Second Rezday ^^
Yup, it's been 2 years since I've become a resident of Second Life. And SL changed so much since then. When I meet newbies I feel like saying "when I was your age..." ;) I've been reflecting on what actually has changed and came up with a pretty long list, which most likely is incomplete. So... When I was your age:
- Group limit had just been extended from 15 to 25 groups
- Flexi prims and local lights were relatively new features
- Profiles had a built-in rating system, to help residents build their reputation. There were three things you could rate: behavior, appearance and building skills, costing 25L$ each. Here's how it looked like.
- There was help through live chat for everyone, started from SL viewer
- The first land program (getting 512 sqm of land for free) was still on
- SL newsletter, Second Opinion, was still active. Here's the issue from the time my av was born ;)
- Meeting someone from my country was almost impossible. Now there's a huge amount of Polish residents, and more coming in, each time a TV show about SL is aired. There's a rumour that last time LL registration system crashed due to a huge number of Polish people trying to join SL.
- Banking and gambling were flourishing. In fact I camped for the first time at a casino :)
- There was no VAT for Europeans
- Shop OnRez was called SLBoutique at the time and took commisions
- SL hit 1 million Residents the previous month (sounds pretty small now, doesn't it?).
- Avatar's height wasn't so close to RL as it is now. If you look around, you'll see older avatars are taller (unless they adjusted their height to the new trend).
- There was no such thing as optional SL update :) All updates were mandatory and usually happened on so called 'Update Wednesdays'. At the time you never ever scheduled your important events on Wednesdays ('SL Update… Coming to a Wednesday Near You!') and T-shirts with 'I hate update Wednesdays' prints were selling like hot cakes.
- There were no sculpted prims! No, really. No sculpted clothing, no sculpted furniture, no sculpted trees :) I think more residents from that time know how to manipulate prims into unusual one-prim objects, like a leaf or a flower, while nowadays people don't, since they never really had to learn that (not that sculpties are easier to learn, they're not :P).
- No windlight (how beautiful SL is now!)
- No web tab in your profile
- SL was much more unstable and a lot of things would constantly break. Imagine that in-world search doesn't work, you can't buy land (not to mention that your Linden Dollars balance isn't showing up), the map is not loading, teleports and money transfers are failing, a lot of regions are unavailable, a lot of regions keep crashing, and most of all, inventory loss happens all the time. That was everyday life in SL. You'd constantly read on the official blog about 'database issues' and 'grid temporarily down'. It changed, a lot, for better. I see people complaining now that SL is unstable. Believe me - one stale transaction is nothing.
- At those times logins were often closed to all except Linden staff. If you were logged in and managed to stay in-world somehow, SL would become quiet and tranquil - quite an interesting experience.
- Oh, right, there was also that "shoe-in-your-bottom" bug, also known as "hair-down-there" bug ;) Who remembers that? If you often teleported, you'd notice all your attachments would be stuck in your... erm... pelvis attachment point :P So anyway, despite what you may think, there's been a huge increase in stability, and ocasional problems that might occur are nothing in comparison to what used to happen around the grid. Oh, those were the funny days.
12 comments
Congrats Ayumi!
ReplyDeleteI totally forgot about the ratings! Now I remember getting L$50 once from somebody asking me to rate them.
And I got my first L$ from a casino camping chair too.
Also on update Wednesday were server updates. The whole of SL, and I mean the WHOLE of SL, was shut down to Residents for I think at least 5 hours, usually taking longer. When the Grid opened up again, the huge amount of people attempting to log in caused so much log in troubles, you'd have to wait for another hour or two before you'd be back inworld. And then the strain on the inventory servers was so high, you couldn't see half your inventory and your L$ balance, you had to avoid rezzing no-copy items and you could not reliably pay for something. I think nowadays missing inventory is a rare occurance. But in the days, it was so bad, even one of the most talented content creators, Arcadia Asylum, actually left SL entirely after her inventory had *poofed* out of existence. Even though a dedicated Linden managed to get it all back (probably from some tape streamed backup or something).
But to get back to update Wednesday, the whole strain it brought to the servers meant SL would basically be unreliable all Thursday and Friday and in some cases throughout the weekend, iirc.
And back to content creators, when I joined (in December, same year as Ayumi), Starax Statosky had already left SL. But not too long after, the Greenies appeared and a few months after that it was revealed Light Waves is the true reincarnated Starax.
Which reminds me of Oyster Bay, the art gallery on the mainland (region Oyster), owned by Morris Vig. I was one of the first four to rent a shop there, so until Oyster Bay closed just over a year later, I could rent for I believe it was L$150 a week, instead of the usual L$250 other renters paid. It cost me more than I got back from sales though, but I didn't mind, I was supporting the coolest art gallery ever. I have many great memories there, from the Hidden Starax show to the Balloon Festival to the many concerts. Especially Hidden Starax gave me the opportunity to really practice my inworld photography. And I'm quite honoured Morris used my photos for the free Starax packages. Btw, you can see all the photos I made there on Snapzilla.
Oh, there's so many bugs squished in those two years. Not only viewer-side bugs, also server-side bugs. Improved physics (long awaited!) and scripting, the sims have become much more stable too.
Also I believe in the first year LL really opened conversation through the Bug Triages, I attended many of them, until I got in a band and couldn't come on the Triages anymore. I did get a Linden on my Friends list because of it :D , though she's already left LL too.
Ooh, and I remember SL used to have a working video capture mode. Just like Snapshots, but with video! Unfortunately it didn't take long before it became a crash-button on Macs.
Oh, and in the beginning, "Second Life [wa]s a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents", but in October 2007, that changed to "a (...) world imagined and created by its residents" (so no longer owned).
Also, I think I was just too late for the Copybot outrage and the Grey Goo massacre (I'm Googling reports from November 2006 on the Goo).
And of course, two years ago, there was no SLang Life yet and even we did not know eachother, Ayumi!
So many changes in just two years ^^ SL changes with the speed of light ;) I remember all those things you mentioned, like waiting to log in to SL after updates (Login Queue!) ^^ And I think I remember at least one self-replicating object attack on the grid which caused the grid to close (I might be wrong though). Those were crazy days. Also, somewhere around that time there was a rolling restart which caused a bug that could turn pretty bad if it hadn't been discovered early. Basically, when you bought an item, you could look into the scripts inside :P Luckily these things don't happen anymore... I think :)
ReplyDeleteOh, not to mention Ruthing! The fluffy cloud we're now is so much better.
ReplyDeleteAh, I remember one day, there was a Bug Triage at Benjamin's office, when suddenly, Philip showed up to attend the meeting. But of course, Philip was Ruthed :P
Luckily most changes are good. The gambling ban is a good thing, just the way how they did is was terrible. Sexual ageplay mostly is gone (I'm sure some stuff still happens, but not as much as it used to. Or so I hope). All new gadgets and stuff, even a new UI if you choose it. New mainland is organized, see Bay City, much better than the Atoll for example.
Now just to restore proper communication, the blog should be used again as it was, possibly with better methods of replying and having a discussion.
hmm
ReplyDeleteI remeber some one nice bug when use somewhere teleport and what I see nice I am woman :D.Heh when some newbie talk and see "I am here more one years" always see "Wow , Really ?".
"We are old and we are history"
2 years and still there? Really sorry
ReplyDeleteB-(
HAPPY REZDAY TO YOUUUUUU!
ReplyDeleteOh, and you didn't mention my fav bug! The one that made your avatar cross-eyed.
They aired the documentary "My Second Life" on Dutch national tv today, and that made me think of another thing that's been added: Voice.
ReplyDeletehappy rezday Ayumi! I'm not quite that old, but I still remember mandatory updates and "hair up there"
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, everyone ^^
ReplyDeleteWhew, seems like I forgot lots of stuff ;) I've got more: there was that grid-wide 'drought', when the water would not rez in some regions. And there was a very important change: SL went open source :)
BTW, I just checked - the concurrency was around 20 000 users at the time :)
@Anonymous
There's nothing to be sorry for :) Through SL I improve my RL. I can't possibly list all the new chances I got in my RL thanks to SL. I've met great people who has become my RL friends (we do meet in RL every once in a while). It's all about the balance :)
Ooh yeah, I remember the water not rezzing. I believe if you teleported, the water in your destination sim wouldn't rez, but if you simply crossed sims it would.
ReplyDeleteI love the last one lol :) very funny.
ReplyDeleteAnemysk, imagine my reaction when I first saw that and didn't know about the bug, haha ;)
ReplyDelete