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Big enough re: population wise, at least. SL's still quite profitable, but the numbers are trending down, and having been a user of that world on and off since

Big enough re: population wise, at least. SL's still quite profitable, but the numbers are trending down, and having been a user of that world on and off since 2004, I can say it's probably because there's not a lot to do there anymore that doesn't involve making, buying, and selling things. It demands a lot of technical literacy on the part of its users, both from the hardware demands (the SL client, or "viewer" is infamously demanding of the local graphics hardware and internet connection), and from knowing how to navigate the sometimes obtuse interface and conventions of the world. ..that goes double if you actually want to make things. Then, your corpus of knowledge needs to include 3D design and familiarity with Serious Business modeling programs like Blender or 3DSM. If you're making things besides furniture and clothing, add some programming knowledge into the mix for their own custom programming language (LSL). This sounds damning with faint praise, but the magic's just not there anymore for me. Still, if you haven't actually had a look yet, you should. There's plenty to explore and there's quite a lot to see before you get bored. The client is free, as is an account.

irl_zebra 11y ago
I've never played. Was there ever anything to do there that didn't "involve making, buying, and selling things," or are you just saying that it has become boring doing the same things over all the years?
- Karunamon 11y ago
  tl;dr: There used to be, at least it felt like it, a lot of games and social experiences and other "cool stuff" that was less about showing off how you decked out your avatar and more about either playing games with others or exploring strange environments. An example: There was this Tetris/bingo hybrid called "Tringo" that was big in the early years. You'd buy a board, and then anyone could click on it, get a human-sized "card", and play the game against anyone else that was in the area. There was even a reward element to it - you could set a game as pay-to-play, and then the top X players of each round would get a share of the donated proceeds. Anyways, it was everywhere for a while. If you looked at the ingame list of registered events back then, it was absolutely dominated by Tringo. (The guy who invented the game even made a Gameboy Advance version of it!) Eventually, people got bored of it, and now you hardly see it around anymore. There were lots of other gaming fads (Chariot Races, Tech Warfare, skydiving at Abbot's Aerodome..), but people just stopped coming. Part of this is due to the server side being really quite awful at having a bunch of people in the same space. Tringo worked because those people weren't doing a whole lot other than clicking on the board in front of them. This never really got much better over time. More than about 20 people in the same space and the server starts dropping frames (increasing "time dilation") to keep up. It gets worse if those people have any scripted bits on their avatars (and many do, since those run on the server responsible for simulating the region) The absolute hard limit is 40 people in the same region (65535sq/m) before it won't let anyone else in, but it becomes unusable much before that.

irl_zebra 11y ago

I've never played. Was there ever anything to do there that didn't "involve making, buying, and selling things," or are you just saying that it has become boring doing the same things over all the years?

Karunamon 11y ago
tl;dr: There used to be, at least it felt like it, a lot of games and social experiences and other "cool stuff" that was less about showing off how you decked out your avatar and more about either playing games with others or exploring strange environments. An example: There was this Tetris/bingo hybrid called "Tringo" that was big in the early years. You'd buy a board, and then anyone could click on it, get a human-sized "card", and play the game against anyone else that was in the area. There was even a reward element to it - you could set a game as pay-to-play, and then the top X players of each round would get a share of the donated proceeds. Anyways, it was everywhere for a while. If you looked at the ingame list of registered events back then, it was absolutely dominated by Tringo. (The guy who invented the game even made a Gameboy Advance version of it!) Eventually, people got bored of it, and now you hardly see it around anymore. There were lots of other gaming fads (Chariot Races, Tech Warfare, skydiving at Abbot's Aerodome..), but people just stopped coming. Part of this is due to the server side being really quite awful at having a bunch of people in the same space. Tringo worked because those people weren't doing a whole lot other than clicking on the board in front of them. This never really got much better over time. More than about 20 people in the same space and the server starts dropping frames (increasing "time dilation") to keep up. It gets worse if those people have any scripted bits on their avatars (and many do, since those run on the server responsible for simulating the region) The absolute hard limit is 40 people in the same region (65535sq/m) before it won't let anyone else in, but it becomes unusable much before that.