Is Second Life Just Turning Into a Lot of Backdrops?

[Blaise Glendevon]

On 8/18/2019 at 10:34 AM, Syo Emerald said:

I find all those backdrops, that have been floading shopping events in recent months/years disgusting. I don't care if any of those "I live for my flickr account"-people have fun. I feel like those backdrops are eating away the potential of real builds, because all efforts for intersting and new designs seems to flow exclusivly into backdrops and nobody cares to build a full version of any of those buildings. Its frustrating to see a cool advertisement for what seems to be a building and then its just another backdrop.

You're perfectly free not to buy any, then!

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

8 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

This is because a lot of people come to SL wanting their own private little space.

Have you looked at the picture? It's not private skyboxes. It's mass rentals. And hardly anyone lives in them. So, they just drain resources and they sit there doing nothing. In biology, these are called tumors.

Edited August 22, 2019 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Penny Patton]

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Have you looked at the picture? It's not private skyboxes. It's mass rentals. And hardly anyone lives in them. So, they just drain resources and they sit there doing nothing. In biology, these are called tumors.

Mass rentals of what? Private skyboxes. Do you think the people offering these rentals expect their tenants to place all their furniture on top of the domes? Maybe you're expecting them to do a bit of skydiving to visit the neighbors?

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

Mass rentals of what? Private skyboxes

Just log in SL and have a look yourself. They are mass-rentals. Spheres with skyboxes inside, dozens stacked upon each other, by the thousands from the east to the west, and from the north to the south, and all looking the same and at least 99% unused because they are too ugly (just look inside them) and lack too much privacy to live in them, because you are sharing the same parcel with the neiughbors above you and below you.

[Miranda Umino]

On 8/20/2019 at 11:10 PM, Love Zhaoying said:

I’m going to guess, you shined your “headlights” out the window?

Maybe you have  an old version and the firestorm team has rolled back ?

Ir Maybe tou have compiled by yourself the viewer in forcing  the max value

My version is Firestorm 6.2.4 (57588) Jul 12 2019 00:15:15 (64bit) (Firestorm-releasex64) with Havok support .

It s the last version

Edited August 22, 2019 by Miranda Umino

[Selene Gregoire]

3 hours ago, Miranda Umino said:

Maybe you have  an old version and the firestorm team has rolled back ?

Ir Maybe tou have compiled by yourself the viewer in forcing  the max value

My version is Firestorm 6.2.4 (57588) Jul 12 2019 00:15:15 (64bit) (Firestorm-releasex64) with Havok support .

It s the last version

That isn't what Love meant by "headlights".  It was a reference to boobs.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/22/2019 at 7:59 AM, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Just log in SL and have a look yourself. They are mass-rentals. Spheres with skyboxes inside, dozens stacked upon each other, by the thousands from the east to the west, and from the north to the south, and all looking the same and at least 99% unused because they are too ugly (just look inside them) and lack too much privacy to live in them, because you are sharing the same parcel with the neiughbors above you and below you.

I agree, although this is really another topic. Skybox and dome blight isn't so much about the backdrop tide, unless you think of skyboxes, in cramped box-like spaces, as a kind of "backdrop" (and I have to say, some backdrops have evolved into 3D spheres that are more immerse and in the round, so much so that you wonder why they just don't make scenes without the "fourth wall" especially to enable mixing and matching them. Which I do anyway. But it would make it easier.

The blight you describe is fixed by moving these items at least 500 m up into the sky. It's absolutely unconscionable to put up those giant, sim-wide domes within the view -- they are 100 m often. Absolutely no excuse. They could be rezzed anywhere, and it's not even that the owners look out of them -- they don't have that feature in most cases. It's not like they want to be at helicopter hover height and look at the nice view created by others. It's that they are too lazy to first put a board up in the sky above 500 meters, then rez that dome. Or merely change the Z axis on that dome to shoot it up into the sky. It's pure laziness that they want to lift it up in the view with an eye to the ground. 

It's true also that people don't seem to rent those stacked-up boxes. I see them all around, and they're empty. How can the owners pay tier? Then after awhile, I see them abandoned. I think the pattern of a few big rental agencies that had had success with this model and do fill their units has gulled some into thinking they can just copy the outer format and do the same -- even if their skyboxes are ugly and their customer service non-existence.

[Prokofy Neva]

There's another element to the backdrops phenom which I hadn't realized or thought about, illustrated with this bloggers' lament.

I do a lot of social media posts about home & gardens, but I don't count myself at all among the H&G bloggers, which are a world apart I'd never want to be in. I don't believe in accepting free content from creators with the expectation that I'm going to blog about them -- and positively. I've made very few exceptions to this rule, mainly a few times when I was really stuck finding the perfect item in a designing contest and a creator offered something. I think by blogging about what I genuinely like and even more, by buying something to put in my rentals, I'm more authentic and lead to real purchases by real people instead of traffic to showy web sites that don't have clickthrough to purchases. 

In the world of payola blogging, it's a part of the system to get the freebies, sometimes entire gatcha sets which, to be sure, are often put on no-transfer. And it's part of the culture that it has to be a beautiful, gorgeous scene with little comment. And that drives busy bloggers with very low compensation in Lindens, if anything, and the freebies, to use backdrops. If they have lots of blogging duties to get through, rather than gallavant around the grid looking for settings where they might be able to rez (or might not), or see something used "naturally" in its environment (or have to struggle to set it up), they need to do what amounts to poorly-paid marketing and advertising for creators and make them look good at low cost in time and money. The backdrop isn't just for amateurs blogging their SL in a way that makes them look best; it's the blog slaves working for either creators or events or feeds doing this. I realized this is probably a lot more responsible for what we see in terms of Backdrop World than anything else!

I'm always noticing things like the top creators disappearing from the top feeds because they've quarreled (or been priced out), or bloggers being dropped or not accepted on a whim, or bloggers being dispensed with entirely (I actually can't help thinking that's a good thing).

Merchants pay a lot to be in events, and they except 360 service, which can include blogs, ads, feeds, even videos of their work. What a lot of work! It can't be done without backdrops.

Edited August 23, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

On 8/18/2019 at 6:01 AM, Stephanie Misfit said:

I saw an amazing picture on Flickr of a beautifully decorated venue with all these great Cuban buildings..

I know the ones you're talking about. I did the SAME thing you did. I wanted to buy them so that I could decorate the inside but nope.

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

On 8/20/2019 at 6:43 PM, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Social medias tend to create this weird and perverse idea that it's more important to appear to have fun than "have fun".

So true. I hate social media. But I use my sl blog to post pics of places that people may want to explore, which is one of the things I still like to do in SL.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/23/2019 at 2:00 PM, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

So true. I hate social media. But I use my sl blog to post pics of places that people may want to explore, which is one of the things I still like to do in SL.

what's the URL of your blog?

[Blaise Glendevon]

On 8/22/2019 at 6:59 AM, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Just log in SL and have a look yourself. They are mass-rentals. Spheres with skyboxes inside, dozens stacked upon each other, by the thousands from the east to the west, and from the north to the south, and all looking the same and at least 99% unused because they are too ugly (just look inside them) and lack too much privacy to live in them, because you are sharing the same parcel with the neiughbors above you and below you.

And you are perfectly free to not rent them!

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

1 hour ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

And you are perfectly free to not rent them!

That does not really sove the problem of the grid being flooded with huge and ugly stacks of unused rentals and the energy and other resources like scripts and collision surfaces they take up. This is what drives most people away from the mainland.

[Alyona Su]

8 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

This is what drives most people away from the mainland.

BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front LOL): I'm not saying you're wrong, you aren't. What I'm saying is that I believe your comment is more or less outdated now.

I'm not so sure about this. I believe what "drives" people from the mainland is cancellation of their Premium accounts. My theory is that most renters don't have premium accounts so they obtain land by renting with L$ rather than paying real legal tender for land-use fees to Linden Lab at any tier. As for the rest of your comment, much of mainland isn't that way at all any more, albeit there still are pockets of what you describe. Any of the free "lag meters" can be worn as a hud for spot-checking and most on Heterocera, Sansara, and Jeogeot are pretty clean and have great performance throughout.

[Blaise Glendevon]

10 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

That does not really sove the problem of the grid being flooded with huge and ugly stacks of unused rentals and the energy and other resources like scripts and collision surfaces they take up. This is what drives most people away from the mainland.

What drives people away from mainland is no coherent renter's agreement or land-holder's compact. Your neighbors and their bull -- you know -- are a bigger detraction from enjoyment of mainland than any skybox farm could be. 

[Alyona Su]

36 minutes ago, Blaise Glendevon said:

What drives people away from mainland is no coherent renter's agreement or land-holder's compact. Your neighbors and their bull -- you know -- are a bigger detraction from enjoyment of mainland than any skybox farm could be. 

Yes and no. Though the *easiest* way to handle bad neighbors or unsightly builds is to *move* to a new location. Drop-dead easy to do and if planned accordingly, costs NOTHING, even sometimes making a profit. I genuinely people are not being driven away from mainland because they are note leaving mainland; they are leaving SL or otherwise moving locations as I describe previously. The only people to "leave mainland" are those who are downgrading their account away from Premium and then either moving in with their significant other, not maintaining a home at all, or plopping some $L for a rental for a week and then begin the rental-estate-hop.

[Janet Voxel]

I have a very nice beach front parcel on the mainland. No skyboxes, my neighbor is very nice, takes care of her property (geez this sounds like RL). The other side are two rentals that seem to always be empty (one day they will be mine...mwah ha ha ha).

The first land I ever bought was a crappy interior plot and EVERYBODY had a skybox. It all depends on where you buy land. I knew nothing about owning land the first go round. I just threw a bid out there and got it probably because the land was crappy. I put up a skybox because everybody else had a skybox.

I think if LL made some kind of grid system on all of those gigantic parcels, more people would buy land put actual buildings on the ground instead of throwing up skyboxes.

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

On 8/26/2019 at 8:08 PM, Prokofy Neva said:

what's the URL of your blog?

Oh it's just the my.secondlife one that LL provided us. I post pictures there. 

 

https://my.secondlife.com/ingrid.ingersoll?username=ingrid.ingersoll

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/27/2019 at 2:20 AM, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

That does not really sove the problem of the grid being flooded with huge and ugly stacks of unused rentals and the energy and other resources like scripts and collision surfaces they take up. This is what drives most people away from the mainland.

I would wager that what drives people from the Mainland are ugly builds on the ground, not the stacked-up rentals.

I am puzzled by these stack empires, however. For several years, I had one next to my rentals on one sim, taking up the entire sim. The owner opted to use those sort of weird landscapes with the folded edges that are designed to make you think you are "on a beach" or "in a forested valley" if you perch your skybox amid them. He had furnished houses that looked pretty decent for the price. None of them were rented, as far as I could tell. I never saw green dots, beyond the rental agents. I had to struggle to place my own skyboxes at different levels of his which were everywhere so that my tenants felt like they had privacy -- but I need not have bothered. No one ever came. I wondered how they could stand not having their own radio station, i.e. dedicated land to have their own stream. That seems essential. Stacked up, you can't (I have some apartment buildings like that where the channel is changed all the time). All of it, so odd, but I looked around the grid, saw tons of sims with that same logo all over hogging the map -- surely they must make money? But maybe not, because eventually that sim was sold for a low price, than abandoned by several would-be land barons, then chopped up after being bought from the auction, etc. etc. But still, they're in business elsewhere. On another sim where I saw that stacked-up model, which annoyed me endlessly as those tenants and owner constantly encroached on my land, but worst of all, left up plywood for months, the person went out of business and the land remains abandoned.

Still, when I saw some tenants refund and they told me they found a cheaper place they liked better because of its changing scenery, I went to the link they gave me and found stacked-up heaven -- a puzzle about the radios (and they didn't use that well-known "Internet radio" device unrelated to land). I found the cheapie sculpty furniture there a horror and the scenery also ghastly, but there's no accounting for taste! I guess this business model works, especially for those willing to put out nicer mesh houses and scenery. But I have no facts or figures on this, only anecdotes.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/28/2019 at 12:14 PM, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

Oh it's just the my.secondlife one that LL provided us. I post pictures there. 

 

https://my.secondlife.com/ingrid.ingersoll?username=ingrid.ingersoll

Oh, you mean those profile pictures. I should post to those more. I see you visited Sovkovo and Cooper River, I love those sims.

[Prokofy Neva]

OK, I can't believe I bought two more backdrops. They were so deliciously tempting and when I saw them in at least tiny model form, they seemed "complete enough" to make a skybox out of. One of them even came inside a dome.

So I went to a skybox and tried to put several of them together, as one seemed too small. Oops, I have 1000 prims before I knew it. And the waters didn't match and I spent a fruitless half hour trying to tint them to match (at least they were on mod) but the build construction was too different and the light and shadow made them seem like different colours.

I tried to take off trees and walkways -- but some of them were all-in-one pieces of mesh. I got a cliff down to just...90 prims. Put that with another island or house on water, I'm up to like 400 prims. Where am I going to put those? That's a lot of prims to give away as "management prims" or convince people to pay for along with their lesser allotment. I contemplated putting them in the land preserve -- they were so pretty! So detailed! So fabulous? But I don't have 400 let alone 600 prims anywhere to spare like with no interactivity. I am considering this idea of having more advertised "photo places" as suggested above, but I don't know, it could get expensive.

To make good on my expense, I've got to try to rent out one of these gorgeous backdrops now. I think it's going to be a non-starter...Even just one backdrop alone is a whopping 196 prims...So much for the idea that mesh will reduce prims. No wonder the Lindens had to add more prim capacity to land.

Edited August 31, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Lexbot Sinister]

I think the backdrop situation is getting increasingly depressing. For about three months in a row now, i've gone to every event more or less, hoping to buy some more sci-fi -ish looking additions to my build. With money in hand, please, sell me something. There are things that would have fit- except they are waaay too high in Li backdrops. It's so obvious that the creator is talented enough to make wonderful creations that would be a great addition to any sim, but, have decided to not bother. Or maybe the backdrops are just.... sets bought from a 3d website...

Either way, the backdrops seem to increasingly push out anything more substantial out of events at least. There's fewer and fewer actual houses and environment pieces.

The latest's i've seen, was a backdrop kitchen. Is that where we are going now? Because if that thing is 200 Li, a smaller plot is then filled, no house, no decor. It makes me really sad. There's no meaningful way to incorporate them in builds.

 

This shift makes me spend less on SL.. i guess there's a good point in that in some way...

Edited September 15, 2019 by Lexbot Sinister

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Tragedy of the commons.

I suppose there is a significant market for this kind of product to be able to displace products you can actually use.