Strange’s Second Life Blog

Later tonight, the new episode of CSI: NY will be shown and will coincide with the release of a new Second Life viewer. The AOLized viewer from Electric Sheep, called OnRez will be available for new users that sign up to SL through the CBS web site and to current residents. Some people are estimating that this will have the effect of giving SL 1,000,000 new sign-ups. The statistics that are posted (here’s Oct. 23rd’s) on SL Insider for October 24th should be interesting, to say the least. Your2ndPlace has a lot more “specific” details… check it out.

I’m trying to envision this whole thing as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for the companies that I’m involved with to market products and services to a lot of “fresh meat” (or fresh pixels, as the case may be). It’s an opportunity for many other companies to do the same. The kind of congestion that this will cause in the SL marketplace could be overwhelming, though, so there are also some big doubts that go along with my optimism.

With this opportunity, there will be a huge jump in the percentage of new residents that will come in to Second Life with no money, at all. They will come in through a whole different experience and for a completely different purpose than the majority of the residents that are already here. A lot of them will see Second Life as a “who-done-it” game and will not even realize the potential of many other aspects of the platform. Will this truly be an opportunity to market products and services or maybe hire some cheap labor?

What this may become is the equivalent of illegal immigration into the US. We’ll have a huge jump in the amount of SL residents that have not had the time or desire to go through the process of getting their “virtual green card”, but all of them will need to make money, somehow. The job market will be flooded with these new “residents”, taking good paying jobs away from established residents and causing the average wages to drop. This is “great” news for employers in SL, since the overhead costs will go down. This is truly bad news for marketers in SL since the average avatar will have less money, and they’ll be frugal with what they “do” have to keep from paying to buy more Lindens, because they can’t earn them as fast.

Of course, this is something that Linden Lab needed. A huge influx of new sign-ups, of which a certain percentage will no doubt become “premium” members, a large media company that invests a crapload of money into buying server space (440 sims - 110 groups of 4 identical islands, each), and the media attention and “free” advertising that Second Life gets as a residual from the CBS advertising.

Is it really what Second Life needed, though? I hate making predictions, because I don’t like to get proven wrong, but in this case, I think I will. About 15 hours from now, or right around the time that the new episode of CSI: NY starts, the problems will begin. The first wave of problems will begin when current residents download the OnRez viewer (just to see what it’s like) and begin to log on. Some of these current residents will use their current name, while many of them will create alts, just for the purpose of using the new viewer. The time that it takes to log in to Second Life will start to slow down, considerably, much like what happens on “update Wednesdays” when the “all clear” is announced.

Suddenly, search will refuse to search and the ability to teleport will be gone. At the same time that this starts to happen, people that are watching the CSI episode will begin the process of creating their accounts and downloading the new viewer. The load-balancing that Electric Sheep has put in place to transport the new users to the various regions will be realized as a futile attempt to keep things running smooth while creating other problems that were not taken into account.

The default avatars will all begin to show up with “missing images” and/or “Ruthed” and the first impression that the new users will get will be highly detrimental to what CBS was trying to accomplish. While not affecting the new users, much, the ability to rezz objects anywhere on the grid will quit working. HUDs will not appear on-screen and users in the CSI sims will not be able to do too much, because of it.

Soon after the show ends (if not “right after”), Linden Lab will announce that something has gone wrong and they will begin a rolling restart to fix the issues. The new users will have absolutely no idea what that means and will suddenly quit moving, not realizing that they’ve been booted out. When they finally decide to log off and restart the viewer, their attempts to get back on the grid will not work. They’ll become frustrated with Second Life and realize that they don’t need this kind of frustration in their lives. Even though they just created an account, they decide that they don’t need to log back in, ever.

Starting on Thursday, there will be a big blitz of people reporting how many new user sign-ups there were on Wednesday, due to the new viewer and the CSI: NY episode. In the days following, the average concurrent users will not reflect the amount of users that recently signed up. It might go up, slightly, but “peak” concurrency will remain around 51,000, with average concurrency around 40,000.

Bloggers who have never talked about Second Life, before, will start to write about their experiences. There won’t be many long posts, because they will not have had a whole lot of experience. The backlash that will come from the bloggers, alone, will begin another wave of SL bashing from big media outlets. CBS and Electric Sheep will stand by their numbers… numbers that they’ll try to justify and spin. They’ll call the whole thing a success and will point out that this is something that is meant to last “months”. They’ll ignore the problems that were encountered on October 24th, and instead, focus on the long-term aspect of the whole project.

Did I say that I hate making predictions?

I honestly hope that my prediction doesn’t happen. I hope that the grid is able to withstand the amount of users that they are predicting and that everything does go smooth. Maybe “Massive Disaster” is too strong of a term for this prediction, too. There would only be a small percentage of residents who would truly consider it to be a disaster, while the rest of us would see it as a “bad night”. Let’s see how close I get, though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 6:17 am and is filed under Posted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.