Gabriele Graves

If the goal is just to move them off the landing spot instead of really fixing the bot problem then LL just need to install one of those round landing spot gizmos that a lot of stores have which move all visitors to a random position off the landing spot. No need for experience scripts or having to make sure there are enough seats for 20+ bots (Adult Safe Hubs for example) and the effect would be immediate.

There is no buying land if you just stick to picking a Linden Home. Correct: You don't need Premium to rent anything. You cannot get more than one Linden Home per account. What is coming is a Linden Home type that is on 2048 land but it's not available yet.

You don't have to buy any land. You can get a Linden home that has a 512 or 1024 sized parcel. It's what you can do with the rest of your tier that is the issue. There are no 2048 sized Linden homes available yet. You can choose do nothing with the extra tier or buy some mainland with it or wait for the 2048 sized home to appear.

I disagree with this as a solution. It relies on there being enough seating for all the bots and presumes there is some value in the bots being there at all. I would assert that there is no value to those avatars being logged in at all at the safe hub and the right thing to do would be to log them out. I think a better solution would be a new land setting that allows the land owner to override the idle timeout of the viewer and set an idle timeout period which just tells the viewer that the avatar has been logged out. The region must already have stats about how long each avatar has been there and the last interaction received. If not then collecting that info doesn't seem as though it would be onerous in terms of performance or storage. It would affect any avatar, not just bots because avatars that are bots cannot be reliably determined. LL would enable it on safe hubs and set the timeout value to whatever they felt appropriate. Why even wait as long as an hour? My opinion would be that 30 mins should be plenty, maybe even as low 15 mins. If you are interacting with your viewer at all, even if just cleaning inventory, you wont hit this at all unless you leave the room. LL could place a sign or two warning that their safe hubs are idle timeout logout zones so there are no surprises. It also has the added advantage that anyone would be able to use this on their land to remove people who just park their avatar for long periods of time.

Put 'em all in a death arena and let them fight it out. The last one standing gets to leave Welcome Island. The next round starts in 30 minutes with a bunch of fresh newbies.

The kind of achievements that might work the most, you cannot give points for. "Start a meaningful friendship." "Strike up a mutually interesting conversation with someone" etc...

Since we all made it past the 10 minute limit, seems like we are all the last ones who can really pinpoint why people left. I find it difficult to believe that failing to retain someone is the same exact reason in each case. Like with a lot of things it is probably more complex and nuanced than that. Games must also have people who check them out and then check out for good. Perhaps it is more limited due to people often paying for a game upfront but in free-to-play games it would seem logical to expect there would be a large amount of this too. Is there an assumption that if a service can just change a few things that this effect can be eliminated? That sounds dubious to me. I don't think the question to be asking is why did people leave? I think the question is really, why aren't there more people like the ones who stayed? What marks them as different and are people now fundamentally looking for something else? Somewhere out there is a parallel reality where in the first 10 minutes of logging into SL, I ran screaming from the first giant freenis on display and never came back.

Woah! That someone really ought to use lamp oil for lighting lamps instead of getting high.

I only went away for a long weekend and then was working earlier today. It was nice to get a mention though and a pleasant surprise that it wasn't for being on Seicher's alternative list. Don't think I've ever made it to a list before.

I nominate this topic as the weekend topic.

To me there's only two reasons you don't make a public announcement about this: 1. The changes are too insignificant to make a blog post about. 2. The changes are because you perceive you have a significant problem and you don't want to publicly admit your platform has a problem. I note that blog.secondlife.com doesn't require being logged in to see them even after the forums do. So, which one is it? It doesn't feel like #1 to me.

I agree with this and was thinking along the same lines myself. The recent change made so that now you cannot read most topics unless logged in adds fuel to this. There's always the possibility it all indicates they are getting ready for another sale.

I think it would have been much better to have had those announcements preceded by a blog post outlining what was going to be done, why they were doing it now and what in practical terms residents could expect from the changes.

Realistically you cannot discuss PRS type topics anywhere online or in RL without it ending up that way from time to time unless the discussion takes place in an echo chamber. It's the nature of the beast. Those topics are too polarising.

Well this is an interesting turn of events. Mixed feelings about it myself. I've mostly steered clear of non-SL and PRS type topics but I can see how concerning it is to those that do participate. Will be interesting to see what effect it will have and what else is going to come down the pipe.

I've seen a lot of body survey results. There is also the work of @Lucia Nightfire who collects mesh body/head stats from what people are wearing. Her most recent topic is here and links back to previous surveys: No two surveys agree with each other about the exact numbers because all of them only show a slice of the truth but it is the best we have to go on. Everyone seems to agree though that Legacy hasn't reached anywhere near the level of popularity of Maitreya who sits at between 30-40% depending on who is counting. At this point it seems likely that the numbers have peeked for Legacy if not already in decline. There aren't hordes of new people arriving in SL wanting mesh bodies, we have a huge new person retention problem. This means that except for a tiny amount of people, anyone who wanted a Legacy body has bought one and some of those are now being lost to the other newer bodies on the scene. Those whales move on very quickly when the next new shiny comes along. It is not enough in SL to have sold a lot of units, you must also have the mind share of users to go with it. Once you lose that, people soon forget about you. The way to stop people forgetting about you is to keep coming up with new things to keep that mind share.

LL does not and would not provide stats like that. It isn't necessary for any group to have posted this like it is a declaration. That would never happen anyway. Nobody is blacklisted from anything. I'm not saying it is a collective decision at all, it has happened bit by bit, vendor by vendor as more bodies came along. I shop a lot and at many shops/events and have done since my last long break that ended in 2011. I went shopping yesterday and I will be going shopping today. I notice what bodies are included and what is not and when bodies disappear from packs. Once there were far more vendors with Slink in the box than there are now. I also listen to what people are saying on groups, forums, blogs, etc. Many clothing groups have had questions, complaints, discussions about Slink, one or more of the Belleza bodies and other fading stars being dropped over the years. A lot of creators have run surveys in the past to decide what bodies and heads they want to support because it is too much work to support them all. Clearly if a body scores very low on those, which Slink generally has done for a long while now, then it makes sense for a creator to drop it. Admittedly I haven't taken part in any recent surveys, last few were maybe 6 months ago. If a body declines in use dramatically though it generally never recovers simply because there aren't vast hordes of new residents coming in with no preconceptions to decide that is the body for them. Pretty much everyone in SL baring a tiny number has already made their choice regarding Slink and as time as gone by fewer and fewer wear it and so even if many of them have bought Slink in the past, most of them are now using something else. These things are a bit like a snowball that gathers more snow. As people move onto other bodies and prefer them, support amongst clothing creaters starts to fall which in turn makes more people discard those bodies because their favourite clothing makers are no longer supporting it and no new ones will come on board and so it goes round and around. Some creators never drop support for a now unpopular body because it is their favourite body, you can see this in effect when a rare vendor still supports something like Logo, Tonic or Altamura. In addition, I have never heard personally of a creator who dropped a body and then later reinstated it because of a flush of renewed popularity. None of this is a secret and is generally well known if you've been around a while and paying attention to everything going on in and around SL to do with fashion.

Maitreya continues to have the most market share by far and is supported by the most clothing creators.

Slink is now poorly supported by Mesh clothing creators with many having dropped them a while back. Can still find Belleza supported in many places but mostly only for Freya.

There is more to add to what @Persephone Emerald said but suffice to say that there is a lot to dislike about the technical aspects of the Legacy body and the company. However, that said, I just don't like the look of their bodies.

Not for me and not for many people, no.

I fully endorse the sentiment of giving explorers much better tools to avoid inadvertently straying into restricted areas. It should definitely be possible with ban lines. It's much harder with orbs though. Perhaps it would be possible to automatically mark the parcel on the mini map in a colour to indicate use of an orb and detect that from any script in any rezzed object using LLEjectFromLand/llTeleportAgentHome. Of course, they would then have to actually send the parcel data for all parcels to each viewer when the logged in avatar enters the region, a thing they don't do now presumably for efficiency and contributes in part to the lamentations of explorers. If they could do all that though, they could add a mini map API so that scripted detectors could get that information too.

They could but that would affect private estates as well and so they then would most likely have to exclude those. All that would do is ensure that everyone either uses an Experience (after all they are Premium land owners) or change their orb to TP home. Start to nerf those and people may end up just putting prim barriers around things. I wouldn't be surprised if LL has deliberately decided in the past to avoid these kinds of escalation scenarios because they harm everyone. I could show you any random script function and warn people that at anytime LL could nerf it. Nerfing has definitely happened in the past but generally only when a new particular problem, permission/security hole or exploit has arisen and LL needed to deal with it. That isn't the case here, the perceived "problem" here has always been in existence, it's within their own rules currently and I doubt they will see it as an actual problem. They have bigger fish to fry. I agree with the sentiments about Bellisseria from @Rowan Amore and @Sylvia Tamalyn. I'm pretty sure I saw Patch also refer to Bellisseria as "land ownership with training wheels on" and that it was designed to give residents a taste of land ownership before moving on to mainland or estates, not that anyone would be forced to but it would be the natural progression from that point for many. Training grounds require different rules for them to work well. There were at least two opportunities to apply any of the additional Bellisseria rules to mainland, first when it was built and then when they overhauled the Linden Homes covenant. They obviously decided at both those opportunities to not do it. I would not expect them to suddenly decide at some random point later to then backtrack just like they never applied the original Linden Homes covenant to mainland during all those years. In the end, I'll admit, LL could do anything they please at any time. However that doesn't mean that any random thing that people can conceive of has much likelihood of ever actually happening.

IKON is great. I just wish he sold fatpacks.

Tempting as it may be to draw this conclusion, it's probably incorrect as a most other bodies share a much smaller slice of the pie. That may not be the case going forward but unless one has figures, it cannot be assumed currently. My take is that until/unless there is a viable competitor to Maitreya for that body build type then it is going to continue to enjoy a large slice of the pie. Most of the new bodies cater to people who want something different. None of them appeal to me. I would potentially only upgrade to a new body in the future that has the same body build type but better/newer features. TBH for me Maitreya is pretty much perfect and would be exceedingly difficult to beat. It is hard to even imagine what another body could have that I would need and don't already get.