Irina Forwzy

Usually, when mandates and laws come into play. Companies (and I worked in Financial Technology and currently work in a similar area now), start to implement these changes before the countries come in with the signed legislation. In fact, I recall GDPR because my old company had business in Europe. They essentially rolled all the changes into production two weeks after it was signed. And that was because of defects. There is always knowledge sharing on which laws and mandates are really going to be enacted. And governments give specific due dates on large scope ones too. Ones where they know, implementation will take months or a year too. Especially in large markets. And European states, Japan, are large markets for LL. Or surely I'd hope so (and maybe this is where my misconception is).

I'm not questioning that it is their platform. All I'm doing is replying to someone. We are all here conversing and analyzing and discussing things. No one is actually yelling against LL. Why can't we simply wonder and just converse about it?

1k-2k-3k is what I recall. I have played gachas myself and spend about 1k-maximum 2k. And I would resell but at a lower cost, because I knew I had over spent. So I probably was a part of the inflation and devaluation issue they had. If I paid 50l, I'd sell my dupes for 45L. And get 500l back through that at times. I am assuming resellers actually play upwards past 3k. To essentially 5k. Then they upsell them in marketplace. Those actually pissed me off. Sometimes they'd sell a common for X10 the price. As for a friend of mine, they would play upwards of 4-5k, but because they liked to play for friends and gift things. They just liked playing. And had the disposable income to do a large gacha run. Mind you both of us have rl professional degrees which allow us to overspend. But they far surpassed me. And they never, ever wanted to sell extras. Probably had enough for a full sim of items.

Europe has had these laws in place for years though. Why didn't LL act then? In fact multiple European countries, Japan, China have had laws. And they aren't new. They've been in place for some time and other games already rolled changes similar to this I would say before last year? Was it a misinterpretation?

For that, just put the gacha items out into regular events. Most people don't buy fatpacks. And see the 2k pricetag with trepidation. Even if they were to spend 2.5k in the fatpack. So yeah they may get 2 fatpack sales per day, but that maybe 1/4th their revenue for that day. And they have to pay a very large amount to event owners (which I am looking at as part of the reason why this got out of hand). So it the ROI wouldn't be enough.

I believe it is probably because they've had a change of Upper Management and Board of Directors. I do not necessarily see laws coming into play in the US on a National Level against gachas. Considering Democrats whom usually are the ones that engage in this style of governance have two Democrat senators to centralize them; that is if they get around the infrastructure bill and Covid-19. And either way, if there are interests from larger corporations such as Apple, and Google. Chances are that the pockets will be lined so to speak. And only specific states will have these cases. Only to then go through the legislative channels toward the Supreme Court if need be, and if seeked. Unless, and here's where things can be alter, unless they are rethinking relocating their corporate office to a country that DOES have these laws in place. So either they are being proactive in the event that next year there's a win in the US Congress that will eventually change our Federal policies; or something else. But this is me analyzing this at a rather late time. I may be missing an angle I did not think about.

They undercut themselves though because the average SL doesn't want to spend the actual price tag. Whether it is those of us that can afford it, or those that can't. They'd rather spend 75L on 200 items a month, then pay 2k for an item. And unfortunately Sl doesn't have a surplus of individuals coming in to compensate for the loss of those that do not want to pay, or have lack of income.

I would say that one of the largest target audiences of SL come for the "shadier" side of SL. Those do not spend any cash, and if they do it is not on their aesthetic, their land, or their sl possessions. If they are up to date, IF, they may spend 5k a year or maybe at max 2k in lindens a month. That's the bulk of SL. Those are not an asset to SL but rather a liability because they use the resources of the grid, but they contribute little to nothing to Linden Labs and/or content creators in SL. Thus the "pool" of demand is actually much smaller than one would think. In order for event creators to counter this decline in demand due to behavioral changes in customers; they developed events. Those events, allowed SL users the convenience of finding newer products at a discount for a group of creators. This was a win, win at the time to the stores. They now had a constant flow of lindens on a weekly basis. They could create what they pleased, or create by theme. And just needed to create one to a small number of items on a given month. So now they had somewhat of a fixed revenue stream. A constant monthly cash flow based on their regular events. (These are your C*******8, F*******d, U**r, etc). During this time, or I should say a little before because I do recall gachas in sims similar to Starlust and Albero (and I mean YEARS ago). Small gacha events started to pop into gear. They had cute items, and were relatively cheap (25L) and people played for the fun of the event, and all of the items were cute and useable. Event organizers then came out with the larger Gacha events. At the time the idea was novel, the items in most machines were cute. And if you could afford it, you didn't mind playing 2k-4k in machines, because you could then resell the extras you got or use them for holiday gifts in SL. Creators saw a larger revenue stream. Now they could create several items a month and actually earn some RL money from SL and not have to essentially work for peanuts. That to the consumer it appears to be inappropriate, that is debatable. These events augmented in scope, in volume, and of course eventually as inflation kicked into rl in pricing within SL. Machines shifted from 25 L to 50 L to 75 L then to 100 L and lastly to 125 L. And as more creators came into the equation, and rules began to become laxed in events; machines seemingly got harder due to the volume of items within it in comparison to the rare. Now, of course some people really overspent in trying to get the rare, even if that same item in Marketplace was at 500L or 1000L if they wanted to go that high. Events started to pop all over. Now event creators saw more opportunities to charge creators huge fees, and get people into the places. If you sit down, and you analyze the difference even across events you cannot but realize that gachas are an incredibly lucrative way of earning revenue. You make a shirt for one regualar event. You have to compete with ultimately 50 vendors in your event. An event that also has others making a shirt.You price that shirt at 250L. But then you have maybe 20k purchased for the week across all colors and fatpacks. You have to pay an equivalent of 5k for the booth, and remember pulling 15K back to your account is about 60 USD. And I probably am undercounting the cost of the booth. There's probably also less sales per each week that an event is open. So for instance week one you may sell 50k, week two 25k, three 15k, four 7k. And you MUST go to multiple events in a given month. Which means you have 4 weeks to plan what you want to achieve for the next month and work on it. Maybe you need to get into 4-5-6-7 events to sell enough to earn 1k a week in US dollars, if at best. Those probably are the top creators on the grid, on a good month. Now compare it with a gacha. You can build a gacha with multiple items. This means that you have a higher probability of someone liking something in the Key. Then you probably have a constant cash flow of small transactions but periodically throughout the day. Instead of selling 5 of the same shirt in one day, because only five liked your shirt. You now have 20 people paying just 50l once or twice in one day. Those already beat the usage sale of the shirt. To top that, you will have the resellers that do this for a slight markup on marketplace, and those that do go crazy in a machine. So they probably double, triple, and even quadruple their profits. They can do less monthly events, and focus more on creating the items for the gachas. So even if they have to pay 20-30-40k a month to the event owners in sales, since it not just a flat fee but a percentage of the gacha sale; they are making a higher profit. This is why you may have noticed that some creators ONLY do gacha, or they tend to make their prettiest and best items as gacha. Because it works. Ultimately, it will be incredibly hard for vendors to actually compete through the regular event model. Which I am conscious about. We have an oversaturation of events. Both gachas and regular ones. Unfortunately though, the average SL that actually likes to spend money, is too lazy to hop to stores to buy items. And yeah, Saturday Sale and Weekend Sale may assist, but the only reason people are going to the stores themselves is because items are going for 50L-75L. I see a few vendors actually having to close, I see a large volume of items getting priced up in regular events, and I do less merchants. The question is, will this cause us to bleed enough sellers that ultimately the SL economy will see a hit? Maybe. Got to admit, I've known friends that have spent large volume of their RL cash on gachas; whom could afford to by the way and they just liked playing to gift rares to their friends. Those will no longer convert as many US dollars into Lindens. Nor will they buy as much from events. So we shall see. And as for pond size, that has always been small. As I said, a large volume of SL users don't even know about anything other than specific adult sims. (Something that I think the new LL management team will cleanup soonish). Others are leaving, and those coming usually do not spend until 1 year or 2 in at the level that many of us do. Quality, not necessarily. Again, many of the gacha makers in the larger events are actually very good at what they do. It's just a tough market to compete in when demand is there for specific type of products. Aimed for a group? Actually no. Vendors make according to demand. Gachas are sometimes where they get creative. They play safer, and tend to follow the designs that everyone else does in order to live. Unfortunately, that's a pet peeve of mine because I'm one of the few SLrs that loves mid-length and knee-length skirts for instance and usually sees a sea of minis. The reason you tend to notice that same aesthetic in clothing, jewelry, shoes, decoration, and home design is actually the supply and demand rule. If creators make vintage clothes, but less people buy it, they stop making them and go for underwear. Gachas is where they can experiment because one person is willing to pay a bit more than the cost of just one item of a regular priced item. Bottomline, the lack of diversity, the concentration toward gachas, is due to us. We as consumers always had the choice to slowly stop buying in gachas, to request different styles and items, we just normally do not do much.

Actually, it could theoretically be that, if the weight inventory archives cost $$ to maintain. Which they do. But then again, they would also have to go after us that have over 250k items because we own sims and have a crazy inventory for that.

Well the same can be said of any other job right? You can work freelance and not get any customers due to a dryspell. You can work in a department, and the budget shortfalls and lack of ROI to the Finance org shuts it down and you end up fired. Every type of job is ephemeral. Regardless of the type of job. In a world with volatile geopolitical, economic, and even customer patterns you must be able to adapt. Unfortunately. SL was created as a sandbox, by that very definition LL should have guessed people with backgrounds in graphic design, creative type jobs, could potentially earn an RL revenue stream that was sufficient enough for it to be their real world job. And why not? You put your time, your creativity, your effort on a product. Why can't you equate that with an RL Income? What's so wrong with that? It is entrepreneurial in nature and I agree with that mentality over one that prefers to have RL corporate ideology. Where the only "real" jobs are sitting behind a desk. And by the way, if SL dies, another game will begin. Do you think these creators aren't in other platforms? If they have design knowledge and play IMV or other games, do you think they wont create for them?

I'm incredibly progressive in my rl politics but there's a point where you got to also put responsibility on end users. As to rules on loot boxes, I comprehend it. I even comprehend some of the gacha policy. Though I know this will impact creators negatively. What I do not get is regulation about addiction in games. When the whole process of you playing in SL for 10 hours, and NOT GOING OUT. Is actually ruining your RL. It may not ruin it financially, at first. But plenty of people actually have had their relationships, their financial lives, and their work lives ruined by online games. Sooner or later governments WILL start to see this and also may potentially try to control that as well. I would have actually allowed gachas but as long as the maximum item was 10l-25L lindens, and the script was the same, and created by LL. As in you have a random chance, but no more than approximately 500-1k to get all items or at least the rare ones. In other words, you control the gachas but you don't necessarily eliminate them all. And plenty of people get financial issues just from buying land in SL. But you wont see that as a control issue in LL. In fact, this is more than likely what we will see. 1. Some creators will no longer sell any gachas. (I suggest they do put their items out at fatpack price of 500-2000k depending on quality and quantity. 2. Resellers in Marketplace will edit their pricing. Now they will no longer sell something that you can get for in a vending machine if you play 2k. Now the items in that vending machine may no longer even be in the game itself. So the limited stock will drive some marketplace stores to price up basic items from 50L to 100 or even 200 lindens. And since people may not want the full fatpack, they may go for that item.^ And resellers do not get any ideas on this, I usually skip over these type of resellers, and can spend that cash. But nope, I rather give that level of $$ to the actual creator and not you. I just know some folks will do this. Thus, there's going to be some price gouging for a while. I strongly, strongly suggest creators fatpack their creations and do not overprice them. Because they will now need to compete with their resellers and become the more viable option. (Food for thought, and I may be wrong, but I've seen this happen with some gachas that have been taken out commission by vendors).

I tried to copy my rl height, which is 5.9. However, I looked like a dwarf around sl. I had to change slightly to about 5.10 to not look so small. But I haven't gone higher than that. It's quite comical how I tower over folks in rl (which is fun when going on blind dates) yet in SL I am smaller than most.

That would in the inworld sales. However, ordering for multiple individuals online doesn't necessarily cause issues. The issue with the online problem was just headcount of literal interactions with it. Which was the problem that spawned most of the comments here. We expect the real world to be super busy, sims have a low limit on avatar count, people sometimes go to these places and just sit there for an hour and block others from going in, and you got those that buy multiple of the items either as themselves to send to their alts, or as their alts.

Won't change though. I believe you can't create a script in sl to combat that for TS reasons. And hey, I'd do that myself if given the chance. I did that with Lelutka.

News to me. I have boats and planes. I haven't used them yet though. I wonder if there are some that allow script edits to be made. May need to look into that. I don't sail all that much but I tend to do a yearly trip. (Last year was an exception).

Absolutely Fantastic!

Cocoon, Insilico, and Drune (when the creator sets it up as cyber, she now has a Steampunk/Dieselpunk version. She repeats though!).

I have countless poses and I have the pose hud. I have considered creating my own poses though, especially for those one-off shots I've done for comedy like sticking my finger up a Buckingham palace Guard as a Tacky tourist; or the mermaid being hunted one. I wish to have some of the imagination I had back in 2017-2019. 2020 has left me going, where's my brain?

Depends on the situation: 1. Out of nowhere = Don't accept. 2. Just met and I'm reading it as a pickup attempt. = Say I'm with someone (which I am) and that I don't talk all that much. If they insist, then no. 3. If We are just having fun and I can sense the person isn't really interested in me. I will friend back. After many years in SL I can tell you that your instincts with the folks usually isn't wrong. When I've thought the person was trying to flirt, it usually is that. Though some of them do it very politely and actually do not bother me most go full Don Juan on you.

By the way, in all of my comments I'm speaking matter of factly. I'm not indicating that what is done, or not done is incorrect. To be quite honest, I think what Catwa did was brilliant from a PR perspective. It may have been a mess for all of us in the marketplace side, but let's face it. This wasn't a "need", this was a "want" that all of us had. So it worked to get all of us talking about it here and a large volume of people talking about it in world. Thus, curiosity will rise and sales will increase. As I've said before: large enterprises such as Targey, H*M, and Mang- have done collaborations in rl with top designers. Have spent millions advertising them in all forms of media including influencers. They created the demand which crashed their websites, got hundreds of people to run through store doors to get the clothes and most importantly made everyone watch the items in tv. In the world of marketing, it's a win win.

They will, however this was actually the responsibility of the creator themselves. LL does not only cater to one creator and to their fanbase. They cater to thousands of creators and all other customers. Since these other creators also purchase services from LL. That they will correct this is no problem. But the fault lies on no communication from said creator to LL. Had there been a notice of this event then LL would have provided a options for the creator. Which were more than likely to create dedicated regions for it. Had the creator been a large volume one, they may have even discounted or allotted the sims for free with a caveat. The fact is, there seems to not have been any of this. Thus, the fault lies on the lack of communication toward LL. However, be that as it may since LL is the owner of all business in marketplace. They will take full responsibility and create more than likely the channel of communication with all large creators. Maybe a support portal style category so that these creators can open a ticket to either a) augment the capacity on the Marketplace side (which they can now do analysis on with today's crash) or b) work with the creators for the dedicated server. I am assuming the latter will be their main option. But as I said, not all end users really care about the impact of other stakeholders or fore see it. Whether it is tunnel vision or just lack of comprehension on how and why systems/processes work the way they do. As we've all seen if we work in service or IT. They want changes made in a system, or they want a system to behave according to how they want it to. Irregardless to business rules or impact to everyone else. The ones that pay however, are the customers themselves that are unaware of all of the back-end craziness. Where you can claim SL is slightly at fault, is that they could have tried to predict how their merchants would behave. And used RL references to create communication channels for vendors and process flows to follow to create the action plan. That being said, why work on that and spend countless hours of work on a flow that may only get used once? That's actually how a large volume of corporations and companies think. Think ROI and MVP. Alas, what is done is done. They crashed the market. Most other creators will probably not bother with creating this 1-day, 1-linden sale if they see a negative outcome. Though I find that hard to believe, because some rl companies do just this to create the frenzy as PR.

I wanted to play the devil's advocate with that statement, because some people just are aloof.

Got mine too. I still have the free Lelutka and haven't opened it though. i need time to just sit and essentially experiment with shapes and turn every head into a cousin of the other. LOL.

Right click and add or do what Kayly states. Either way, the reason why your clothes disappears is because you primary attached two items to the same point in your body. You can only attach 1, and add multiple over it. I believe the max is five adds including the primary one on the point. View a point like a joint.

Agree with this. I believe they updated the head but didn't create a new shape for it. I haven't updated my Lake for this very reason. I fear redoing it, but never really having the same shape/look.