Deltango Vale

As with everything in this life, you need to deal with reputable people. I, for example, give a full refund within the first week if a tenant is unhappy (no questions asked). I also refund unused rent if a tenant gives me enough notice. My goal is to make my tenants happy so that they will remain a long time and tell their friends. It's called customer service. The great irony is that customer service is built on RAW GREED. Yes, you read that right. You see, screwing your customers results in LOWER profits. Treating your customers like gold results in HIGHER profits. Stupid people don't understand this principle - and they go out of business rather quickly.

Haha. Sure, mesh is easy to learn if you have an undergraduate degree in computer science from MIT and a Master's in object design modelling from Stanford. No problem. It also helps if you are independently wealthy to afford the leisure time to spend 20 million hours learning Blender. As for the rest of us normal proles, not a chance.

I much prefer layer and prim clothing because it actually fits me. Mesh is like armor; it rarely fits properly. Also, I don't want my legs amputated every time I wear a skirt. Mesh furniture is good, though it usually takes time to rez and often wobbles when zooming in and out. Honestly, things were better back in 2006.

My 10th will come up in October. It never crossed my mind that LL would care. Many residents of my generation feel abandoned by LL. Those of us who remained did so with a heavy heart, retreating into whatever personal projects and relationships were important to us locally. All my friends of 2006 are gone. Now LL wants to build Blue Mars Sansara instead of understanding what made SL initially successful and rebuilding it in line with those principles. I wonder if any of us will have a 20th birthday or even a 15th.

Sansar reminds me of Blue Mars. I expect the same outcome.

You mean LL still makes a viewer? The last version I have is 1.23 from 2010, which I keep only for historical reasons. The V2 interface was a disaster. Been using Firestorm since Emerald days.

So cool to see you here. I love it when some of the old guard check in

Good points. I must also agree with you that the mainland can be a junkpile. My solution was to consolidate sims. The downside is that it takes about a decade per sim. There is a big part of me that wants to rant about the mainland. The problem is that one woman's junk is another's palace. If I see another castle, I think I'll puke, but hey, who am I to decide what's 'good' and 'bad'? There are, of course, extremes of obvious griefing. There was a notorious case back in 2006-2007 of a seriously mentally ill resident who would buy 512s and pile them to the sky with trash. LL finally booted the person (I'm going out of my way to protect that person's identity, but anyone owning land back then knows who I'm talking about). I have long thought about the problem of the mainland, but I have never found a satisfactory solution other than PG v Mature ratings for whole continents. The line between commercial and residential is difficult to determine. As with most things in life, there is a continuum. It's easy to compare the ends of a line (small cottage v monster mall), but the bulk of such lines are in the middle (as with any normal distribution). Truly, the only REAL solution is not to have a mainland at all.

"To be honest, I think LL doesn't understand what they've got with Second Life. I think they'll learn, once they blow through this Sansar thing and get back to Second Life, the one and only thing that has ever made a dime of Linden revenue. Remains to be seen if they'll still have a viable Second Life to fall back on at that point, or if they'll have killed it trying to find a market for Sansar." QFT

Zoning is nice in theory, but problematic. I think LL got it right with the original Mature and PG sims, though it was a mistake to put them side by side. Anything else is asking for trouble. Good luck getting agreement on the 'regulations'. The bickering will be endless. Good luck enforcing the 'regulations'. AR filings will soar as people complain about their neighbor's horses or pink roofs or garden hedges. LL will have to shut down Sansar and spend every man-hour cruising the mainland, chasing complaints and returning objects (which will reappear the next day because the landowner is disgruntled). Good luck maintaining "Your World, Your Imagination". SL will become a nightmare of uniform banality. Part of the answer is again to reduce tier, which will encourage residents to own larger parcels, which will reduce friction and encourages better parcel management. Zoning is a non-starter.

Having owned mainland for nearly 10 years, let me provide a little history. In November 2006, SL passed the million-resident mark. As people flooded into SL, the demand for mainland greatly outstripped supply. At the same time, LL raised the monthly cost of Estates from US$195 to US$295. By January 2007, mainland prices had increased by a factor of 10 (year-on-year). When LL began adding mainland sims, they sold for up to US$5,000 at auction. A 4/4 'green' waterfront sim would retail for L$1,000,000. LL had no strategy or management program in place regarding the expansion of the mainland. Over the next few years, LL simply dumped HUGE quantities of mainland onto the market. The results were catastrophic. Those first million residents and the next - vital to the reputation of SL during its dramatic growth phase - were crucified by the collapse in mainland prices brought about by oversupply. At the same time, LL failed to formulate a strategy to upgrade the technical infrastructure of Second Life. While it may have been amusing for early adopters to lose their jewelry during teleports - or have their hair reattached to their butts - the wave of new residents were unimpressed. Who can forget the dreaded 'Upgrade' Wednesdays when all hell would break loose on the grid? Then LL dropped account verification, opening the doors to kids and griefers, who swarmed in via free, ANONYMOUS accounts. Needless to say, the mainland suffered badly from this triple blow. Then came the fourth blow in the form of LL's disastrous 'Adult' policy. Long-established mainland landowners were forced to relocate to Zindra. Many left SL. Zindra became a junk pile. What was the alternative? In 2006, there were only two continents. The zoning of these continents was a hodgepodge of Mature and PG sims. The first step would have been to convert them all to Mature. The second step would have been to design kernel continents which were either Mature or PG (one or the other) then build them up based on the demand for each type. As is known now (and was pretty obvious at the time), demand was much higher for Mature sims. Still, a PG continent would have evolved naturally, preventing the entire Zindra fiasco. More pernicious yet has been LL's inability to understand basic economics. Of utmost importance (Econ 101, day one, lecture one), is the concept of 'relative prices'. The price of an apple is not given by God, nor is the price of an orange. Prices are determined in a market by the aggregate demand for apples relative to oranges. Those of you with a background in economics will instantly understand that the relative price of tier has increased by a factor of 4 compared to a basket of RL 'infotainment' goods and services between 2006 and 2016. In short, the relative price of tier is 4x higher than it was in 2006. For non-economists, this may seem confusing, but this post would be much longer if I have to go through the entire process of explaining it. The standard reply is that the grid can't handle the potential demand that good policies would generate, but the grid is shrinking and has been for years. Reducing the relative price of tier would OFFSET this shrinkage, providing GREATER revenue to Linden Lab. All of this to say that the mainland could have been far more habitable had LL managed SL properly from the beginning. We inherit today a legacy of failure and mismanagement, which LL is either unable or unwilling to address. Perhaps the company sees Sansar as its salvation, but honestly, who can have faith in such a project considering the mess LL made of SL?

Hehe. Or else LL will enhance its reputation as a stingy, miserly, petty, myopic, third-rate company with a lousy marketing department.

Yup, in November 2006, LL passed the million-resident mark. Mainland was scarce and LL figured it could milk the estate sims. For that reason, I never purchased an estate, sticking solely to mainland. In September 2006, initial setup fee for an Estate sim (also called a Full Region or Island sim, 15000 prims) was US$1250; monthly tier fee was US$195. Initial setup fee for a pack of four Openspace sims (1875 prims each) was US$1250; monthly tier fee was US$195. Openspace sims could only be purchased by the owner of an Estate sim. In November 2006, initial setup fee for an Estate rose from US$1250 to US$1675; monthly tier fee rose from US$195 to US$295. The same price increase applied to a pack of four Openspace sims A bar chart of estate ownership through time can be found here. A full history of private island pricing can be found here.

"Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" LL, quit f*****g around. Just lower the bloody tier to US$195.

I recognize most of those names. I guess it all depends how long one has been in SL. Boardman sim, for example, was once a real marketplace. Now it's a deadzone. The hub at Miramare was once choked with residents. Ahern was like the back streets of Calcutta or Cairo, though far more rowdy. I recently met the alt of a former LL employee. It was great fun to catch up on old times and get confirmation of what was going on inside the company when things started going south in 2007-2008. I remember LL posting almost daily back in 2006. The forum was hot. Anyone remember Argent Stonecutter? You didn't want to mess with him. Still, it was a lot of fun. There were some amazing threads, clever and artistic, to offset the political slugfests. I didn't join the mass exodus to SLU. One does get tired of headbanging. Also, it was about that time that LL severed relations with their residents. It was a frustrating and depressing couple of years. Broke my heart. Anyway, nice to see some familiar names still here.

Sigh, why the biterness? - JR Unknown (one of the first big mainland realestate agents specializing in 40/40 sims) - Nephilaine Protagonist (PixelDolls, one of the first big fashion houses) - Suspiria Finucane (active member of the fora, RL musician and designer) - Avi Arrow (one of the first big mainland realestate agents, now active with the Ivory Tower Library of Prims) - Fallingwater Cellardoor (Shiny Things, one of the first big fashion houses, still active) - June Dion (BareRose Tokyo, one of the first big fashion houses, still active) - Ameshin Yossarian (Curious Kitties, one of the first big fashion houses, still active) - Sythia Veil (Unveil, one of the first high-quality 'boutique' designers, sadly gone) - Etain Peregrine (Dark Eden, one of the first high-quality 'boutique' designers, still active) - Karsten Rutledge (KR Engineering, the king of inworld games) - Random Calliope (Random Calliope, SL's top jeweler, sadly gone) - Dexter Bachman (Dexter Bachman, one of the first high-quality 'boutique' jewelers, still active) - Mhaijik Guillaume (Mhaijik Things, one of the first high-quality 'boutique' jewelers, still active) - Nonna Hedges (Nonna Hedges, one of the first big fashion houses, retired) Any resident active in SL in 2006 would know many of these names. It was not meant to be a comprehensive list. Obviously, many 'stars' of SL are missing and most big-name posters are long gone to SLU. It sprang off the top of my head. It was meant to be fun, a trip down memory lane, not a debating point.

Unless I've confused her with someone else or she's lying, she now has a chain of RL stores in the US.

So this was an April Fool's joke? I gotta admit, I've seen better.

It's the red hair, huh? Gives me away every time Come to think of it, I've worn the same hair for 10 years. Trying hard to get my mind around this 10-year concept. How many people have lived in a virtual world for 10 years? I might look like a normal radish, but my RL friends think I'm truly demented.

Y'know, I agree with you, but I had an interesting thought. While you are right that LL should come up with a better system avatar, we both know they have very little interest in SL at this point. That being the case, I don't mind my 10-year old avatar (not 10-year-old avatar, note the position of the hyphens). I'm willing to forgive the beefy armpits, knobby ankles and weirdly 2-dimensional breasts in return for simplicity and consistency. No amputated legs or space-face; hair and jewelry that can be worn without an instruction manual from NASA. I don't mind the flaws because my mind glosses over them (unlike RL where they can be a source of irritation). I'm sure a psychologist would have much to say about projected v real body image. In any event, my imperfect avi is not a problem. What drives me mad is unnecessary fiddling. No, I am not going to modify my shape to fit into a blouse that looks like armor. Nor am I going to saw off my legs to slip into a pair of pants. It's 'unrealistic' in that it runs counter to RL behavior and appearance. Moreover, I don't want to take five hours to rez from a twisted mathematical abstraction, appearing to all the world as a demented radish. A puff of smoke is okay so long as I materialize as human, preferably clothed. In LL's defense, I'll say that anyone trying High Fidelity will soon run back to SL and breathe a sigh of relief at having a sane avatar. HF is so complex and quirky as to be dysfunctional. I gave up after banging my head on it for several months.

I hate mesh clothing and all the nonsense of fitting it. No thanks. I'm quite happy with my layered and prim outfits.

Ah, Jumpy. Nice to see you here. You've got my vote. Some other famous ol' timer are: - JR Unknown - Nephilaine Protagonist - Suspiria Finucane - Avi Arrow - Fallingwater Cellardoor - June Dion - Ameshin Yossarian - Sythia Veil - Etain Peregrine - Karsten Rutledge - Random Calliope - Dexter Bachman - Mhaijik Guillaume - Nona Hedges No doubt, I'll think of a dozen more the instant I post this. Such good memories.

Second Life makes it into "The 50 most important PC games of all time"

Linden Lab is a day late and a dollar short. Actually, five years late and still short. Always half measures with this company; always behind the curve. Here is what I proposed five years ago. Today, I would eliminate the setup fee entirely.

So it looks like Twitter buggered things up just as badly as Linden Lab - and in much the same way. As with any soap opera, perhaps now our two weary heroes, older and wiser, will finally find each other and settle down. Without rereading the entire thread, my main point was that Twitter could be a bridge between Second Life (+ Sansar) and RL - particularly as a feeder system from RL into virtual worlds. Twitter would actually have a purpose (instead of being a global trollfest) by giving avatars the freedom to explore RL without damaging their RL reputations. No doubt there are other potential synergies. Maybe now is the time to act while Twitter is inexpensive - a bargain, actually.