Second Life's Entry Areas: Learning And Social Islands

When yours truly decided to check out Linden Lab's new starting avatars for Second Life, the method done was to do so with a new alt, and as a result discovering the starting locations for newcomers, Learning Island and Social Island, had changed. So what are this new areas like, and how do they compare to previous first areas for newbies? This reporter took a large number of pictures to give you the readers a good look.

Read the article in Places.

A Glance At Two Starter "Bento Enabled" Avatars

After the new starter avatars were announced a few days ago, I'd heard a few complaints about them, and finally someone asked me if I'd given them a try. Not seeing them available in my viewer, I went ahead and created an alt and started out with one, the male "angel."

In my up to date Firestorm viewer, which is designed to see Bento avatars and attachments for, the avatar looked pretty detailed, and the wings gently flapped. But there was one small flaw, at least in my opinion. The avatar was shown sword in hand. It would have probably be better for the sword to have been in a scabbard on his belt as presumably it would be mostly in social situations chatting with others, and a newcomer would take a while to learn how to remove it.

Two of the avatars, a female and a male (shown here), were horseback riders. Not only did the avatar come with a horse, when switching over to it the rider was on the horse. The horse was quite detailed, and moved around a little at rest, and when walking or running, the animation kept up. It would be good for someone heading straight to a horseback riding sim or a fantasy roleplaying area that was mostly forest land. That is, if the newcomer knew where to get to such places. The problem with the newcomer arriving on horseback is he's not going to know how to remove his horse for a while, which may make interaction with others indoors a little awkward at times.

Gentle Heron mentioned one other complication with the horseback riding starting avatars, one that in my opinion Linden Lab couldn't be blamed for not anticipating. It seems at least one resident was staying clear of these avatars due to a phobia caused by a traumatic experience with one of these huge animals with powerful legs. And since a newcomer couldn't be expected to know how to remove the critter, he wouldn't know how to remove the source of fear of someone with a similar phobia.

As many weapons in Second Life are designed to be sheathed or drawn with either a code word, or a gesture that can be made with the press of a button, perhaps something similar could be done in the case of the weapon and the horse. But how to make it simple for newcomers, and getting this information to them?

And of course if a newcomer in  Bento avatar comes across people in older viewers, the features that were improved on new viewers are going to come out a mess. Since you don't know what viewers others have, when arriving at an event in a shinny new Bento avatar, you may need to ask everyone of they can see it okay.

After playing around for a while, I sent the alt to Curious to get the freebie furry Felis avatar there before calling it a night.

Addition:  here's a more cheerful review by Alicia Chenaux.

Bixyl Shuftan

New Mesh Default Avatars for Second Life Newcomers

Earlier this month, Linden Lab introduced new starting avatars for beginning Second Life users. Residents got an early peek when Ebbe Linden was in public as one while giving a speech for the VWPBE conference in April. Some expressed hope this would be an improvement for the newcomer experience with better looking avatars. Finally on May 15th, the Lab announced their arrival.


Today, we’re updating Second Life’s default avatar options with 24 brand new mesh avatars. You may have spotted a sneak peek at a few of these as Lindens tried them out recently, and starting today, you can start using them yourself! These avatars are designed to give new users a more appealing set of choices as they start their time in Second Life. Based on the most popular avatars picked at registration, these new options are much better-looking and take advantage of technology incorporated into Second Life over the past year (like fitted mesh and materials) for a more modern feel.

 To access these default avatars, one has to use the official viewer. So those who favor Firestorm, Singularity, or another third-party viewer will have to temporarily switch over. Under the "People" tab, one finds the selection of default avatars. The good news, these avatars are more detailed, the human ones more appealing and the monster ones looking scarier. For some reason, all the monster avs are listed as "vampire," even though they include a werewolf, a gargoyle, a zombie, and a monster hunter (human?).

The bad news, these avatars can't be modified. You can't change the eye color. You can't make the nose a little smaller. You can't change the hair color. contrast this with many MMOs such as Elder Scrolls or even the long-standing World of Warcraft in which players can modify their characters appearance, sometimes with lots of options and many degrees of variation. Even earlier newcomer experiences in Second Life invited and encouraged the new user to make changes to their avatar.

The old (human) default avatars are still an option, now listed as "classic." These are still modifiable. But assuming a newcomer chooses one of the new avatars first, it might be a while before they figure that out.

Jo Yardley had a few things to say about the new avatars on her blog. When they were just about to appear, she expressed hope they would help encourage new users to stay. But once they arrived, she had mixed emotions, "I ... fear a flood of new users visiting my sim, and then having to explain to them that they won't be able to dress their avatar in 1920s clothes because we don't have fitted mesh 1920s clothes as a freebie ... and having to explain to them how to completely change their avatar ... good idea to replace the old avatars, about time even, but I don't think it is a huge improvement to Second Life as a whole." Her idea of a better solution was instead of giving newcomers a choice of 36 avatars, why not allow them to create their own? "Creating, adapting, and customising your avatar should be fun and easy. Look at the game industry to see how they do it, and translate that to an avatar builder on the SL website. If others can do it, so can we."

Hopefully Ebbe Linden and the Lab are listening.

Top image from Linden Lab
Sources: Linden Blog, Jo Yardley's Second Life 

Bixyl Shuftan

Learning Island: Second Life's New Starting Area

Everyone new to Second Life starts out at a place just them. Over time, this has changed from the beach islands from Second Life's heyday to high tech buildings, to last year's simple tutorial and portal. First impressions do not count for everything, but a bad one can be difficult to overcome. And with the first newcomer areas having only a ten percent retention rate, the Lab has been trying to find something better. Recently, Second Life Newser found out about the new place for those brand new to the Grid: Learning Island. So one reporter created an alt to check it out. So was it an improvement?

Read more in Places.

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