Damian Mills

I'm a much less sophisticated land owner than most of you. I am a premium member mostly because it amounts to a [nearly] free house. You pay the annual and collect the stipend which mostly pays for the annual. I have a basic linden home in some generic subdivision somewhere. It wasn't the home I wanted but it was good enough. I would love a nicer house (better laid out) on 1024m with the extra prims to decorate with. I would also love something that vaguely resembled "community". I doubt I'm going to get that... ever. So to me, this is just a price increase with no benefit attached. What will happen is that my premium account (ie, my linden home) now costs me more per year. Overall I wish that weren't true but I certainly re-upped my account during the grace period (which I was lucky enough to find out about and take advantage of). Whether I do so again for another year remains to be seen. What I wish is that the process for getting a new home wasn't so incredibly disruptive. You actually have to become homeless first and then you can spend all day every day clicking refresh on the web page hoping to see whatever it is that you wanted. As processes go, that's pretty much ridiculous. Overall, I find most of the processes around premium accounts and land ownership in general to be more than a bit opaque which probably leads me to not utilizing the benefits I have very well. I've been in SL for 12 years now (on and off -- mostly off) and I still have no idea how to buy a mainland parcel and a ton of other things that ought to be pretty basic but instead, are wrapped in layers and layers of crap. So I'll probably end up staying in my current home and I doubt I'll ever know if or when it might really be possible to upgrade it. To me, this cost increase will remain a pure cost increase with no additional benefit attached. Whether that drives me to downgrade my account or not we'll have to see in a year and change when I have to pay up again.

Yeah, I know this thread is old but still... In my experience there are two kinds of hosts. There are those who monitor their host script and send out the canned responses. They generally get ignored by me. I'm not tipping a bot. But some hosts are active and engaged. They don't used canned lines. They greet me differently depending on if I'm returning or not or maybe if I'm wearing something interesting. These are actual humans actually adding to the festive party atmosphere in the club I'm in. I value that service so I tip it. Generally I tip hosts in small blocks. They probably will get 25L from me for a hello. They might well end up with 500 or 1000L from me by the end of the set. It all depends on how much I think they have contributed to whatever I wanted at the moment.

*chuckle* I sympathize. I have the same problem from the other end. I often say, "I'm a liberal. That's exactly why I'm not a Democrat". Thinking for yourself is an excellent way to get ostracized from both the red and blue teams.

*shrug* I upgraded my 10 year old avi to something reasonable looking for today for 1250L. Sure, that took a lot of creative shopping but it isn't really necessary to spend zillions of lindens to look more or less decent if you don't want to.

LOL. I already had that link ready to post when I got to the bottom but you beat me to it.

For me, this was the result of the horrific network code in SL crashing the firewall on my cheap-assed router provided by the cable company. What I ended up doing is moving my PC to the DMZ which completely resolved all issues. NOTE! This is a semi-dangerous move from a security perspective. You'll want your computer buttoned up tightly with it's own firewall and solid anti-malware protection. It isn't, however, as dangerous as some might have you believe. It's significantly better than logging onto a public wifi network with your laptop for instance. Some other things that might alleviate this same problem. Try disabling the stateful packet inspection on your router's firewall if you can. Try limiting the HTTP texture fetches with SL debug settings.

Actually, I haven't stopped reading and my reply contains no argument with the "limits crowd" because they are right... as are you... and I think that's' obvious to anyone. There are two points being made here: Some level of optimization needs to be enforced in the system. Some careful thought needs to be given to the problem of transition management. I just spent $300 on a graphics card and that's on top of a new motherboard/cpu/ram/SSD last year. I get decent framerates with ALM and shadows in most places. I have a preset for "club graphics"' that limits how many avatars get rendered to 10 and that works in most clubs to keep me at 15fps or better. I manage more or less OK. My new friend is lucky to see 15fps in a deserted sandbox. In a club, FPS drops to around 2-4. That''s without ALM and shadows and avatars set at 3. That's the reality of SL for way too many people and somehow that needs to change. I''m also none too happy with how the flaws in the LOD calculations encourage developers to cheat. Because as a consumer, how that cheating ends up affecting me is in hair that turns into 2 triangles the moment you're more than 5m away from me or furniture that does the same. I want LOD to work the way it's supposed to and I want ARC to work the way it's' supposed to. Personally, I think if hard caps are introduced they should be very high. I think most of the course correction will happen by venues banning laggy avatars and people's clients de-rendering them.

That landmark package was appreciated, thanks. A picture is worth a thousand words and all. For anyone else reading this, my assessment is that the living conditions in a Linden Home were not that bad. In fact, pretty good for economy-class lodgings. The homes appear to be unfurnished meaning they can be populated with reasonable furniture and animations. The neighborhoods themselves are designed and controlled by the lindens so they are not eye sores. Here's a view looking into a cluster of homes which seem to be arranged around a small central courtyard. For my purposes this will serve. It gives me a place to rez my casper dropbox for business purposes and offers somewhere other than a telehub to call home. I could have my own radio!!!

I need to drop a casper dropbox somewhere and it needs to have some permanence. So for the first time I'm pondering buying land as opposed to renting and I'm trying to understand how a premium membership might help. I mean... in theory I should be able to get the premium membership along with a linden home and put the dropbox in my home and presto... "permanent" land for a year and no further fees, right? And while I'm talking about that linden home, I'm assuming it's going to a poorly constructed, textured, scripted, and animated home in an ugly neighborhood. In other words, it'd be useless for actually living in. Is that about right? Can it be scraped and replaced with a nice sky platform? Where are these linden homes? Can they be visited? Thanks in advance