I received an announcement today that the Firestorm/Phoenix Team has created a support island that will be opening on August 25^th. The island is for use of the SL community. The team is encouraging RHN, White Tiger Mentors, Mental Mentors and others to use the island for training and support. I get that other support groups are welcome too.

Update 8/25 – Now Open: Second Life’s Firestorm Support Island by Firestorm/Phoenix

Update 7/2017 – Photobucket has disallowed use of their hosted images on 3rd party sites unless I pay them. Images are here.

Obviously the island is designed to assist new Firestorm users and for the team’s support crew.

FS Support Island Landing Point

The island has a landing point that starts new users on an educational path, a literal path as you can see in the images. It is designed for those using the Firestorm Viewer.  So, people using other viewer may be a bit confused by the images of what to click. But, confusing new users by showing multiple user interfaces might be worse.

The area has some freebies. Animation Overrides are explained and provided. Basic skin, shapes, clothes and other stuff is available. It looks like a good collection of new user gifts. Several are only for new avatars, 30 days old or less.

The Flying Lesson

It looks like they have gone through and answered all the most frequently asked questions. The island attempts to answer the most basic and the likely most often asked questions. They start with moving and touch on most aspects of Second Life, except sex. Sex is only mentioned in relation to region classifications; General, Moderate, and Adult.

I disagree with some of the etiquette lessons but that is minor. The idea to TP into an area and wait until things rez before moving is one. I’m convinced one should take 3 or 4 steps to the left or right as soon as you can move. I hate it when I come in and land on someone’s head and flail like fish in the air. In No-Fly regions it is a real PITA. But, that’s my thing.

The Lesson Path

In general it is a very well done simple region. The -io- Teams Inspiring Orientation Island in LEA is much more of an artistic design. The FS Team has done some nice stuff with the flying and teleport lessons that should help new users that don’t have movement down. For the flying lesson they actually trap the user in a glass ‘tube’ so they do not get surprised by fly speed and end up lost. I think it is a good idea.

Next Steps

In the teleport lesson they make it difficult to walk around/past the lesson. One needs to teleport to get through it.

FS Park

There are some places to explore. They have some Meeroos and other animals. The weasel is way cute.

All in all it is pretty place and very park like.

The project manager Jessica Lyon says, “We want to share this region with the helpful people of Second life so that they can further help new and old users alike. Our mission at the phoenix firestorm project is “To improve the user experience”. This region is a support initiative towards that goal. We are using the extra money we get from Google Adsense to pay for the region to help our users and provide a location for other helpful people to help others. No strings attached, no ulterior motives.”

Opening

The open house will be held at noon SLT, Saturday, August 25th. There will be a brief speech by Jessica Lyon and then a live DJ.

Watch for the formal public announcement and SLURL.

Summary

I am not sure the level of training that starts on the island will work for Firestorm users. The first part, may be more than half the path, will be for things a user is very likely to know by the time they find out about the Firestorm Viewer. Users new to SL that get dropped in the area won’t understand why the examples don’t match their viewer’s controls. So, I’m not sure what audience they are targeting.

Whatever, I do think it is a nice gesture by the FS Team.