Massively^™

one would think the Ls would be testing the orientation island(s?) systems often enough to pick up those glitches :/

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Despite all the Lindens who work on this, they remain resolutely, staunchly, stubbornly opposed to making any corrections to this insanity.

The solution here is to remove the HUD device completely. It's just too prone to bugs and too hard to handle. Orientation has to be far simplified, and remove silly things like "learn how to drive a vehicle" which nobody wants to do, nor can do, realistically, in SL, given the sim seam problem, until they are far more experienced.

People care about appearance, sometimes obsessively worrying about looking newbish -- make it dead simple for them to chose a look that goes on them completely with one click, again, until they can sort out.

Teach them how to walk, get and keep notecards, send inventory, send an IM, use search, make a friend. I personally think those are the 6 most important things that get them to everything else.

I totally agree about Nova Albion. The Lindens are artificially pumping newbies to it now, by adding an additional teleport board to press on at the end of the tutorial. That's forcing newbies to go to an area they find aesthetic or compelling or near their new 1950s condos they want to hawk in their DPW sim, who the hell knows.

On their own, when they were only one of the random assignments of the random script out of the help island (which should be changed to serial instead of random, as it spits up and lands newbies 100 times on just one place and then doesn't load balance), Nova Albion and Miramare did not retain newbies. They didn't come back to it after being dumped there, as it was cold and unattractive and uninteresting in terms of content -- newbies are forcibly set home, but unless they like an infohub, they don't keep coming back. So the Lindens artificially pumped up the LEAST trafficked of the resident-made infohubs for reasons that seem to have to do with their FIC friends having made this infohub.

It's just insane, all of this. The solution to fixing the welcome area/orientation madness is to simplify it down to the very very basics, remove all the junk like freebies and feting, and have ad boards that people can buy, combined with some sponsored newbie helpers, that people can select on their own to travel to and learn skills by doing and finding real friends instead of first getting trapped under a HUD in a stupid vehicle that goes nowhere, then trapped at the bottom of a canal.

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I've had to help other friends get out of that Orientation island as well. Sounds like it was a good idea, but pooly executed and maintained. Definitely not one that'll make folks want to come back!

I have to say, too, that I agree on focusing on "how to walk, get and keep notecards, send inventory, send an IM, use search, make a friend" -- at the least, these are skills that not only help a newbie, but also help the SL community as a whole. I might also include "rez a cube" in there somewhere.

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The Orientation Islands are designed to keep population of SL down, so grid performance stays at almost tolerable.

I remember by orientation day back in 2005 on that lil island, with the parrot. within 15 mins i was on the main grid exploring with the basics, how has it gotten so complicated?

With all the funky new features its easy to make things more complicated than they need to be. I started using super vendors that had a central server and multipal items with funky fading effects to sell my stuff. As time went by the buggier the grid got and more and more customers complained of not getting what they paid for.... i decided then to go back to the days of individual boxes on a wall and do away with the fancy scripted vendors. Sales are much healthier now.

The orientation needs to be simplified LOTS, never mind the funky huds, and over the top funky games.

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To Prok's list I'd add send and take a tp offer - but walking, talking, flying perhaps, tping, searching, shopping, changing clothes and hair, making friends cover most of "need to know" early.

It's what we teach new students, pulling them out of OI asap so they can get some face-to-face time. We don't teach all of those skills at once, and for students we add uploading textures, rezzing prims, adding textures, notecards and scripts to prims so they can make displays quickly (we give them the scripts and L$ for those bits). In terms of retention - we basically keep 100% for the duration of the course. We keep more than 10% who use SL for other things for more than a month, so we probably do something better than OI manages.

I understand why LL don't want to staff OIs and HIs continuously, but they have hundreds of educators in world, you might have thought some of the skills from there would be used. Ironically, all the educators I know have abandoned OI and HI and do it themselves, on either a big scale, or a per-class scale. It's got to say something about the perceived quality that LL should listen to when teachers choose to do extra work than use existing resources.

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Cripes - I'm with Loki and Prok on this.

I remember the old little island with a parrot. I had to create my first alt for a build test I needed him for. So I got to see what was up.

YIKES!
I have been in SL sinc e2006 and *I* had trouble getting out of Orientation Island! I am *not* kidding you.

Finally just friended myself and offered a tp out - and poof - goodbye forever Orientation island! I can only say - "Wholely crap"! LOL

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Oh, yes, this situation is sad. I have been trying to help other professors in my university enter the Second Life(R) world (hereafter referred to as "SL"). This usually requires that I orient them personally, since the Linden-based SL orientation experience is inevitably frustrating and confusing. I have found two of the non-Linden orientation sites to be better. Circuit City actually has a reasonable orientation area. There is also "Avatar Island".

In general, I have found that the best way to get new users to stay is to have another human being essentially shepherd them through the first few weeks. It seems to take at least three weeks for new users to lose their "newbie look" and begin to function independently. Even after several months, the risk of doing something discouraging, such as derezzing a wall of one's house, persists.

Clearly, there is a need to create a more user-friendly SL experience that does not seem to constantly punish people for being new.

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is there a mirror of the the current OI accessible from the rest of the grid? (I mean, the current one doesn't allow one to teleport in from outside, right? or have they changed this?)

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I remember that parrot, too. LOL! I don't know why, but I didn't have any probs with the UI back then. I went from Orientation Island to Help Island....then flew off of help island to one of the nearby ones that I could fly to.

I loved it! Made a ton of mistakes but that's how I learn.

As far as how to change clothes and wear hair, etc. some of my best friends inworld are avis I met when first starting out and asking questions of them. And people I in turn helped when I saw a noob trying to open an object. That kind of thing, for me anyway, helped build community.

Sorry your friend had such a miserable time. I just don't get why it's so much more difficult now.

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As a Mentor, I am totally agree with you. I am sorry you did not see a Mentor on the OI you were on. When I am approached by new residents with those same problems I always tell them to disregard the HUD and just try each task at the 4 different parts of the Island. Whats worse are the many non-English speaking new residents who cannot be helped when same lanquage speaking Mentors cannot be found.
Several months ago, Linden Labs rolled out an impressive new set of Orientation Islands, Mentors were asked to seed the Islands and observe the user experience. Overall the UI of the Islands were easy to navigate and very educational. Avatars were forced to follow a set route and at the end were given the choice of staying in a sandbox to learn building skills or leave to go to the Mainland.
Sadly, those Islands were wiped.
As with the questionably designed Dazzle Viewer, Linden Labs does not seem to pay attention to the comments and critics of the users. Isn't the Patient and Customer always right?

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Imagine sending a friend to sign up for SL and what they actually experience. When I joined in 2005 orientation was a nice little stroll down the hill where you talked to the parrot and then learned to fly. Now, I'm not even sure either how to leave that sprawling complex or handle the icon-laden HUD.

How it got this bad is very puzzling. If the purpose is to keep people OUT then I guess it's not accomplishing that either.

Either way, it's something we would like to see get better as the de-facto salespersons for this virtual world.

-MRO

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To the list of basic skills I would add camera control - learning how to use Alt+left mouse button.

I've run into many people that have been in world for weeks and even months that did not know how much easier life is when you control the camera.

And perhaps, for Adam Neal and his ilk, how to use Mute.

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I just want to add my agreement to these comments! I hope LL is listening!

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Staffing the orientation island really isn't feasible

For one, There is no "orientation island". There are hundreds of the damn things. A lot of new people register every day. No way one sim could hold them all. Newbies are load balanced across dozens of OI sims.

I'm in agreement with prokofy about how it should work. But It needs to be completely autonomous, and work without human guides.

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