Trying to help newbies is idiotic, stupid, thankless work. For every one that you do help usefully and provide a service to, there are probably 100 who are a) too stupid and clueless to ever get even how to press FLY, as they are young children using the free accounts or distracted and unteachable oldsters; b) rude griefers who will fleece you; c) emotional f32s who are in the right place for the right demographic but will bail because they can’t find a partner, and don’t care about help, they just want a relationship; d) tekkies who spend their whole time sneering at the architure and imagining that they could make it better and never having a good time and screening out actual help that could help them do that; e) pathetic loser asstards in their mom’s basement who think they can get rich off SL.

So it makes for a hugely nasty experience, let me tell you. Hugely nasty. I mean, no human being should have to be subjected to this shit. The flotsam and jetsam of humankind that washes up to the SL shores in the form of those five categories would try the patience of a saint. No good comes out of bending yourself backward and draining yourself dry for these people. They are meant for WoW or There or Kaneva or some other virtual world. And that’s ok.

The energy spent chasing the chimera of getting these particular five categories of people to stick has been truly phenomenal — but stupid. I gave up chasing 15-year-old mall rats around my sims trying to explain prims to them. If they can’t figure it out from a notecard, too bad. I’ve gotten really callous about putting out the most brutal of instructions, like YOU MUST READ AND UNDERSTAND THIS NOTECARD AT A 12-YEAR-OLD’S READING LEVEL TO LIVE IN THIS APARTMENT. ETC.

Accordingly, what I think has to happen, is two things:

a) the Lindens have to realize they need to still attract customers, stop listening to the echos of the old little cult of utopianist geektards from their non-existent ex-forums, and allow the newbie experience to be franchised. Billboards need to be sold in welcome areas. Companies, both non- and for-profit need to be deployed in them with the profit or the reputation movement firmly displayed. Other people need to take care of newbies, and sell to them what they have to sell, whether furry BDSM pedo role-play, ticky tacky houses on the hillside, or rich emo lesbo moments in the lost gardens of lostness. Whatever. Let them SELL it and TAKE CARE of those customers.

b) companies that have something for newbies — lesbians of lostness, little ticky-tacky houses on the hillside, pedo furries disguised as Disney sets now, whatever, have to get in there and get those people by having their own API for registration, and become a pressure on the Lindens to start selling off pieces of their WA. Seriously. It’s going to waste otherwise.

Countries that try to insist on institutionalizing Christianity through things like socialized medicine never get it to work. You need the profit motive to take care of your fellow human being, who is a wretch and given a chance, will be a wretch back at you.

All those interesting, creative, fun, exciting people you think are out there to be had in SL won’t come here unless somebody takes care of them, and they will show their worst side and be their most ridiculously entitlement-happy and belligerent unless they can exhaust you completely. Make sure you are paid for that experience, there is no other rational way to do it.

Perhaps a Mentoring setup is needed where a volunteer gets 6 new people as they arrive and shows them, step by step, the basics of the game over a couple of days. The first day, the volunteer guides them in person. The other days, he answers IMs. Then again, didn’t we have something like this with the Help Island and the New Citizen Center at one time?

2. If live helpers really go and help on their own with no perks or Lindens, who’s to stop them? I don’t “scream like a stuck pig” about New Citizens, for example, don’t be ridiculous. And I’m all for building the profit motive into helping newbies. Let businesses who need newbies help them! What I hate about the socialism and state capitalism of the Lindens is that they discourage capitalism in the WA by banning billboards or ads, and thereby in fact make it possible through crime, i.e. mentors steering and giving out ads anyway. That’s ALWAYS what happens.

3. Barney, your statement reminds me of one of my hallmark moments with Lee Linden. It was a gem. I complained about some sim always crashing and being a problem, even without any visible scripts or heavy avatar load or anything. It had like the normal 4-6 people on it. I kept bitching, and he kept writing back stuff. Finally I logged on and found a priceless one-liner from him, to the effect, “I tested it without avatars on it and it worked fine.”

Are you saying that SLURLS don’t pull up maps anymore?

I was really upset when the “New and Improved” Unreal Tournament came out a few years ago and they did away with all sorts of great stuff, like reflections of your character in mirrors, breaking glass and destructable parts, and introduced very little in the way of new features.

One step forward, two steps back.

But then, when you look at SL for what it is – a 3-D chatroom where you can buy things – there’s not many features that are vital to maintaining that description.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-78

Web-78 is the bug report and the “resolution”. Because it didn’t work on IE7, it was thrown away. No maps on slurls. It’s just gone. One day they will remove the grid and discover that without it, they have less crashes and less load on the databases …