Jump to content

Secondlife 15th anniversary and CEO's letter


You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 2066 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

To be honest, I don't recall what the ownership requirements had been and how they changed before that big spike in Homesteads. I do certainly recall the price hike and the resulting Great Grid Grimness. That said, I often read Mainlanders wanting to swap for a Homestead -- even at much higher prices than Estates pay for the product -- so I'm not sure it need be all that disruptive to either market. (On the other hand, priced that way, it also wouldn't sell all that many Homesteads, so may not be worth anybody's time.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

To be honest, I don't recall what the ownership requirements had been and how they changed before that big spike in Homesteads.

I'm going by memory here, and that's certainly not to be relied upon, but, if I remember correctly, there were no Homesteads before the fiasco started. There were Openspace sims, but Homesteads were new. I think the requirement to get them was the same as Openspace sims; i.e. you needed to have a full island sim, and then you could have up to 4 Homestead sims.

For anyone who wasn't around at the time this is roughly what happened. LL introduced Homesteads - full size sims but with a lot fewer prims - 5000, I think, or maybe 7500. People asked support Lindens specifically if they could be used for certain things, such as clubs and businesses, and they were told that they could be used for them, and even told that "that's what they are for".

Not long afterwards, LL changed their minds and, using the excuse that they weren't intended for those types of things, which was contrary to what people had been told before they bought them, they said that they were being abused. LL changed the deal overnight, causing people to lose significant money. It was a mega *****-up at their customers' expense.

In spite of the past, I rather hope that Homestead, or a version of Homestead, ownership will come to Premium members who don't own a full island sim, perhaps Premium members could simply buy one, or maybe they need to own a certain amount of mainland and then they could buy one. Whatever it takes, I do hope that they become available to Premium members without the need to own a full island sim.

ETA: We're expecting different Premium levels, presumably at different costs, and perhaps a top level user will be able to buy a Homestead. That's not a bad idea, since we're going to get different Premium levels.

Edited by Phil Deakins
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

*Washes your mouth with soap.

Qie, you were there for the absolute disaster that was Jack Linden and should recall very clearly the total, utter omnishambles that occured last time the lab tried to mess with homestead ownership requirements!

privateestates.png.56761dc0a2758106bd3e0206dfe85e7a.png

Look at that 2008 spike in region ownership, and the sudden drop. That is 101% the work of Jack Linden under the stewardship of M, as they messed about with homestead ownership requirements, then pulled it back with increased fees. I abandoned mine then, as many did.

Never again, please.

(*insert's love newspaper/ych image)

 

 

77E5FC02-4BE7-41EA-99D0-2BF4E257E863.jpeg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally you needed to own a full region, buy openspaces in packs of 4, they were 1980 or so prims, and they had to be attached to the full, you couldn't have them stand alone.

The Lab removed those restrictions, and sales boomed. As they would at US$75

I believe that in late 2008 they decided the removal of restrictions had made the product far too successful, and the Land barons were hurting, the Lab had a chance to lose some big eggs.

The door was closed, and in a bad way, with no respect for the customers who had bought in on a promise, the open spaces would be reduced to 750LI, and the rental would go up to 95. There would also be a new product bought in for more money

Do all that again? Make it so anyone without concierge can get a homestead? You would find that mainland would reduce, the Land Barons would bleed customers, and the market in used regions be totally messed up. There would be a huge amount of churn and uncertainly in land, and the estate owners would leave.

These are transactions worth many hundreds of USD each, people have large inventories of homesteads and whole businesses built up around renting them. Those inventories would be destroyed.

The estate landlord community is where the Lab are currently getting most of their money, and it's moderately steady, there are no huge ups and downs or spikes in tenancy, we absorb the cost of yellow homesteads that are not renting. Remove the shackles and all hell would break loose, just as it did a decade ago.

Edited by Callum Meriman
  • Like 1
  • Thanks 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

57 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

Originally you needed to own a full region, buy openspaces in packs of 4, they were 1980 or so prims, and they had to be attached to the full, you couldn't have them stand alone.

The Lab removed those restrictions, and sales boomed. As they would at US$75

Have you noticed the pattern? Start out with land (any type - tier or islands) expensive, milk it all it’s worth, then when the market dies down run a “sale” (grandfather nao!!!1!), lower the prices, increase premium land, give free Linden Homes for premium, etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, Kotelle said:

I wonder how exactly the return of the last names is going to look like. Hope it doesn't mean we are stuck with current names as first names and we will be able to customise only the Resident part. 

My first impression is that it will be this. Or...

12 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

hopefully the option to change lastnames for a normal resident account will be possible too.  like to get a few alts that are sibblings (what I call alts) with the same lastname as my concurrent one.

The one easiest way to do it will be to allow all residents to be able to change your entire (first and last) name. The real trick here will be the requirement to check for existing names: If you want to change your entire name to John Doe - the system has to verify someone else hasn't already set their name to that. Of course, the last name will be selected from a list, then the first name checked against it.

Certainly doable, but the question is will they go through the effort to make it work that way OR will they just allow all people with "Resident" last names to choose a new one from a list?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The way I remember the Openspace/Homestead sim thing was like so:

You had to own a full sim to get an openspace sim. The maximum number of OS sims were four. So you could add on between one and up to four openspace sims around (and connected to) your full sim.

Then LL created the Homestead sim. I forget how many prims, but it was limited to 20 avatars tops. It was specifically marketed as just that: homestead: designed to be a "residential" type sim for those people who wanted the space but didn't want to run a business; basically a private island for yourself and your friends. It was asked whether clubs or stores could be put on these and LL's reply was basically: yes, you can, but know they are specifically designed to be homesteads with low prim/low avies count and low performance.

If I recall correctly: there was *no requirement* to already own a full sim before you could buy a homestead sim. You get three guesses as to what happened and the first two don't count. LOL

Holy-smackers, Batman what HAVE we done!? People were buying up homestead sims and throwing up pretty much anything you can thing of: shopping malls? CHeck., dance clubs? CHeck, BDSM sex-parks? Check, Role-Play cities? Check.

Needless to say the sale of full sims took a nosedive, and so did opensapce sim, at least a little. So within a couple months or so they added the same requirements: you must own a full sim before you can buy a homestead sim.

At least, that's how I remember it all going down, though I could be misremembering some of it. I had a couple openspace and homestead sims connected to my main full sim when I owned a popular role-play sim. And here's the other thing: Adding the Homestead sim was also a mistake: creating an additional space to put the "rental homes" created a space for all the role-players to go and camp and not be around in the role-play main sim.

Go figure.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

In RL many people have the same name. Only obvious reason not to do that in SL is fraud, plus it’s used to log in. Could fix login conflict by requiring name + email.

Have you any idea how many alts would be ruined by that idea? They all use the same email address. (A hypothesis on my part) Hahahaha!

You are eeevviiiillll!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Callum Meriman said:

These are transactions worth many hundreds of USD each, people have large inventories of homesteads and whole businesses built up around renting them. Those inventories would be destroyed.

But that seems unlikely, unless the Lab screws it up. Rather, I think there's a limited market for a different product, priced differently, but identical in specs to the current Homestead. At present, full-sim-owning Estates pay $125 / mo for Homesteads but I think there's a market for bare standalone Homesteads at something like $150 / mo plus Premium membership.  Frankly, any Estate resellers undercut by such pricing should be gone already.

Why would anybody spend so much more for a standalone Homestead directly from the Lab, compared to what they'd pay for it from an Estate? I think we all know the answer to that -- and those people will never be Estate customers, ever. But again, I don't suppose there are that many such folks, so I don't know that it's worth the Lab's time to try to serve that market.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

In RL many people have the same name. Only obvious reason not to do that in SL is fraud, plus it’s used to log in. Could fix login conflict by requiring name + email.

This shouldn't even be a consideration.

 

Legacy names are unique for good reason, if there's 2 Ipecac Burnhams, and one has a problem with a purchase from another Residents store, how could support be given to the right Avatar without the vendor dancing through a load of "Name2Key" hoops?.

 

Should we scrap names all together and just use agent UUID keys?.

 

Should we be displaying our Emails and contact addresses in-world publicly for clarity?.

 

It would also open up the door to many avenues of griefing and add to the support load of dealing with them... Make an alt with someone else's name, do bad stuff, AR the other person, with pictures of and chat logs of you.

 

Many novice scripters use legacy names as an identifier being unique and shorter than most UUID's, would confuse a lot of databasing on greeters, visitor trackers, all sorts of toys and gadgets people made on a whim.

 

Would also be avenues for fraud as you mention, Avatar Z knows Avatar X is a friend of Avatar Y... so make an alt with X's name to try and discredit the other, or... blackmail the other, or, etc... thus more support.

 

I for one, do not want to be handing out my email address to people just so they know I'm not the three day old alt trashing their land.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

Bakes on Mesh - Extends the Viewer and the Avatar Baking Service to allow wearable textures (such as skins, clothing and tattoos) to be applied directly onto mesh body parts as they are on system avatars. To do this, you'll 'wear' the textures as you would for the system avatar, and then edit the mesh body part to indicate the body part that should be used on each of the mesh faces; the corresponding system body part is then automatically hidden for you. This project also increases the supported resolution of wearable textures by 4 times (from 512 pixels square to 1024 pixels square).

So, it sounds like this doesn't really help reduce onion skin mesh poly count or does it? I mean, the onion skin layers need to be there for the baking service to process if that's how it works. If anything, it's only helping to reduce texture usage, which is still very important and perhaps the most important part in performance comparison. What exactly does hiding them do? Is it just a transparent texture, or does it actually remove that mesh from the rendering process entirely thus reducing draw poly count? Also, I'm wondering if these wearables take into consideration not just the mesh bodies but mesh heads as well along with all their makeup and stuff?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

Lab slip in some other "feature" to help us, maybe increase the texture upload from L$10 to L$20.

Imma guessin' that would cause an uproar on par with the TOS changes  of August long, long ago ^^ and cause folks to upload 1024s in order to "cheat" the system with lower costs -- something that I suspect the devs would not be happy about. Since textures are STILL going missing (I found one  gone from my inventory when moving yesterday and I had uploaded it last month -- this would be a real slap in the face.  

And "no" it "wasn't me". By now everyone (EVERYONE) should know how careful I am with inventory LOL.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tell me we will have a choice on our last names? When is this happening? Anyone have a link to more info? 

I think the premium membership would work nicely with better options. Such as a menu with package choices. Maybe an incentive to use autopay as well. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, o0harper0o said:

Tell me we will have a choice on our last names? When is this happening? Anyone have a link to more info? 

I think the premium membership would work nicely with better options. Such as a menu with package choices. Maybe an incentive to use autopay as well. 

 

 

The only information we have is what is in the blog post:

 

 

Edited by LittleMe Jewell
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, Claireschen Hesten said:

According to SLnamewatch Gossipgirl was the most registered last name but it was only available from one third party registration portal i used to see loads of people around with the name but they now seem to have disappeared from SL i do remember using the SLnamewatch site to secure the last name Ghost for an alt as i used to get ghosted a lot i could only get it through one of the third party registration sites that used to be around

there are plenty of last names that have no registered users those with few users likely either bought by businesses with an SL presence or people paid to have a specific name

my name is bigmoe whitfield because somebody snagged moe whitfield,  :/  an account that looks to have never been used.  which is to bad we can not buy those older accounts like that.  would really like the name moe whitfield since it is the name I run by...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Kurshie Muromachi said:

So, it sounds like this doesn't really help reduce onion skin mesh poly count or does it? I mean, the onion skin layers need to be there for the baking service to process if that's how it works. If anything, it's only helping to reduce texture usage, which is still very important and perhaps the most important part in performance comparison. What exactly does hiding them do? Is it just a transparent texture, or does it actually remove that mesh from the rendering process entirely thus reducing draw poly count? Also, I'm wondering if these wearables take into consideration not just the mesh bodies but mesh heads as well along with all their makeup and stuff?

It can completely eliminate the tattoo layer and also make it unnecessary to have alpha cuts and HUDS to control them, because an alpha layer could be worn to do the same thing.  A Maitreya mesh body is built up of over a hundred linked individual meshes because you need 1 face of a mesh for every alpha cut section for the body and also each equivalent secition of each "onion layer", and each individual mesh can have no more than 8 faces. You could make a mesh body that would look absolutely identical with a single-digit number of meshes if you didn't need the alpha cut system.

  • Like 3
  • Thanks 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

It can completely eliminate the tattoo layer and also make it unnecessary to have alpha cuts and HUDS to control them, because an alpha layer could be worn to do the same thing.  A Maitreya mesh body is built up of over a hundred linked individual meshes because you need 1 face of a mesh for every alpha cut section for the body and also each equivalent secition of each "onion layer", and each individual mesh can have no more than 8 faces. You could make a mesh body that would look absolutely identical with a single-digit number of meshes if you didn't need the alpha cut system.

plus: no more flickering layers on low GPU settings or in skyboxes ^^

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators
On 3/21/2018 at 1:49 PM, Kotelle said:

I wonder how exactly the return of the last names is going to look like. Hope it doesn't mean we are stuck with current names as first names and we will be able to customise only the Resident part. 

It will be complete and total name changes, both first and surname.  Just to set expectations on this, it is a later this year item.  

  • Like 2
  • Thanks 9
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, o0harper0o said:

Tell me we will have a choice on our last names? When is this happening? Anyone have a link to more info? 

I think the premium membership would work nicely with better options. Such as a menu with package choices. Maybe an incentive to use autopay as well. 

 

The way it used to be done was that you had a blank first name and a very long drop-down list of last names (at least a hundred or so) - you wrote in any first name you wanted and picked a last name from the list. If that name (first+last) was taken you could try a different last name. The list of last names used to change every three months. Then it changed ever six months. Then they said awe-heck - everyone will just be Resident LOL.

31 minutes ago, Patch Linden said:

It will be complete and total name changes, both first and surname.  Just to set expectations on this, it is a later this year item.  

THANK YOU for this little bit of helpful information. And setting expectations for it still being a long way off is good, too. But at least now we know it will be "full names". And - to everyone else: "Later this year" *could mean" delayed until early next year. Let's be fair and understand LL priorities, technical hurdles, and just plain workload. However, they did announce it so we *know* it will be coming. :)

*Does a giddy dance* (I have an alt who has a full name, but hopefully a change to rename her to my very first ever that had since been deleted. Wow, resurrected, how awesome that would be!)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Will it be available to everyone, or just those with the Resident last name?

I'm going to play it safe and presume "Resident Last name" - if it turns out to be everyone then that's just icing on the cake. And I doubt they'll tell us this soon because: They could be *planning" everyone, then run into some technical snag and have to drop it down to "Resident" only. So that's not something I would expect them to announce at this time because people take announcements as "commitments" even when they aren't.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 2066 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...