Hunts: An easy way to make you suffer

Hunt organizers should be classified as psychotic sadists. And I’m talking about the out-of-proportions grid-wide hunts specifically.

The first thing to notice about their torture scheme is they think you spend all your real life in your second one. That may be true for some, but not for most. Second Life isn’t WoW, haven’t you realized that? The people in here aren’t teens or twentysomethings with no job and living with their parents, with all the time of the world to do whatever they please (I’m just giving this as an example, so don’t flame me). For most adults –the population this SL grid targets– time is both too precious and scarce. Every single minute is worth a thousand lives. So it isn’t fair to program an event that simply requires so much gold.

We aren’t living in computer heaven: SL is a resource hugger client, and usually it takes a while to rezz everything in sight. Not all folks have state-of-the-art computers, nor unbeatable Internet connections, meaning, it takes some time to rezz, search and move from place to place.

SL in itself isn’t as cooperative as many think. Bugged, bloated, borked, fucked up, etc., are all expressions heard or read on a daily basis, whenever SL start to misbehave. That’s also more frequent during peak hours –that’s to say high concurrency–, and hunts in themselves tend to attract a lot of folks, who teleport from one sim to the next in a matter of seconds. Do you know what that implies? Hunts contribute a lot to server strain for all the traffic they generate. Remember: servers need to transmit all that data to every computer connected in a particular time, including the abusive number of prims and scripts some avies need to render (some even require  more resources than a single homestead).

Also, most gifts are not for you. They don’t suit your style or you simply don’t like them, and as you accumulate all that junk, they become inventory trash… if you don’t delete them immediately, that is. Worst: if you’re a male, forget it: only 5% of hunt items are intended for your gender because SL perpetuates RL stereotypes, and in here women are also considered the ultimate spenders.

Harassment and griefers. Are those words in your vocabulary? Sound heavy, isn’t it? That has nothing to do with the hunts  of course, but have in mind that the world is full of sociopaths, and the probabilities of finding one in your gridtrottings are pretty high if you ask me. Fortunately, that’s usually a situation that doesn’t last too long (there are ways to get rid of them), but can turn your hunting experience into a temporary nightmare, especially if you’re naive or inexperienced.

But hunters aren’t the only ones to suffer. They too manage to reciprocate their suffering to the givers. Personally I think the latter are the ones to suffer the most since they get back much less of what they expected to gain in the first place.

Hunt items are gifts: you pay nothing for any of them. A little effort on your part may help pay some of the investment. But, what’s the purpose of hunts: to give away free stuff for the love of it, or to promote your store and products? How many minutes to you think travelers spend in each store: 15 seconds, perhaps? Ok, ok, maybe a little bit more (let’s say, 20 secs?), but do you think they spend that time glancing about what you, the store owner, have for sale? Hell, this is a hunt: people don’t look for what’s in the store, they are seeking for something specific, and forget about the rest. You’re lucky if your pictures rezz before the hunt item does, or else participants don’t even care about your advertisements.

Have you heard about hunt radars? They are crap, yes, but can make users go from one box to the next a little bit faster. If you hope people will look around your stuff while searching for the hunt item, you should know hunters can walk blindly if they are using a radar.

And what about the wireframe trick? I won’t add anything to this in hopes some folks ignore it, but yet, that’s another way of making the world look Matrix-like and skipping the hues that tone the scenery.

Hunts are for fun. Sure they are. Erm… what’s funny about going to a blog, finding all the clues and sURLs, and teleporting directly to each and every item? Someone is wasting his/her time, if you ask me.

Time is too precious –I need to say that again. If I were to take a long look at everything a store owner have for sale, it would take me a year to finish one of those hunts with 2-3-4 hundred gifts to collect. So, by design, such grid-wide hunts aren’t good for both participants and hunters, they stress the latter and punish the former. And it’s worst if there are more than one grid-wide hunt going on simultaneously, as is the case at the time of this post.

The best hunts for me are those with no more than 20-30 gifts per event. At a rate of one gift per participant, they help enough in promoting content creators, and give more time for hunters to explore your store, even to buy some non-free merchandise and products. It also give them, or us, more time to open our gifts and enjoy what we got.

Virtual worlds have a big flaw. Everything in them is possible, except bending time, a time that crosses dimensions and is inevitably shared by all the lives you try to manage, be it virtual or actual.