OMFG!!! We Knew It Sucked!!!
Raul Crimson seems to be surprised that the service quality metrics for SL look so bad, even though he admits that ΒΌ of all of his sessions crash, normally.
Unplanned outages replacing planned outages. 25% of viewer sessions crashing. Yet, people still continue to throw money at them, each month for this level of service. There’s no other service that anybody would tolerate this level of service and still continue to pay for it.
For example, I pay about $300 a year for web hosting service. There hasn’t been an unplanned outage in over 3 years. I’d gladly pay them twice as much because of the service level they have. If they had outages of 100 to 175 hours (2%) per year, things would change, very fast! They would damn sure not get my money anymore.
I really just don’t understand why people put up with this type of service level. Somebody please explain.
Malignant Narcissist @ December 18, 2007
When i first heard of SL i was already (and still am) a proud citizen of ActiveWorlds, an avatar based 3D virtual world which opened its doors in 1996.
Some tend to believe that SL was inspired by AW, but i have my doubts. SL in fact seems a lot more similar to the game The Sims 2, where AI characters are replaced by real people online. Linden Dollars are in fact very similar to “Simoleons” and social interactions feel just as artificial as in the Sims game.
This is the reason why people call AW a 3D community and SL a “game”. I hardly ever heard anyone calling AW a game, unless it was someone too young to remember the good old days of Alpha World…
Logically, AW should be more popular that SL, right? It’s been around longer, it’s cleaner, friendlier, easier to navigate, lighter on the system, and it runs on the crappiest computers effortlessly. also there is no porn. Even “Gorean” worlds are rather tame, in spite of the “X” classification. Also no currency is needed since a yearly fee of 67 dollars is all i need to go around and build wherever i feel like.
So here is where the matter boils down to:
SL created a universe where the worst crowds could gather. It gave them tools to explore the darkest aspects of their personalities and ego, and unleashed them.
Perversion alone creates the motivation for people to put money down and have their own little place where they can cheat, lie and unleash their frustrations and deviations without their families and friends knowing.
In the beginning there was Yahoo Messenger and its Adult forums, where people of the worst kind would gather and look for someone to victimize, powered by their frustrations. Then web cam communities like CuSeeMe came along. Finally perverts would have web cams at their disposal, to show and to watch. P2P file sharing networks became quickly the vehicle of choice for perverts to publish their spoils of war, with the label “Caught On Yahoo Webcam” and later on YWebcams. Namely equally dysfunctional internet parasites deceived into performing a variety of acts for the enjoyment of a panting and sweaty crowd of one-hand typists.
Take a look at how many “clean” worlds there are available on SL in respect to it’s sex-based worlds and then answer me this: what’s the number one crowd SL is gathering in?
You guessed it.
So… why do people keep on throwing money at it? Because as it is now, there is no other virtual place that people can access from the comfort of their own computer that allows all the above possibilities. An obsession is what drives people to do the stupidest things… like paying for worthless service… if it means the ability to do what in real life we could never even dream of doing.
The day AW will have its own currency and a system that allows virtual sex between avatars will be the end of SL. Yes… it’s just as simple as that.
Meanwhile people will pay… and wait… faithfully for their favorite perversion to get back online.
Actually, there are many more “clean” areas in SL than there are “sex-based” areas. That really wasn’t the point of this post anyway, though I “do” understand what you’re saying.
This was just about the level of service that the virtual world, as a whole, provided.
In the near future, I’ll have another post about the adult areas of Second Life. It’s not the “amount” of areas that there are, but the level of perversion that exists in certain areas.
finance bad loan car special credit finance car credit bad special loan