Cliched TechCrunch article on Second Life

Must be a slow news day in the tech sector.

Techcrunch which usually covers new Web 2.0ish startups is looking instead at two established players in the MMO space. One (Second Life) more established than the other (Entropria). The article also mentions World of Warcraft but the comparisons there are less clear and valid. You can’t really compare World of Warcraft an MMORPG to Entropia or Second Life. MMOs have different objectives than MMORPG.

The Techcrunch writer Duncan Riley asks if Entropia is a better Second Life (emphasis mine):

The addition that makes Entropia Universe a direct competitor to Second Life though is money. Like Second Life, the in-world currency in Entropia Universe can be converted to US dollars. Unlike the Linden dollar that continues to decline in value, the Entropia Universe PED can be traded at a fixed exchange rate of 10 PED to $1 USD.

First, an important correction: the value of the Linden dollar has not continued to decline in value. The current exchange rate of this writing is around L$267 per $1 USD is among the best it has been since I’ve been in Second Life (December 2005). There was a point when the Linden dollar was being exchanged at L$320 per $1 USD. Duncan is correct about the Entropria Universe having a fixed exchange rate.

What good is money if it isn’t fluid?
Recently I withdrew money from my Second Life account to PayPal and reported the amount of time (some 8 days) as being excessive. I received feedback that Project Entropia was even worse about cashouts than Second Life, sometimes taking months. Can any readers verify the amount of time it has taken for PE cashouts?

The Techcrunch article points to the ATM card that Project Entropia offers as being a way to immediately access the funds inside Project Entropia. If it works that seamless then it is far superior to the cashout system at Linden Lab, but I don’t know anybody who has used one of these cards that can confirm it works this great. Do you? If it does work this slick then I hope Linden Lab will do this for Second Life. I first wrote about the Entropria ATM card over a year ago on May 3, 2006, BTW. My experience inside Entropria thus far has been less newbie-friendly than Second Life but I haven’t given Entropria anywhere remotely close to the amount of time.

I agree with Duncan that the graphics in Entropria are better than Second Life and I remain intrigued with Entropria.

The Second Life is aimless complaint
Duncan didn’t stop swinging at Second Life with the economy, he moved to sensationalism:

One criticism I hear regularly about Second Life is that it’s aimless; it’s not a game so there is nothing really to do other than enjoy virtual sex and play Tringo.

Umm, no. But wait with the pitchforks, he added an exception, sort of:

Now before I am shouted down by a legion of Second Life groupies, I do see Second Life’s appeal as a creative and social space, but not everyone wants to get online and build virtual strip clubs or interrupt interviews with flying penises.

Personally don’t consider myself a “Second Life groupie” although I’m part of a group that covers virtual worlds including Second Life. Neither myself or anybody in our VTOR group that I’m aware of has built a virtual strip club or disrupted an interview with flying penises. Duncan is referring to the incident with CNET and Anshe Chung, but Anshe is just one resident of millions. If you want to point to her incident as significant of the platform as a whole, then what about our resident experiences? Yes, Anshe is the most trotted out celebrity resident aka wealthy land baroness, but using an incident with her to describe how Second Life is overall is dramatic over-generalization.

What about events like the book reading with Dean Koontz? I was there and not only did the event go off without a single flying penis, it was structured in a way that dealt with the sim (server) limitations. As far as celebrity goes, I’d say Dean Koontz is much more popular than Anshe Chung. Why wasn’t his avatar pelted with flying penises? Fellow VTOR author Weirdharold has reported and reviewed several live musicians and I don’t recall any flying penises described at any of those events. Then there was the Major League Baseball All Star Game last year that came off very well. I can go on and on and on with events that have been pulled off without problems or disruption that I’ve personally attended.

There have also been company launches like Visual Studio Island. The biggest complaint I either experience firsthand or hear about these type events isn’t flying penises or sex-starved, Tringo fanatic avatars, it’s the number of people who can attend. I wish more people writing about Second Life would be critical of its true flaws instead of pointing to isolated events with controversial avatars.

Either Duncan doesn’t know anybody that’s been to Second Life events like the ones I described or was too lazy to do the reporting while he was waiting for Project Entropia to load. Hint: I’m on your Skype list, Duncan

The real SL issues
Second Life is far and away not without plenty of its own problems that a critical piece could and should mention. Duncan, if you want to bash Second Life then subscribe to VTOR and we’ll give you plenty of legitimate issues to shout from the mountain top:

- serious architecture problems (Linden Lab says they are working on redesigning)
- inventory and backup issues (residents losing inventory items they’ve paid for)
- overcharging for hosting a ridiculously low amount of people on a server (40 or 50 per server?)
- amateurish distribution of new updates, patches and bug fixes (Darius has waxed on this repeatedly)

I could go on, but if they fix those four, they’ll make a lot of residents — ok, perhaps not all the “SL groupies” — happy.