Ariadne Kira

SL live music relies on groups. Yes, a lot of musicians have subscribos, but you know what, I hate having to be on a subscribo when I don't have space for the group because firstly I can't participate in group chat and secondly, when the notices for an imminent gig go out, the subscribo messages are too easy to miss. I want and need to be in more groups, not fewer! Is the reduction in groups going to persuade me to become a premium member? No, absolutely not. Will the reduction in groups be yet another SL irritation that drives me to spend less time and money here? Yes, absolutely. If there was some sort of half-way house between free membership and premium membership, of a couple of USD a month (max 3USD), then I'd consider it if it provided me with 100 group slots.

Hiya I went to dogoog and even though I put my radar up to 500m I didn't see you anywhere. If you still need it, the sim owner is Rael Ellisson. good luck! xoxo

You're probably in a Group that left on the setting for charging all group members liabilities. The best way to find out where the money is going is to log into your dashboard and select Accounts/Transaction History and then use the drop downs to select a date range of the last month. It should then be clear what is happening. If it is a Group that is taking it, firstly inform the group admin that they left on the group liability setting and that you have been charged however many lindens on which dates and politely ask to be reimbursed. The group setting to look for is Group Information/Members and Roles/Roles/Everyone/Accounting - pay group liabilites and receive group dividends This sort of thing happens fairly frequently. I would suggest keeping a regular eye on your transaction history for this reason. Best wishes

From what I understand, the beta works by running all the graphics processing on a 'cloud' computer, which then pipes the output to you in the form of a video feed. Your computer only has to do the equivalent of rendering a dvd picture, hence the drastic (in some cases) performance increase. It's great for the home user, as long as your internet connection is fast enough, but it pushes the cost of processing out to the 'cloud' where the owners of those machines are going to want to be paid for it.

I'm in the UK and I couldn't get in.. until I used the workaround listed on New World Notes http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/11/tip-second-life-cloud-web-access.html I suspect the reason for my initial failures is that my ping times to servers in California are too slow, even though my internet connection can go up to 20Mb. Once the Beta was up and running I watched my download speeds; I saw them regularly hitting 6-8Mb. The connection quality indicator at the top of the game screen gave me a value of between 105-110%. Positives: sooooo fast! I have a 3 year old laptop that struggles to run SL at the best of times, so I have my graphics settings low. The beta gave me speed AND great graphics. Yes, what I could do in-world was very basic but I expected that. Negatives: inability to turn off the awful LOUD music which drowned out all other sounds. I visited a pretty sim with lots of nice sound effects, birdies tweeting, etc. Couldn't hear them. I had to resort to the mute button which silenced everything. If I was a newbie trialling SL the music would be an instant turn-off. I like music, don't get me wrong, but *I* want to choose when I hear it and at what volume. As a test for the technology, I'd call it a success. For implementation, I'd give it a C - good effort but a few things were just not thought through. *edited for typos

Hi Lillia. I don't know what else to suggest. The first time round it took me a LOT of tries but subsequent ones have been easier. Maybe I'm just anally persistent. ^.^ It often (for me anyway) crashes straight after I enter my email address and I have to start again from the initial page. Once you get a blueish-green screen that has the Gaikai logo to the lower right, keep an eye out for messages at the top of the screen in small text saying 'click on the game to play'. When you see that, regardless of what appears below, click in the middle of the screen. Voilá, you should be in.