Polymath Snuggler

Correct me if I'm wrong here ~ but ... uh... don't vertex normals HAVE to be recalculated under deformation? Constantly? That's a substantial part of what a GPU does. ~ That's it's 'thing' ~ otherwise nothing would animate ~ period. No? I think? If I had to take a wild-flying guess as to what's happening here ~ is somehow slider deformation isn't getting fed to the lighting calc ~ Somehow? I'm no rendering expert either ~ but this is definitely worth investigating further.

Actually ~ Firestorm outperforms LL viewer ~ by quite a measurable difference. Over the years the FS team has been adding in little optimizations and features that speed things up ~ ( some of which have been re-contributed back to the LL default viewer making the Linden Viewer part 'Firestorm' actually! ), and alleviate pain points such as simplified shadows. The biggest single setting that will make you think that Firestorm is less performant is Firestorm ships with an LOD Default of 2.0 ~ which is substantially higher than the Linden Lab Official default of 1.25 ~ https://gyazo.com/effe406fbf750baa63c6aa451bf85c03 Changing the value of this setting governs when objects disintegrate into unrecognizable triangles just a couple meters away from them. This is a common problem on SL due to content creators cheating the Land Impact equation at the cost of a poorer visual experience for their customers. Anyhow ~ the overall point is ~ the lower you push this setting the better your viewer performs~ giving people a false notion that one viewer is inherently different from the other~ in ways that it is not. Edit : But yeah.. stumbled upon this post 'cause @#)% Subscriber things won't let me unsub and I want to scream.

I know very little about the finer details of international monetary transfers. But at face value~ a more geographically equal way of cashing out sounds amazing. But ~ It's not my area of expertise ~ I'm just a girl with a keyboard and a google search engine. I know some of the underpinning problems ~ like having to deal with compliance for money laundering and ~ anti-fraud measures, but an expert, I am not. JIRA is a great place for suggestions though ~ making them on the forums, in dead threads is definitely not a good way to get them noticed. Always always file a JIRA!

Yep yep ! ~ I know there's better options than online currency converters ~ but I was simply pointing out that Paypal's international conversion fee plan is hardly a "BIG MESS" that warrants LL providing a better alternative to ~ like currency conversion websites actually are ~ https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/paypal-fees It's about what you'd expect from any other financial service ~ for that amount of money. It's also neatly laid out and explained ~ hardly a money-swallowing black box. Edit: In fact it actually provides a bit better context to the entire conversation that we've been having on this thread about processing and transaction fees. It's 2.9% + a flat fee to transfer from one currency into another, as per Paypal policy. Making smaller transactions have an effectively much higher fee than larger ones. It makes the 5% LL has opted to go with seem a tad steep initially ~ but it might actually be lower for monthly "pay checks" for the average creator. Of course international people still get doubly hit with the Paypal fees on top of that, which really sucks~ but that's back to geopolitical debate, none of which we can rationally expect LL to compensate for.

480$ USD converts to 424 Euro . That's called an exchange rate. The euro is more valuable than the dollar. ( at the time of writing this it's presently 1.13 USD to 1 Euro ) Much the same way that 480$ USD converts to 8234 Mexican Pesos, as the Peso is less valuable than the dollar. The fact that you're only getting 413 instead of 424 makes it sound like you have a HUGE GAP-BIG MESS of a 3.5% processing fee. Which I very much doubt that LL would be able to negotiate a better deal on that an international finance exchange like Paypal. Edit: I'm going to just point out~ that if I go to a currency exchange website because I'm traveling and need to have Euros instead of dollars, If I hand them 480 USD ~ they'll give me a whopping 388.80 Euros. What's even better is they justify that by using the most expensive exchange rate that it's been in the last few months ~ claiming it's 7% different than it actually is...

Raise your prices 2.5% then? Your 1600 price point objects won't suddenly stop selling if you raise them to 1640. People aren't going to see the 40L$ and go "oh dear no, I can't afford that"~ the 1600 ~ that I could pay.. the 40L$ ~ can't do that ! Passing the cost on to the consumer isn't ideal. But if you really "can't stay in business" any other way. Then that's the clear answer.

The biggest problem with this current situation is that for most people with fixed income, there's no way for them to take advantage of the discounted rate at the moment because 72$ USD on a 1 month notice is simply an impossibility, so they're going to lose out on that 37$ discount come their next billing cycle. ( That's what they're upset about ) The only reason I was able to so easily pay it is I've been floating an annual premium fee on my account out of sheer paranoia, which wound up being a good forward planning thing. So ~ yes the 'planning' argument holds up... sort of ~ but not really. It's a fact of modern life that people who live very near or below the poverty line actually have a higher cost of living than people who are not. Bank fees due to low balance amounts / overdrafts, loans, loan interest, and surcharges for the smallest of things that others ordinarily expect to get for free are facts of life. I can go on for hours about socioeconomic inequality.... But getting upset at LL for being a part of this ecosystem is a tad irrational I think. Legally SL isn't an essential service, though, as I argued earlier in this thread, to many of the residents I'm sure it very much is one. The thing I have a more difficult time arguing that Premium in SL is so essential to need an extra accommodation, especially with the reversion of the basic group limitations.

If you already had a paid premium plan ~ and you buy more again now, it winds up looking like this : As you can see it moved my billing date forward one year from when it was expected to be due.

I've been rolling my stipend refund + SL income back into my premium for 4 years. When I do get extra money, I've made sure to keep an extra annual billing cycle worth of premium on my account, as I've been deathly afraid of getting locked out since I wouldn't be able to just "pay off my debt" without using L$ to do so. So it's been literally the 12$ / yr annual fee that I've been citing on this thread, and it will remain so until 2021, I never have been on a non-annual premium plan. I may not be the best example due to the fact that my net SL income is positive, but that's how I've always managed this.

If you have a fixed income, wouldn't the lowest price overall price be the most appealing? I live on a pretty near fixed income at the moment and I have always opted for annual. Quarterly brings the annual cost to 131.95 $ USD as opposed to 99 # USD ~ Which when taking in to account stipend, is 70.95$ USD compared to 39$ USD

Just pretend that they've been slowly raising their fees every 2 years like every other service out there and that you've got a lovely discount for the last 8 years and it finally ran out.

...."Find people who are willing to operate at a loss to subsidize your existence" is not really a sound economic strategy ~ but okay. I'll go amend my minor hyperbole. Edit: Fixed ~ that still doesn't detract from the point I was making though. Of course if your landowner operates at a loss you'll get cheaper land. But under standard circumstances ~ even if your rental region is non-profit ~ my overall math is not wrong.

That's... not ... relevant. Business or not, if 1/3 of your parcels remain un-rented, you have to charge that additional amount to your active renters or you operate at a loss. Whether or not your goal is to turn a profit or not is completely irrelevant to the fact that not doing this causes you to basically just be donating money to LL for the right to own empty land.

I've literally been explaining why everything about your sentiment on this topic is completely off-base ~ but ehhh~ @Da5id Weatherwax That is a serious concern of mine really ~ especially since services in SL sell for mere pennies on the dollar of what their actual value is. I had a close friend of mine point out to me awhile ago that my "scribbling little scripts for people" in LSL~ if framed in "real world" terms, it's a custom code project in a proprietary language, with an obscure API that plugs into a system with tons of workarounds and caveats that need to be known. If someone put up a job posting for an LSL scripting project ~ they'd be paying premium hourly wage, yet here I am charging people 2000L$ for an hour of work and thinking it's high.

.... The fact that owning your own parcel is more economical than renting is what's forced land barons to give up land baroning ~ one of my parcels I own with premium was sold to me by the person I rented it from for a year and a half ~ She sold it to me, because she was abandoning all her commercial land, and giving up on being a land baron, because it wasn't worth the effort anymore. At any given point in time your average land baron has somewhere between a quarter to a half of their total land estate not actively rented. This means that in order to remain solvent they have to charge 30% or more than the cost of the land itself to not just hemorrhage money. So you'll never hardly ever find a island rental at cost, which is what I was trying to explain before. I understand that what you're saying is what you feel is happening ~ but it's not even remotely based in numerical fact~ in fact the numbers actually skew the other way ~ in favor of premium memberships ~ which I believe is the entire goal that LL has in all this. I get upset about these things too ~ but I long ago learned that my emotions should not be tied to rational economic decisions. My feelings in fact suck at economics ~ Fortunately! I have a calculator~ Edit: Oh yeah ~ one other thing The 2.5 % > 5% Transfer Fee further hurts land barons as well actually, almost more than content creators, since they're dealing with fixed costs that are substantially higher than software licenses already.

If you could get my government to do that too while you're at it ~ that'd be amazing. For y'know ~ things that actually matter.😊 But ~ in all seriousness ~ LL used to make a whole lot more statistics publicly available ~ they stopped , I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it was mostly because people would take them out of context and/or blow them out of proportion ~misinterpret them ~ rant about them, much like people are doing with these fee increases. Giving people numbers isn't always a good thing, as they are frequently laundered and misused to apparently mean something that they do not.

I just posted the math as to why this statement is completely incorrect ~

Actually when you factor in the 3.5% transaction fee from selling L$ it's more like 39$ / year , which comes out to be roughly 208 L$ per week for a 1024 parcel on the mainland, which still has parity with private island rental rates, in fact it beats them easily when you look at actual offered rental prices. 179$ USD for a grandfathered region gives you 65536 square meters, which gives you 64 1024 parcels if you rent them out, meaning that if you rent a 1024 parcel at COST ( no markup whatsoever ) on a private island you're still paying 174$ L / wk without any markup. That's on a region without the prim allotment increased for 30$ a month extra. That change raises it to 204 L$ per month ( again AT COST ) But good luck finding someone who isn't taking a percentage to cover fallow land in their region... In fact most people who are renting out parcels, are renting the region that they're renting out from a land holding co, which means that you're paying a price twice-marked up.

@Madison531 I don't get it, you remember that they doubled your total land you can own *for free* and you're upset that estates are getting a cut? I mean ~ I get it, loss aversion. But if you wanted a 1024 parcel a year ago, you had to pay TIER ~ which is like 5$ USD / month.... . MONTH, not year. Premium includes all sorts of other perks too ~ over and above "free" parcels, albeit most of them are useless, but still. Value is value.

"We've not raised prices in 8 years" is the crux of your problem. In the last 8 years the price of literally everything else in the world has gone up. Since about the year 2000, the purchasing power of money has dropped over 50% according to a quick google search. That also means the cost of electricity, which keeps servers running has gone up. The cost of compliance work with all of the new copyright laws has gone way up. The cost of running SL has simply gone up. (Migrating things to the cloud doesn't actually reduce costs, as you've been told, they stay about the same, and might actually increase, but it also provides flexibility and robustness to the system, which is why they're doing it) It was ( and still is ) clear from the amount of abandoned land on SL that land pricing was simply not working at the price points that were set. So they had to reduce them, shift that economy over to a different model or I'm absolutely dead certain that there would be no more SL in 5 years time. At least not one that is owned by the Lab. My biggest fear isn't some price increase, my biggest fear is SL becoming insolvent as a business venture, and then having the Lab totally bought out, wholly by a different company that has no idea what the product actually does, which then decides to 'fix' SL to become a profitable enterprise with no concern for the actual user base, followed very swiftly by the shuttering of the entire operation, because we all know that would never actually work. So yes, you might need to raise prices on your products, maybe not across the board, but on some new releases, etc. or on your SL Marketplace listings etc. Sadly the world changes, and everyone, the lab, us, and your customers will have to adapt. 😩

"Offline install" is called ripping content from SL. That's a bannable offense. On the other hand ~ maybe you got banned for posting off-topic nonsensical stuff in unrelated threads...

No ~ no they do not "nuke" your account. Your land holdings go bye bye, because they're unpaid for, and your account does go into lockdown until a payment is made, which can be problematic, if you only use L$ sale to pay your fees, you can't access the marketplace to sell your L$ to get your USD to pay for your fee to unlock your account. But they don't delete anything. I've had friends who were premium~ quit, ~ came back 2 full years later and were locked out. It took a few days of pestering support until they got everything reset back to where it needed to be. It was a pain in the butt ~ but nothing was nuked. No nuking occurred. That's for an account that was 2 + years arrears. Mind you they still ought to just make it so you can set what you want cut when you auto-revert to basic. But I'm tired of people spreading rumors of death and demise due to premium account non-payment.

Judging by his google-translate language barrier, I'd say he's got some first hand experience with communist governments. The internet troll stench is easily identifiable, even through a language barrier.

https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa File a feature request.

You realize, that L$ earned from the stipend can be cashed out, and then used to re-purchase premium right? And that Premium didn't really cost 72$ USD / year all this time, because they've always been paying you 62$ USD back in L$ ( minus 3.5% transaction fee ) > 60$ USD of that back , for an actual real 12$ USD annual membership fee cost. And that the actual cost of the new Premium, when the stipend refund is factored back in is still only 39$ USD per year. That's $3.25 USD per month.... EDIT: As an addendum, I'll point out that they *FOR FREE* doubled the land allotment for the premium accounts a year ago. So that means you now get 1024 sq.m of land for your 3.25 USD / month. That's an actual rent cost of 203 L$ / wk for 1024 sq.m of mainland parcel.