New Welcome Island For Starting Residents

 
For some newcomers to Second Life, their first steps will be at a new place inworld. There's a new entry place for those starting out: Welcome Island.

Hearing that new accounts were already entering Second Life through the new place, I created a new alt to take a look. The new sign-up process doesn't offer a choice of appearances. Every male logs in as the same brown-haired human with facial hair, jeans, an open shirt, and carrying a radio. Women were logging in wearing red dresses with white blouses and carrying pocketbooks. A "Welcome Island Guidebook" opened up, providing instructions on how to move around (on the Linden Viewer that new accounts are asked to use, one can walk about using the WASD keys).

There were a few areas to be used as one went through the Guidebook, for practicing sitting, introducing newcomers to the ability to change appearances with the various starter avatars (aside from a couple fierce-looking werewolves, the only alternatives to human were a few vampires and elven avatars), and getting attachments and wearing and detaching them. Overall, it looked like a park area, with plenty of greenery and plenty of places to sit, with some water.

Not everyone there is a newcomer. I was messaged by someone almost right away welcoming me and asking if I needed help. So it looks like volunteers are there at times to help out those who are new. I was also invited to a group, "The Newbie Mafia," then cautioned about accepting any more invites.

Near the end, the Guidebook brought up the Destinations Guide and the Events page, encouraging people to explore the wider virtual world, with a nod to the Guide's "Newcomer Friendly" section. It also invited people to check out blogs about Second Life. My new alt's first journey ended at New Citizens Incorporated, though someone could have easily checked out London City if they didn't mind the crowd there.

Not everyone appears on the New Welcome Island. I ended up creating two alts as the first I made appeared on the same Learning Island I did four years earlier. So the Lab hasn't replaced the previous newcomer places, at least not yet.

Comparing Welcome Island to the two-sim Learning and Social Islands, the new experience is faster and quicker. There's nothing on how to jump or fly, no introduction to building, no instructional videos, none of Social Island's games that made learning a little more entertaining. At least there wouldn't be if it wasn't for the helpers who were at Welcome Island. 

This new area seems more dependent on volunteers, and perhaps people at newcomer-friendly areas the new residents would see, to answer questions. But there's no comparison to Destination Island of 2012 that offered very little instructions and newcomers could very well end up in a place that threw them out for being too young, and the new resident experience introduced in 2013 that was apparently so bad the Lindens discarded it in a few months. The Learning and Social Islands came about in September 2013, and have been around for almost a decade with one change in 2017.

While Welcome Island is closed to all but brand new accounts and volunteers, there is a Welcome Back Island anyone can visit to check out what the place is like.

Hat Tip: Daniel Voyager

Source: Uccie Poultry

Bixyl Shuftan
 

Reader Submitted: "A Peculiar Morning in Second Life"

I logged into SL with my admin avatar this morning as I usually do, when I need to get something done.

I landed on the Welcome Island, sat down on a comfy bench and proceeded to make some payments, when a newbie approached me and asked for help.

"How do I change my clothes?" He asked...

To make a long story short, I ended up giving him a two hour crash course on SL.

My admin avi is a female because it was made by Sikiu Torres (Shinya Tandino) and my new friend commented what a beautiful girl I was...

He then told me he was from the Middle East and told me not to worry because he was an atheist...

Lastly, he made it clear that it was ok for me to talk dirty to him.

I logged off.

Frolic Mills (Juan Delago)

The New "Destination Islands" for Newcomers Compared to Previous Entry Islands

I recently heard about new "Destination Island" areas set up as the new entry point for newcomers. With the Linden Helper and Greeter Islands recently closed, this got my attention. I couldn't head over with my own account, getting a message saying the destination was "not available." So I decided to have a see for myself by creating a temporary alt, and logging in.

And the experience was … simple. One landed in a circular structure made of arches and pillars. The floor was white brick with the Linden Lab hand symbol in the center. Around the place were trees in the style of the Linden Realms area. One could walk for a short distance and fly around. There were a few other avatars around, mine taking over a minute to rezz. There was no music.

A window named "Tutorial" popped up, which had simple, basic instructions such as movement, panning the view, flying, chatting, adding a friend, and using search. There were several portals here, with names like "Popular," "Music," "Adult," "Editors Choice," etc. I chose one named "Roleplay." But this revealed a flaw in the Linden's intentions. The sim where the infohub was, a script called my avatar "too young," and I was ejected to another sim at random. This would be a very confusing start for a newcomer.

It certainly was a different entrance than my own initial experience to Second Life years ago in December 2006, over five years ago on Orientation Island. It was fairly well detailed, a beach island, and looked interesting and different compared to what else I had seen. At least it looked interesting once everything rezzed. And the music was nice too, as well as having appropriate lyrics, "If you bravely go, you can build a whole new wor-ld!" The brick trail I went on took me to several stations, which had me click on a Linden hand hologram for a notecard on how things worked, such as flying and chatting.

Trouble was, the lag. On my old PC, it took a while for everything to appear, and getting around was terribly slow. Not to mention I crashed frequently. It was more than a little frustrating. It took a total of a few hours of time inworld due to the lag and crashes before I had gone through the island to the place where one. Trying it again more recently (see below) I moved much faster, so perhaps it was the computer that made me so slow then. Other residents described other problems, such as those tacky-looking "noob" avatars (Click here for a list of Orientation Island experiences from New World Notes 2008).

In March 2010, Linden Labs made a change. Orientation Island was replaced as the entry point with the Welcome and Discovery Islands. Hamlet Au described them as being two years in development. He thought they were an overall improvement, but still didn't take care of some of the issues newcomers had with Second Life. Noting the high tech feel with the white roundish buildings, he called it "like walking into an Apple store that's selling Microsoft products." The biggest improvement to him was the place being a series of instructional rooms, which he felt kept newcomers from getting lost or confused.

Following a trip through here, there was an option to head to Discovery Islands, an open place with a similar high tech look. It had video screens for more instructions (often from Torley Linden). Hamlet Au thought while useful, he doubted most new users would recall "much of the firehose of information thrown at them."

Blogger Mickey Vandevere described her own experiences with Welcome Island. She found herself cloudy, or naked and bald instead of blonde and clothed, "I feel alone, and I'm not having fun. And I know what's ahead. A true newcomer does not."

Daniel Voyager has his own article about the new Discovery Islands. It was his opinion (in the comment section), "I think many newbies will get lost and most likely quit faster than in previous years. Changes are needed ASAP! " Others commenting on his blog, and in the Linden forums, that this needed more work.

On another note, there are public versions of Orientation Island and Welcome Island up (Orientation Island Public and Welcome Island Public), the former where I found moving around was much faster than my first experience (though the beach look had been changed into grassland). Perhaps newcomers are better off with these places than with the new bare-bones welcome area.

Sources: New World Notes, Daniel Voyager, Mickey Vandevere
Image of Orientation Island by Hamlet Au
Image of Welcome Island by Daniel Voyager

Bixyl Shuftan