Stargates!
September 25th, 2008 Posted in Purple Wyvern DesignsWhen Abalus was first set-up, one of the first things Nimbus rezzed was the Stargate at the sim entry point. This gate had all the functions you might expect, flashing lights, noises, event horizon and a kawooosh!
When I first came into SL in 2006, I remember stumbling across the Cleary region and finding a stargate there. I took one of their free stargates and placed it at my home in Jsindo. At the time I was on a 512m² plot and a stargate ate badly into my prim allocation so I removed it and thought nothing more.
The Stargate looks cool and serves as a nice central item for the sim rez point in Abalus. It also provides a link into a network of other gates. But does it have any other uses?
Why have a Stargate?
So why have a Stargate? The gate could be taking anything up to ~200 prims that you could be using for item vendors or product displays. They are also scripted items that could be adding lag.
However, a Stargate has a potential use as a marketing tool, to understand the reason why this might be, you have to consider how people move around in SL compared with reality.
Too move between two sims you generally do point-to-point teleports. You would not walk or fly between sims because it would take too long. Besides, if you are on a single sim island there is nowhere to fly to! If you are on the mainland there are usually too many obstacles (ban-lines, etc) in the way. Within a sim, generally most people either walk, ride or fly depending on the mood and distances and obstacles.
This also means there is generally no benefit or disadvantage in being in any one location, because it takes the same effort to get to one sim as another. In real-life a person is more likely to use a shop that is close to them, then to travel to another town. Unless the shop in the other town offers some benefit the close one doesn’t (such as prices or range). There is benefit is being in a specific location that is popular with your target market.
The Stargate has a random function - this allows you to randomly dial another gate without having to know it’s name. This can effectively link the sims with gates together as an entity. In some ways it is like having a giant mall where the Stargates are the level escalators. A person can be at another sim location, dial random, and end up at your location. If they randomly clicked on the SL main map, the odds that would click on your location is probably fairly low.
So therefore, people who visit a sim with a Stargate possibly might also visit another sim with a Stargate on the same network (assuming they know how to use it). Those random visitors are likely to explore the surroundings they land in and might go on to buying something.
However, this assumes that there is a high-visitor volume location somewhere on the network from which people can dial from. This isn’t necessarily the case, I did a number of random dials and the gates I visited where either:
- 6 island sims with private homes (community gates)
- 5 empty nightclubs/malls (ok, I visited in the quiet time, but still…)
- 4 good “feature areas” like the sgc, midway
- 4 gates at high altitude in reception blocks
I only went to about 20 gates (Alteran has over 350 gates), so this isn’t a representative sample.
Vistor Demographics
So who is likely to actually use the stargate? For a newbie, using a Stargate is not necessarily clear. Therefore the most likely visitors into your Stargate are going to be existing gate owners or Stargate role-players.
Looking at existing statistics (for Jsindo rather than Abalus), on average there is only 1 visitor a day. This is probably consistant with a friend using the gate, or another sim owner. Since both Abalus and Jsindo get a number of random visitors per day (anything from 4-8) it is obvious that these are generally not appearing via the stargate.
One of the issues is that you need to know the command to operate the gate. I have put a “How To Use” notecard dispenser next to the stargate to get the newbie’s into the network and hopefully that will increase gate usage (although effectively sending my customers away!).
So which Stargate network should you use?
There have been a number of Stargate networks that have popped up in SL, some are small, others are large and I won’t claim to be familiar with all of them. The original Cleary network still exists and there are two other large (>200 gates) networks also; Alteran and Open.
Unfortunately these networks don’t yet talk to each other and therefore you can’t transparently move between them. Ideally, I would like to see the day when all the different networks can talk to each other and thus support seamless transporting between networks. One option you could do, assuming you have space and prims, is to have all gates from all three networks on your land (there are those that provide this “hub” service).
Which gate network to choose comes largely down to personal preference. You could look at the list of gates on the network and choose one that has sims which you would like to be linked to. If you are really low on prims, the Open Network does offer a single prim gate and single prim DHD and the Alteran network has a couple of low prim gate designs.
Jsindo is on the Alteran network, mostly because Abalus is on it, but also because I ultimately prefer the design of the gates and the options that come with it.
OK, I got a Stargate, What now?
The obvious stuff, make it a pleasant area to visit. If a SGC team do visit and you have gaudy advertising hoardings all over the place they are probably going to dial out just as quickly. The same actually goes for any selling area, having a nice environment for your customers to visit is as important as price, product and location. The Stargate creators often also offer advice and guidelines on how to locate a stargate.
Having a Stargate will not guarantee extra traffic and extra sales. But having one means you have got something that potentially might generate extra traffic, plus, they look cool anyway!
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