Sparkle Bunny

is showing up as Comic Sans for me, so consider yourself lucky.

Banlines and security orbs on mainland roadside parcels. If you don't want randoms on your land, WHY have you paid a premium for a parcel that they will inevitably crash into on a regular basis, instead of getting a cheaper one away from thoroughfares, or an estate rental, or a free one in Bellisseria with more prims? You know, like the people who actually want privacy do? And leave roadside for those who want the traffic for which they're being charged extra? Either these people are griefers, in which case LL shouldn't be enabling them; or they're idiots, in which case LL should be protecting them from their own stupidity.

It does have an alpha hud, but you'll want to buy the L$250 BoM upgrade so you can wear skins (and alpha layers, and system clothing) other than those in the hud.

Cardboard cutouts of avatars are creepy too, yeah. That's why people are using them as Halloween decor. Come to that, flat kitties would pass as decor, if they turned off hovertext and hung them up on the wall. It's just that these small-time breeders ignoring the covenant are too lazy even to attempt to remain in theme, let alone rez a skybox at an appropriate height.

What about the breeding KittyCats displayed as a flat prim inworld? THOSE are creepy af. Roadkill kitties having hovertext box babies. (Yes, I have kept KittyCats. I don't rez them in Belli, purely because they are prim hogs and I like my cats to be cats, rather than pictures of cats or legless things in baskets.)

They can do this in an old 512 Linden home, albeit on a more limited scale. No breedable restrictions on those estates. And of course there is nothing to stop you keeping a single breeding pair in Bellisseria, though by 'a few' I suspect you mean a few dozen more than that. If the covenant leads animal hoarders to flounce from Bellisseria, great! It obviously wasn't a good fit for them and frees up desirable properties for those who will furnish them with something other than pets.

The objection isn't so much that they're a resource hog, it's that they're unsightly and out of theme. (I could probably live with it if they killed the hovertext.)

Well, no, it's a palace. Hence the name. The Spargel and Shine home has a 18x20 footprint so I can't see they'd have much trouble accommodating something on that scale. We've seen before that authenticity is not the prime concern here.

Oooh, chateaux!. Suitably grand and could lend themselves to a Gothic/fantasy treatment, for those who lean more vampire than hobbit. Or just a nice upgrade to Victorians for those who found the ranches too rustic. This is what SL designers think a chateau looks like, btw:

Way back in the mists of time, everyone got land with their accounts. They mostly sold it to land barons, because that's what happens if you give people stuff they can resell. Nowadays, of course, there are far too many accounts to give everybody a free house. It would be a colossal waste of resources, given that the vast majority never log in. But it's OK because you still have plenty of options. Previously mentioned; sandboxes, newbie groups, squatting. Nearly all GTFO hubs allow you to rez stuff temporaily, so you can always live out of your car. A couple of my alts have their home position set to a favourite store. Or get yourself adopted by a wealthy family, if you can handle the drama.

The way this new page has been designed does make it look like they're sticking around. If they wanted to deter people from claiming them they could easily have kept them out of the main list, providing a link to a sub-list or the old version for those who really want them; but no, they seem happy to promote them over, say, ranches. It's really odd.

The numbers available for each home are on the large side, so I'm guessing not? I'm not even going to get into how, according to this new interface, skyboxes are now apparently allowed on those continents, but only if they're below 2000m. 🙄

Also, refreshing page 2 of the list just flat out doesn't work for me in Firefox; I get told the page isn't redirecting properly. So if I want to see if any Vics have been freed up within the last five minutes, it's back to scrolling down past the ads for a feature I've already bought, past the themes I've already decided I don't want, back down to the link to page 2. I know they hated it when everyone was hammering them with auto-refresh, but this seems an extreme solution to a problem they'd actually already solved.

So I now have to scroll down past the bumpf above the fold, then click through to another page to see if there are any Vics or Trads available, and then yet another page to actually claim one. I get why they've done that -- it will encourage takeup of the less popular themes on the front page -- but it looks expressly designed to deter GoH players, which given the amount of income they generate seems short-sighted. (As does clinging on to the older homes, but I stopped trying to make sense of LL's business decisions some years ago, so whatever.)

Yeah, it seems far more likely to me that LeL would use their own skin and tattoo layers in the ad than some random third-party skin almost certainly designed for another head. I think the wrinkles are in one of the addon boxes you have to unpack, though, so easy to miss when demoing.

Well, whoever did this mockup certainly wasn't briefed on the 1.0 homes being deprecated, so maybe they've changed their minds and decided not to bother getting rid of them after all? In which case, yes, there will definitely be more takeup of the older homes if they're presented in this way. You can't treat Bellisserian themes and old individal home styles as equivalent, because it then looks like there's far more variety among the latter. Given the time they've invested in demo regions and mentoring, it seems like a really weird backward step to suddenly change tack and start funneling people back to Meadowbrook.

why does it still have the old homes on it? I thought they wanted to empty those continents.

Doll av found this B@re Rose dress in the depths of her inventory. It's from 2009, so slightly younger than she is. This was the golden age of lolita fashion in SL, IMO.

My money is still on the next 2048s being Selling Sunset-style luxury modern. Nobody will be able to claim the swimming pools and helipads are out of theme, though I personally will still have reservations about the elephants.

heads up that the group is now L$99, so the price of Erika Zero X is double that of Erika Zero Plus. (No, I don't know why they're still calling it Zero either, but their branding in general has been all over the place, so yeah.)

They've got it mixed up with all those blockchain NFT crypto worlds nobody cares about. Bless.

The old homes are customised through a web interface that ideally LL would like not to have to support anymore. That's the main issue, as I understand it. Also, it'd be kind of embarrassing if any those shiny new mobile users they're hoping to attract were to select one...

It may be worth waiting for Black Friday in case Maitreya have a sale. On the other hand, the new version could be out by then and be more expensive than the current one, so you take your chances.

I know it's free now. It says so, earlier in the thread. I was answering the question of how much the group fee normally is, which is obviously going to factor into the decision of whether it's worth joining right now.

The current group was L$50 when they created it for Zero Plus; wouldn't be surprised if they put it higher after this promotion is over. Full body is also heavily discounted (under L$1000) for group members right now, which given the scarcity of clothes may be worth it for the wardrobe bundle alone.