steeljane42

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.

Yeah, assuming much again. "Everyone who doesn't agree with my point of view must be curmudgeons, won't ever buy a full product and will rush to leave bad reviews if they actually do". That also speaks of your mindset, but not really related to this discussion, just like your comment, though. P. S. Sorting on MP for women's apparel with 0L$ returns 136165 results right now, 1L$ - 35768, 3k more with 2-3L$. Can't say I remember the in-world vendor that would have had paid demos and didn't refund right away, so I'd say it's pretty obvious that majority prefer 0L$ demos over paid ones.

More like a principle to not feed the greedy people. It's their creations, of course, so they can charge w/e they want for the full versions and demos, but when someone is so desperate to try and squeeze a few hundred of L$ out of the free demos it just screams "greed" to me, so I most likely to avoid it and make business to someone else. Thankfully the stores I like a lot don't do that and for everything else there's plenty of alternative in most cases. And yep, when in shopping mood I often grab a few hundred of demos at the time to see if I can mix and match a couple of new looks/outfits (I almost never go for full/ready to wear outfits). So while ~300-900L$ (with 1-3L$ per demo range) wouldn't be THAT bad, I'd rather spend them on something else.

Assuming much? It's more of a principle, than being cheap. But yeah, given that 99%+ of demos I get going directly into the trash for various reasons (some are just bad, some don't fit the other clothes I had in mind and so on), I don't see why I should waste hundreds of L$ on demos when they cost nothing to make. Or, you know, some creators could even sell passes so the possible customers could access their regions to look at the rezzed buildings, landscape/decor, furniture and other not demo-able items. I make some exceptions from time to time, but in general if a demo is non 0L$, then I just skip it. Thankfully it's mostly template resellers that try to charge for clothing demos these days, can't say I remember seeing many (or any) original creations' demos being sold for 1L$ or above.

Without too many tech details: you can see materials with it enabled. https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/materials-normal-and-specular-mapping-r1352/ So leather shoes will actually look like leather, latex will look shiny and your red dress will reflect the lights (given all of them actually have materials). Depending on how item is made it can look different or absolutely plain without ALM. Unless your PC has some difficulties with having ALM on (even older/weaker machines shouldn't, if you keep shadows disabled) I wouldn't suggest turning it off ever.

If it's not there anymore, then there's a good chance it was removed since then. Unless you already made sure it's just you and your friends (or alt) can see the building in question. Either way, if you still want to try, the assets blacklist is local (unlike mute/block list, which is server sided) and located in (default path): c/users/username/appdata/roaming/firestorm_x64/avatarname folder. Delete/move (if you wish to save it and don't derender bunch of stuff again moving would be the better option) assets_blacklist.xml from the needed avi's folder with viewer closed and login to check if building is there. If you will need your blacklist, then just move your old one back and replace the newly created/empty one with it. If the building is 100% there and you can't see it like that, then there's a slight chance for cache corruption, so could be worth to delete it.

It's not about complexity, which doesn't mean almost anything anyway. Here's a short chart of some mesh bodies. I was lazy to get them all (or to make the chart look better, so just a basic picture), but as far as female bodies market goes it's probably well over 85% of what you see in-world anyway, a few male ones as well. Old Catwa pre-bento head is there to show that "it's not as bad" as it used to be, so despite new TMP bodies taking the lead in vertices amount, they are behind Belleza female bodies (all 3 have roughly the same numbers) in triangles and well behind some old stuff, like said non bento head, so nothing new really, no one's PC is gonna burn. Those are just bodies, without hands (and some without feet), so the full amount of vertices/triangles will be higher, in some cases (like for the new TMP bodies) a lot higher, their hands are almost 190k triangles (or were it vertices?) for some reason. P.S. Couldn't find anyone with new TMP bodies in-world while I was checking a few new events, so I went there to grab demos myself to get the numbers. What an atrocious shopping experience they've made. You have to accept experience, which controls your camera for no reason whatsoever, attaches temporary stuff to your avatar and demo itself is invisible to others, so if someone wants a friend's opinion on how their body/head/skin/hair/etc combo looks like before buying, they have to resort to sharing pictures of the demo inside the store, since it auto-detaches if you leave the region.

They look like secondlife:///app/wear_folder/?folder_id=<id here> normally, but it's possible to put custom url instead as well. If you click it, it will replace your current outfit with content of the said folder. I believe it should be library items that everyone have in their inventory, otherwise it won't work for anyone else, but the owner of the folder. So the worst thing that can happen is someone putting a bunch of ancient library items on you, but it's more annoying than harmful. Most commonly used by "fun people" (the ones who are only fun to themselves, but usually quite obnoxious for everyone else), like "click here to see my RL photos" or "click below to receive free stuff".

That's way too small sample size, besides nature of those disconnects is very random to begin with. I had a couple of completely free days 2 weeks ago and did a lot of shopping/demoing/checking in world. Probably around 1.5k of teleports give or take a hundred. Not a single disconnect, even in to/out of very slow regions. And then it did disconnect me 3 times in 6 teleports on the next day and had those annoying random disconnects again ever since. Today is good so far (for me, but seems like others already got disconnects), but way too early to tell. I'll believe it's fixed only after a few weeks of testing, if I won't disconnect even once (and that's how it used to be for me before), then hopefully LL finally managed to track down the issue, fix it and make sure it won't happen again. It's been over a month already and is beyond annoying.

I thought they are rolling those changes only around new Linden homes because those don't allow skyboxes to begin with? Someone correct me if I'm wrong and they did adjust the rules for the new area. Because otherwise for other mainland parcels it's not a viable solution. People do live in skyboxes there, some have them on different altitudes. I doubt LL will want to restrict privacy/security for residents there or dictate how they can use their parcels. Like a certain person keeps suggesting in every other mainland thread - forcing everyone to live on the ground. Maybe have other plans to disable teleports on mainland too and force everyone to use vehicles. Because... realism! I mean LL could do that, but I really doubt they would. Mainland already looks like a loss for LL when it comes to revenue. With private regions it's simple - someone always pays a tier, be it a landlord subrenting it to other people or someone directly paying to LL. People stop paying - region removed, server space/resources saved. Mainland regions, however, are always there, 24/7, even if they are completely abandoned. And there's a lot of abandoned land around. I wonder how many of ~7800 LL owned regions could be taken offline if they weren't the mainland ones. So further restricting on how people can use their mainland LL would risk to push even more people into private regions making even more mainland into lifeless desert that no one pays for, because I'd imagine a lot of people would want to keep their skyboxes for all kinds of reasons. Especially I'm talking about large parcels, because even if someone loves to live on the ground level there are some things that better if they are put somewhere else. For example in my region I have the usual cozy lakes and forest kind of place, with a few houses, forest paths in between and other matching stuff. And in the skies I have some very nsfw facilities, which would be plain ugly from the outside if I left it on the ground, plus I'd have to cut into the forests to make space for them and make my home less of how I'd want it to be. LL could drop the mainland tier to make it more appealing, though. But it's already 70$/month cheaper for full region compared to private regions and I don't see it helping too much, there's more that twice as many private regions on the grid now and like I said earlier, none of them are really abandoned, like a good portional of the mainland. Just in case, "I have no beef" in that argument. I never liked the idea of "living in a community", so first parcels I did rent were in private regions already and yes, they had banlines and a security orb with 20s warning, then many years after I did get my own region which is closed to the random visitors completely. I'm also not really interested in sailing/flying so others' orbs never bothered me, but I will agree that instant kick ones are pretty unnecessary, though. There were many cases when I teleported to what should have been a store and got instantly kicked by someone's orb, so I think 15-30s range is fine, it leaves people time to press the teleport back button. So yeah, I don't really care either way, but I strongly support the "privacy group".

Spare time for homestead is most definitely not the "actual spare time" that full regions have. For full regions it does work as you'd expect from what I saw. If you have spare time you're looking at 90%+ for scripts run, often around 95-100%. If region runs out of spare time it'll start eating into scripts' performance and you will see less and less % run. Homesteads always have tons of spare time, but I think actual spare time for those is around 4ms (maybe 5ms), after that scripts run % starts dropping while stats still show 15-16ms of spare time left. It's probably just lack of interest from LL to update/adjust their tools when it comes to homesteads. Maybe a technical limitation too, you never know with SL and its spaghetti code that goes back to 16 years already. P. S. My friend's homestead has around 2.1k scripts (majority of them seems to be very light, mostly just idle ones in landscape stuff used to change seasons in whole region easily.) and 85-95 EPS. It usually hovers around 45-50% scripts run too.

Looks like the this one to me (but I'm not 100% sure, picture is too small) https://www.flickr.com/photos/157661345@N05/46617069364/in/dateposted/

I'm pretty clear I believe. The main thing is that the premium and basic users both can be spenders and in many cases basic ones will outspend premium ones by a lot. Therefore I don't see why premium perks should even be a thing, more than they are now or some versions (and I did add a few examples of what could different premium groups have in my last post). Stipend, home, live support and/or little things I did mention earlier, sounds like enough for 6$ a month. I also was very clear about not seeing anything that would make me do that (aside of expensive permanent subscription option, but mostly because I do have a thing for "lifetime upgrade", than actual need) and the only things that could change that would be ones which would start ruining it for non premium users. Which is what I'm against.

As you see I didn't find any reason to "upgrade" myself, if I had some kind of example what I would give to premium users I'd probably have said "if there was this, that and this too, I'd subscribe myself". But I don't need any mainland as I have my own region (and before that I was just renting parcles in private regions, which is what majority people with any interest in having a land do I assume, there's 16k of private regions vs 7k of LL owned), I don't care about 300L$ a week because it's the drop in the ocean compared to the rest, same for premium sandboxes, voice morph etc. So in a way I actually think that whole premium thing is the relic of the past. And LL could easily let people to buy mainland's parcels without it. If this how it works for whole private regions, then no reason it can't work for parcels on the mainland, after all the mainland region is just joined usable parcels plus a few LL owned ones, like roads and protected water. The other benefits (more groups, 2 animesh attachments vs 1 etc) are all in the "locking out content" territory in my opinion and like I already said, it's the path I hate the most for online "games". But on the low scale and because I remember LL was going to change their premium model I think they should separate perks into 2-3 groups. 2048sqm (or more) free tier and no stipend for those who need more land (maybe for their stores?). No tier option with more L$ a week and no free home, for those who already rent a parcel elsewhere or don't need a home at all (and there's a lot of those people). Maybe another group for bloggers/fashionistas/photographers with free picture uploads or something similar. LL could cooperate with some well known 3rd party creators and increase the number and quality of gifts for that group of premium users, kinda like a LL version of monthly subscribe box with clothes, skins, vehicles, decor etc. All of those groups should also have access to live chat as the main benefit. And what's up with that "paying player"? Basic doesn't mean "not paying". You don't need premium to buy L$ or to even own a few full private regions and homesteads (yes, I know you need a full region first before you can get a homestead), you only have to add a CC or paypal and have money (duh). Basic user with one private region pays more each month than "premium user" pays in 3.5 years for the premium status (assuming yearly plan). Now where are my "ultra mega premium" benefits then? Right, nowhere and I'm fine with it. Because It's a dangerous path of making the basic experience worse and adding more perks for different tiers of "elite users". Lots of F2P games do that, they cater to so called "whales" who invest thousands of $ into the game each month, while making normal (often paying too, just in way more reasonable amounts) users experience pretty miserable, pushing them to "buy it, suffer or quit". I don't want that to happen in SL, there's already enough of other issues with "new user experience" as it is, locking features behind the paywall won't help to keep those new users interested, that's for sure. And might piss off the old ones as well.

I thought about it for a while and still have no idea what would change my mind. Certain thoughts that I've seen in this thread (like script stalling for non premium users in favor of the premium ones) are not the premium benefits, but more of a basic downgrades and I think that's really awful idea. There are many people that own a region, buy a lot of L$ to get stuff for that region and other random things on top of it and make LL a lot more money than w/e that premium costs a month. I'd very unhappy to see that my SL experience would become worse in favor of "premium users". And no, few additional bucks a month is not much compared to how much region cost, but I can't stand when I feel forced to get something. Locking out new features/content/performance behind the paywall is among the worst things that happened to online gaming and while SL is quite far from your generic online game, the effect would be the same here. Maybe I'd get it if there was a permanent upgrade option (I read there was at the start of SL) for, don't know, 300-500$ maybe? Mostly to just have it, than anything else.

My guess is LL will do their best to release it before (or around) SL's 16th bday, unless some new serious bug shows up or some of the big known ones are way too time consuming to fix (was that blended alphas + ALM one fixed yet? I remember seeing pictures of mesh heads with it, it was in pretty bad state by then). Makes sense to me at least. Another year, recap of the last one, plans for the upcoming one, celebrations and shinies. And what can be more shiny than environmental changes that will be visible by nearly everyone who would update their viewer in time? Out of all known/planned features it's the one I'm waiting the most. I've seen plenty of screenshots with examples of what is/will be possible and very excited to make my own sim wide windlights (or better call them EEPs now?), but I'm gonna wait until all big bugs are fixed and Firestorm implements it.

This one for me too. I'm always like... "C'mon, instead of trying to act tough better teach your friends/family/etc how to use the block function". Also worth noting that in my 6.5 years in SL I have never met anyone decent who would have had this kind of "threat" in their profile. And blank profiles as well. Ones with "IM me to find out" or similar kind of line I also count as blank. No need for fully filled picks that tell your (S)life story, but the "I'm so special so YOU have to find out about me by yourself" attitude is pretty terrible in my opinion. Those are usually rocking pretty default-ish looks too, either classic or mesh, but not comment worthy as well. RL/SL ones don't really bother me, though. It's actually good thing to see right away in my opinion. Saves a lot of time for completely incompatible people (ones who do want to heavily mix SL with RL and ones who just come to SL to relax and roleplay a bit).

My partner and I have same teleport issues since last week too. Reminds me of the similar issue from 3 years ago, when it just started randomly and ended just as randomly after a few months. It weren't fun few months, though. This one https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-20201 If TP fails the next login sometimes (not all that often, I'd say 1/10 or so) is also a mess. First it shows a window saying about avatar not being in region, then when it lets me to login it doesn't seem to fully connect to the grid, clothing is "downloading" and I see the "buy land" icon even on protected land. Unlike 3 years ago I always see my L$ balance properly, though. If that happens, then the relog always fixes all issues.

That's only partially true. Competitive online games where ping matters the most - you are correct, streaming service is completely unusuable. But even for action based single player games it can be "ok", not perfect, but playable. See PS Now as an example, Sony provides PS2, PS3 and PS4 games through that and only PS4 games can be downloaded, the PS2/3 are streaming only. A lot here depends what is your ping to local node, if you're close enough and have good connection, then the difference is not too big (speaking from experience after comparing "local" version of a PS3 game vs how it works like through PS Now), but if your ping is bad, then input delay makes it quite awful for anything, but turn based games (rpgs mostly). Considering that SL (for most people) is exactly afk simulator like you said, I think it can work through streaming just fine, given the not terrible connection. Then again, unless it's a temporary solution for someone during traveling, I'd say it's better to just save 250-300$ for some used hardware and make own PC, than subscribe to said service for 17$ a month.