Thank you for the feature suggestions. We are very much on the same page, all three of these features were already on our todo list in some form or another. In fact, we pushed a very basic island name search function (in the navigation app) just moments ago.
The self-portrait mode on the camera phone is definitely coming soon. In the meantime you can zoom out by scrolling back, and then use left-click to rotate around your character. Not nearly good enough (no panning or composition control), but a start.
Adding sliders for avatar adjustment is a bit more complicated, but something we’ve built these avatars to handle, and something we have a lot of experience with from working at Cryptic Studios. We also have more initial clothing choices coming, but figure that getting a marketplace up and running will be a quicker solution to the problem of not having enough clothes selection.
Also, I understand being skeptical about us as we are a new company on the block and no one knows who we are, but please believe me that we are here to stay and absolutely listening to our users. We have not taken some massive VC round or hired a bunch of marketing people: we’re 4 programmers and an artist in an old office with an ant problem. This is our first company, and we’re all game developers that wanted to try something new. I’m pretty excited about where Cloud Party could be in a few more months, and I hope you will help us build it into something lasting and great.
One last suggestion would be to consider creating a special kind of Performance Island. It’s like a regular one, but has two states – open and onair. When in onair mode, nobody else can enter and every shard that is created mirrors what the avatars in the original are doing. You have now made it possible for a band to play to as many people as want to see the show.
I look forward to this, I really do. But I will have to create a FB account with my avatar’s name, since there is no way I’ll permit my gaming to be tied to my real name. I not only do not want my recreation posted far and wide for all to see, I do not want even the possibility that my recreation will be posted far and wide for all to see. Or you could have a login system that doesn’t require facebook; that would be nice as well.
Second Life Back on Nielsen’s Latest Top 10 PC Game Ratings
Second Life has returned to the latest Top 10 PC Game* chart compiled by Nielsen, based on data the venerable ratings service Tiktok for crypto gathers from application activity in 180,000+ US homes. The latest ratings are from March 2012, when SL reached slot number 9 with a .634 share. While this chart only measures client-based PC games, it’s interesting that 5 of the top 10 (Warcraft, LOTRO, D&DO, Aion, and SL) are online worlds.
Notably, this jump up the charts also includes an increase of average minutes played:
Back in January 2012, SL was not only number 17 on Nielsen’s chart, but counted only 240 minutes (i.e. 4 hours) on average played per week. Now in March, the average has more than doubled, to 499 minutes (i.e. over 8 hours a week.) I’m curious what accounts for such a huge spike in March, but maybe the March Penny Arcade comic on airship sex in SL (yes) had something to do with it.
Also notable: Earlier this month, financial analyst Candlestick argued that Linden Lab market capitalization had decreased $102 million from 2011, in part because SL had dropped from the Nielsen Top 10. Now that Second Life’s back on the charts like the fricking Terminator of virtual worlds, Candlestick, will you bump up Linden Lab’s valuation?
Pre-emptive reply to Dwight Scrhute-esque “But Second Life is NOT a game” complaint: Yes, Second Life is not a traditional game by some definitions, but then, neither is The Sims 3 (often on Nielsen’s top 10 list) and as a PC client that’s primarily used for 3D graphics-driven, avatar-based entertainment and game-like interactivity, from Nielsen’s perspective this is the only appropriate category to put SL in.
