Coffee Pancake

STALKER 2 does a 180 and is removing NFTs following backlash https://kotaku.com/s-t-a-l-k-e-r-2-developers-remove-nfts-after-fan-uproa-1848230588

wasted .. past tense .. 😂😂🤣😭

They just don't have the staff, so the mile long wish list gets prioritized and rationalized in business terms. As our wolfsome overlord put it at SL18B .. if something can show growth he's happy to find all the money it needs! .. Which is a giant catch 22 and simply impossible. Big projects are avoided, small projects that overrun get canned or allowed to slowly stagger forward for years on end. They don't have the staff because upper management culture has been, and still is, determined to be in any other business than running this virtual world. It's been no end of life raft projects to try and convert the income from SL into something, anything, else. After almost 2 decades of this, I'm amazed SL's "residents" (language that diminishes and belittles that we're actually their ONLY paying customers), aren't in the street with pitchforks. Look at the hiring.

It had no users. No one logged in and did anything. Performance and the need for a strong PC (as it was based on Cryengine) was often cited as a reason, and the company secured many rounds of investment on the promise cloud rendering would save it, however it was fundamentally a dead static experience, there was nothing to do because there was nothing you could do. The only dynamic content was your avatar and how you dressed it up. In short it failed for the same reason Sansar did.

Please let this be hidden in the XYZ coordinates of random plants and bushes.

Lets see. Right now we have a currency with a stable value and negligible processing overheads and no transaction fees (outside of SLM sales and conversion fees). A crypto would require significant processing overhead needing it's own server farm to grind out the blockchain, this is expensive to operate so all transactions would need a fee to offset the costs or procuring and operating a farm. Opening up the farm so anyone can mine L$ makes the fees more important and prevents LL from mitigating them with offsets from other parts of the SL economy. How many users would want to have (at least) 2 PCs for SL? One for play and one to mine? How many L$ would you like to spend every time you move L$ between avatars? L$100 .. L$1000 .. L$10000 ? What impact would that have on the wider SL economy when all merchants have to add the processing fees into their product pricing? What happens to SL should large quantities of L$ be held and traded outside of SL as though it was any other altcoin? What happens to SL should an external exchange "get hacked" and someone runs off with all the money? How is the US$ value of the coin regulated? If it's up to the market, how will people, sellers, landlords, vendors keep stable US$ prices? Do you think people will spend more or less L$ knowing it's value can fluctuate? How will fluctuations from an external market unconnected to SL in anyway impact those habits? Crypto tends to encourage HODL rather than spending, is depressed consumer spending a sign of a healthy economy? This radically alters the SL economy that much of SL depends on to pay for everything we do in SL (and RL for some). Even if no one quit over it (and lots will), it still kills SL as we know it.

As an individual, IP rights matter .. do you own stuff you create in Meta. VR is not "the new thing" it's serial hype bubble offender that's been used to pump expectations over and over. It's one of the oldest "future tech" toys in existence. https://virtualspeech.com/blog/history-of-vr Of all the people I know with VR gear, (friends, family, developers), NONE are using it regularly in any serious way. Most headsets are gathering dust and get trolleyed out for novelty value or the odd round of beat saber. The answer I get when I ask why is always the same .. it's sometimes fun, sweaty, and tends to result in nausea. Don't under estimate the nausea, feeling sick is the tip of a huge psychological iceberg that acts as a major brake on usage, people don't use VR unless they are in the mood for VR, and due to the psychological effects, that mood rarely arises in most owners of VR gear. The second hand market is flooded with "barely used" gear at give away prices. My son paid 10% of retail for his full set up that the previous owner had used twice. He loves it .. and has used it only a handful of times because it makes him feel ill. The statistics are pure projection. Check out this graph .. the light blue numbers are actual data, the rest is projection. But it's worse !! EVERYONES GOING TO THE MOON !! Wow, next year looks awesome for VR, wait .. is it always next year? Source https://www.statista.com/topics/2532/virtual-reality-vr/#dossierKeyfigures Hey, did you know you can use google to search within a date range and find all those articles from 2019 that said we would already be on the moon. You know what you wont find statistics for? Actual usage data. Why .. because those numbers are terrible and don't support the hype. If they were great, they would be plastered everywhere. But you will find lots of articles, recycled billion dollar industry claims, and statistics proclaiming were on the cusp of the next big thing, that problems will be solved with lower latency, higher framerates and the next generation of gear .. over and over and over again.

To prevent this happening again, pay attention to the bounding box size, not the visible object you can see. Bounding boxes have been abused in the past to make the viewer think an object was more important in a scene that it's actual size might imply (so as to keep it rendered).

If this is mainland, and your objects bounding boxes encroach onto another parcel .. they can be returned by the owner of that parcel. If this is a private estate, the estate can return your stuff because they feel like it. Maybe you have granted modify rights to another user, or the land is group owned and someone with relevant land powers swung by, or you forgot to set the group and autoreturn got it, or maybe someone reported your stuff and the game gods yeeted it back to your inventory. Just because you don't understand how something applies, does not stop it from applying, as you have found out by getting stuff returned. Or it's nefarious ebil haxors/aliens with magic powers targeting you, again, specifically, for reasons.

Donating yourself to a billion dollar corporation to recapture a little lost nostalgia is about the most depressing endorsement of anything I've ever heard. It's really not. To continue your analogy, imagine upon reaching the new colony, with no way home .. you discover the brave new world is a perfect paradise in every way but one, making it irrevocably incompatible with life transplanted from earth. Supplies dwindling the colony turns inwards and consumes itself, literally. Will you eat your new friends before they eat you? Meta is no more the future of virtual worlds than Elon is king of Mars.

Might want to look at who owns what you create ....

Fraud. The blockchain is great for preserving the amount items sold for and it's trivial to generate those sales. Real money is involved, but that real money could easily be going between wallets owned by the same person. It's all anon remember. If I have to guess, a few people clubbed together, pooled their resources, maybe got a few loans out, shuffled the money around in a circle some and then recovered their investment. Then find an idiot willing to buy the yacht using the blockchain as evidence of appreciating value. Expect to see NFT adjacent businesses crop up offering to do the leg work and appraise NFTs value

If you can't identify the business model, how do you expect to reproduce it ? I can assure you it's more complicated than YACHT + NFT = RICH

You're not wrong. The solution to this is to sell your regions, cover the tax bill, and then enjoy SL by hanging out at someone else's place without any of the stress of trying to make this into a land based financial thing, (which as you're discovering) isn't viable with individual region pricing as it stands and the methods required to pay for those regions. There are many things @Linden Lab could do about this, from dropping region pricing to allowing payments in L$ which they can sell back to residents on the exchange themselves. But we all know they wont do either of those things.

Blockchain has uses, but not as a proof of ______ based currency. Viable uses can't happen while the investor bubble is being pumped. My vested interest. I live here too. It's a pure hype bubble economy offering a "get rich quick" way out of late stage capitalism with a techy "hack the system" veneer. Crypto and NFTs are an environmental disaster both in terms of energy and physical resource requirements. The tip of this iceberg is the supply shortages we see with chip manufacture, huge swathes of our silicon manufacturing capacity (GPUs, ASICs, etc) are being diverted into this dead end and can only increase over time (by design). There can't be any valid use cases while everyone is playing money rocket ships to the moon. Because money. NFTs an a sheen of legitimacy to the practice of selling half a game and milking the players for the rest by selling it as "optional" DLC. These companies exist for the singular purpose of extracting and focusing wealth, everything else they do (make shoes, games, food) is incidental and simple a means to that end. They can't ignore a bubble that intersects with their operating space. The NFT Crypto bubble will be burst by factors beyond the control of those who use / invest in them. Crypto does not scale to the needs of a currency. The math is really quite simple. How many transactions would crypto need to replace currency? How much bigger does the infrastructure required by crypto need to be to facilitate that? Do we have the planet wide manufacturing and energy generation to make that happen? NO. We could devote every silicon plant and every power station to crypto as a currency, and not only is it not even close, the escalating requirements mean we can never reach that goal. https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/heres-how-much-electricity-it-takes-to-mine-bitcoin-and-why-people-are-worried/#:~:text=To put that into money,than %24200 in energy bills. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2021/03/09/bill-gates-bitcoin-crypto-climate-change/?sh=343c05056822 https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/bitcoins-energy-usage-explained/ https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56215787 https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-uses-as-much-energy-as-sweden-and-is-on-course-to-use-even-more-2021-3 I could post links about this ALL DAY LONG, and those just focus on the energy needs of ONE system as deployed. Factor in the manufacturing requirements and it's laughably untenable. Even if we turned over ALL the activity and energy of every person on the planet. This is not going to work. This can not work. We can't make this work even if we wanted to. SL's problems are systemic, addressing those platform problems is the solution. Crypto and NFTs do nothing to address any of those problems. Much in the same way VR didn't actually solve any of the problems it was widely cites as being a solution for.

STALKER 2 (game) just jumped face first into hyping in game NFTs .. and the reaction is a bloodbath, their social media are trying to backpeddle with promises that none of the crypto content will affect game play and is entirely optional (yet it does, and it isn't .. it never is .. ) The point of note here is that the industry press jumped on the NFT hype bandwaggon with the publisher and the backlash from gamers has been a surprise. If SL does NFT anything, it will be because an out of touch higher up got over excited by the prospect of magic money. My concern is this isn't being recognized as a visceral "do not want" from consumers, but rather as a marketing problem to be "solved".

The $40 + Premium fee for a name change is obscene.

Which implodes hilariously on opensim as copying content is a culturally endemic. Rez your carefully constructed one of a time phone home self verifying NFT precious. Watch someone next to you copybot it, rip the script out, rez 300 copies while laughing at you. Further hilarity ensues when the NFT owner tries to get region hosts to remove illicit copies of the precious as NFT's do not not transfer any IP rights. No IP rights, no DMCA takedowns unless the creator of the precious gets involved, good luck!! In related NFT hilarity .. UBISOFT aren't getting much love for adding them to games .. such a shame, who could have predicted this ..

Tell me you're not a 3d artist without saying you're not a 3d artist. Creating and Importing a model made in blender (or whatever) is only half the battle. A model set up for Second Life will be useless junk in unreal engine (or anything else) without additional work, and vice versa. All models, regardless of their target platform/engine (creating for a target is a requirement) , need additional work in engine. The 3D model itself does nothing without this and will not "just work". There is a reason NFTs tend to reference JPEG images, those do "just work" everywhere by being a standard ubiquitous format for encoding and displaying a 2D image. There is no comparable "magic" format for deployable 3D assets. Your assertions depend on simplistic assumptions about how all of this works.

OBS is quite excellent

That's part of the NFT hype that's sadly not possible, it's just not how any of this works. To add a dress (or anything else) into SL or a game, that asset has to be explicitly created for the target environment. Content made for one system will not "just work" on another. It's like trying to apply a chocolate cake recipe to a lego set. The NFT part is literally just a receipt recorded in a database. It does not contain the actual data, no images, no 3d models, no rigging or texturing information. Whatever information the NFT receipt points to on external services is fixed when the NFT is minted. So if you buy an NFT of a gown by a famous designer .. you get a digital receipt that includes a link to a JPEG of the gown. Nothing more. It can be used anywhere JPEGs can be used. It can also be used by literally everyone and anyone. The JPEG (or whatever format the NFT thig is) has no link back to the blockchain. Unless explicitly in the sale, an NFT does not include or transfer any IP rights away from the seller. All the NFT receipt does is give the owner of the receipt the ability to demonstrate they paid for the receipt .. and likely unmask themselves in the process.

The best you can do is poke the creators account every now and then in IM and with a notecard, don't get impatient or angry, they really might just not log in very often, and everyone messes up from time to time. I'm confident that the seller will fix this. There isn't really a clear resolution in contacting LL, they can't access the creators account, won't refund you, can't fetch you the correct hair, fix the vendor, or coax the user to come on line. The best they can do is give the same advice you have received here and say "we're sorry that happened". Plan B might be the better option .. the hair you got and didn't want, find a use for it, build a whole new avatar around it if that's what it takes. Happy accidents.

What if I sold the same NFT JPEG of two linked prim cubes (one being slightly shiny, and therefore special) to two different people making it clear they owned one of the cubes but not saying which one

I don't think it's going to matter. When regulation comes, it comes because of BTC and ETH, and will tank all the technically better evolutions of the technology overnight. The only reason were seeing slow pondering steps towards regulation is the investor class are up to their necks in it and can literally purchase time to divest. If you're not a member of the investor class, trying to ride their coat-tails and hop off the train before it crashes is probably worse than spending every penny you make in a casino, they will have a heads about any game changing policies, you will not.

The point is that people can't use it as a currency. Crypto has shockingly high transaction overheads, either in terms of processing time or fees. Speculation and wild value fluctuations further disincentivize actual spending. While there are crypto schemes to address this problem, the reality is BTC (and to a lesser extend ETH) are the only games in town, and they determine the fate of the entire industry.