"Chicklet453681;c-18185441" wrote:
I can honestly say that if it's totally 100% online/multiplayer ..... I will not be getting it.
I played Second Life for years and year (over 9 years, logging in every single day) and while I did enjoy chatting with my friends from all over the world and doing virtual things together like living together, swimming, boating, surfing, hiking, dancing, shopping, exploring etc and chatting on voice, it also was a pain the tushy a lot of the time.
Too many avatars on a sim (aka world) wearing polygon heavy hair or scripted accessories, or if the sim (aka world) had used a million high res textures, there would be massive lag .... to the point that avatar clothing (and hair) would take RL minutes to render and you'd see a bald, naked avatar (in all of it's Non-PG glory .... no Barbie & Ken dolls in Second Life, or pixel blurs) on your screen.
Then there were the trolls! The people whose only purpose for logging on was to cause grief and chaos for other people. If you went to a build sim (aka world) to build a house or an object or to try and texture something, whatever you were working on .... you could almost guarantee that some griefer would drop some heavily scripted item that could/would render your PC useless to the point it would crash your graphics card and the only thing you could do was a CTRL+ALD+DEL to shut it down and often times you would need to completely reboot your system to reset your graphics card.
Or the massive amount of rude/crude and obnoxious IMs/DMs from strangers when you would teleport to a new sim (aka world), who wanted to get up close and personal with your avatar or would send you RL pics of their anatomy!
And then you'd have people on your friend's list who would immediately IM/DM you the moment you logged on, even before you could see the world or your avatar on screen you'd hear the IM ding sound, which is great (unless you were logging on to work on some build or creation and just wanted to do it in peace and quite without having to stop every 15 seconds to answer a message).
Plus, in that game .... there was no "undo", so if you messed something up you were building or working on and accidentally deleted something .... too bad, so sad! Start over!
So yeah .... if I wanted all that headache again, I'd just log back into Second Life (because it's NOT PG and made for kids).
Being female in an online gaming environment
isn't fun. That's on top of everything else you mentioned about the trolls. I never played Second Life even though I came close to it. I'm glad now that I didn't. I feel like I have thick skin, armor almost, even that can't stand up for long when you're bombarded with the kinds of people that still get into a moderated online game network. I've never seen a gaming network yet that could keep them at bay, even though they all talk about how they won't tolerate harassment. That's why I love coming in here to talk about the game I love. It is well moderated and the safest/least stressy environment I've found to be female and talk about gaming. Maybe it is because most of us are women, I don't know. I just know I feel free to be me here. Just because its safe here doesn't mean the gaming world will be the same. Even if it is, there is still the fact that I like my sims and I to control their stories without outside interference.
