Another Second Life™ anxiety discussed in the Drax Radio Hour Episode #81 is one being called separation anxiety. I’ll explain.

Separation Anxieties

Leaving Second Life and having to leave all our stuff behind is an anxiety for many. This last week I’ve been on a quest to update my collection of stockings. It is a costly thing. But, I love my Slink feet. My Babel Fashion stockings have no appliers. Trying to change a copy of the feet so the skin and a similar stocking with an applier match the lag just hasn’t worked for me. So, new stockings with appliers. So, will I have to leave my new stockings behind?

New Stockings

We are sure that most of what we have in Second Life is not going to transfer into Project Sansar. So… do I lose all my new stockings? No… but I don’t get to take them with me to Sansar. But, I don’t get to take my things to OpenSim. Nor did I get to take my things to Blue Mars or Cloud Party and likely not HyFy. 

The unrealistic fear we hear being voiced is that our stuff will be taken away, Second Life will be closed when Sansar opens. The idea seems to be that a new version of the game is coming out and the old one will be thrown away along with all our stuff. That is sort of common in the gaming world. A game closes, you’re screwed. If this were true, we would no longer have access to the current SL world and our inventory. But, it isn’t.

It doesn’t seem to matter how often the information is repeated that SL will remain open long after Sansar opens and we can be in both, just as we can move back and forth between OpenSim and SL. But, people keep thinking it will only be possible to go to the new Sansar world. Dumb.

I answer questions in the SL Forum. The number of people complaining about not being able to add items to the SL Marketplace after the switch to Viewer Managed Marketplace (VMM) and wondering why reached the point people were getting really annoyed with them. While that annoyance is silly, it is understandable. My point is it does show how few people pay attention to what is happening in SL. People have been talking about VMM for months and yet people are totally surprised… even after emails were sent out saying things were changing.

It is some people’s nature to never bother to research anything. They make an assumption based on their experience to date and never question what they have speculated. After all, their experience shows them how the world works, unless it doesn’t. People seeing things differently and many are not really in touch with the shared reality. But, those people treat their imagined scenario as fact. This seems to be how this separation fear is perpetuated.

It is an imagined fear based in erroneous thinking and lack of information.

Sansar Templates

I’m not sure where this idea came from. The idea is there may be templates for Sansar worlds/regions. That idea may come from the statements Sansar will be like WordPress. WordPress has templates. This site uses the Sunspot template. So, there are a few sites that look very much like my site.

Templates will not limit what we can do in Sansar any more than they do in WordPress. I built a child theme based on the Sunspot template. I could have built my theme from scratch. For some clients I have done just that. But, it is much easier and faster to create child themes as a modification of an existing theme/template.

So, templates would not be a limitation as it seems some fear. But, they would make some creative efforts much easier and faster. In general they are a good thing.

Summary

People tend to think of the worst scenario and worry about that. For some planning matters that is a good thing. But, to assume a worst-scenario has to happen and is fated, is silly. People do need to plan for Katrina type disasters. They need to know if they live below, in, or above the flood plan. People need to know they may have to survive for 5 or more days without electricity, water, gas, grocery stores, drug stores, or gas stations. Then decide what is a practical level of preparation. When anything about Sansar causes us concern we need to consider what facts we have, what is possible, plausible, and rational.

My solution, buy stockings to wear with my Slink feet and way nice shoes…

With Second Life we know we have all of 2015 and probably 2016 before anything significant happens with Sansar. We also need to remember that over the last three years the peak concurrent user count in SL has been dropping. We have gone from about 68,000 in 2012 to 58,000 in 2015. On a straight line projection by 2018 we would be at 48,000.

By the way… The loss is not straight-line. It is a curve and losses are decreasing. But, something has to give at some point. The loss has to stop or turn around or eventually SL closes. At the current rates SL could easily run 5 to 10 more years and possibly longer.

So, things have to change, they always change. The Lab is preparing for the tech changes they KNOW are coming. We decide how we will prepare for the changes we expect. I expect to be in SL for at least a year and then be in SL and Sansar, or whatever it is called, for several years. That’s plenty of time to wear my nice new stockings with my gorgeous shoes.