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PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Second Life Opens Public Beta 42

Posted by simoniker from the dont-have-a-first-life-yet dept.
thehossman writes "A friend of mine works for Linden Lab, and for the past few months he's been hyping their upcoming product: Second Life. I've just been nodding my head, and ignoring him, but last week he logged in and gave me a mini-tour of the VR world (and some things their alpha-testers have helped create) and I was blown away. Now they've announced their public beta, and if you've got a machine that can handle it, I highly advise you to check it out." This is another of the lifestyle-focused massively multiplayer titles that seem to have very big (venture capital?) budgets backing them - can they succeed?
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Second Life Opens Public Beta More

Second Life Opens Public Beta

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  • credit card number? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kLaNk ( 82409 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @09:19PM (#5849927)
    They require a credit card number to sign up for an open beta? That seems a bit extreme if you ask me. There are other ways of making sure that your users are unique without requiring everybody to trust you with your credit card number!
    • I guess we now know what the '???' means:

      1. Develop game website
      2. ????
      3. Profit!

      (gotta say, it looks pretty cool, tho)

      -Sean
    • There are other ways of making sure that your users are unique without requiring everybody to trust you with your credit card number

      Yeah, stuff like:

      Phone Numbers
      Email Address
      Home Address
      Social Security Number...

      Crap. Can't win

    • Age Verification (Score:2, Informative)

      by amaprotu ( 527512 )
      The minimum age for this stage of the Alpha/Beta is 18. This is because the measures to keep under age people out of the Mature areas are not yet in place. And thus.... credit card.

      You are not charged, and to my knowledge after signing up your card information is ditched.
    • When the game goes live they'll probably roll over all free beta accounts automatically, and if you don't cancel your subscriptions within the x day period ... This reminds me of the behaviour of many web sites, "Sign up for a free X day trial"
  • You need to give them a credit card to apply for the beta?! I had done some reading and thought I'd give it a try. Started filling out the form, when I came to the credit card part....Ctrl+W
    • I was a little dubious about the first portion. Why do they need my address and phone number for a beta test? I figured that wasn't that big of a deal, they are verifying that I am who I say I am. Then I see the credit card portion and I closed the window. I'm sorry, but I'm not giving anyone my credit card unless they are charging me a predetermined fee that I agree to. I'm certainly not going to give a company my credit card number for a beta test.

      • Re:Credit card?! (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Heh, I'm a current member of their beta program (you might say), and if you go to the links section, you'll notice links to both the EFF and Slashdot. You might also notice that Linden Lab just announced that Mitch Kapor, one of the founders of the EFF, was named as Chairman of their Board of Directors...

        It really sucks, but there's really no way to do anonymous age verification of users, which is the primary reason for requiring credit card numbers on the beta application. Given the choice between requi
        • It's not a matter of who they are or why they are doing it. It is a personal preference. I don't give out my credit card for age verification. I only give out my credit card information when making a purchase.
  • Ahh, this world isn't real because they don't yet have trademark infringement [secondlife.com]. (or at least until MLB sees it) Is it fair use if I own an officially licensed shirt?

    -Sean

  • Second Life? (Score:2, Funny)

    by orkysoft ( 93727 )
    Some of us are still busy to get their first life! And what about cats?

    Insensitive clods.
  • But I'm going to leave it at looking good. I'm not going to trust someone to take my credit card number to make sure I'm a unique person. They have an email address, they have a home address, they have a phone number, why oh why do they need a credit card number? As legit as I'm sure this is, it sure seems a little shady. I guess they probably won't be swimming in beta applications though, maybe that's the real goal.
    • I agree, Such privacy intrusions so early is a real turn off.

      Earth to Second Life.

      Wake up to the real world. You must build trust and confidence in your service with your new users before you can request such sensitve details from them. With zero track record there isn't much to set you apart from the barrage of scam artist websites out there in the users mind.

      First impressions are important part of the user experience. Screw it up and many people will never give you a second look much less life.

  • Second Life, First Girlfriend? Last Job? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nathan Ramella ( 629875 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @09:57PM (#5850089) Homepage
    Why is it nobody has harnessed the MMORPG model to get humans to do something useful. Like parsing, culling data or inputting data to get 'money' in the game.
    If somebody would just come up with the right setup, they could get the 'Matrix' harness developed to use people as the engine for their business model.

    Marketing people could test new music out in Virtual 'Bars' to see what people like, You could capture all the conversations and find out who's drinking coke and who's drinking pepsi..

    And the instant gratification as you talk to someone in a virtual bar and a passer-by auspiciously mentions that the new poster on the wall can be purchased online at the following URL..
    -n

  • Does anyone know of any "games" in this genre that are open source and free? Imagine having something like this as open as the web, with a scripting (or ofcourse we could all learn cg/openGL/etc, but i don't that would go over to well) languages to let people make objects. I guess I've been reading Snowcrash a bit to much though.
  • If you're not finding much on "Linden Labs", it's because the company name is "Linden Lab". Yes, even among the beta testers, everyone calls it Linden Labs. Yes, it's a source of much confusion.

    For the record, the company URL is lindenlab.com [lindenlab.com].
  • Ok, not the same genre of game, but the game I've really been waiting for is The Last Ninja 4 [lemon64.com]! What's really cool about it is that the developers have been very active in Last Ninja fan-forums, asking fans of the classic Last Ninja 1-3 games questions how they should do this or that to keep the wonderful feeling of the old games. It's been in development since 1999 and the current planned releasedate is set to "end of 2003". Their attitude is also "if it doesn't have the same state-of-the-art gameplay and a
  • Mozilla and w3m have no luck with that link. Thanks linden labs and slashdot for supporting the Microsoft monopoly's network effects.
  • I've been playing the beta for about a week now, and I'm blown away by the possibilities for this game.

    Everyone has the ability to 3-D model objects and then script them to do whatever they want in-game. There are a bunch of pre-manufactured objects for you to play with, but you are free to build anything you can dream up. I've already seen guns, planes, pool tables, slot machines, skyscrapers, log cabins...it's really amazing how in-depth this world has already become.

  • Noise, Noise, Noise (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chris Canfield ( 548473 ) <slashdot@chrisca n f i e l d.net> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:53AM (#5853543) Homepage
    The fun of Second life, and the major problem with it, is the freedom of creation. You build and script objects in the world, from simple benches to mansions to Soccer Balls to Casinos. The problem arises that the world has all of the beauty and serenity of a graffiti wall. My little house by the hill is surrounded by a dilapidated building consisting of four walls and a triangle, a TIE FIGHTER on a launchpad, a pole-shaped thingie extending several miles into the sky, and a floating billboard for a skin modelling company, among others. There is no stretch of land anywhere unclaimed, and there is very, very little that isn't loud, gawdy, attention-grabbing, poorly made, or some combination of the above.

    Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm attempting to get away from: I live in a loud, attention-grabbing city, and would suspect that most people do too. The gameworld doesn't have the cultural feel of a city, with densely-packed space and open culture, but rather a suburbia with every parcel of land claimed and all of it wasted. But it has the dirty, technological, noisy feel of a city. Very few people bother to plant trees on their land, or go through any other sort of beautification with the surrounding environment. Even the people themselves can look like anything, from tiny little dwarves to pasty-white goth vampires to robby the robot.

    It's not necessarily lunacy, but it *is* disconcerting. Without an external area that people go to fight in, ala everquest, there is just no large open space within which one can be alone, or free, or communal. You can hardly sit down without paying attention to who owns the bench. Everything is owned, everything is shouting for attention, and everything looks different than everything else. The old-west themed area is refreshing, following the pre-concieved notions of design and function allows for a user to rest peacefully in a cute little town and recover sanity, but other than that area the game is a big aesthetic mess.

    I wish the Second Life people much luck and much success... But, in addition to a tremendous server upgrade and continents more worth of land, they need to deal with issues such as how to regulate freedom such that the activities of one person do not create a form of aesthetic pollution that makes things less enjoyable for their other paying customers. Perhaps pre-set texture sets for given areas? Or single-purpose areas? We will have to see.

    BTW, I gave credit card details, and haven't been charged. They do that to prevent people from signing up multiple times, giving the free sign-up currency and the weekly in-game stipend to the primay character.
    • I haven't played the game, but your description along with the description on the website reminds me quite a bit of the Metaverse in Snow Crash. Sounds like what people really need is to set aside some virtual space and build a few safe havens that everyone can enjoy in serenity, like public parks in the real world. That, and a Black Sun.

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