Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Good comment from Alicia, responding to Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's thoughts on the importance of bringing social networks in to virtual worlds and vice versa:

Honestly, keep social networks and virtual worlds separate. People want to keep their social networking/RL private for personal reasons while losing themselves in virtual worlds for a few hours a day/night depending on where one lives. Remember that there are people who have been stalked online by naively giving out personal info about themselves; or have been doxxed by a vengeful person seeking to create trouble for their victim(s) wherever they are.

I can attest to that last point, having interacted with several people (all women, actually) who've been stalked in virtual worlds by men who figure out their account name. Always important to remember.

However, a social network doesn't necessarily have to be a real name-driven one like Facebook — in many case, it's better that the social network just be avatar name-driven, a great way to drive and maintain user activity.

When he was still at Linden Lab, as Jim told me recently, "The friends online page on SecondLife.com was the most visited by orders of magnitude." That is probably one of the reasons, by the way, that Facebook is integrating Oculus with its social network — so people can tell when their friends are online in VR. (I.E. it's not just about personal data mining.)

In any case, Alicia agrees with Babbage's point that virtual world companies need to focus on player-to-player communication, if only because players tend to consume the game content incredibly quickly:

When that happens, a period of downtime occurs between the devoured initial content and the next patch. Case in point is, literally, World of Warcraft as every time a new expansion is released… there's always the mad dash to become the world first highest level.

Then, as it pertains to Mythic Raiding, the best guilds in the world such as Complexity Limit (US, formerly Limit), Method (EU), Exorsus (EU), Alpha (Asia), etc (https://www.method.gg/raidprogress) all prepare weeks in advance before the first raid goes live. These guilds specifically start on Heroic Raiding to get the gear they'll need the moment Blizzard opens the Mythic (highest difficulty) version of the raid; and will literally spend countless hours, with breaks in between, to learn the boss fights… figure out which piece of gear, ability/spell will give them that extra boost of DPS (Damage Per Second)/TPS (Threat Per Second)/HPS (Healing Per Second) to get their raid team on top, and so forth with all the intel they gather and learn with each attempt. 

Without a gamified system, open-ended virtual worlds like Second Life can quickly lost new user growth, because incoming players who don't know anyone feel like there's nothing to do. Conversely, virtual worlds with a gamified system can quickly lose user activity when existing players who don't know anyone feel like there's nothing to do.