Castaway Cove feedback
Chaser Zaks
I want to make this perfectly clear. I am not trying to be mean to LL or LDPW. Instead, I want my raw opinions on it to be clear to LL, because if this is how a majority of people are experiencing it (which I have seen thus far, both in Discord and with other residents visiting the island), this is what they think.
I've enjoyed almost every experience LL has officially offered. Castaway Cove was announced a day or so ago, and so far I have to say the worst official experience I have experienced in SL.
Issue 1: The bots are (seemingly?) built with "exclusive attention" in mind.
> I am sorry, I am speaking with someone else right now. I'd be happy to talk to you in a bit!
I am not sure what the reasoning is here, be it for immersion/realism purposes, or because the bot can only handle one session at a time. Either way, this is absolutely unacceptable.
No platform ever does exclusive attention for NPCs, because players can take a long time talking to a NPC. If people can't talk to any of the bots because they are "busy", people will leave the experience. They do not want to sit around and wait.
The cool part about AI is that it can talk with multiple people at once, and this isn't being utilized.
If this is a catch all for errors, it is a
very bad
way to catch all for errors. Tell the user there was an error, don't make them feel like they are waiting for something that will never come.Issue 2: The bots never tell you when they are available.
I sat around for a least an hour, waiting for these bots to tell me when they are available. If I talk to them after they told me they aren't available, they will not send me any message in response. To me, as a developer, this comes off as "Once a session is initialized and the user has been told that it is unavailable, do not check again until a new session is created". In SL, sessions can last for a long time, especially since the bots are online 24/7.
Feedback is important, even if it is repetitive feedback.
Issue 3: Who are the bots?
The first two issues assume you can get past this issue. Who are the bots? Some of the bots are obvious, like Greeter Bot who is explicitly called a "bot", BukowskiDude who sits by the surf boards like a NPC, or MixmasterMariner who is at the bar. Others are deceptively named like a actual resident, like J1ve or xXFireEmberXx, which I didn't know were a bot until I checked their age and saw that they were created around the same time as the others(Normal residents WILL NOT check this!), and messaged them "Hey are you a bot?", only to get the whole "I am sorry, I am speaking with someone else right now. I'd be happy to talk to you in a bit!" line.
I was actually asked by someone "Are you some kind of bot?" by someone randomly, and I was even moving around! People can't find the bots, and when they do, they don't work!
To add onto this, they are not marked as scripted agents, which again, not only makes it hard to figure out which is a bot, but also sets a bad example for residents, considering all bots are supposed to be marked as a scripted agent according to the TOS.
Ideally, the bots would be in a group with a "[NPC]" role above their head to explicitly mark that they are a bot, even to those who don't use scanners to figure out who are bots. This is especially important for newer or less technical residents.
Issue 4: There is very little information regarding the place.
Sure, there is the parcel description, but there should at least be some notecard giver that tells the user what to do, as well as information regarding the above issues, and a starting point on who to talk to.
It doesn't have to reveal anything, it can be as simple as this:
Welcome to Castaway Cove. Can you discover the secrets of this ancient island?
Each character, a keeper of tales and whispers, invites you into a world of hidden treasures and lost stories.
To get started, go ahead and send Greeter Bot a instant message! Say hello, or ask it anything. Each response is tailored to the message you send it, so there is no right or wrong way to go about talking to them!
When you are done, try talking with the other characters to see what they might know.
Final words
I again want to make it clear, I'm not trying to be mean, I want to see this work and think it is a interesting idea to integrate AI bots with experiences in SL. It'd make experiences even more interesting. But I think it is important for this feedback to be brought to the attention of LL, because a majority of people who go to experiences
will not leave feedback
and will leave with these opinions in mind.Log In
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Piping in very late, but I totally agree — all of the above is absolutely wrong in many regards.
First and foremost — if this is a LL project, LL should know better than to let people guess about who is a bot and who isn't. That's plain stupid in more ways than one. If the purpose is to try to deceive residents in guessing correctly, well, that would be fine, but in that case, not only are the bots very easily spotted (because of their canned answers when they're "busy"), but that should be strictly stated when joining the experience.
Secondly, as someone who has done similar things in SL (albeit with much less advanced tech — orders of magnitude less, in fact), our main worry was that people mistakenly thought the bots were "real". They were all flagged as scripted agents, of course. But they are also clearly labelled as such on their profiles (even in more than ne language, I think). When you touch them, they will explain, in chat, who they are and what they're doing. The project, at the very start, explains what people are supposed to expect. And while the bots have several issues (all of which non-LL-related, i.e. it's all my fault!), their existence is secondary to the experience — the first plan was to simply have those "mesh statues" of realistic people which are used as props, and, in fact, many are. However, we needed to have a variety in clothings and styles that simply are absent from these mesh "statues" for the main characters, and these could only be found as regular apparel for regular avatars. Again, this is not a
complaint
about certain weird limitations in SL. It's just that, on one hand, we need to deal with the reality of the circumstances — SL was not designed with NPCs in mind, period. But on the other hand, there is a certain amount of common sense that is lacking:— Why aren't avatars flagged as scripted agents clearly flagged as such? What is the purpose in that? If someone wants to trick others with a very sophisticated animated chatbot, they surely will
not
flag it as "scripted", right? Those that want/need NPC/bots for perfectly legitimate uses and
have been quite willing to flag them as such should have no issues in getting the scripted agent's status displayed on their profiles (as oppposed to "No payment info on file"....).— Why do scripted agents appear on the mini-map, the map, and elsewhere (e.g., ehwn counting the humber of avatars in an experience)? Well, I can admit that they
do
get displayed, but why arent they clearly marked as such? Just give them a different colour on the maps. And for those who spend massive amounts of L$ in bots, to make sure their shop has far more traffic than it has... well, just ignore their existence for the pruoose of merics/statistics. Or, if you wish to present those in some way, you can always do something like "There are X avatars in this region, of wiich Y are scripted agents". So-called "campbots" would easily be excluded that way, turning the whole controversy around them moot.— Give scripted agents the opportuniy to chan ge their family names to "Bot" or "NPC" or whatever is appropriate.
— Or: give bots automatically a name prefix, like "R." on the Isaac Asimov "Caves of Steel" quadrology, his sequels to the "Foundation" saga and others.
That should be good enough for starting the conversation, IMHO!