes a box out of the inventory and opens it up in front of you in 3-D. It is possible to click and make prims move like that, more could be done with it. Making a video 3-D instead of 2-D.
I still feel that my idea of having objects that you click that chat out the question you would ask is one way to get people to take notecards, I use that in my infohub. Clicking and merely getting the chat script with the answr to the obvious question might work, too. But sometimes people can't even follow where chat is, one of the things needing help.
The Lindens claim they pull people in off the street to test usability. The problem is that in San Francisco, pulling people off the street probably nets you a geeky start-up dude who will already know all this stuff anyway, or a gamer.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 13, 2008 at 11:32 AM
Explanation of Load Balancer: The Lindens do have such a tool, and a similar one was used in the CSI Project. Now here is the secret: it does not really work. Here is why: 1. Does not account for "Ruthed users" who lack the ability to load the world, so typically you are stuck in a pileup, and some users doing everything right can arrive ruthed too, which can alienate the young male geek crowd. "Why do I have breasts?" Is actually one of the most common questions. 2. The Lindens never fix something after they create it unless a huge number of people complain. My understanding is that the vast majority of the OIs have some problem, some have had the same issue for months. (As Prokofy observed, Linden vehicles HATE the new physics engine, and most no longer work). Also a fun glitch in these "new OIs" is that if a user teleports from Help Island to another location in Second life (not one of the infohub landmarks) the first location you are able to get into is now your home. Had a newbie set his home to my dining room table once.
Also on the Orientation, you CANNOT IM or receive items from another user. Tried to give a friend a notecard on getting through the OI, claimed the user did not exist. They do not show up in search until they reach Help Island.
If their plan is to go totally to private OIs they need to be more discerning. Some of them are actually worse then the Linden one (Example: Avatar Island) And most do not explain how to find the rest of Second Life, just stick you on a few small islands.
Posted by: economic mip | May 14, 2008 at 12:08 AM
You've mentioned some of the other 100 things I would have added if I had the patience to keep going -- glad you hit on that really, really retarded thing whereby no one can IM them and they can't IM others. This is to keep them in the quarantine and supposedly keep people from "preying on" newbies. Of course, the Mentors are there, and THEY get to prey all they wish, as do those feted ones with feted content displays.
I forgot to explain my favourite theory (again) about "home-stays". Well, the theories of how best to care for immigrants and refugees in real life, to the extent they are relevant here in SL (and they are in some basic senses) always involve home-stays and finding compatriot communities, and not herding people into giant camps to the extent possible. People who can get into home-stays with extended relatives or even kind strangers are always going to be that much better off. So to the extent that you can arrive and have a friend or homeboy show you the ropes, it's all to the good.
Thus, this OI defeats what is the best, built-in, proven means of helping retention -- helping people find or reach a friend.
If the problem is that there are groups that now spam newbies, guess what! they do this ANYWAY. There are some that methodically now go and spam each and every person in the new name list, over and over.
I had never heard that about "why do I have breasts?" dear God, what a way to make people leave in a big hurry, given the fears of being unmanned and humiliated. Awful. The Ruth creature is so coyote ugly, too.
The Lindens know full well this stuff is broken, and has been for months, after they made a big push to fix it -- and made it far worse.
So, why is this?
1. Lindens are fighting among themselves over how to do this, and no one group has the power to prevail so it festers.
2. Lindens are passive/aggressive because they know it doesn't matter, they don't care about retention now because they have too many problems scaling.
3. Lindens are doing nothing because they know they'll be overhauling it completely in some huge way as the new guy re-does it or whatever.
4. They plan to phase out the Linden OI and give or sell off the rest of the franchises to whomever on their friends' list.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 14, 2008 at 12:38 AM
"Also on the Orientation, you CANNOT IM or receive items from another user. Tried to give a friend a notecard on getting through the OI, claimed the user did not exist. They do not show up in search until they reach Help Island."
I made an alt through one of the alternative registration apis(because they had "messenger" as a surname, so I could make an account with that in case I figured out how to do something useful). I was able to find the account in people search before I'd even logged it in- to send a friend request and some outfit money.
I don't believe this first hour stuff is anything instigated by M.
Posted by: Ace Albion | May 19, 2008 at 05:29 AM
Ace, I think the point is that if you don't figure out how to use that method you describe and you just log on fresh with your new account, you cannot IM somebody in order for them to then find you. You'd have to pre-arrange it with a friend. Maybe something has changed on this recently but I distinctly remember trying to find someone to get them to send me a TP off that damn island and couldn't.
M hasn't instigated this first hour -- it was this way before he came. The question is: will M change it?!
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | May 19, 2008 at 12:30 PM