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YMMV / Second Life

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  • Best Known for the Fanservice: Second Life is notorious for the fact that the users are able to do almost any fetish in-world.
  • Broken Base: In the furry community, the use of the Kemono based avatars tend to bring two camps out in the open; supporters of the Kemono avatars find them cute. Opponents see them as looking quite off while also being dangerously close to looking like a child, which in itself is a hot issue on Second Life in general.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Second Life is very popular in Germany, particularly sims dedicated to fetishes. At certain times of the day, a functional understanding of German is needed to know what people are talking about and a lot of long-term Second Lifers at least know tourist-level German just through passive exposure.
  • It's Hard, So It Sucks!: About 80% of all first-time users only log in once, never to return again. This is usually blamed on SL's learning curve being much steeper than that of your average online game combined with not quite intuitive mechanics as well as the lack of a full-on tutorial and objectives/quests to take. Yes, SL is considered difficult because there's nobody and nothing telling newbies what to do; they have to find something to do all by themselves.
  • Never Live It Down: SL had a real problem early on with every sim being an ad farm or some kind of sex sim. They've since made adjustments to eliminate the ad farms and created some segregation between the sexual and non-sexual areas, but the reputation remains.
  • Periphery Demographic: SL is a Mecca for practitioners of Gorean bondage role-play.
  • Popular with Furries: Thanks to the vast customizations and what one can make on Second Life, the furry fandom thrives in many communities within the game.
  • Popularity Polynomial: Second Life went almost mainstream in 2007-08, with political candidates, major companies, and universities carving out space. Even crime drama CSI: New York had a pair of episodes set in Second Life. This rapidly faded out, leaving a smaller, dedicated player base until the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, which saw a massive increase in use. As the pandemic lockdowns receded, activity in Second Life has receded with it, returning to something slightly higher than the pre-pandemic norm, but still down about 10,000-15,000 concurrent users from the 2020 peak.
  • Quicksand Box: Second Life is a big, confusing place. This tends to turn away many new users, who wander around their welcome area of choice, try out the build tools, and get bored fairly quickly.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Any item that is created with a "No Copy" permission. While most items marked as being no copy are usually made this way if they are a part of a game and require that the players don't cheat by making multiple copies, many creators make their products under the no copy permission even if they're not part of a game (such as clothes or attachable, non-scripted items), which can greatly frustrate people who want to make backup copies of their items when editing them. No copy is worse in areas where you aren't allowed to rez items since attempting to do so has the item appear and vanish instantly, followed by a message stating "you aren't allowed to rez items here". Since the item is no copy, you can lose your items this way. It's gotten to the point that the online marketplace now has options to filter non-copyable products so that they do not show up in a search.
    • Rigged mesh items. Unlike traditional items that attach to various parts of your body, rigged mesh items attach directly to the joints of the avatar's skeleton, which allows the item to move, bend, and stretch as that joint does. The main problem is that not all rigged mesh objects are created equal; some only work on the default avatar base and others only work on specific avatars. Rigged mesh also cannot be resized or moved at all, so whatever size the creator made their item as is what it will stay as.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
    • Viewer 2 in spades. Complaints ranging from ugly UI design to horrible performance. Linden Lab had no intentions of changing viewer 2 and viewer 3's interface, which caused users to flock to third party viewers that are based on the UI of viewer 1 and some of the 3rd party viewers are using features from viewer 2 (display names, alpha textures for the body, etc).
    • Phoenix Viewer, a 3rd party viewer that was made after Emerald Viewer was banned, was stated to have development for it stop after they import the mesh feature to it so that the development team can focus on improving their Firestorm Viewer (based on viewer 2 and 3) and have said that it takes tons of coding and time to be importing new features into an old Second Life viewer, which is why they want to focus on Firestorm. The fan base were quite unhappy.
    • User names were changed where all new accounts will always have "Resident" as their last name while in the past, people could choose their own last name. Many were upset at this change though people who signed up under the old name system would still have the last name they signed up for.
    • Linden Lab trying to phase out Viewer 1 also generated this from many people. Many have swore by the old viewer simply because it uses less resources compared to the more up to date versions. People were also not happy that support for Windows XP was cut once the OS reached its end of life.
    • More egregiously, the same users may not have realized that Linden Lab has allowed out of date viewers to still connect, despite being probably the only online game that does not force all users to update to the latest software before connecting, at the expense of a broken and possibly insecure user experience. However, with each new feature and tweaks that Linden Lab pushes out, it makes the old viewers become more and more broken and/or unstable; Mesh objects won't be displayed correctly in a Viewer 1 client and the new server side baking (which handles how avatars are loaded) are also incompatible with old viewers. You can still use the old viewers if you want to, but you won't see everything properly.
    • When Sansar was announced to be in the works. Linden Lab stated that people wouldn't be able to transfer their inventories to the new game (at least not at first) and that there wouldn't be any 3rd party viewers at launch (again, not at first). Nearly everyone displayed worry and disgust over the potential of losing all of the items they invested in from the past several years and fear that Linden Labs is trying to gain full control by stopping 3rd party viewers from showing. However, these fears died down when Sansar was released in 2017 to little success and ended up getting sold off in 2020.

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