The Change in MMO Appeal

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Over at New World Notes Hamlet has an article up titled: The MMO is Dead; Long Live the MMO. He points us to an article over at Paste Magazine (site about entertainment). It has an article titled: The Moment of the MMO has Passed.

Playing Around
Playing Around

The author is writing about how the age of MMO’s (Massive Multiplayer Online) has passed. He feels that much of their popularity was from socialization. If you have read the study Longevity by n-Yuen Teng and Lada A. Adamic, that I often refer to, you’ll see how the two support each other. It seems social interaction is more the key to player retention than any other single factor in a game. So, I see the study as supporting the author’s thinking.

The author, Ian Williams, feels that while MMO’s once filled this niche for social interaction in our lives they now have competition and thus are not going to be as popular as they once were. He may have a point.

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Second Life News 2014-27

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Servers

There are no server roll outs this week, main or RC. Things will continue as last week. The RC’s apparently didn’t do all that great and improvements are being devised. We won’t see those hit until next week.

Server-Scripting-Content UG 2014-27
Server-Scripting-Content UG 2014-27

For holidays there is a no change window that comes into play. No one has said that is happening, but I suspect.

Viewers

Not much change since last week. The main viewer is the SL Sharing version 3.7.10-291134, no change since last week and likely no change until after the Holiday. 

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Internet News 2014-27

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Every so often I pass along news about the Internet. Mostly US centric. This summer lots of things are stacking up that are mostly never mentioned in the mainstream media.

Stop Drama w/Dramamine

[youtube 2hEUbezqd88]

Facebook Guinea Pigs

This week news broke that Facebook experimented on 700,000 of their users without their knowledge. The idea was to see of ‘mood’  is contagious in the digital world. To do that they added either more positive news or negative news to the test subjects’ feed. So, you aren’t just seeing an unedited feed at FB. It can be manipulated. 

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Firestorm Q&A on Second Life

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Jessica has posted on the Firestorm blog that there will be a Q&A meeting this coming Wednesday at 7:00 AM PDT (SLT). Oz Linden and Peter Gray will be there to answer questions about Second Life, not the future world we’ve talked about for the last week.

Generally the team has not been announcing meetings until just before a meeting starts. I suppose that keeps the crowd to a manageable size. Seating is always first come first served. The SL11B region held 96 (the most I saw) avatars when Jessica held an event to talk about the new world and the region worked very well. Yes, things get laggy and moving around is difficult. But, if one sits down and cams in, all is well.

The meeting is going to be at the Firestorm Auditorium. As with any popular event, be sure you minimize your script weight and prim count.

The Auditorium is on an island, so there is no walking in…

The meeting will be recorded and posted to YouTube. So, if you cannot be there, you won’t miss out. If you want to ask a question, post it on the comments of the Firestorm Blog post. Please don’t ask if the Lab will reduce tier. Enough people have already asked long winded versions of that question. Plus, I think asking Oz and Peter this question isn’t going to draw an answer as such a decision is above their pay grade. If such a plan is under consideration, they are not going to say, either way. They have to wait for upper management to announce those types of changes. Spend the time more wisely.

SL2 Ebbe Altberg Update

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I think Loki Eliot made this...
I think Loki Eliot made this…

The SL Forum thread Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world  has continued to grow. It does seem to be slowing down. Ebbe Altberg (Ebbe Linden) has continued to respond to comments. But isn’t saying much over the weekend. He also seems to have started avoiding answers that are repetitious.

Since his comments are the only source of real information on the new Linden world, I collected them. You’ll find them with links into the forum for the post he responded to in each comment. It was too time consuming to copy the link for each post. Look in the thread list and you’ll find his post a line or two below.

You can search on Ebbe Linden in the SL Forum and get a listing of all his posts. But, the order there seems bizarre. I placed these in the order they appeared, most recent first.

Ebbe often quotes a post in his reply. I decided to leave out most of the quotes to keep the size of this post smaller. I have added some words to Ebbe’s posts so they make sense without the quote. You’ll see the [ ] with my words in the quotes. I’ve also added text, again in [ ]  to give some idea of that Ebbe’s post is responding to. A simple ‘Thanks’ is meaningless for defining context, so added some.

In a couple of cases I have included the posts that lead up to Ebbe’s response. I’ve also corrected spelling. I’ve left grammar as is. I kept the list in a single page so, you can use your browsers FIND to search it. I’ve colored posts other than Ebbe’s silver.

The opening post in the thread is here: Linden Lab is building a NEW virtual world. 

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Second Life 2.0 and the Competition

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The Second Life™ blogosphere is abuzz about the coming new world being built by Linden Lab. Everyone wants to know what it will be like and whether we will be able to transfer out inventories. But, today I came across Gwyneth Llewelyn’s article NeXT Life. In the title Gwyn is making a play on the 1990’s Steve Jobs ‘other’ company NeXT, which eventually became the Mac OSX.

Fashion for Life - 2014
Fashion for Life – 2014

In her article she takes an in depth look at who Linden Lab’s™ competition is and how they stack up. She also suggests some interesting ways for the Lab to deal with that competition. In all I like the long article. I shouldn’t complain about length after the article I wrote yesterday. 

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