steeljane42

There're more reasons to it. So no need to focus on "but the creators!" that badly. Yes, they are responsible too, especially when someone releases a 1m triangles decor set that everyone grab and put to their home, but it's not just them. SL suffers from the similar problem that many old "games" do, most notably multiplayer/mmo ones. The "engine". Now SL is not your average "game" or game at all, but that part is the same more or less. Take some old (really old) mmorpg, for example Lineage 2 (2003/2004 release date). It still lags on modern hardware when there's a lot going on. It uses only 1 thread/core. Then take Starcraft 2, a pretty basic looking (especially by today's standards) RTS from 2010. it does use 2 cores and yes, it also suffers from terrible fps in big battles, even on top hardware, with zero user created content. You're not going to fix it with just better optimized content, not fully at least, it will be more of a band-aid solution. Not saying it wouldn't have any effect, it would, but viewer need some serious rewriting as well. To use at least 4 cores for starters, it already would make things much better for most people. I've seen LL are planning to rewrite how cache works, so that can hopefully help some too. P. S. You also want too much from the hobbyist creators. There are contless examples when professional developers release completely broken AA(A) game that they can't fix for months, if not years. One that crashes, suffers from poor performance even in closed hardware environment (consoles, where it's pretty much same specs for every user) and often make awful ports to PC, that "should" run times better, but end up unplayable. And that's paid developers with full-time work and at least some experience in creating things. You can't expect even fraction of that experience from usually a single person who does make something for SL in their free time, often for fun or to just to have some pocket money to spend in SL. Add too strict requirements and most will be gone, leaving the non-creators such as myself with poor choice and bad variety of products. No way LL would want that, ever.

Probably because it's unrigged. From my experience unrigged wearables rarely can be demo-ed, if ever. Same for most makeup appliers, there's maybe 5-10% of them with demos, the rest is "try and see if it works for your head". I'm not big on jewelry myself, but when I was in mood to pickup some it was pretty much a game of chance on quality, complexity and textures in almost every single case too. I suppose creators don't want their demos to be used for photoshoots or something and can't be bothered to upload demo textures for each item either, so it being unrigged means you can resize/move it all you want, so it's either a demo cube 1cm in front of the actual item or said demo textures. Or no demo at all, which is the case.

I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, but because the region is more dead, than alive, timers show everything, but the actual time left. At least it was like that during opening day and seeing it still has around 50 people there most of the time, I doubt anything has changed. Clicking the gift a few times in a row always got me what I wanted within 10-15s, when those 1-5% of "scripts run" did allow for that to happen.

I actually prefer alpha HUD to old style alphas myself. Having to wear one full body alpha made it a lot easier for me than finding whatever alpha was needed for top, pants, hair and so on. I also suspect that auto-alpha functionality won't go anywhere, because people already got used to it so much, I doubt any clothing (those who used it all the time) or mesh body creators will kill this functionality. It's a lot more convenient "wear and forget", than "wear, find a matching alpha, don't forget to add it instead of "wear" " for an average user. I personally can't stand it, because if region is slow or attachments just put in wrong order (when I attach a few together, in case when I switch full outfits), then I have to fix it manually anyway... each time, but that is mostly because of no-mod clothes so I can't kill scripts in them. Also mesh body/head HUDs come with save slots (I wish they had more, though) for skins, alphas and layer appliers, so instead of looking for an applier in the inventory, I can quickly attach one hud from favorite wearables and change what I need in a couple of clicks. Dragging appliers/layers to the same favorite wearables works too, but in my opinion it can't have too many items in it and remain useful, since whole point of it is quick access and if I'll have like 30 makeups there, 15 body appliers, maybe some tattoos on top of what is already there... it will be like a mini inventory I have to carefully check each time, may as well open full inventory and find folder with them then. Then there are material enabled appliers and appliers (some catsuits for example) that look better on a clothing layer because of the 3D-like effect. BoM won't have materials as far as I know. So I'm pretty sure mesh body creators won't fully remove layers, maybe will reduce layers to 1-2 instead. Or there will be 2 body versions, one with layers and one without. Which is a good compromise I suppose, at least for those who don't mind to switch bodies for different needs.

There won't be much screams and tears, because it's apples and oranges. One is completely new product that you can avoid buying if you think it's too heavy li wise, it was like that from the very start. The other will affect every single rezzed object (or mesh only, no idea really, but it's rare to see non mesh things these days, unless you explore ancient-abandoned mainland places) on the grid. It would be commercial suicide for LL to tell people "welp, now you can't use things you bought, because... reasons. but it's good for you! now go buy L$ and replace your things with new ones". But LL won't do it anyway, they have been very careful to not break any existing content. Also see the recent thing about completely free 7 groups reducing, which didn't cost anyone anything, yet people were THAT unhappy so LL decided to revert the change before it even happened. Now imagine it would be something affect things people have bought for 1.5 decades (a bit less, if it's only for only mesh). And I remember Oz saying about ArcTan, that they want people to have more stuff, not less, so perhaps even if some stuff will become more heavy LI wise, it will come together with another LI upgrade. It surely will be after moving to cloud is done, so I won't be surprised if it was the case. 40-50k LI full sims might be a reality then, especially if they'll sort the scripts issues. But yeah, I think heavy li is very big limitation for the animesh things. it's been what? Half a year+ since full official release and I barely see anything "animesh" if don't count an odd attachment here and there (mostly tails and ears, sometimes some weird npc followers). I thought I'd see cute rezzable animesh cats and other critters ages ago, but there's almost none on the MP and ones that are... let's just say I don't like them, to avoid more negative comments. I can totally see why 30li at the minimum is one of the main reasons for it. If someone has a small parcel with around 300li, then it's 10% for just one thing. Less possible sales = less reasons to make them for creators, since it's not a direct upgrade over existing static/animated ones thanks to such high li. To compare, bento stuff started to show up even before official LL viewer was updated with it, half a year later there already were bento hands for all major brands except belleza, there were plenty of bento heads and numerous wings/tails that you could see everywhere in-world already. Because it was direct upgrade, while animesh is more like a questionable sidegrade, thanks to its li. At least when it comes to rezzable things.

They are not going to top even belleza or hourglass with it. Not with 5k price tag and no omega support, a bit of clothing support won't do it, even a lot of clothing support won't do it. Even going by simple traffic numbers. Maitreya's store has 12-16k on average, belleza's 7-9k, slink's 4-6k, tmp's 1-2k. And that's with the fact that you can only demo it there, which forces anyone who want to give demo a try to stand there like an idiot with changed camera angle (thanks to "awesome" experience), instead of picking a demo and checking it at their home or any other spot they might like, thus boosting traffic numbers. Now waiting until someone "totally not affiliated in any way" will show up and tell me it's because "legacy body is that awesome, so even one a few seconds of demo time is enough for everyone to decide and buy it, while all those other stores have a lot of hesitating people who can't decide for hours if they like it or not". --- And yeah, I shop a lot too. I check majority of monthly events, keep up with releases from my favorite creators, discover new ones when and where I can and all that. But clearly I must be lacking "whole 20$" to not being able to afford one. Poor poor me. And if it's not the case, then I just have a bad taste and look awful compared to our "new overlords" with this revolutionary product.

It's not ARCtan, it's on hold and even if it wasn't, they won't force it overnight anyway as they don't want people to deal with mass returns in case if it will increase LI of some objects. But I remember similar issue from the past, when some server issue caused incorrect LI to show up. I sure hope it's not this again, but you may want to check if physics on your objects is correct and make JIRA/support ticket if it's not. Here are two links for that last issue: https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/2248-the-return-of-the-living-objects-a-pre-halloween-horror-story/ https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/411549-heads-up-you-might-want-to-check-your-sims-after-the-downtime/ P. S. Your region can't be restarted less often than once every 10 days, it'll auto restart by itself then. You can also ask estage manager (if it's an island) or LL support (if it's mainland) to restart it as well.

She meant the "restore to last position" functionality I believe. Which is only available to full region/homestead owners and estate managers right now. I wonder if LL can tinker with it enough so region would check if you have rezzing rights at where you actually attempt to restore an item, instead of the current 0.0.0 spot. But meanwhile... They already sell this feature for the "low price of 229$ a month!". And (alternatively) for whatever grandfathered regions/homesteads are. Be on another level, don't settle for super premium, become MEGA premium today! * *in your own region only /s

Based on the fact that I still see close to none of them in-world, I'd say it's not that many people or they all group up somewhere and don't go anywhere else. Even on new events/fairs there's almost zero of people using new (or old, if that matters) TMP bodies. I think they did tick wrong boxes on far too many things, so it just can't be any different. 2x the price of all other established bodies, because... reasons, apparently? That already would be enough to push all non impulsive customers away, a few minutes of research and yep, it looks like (and is) a bad deal, if someone just wants a mesh body. Awful reputation/close to zero support/awful web-based hud that'll stop working whenever they pull the plug. Those all big enough reasons to scare people who already had enough of SL experience, especially with mesh body parts and know the market at least a bit. Only normal cases of why someone would get it that I can think of are: "oh a new toy. why not?" from people who don't really care about money and like to try new things anyway. Which is pretty legit, I guess, to each their own. Other people enjoy flushing tens of thousands of L$ on gachas instead. And ones who actually fell for their PR campaign at the release. There were quite a few big names posting about "how awesome it is". Which did remind me their last push to sell the old one at the full price, which was on MBA fair (so summer 2016 I think? maybe summer 2017), when they finally started to handle their dev kits freely, but it was at least 2 years too late at this point. Next step after years of silence was selling it for 500L$ instead of 5k. We'll see if it all will repeat with this "new" one.

I and most people still would. Ain't nobody got time to look through hundreds of slow rezzing vendors and often "full examples" of what an items is when I just want 1-2 of them and it's not in the most recent releases corner. Or it's some event and I already know exactly what I want to check and/or which demos to try before even going there (thanks to SL related websites, flickr etc). I'd argue that it has some positive effect too, at least when it comes to big and timed events. I only spend a few minutes there at worst, instead of 10-15+ while slowly walking through stuff I wouldn't grab even for free (not necessarily because it's bad, I just don't need it) trying to find those few items that I'm after. Less lag because of my avatar is there, less waiting time for someone who also wants to check the event, but can't because region is full. And then there're not busy regions, like your typical landscape/decor/furniture stores, they are mostly empty or close to it, unless there's a big sale going on. Yes, in the ideal world every merchant/creator would put their releases in some kind of order that makes sense. Alphabetical, by the year of release or at least in groups of similar ones (that one actually is the case, but rarely. and often doesn't help, if there's still too much stuff). But it's very rare from my experience and things all over the place everywhere. I don't want to look through hundreds or in some cases thousands of items, so assuming that I saw something on the MP/flickr/whatever and know the name, I put part of its name into the search and usually find it pretty easily. It's a QoL improvement among many others in some TVPs. Perhaps it's not vital, but all those little things add up together. I'm more happy, have more time for fun things instead of ones I've described above. And more likely to spend more L$ too, purely because I didn't spent whole day in futile search for items I need or want and can start to look for something else if I'm in such mood. And yeah, before trying to do LL's work, by making "busy regions less laggy", how about waiting for them to fix their own stuff first, like teleporting avi lagging the hell out of not even busy region. But it's been the case ever since I joined and probably much longer and it's still here. Even in places where (at least I assume it's the case) little to no area search going on (clubs, hangout spots where everyone just stand around and talk in IMs mostly and similar ones) when new avi teleports in it's a nightmare if you're trying to move or do something during that time.

I wish it was just the skinnery. There's plenty of other skin makers who has it the same, including big ones. Actually sometimes even skins in exactly same tone (and close enough creation dates on top of that) do vary a lot, where one has it almost perfect and other has a very obvious line. In case of body appliers that come in two parts, like "sessions", there's often a rather noticeable line between lower and upper part of the body (at least on most pale skin tones, not sure about darker ones, never tried). Had to give up on one very good looking skin recently because of this issue.

I'm pretty sure you can disable it on LL viewer too, through some file edits (yes, not as convenient as through simple setting, but still). Edit: found the topic where I saw it recently: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/438026-black-dragon/#comment-1913408 And perhaps it's about time LL killed that thing completely. It was among first annoying/weird things that I did look into after joining SL, together with eyes/arm following the building/selection direction. "How do I disable it completely, I don't like seeing mine and seeing others' selection on me". It really should be no one's business what other people are looking at right now.

Here's one shelf (it's not even usable or has any opening/sliding parts, just a kinky static prop in pretty average size, around 40li I believe) that I wanted to get before I've seen the numbers. And I can't say that I care about it too much, I do have quite a few decor/furniture items between 100k and 200k triangles, a couple around 250k each. But some things are just too much, like that one, so I just don't get those, despite liking them. My region is far from the "low-end PC friendly" ones, but I do actually use it for more than just taking static pictures where it wouldn't matter, so I do my best to avoid such extremes. P.S. There's also a very cute "food set" (to avoid names) at fameshed right now with this kind of crazy numbers (props with just 1-2li, but together they are over 440k triangles). Yep, also one of those examples that I'd get otherwise, but did not, purely because it has inadequate amount of triangles to what they are. I have not worse looking food props with just 8-15k triangles that look good even zoomed up fully.

By adding QoL things to it, like ones Lucia listed above. It's kinda funny how it lacks so many useful features (unless you're digging into debug settings, which is even more non user friendly than just having a million of preferences) and yet still confusing to use for someone with little to no experience with games/online platforms. Back into 2012 after checking what "this SL thing" is about and finding that it's more fun than it looks like, I gave all viewers that were listed on TPV page a try after finding that LL one is just pain for me to use. I did settle on FS back then and still use it to this day. LL one felt clunky to me (UI wise) for the most part, not that I had any real difficulty using it, I had nearly 2 decades worth of gaming experience by then, including doing stuff like running 5 heavily modded clients at the same time in some mmorpgs (because why create a party and share the loot, if you can have all profits from a dungeon run for yourself?), but I still found it painfully uncomfortable to use. And still do, I did instal it for a few minutes last summer to test some stuff once and yep, still it felt the same. I'm not saying that someone might find FS (or other more advanced veiwers) much easier to use, but if there's roughly the same learning curve (and I do believe it's the same, for all basic stuff at least), than it may as well have some extra features for later.

You can do it so already, there are some stores and people who are willing to make custom mesh, textures, animations and scripts for you. Just the price will actually be a boutique one, not the "couple of $ more than everyone else are paying". Those custom work prices don't scale down for the usual SL prices too well, since it's all about the creator's skill and time needed to create something, as well as about their interest to create something unique for someone. Because otherwise, if they are talented, value their time and skill and want make some business in SL, then (for example) selling 400 clothing items for 250L$ is more likely than selling the same item in a single copy for 100kL$. It's more complicated than that. You might not object and be fine with it, but if something that LL does will drive enough people away, then your SL experience will suffer as well. Less things to buy, less people to hang out with, less places to visit and most likely even more fees for remaining people to make up for those who've left. And then next round of increased prices and fees will push even more people away and so on, until there's almost no one left in SL. I've seen it in a few mmorpgs I used to play back in the days. Bad and not thought out decisions, sometimes pure greed and what did look like a healthy game a year ago starts to go through things like server merges, old team leaving, reduced/slowed down/zero actual content releases, more microtransactions for those who are still playing until there's only a few hardcore "veterans" and mmo surfers (who just try games for a few days or weeks and move onto the next one) left. And many more big youtubers/streamers either continue to make a decent amount of money or just moved on, without any kind of scandals and monetary losses, it's just drama that gets noticed, that's why it looks like it happens a lot. Now the SL is a bit too niche market, but with youtube and twitch it's somewhat "easier". It's still a game of chance, though. Some people get noticed, some always sit down there with a few views/viewers while they invest roughly same amounts of time and energy into streaming/videos making. But sometimes stars align and someone gets to the top and that's where the jackpot is, really big streamers make more each month than they'd make with other "good normal job" in a few years and that's even without extreme cases like Ninja's who made around 10m$ in 2018 thanks to Fortine's popularity. Most streamers are between 18 and 30 I think, so I'm not really surprised that a lot of people trying. There's not TOO much harm done if you take the 1-2 years delaying your education or taking a break between education and actual work, given someone has a supportive family and/or friends. If you luck out, then it was worth it, if not... people do way more pointless things around this age, without even having a chance to succeed. And, well, sometimes it's just about the dream too. Maybe you heard about Stardew Valley and how a single guy made it by working 10 hours a day for years? It did turn out amazing, but it had a good chance to remain unnoticed in the sea of games. It's chasing the dream, same as being a content creator and making living doing so. I'm glad we have plenty of those dreamers in SL, otherwise it wouldn't be nearly as good and creative.

Thanks LL for listening. Gotta say I'm pleasantly surprised, because I didn't really thought there will be more than some promises for later (to fix the groups and then consider increasing the limit for basic accounts again). 2.5% credit processing fee increase and more expensive premium still might be a bitter pill for some people and rightfully so, no one likes to pay more. But I think all reasonable people understand that sometimes such changes are necessary. And I believe everyone who did post their feedback in the last couple of days want SL to not just survive for another 16 years, but grow to be even better platform. I personally won't mind too much if creators will up their prices to make up for their losses, but I know it's a touchy subject and not all creators are willing to risk and see if their regular customers are loyal enough.

Since you're open to suggestions... Don't put it up together with premium when it's ready (some more news on it would also be appreciated), there's literally no reason to aside of "if you want it that much, then on top of the fee for that service (whatever it might/will be) we're also gonna make you pay for that 1 month of premium". And yeah, I also disagree with that nudge method by taking 7 group from basic users and giving 10 to premiums. If anything it'll make quite a few people unhappy. Adding more value to premiums - sure, why not, maybe some people just needed that slight push to take the leap. But taking away the basics to make enough room for it... is still a bad move. And It's no secret that a lot of people in SL have plenty of alts for all kinds of needs and I'm pretty sure that most of those people don't pay for premium on each of those accounts (some do, I know that). Lots don't even bother to add payment info on alts, since they can freely transfer L$ from their main account. But as long as those other accounts are "socially active" and not just testing/building ones, they ALL benefit from the basic functions, such as groups (and offline IMs to a lesser extent). The group gifts, discounts, sales, credits, notices, chats/support, RP groups etc. In this case, you're adding value to/making such resident's experience better and worse at the same time, depending on the amount of active "non premium alts" you might be taking away more value than you give, which will make the user behind all those accounts unhappy. Unhappy users are less likely to spend money, stick around and so on. I do understand the back end's issue, I remember reading about it a few times. But again, taking from some residents to give others... is not the right move. There also should be moving to the AWS soon (tm), which should help with infrastructure and hopefully have positive effect on SL's general performance (Right? Or why even bother with it). I'm not sure how possible it is from coding/development side of things (especially knowing how old some of the SL's code is), but maybe instead of just cutting the groups you should try to find a way to limit the number of active group chats? There's already a *Receive group instant messages* checkmark in group's options, now it works as the blacklist and just mutes the group if you uncheck it. Maybe make it server sided and make it so it can be checked only for a limited amount of groups at the same time? So a user have to disable chat for one of his/her groups if he/she wants to activate it for another. Alternatively make some new type of groups - "group lite" (and add an options for existing groups to convert to it), with chat permanently disabled and some kind of a notices per week cap (5-7 maybe). That way people can still take advantage of being informed on new releases within SL (not everyone checks blogs and flickr), of group discounts and gifts, but won't overload your group/chat servers with spam and other stuff that is usually goes in big groups. I think more people would be completely fine with it, than there are with just plain group decrease. After all majority of shopping related groups already have chat rights disabled and used purely for notices/group perks. And many residends keep group chats closed at all times as well.

Why even bother to speculate about what would be a better plan if we, users, don't see almost any stats that LL have? Sure, we know amount of regions on the grid (thanks to the Tyche Shepherd's work) and also know that the last year's land price decrease has finally stopped private region numbers from dropping, we can check the daily L$ exchange rate and the volume (at least what LL shows us anyway), we can see concurency numbers and compare them to last years to see the trend. But that's about it. We don't know how much average resident spends in SL, both money and time wise, we don't know any positive or negative effects of the last transaction fee increase, we also don't know if MP's fee for buying L$ that went up a couple of times in the last two years also had any positive effect, we don't know much at all. Without all small stats and a lot of time needed to analyze it, finding out your target auditory and their habits and needs, what could be interesting for them, what LL can get away with and what they better don't touch to avoid negative reaction and possibly - users just leaving, it's all pointless speculation. And before you'll say "but LL does have those stats and that's why they did what they did" - LL did a lot of weird decisions and sometimes just looks like they are out of touch with their own product. "Premium gifts" is one of the listed bonuses for example. Really? The "force bundled" 1024 tier even for people with zero interest in having any land or home with no option to get something else if you don't ever use it. Yeah, fabled "premium tiers" announced ages ago, along with other good stuff that gets a single "we're working on it" update a year. Either way, I agree with Desudesudesuka's comment from earlier. Sansar has to go. There are times in life and in business when you accept that something you thought was a good idea/purchase turns out pretty horrible. You can continue to hold onto as long as you want, try to make it work and find a better place for it, but it's often better, easier and much cheaper to just accept the loss and move on. I can't help, but to think that LL screwed up big time with it and now we're paying for it. What else? Don't touch the majority of your users - the basic accounts. Especially considering that many of them are spending a lot of money, because for some of us premium is just not needed for what we do in SL. Want to add more groups/offline IMs to premiums? Sure, make it 100 for each right away, but downgrading basics to make premium look more appealing? Low and petty move. Whoever in LL was in charge of that idea is pretty terrible in understanding basic psychology. Taking away what was there is always taken way worse than seeing new shiny that you can't have for whatever reasons. A lame example: someone might not be upset at all because they drive a used 20 years old (but in a good condition) car and see a brand new supercar nearby while they wait in traffic, but they sure will be super upset if their old car gets taken away and replaced by hardly working junk. And while I'm at horrible examples: you don't make other more expensive meal look more appealing by taking ingredients out from the already existing affordable one. Improving new user experience is another big thing that LL have to work on. And not in "usual LL way", by trying to put it on users, by adding some artificial limits, but themselves. It's 2019, make viewer multithreaded even if it breaks some content from 15 years ago, make alternative UI (keep the old one too, otherwise lots of existing users might be very upset) that most people are familiar with (so something windows-like for the inventory/outfits management and usual generic 3rd person view game for the rest). Already mentioned earlier too, but I agree with it - stop hiding adult content. It's there, it's popular, it sells. Getting new people is vital, because no matter how good your product is, the people will get move on for all kinds of reasons. You need a steady flow of new ones to make up for it and those new users might have higher standards than old ones. Trying to put more expenses on remaining users because there's not enough of new ones is a fast way to kill your product too. And last, but not least. We don't know how well LL does with SL right now. Is this a badly planned desperate move to keep up with their business because their revenue is dropping or it's more of a greed move? Again, just speculations and guesses. While LL is not exactly a gaming company, but it's somewhat close. And there's plenty of publishers that just will jump out of their pants to please their investors and just "making money" is not enough, they need to make all the money. That's when you read ridiculous statements of certain games sales being "below expectations" while they have literally best in the series results. And the next one comes with a million of paid DLC pre-planned in order to milk their players for some cash. /wall of text

Private estates number didn't change at all for this past year after the 15% price decrease. It even did show a small YTD growth around autumn-early spring, but seems like it did bounce back to zero this month. I guess we'll see in a year, was another 8% price cut enough to make it grow a bit or were other negative parts of today's annoncement more important to people and some more will move on completely or stop bothering with the land at least.

I've already posted in the other thread, but why not do it again. Besides the more I think about it, the more awful this "new exciting change" looks. Kinda funny it's posted around SL's bday, as a positive thing, while there's like.. almost nothing positive about it. 8% price decrease for ~8938 full private regions (stats from a week ago or so). No decrease for ~8013 mainland regions and ~7070 homesteads. That's compared to last year's 15% decrease for all islands and 10% for mainland. Processing fees increase from 2.5% to 5%, which will most likely result in higher prices for new creations, because creators (especially ones who make a living in SL) need to get their money too, so to make up for all those $ that will now go to LL, they'll probably increase prices and rightfully so. So even if you're not a creator (or have some other good business in SL) and don't cash out so this change won't affect you directly, it will still affect you if you shop at all. 27$ annual premium fee increase with rather small benefits and even those come at the expense of basic accounts. "We're going to take 7 groups slots from each basic account and give them to you for a mere extra fee of 27$ a year! Perks, benefits!" They didn't even try to sugar coat or justify the basic downgrade so the premium would look better. Nothing about "the server space" or anything like that, just plain downgrade in order to make (now more expensive) premium look better than it is, without actually making it almost any better. Way to spoil the upcoming SL's 16th bday, LL.

P2P model is pretty unviable for quite a while by now. See mmorpgs for example, there's like a couple of big ones left and that's about it, the rest went B2P or F2P with their versions of "premium" subscription and it was the only way they even survived for as long as they did. Back in the days pretty much every single one was P2P, but times change... now we live in times when F2P junk like candy crush makes more money than all Blizzard's games combined (stats/numbers are from last quaterly Activision Blizzard report). And yes, I also pay for PSPlus (and used to pay sub for a few mmorpgs before) and considering that online play was free on PS2/PS3 and is completely free on PC (steam, origins, epic, battle.net etc ), I still think it's meh at best. At least there's an odd non garbage "free" monthly game here and there. --- Overall.. I have mixed-negative feelings about those news. Yay for 20$ less a month for full regions. Assuming landlords won't be too greedy and drop their prices by roughly same amount, it will make rentals a bit more affordable. Although if someone rents a small parcel, then the difference won't really be noticeable. It's pretty late here and my math can be off, but now 1/16 of full region (20k prims) should be around 15.56$ a month or 3970L$ with 255L$/1$ rate. After this change it'll be 14.31$/3650L$ a month. That's ~80L$ a week difference. No mainland/homesteads price change this year either, which is a shame. Doubled processing credit fee. Yikes. I guess we'll see another bump in "usual prices" for new releases. Last one was pretty obvious and it happened a bit after LL made it 2.5% and removed maximum fee cap. A good chunk of big/well known creators and brands bumped prices for their "regular items" from 200/250L$ to 250/300L$. 300/350L$ for a single color is the next step I suppose. Premium fee increase is pretty bad no matter how look at it. No new promised tiers (yet, but another "later this year". Just like the last names are coming in 2018, right? ) for premiums. Decreased basic groups slots/offline IMs is just plain petty. And a very obvious "slight push" towards "but there's a premium!". No other reasons for that. I'm aware about Lindens saying how groups are pretty heavy for servers and that the big amount of them on our avis can slow down things like teleport, but c'mon, it's still petty to downgrade it. Especially considering that server hardware gets better and they are slowly getting ready to move to the AWS, which should be much better than the dedicated server farm they have (and cheaper for LL to maintain).

Checking the demo is essential anyway. Because even with unedited SL pictures there's always a large variety of how it will look for someone else on their PC with different viewer/settings. Someone experienced with SL's photography can (and will) take amazing pictures using ultra graphics and some tweaks from FS's phototools or the BD viewer. And those pictures will most likely will be taken from perfect angle in the perfect environment (lights mostly), so you really won't see any possible issues that might be present (bad rigging, bad textures, seams between textures or meshes etc) or how it looks on your screen, until you actually try it. Same story for all those awesome outfits you can find in blogs or flickr pages. Pictures in many cases look great and mix-and-match outfits themselves are very creative, but I think I won't be too far from the truth if I'll say that >90% of them are unusable for any other purposes, unless you enjoy having items clipping through your body (and through other items) on every step. And yeah, sadly SL follows the RL here, products (especially food) always looks perfect on ads, but in reality... not so much, especially if you take a really close look. --- New pet peeve of mine after recent MP shopping streak. People (mostly the FP template resellers, but not always) who list million of demos for each color. Sometimes there's like 1-2 full pages (with 96 items on each page) with just 1-2 of such items that I have to scroll through that garbage to get to something else, then maybe a few random things and another page of colored demos from the same store. We've finally got the favorites/wish lists on MP not that long ago, maybe it's time to add the black list/filter for such stores or "the technology just isn't there yet" ?

This deformer is not any different from countless other deformers (or in some cases called "enhancers" ) that can be found on the MP and no, nothing new was added/changed in SL recently to make some kind of "new magic deformer possible". If this concept was any great on practice, then it would become popular ages ago and people would have had way easier time to use all clothes on the body of their choice. From what I've seen with other deformers it's a hit or miss when it comes to clothes and even different shapes. Some things might work, some just won't, especially when it comes to using animations. So knowing TMP's shady reputation and all that PR campaign that was going on during the "new" body's release, I'd say it's just marketing and nothing else. Quite unsuccessful one too I might say, I barely see anyone using their bodies or any fashion related content (blogs, flickr etc) with their bodies listed in credits.

Notifications/people *flash the app icon* works.

And why is this silly? Seems perfectly normal to me. People come to SL for very different reasons and have various interests. And *usually* people prefer to communicate with like-minded individuals and avoid ones they have nothing in common with. If someone has a great interest in, let's say, fashion side of SL and spends 99% of his/her online time browsing new events, grabbing demos, putting new outfits together, taking pictures and blogging about it, then there's almost no chances that such person would find someone with an "old orange skinned avatar who is wearing hair from 2003, has no AO and still rocking not working (on ALM that is) shoes with invisible prims, but is a pro in scripting' very interesting to hang out with. Vice versa is true as well, so it's all fair. SL is very much like RL anyway, with social circles and all that. So not sure why it's so surprising that someone who spends the great deal of efforts and time to take care of themselves don't really want to deal with someone who wears the same shirt for 2 weeks in a row and can't be bothered to brush their teeth. Also "bonds" are not just friendship. Some of us are not looking for friends online, so the avi's operator qualities aside of what is visible in SL don't matter. When I feel like doing some social stuff, I usually check some places where I know I can find what I'm looking for (the roleplaying mostly). And when I do, then I look for someone who; 1) has a good avatar in my taste (yes, there's plenty of quality/full mesh looks that I'll avoid because I don't find them aesthetically pleasing even one bit, despite all the money they spent on it. I fully expect others to dislike my avi sometimes, too, for any personal reason they might have), 2) is able to RP on the decent level. If both of those qualities are not met, then I'm not interested at all, regardless of how awesome and sweet the person might be. If they are met and we play some and both happy with the result, then I don't mind "forming a bond" to play some more sometime, but I still don't really care who they are and what else they are doing outside of RP times. That being said, it costs nothing to be civil and polite, so even if I decline someone's "offer"/attempt, I do it without unnecessary comments about their look and/or emoting skills.