femhalf

This might be off-topic, but what about resellers and affiliate programs? Anybody know if those are worth pursuing?

Yes, it is cheating. Cheating doesn't have to be a physical relationship only. If you're sharing an abstract emotion, such as love, which betrays your partner, then it's cheating.

It's basically a universal identity, not necessarily an avatar. This is just like Gravatar, except it was for forums and posts. It was gaining popularity years ago, but then it became a nuisance and fell off. People do not want a single identity all the time. They want alts because of privacy. Opensim already has this universal avatar idea. You keep the same avatar, identity, and sometimes the same inventory (restricted across some opensim servers). The article is basically calling for an opensource avatar, which has already been attempted but never caught on.

In my opinion, that was a huge mistake on their part. They already have a userbase with millions of people (active, inactive, and former residents). SL will likely suffer because of it. They tried entering an already saturated virtual-world VR market: High Fidelity, VR Chat, Altspace VR, Janus VR, and so on. It could've worked if they offered a robust avatar & content creation system. Instead, it's a restricted generic platform just like the rest, with the exception of High Fidelity.

Looks amazing already. I would like to know more details on how they handle communities, content creators, and server hosting though. One thing that SL does well is supporting their community, via features such as custom events, notices, chat/communication, etc. A lot of people take it for granted, but no other MMO or virtual world comes close. If Amazon can pull this off, then goodbye to SL, Sansar, and even High Fidelity.

Yeah, that would be nice, but this could be a temporary fix. I don't have faith in LL to revamp the entire avatar system though.

As i've said before, all they need is an applier system for their current mesh avatars (retrofitted), or for newly designed ones. It would solve many problems overnight. Their current mesh avatars are useless because you can't change the skin or customize the face. They were so badly designed that the newest released avatars went back to the standard system avatars (recently released with bento accessories).

Spot on. Here's what i wrote back in August of 2016... SL is like Frankenstein. It's a patchwork of a mess. They can easily solve this mess by releasing new avatars with an applier system. Appliers are everything in SL now. You need them for skins, clothing, tattoos, makeup, etc. If they wanted to go further, they could also release three sets of feet for females; flat, mid, and high poses. Those two changes would do wonders for SL and ease the process for newbies and returning players. Not only that, but it would give developers some incentive to start developing for LL avatars again, because that market is still the majority.

Just curious, but which skin & brand is that? I'm looking for something similar for an alt. Thanks in advance.

I was going to recommend it to a friend today, but i logged in and just had a terrible experience with FPS lag. It's not my PC either, because i can run every other game just fine with maximum graphics. The newbie tutorial island and avatars were also bad experiences. Me and my friends are also from IMVU, and i want them to join me, but i already know they will get frustrated due to the slow rendering and lag. It's too bad really, because i love the customization a lot better in SL, but it's not worth leaving all our avatars and connections in imvu, until Linden Lab gets it's act together (which i doubt since they've had 12+ years to do it already). I'm not an SL newbie either (going on 4 years i think), and this is just my opinion, but i wouldn't recommend SL to anyone in it's current state. Another frustrating thing is the complicated avatar mess. There's no uniformity to it. There's default avatars, new mesh default avatars, old default avatars, fitted mesh, rigged mesh, and then mesh bodies and parts. It's just confusing! And it gets even more confusing when you try to find clothes. Almost all shoes require Slink feet. Clothes are either fitted, rigged, or mesh. Hair and accessories are confusing too. Anyway, i'm done ranting, but these are some of the major problems i experienced with SL after coming back to it. I just hope some SL veterans don't think i'm hating on SL, because i'm not. Cheers.