skepwith

I hate to be the annoying person who replies "Well ACKshually" to a really good and informative post but I do want to mention there are a few free mesh bodies and heads that a newbie might consider, depending on what they're looking for, that are described pretty well here. LucyBody Atenea is definitely a good option but isn't really free unless you want to be stuck with the included skins which honestly don't look very good even if you're able to match them fairly closely to something. Otherwise you need to pay L$250 for the BoM activator, which is still a really good deal. This is definitely the best option for someone who is fashion driven but on a budget. I don't think it's a good option for people who are naked or in swimsuits a lot, because it's got some weird lumps in the waist/midriff. I tend to steer newbies who aren't fashion driven toward the eBody Classic or Curvy, usually the latter unless they really want to be petite. Both have a free BoM relay and look decent with the freebie skins available at the Free Dove and have enough free clothes available to get by if you know where to look (I have notecards with lists of locations and items for each). They both use Slink shoes so that's a huge plus. The Meshbody Classic aka TMP is definitely a good body but I'd hate to walk a newbie through the BoM activation and the nipples don't map exactly right to the free skins I can guide newbies to easily. It's absolutely an awesome body for a free alt though! However, sometimes I get people who have a hard time understanding how all that stuff works, and in those cases I send them to the Altamura bodies you can get at the various community help centers. If someone is really, really new, this will tend to be a better choice at least until they get a better handle on what they're doing in SL and can understand skins and BoM and so forth. The places that have those bodies have at least some free clothes for them, and they also wear Slink shoes. Everyone uses the Genus Gift head on that page but with a little extra shape work the Kalhene Leah and Rebirth Kyra heads can be made to look pretty good, and are worth considering if you don't want to bear a family resemblance to a lot of other newbies and alts. I haven't had much luck making a face I like with the other free heads on that page. I will add that I do see quite a few Ruth 2 variants in the wild and while I do want to be supportive of this open source effort by dedicated volunteers, I haven't seen any avatars using them that wouldn't look better with one of the above instead, especially when it comes to the heads.

The Free Dove is terrific. Also worth mentioning are the help centers that have free shops aimed at newer players: Helping Haven Gateway, London City Freebie Center, Ajuda SL Brasil, and Unihispana. All of these have free clothes for mesh bodies. They also have free mesh bodies like Altamurra and eBody Classic/Curvy that can at least get people out of those awful system avatars. Freebie Galaxy is a terrible place to find anything you'd actually want, though it's kind of interesting to walk through anyway. I'd never send anyone there to actually find freebies though. Also, if you're looking for good free stuff, you definitely want Fabulously Free in SL.

Oh for Pete's sake, how many more of these things do we need? I wish Maitreya had made the Petite a separate body and broke the shoulder compatibility for that.

They actually crumpled really badly when I took them down to 35 before but now I can't repeat it, so I guess it was just a glitch on my end. 🤷‍♀️ I still don't think they're shaped very well at that size. They look pressed against the chest. Also yeah at some high level of body fat they'll probably look ok too.

I'm not expecting that, I You know what, never mind

In SL, curvy is being fat while an invisible force gives you a thigh gap and holds your tummy in. Some kind of Jedi corsetry I guess. Anyway, snarky pixel-shaming aside, those tiddies are only small by SL standards. [Problem at under 40 breast size deleted - apparently there was a glitch on my end and I can't repeat it now 🤷‍♀️]

I'm honestly a little frustrated that these really aren't Classic and Curvy, they're Curvy and Curvier. SL is getting fat. You can get a somewhat nice slender shape at the bottom (ha!) end of the Classic except for the breasts which deform really badly once you start going under 40. A Petite add-on would do wonders for this body but paying for that on top of the initial 5500 layout seems a bit ridiculous.

I agree with you but I was really hoping to at least get a viable petite alternative to Maitreya before we reached total body saturation. Alas, it was not meant to be.

I was afraid this would happen. What a disaster. A body isn't just a body, it's an ecosystem of clothing, accessories, and add-ons, almost all of which are going to be third party. eBody learned this lesson, Kalhene at least tried with Erika, but Tonic/Prima clearly wasn't even paying attention. Stupid, and a waste of good work and talent.

Get yourself a free body and head for now and then spend time playing with it so you know what you really like and dislike before you drop money on it. I recommend trying the free eBody Classic and eBody Curvy with the BoM relay to see how all this stuff works first and get an idea of what kind of shape/proportion suits your desired avatar. You can find some nice skins to use with these bodies at The Free Dove in world.

The NUX body is just so newbies won't look like garbage on day 1, as they do now. I still don't know why people act like its success will be measured in how many outfits will be available for it. Who cares. It will be the new starter av, nobody's going to choose it, every new user will just have it. It could be entirely proprietary Mole work, with hardly any clothes, and it will have done its job because nobody will be walking around as dog-purse lady or 70s radio guy and newbies will be more likely to stay in SL because they won't feel (as) ugly or be treated like they smell bad (as much). They should still want to upgrade, though, and the sooner the better. That's capitalism, baby. LL still wants you spending money in SL to get a better body, they just know the new user experience is a huge turn-off right now because nobody likes looking that bad even to start with. All NUX has to do is keep newbies here long enough to want more. Anyway, back to Prima: I'm with you on that, and it's consistent with the way the old Tonic bodies were marketed. Fizz made the dev kit very easy to get and then I guess she figured that if she built it, they would come. I think it even worked a little bit at first; there's actually a lot older Tonic stuff available. But that was a long time ago and now I don't see it happening if she's not actively roping in creators. It's a shame, too, both with this and with Erika, because the bodies themselves seem to have a lot to offer, but fashion is all about hype and if you can't muster the hype you will get run over by those who can.

You should definitely play with the HUD. If there's anything that could sell me on this body, it's the bust, navel, and butt settings you can play with in the HUD. There's only a small subset of deformers in the demo that seem to be pretty similar to the ones previously sold by Tonic.

I didn't see any problems with the hands either. After playing with shape sliders a bit, I did notice that the Torso Muscle slider thickens the arms all the way to the wrist, whereas Maitreya Lara's arms don't increase in diameter after about 2/3s or 3/4s down the forearm. That could make the hands appear to be smaller if you judge how they compare to arm thickness. I prefer the way Prima does it; you can have pretty dainty wrists! Even the Busty is on the thin side aside from the chest, which was also true for the old Tonic Curvy. The Petite really does seem to be the next generation of the Tonic Fine, which is a body I've been tempted by for quite a while. The question is whether it's that much better than a Maitreya with the Petite add-on and a good set of deformers. I'm thinking probably not, at full price. But if you do already have a Tonic body, the price of the Prima becomes low enough that it might be worth it.

The good news is that if you have a Tonic body, you can get the corresponding Prima body (Petite/Busty) for L$1000 or the Prima Elite (combination of both plus a big set of deformers) for L$2000 from now until the end of the year. It won't fit your Tonic clothes or Slink shoes though. Lara shoes are likely to work but apparently no promises. Demos are available in the Tonic store. There are definitely some neat features. You can choose shape adjustments for the bust, vulva, bellybutton, and butt cheeks from the HUD. Lots of nail shapes to choose from. I was able to wear a few different Lara shoes with no problems. Edit to add: the demo shapes that come with it are terrible, no mod, and with distorted hands, I swear I do not understand why creators feel the need to do this. Making a shape of your own for it is a better way to demo anyway. I do like the way it responds to the sliders that I've played with so far.

The people who are mad about the forum changes are all extremely annoying so I'm in favor of them. I have no idea if they'll make things better but they can't really make things much worse.

Yes, it was my intention to state a presumption, specifically the kind that a clothing creator seems likely to have to make in the face of little actual data if the intention is to catch a trend before it takes off. This whole discussion is necessarily, and unfortunately, a battle of presumptions. But it's not about which ones are more likely to be true, it's about which ones clothing creators are more likely to make. I would argue that one assumption clothing creators are likely to make about someone who has bought a very recently introduced body is that it's not likely to be a newbie, or at least not a penny pinching one. I think the assumption they'd make about newbies buying bodies is that they are more likely to buy what their friends have or recommend, or what they see around them, or what they see clothes being made for that they want to wear. The TiddyGurl Deluxe that just came out is probably none of those things, and so it's a risky purchase from the start. I know anecdote isn't the singular of data, but if you'll entertain anecdotal evidence anyway, I can say that as a habitual attachment lister it's pretty consistent with what I see for the eBody Reborn. Regardless of account age, I don't think I've ever seen one without soft thighs, clothes and hair from higher end stores, HD head, and very often they have the "juicy boobs" add-on with compatible clothing, expensive adult attachments hidden away, and so forth. Decked out, in other words. Five figures, easily. And while that certainly doesn't prove anything, I do think that clothing creators are going to think similarly: People dropping thousands of lindens on newly introduced bodies are more likely to be big spenders.

I have always thought of it as this, quite deliberately because it amuses me, and have been known to write it as "FameShed" or even better, "the Fame Shed" and I will never stop doing so. I support this 100%.

I think this is very smart. I have a roleplay focused alt whose body isn't even in the top 50 and I'm still able to find plenty of clothing to meet my needs. I have to admit that part of the incentive for buying that body (aside from just really liking it) was knowing that I wouldn't be terribly inclined to do a lot of shopping for her. I guess sooner or later support might wane to the point where I need to switch to something else, and it will be interesting to see whether I ultimately go for something more popular, another niche body with just enough to get by, or land somewhere in between.

I'm sure that's true, but I was referring to the broader generalizations that clothing creators seem likely to make. Even for a total Maitreya clothes horse, clothing purchases are a lot more discretionary than they are for someone who just bought a newly introduced TiddyGurl Deluxe or whatever and has literally nothing to wear. I'm sure it's part of some kind of cost/benefit gut-check, and perhaps the desire to make "fetch" happen. What if you could make this body that you've decided to take on support for seem special or exclusive? Would it be worth lost Maitreya customers? Maybe.

FWIW, the way to win any argument on the internet is to just walk away, even though it seems pretty counter-intuitive. No one ever changes their mind as a result of an argument they've had; I think most changes of mind start as changes of heart. At best, you might persuade an uncertain bystander, but even then I'd say that people who don't have a definite position on a topic aren't interested in it enough to sit through a long argument thread. The first person to walk away is the one who first realized that the discussion has become a waste of time. Winner. The person who got the last word is the one who never realized what a useless endeavor it was and was left shouting at empty air. Loser.

Please don't make me defend I guy I just added to my ignore list but I'd say it's used enough to merit being called a word. Lexical items get added to dictionaries after they're in use, not the other way around.

But that's not what you said. Here's what you said: I mean, I know you can't see it, so I'm not going to step through it, but lmao

You're the one who threw a bunch of aggressive, attacking statements out there and then complained how we can't have friendly discussion. You are actively inciting people to not have friendly discussions with you. You are completely unselfaware and that is extremely hilarious to me.

Sounds like the thought police need to call in the irony police for backup.

The forums population primarily consists of a few dozen people with thousands of posts each, so anything LL can do to shake things up a bit if they want this to be a place where they can actually engage with their customers is probably good and necessary. As much as I've enjoyed posting here a bit recently, if I were them I'd probably just delete this as a waste of time and money, so seeing them actually get engaged with the forums a bit is probably a good sign.