Secondlife declining player base

[Phorumities]

3 hours ago, Garnet Psaltery said:

You could start a trend - frozen weddings!  Everyone dresses up and stands still for half an hour.  They can still chat and make vows, and there's plenty of time to take nice pictures

I went to a pretty sad wedding a while back, the couple paid a fee and a bot did the service.

Of course considering the marriage lasted about a week, the ceremony wasn't worth any more effort than that anyway.

 

[Janet Voxel]

[DarkRavenWolfie]

58 minutes ago, DarkRavenWolfie said:

The thing is: its not even pc related NECESSARILY

 

you can have the biggest beast of a pc and you would still have lag on SL due to custom content that needs to be loaded and meshes. I dont think lag can ever be fixed, not without removing custom contents altogether and not without recoding SL from scratch altogether which isnt happening especially with Sansar around the corner.

 

 

 

21 hours ago, Phorumities said:

Really? we are going to make virtual reality as good as reality? Why? 

I notice you didn't mention genital attachments. 

Imagine the sensations when you are having virtual reality sex with that special someone.

The whole thing kind of sounds pathetic to be honest.

Not to mention that wasnt the idea of virtual world being to essentially escape from real life?

 

 

On 2018. 08. 09. at 4:59 PM, Klytyna said:

"Ahhh... Home from work, I'll just log into "Project Really Stupid - Sansar-2 The Madness Continues", to check my messages while I wait for my tea to finish cooking... Ok, now to spend 45 mins strappong and bolting my self into my 200 lb Living Room Cyber Cretin Advanced Vomit-Retard Sensor Armour with built in toilet facilities! Gotta pay the $750 for the toilet upgrade, it was so difficult trying to sit down and pee in 200lb sensor armour!"

Yeah, thanks but no thanks, don't want to have to play hi-tech mo-cap dress-up just to log in to "art business and education".

Art's better seen in person real time if you like art that much, business meh, and education online has always been a failed pipedream.
 

 

what kind of education are we talking about here?

 

 

Edited August 10, 2018 by DarkRavenWolfie

[Phorumities]

17 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I do my poor best in SL with my own little Monument to the Victims of Communism, which you can find in Marieta. People are encouraged to leave their stories and I have had a few. My in-laws were lost in the GULAG. There should be far, far more education on the ravages of Communism than there is, given that this is a system that has killed the most people on the planet and stayed in power the longest and is still in power in too many places. I was fortunate to have the early experience of typing Soviet demographer Iosif Dyadkin's book on the Bolshevik and Stalin terrors and mass crimes against humanity. No one should study this region or indeed world history without grasping that there are 58 million deaths in the Soviet Union alone, when you count terror-famines such as the Holodomor in Ukraine and mass famine in Kazakhstan; forced labor brigades; arrests and executions even of the Party and KGB itself; arrest and forced labor or torture which led to death such as for the biologist Nikolai Vavilov; assassinations and covert killings like the arranged car accident of Mikhoels; even Stalin's weatherman was thrown in the GULAG, and this continued through the Brezhnev and Andropov eras with such deaths in prison as Anatoly Marchenko, the labor activist.

If you argue and say, why, there's only 27 million, count them differently, or let's not count Lenin's era, that's still a staggering, staggering number. It puts in perspective the Cold War; cold is what you need to be to such levels of mass murder.

I wouldn't expect the lefty and trendy Lindens to get into something this -- that's why I suggest climate change, more to their liking, but still -- what I mean is programming for educated adults. The answer is often, well, let the residents do that, let some university do that. But as I often say, sometimes these things need organizing, and if they can make games with glitchies or whatever, they can make other things that are more compelling and interesting.

BTW I also have a Monument to the Victims of Terrorism in Iris, another very underserved group, which interestingly gets a lot of visitors every day, way more than for Communism but that's because it is very much a factor of our times. 

I'll make a point of visiting you Memorial to the Victims of Communism.

I read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archpelago twice.  It's a powerful book.

I wonder though, why can leftists drone on and on and on about the evils of Nazism, and yet usually respond with a blank face when you ask  them about communist atrocities.

Is it because, in their mind, all the victims of communism were at least murdered for a good cause?

I wouldn't put too much stock in "Man Made Global Warming". It's just the lefties latest attempt to destroy the west.

It's a well known fact that if you scratch a green, they are usually red underneath.

As for the Victims of Terrorism, President Bush did the world a great disservice when he declared his "War on Terror"

Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy.

Bush should have declared clearly right from the start who the enemy was, and still is: Radical Islam, who's goal is the destruction of the West.

The West is the shining beacon of hope and freedom for the world. It's no wonder so many evil people wish to see it extinguished.

 

[Phorumities]

10 minutes ago, DarkRavenWolfie said:

 

Not to mention that wasnt the idea of virtual world being to essentially escape from real life?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isn't that what recreational drugs are for?

[Coffee Pancake]

20 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

On 09/08/2018 at 9:38 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Regarding all this discussion of land impact, I imagine that the Lab has a road map on this in fact, but we just aren't privvy to this. They may have suddenly become so generous with offering 50% more prims and cheaper land because they realize they had to make hard changes on land impact that are going to suddenly cost everyone more in prims. And by easing people into a higher prim amount and cheaper land, perhaps they think the bite will not be so hard, if that's the form it's going to take.

I think you're probably right on the money here.

It makes no sense to boost the amount of land we can use months before making everything twice as expensive to rez.

I stand by what I've said, expecting LL to suddenly make rezzed content use a higher land impact is wishful thinking at best. downright malicious at worst. Huge random chunks of literally every single built up sim in SL getting auto-returned would be an unmitigated PR disaster, the change would live in world for minutes before they back peddled and rolled back everything. There is no way any customer with land will not be up in arms and on the phone to LL support. There would be actual lawsuits.

I asked Oz about this today at the TPV, and while they are looking at a recalculation, the intent is not to trigger a mass return, even if that means boosting land capacity at the same time to cover it. It was even suggested that some rezzed Li numbers might go down.

To quote Oz "We want you to have more stuff, that's part of the plan."

 

(Video of the meeting will be in my TPV cliff notes post in a bit)

 

[Pamela Galli]

2 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

On 8/9/2018 at 9:02 AM, Pamela Galli said:

 

First, let's not be disingenuous.

• No one was forced to remake all their prim content as sculpts. Sculpts provided a way to make more varied and detailed content so people chose to hop on board with it.
• No one was forced to remake their sculpt content as mesh. Mesh provided a way to make more varied and detailed content so people chose to hop on board with it.

Please quote where I said forced, Penny. And if you can’t find it, pls retract your accusation. 

I chose to stay in business. I wasn’t forced. 

[Penny Patton]

10 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

Please quote where I said forced, Penny. And if you can’t find it, pls retract your accusation. 

I chose to stay in business. I wasn’t forced. 

 You don't have to literally use a word for it to be clearly implied in the sentiment.  Why would you complain about "remaking" all of your content if you felt there was no compulsion to do so?

 For the record, I do sympathize.

• It's not fair to content creators that they should fell compelled to fix their content due to LL changing the rules. (An exception to those who knew better, and those who would argue against the facts of 3D rendering when presented with reasons why they should optimize their work. I have no sympathy for them. They brought the extra work upon themselves.)
•  It's also not fair to customers who purchased content in good faith and who would need to deal with replacing items with updated versions, or altogether replacing content when no update is made available. 

This whole mess was avoidable from the beginning. Linden Lab screwed up. There were even those of us who told LL that the current situation is exactly what would happen, and how they could avoid it. The Linden management at the time chose to ignore that advice. But it's better to fix the problem than just throw our hands up in the air and declare that there's nothing to be done about it. The problems of unoptimized content will only get worse as time goes on, pushing framerates down and hardware requirements up. Making it so fewer and fewer people can even run SL as time goes on is a poor business strategy for LL, means fewer potential customers for SL's content creators, and fewer active SL users and communities overall. That's no good for any of us.

2 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

It makes no sense to boost the amount of land we can use months before making everything twice as expensive to rez.

I agree but of course I don't believe LL will make everything twice as expensive to rez. I expect, if LL is sensible about it (I know! I know! But if they're determined to change how LI calculations are made we have no choice but to at least hope they'll do it sensibly even if experience says otherwise. I'm still waiting to see LL deliver on the promises they've been making, but I want to at least give them the chance to show things at the Lab have changed.) some content will cost more LI, some will cost less. And given a reasonable timeline, we will all still come out ahead because of the LI increases LL gave us.

 I'm certain LL has no intent to trigger mass returns. Oz himself already said that there will be a grace period between the time they finalize the changes to Land Impact and the time those changes go into effect. I'm also fairly certain that even after the changes go into effect, they won't cause anything to be returned. If anything, I imagine there will simply be no extra LI to rez more content on land where the LI changes push the existing content over the limit. So existing builds would be unchanged, but if someone wanted to change anything in such a build then they'd have to figure out how to lower their LI use first.

 I also expect most (non-sculpted) prim content will be more or less unaffected (or even have a reduction in land cost).

 

 

[Pamela Galli]

7 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

You don't have to literally use a word for it to be clearly implied in the sentiment.  Why would you complain about "remaking" all of your content if you felt there was no compulsion to do so?

Because Penny there is a vast difference between making a well reasoned business decision and claiming that I had no agency and was forced. Being forced is the opposite of choosing, look it up under antonyms.

”Disingenous” however is a synonym for dishonest.

Edited August 10, 2018 by Pamela Galli

[Penny Patton]

4 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

SL doesn't and wont ever translate to a mobile platform, there is no facility for your presence to be transient. You are either a fully logged in avatar in world... or you aren't.

What meaningful interactions can you have in a phone based 3D virtual world in a 5 minute window that isn't better served by just regular text chat.

There is a reason we are drowning in mobile friendly rich chat clients (telegram, discord, twitch, steam, skype, viber, whatsapp and so on ad nauseam).

Missed this earlier, but I still think SL could benefit from a proper text-only mobile client. Chatting with friends, making payments or managing your account, browsing the marketplace, etc. Done right, I think it's something most SL users (but especially those who run large communities or their own SL businesses) could get a lot of use out of.

Of course, given the current state of the marketplace and SL's social tools, I don't think LL would know how to properly design such a mobile client. Not to mention, I think to really work well there would have to be massive improvements to said in-world social tools.

[Penny Patton]

1 minute ago, Pamela Galli said:

Because Penny there is a vast difference between making a well reasoned business decision and claiming that I had no agency and was forced. Being forced is the opposite of choosing, look it up under antonyms.

By your own reasoning one must conclude that you felt to achieve your goal (staying in business) you felt compelled (read as: forced) to adapt and embrace new features. And that's a wholly reasonable conclusion! You would have to adapt to stay in business. But if that's the angle you're viewing this from, then your initial post, and now each of your follow-up posts, make even less sense if you remove that implied compulsion.

 And look, sculpts and mesh came out many years apart and each took years until you could say they were fully adopted by the SL market. You were never in a position of having to remake your entire product line to stay in business, rather you incorporated new features into the new products one must reasonably assume you would have created anyway. (Because if your goal is to stay in business, then continuing to create new content would be unavoidable).

[Penny Patton]

52 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

”Disingenous” however is a synonym for dishonest.

Maybe a bit harsh on my part, I'm sorry. But if you really see it that way (your initial post) then you're mistaken, and I hope I've been able to communicate why with my previous post.

I'll even go further to say that "upgrading content to account for changes in how LI is calculated" is even further removed from the comparison with creating new sculpt and mesh content as those features arrived, as those were cases where content creators were creating new content to take advantage of new features, where in this situation it's fixing existing content, or creating all new versions of that content, to adapt to a rule change. And I've already said why I sympathize with frustration at that, but also why I see it as necessary and how LL can mitigate the work it would put on content creators. It's a short term inconvenience for long term gain.

Edited August 10, 2018 by Penny Patton

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

 For the record, I do sympathize.

I know you do, Penny.

I'd like to add something to your list:

2 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

• It's not fair to content creators that they should fell compelled to fix their content due to LL changing the rules. (An exception to those who knew better, and those who would argue against the facts of 3D rendering when presented with reasons why they should optimize their work. I have no sympathy for them. They brought the extra work upon themselves.)
•  It's also not fair to customers who purchased content in good faith and who would need to deal with replacing items with updated versions, or altogether replacing content when no update is made available.

• It's  also not fair to the many good content creators who know how to make good SL friendly content and struggled for years to get through before they finally gave up in disgust.

And that raises another question: If/when LL finally comes up with a way to reward efficient content and discourage inefficent, laggy content, who's gonna make it?

The Moles? They have an official policy to make faulty LoD models because in their ignorance they've deluded themselves into believing they reduce lag that way.

Linden's "good old buddies"? Yeah right. They've been at it for years and haven't learned yet.

The gacha/event kings and queens? Yeah, right!

All those people have to manage to forget everything they think they know about SL mesh before they can even start learning.

Most of the people who actually have the skills and knowledge to handle the quirky LoD and physics models and all the orther SL mesh pecuilarities are gone and they're not coming back. Pamela is one of the few who still holds out and I think her frustrated posts here speak for all. They all have a deep, healthy and dearly bought distrust in Linden Lab, especially now that LL has announced they are going to charge more for their services (for lack of a better word) to the SL merchants.

We need a brand new generation of content creators to replace the ones we've lost. Where are they going to come from? How are they going to break through in a market where hype and inside connections count for so much more than actual substance? How long will it take them to learn the neccessary skills? And who's gonna teach them? Do you know of a single skilled mesh maker among the Moles and Lindens? I haven't found any and I've looked everywhere.

[Chic Aeon]

6 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

I asked Oz about this today at the TPV, and while they are looking at a recalculation, the intent is not to trigger a mass return, even if that means boosting land capacity at the same time to cover it. It was even suggested that some rezzed Li numbers might go down.

And Patch said at his SL15B talk that they might be increasing the land impact per sim again as their tests on that have been going well. That is a vague paraphrase as it has been awhile but I mentioned it in June here too.  

 We KNOW there will be increased fees but it is very likely they will be tied to land or have anything that makes the current land impact less inviting.  The whole point  -- for anyone paying attention this last year  -- is to SHIFT the money stream from land to commerce. 

 

[Chic Aeon]

3 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

Because Penny there is a vast difference between making a well reasoned business decision and claiming that I had no agency and was forced. Being forced is the opposite of choosing, look it up under antonyms.

”Disingenous” however is a synonym for dishonest.

In my mind one of the best things LL did in the past was to make sculpts "obsolete" as they were almost always (there were some exceptions) a HUGE drain on our experience here. I was in some place where I waited twenty minutes for a bridge to rez. MESSY.   

I remade a few items when I started learning mesh but not many. Mostly I just took things off the market. There are a  couple still there and they still sell but there is an ALTERNATIVE for folks in mesh should they not want to deal with the sculpt version.  The only sculpts I have at LEA6 are some bushes and grass -- both load quickly.

[Luna Bliss]

I'm catching up on this thread.

 

[Coffee Pancake]

5 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

Missed this earlier, but I still think SL could benefit from a proper text-only mobile client. Chatting with friends, making payments or managing your account, browsing the marketplace, etc. Done right, I think it's something most SL users (but especially those who run large communities or their own SL businesses) could get a lot of use out of.

Of course, given the current state of the marketplace and SL's social tools, I don't think LL would know how to properly design such a mobile client. Not to mention, I think to really work well there would have to be massive improvements to said in-world social tools.

Oh I agree.

An intermediate online status, logged in but no avatar present and able to IM would be perfect for a mobile client and make the social side of SL extend way beyond what people do in world.

[Drayke Newall]

11 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

I asked Oz about this today at the TPV, and while they are looking at a recalculation, the intent is not to trigger a mass return, even if that means boosting land capacity at the same time to cover it. It was even suggested that some rezzed Li numbers might go down.

To quote Oz "We want you to have more stuff, that's part of the plan."

So basically instead of working on other more beneficial methods to reduce lag and optimisation issues labs response is this? Bad move I believe. The whole issue at the moment why people use hack methods to reduce the LI at the cost of optimisation of an object is to get more use out of the land LI restriction. If labs boost land capacity and increase the rezzed LI numbers instead of giving extra LI usage to the sims to use and leaving the calcs for LI where they are it will just result in different hacks to reduce LI rates again. This would mean back to square one and an never ending cycle of increase and reduction.

I haven't uploaded mesh in a while so may have changed but, why when loading a mesh into SL is there not a default cap on the upper and lower end of the LOD calculations. Why can people still set all levels of the LOD as the same value or even down to 0? They need to look at this first. If you have an uncapped and non default LOD input method of coarse it will be abused. Would it really be that hard to have whatever the higher LOD is the lower LOD's are calculated automatically at 1/3 (or whatever) of the higher figure and making them fixed? 

Next thing to look at is increase the L$ upload figure of mesh to compensate for the optimisation issues. Make it more expensive to upload unoptimized stuff would also help. Whilst probably not possible without a lot of recoding make textures resize to their designated surface area. 1024 for large, 512 mid and going down to 8 for tiny. Why do I have to endure lag based on some creator making a tiny diamond texture on a ring stone 1024? If this isn't possible vary the upload cost of textures rather than 10L$ for all levels, Increase higher texture L$ upload figures and reduce lower.

Any form of optimisation that involves decreasing potential gains in sim LI as a whole is counter productive and unnecessary. Changes like the above will ensure that nothing gets broken or becomes unusable whilst also ensuring future creations start becoming more optimised which will eventually, like what happened to sculpts get phased out of use due to better stuff. Additionally it would also open up further potential L$ revenue for labs (if the texture upload increase is put in place) to offset land prices whilst benefiting the community with better thought from creators into creation optimisation.

Edited August 11, 2018 by Drayke Newall

[ChinRey]

13 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

I asked Oz about this today at the TPV, and while they are looking at a recalculation, the intent is not to trigger a mass return, even if that means boosting land capacity at the same time to cover it. It was even suggested that some rezzed Li numbers might go down.

To quote Oz "We want you to have more stuff, that's part of the plan."

So it's not about reducing lag then? Drayke's reply says it all I guess - I'll just add a quote. Waylon Jennings this time:

"I know what you're thinkin' and I don't think your thinkin' at all"

 

7 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

I was in some place where I waited twenty minutes for a bridge to rez. MESSY.

That's the software, not the sculpts. Without going into a lot of technical details: if it had been done right, sculpts would have loaded faster than mesh and the render weight would have been somewhere between optimized mesh and the regular SL mesh.

[Penny Patton]

11 hours ago, ChinRey said:

We need a brand new generation of content creators to replace the ones we've lost. Where are they going to come from? How are they going to break through in a market where hype and inside connections count for so much more than actual substance? How long will it take them to learn the neccessary skills? And who's gonna teach them? Do you know of a single skilled mesh maker among the Moles and Lindens? I haven't found any and I've looked everywhere.

 I don't think there will be a shortage of new content creators, and if LL can make SL appealing to digital artists, specifically those with a background or interest in game design, then they will bring their skills with them. That's always been an obstacle for SL, Linden Lab has done a great job in driving off precisely the sort of people SL should appeal to the most.

I also don't believe SL is going to lose any content creators. Not unless LL screws things up massively (far more than we're used to seeing). Optimizing content doesn't take any new skills beyond what it takes to create content in the first place. LL will just need to communicate to content creators what new factors will be driving up LI costs. There may be grumbling, but I imagine even the worst offenders in SL will figure it out with little trouble. It's never been that they don't know how to optimize, it's that they've never seen a reason to do it.

What concerns me more is whether or not LL will get Land Impact changes right. I want to believe there's been a shift in attitudes and priorities at the Lab, but they've yet to really show they know what exactly they need to aim for with new LI calculations.

4 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

The whole issue at the moment why people use hack methods to reduce the LI at the cost of optimisation of an object is to get more use out of the land LI restriction. If labs boost land capacity and increase the rezzed LI numbers instead of giving extra LI usage to the sims to use and leaving the calcs for LI where they are it will just result in different hacks to reduce LI rates again. This would mean back to square one and an never ending cycle of increase and reduction.

Oz, Patch and other Lindens have all stated that a primary goal for the changes in LI will be to discourage the LOD exploit.  (And to answer ChinRey's question, yes they want better optimized content so SL is less laggy, rezzes faster, and runs better overall.)

There's nothing yet to indicate that this means all content will suddenly see a major increase in LI cost, but it's fair to assume that they want content that has a larger impact on rendering will have higher LI costs, but optimizing content will also be incentivized with reduced LI costs. At least, one would hope that's their intent. It's always hard to tell what LL is doing or if their general lack of expertise in this aspect of game design will lead them to some crazy nonsense approach that backfires horribly. Again, hoping the current crew is on top of things, but it's hard to shake 15 years of bad experiences until we see the results.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

 I don't think there will be a shortage of new content creators, and if LL can make SL appealing to digital artists, specifically those with a background or interest in game design, then they will bring their skills with them.

Why aren't they here already then? There isn't much in this they haven't heard before. Even if it is true this time, why should they believe it?

As for skills, yes, experience from other platforms helps a lot. But there are so many pecuilarities about SL, especially the way LoD and physics are handled, and so much of it is undocumented. It takes time to figure it out.

Look at the Moles. They don't make good LoD models. Are you suggesting they don't care? They do! They care a lot and they are doing everything they can. Or are you saying they aren't generally good builders? They are. The reason they don't make good LoD models is that they still haven't figured out the basics of SL LoD. After seven years with mesh, they still don't know.

 

2 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

What concerns me more is whether or not LL will get Land Impact changes right. I want to believe there's been a shift in attitudes and priorities at the Lab, but they've yet to really show they know what exactly they need to aim for with new LI calculations.

Yes, exactly. You know what, for all my complaints, I have never ever doubted the Lindens' good intentions. Not once. Except for a few histrocial cases that happened long before I joined (but that we are still struggling with). But good intentions are what the road to Hell used to be paved with (before they figured out frozen telephone sales people provided an even more slippery slope).

Even though I never said it straight, I don't suppose it comes as a surprise to anybody that I never had much faith in the new LI calculation to start with. Creating such a system would have been extremely difficult even under the best of conditions and this isn't anything like the best of conditions. To me reading CoffeeDujour's post about LL's verry cunning plan how to bth have their cake and eat it, was the last nail in the coffin. I have no faith in it anymore.

But faith is not facts of course. I'm sure Penny will still be here when the results become apparent and since it's much harder to get out of SL than to get into it, I may well be too. If so, one of us can give the other a snug "told-you-so".

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, ChinRey said:

So it's not about reducing lag then? Drayke's reply says it all I guess - I'll just add a quote. Waylon Jennings this time:

That was not my impression at all.

It's about reducing janky mesh objects that game the LOD tool ... but then this is going to be a very long and slow process for LL, so ..

It's not going to be "all your triangles are twice the price and those evil textures too", although for textures .. things could well change after the cache overhaul, that's a foundation element and once changed could both lead to performance improvements throughout the texture pipeline AND enable previously unavailable texture handling options. (It really might be that they tried a more aggressive texture algo once upon a time and scrapped it because the cache & decode times made it unfeasible).

We really need to be pushing creators to manually make LOD meshes.

Textures and VRAM use is less of a concern as that can absolutely be 100% solved though better code in the viewer (and is certainly something TPV devs can have a crack at) . A better and faster cache is a huge part of that, so there isn't much point getting our hands dirty till we know what we have to work with. It's a complex problem, but it's just shuffling data about - a low res textures is still a perfect texture, unlike a mesh.

[Drayke Newall]

5 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

Oz, Patch and other Lindens have all stated that a primary goal for the changes in LI will be to discourage the LOD exploit.  (And to answer ChinRey's question, yes they want better optimized content so SL is less laggy, rezzes faster, and runs better overall.)

There's nothing yet to indicate that this means all content will suddenly see a major increase in LI cost, but it's fair to assume that they want content that has a larger impact on rendering will have higher LI costs, but optimizing content will also be incentivized with reduced LI costs. At least, one would hope that's their intent. It's always hard to tell what LL is doing or if their general lack of expertise in this aspect of game design will lead them to some crazy nonsense approach that backfires horribly. Again, hoping the current crew is on top of things, but it's hard to shake 15 years of bad experiences until we see the results.

Don't want to come across as negative, but whilst i'm sure they will look into it, the very fact they aren't looking to alter the existing flawed core methods and have just come up with oh lets just increase the calculations doesn't inspire hope. They have a flawed method in place already as far as not fixing lod levels on upload and instead of fixing that first and trialing that to see if it helps to resolve the issue they instantly use a sledge hammer and increase the LI cost. Case in point, take avatar rendering cost. How many times have they attempted to 'fix' the issue by recalculations to the arc only to result in people still abusing it. So their final solution lets just make it so people turn into jelly dolls and let the user determine the value. So what happens some new person logs into sl for the first time it auto sets the value initially and if low you get their first impression as ugly jelly dolls or they don't know what the setting is leave it high and lag and leave.

Labs need to first look at the core systems and get them right before further hampering sim LI costs it should be a last resort. As to CoffeeDujur's point regarding custom lods.. in a perfect world yes, but one again you are relying in amateur creators to know better which they don't and trying to teach them different is near impossible. It took almost a year of arguing with people just to convince them that mesh is far better than sculpts. Whilst yes I do agree custom LOD's would be better, by not having automatically calculated LOD values for those that don't do custom lod's is part of the issue that needs to be fixed. If labs are too lazy to do this then remove the option to enter lod values entirely and just make it so that you have to upload custom lod's otherwise you cant upload. You have to force the content creators hand. If that doesn't work increase the L$ value if you don't upload custom lod's. Just don't give them a secondary option that provides them with a flawed lod calculation that can be abused.

[Coffee Pancake]

9 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

As to CoffeeDujur's point regarding custom lods.. in a perfect world yes, but one again you are relying in amateur creators to know better which they don't and trying to teach them different is near impossible.

If you are making the content yourself then you have ALL the required skills, it's fairly trivial and just takes a little patience.

But then who makes their own content !

[Sammy Huntsman]

I think he is referring to them, lacking the skill of an actual 3D modeler, like at Pixar, or any other AAA game studio. But he does make very good points, you can't just throw a band-aid over a gaping wound. You really can't, they need to overhaul many things, for SL to actually work properly.