Rosa Hexem

Oh my sweet summer child. That works really well until the first time someone decides to shower the sim in instakill damage megaprims that render combat impossible, or when someone desires to not be in a combat area where people shower the sim in instakill damage megaprims. That being said if you want that experience right now you can go to any of the damage enabled combat sandboxes and just start randomly shooting at people, nobody was stopping people from doing that ever it just hardly appeals to most people looking for an actual game to play with a structured experience.

Yeah, broad compatibility is cool but Bring Your Own Blaster still leads to a need for local rules enforced by local referees in combat areas to keep things sane. I applaud the ideas to make combat systems mutually compatible and things such as max damage capacity regardless, it's just there are circumstances where I understand why gated third party systems are a thing. Third party systems usually mean arbitration by whoever runs that system on what is mechanically acceptable down to a systems level, which ironically leads to a lot less headache for people who want to buy weapons but don't want to have to worry about said weapon being banned for breaking combat area rules. It also means that the developers who own the system are the ultimate authority on how the balance of their game should work, and that there's less endless bickering about different groups of people trying to push their own preferred standards within an open system. Even with max damage cap in the proposed Combat 2.0 it's not accounting for some creator deciding that having a gun that spawns damage prims on a hit target until they die too ensure 1 hit kills regardless of damage cap would be a really marketable feature to sell their weapon as "more powerful than any competing weapon!" or "a game winning advantage!". Meanwhile when someone has a fairly closed system where only pre-approved weapons work, then the people running that system can catch out people who want to sell users the promise of being game-breakingly overpowered.

This might be a bit beyond scope but I gotta say it because all my experience with combat in SL tells me it's almost equally as important as the damage system itself, at that's avatar movement in combat areas. There might be scripted solutions for this in SL already, but then the same could be said for making scripted combat meters for damage and whatnot so I'm going to shoot regardless. This post is going to get a bit rambly, but I really want to spare no detail on why this is important. Just as my case here I think combat features and movement are inextricably linked to one another in terms of gameplay. It determines how you design game environments, how effective certain kinds of weapons can be, the entire gamefeel of the moment to moment experience. The difference between moving from one place to another in Quake vs Call of Duty vs Zelda TotK are so critical to the gameplay they are practically core to the identity of the game, never mind the combat gamefeel within said games. First off we already have flight and teleport restrictions, and I imagine that those are there at least partially in anticipation of how they might break an experience as heavily focused on movement as, say, a swordfighting or shooting combat game. Now anyone who's been around the block long enough knows that even the default jump in SL lets you jump effortlessly over walls that would otherwise serve as obstacles in many other games, as well as the myriad movement quirks such as "primjumping" which let you invalidate terrain obstacles even further. I assume only so much can reasonably be done about the nitty gritty of how jumping in SL works but some way of controlling maximum jump height for avatars in a region would actually be a gamechanger for the viability of combat experiences in SL. There is also enabling/disabling prejump. It's a clientside thing right now and it can lead to some really weird behaviour, but it's also another mechanical thing baked into SL that greatly affects how movement works. If that was something we could fiddle around with more it'd be appreciated as I know many users in general are just somewhat confounded by why their jumps seem unresponsive and sluggish until they turn off prejumps. Secondly we have the speed at which avatars can move laterally at, as in walking and running. Scripted movement boosters for "sprinting" and such have been made to alter this but they are unreliable in circumstances where you don't want them to be extreme enhancements to basic movement. It's easy enough to turn your avatar into a million mile an hour comet but it's hard to just have an avatar move slightly faster on normal terrain without hiccups like colliding on said terrain and killing your avatar by running into a molehill. Just like jumping even adjusting the basic movement speed can be the difference in making a sim feel much bigger by making travel slower, or making combat high speed and intense like in so many beloved arena shooter games. Not to mention the benefits of if speed boosts or such could be applied to avatars for temporary periods of time. I'm open to more input on this from scripters and such, but I think it's pretty easy to intuit for anyone who plays games how these things can be intrinsic to combat. I'd be remiss not to mention them as we're all talking about other features like adjusting hitbox sizes (consider this also: hitbox size when avatars crouch? The tradeoff isn't just hitbox size being smaller but movement speed being slower, just saying) and being able to manipulate how much damage can be dealt per hit in a combat area.

I think you're right that LL won't want to make this something where they end up dealing with a bunch of reports every time their script or any is deemed to be unfair. Frankly I just don't have enough faith in LL to imagine them putting that much effort into something relatively small like this to them. That being said I'm still open to the idea of LL making and distributing a script that they think is okay as an example for a conveyor (without them becoming a regulator for if a conveyor is fair or not). It might just make the adoption of these kinds of vendors a bit more painless if a foundnation is put out there which merchants feel confident in using both in terms of functionality and legality.

Another thing about conveyors, while we do have Nadi's post with their handy-dandy diagram of how a conveyor works and their own conveyor mechanism I do think that it might be hard to convey to people how conveyors work just as they come across them in the wild so to speak. Is this a concern for people making conveyors or are we just trusting in the notion that people will generally intuit how they work after seeing them? ANOTHER another thing about conveyors and in relevancy to what was posted earlier about an LL approved conveyor script: at the very least it might be handy to have an LL approved conveyor script example at least. This doesn't have to be the only one people are allowed to use but one that anybody can look at and see what kind of mechanics in detail LL has approved of for their own designs. It'd also help having a free example for people who want to make and sell their own conveyor machines but don't have scripting knowhow: a free, fair example script could easily be thrown in a new conveyor machine and better the first free script everyone is slapping in their conveyor vendors is a fair one, right?

H'yup! WRT if this will be an "interesting ennough replacement for gacha" that really depends on the whims of the userbase and that's something I won't claim to predict. People in this thread, the loudest and most passionate voices amongst us, will likely say things to the effect of "This will never replace gacha, this new thing sucks! I will never play it!" or "This is basically gacha, this thing sucks! I will never play it!" aren't an accurate representation of SL's shopping demographic as a whole. If we want to see if it's interesting enough we'll just have to wait and see, if not be the ones to put up vendors based on these new ideas in stores ourselves and see what kind of feedback we get from their use.

As far as I can tell not only is this based on skill but it's also free meaning no money is being exchanged for goods. I think you're completely safe on this one 👍

Maybe you could just pay the not attached-to-hud element of the machine and that could relay to the hud element that you had paid. Maybe you could pay a non hud attached machine for conveyor-vouchers and then use those vouchers on the attatched HUD element so it never has to ask for access to your L$ directly.

While I feel like certain measures here might be untenable such as making non Linden rollers a reportable offender (but skill games have to be approved so what do I know) I feel like overall this is a good solution to people worrying about rigged scripts. When they work based on a transparent and commonly understood set of mechanics in a tamper proof no-mod script then people could trust in the odds of a conveyor using these scripts. As it happens, I feel like if LL doesn't choose to do this (I suspect they won't if only because maintaining a script forever where they also have to make it meet the demands of everyone would be more work than they are willing to do) then people running shopping events or selling conveyor vendors on the marketplace could do similar: making one commonly understood tamper proof conveyor script and having people use that. That would allow people to iterate on the script still to in case they want to try features like a rollover timer or showing what the next 3 items on the conveyor are and whatnot. Apologies if this sounds overall disapproving of the concept though because I feel like this is definitely moving in the right direction.

I'm still talking about the on-paper idea for a conveyor machine under the assumption that it's fair play in so far as this stuff can be fair play on SL because I want to see where this stuff is headed. You're talking about problems that existed while gacha was still a thing and, frankly, ones that I imagine were solutions desired to be found that they would at the height of gacha's popularity. Ultimately I think your end goal here is to make a convincing argument for there to be no such thing as a purchase with a chance mechanic for fear of unfair rigging making the whole practice a scam. I am discussing how a conveyor system made in good faith could avoid issues that aren't built on the idea that the whole system itself should be banned due to corruption. Your concerns are valid, but our discussions are fundnamentally incompatible, I'm looking for ways to make this work, you're looking for basis to make it go away.

This is more of a problem with faith in the vendor's designers to make it actually be fair and holding them accountable for that. That seems like a fair point but more of some kind of regulatory issue than a mechanical one to the ideal on paper version of a conveyor. I wouldn't go as far as to say this isn't important to the discussion, but it's not what I'm discussing wrt the fundamental mechanics of the conveyor system and making it fair in an environment where we assume the conveyor itself isn't intentionally designed to rip people off (any more so than a gacha-alike system is already kind of a ripoff, but hey, people liked that in gacha apparently, iunno). Edit: Since it's still a valid point of discussion though, I do kind of have an idea. If everyone's working off of some kind of unmodifiable script with set odds in it that's made to be fair, that'd ensure people couldn't tamper to make it intentionally cheat people. Maybe people hosting events could make their own vendor script for the occasion with these set paramaters and have sellers use those? It wouldn't stop people from having unfair conveyors in their own stores but it's one way of curbing bad faith stuff in general.

I am not here to discuss morality, I am here to discuss the future of this kind of vending in SL. If I can help steer it towards something more ethical for the consumer that's great and the idea that this system tells people what they're buying before they buy it already sounds like one small improvement from the blind gamble gacha demanded. That's about as far as I want to get into discussing how EVIL it is.

Okay while some people want to prevent people from sniping products off the conveyor by having a "lock in/out" system for buyers so people spending are the ones that get priority someone I was talking to had a different idea: What if each person who was on the vendor got their own temp-attach vendor on their HUD? This means that each vendor, and in turn its rolls, would be personalized and exclusive to that person's perspective/viewer. Nobody can snipe/touch something that's on your hud, and so people are "locked in" without anyone having to fight over a chance to use the vendor and get what they want! Sounds pretty good to me.

Heyyyyy, so it turns out the convey belt system IS okay! Funny that's what I thought would end up being okay all those posts ago, now lets get to discussing the finer points of how to make the conveyor system work: what potential issues might it have and how might we solve them?

I made a similar hypothetical earlier back in the thread, though this one raises other new interesting points about how 7seas reflects on gacha-like systems. While this can be used to critique the uneven application of these anti-gacha rules on SL, it might really just be the dna for the thing that replaces gacha. if 7seas or some breedable systems are a model for acceptable, permissable pay-for-a-chance systems then maybe that's what people should start basing new vendor ideas around.