When you’re feeling like you want some company in a virtual world, where do you go? Sometimes people choose to go to popular places, where they can be fairly certain to meet other avatars who are also in-world at the same time. What are the metaverse equivalents of the Cheers bar, where you can just drop in anytime?
Second Life
For example, sometimes when I’m bored I go visit the London City sims, which are always busy. Clubs such as Muddy’s, Big Daddy’s, Fogbound Blues, and Frank’s Place are always a popular choice when you want to be around other avatars in a social setting.
Second Life does have a Popular Places listing, but the truth is, most of the places listed are actually pretty deserted. Clubs, in particular, seem to come and go with surprising frequency. Sometimes you have to go by word of mouth to hear about popular spots.
Here’s an interesting canned search that pulls up a list of Second Life sims, sorted in descending order by “traffic”. However, you should know that Second Life is notorious for having sims that may look busy, but are actually populated by armies of bots hidden away somewhere in a platform in the sky, in an effort to game SL’s traffic measurement system, and therefore appear higher in the Search function under Places. So be skeptical when looking at traffic statistics; they often don’t tell the whole story.
But what about the newer virtual worlds and social VR spaces? Where are their Cheers?
Sansar
Every so often Gindipple posts his statistics of the most popular Sansar experiences. Two that seem to be perennially popular are 114 Harvest (the starting place for the weekly Atlas Hopping event and the home of several notable Sansarians) and Alfy’s Arena Live Music Stage. Another popular place is Zen Garden. But really, you can just check the Sansar Events listing or the Sansar Atlas under the All tab, which automatically sorts Sansar experiences in reverse order by the number of avatars present (just check the green number in the upper left corner of the picture of each experience):
High Fidelity
Finding popular places in High Fidelity (aside from scheduled meetups and events) can be a bit of a head-scratcher. The social VR platform does have an upcoming events page in pinboard, agenda, or calendar month views. Unfortunately, there’s no events listing within their client (on their tablet), so you’ll have to rely on the website to get your information before you go in-world. If you search under Places in the tablet user interface, it will tell you how many other avatars are in other domains, though.
Sinespace
The most popular place in Sinespace (aside from special events such as speakers at the Delphi Talks) is invariably the Welcome Centre, where there is usually a small crowd of avatars sitting around and chatting.
VRChat
VRChat hosts many popular events such as the ENDGAME and Gunter’s Universe talk shows. The best way to find out when these are happening is to check out the handy VRChat Events calendar or join the VRChat Events Discord server. Again, sometimes the best thing to do when you’re simply looking for some company, is to open the Places menu and just pick a spot at random where there are a lot of other avatars gathered. You’re pretty much guaranteed to run into somebody to chat with.
What are your favourite places to go in the metaverse when you want to meet other avatars? Have you found a spot you like to go visit? Please leave a comment with your suggested places and strategies, thanks!
UPDATE Aug. 9th:
OpenSim
Alan Tupper of the Opensim Virtual community on Google+ has given me a great tip on finding popular destinations on OpenSim, by clicking this link to the OpenSimWorld directory, which gives a list of sims sorted in descending order by number of avatars present! This is very useful, thank you, Alan!
This article was mentioned at G+ Opensim Virtual…
In the Opensims, a great place to Party on most Monday Nights, is at The Great Canadian Grid! Roddie, the owner Djs most Mondays, and there are usually over 20 people at the Party. The Cabin is near the Welcome area, so come on down. Great music, great people – stop by. (Hypergrid address is: http://login.greatcanadiangrid.ca:8002/)
Thanks, Lannorra! I will have to check that out.
ty Ryan.
FINDING GOOD PEOPLE
– Because I’m a gregarious type, I’ve had some thrilling social life in VR worlds. Mostly in HighFidelity after formal events like Rosedale’s presentations, but also in AltSpaceVR near the campfire when I’ve encountered simpatico people with good minds and ideas.
RIDING IN THE DESERT ON A HORSE WITH NO NAME
– But rarely have I experienced worse agony of loneliness than when roaming VR worlds (for hours sometimes) seeking quality company and conversations.
– I maintain normal manners, but in almost-anything-goes SL, even despite being easy going, I often got sullen correction for using voice (voice, to me is ‘life’ itself), and often saw ‘humorously’ extreme obscenity, abuse of others, or just blank, empty, ugly avatars.
– I was told by one, rare friendly helpful person in SL, that there are in fact good places in SL where there are good conversations. I haven’t yet found them, but might eventually.
AN OASIS BEING ATTEMPTED
– Anyway, I’m collecting people of like mind, and will create a private association of them to invite to a regular drop-in event that I’ll host/anchor so it’s reliable. (I’ve done similar in real life, running a weekly event for six years so far, that normally has about ten people attend, some have become good, long-term friends.)
– The aim is to suit a global audience, regardless of time zones, and build it enough so participants will always be able to find one or two really good friends at any time day or night to talk with. So far I only have five people interested, but I’ll keep going till I have at least twenty to start.
– I’m going to call it ‘Inquire’ because I think the most pleasing thing about good conversations is that people explore ideas, share ideas, discover things, go away delighted by their learning, what they can do next with what they’ve found.
– Types… I’m collecting people who seem
º curious about the world and other people’s experiences
º intelligent, knowledgeable in areas of tech, science, foreign countries, industries, arts, etc.
º self-assured enough to cope well with opposing ideas (listen, allow others to speak, smile)
º keen to make friends of others like that, for enjoyment, and possibly collaborations.
– I don’t yet know which VR world it’ll be in, probably HighFidelity, because the quality of avatars can be very good.
– Although I love AltSpaceVR (because I can 24/7 go to the Campfire and usually find one or two pleasant people) but the avatars available to users are so comically primitive that I think they obstruct serious conversation. I was told you can’t create your own, although I do see (maybe staff) good avatars.
I think that this is a marvelous idea! In addition to High Fidelity, may I also suggest Sansar, where you can also have a high-quality, customizable avatar? Please keep me posted on your plans! 🙂