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HarrisonMcKenzie

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Everything posted by HarrisonMcKenzie

  1. Disclaimer: I know nothing about business, investing, or advertising. In my opinion, your clients should run in the other direction. SL went through over a decade ago what these virtual worlds are going through now: a speculator market that everyone is trying to tap into but nobody knows why or how. Every single one is going to have this problem because no one is going to want to visit the virtual Sony HQ or take a degree program via a visual chat room. It already didn't work because companies already found no value in promoting in SL. What I could say is that it's a good place to cut your teeth in something. I know at least one person who became a real life DJ after doing events in SL. The cost of entry is extremely low, the infrastructure is essentially there, you have a larger and more established userbase, and the platform isn't likely to disappear in 3 months when everyone pulls funding again. But you really can't expect to make any money in SL. I've heard that Sansar might be a bit better as an online music venue, but that may have been biased info. I couldn't tell you about any of these other ones, but VR chat is probably the next most well established. I'm also unsure if any virtual entertainment could effectively translate to real world promotion. Just my 2 cents. Play it for fun, not for profit.
  2. There's a decent amount of toys and kid-sized vehicles. There's way more for little little kids (babies to grade 1 ish). After that, it kind of falls off of a cliff. There are some really dedicated creators who basically make all of the kid clothes, but it's a situation very similar to adult males. There seems to be a lot more clothes for older girls, and far more clothes for babies and toddlers. Costumes is actually a weird one because I looked for one this year (like, actual costume instead of fantasy wear) and actually had trouble. There are a few, but weirdly not many.
  3. I like this thread. It's positive and shows a lot of areas of growth creators could be moving into. I'd love to add more ethnic and historical clothing if I can make/find it. Technical issues aside, my biggest hold up is time. But yes, I would love to add more styles of clothes for kid and teen avatars beyond just different kinds of graphic tees. Historical and ethnic attire, roleplay outfits, etc. I also want I resonate a lot of what people were saying about male avatars as well as body positivity. I gave up making a male adult because every avatar looked like old timey strong men. Even the slim bodies were still absolutely shredded. I know that there is an overweight kid avatar available and I just love that idea. I don't think I would use it, but I would love to see more kids using it and more clothing for stuff like that (I am planning on making some clothes for it, but I'm just not there yet). On the side of full perm items, since this is a great way to make your own clothes when you're not good at modeling, I would like to see a lot better avatar support so that it's easier to find things. If I could find more stuff that worked for kids, even if it's not a creator's main market, I'd be able to add a lot more to my store since I wouldn't have to do it myself. And I'd like more options to buy DAE files for when a model creator doesn't rig for a given size. I know of a few creators that are adding more DAE file options and some that can make them available for an extra cost, so there are already some doing it. More is better though. I think the biggest thing I want to see, and this covers some of what I said, is more fringe stuff. Yes, there are a lot of female avatars. Yes, people like elves. All of that stuff's great and sells well, but it would be good to see other stuff too. Where are the fantasy dwarves? Where are the car avatars with wearable car accessories? Where's the weird stuff? Where's the normal stuff that's too boring to see (like overweight avatars)? Again, not always a big market, but you'd be surprised what would make someone's day. I don't know how much I'll be able to take from this thread and run with in my store, but I am kind of excited about what people have suggested and am going to follow the thread. Also, if anyone wants to work together on anything or has ideas for kids stuff, I'd love to hear it and see if I can help.
  4. I do like that idea. This is definitely a challenge, but as noted, "younger" doesn't mean kids. Any organization or business needs to attract new members/customers if it is going to survive. Real world social clubs (thinking things like the Canadian Legions) are dying out because the average age is far closer to 70 than 30. I would hazard that the average age of SL peeps is quite high as well, with a very small number of new users. Making it easier to play around casually on mobile or maybe enhancing the UX could make SL a lot more welcoming to growth, especially in light of this resurging interest virtual worlds. Please sing this from the highest mountain. I am having such a hard time rigging in Max because nothing uploads. Anything rigged completely breaks upon upload because I can't seem to get the bone characteristics to match. Not everyone uses Blender nor cares to learn. There are a lot of students who can cut their teeth here because the barriers of entry are a lot lower. Yes, any skilled Max or Maya user can transfer those skills to new software once they learn that new software, but we have to remember that creators in SL are often hobbyists, not professionals, so they might not know how to do that. And after spending X amount of time learning something like Maya, are you really going to want to have to switch and do it all over again.
  5. I just wanted to hop in and give my best wished. I've long struggled to figure out how to teach Japanese in SL due to how kind of front loaded Japanese is, as well as issues with scaffolding and repeat attendance. It looks like you have some really cool ways to make it interesting though, and following Genki (as opposed to just making it up as you go) could give it some of the structure it needs.
  6. I'm a guy and play a guy. I regularly play female characters in video games and like stories with female characters, but I've just never really wanted to make a female avatar in SL. Maybe it's all the sex people seem to want to have and how weird I would feel about that. I dunno.
  7. I keel scratching my head about this. I wasn't around in the dark ages of SL, so I missed all that weird speculator hype and stuff like actual university sims. But I've read about it, and that seems to be what all this virtual worlds/Meta thing is about. No one seems to remember that this didn't work in SL because that kind of corporate content has no value here. Everyone thinks Meta and all of these other things are going to be the next big thing, but openly ignore all the next big things that already did this and didn't become the next big thing. It's just hype and speculation without an ounce of substance.
  8. There are gacha sales. But I hate going to them because I don't know what I'm looking at. That being said, a proper garage sale or swap meet in a roleplay sim, where people have tables in their yard or driveway, or there are tables in a community centre, where you actually interact with one another and negotiate over prices... that would be really cool. But then I'm a huge nerd.
  9. I like to do this, but I'm a roleplayer. I try to log out in my house, and I've gone so far as to change into pajamas and even sit on the bed (we have these things, but never use them). It helps with immersion. It feels weird not logging out somewhere "safe," even though I realize that it's a non-issue.
  10. 3 things I've been thinking about that will never happen. 1. A "relinquish" permission. Yes, yes. We have transfer. But that doesn't always work. I've accidentally purchased duplicate items and would love to be able to give them to someone. Or I bought something of one avatar and would like to hand it over to an alt. The idea here is that this permission burns every copy of an item you might have in your inventory (for any reason) and turns it over to another avatar. This is different from Transfer, which is too often just about handing something around. I think that SL could have both; Transfer for the normal stuff, and Relinquish for those rare occasions where you need to be able to give an item and have every copy go with it. 2. Different click actions for linksets. Specifically, what I'd like is to be able to build furniture from multiple objects (or mod furniture that already is) and have different parts able to be interacted with in different ways. You can kind of already do this, but it's ugly. Say I have a loft bed (a bunk bed, but the bottom part is a desk or something instead of a bed. I'd like to be able to sit on the bed, click to open and close the drawers, maybe have a computer or something that is scripted and can be easily interacted with, and a bedframe that doesn't do anything (because it's a bedframe). Again, you can do this kind of already, but it's messy, and the "Click to" drop down sets that actions for the entire object. It's be nice if you could set it per object in a linkset. 3. The ability to make child objects in a linkset phantom. Similar to the last one, when you set something like this, it's an all or nothing setting for the entire linkset. How I would like to be able to make a hot tub or something where you can't stand on the water. Maybe this is something you can do already, but I haven't been able to figure it out.
  11. I mentioned in another thread is that my grievance is that most of those 250 events are for women's clothing. There are other avatars in SL. Even when we gets events that might appeal, it's still usually flooded with women's clothing. It's to the point where I don't even look at events much anymore because there's never anything for me.
  12. I don't think L$50 items are destroying SL. There may certainly be too many events going on, but my grievance with them is that they are always for women's clothes. It is so hard to find anything else for any other kind of avatar. But if I do find something and it's on sale, there's a good chance I'm buying it on principle, and that's money in the creator's pocket. It's not much, but impulse purchases are a quick money maker, and L$50 is very easy to part with on a lark.
  13. Wildly discounted land. The mainland is a barren wasteland. If people could get anything but the smallest parcels of land, we could clean up the mainland of all its trash and come up with some nice builds. One free name change or a wildly discounted price, especially for Resident accounts. I don't think we need yearly name changes. That's what display names are for. Nor do we need a way to bypass security and scripting. But for those of us who joined post- and pre-names, having that option once would be nice and not have to pay $40 to do it. Removed group limit. I really don't see a need for this limit, especially when you're paying monthly. If you sell anything in SL, you're in a dozen or more groups just for that. If you have or even use any land, you're in groups for that. If you ever spend money in world, you're in store groups. If you roleplay, you could be in a dozen groups there alone. I get having a group limit on freebie accounts, but if you're paying money, this can be a hassle.
  14. What trouble? The fabricated panic scare that exists only in your mind? After 5 pages of this thread and many, many more along the same lines, you're still going to pretend that child avatars are against the ToS? Read it. You're not going to get in trouble because a child avatar TPed to your club unless your patrons start hitting on them.
  15. Oh, I'm an English native and get a headache trying to figure it out.
  16. I'm in with LL viewer. Granted, I only just logged in, but the status page says it's supposed to be unaffected.
  17. The irony here is that this is even more predatory. You will never, ever walk up to a vendor displaying a rare or desired item. That means paying in to it hoping that item drops, but knowing that the next purchase won't be it. Granted, I like gachas because I don't usually care what colour I get, so whatever.
  18. I'm super happy to try and answer your questions. For question 1, I do use a child avatar all the time, unless I'm going shopping in an Adult rated sim (think hair shopping or something, where I just don't want to deal with being hassled) or have a reason to be an adult. I'm a roleplayer, and the reason I play a child avatar is because I like the immersion of it. When I started SL, I didn't know how to do anything. It made sense to be a kid because kids learn new things. Now that I'm not new, being a kid gives me an excuse to go to amusement parks and otherwise just have fun. Whenever I've trying playing an adult, everyone just talks about RL and sex, and that just doesn't do anything for me. As for things I dislike, there are a few. It can be really, really hard to buy things as a kid. I went to a store that was having a sale the other day and immediately went to the shoes section because I knew nothing else would fit. Even among the shoes, only 3 pairs fit since everything else was rigged for adult shapes. The same is true for furniture and buildings. Things can be so big that it's comical (why can't a 5th grader reach the doorknob?), yet sometimes they cannot be scaled down. As a kid, another thing that annoys me about shopping is how little there is older boy or teen fashion. A huge number of avatars in SL seem to be women, so most things are geared towards women. The same is true for kids, only with the added challenge of so many things being targeted towards babies and toddlers. It can actually be outright difficult to shop for clothes because avatar sizes among kids clothes aren't always clearly marked, or because it's just really hard to find boy clothes among all the girl and baby stuff. There's also the issue of kids being barred from so many roleplay sims, even when kids being there would make sense. We end up getting largely forced into family roleplay only, and that drives a lot of kids nuts for varying reasons. Question 2... I'm kind of always in character. I should note though that this doesn't mean baby talk or trolling. With regards to roleplaying, I make a third distinction about being in character. When I am in SL, I'm "in character" in that I don't go around talking about sex or drugs, because that creates a cognitive dissonance. But I'm not roleplaying in part of a story at all time. This means that a lot of the time, I'm just me, except shorter and with more tailored speech (again, no sex talk). I met some people early on that played kids to avoid people hitting on them, but they still talked like adults. That weirded me out. I'm not an emulationist (where everything needs to be 100% realistic), but I do think you should play to your avatar to a certain extent. For question 3, it's about roleplay. I go to school, attend and help run a scout troop, do family stuff, hang out with friends, play card games, and that sort of thing. I don't like clubbing, even though that's a big thing in the kid community, and I'd love to do more genre roleplay (like playing a fantasy character, or playing on a historic sim). This is ultimately what I like about playing a kid; I can enjoy myself. I just never really enjoyed myself when playing an adult. I don't have to play an adult and do adult things (whether than means talking about investing or sex content). Being a kid makes it that much easier to find things to do and have fun with. Question 4 is an interesting one. A lot of kids have this problem (myself included). I tend to play a little mentally older than my age, and I know people who play younger. I know babies who act like noisy adults, but I know adults who act like kids too. On the roleplay side of things, it seems to be more about intention than accuracy. As long as your playing "a kid," no one seems to really get hung up on ages. However, I do want to bring up dissociative identity disorder. I've met a lot of DID kids and this is where things can get muddy. For a lot of them, logging into SL as a kid allows them to have a body that matches their identity. So while I'm roleplaying being a kid, they actually are one (even though their body is an adult and are legally adults). Interestingly though, I sometimes see this same age sliding even with DID kids, where someone might act older or younger than their identified age. But I've never seen any friction because of it. For question 5, that's why I picked my age. At around 5th grade, kids start getting more freedom, so it made sense that I can run around and do my own thing when not at home. It makes sense for me to go skateboarding or whatever on my own, more so than if I was 8 or 5. But most kids don't really care about this. Babies run feral in the streets, kids are always home alone, and a lot of kids don't have or even want a family. I've seen this come up in roleplay sim rules, where they ask kids of a certain age to roleplay with an adult for the purposes of immersion, but in normal practice, everyone seems to recognize that we're all IRL adults and don't need adult supervision. Does that answer those questions?
  19. I'm getting annoyed that every time I seem to be in a public place, like the Blake Sea, some troll starts harrassing people about being pedophiles and about grooming people, simply because we use child avatars. Twice in the last few months, I've teleported to a public place, fully clothed and doing nothing, only to immediately be called an ap'er and a pedophile. Please stop doing this. Seriously. Just stop. The Terms of Service for SL bar adult content executed by or towards child avatar. It DOES NOT bar the use of child avatars. There is a lot of content and certain groups in SL that I don't like or approve of. I simply avoid them. I don't go crusading or attacking others for how the play this game. If you don't like child avatars, then go on not liking them. All I ask is that you keep your mouth shut and not openly harass and falsely AR people because of something you don't like. Why is this a problem? Besides the fact that this is harassment and can get people banned, an accusation that someone is a pedophile, regardless of any proof to that claim, can cause someone to lose their job and destroy their entire life. In the Western world, you are innocent until proven guilty, but someone even saying that word can end your life forever. It is the absolute worst form of slander/libel that you can commit, and it comes purely from hate. If you see someone playing a furry but you don't like furries, don't say anything to them. If you see someone doing Gor but don't like Gor, don't say anything to them. If you see someone playing a child avatar but you don't like child avatars, don't say anything to them. It's as simple as that. You not liking something doesn't make you the moral authority, and you trying to destroy someone's life just because you don't like something is utterly deplorable. Any questions? I'm happy to have a civil discussion and answer any legitimate questions people have about child avatars, because I recognize that some people genuinely don't know. That's fine. What I'm talking about are the trolls and bigots who won't listen, regardless of the presence of any facts. So if you have questions, please ask them. If you're a troll though, just don't say anything.
  20. I really wish people would take the blinders off and recognize that their country is just one of over 190. Lootboxes have been under scrutiny in Europe and many other countries for years. That SL can operate in almost any country means that LL has to abide by their laws. That lootboxes aren't illegal in the US is irrelevant when they are illegal in countries where SL operates.
  21. An interesting idea. I'm concerned though that it will just be abused. The problem isn't the rando item persay; it's the fabricated rarity. If all items were equally rare, then this idea could work well. But it creators are still fabricating rarity of items, you're still going to have people compulsively feeding money into the vendor to try and get the item they want, much like how slot machines work (they're going to pay out eventually, but you can never know when).
  22. I believe I already explained why in the post you quoted. I tire so much of people online choosing not to read. Then maybe you should have appeared before the regulatory bodies who ruled on this when they were ruling on it years ago, and not after the fact. Also, the sky prim is not falling. Tell that to the regulatory bodies that deemed them to be gambling. This has been going on for years, and LL making this announcement comes as exactly no surprise. Maybe you should read. It's a regulatory decision, because loot boxes are being banned around the world for being predatory gambling schemes.
  23. Question: If someone sold items as gachas with equal probability (no "rares"), but then clearly offered a free exchange option for anyone who bought one but didn't get the one they wanted, would that be permissible? This would allow that randomness factor for those who don't care which colour or specific item they get, while still allowing those who are after a specific one to get is at no additional cost and without gambling for it. I doubt many would do this, but I'm curious if this would be a solution.
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