Phil Deakins

If you own the whole mainland sim, you are more-or-less in control of any lag, just as you are with a private sim, so there's not much difference there. The one lag addition with mainland is the seeing of neighboring sims, but I don't think that's a major lag problem. All sims, private and mainland, share servers with other sims, and they are mixed. Sharing with "heavy" sims can be a problem but, since they are mixed, it can a problem for both mainland and private sims. If I were considering buying a sim, my two main considerations would be cost and surroundings. Mainland wins hands down as far cost is concerned (the monthly tier), and the surroundings consideration would be whether or not I want to be surrounded by ocean. If I decided that ocean is must, then I'd go for a private sim, but if I wasn't bothered about ocean, I'd save US$100 a month and go for a mainland sim. So it would really be a case of whether or not being isolated in the ocean is worth US$100 a month to me. The ability to change the terrain would be a lesser consideration, depending on what I wanted to do with the sim.

Finrod Ghennyn wrote: Personally, i regret the direct ingame support with the Lindens. That help system was excellent but it wasn't always Lindens. Some of the helpers were residents who couldn't actually help when it came to doing things like removing a grossly overhanging prim.

In a similar thread 2 or 3 years ago, 3ring Binder was a favorite. I'm surprised that nobody has posted it here - until now. I'm still quite pleased with my 3toed Frog avatar. Twice Nitely was good. I've never seen it but someone got it because I tried to get it myself and it had gone. I had to settle for 4times Nitely.

Innula Zenovka wrote: Phil Deakins wrote: I haven't thought through the idea of restricting all transfers to indentifiable people, so I don't yet have an opinion about that. NPIOF Resident: Hi, sorry to bother you, but I bought a low prim widget in your shop out of my earnings as a dancer in a club here, and it doesn't seem to work. Merchant. That's OK, since it's transfer -- just send it back to me, and I'll send you a replacement. NPIOF Resident: Ah... that may present a problem.. Good point - and one that should have come to my mind immediately. I think it's because I don't sell "widgets" that it escaped me

It's a pity that there are choices at all. I used to create websites and it was always a pain to have to include things to accommodate IE and Netscape, plus earlier versions of each. I was delighted when Netscape folded and left us only having to accommodate IE. But it didn't last. Firefox came along and was erroneously plugged as the "safe" one to use (it was safer, not because it didn't have any security flaws but because it wasn't well used enough to be a target at the time). Then Google launched their Chrome browser, so it's now worse than it used to be for website designers. None of them have ever been fully compliant with the W3C recommendations so that was never the difficulty. But that's not what you asked - it was just my personal thing. I've no idea which the best browser to use is. I use IE9 on both my desktop and my laptop, and this forum performs differently on the two machines. It's fine on the laptop but the tabs overwrite the top half of breadcrumb links, and part of the search text box, on this desktop.

It's a bad piece of design, imo. Like you, I started a thread about it when I first came across it. I have land that's part rock and part grass. One day I decided to arrange the undulations to match the rock, "worn" grass, and grass textures, but the next time I logged in, it had all changed, much to my annoyance. It's a bad piece of design thinking. Such bad design thinking is what I expect of LL in more recent years, but not when this was done.

piecheese wrote: I'm short on L$ and figured I could return some items I don't particularly like anymore. But I don't know how. Could somebody please help me? Why on earth do you think you can return stuff you "don't particularly like any more"? You can't - unless you unscrupulously lie to the seller. Merchants don't sell things with the understanding that they'll buy them back when you're fed up of them.

Constance Flux wrote: It's amazing that Linden Lab allow NPIOF residents to build and sell at all. I see no reason at all why *everyone* should not be allowed to build. If only PIOF people were allowed to build, then a great many builders and sellers, maybe even most of them, would never have got started. *Everyone* should have the ability to build. Selling, both in SL and in the marketplace, is another matter though. On first thought, I would be in favour of restricting the ability to sell to those who have indentified themselves and can be legally pursued - PIOF's, for instance. I haven't thought through the idea of restricting all transfers to indentifiable people, so I don't yet have an opinion about that. It seems to me that restricting the ability to upload meshes to those who are indentifiable is a very good thing, but is only one step in the right direction.

SyiLynn wrote: If I buy Mainland from an auction and it is just water, will I be able to build up the land so its not water? Thanks! If the water is deeper than the raise limit, you won't be able to bring the land up above it. If it's shallower, then you can. In either event, you can place prims (a platform) on the water and build on that, which is unfortunately what some people do, so you can buy a nice coastline and soon find that you don't have any access to the open water.

They may be trying to rent them out.

Jessika Rang wrote: I think one of the biggest problems in SL is avatars with weirdly short arms. I totally agree! And I'm told they exist in the Library too. The trouble is that arms don't "look" too short on an avatar when they are seriously short, and would look really weird, in RL. I discovered it when I made some animations, assuming that arms would be of a realistic length, but I saw too many people using the animations with their hands ending up where they definitely shouldn't have been. A number of times, I've suggested to people to stand up in RL, hang their arms by their sides and note where on the thighs the tips of their fingers are. Then do the same with the avatar. They soon realise how unrealistically short their avatar's arms are. I've actually seen avs whose hands are pretty much on their hips.

Nefertiti Nefarious wrote: Buying inexpensive items does not mean people should be relegated to your "Bargain Basement" [...] Why not? You said that most of your stuff is high quality and sells at less than 10L. They sound a lot like "bargains" to me.

Penny Patton wrote: Also, RE:Sim Boundaries. It always amazes me that people are so willing to scale everything up in SL to gargantuan proportions. Avatars are regularly 7-8' tall or larger. Vehicles, homes, etcetera all tend to be fully double scale. Does nobody realize that this shrinks the effective size of a sim considerably? When you double size vehicles and environments you effectively shrink sims down to 1/4th their actual size. Consider that effect on things like vehicles, population concetration, etcetera. The reason why everything is unrealistically large in SL is the camera (the view position) inside buildings. If you have a home that's made to RL scale, and you are a typical RL height, then you'd feel utterly cramped in your home because of the camera position, and camming anywhere inside it would be really bad. So furniture has to be larger to cope with necessarily larger rooms and, therefore, avatars need to be larger to look reasonable on the furniture.

So LL didn't implement the 10L per month per item listing fee that they originally announced? I'm amazed. It's not like them to turn their back on getting more money out of their users, but maybe they did some sums and decided they'd potentially make more money without it.

I think the OP was referring to shutting down the website where the image came from, and not LL's website. To the OP: Blame Google and any other search engine that displays other people's copyrighted stuff in the engines' websites. It may be legal but it's definitely immoral, and a form of theft, imo. I've understood from this thread that nothing is being sold that can't be sold, and that the problem is merely an image that's used in the marketplace but isn't being sold. So what? And even if the original image is being sold in RL, and the same image is being sold in the marketplace, so what? MP sales don't conflict with RL sales, or cost the image owner any potential sales, or make money for the MP seller since such things are sold for mere cents. It's more likely to gain the owner some potential sales by people who are introduced to the image in the MP and in SL. You asked what options you have. If the image is being sold in RL by the image owner, I suggest doing nothing, because it has the potential of helping the owner. Or, better still, ask the MP seller to include the URL where the image came from, and hope that it introduces people to the site.

I don't expect any vacancies, as I'm not doing it But I'd guess that, for a newcomer to the rental business, who starts out with a large piece of land (a whole sim) rather than grow from small, a much greater vacancy than 10-20% could be expected, but even 10-20% vacancy would bring the US$200 profit down a great deal - to between 160 and 180 US$ a month. Couple with that the fact that (as I understand it) the OP is thinking of a private sim and not mainland, which costs US$295 a month in tier, and the 100% profit is seriously reduced to something around 50% or 60% profit. Then if the business person is in the EU, add 20% to the tier and the 100% profit is down much more. The chances of a newcomer to that field maintaining a tenancy of 80-90% these days is slim, imo - not without operating at very low rents, which would mean that it would be a good hobby that would most likely lose money, hopefully not much, at least for a while, but have the potential to perhaps show a small profit eventually. The person who stated that the most you can expect from a rentals sim, owned and operated a highly desirable set of themed sims - so desirable that he had a waiting list of prospective tenants at that time. Newcomers would be unlikely to create such an environment. So, imo, a relatively new builder, who buys a sim to rent land or places out, is most likely to run at a small loss each month, at least for a while. A dedictaed person could grow it from there, but it's best seen as a pleasurable hobby which might cost a bit to have, imo.

That's been normal for years because LL uses more than GSA - three the last time I heard, one of which is for testing. I've seen three slightly different sets of inworld first page results simultaneously. Another possible cause is that you and your friends searched at a time when the GSAs were updating. And yet another is that you didn't all have the same maturity settings checked.

I depends on what you call "rich". There are many ways to become rich in $L. And, imo, it's still possible to become RL rich from SL, but I don't see breedables as a way of achieving it. Selling enough to top the markeplace best sellers doesn't generate RL riches. It may generate enough for a reasonable RL livelihood for a while, but that's all, and most breedables won't even do that, regardless of being in the marketplace best sellers list. In my view, it may still be possible to achieve a degree of RL riches in land, but nowhere near as easy as it was some years ago. Building up the sort of land business that Anshe Chung has can still be done but it's nowhere near as easy to grow from scratch any more. The time of the pioneering gold rush is gone, and it would now need a serious RL-type business plan, backed with some significant money, but I believe it can still be done in the same way that it's done in RL; e.g. MySpace ruled that segment for a while, but then Facebook came along. Twitter currently rules its segment but what's in the future? Will an alternative come along and take over, as happened with MySpace? Probably. SL rules this particular slot and makes money but it can be toppled. Nobody has tried yet - not seriously - but all it would take is some serious money. No well-established business is future-safe in RL, and it's exactly the same in SL but, like RL, it will need serious RL thinking. A single sim - the topic of this thread - will most likely lose money, at least for a while, and especially if it's an inexperienced person doing it, but it could make a small amount. I remember a comment by someone who runs a popular set of 35 themed sims (at that time), by renting parcels out, saying that the best profit that can be expected from a sim in the rental market is US$200 a month (that's after tier is paid, of course), and it assumed that all parcels were rented out all of the time, which is unlikely to happen for a newcomer to that business. So, imo, it's a darned good idea to get into that market with a sim, provided that it's done for the enjoyment of doing it at a cost of some RL money, and the loss is the cost of the enjoyment - as a hobby that we pay for - but not with expectation of making money. If it doesn't lose money, all well and good, but it's best to assume that it will - at least for a while.

I've no doubt that you know all this but I'll say it anyway. LL won't make any changes at all for the V1 viewer. In spite of the near total opposition to the V2, they pressed on with it, and continue to do so, presumably because they are too proud to admit that they got something wrong. It's nothing new though. Look at how they got out of the homestead fiasco. After Lindens telling people that it's ok to do certain things with homesteads and that those things are what homesteads are for, which caused those people to buy homesteads and do those things with them, LL found that they'd got it wrong so they changed the homestead game, saying that it's people's fault for doing those very things - and they cost some people a lot of real money in the process. My view is that LL knows that, in time, people in general will be fine with the V2, because the population continually turns over, so more and more people will only know the V2 and LL doesn't need to scrap it. Then they will claim its popularity, of course. Also, they won't lift a finger to help SL commerce - that's SL commerce - not website (marketplace) commerce - because they have a financial interest in shopping going more and more to their website mall (the marketplace) and less and less going to actual SL stores. So they won't be adding anything to search about inworld shopping. People often point out that it's causing more and more land to be abandoned, so LL gets less and less tier, but, although the decisionmakers in LL often show a degree of stupidity, they are not stupid enough not to know all about that. Presumably they've done the sums, and they've decided that LL will make more money from their website mall than from the lost tier. That's why they plug and push their mall everywhere they can, at the literal expense of their own paying customers who have SL stores. For some time, half of the login page welcomed not "users", but "Marketplace users". It's all so unscrupulous when they are taking monthly real money from SL store owners. But then they are not known for their scruples.

As had been said several times already, submit a ticket. Unlike some people at LL, t.he Land people are good people, and you will get the land back for 0L. It may not happen as quickly as you'd like, and it's not in rules that you *should* get it back, but you will get it back. I have no doubt about that. When it's sorted out, do as someone else suggested - create an alt to be the second group member. An individual isn't a group.

I very much doubt that camping bots were a part of it. The pay was always miniscule and it didn't require anyone to "play". "Gold farming" is a phrase used about an aspect of the gameplay in WoW, isn't it? Camping bot systems were on sale here. In fact, the first time I ever saw a bot, or even heard of bots in SL, was when a tenant showed me the camping bot system that she'd bought. So, imo, the practises described in the article isn't anything to do with camping bots, and camping bots were used by ordinary people. Maybe people in China used them, as people everywhere else did, but I very much doubt that they are anything to do with what the article talks about.

FJ Linden wrote: I wanted to clarify what has happened and what we have done about it. We are continuing to work through technical and policy issues that are identified through the beta test of our new billing system. This message was generated by one of our new international payments providers as part of a procedure for requiring additional information only in the case when initial tests for a valid payment method were unsuccessful. While this occurs for a very small number of transactions, it will cause the need for further information to be requested. However, the message response that was generated, as well as the request for sensitive personal information, was not acceptable. We have worked through the policy issues with our vendor and do not expect these requests to be handled in this way in the future. There may continue to be secondary level fraud checks, but we will never request personal information to be sent to any third party, in order for residents to make payments in Second Life or with Linden Lab. Amazing! How come you arranged for "personal information" to be sent to a third party in the first place? Where were the LL brains when that decision was made and, if it was acceptable to LL then, why do you say that it's unacceptable now? The people who dealt with it at LL are just inexperienced amateurs, just like those who dealt with homesteads, aren't they?

This is the "Mainland" sub-forum but you can't buy a mainland region from LL. You can buy one from a user, if you find one for sale. You can buy a private region from LL (with the $1000 setup fee), or from a user (without the setup fee). Such regions are not connected to the mainland. The smallest parcel you can make is 4m x 4m (16 sqm) so, if my maths is correct, you could make 4096 parcels, but such tiny ones would be useless to you.

LuckyCreations wrote: OMG I totally agree with you... I am getting tired of everyone complaining about all of these things wrong with V2, and then when LL does something to try and fix it, they don't even want to try it out. Seriously, You can get get as tired you like but you've got it wrong. LL hasn't done anything to try and fix the V2. and, until they do, there is no point in testing it, is there? The search system is in the V2 but it isn't the V2. Many people complain about the various searches - V1, V2 and Marketplace - but they don't hate the V2 because of it. If they did, they'd also hate the V1. Incidentally, you said it yourself - "I am getting tired of everyone complaining about all of these things wrong with V2". If everyone is is complaining about something, it's not exactly a leap of faith to realise that there's something seriously woring with it, and that it's you who is out of step with general opinion. But do feel free to get as tired as you like LuckyCreations wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: And I wont be asking Phoenix anything. Well, if you don't want to ask the Phoenix team anything, then I personally don't see how anyone can help you.. I can't speak for Toysoldier but I wasn't aware that he was asking for anyone's help. Where did you get that idea from?

You actually criticised some of the posts in this thread in your very first line. Later in the post you suggested trying it - twice. Perhaps you did mean to try the search but my response to those suggestions was perfectly clear in my very first line. However, your response to that showed that you didn't understand what I wrote. It doesn't matter though.