steeljane42

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.

You know, someone can wear maitreya fit on belleza/slink or a system body and it will look like garbage rigging wise and "of course" everyone will think it's your lack of skills in rigging, rather than that person just wearing the wrong version. Better write a script that detects if "body of brand X" is worn and auto-detach your creation if it's not. Maybe even self destruct/deform it (like some paranoidal timed demos do) with the warning for a better effect. --- As for this whole discussion. I prefer everything to be mod as well, in cases with furniture/decor/landscape items it's very simple. Is it more than 50L and no mod? No buy. With clothing it's is a bit different. There are a few brands that have exactly what I need textures wise, so I demo their new releases if they are looking like what I want to wear and if all is up to their usual standards - I buy them (still wish they'd put a killing script mini HUD into folder). There are also a few other creators that have no mod clothing, but provide coloring HUDs (often overly complicated and slow, but hey, it works too) where you can adjust colors, materials and all that for all available faces and also have a kill script option to get rid of that stupid auto alpha. Then it's kinda "mostly" mod and it's good enough for me. But other than that, I usually skip no-mod clothing, unless it's an expensive gacha with which I wouldn't mess anyway since no backup is possible in that case. And I do my best to support creators that are not afraid to leave their original creations (even non fatpack versions) mod. That being said, there's not really much to discuss. It all comes down to two things. Creators make things how they want to and set the perms/price of their choice. And customers are free to choose if they want to support said creator or not. Basically - vote with your wallet and things might change eventually. I remember seeing a thread in general discussion here, about the older times in SL and how no-copy furniture (even expensive 3k+ L$ beds and what not) was a standard. And look at the furniture market now, you won't find many no-copy stuff there that is not from those ancient times or from especially stubborn creators (gachas excluded, obviously. but that's a whole different topic).

I saw my region's performance being low at times too, usually after the rolling restarts as well. In general I try to keep scripts run around 55-60% and sometimes after the restarts (and not during those, when I assume some things could be a bit unstable) I noticed it dropped to 30%. Same everything else: 1 person in the region, same objects, same script count, no noticeable difference in net, physics, simulation or agent times. It's a standalone island, so no child agents either. Manual restart is enough to get it back to the normal state. I also did assume it's because LL are saving on hardware before moving to cloud, it would make little sense to mass change/upgrade servers at this point, so I guess only replacements that happen are for hardware that is completely broken. Just speculation, of course, but I really doubt LL are looking for mass new servers upgrades/purchases at this point, they'd have to sell them to someone (and lose bunch of money on it) after migration to cloud is done.

I wouldn't get too excited about it if I were you. There's a pretty good chance that those skins will look completely broken on system heads. It's the case even now, when skin makers make a skin with a certain mesh head in mind. You can still apply it to other heads of the same brand just fine and even to other brands if skin applier is omega, but in most cases the result is "meh" at best and unusuable at worst (wrong position for lips, eye corners and so on), some heads have very different topology. And I very much doubt skin creators will take their time to make special versions of the same skins for system heads, if they wanted to they'd be doing it already without BoM. As for the topic. It doesn't affect my SL budget at all. Well, almost. It did once when it was close to the bento release, I had a non bento mesh head and was considering changing it to something else, but it was just a couple of months until full bento release already, so I did wait a bit. Other than that, nope. Don't care about BoM at all too, since the only type of an applier I use are catsuits with materials on a "clothing" layer for 3D effect instead of just painted clothing look, which BoM won't support at release (and probably for a long long time, based on how slow LL are at implementing new things in general).

Look up the Overwatch lootboxes and how they are banned in Belgium already. They contain only skins and provide nothing that affects gameplay or provides an unfair advantage over the people who don't have said skins. So yes, gacha = lootboxes. The content of the "box" doesn't matter, it's still gambling for a chance to get an item you want, be it rare or a common; skin or some boost. You have no way of knowing what you'll get and have to gamble.

For clothing and other "demo-able" items - sure, aside of events and a few stores that don't have MP at all (for their own personal reasons) I usually buy on MP. But most if not all rezzable things (unless they are almost free, like <50L$) I only buy after seeing what it is in-world. If it's a decor or landscape stuff, then I want to check textures, triangles (I don't need some light mesh, quite the opposite, but some items I saw are just insane, like 900k triangles for some small decor), If it's a building, then I want to test the above plus check if it has some physics issues, if it's a furniture, I want to check the animations on top of the look. And if I already teleported to in-world store and they have a vendor nearby, then if I decided I need this item I'll most likely buy it right there.

Some creators provide a few versions of their furniture; classic, bento hands and bento head+hands. I don't buy anything that only comes with "full bento" for this exact reasons - they look awful and in most cases don't even work that well. I suppose this is a bigger problem if you visit public places where you can't control what kind of furniture there is. I also do hope all creators will get enough complaints about that and start include option to turn them off or at least add alternative (non full bento) versions to the box. P.S. In my opinion it's not worth to use non-bento mesh heads because of that, though. Not only their expressions are limited to what head creator decided to add or sell as animation packs, they also use frame by frame (or whatever proper technical term would be) animations, which look almost robotic compared to bento ones. They were okay pre-bento, I had one myself, but these days.. not so much.

I doubt caching improvements will push badly designed content to spread, not more than it already does at least. Because I don't think people who already make (or just "port") said bad content care if their content causes any issues, be it with caching or bandwidth. And if use that logic, then better not improve SL at all in most cases. Recent animesh might lag some people with slow PCs even more, it's not too heavy from what I've seen, but it's just more mesh and geometry around in general. Upcoming EEP might too (not that sure about that, but it should come with some rendering engine changes I believe, including godrays and some more). And I'm sure when SL just got mesh many years ago, it also forced some people to leave, permanently or temporarily, because their machines couldn't handle mesh. Most platforms/games designed for average specs in mind, unless it's something aimed for either extremely low or high end. Now what is average in SL these days, PC specs and bandwidth, only LL knows, so we can only speculate. But I would be surprised if LL aimed for the lowest end when they make plans on how to improve SL. Or, you know, if go back to the bandwidth example, there are people on satelite connections in the middle of nowhere too (actually met a few of those in SL), who get unstable 256kbps on a good not rainy/snowy day. Should LL stop all possible improvements just so those would stay in SL?

HDDs fail too, though. And not in all cases they give you enough of time to safely save all information as they slowly develop bad sectors and other noticeable issues. Sometimes controller just dies and in best case you'll be able to find exactly same HDD or PCB from exact same model for "donor purposes" and replace it (or find someone who can do it for you). I did it twice in the past... never again, these days I have 3 copies of backups for all my important data. Can always start with SSD for games/SL/cache and other random stuff and see how it goes for you, less reasons to worry that way. Most reports show year to year increase usually. Like here, not the most recent one, but https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/about/news/press/2017-press/akamai-releases-first-quarter-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.jsp From there " Global average connection speed was 7.2 Mbps (an increase of 15% year over year). " And if compare to 15 or even 10 years ago... it's quite the difference in my city at least. 10 years ago we still had relatively slow (2-5mbps on average) ADSL connections here as the most common ones, these days it's usualy cable or fiber with 100mbps+, plus options to get up to 1gbps if someone actually needs that much. Even my backup mobile connection can reach ~65mbps outside of peak hours (during those it's usually around 30-35mbps), ping is not as good of course and jitter is quite noticeable, so it's not very suitable for games, but for SL it's totally fine. So it would be great of LL finally started to work/implementing some caching changes along with some rework for SL bandwidth system. FS wiki recommends 1500kbps max, which with current internet speeds is very slow. I suppose the reason for it is how cache works, to not choke viewer with too much data.

I don't see how more mass purges would help with either of that. For example old content that got/getting purged has roughly same chance to work/be what is advertised on the MP page/etc as the new one. Like you said, no one stops you or other people from making and selling broken products. So there can't be mass criteria for any purges, it's pretty much on an individual basis for each case. And that's what my initial reply to you was about, when you said "we need more purges". Because we don't. Faster/better reaction from LL when it comes to obvious scams would be great, though. I'd say "easier ways to file the DMCA" would be great too, but it's double-edged sword and I remember a few cases when legitimate content (even from very big stores, like belleza) got taken down (temporarily or completely) because competitors or some especially insistent trolls kept filing DMCA reports,

Scam is one thing, but content policing (aside of said scam stuff/things that break ToS) is a terrible idea. On what criteria you're going to base that policing? Who is going to determinate what is "junk" and what is not? And yes, sometimes not doing anything is better than doing it wrong.

As if purging did help with that too much. In some cases it might, but as far as I know item will be delisted from MP if a person didn't log for 5 years or item weren't sold even once for 2 years. So basically it does absolutely nothing as long as someone logs once every few years (to cashout a few $ perhaps or just to check what's new in SL). Besides whole "support" thing is completely voluntary to begin with. There's nothing in LL's ToS regarding mandatory support for anything, be it items or services. So new items have roughly same chance to be broken and unusable as the old ones and (unless it's obvious scam, like selling basic prim instead of what is advertised on the MP page) LL won't get involved even if you'll fill the report. --- I'm using those winter months where lots of new releases don't interest me too much (way too many seasonal items/clothing for my tastes) to get some old items that I might miss if they are gone. Sometimes I see something I like rezzed (or worn) in world and check creator's profile and see that they are not around already, links to in-world stores are broken and a few cases when I decided to check their last login date through mutual groups it did show that they are offline for a year or more. Can't say it would be an absolute tragedy to miss some of their creations, but sometimes they are quite unique and well made items with custom animations that can't be found anywhere else. So I personally think it was completely unnecessary to purge anything. Instead LL could add a couple if "scary" warnings to MP listing and checkout pages. Like "Creator of an item you're about to purchase weren't online for X years, please make sure you understand the risks" or something similar.

As a consumer (not a creator myself, but I do shop a lot) I can try to answer this at least. But tt depends on what it is and my needs, so kinda hard to give a simple answer. Creativity and originality is a good thing, but sometimes less creativity is better too, as long as it's done right. If use some leather pants as an example: sometimes I just want a quality made leather pants, well fitted, with materials and good textures, but simple, pretty much based on plain leather pants you could find in RL. In that case additional creativity and millions of zippers, cuts, fancy pockets and buttons are "bad", because I want simplicity. That's actually very common problem for me in SL's shopping, some creators overdo with bells and whistles and quality stuff that I'd get for sure, just ends up looking cartoon-ish in my opinion (although I imagine there's other kind of people who appreciate that). Same is valid for some furniture. Like for the library room at my place, it was pretty difficult to find quality and simple/classic furniture that would me modeled after RL examples. I had no need in crazy/fancy designs for that purpose. And sometimes more fantasy/creativity and originality is awesome. I recently felt like making a few sci-fi outfits and that's where I appreciate creativity a lot. The more unique the better. I also have a steampunk room at my place that is filled with steampunk stuff (duh) and I did try to choose most original and interesting decor/furniture for that as long as it did match the rest, so it was interesting to search/shop for it and see all unique and crazy ideas people have. I agree on what others said about "original mesh" label as well, too. Wonder how honest some of those "SLOCCA mesh" and similar labels are, though. FP templates are quite easy to find out, be it clothes or furniture. Even if people reupload them under their name so it's impossible to check linked set and see the original creator, they are still there on the MP and in other people's items, under different names and with slightly different textures, but still very obvious. But in case when someone buys or just grabs 3D stuff from random sites... that's much more difficult to find out and often leads to some drama from what I've seen in SL related blogs/sites, where people accuse certain brands in just using others' work.

Or perhaps, just perhaps, IE was awful since early versions, didn't follow web standards, didn't had any customization options and look where it is now. It's dead. And Edge is pretty much gone too, Microsoft just going to have own browser based on Chromium. Turns out the alternatives were better enough to kill the "original" completely. Anyways, I prefer FS myself, in FS mode. I gave SL a serious try in 2012 and I did try all viewers that were available back then and after a couple of weeks I settled on Firestorm and use it ever since. So it's not getting used to original UI and not wanting to change, I think what people call v1 was earlier than that. I like the pie menus and I like options FS has. I hardly can imagine how it's to use SL without area search, be it my own sim or shopping. I like the UI, I like additioal build options, I like LSL bridge functions, I like easy ways to disable/block bunch of things I don't use/don't like (look at, group chats and similar stuff), I like that is has 2GB VRAM buffer for textures instead of 512mb ( that alone would be enough for me to use FS ). For the most part I don't ever crash (except one version in 2016 I believe, which used to crash every couple of weeks), FPS are good, lots of customization options, just how I like it (my web browser is also heavily customized with addons, themes, userstyles and userscripts, makes browsing much more enjoyable).

FS AO lacks features. It doesn't have mode detection when AO would switch from Mode 1 to Mode 2 based on how close you're standing to other avi, which can have completely different set of animations that suits those kinds of situations, it doesn't have easy access to gestures (not that I use them more than a few times a month, but hey, it still counts), it doesn't have height detection to save me time from adjusting hover slider every single time I sit on the ground and so on. So not sure about you, but I value my time and efforts more than ~750kb of bonus scripts on me. And quite frankly I don't care about scripts usage or complexity that much to begin with, nor do I visit those "real time combat" sims where someone would actually care enough to ask me to do anything about it. Also, like I said in some other post of mine, considering all those heavy scripted attachments people like to wear, including "pets" and HUDs for their bodies/heads that easily can take 2-3mb if not more (combined)... meh, doesn't matter, imo. If I'd consistely was in top 3 scripts usage wise in any given sim, then maybe I'd try to fix that, but I'm rarely even in top 15.

Flawed logic. Heavy AO huds (guilty of wearing one myself, firestorm AO just lacks features/options compared to those), some scripted pets/animals people like to wear/have near them so much, certain (but not all) furry/neko/etc attachments, like some older non bento tails for example, tons of other stuff because there's just way too much to list. Don't know what you might have against collars, but modern ones are not any worse scripts count/lag wise, than anything on that list. So unless you want and expect everyone and anyone to strip out of their "heavy" attachments, including those very heavy huds that you can't even check if someone is wearing (mesh body ones, all those slex systems, battle/rp ones that people don't bother to detach and more), your comment was very biased against the certain kind of attachments that might bother you for some other reason. And to the idea of AFK timers someone had earlier. It probably one of the worst ideas for SL I heard this year. It really is. No idea why some people have issues with cam shopping, though. But when I'm in rush to get into some event asap, then those always worked perfectly for me. Usually I don't mind waiting a few days, though. New items won't go anywhere and 99% of events are easy enough to access after 4-7 days since they started.

Ah, that would expain why some of my home projectors caused some of my hair to look as bad as they did. Thankfully hair are mostly mod and changing a few linked parts from being alpha blended to alpha masked fixed it. Sadly it doesn't look too good for everyday usage, but for a static picture it was okay. As for the actual topic. Nope, don't see BoM causing a big boost to SL fashion economy. Not everyone wears a tattoo in general and especially with clothing appliers, like lingerie (which is also better in mesh, if done right). I have yet to encounter an applier issues when it comes to mixing makeup too (and yes, I use ALM 100% of the time). Mesh wise it changes nothing. And the only thing I personally use when it comes to "clothing" appliers won't work with BoM at the start at least, since apparently it doesnt support materials. And I don't think any mesh head/bodies makers will charge for BoM updates either, in fact one major brand of mesh heads already released a completely free BoM ready update a few weeks ago, so I'm sure others will follow soon enough if they didn't already, I don't exactly follow those other brands too much.

Eh, there are always exceptions! I am very much a hardcore gamer with 25+years of gaming experience (started with NES, sadly missed original Atari times by a couple of years) and I did play a few games on a semi-competitive level (original CS and Broodwar to name a couple) and despite not having as much time for games anymore these days I still keep up with some of my favorite genres/series. And yet I still very much enjoy SL ever since I decided to give it a chance. It is very different kind of entertainment and gives my mind a rest whenever I mess around my sim, shopping for new stuff or do some roleplaying. You are correct about attention span, though. If a person, gamer or not, doesn't have it, then no way they'd stick around SL for too long, but same can be said about some MMORPGs as well. They might have more polished UI in general, but still require some attention to details, like reading on what does what, some kind of an inventory/character management and some more. Those so called "gamers" usually quit such games in a day or two as well, I know it well from my own experience. Whenever I had/wanted to make a new character in mmos for whatever reason, I always did team up/added people as I was progressing on that new character. Mmorpgs, especially last couple generations of them, might not be as socially oriented as they used to be when the genre was new, but they still promote social aspects a lot, it's more fun and easier/faster to level/explore/do stuff together. Long story short: by time I got that new character to the mid levels (usually a week or so) over 80% of people I had on my list weren't logging anymore at all, by time I got to the max level/endgame - it was closer to 90% and at least half of the remaining 10% were just alts/twinks like my own character. So to sum up my thoughts on the topic/video (gotta admit that I couldn't watch the whole thing, it's awful). Should LL continue to make experience and new user experience better? Definitely! But no amount of improvements will make a certain type of people stay in SL after they try it out for a day. It's just the F2P culture these days. It costs nothing (with an exception if someone is unfortunate enough to have a data cap or just have too slow connection) to try SL or a few hundreds if not thousands of F2P games. And people do and will continue to try them out, in most cases to never be seen again. As another example, a certain free CCG recently was celebrating over 100m accounts made, but based on the activity on the social networks, youtube/twitch, official forums and what not, I'd say that it got maybe 1-2% are still playing it on regular basis and is clearly on decline as it ages. It's even true for the retail games too. There are stats on Steam for example and certain not free online games games with over 7-10m of estimated owners (used to be exact numbers, but steam changed API a while ago) and 30-60k people online. It is OK for people to try things out and move on for whatever reason. And no, it doesn't mean that LL or those game developers should turn their products upside down just so those people who already moved on would give their product another chance. Not really. You can check almost any game's forum, be it console or PC games and that topic shows up all the time. "Why other people don't use mics? I want them to hear my breathing, my vacuum cleaner and my TV... for a reason!". Well, because most people don't, even with way more smooth and out of the box experience that current gen consoles provide, they even include the basic (arguable terrible, but it does work) mic in the box.

I think it's a new bug. It wasn't like that before, that's for sure. Would be really nice if it got fixed in december update or earlier.

SSD doesn't benefit from the defragmentation at all, you'll just waste a bit of its resources for nothing. Whole point of defragmentation on HDD is to move fragmented blocks of data together so access time will improve greatly. HDD needs to physically access those blocks and if they are fragmented, then drive's head will need to do a lot more and slow down already slow enough process. SSD has same access time to each of its blocks/cells and there's no moving parts, making defragmentation completely pointless. Whole trim/garbage collection is there to make sure SSD cells get equal usage, so some of them won'trun out of rewrite cycles long before the others.