Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
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Category: Comment of the Week
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Pictured: In-game shot of an Elder Scrolls Online avatar from 2013 (video below) Adeon Writer puts it succinctly: For what it's worth, VRChat has a rating system of "Excellent, Good, Medium, Poor, Horrible" Any avatar above 70,000 triangles is considered Horrible. For reference, most Second Life avatars are about 200,000 to 300,000 triangles. Many Second…
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Good reader thread responding to my somewhat tossed off remark that, "While you should definitely encourage users to customize their avatars, you also want to impose optimization restrictions so avatars don't become a bloated lag-inducing disaster like they have in SL." The problem, as Alicia observes, is the company behind Second Life has enabled (encouraged?) poor…
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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…
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Photo by Alsatian Kidd — click for larger versions New World Notes' story on the banning of political ads was featured in New York Times (well, briefly mentioned at the bottom of this article, anyway), so this is important clarification from reader "irihapeti" is worth calling out: Reading the Terms of Service [it] is clear that…
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When I wondered aloud last week if new SL users remember the virtual world's Wild West years of creative anarchy over a decade ago, many old timers replied by more or less sighing, "Those were the days." For instance, reader "Mondy": I can remember a time when griefing by self-replicating objects was fairly common, and…
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Via Gazira Babeli's blog which has more details Discussing the topic of drama and griefing in SL, longtime SLer Jumpman Lane compares and contrasts what griefing is considered now, versus what it once was: Drama is not new to Second Life. It's also not as bad as it's been in the past…by a LONG shot.…
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In Apple’s view, only the Apple metaverse would be allowed. And that’s what I fear the most here: that Apple is looking ahead to AR and thinking of the absolute power it can wield over the world if they can get away with repeating the App Store payments fiasco in the real world. — Tim…
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Responding to the question, “Does Second Life Have Way More Player Drama Than Traditional MMOs?“, longtime SLer Jumpman Lane (no stranger to drama himself) offers a first-hand compare and contrast: I would say the chief difference between drama in SL and say drama in The Elder Scrolls Online is a matter of scale, a matter…
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Pictured: Jeff "AM Radio" Berg's famed Second Life art recreated by his son in Fortnite Good conversation responding to Tim Sweeney's belief that there should be many competing metaverses rather than just one world that's The Metaverse. My response to that was calling for shared standards for 3D content that enable virtual goods and other…
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Bugs in Second Life may be less annoying than they are in structured, standard MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online, but here's something that does bug some SLers — the open-ended virtual world seems to have way more player-to-player drama. At least reader Alicia, a veteran of both MMOs and SL, makes that case: There is…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 