Shockwave Yareach

Your own avatar is a mesh -- it always has been. If you are worrying about mesh coming in and only a handful being able to control how the mesh looks, you are most of a decade too late.

I agree. While I adore what mesh can offer for avatar creation, vehicle creation and building in general, part of me knows that some folks are going to insist that every rock, every plant and every step be made out of mesh in the near future. Sculpts were troublesome enough in that the LOD would turn a lovely place into a garden of spheres. Just walking into such a place would take a minute for all the sculpt textures to load. Imagine how long it'll take a parcel with 100 meshs each at 27MB to load. I'm looking forward to Meshes. But I would like to see some tests showing how long it takes for a mesh and reasonably identical sculpt to rez from nothing by teleporting right in front of both with a stopwatch.

That is an EXCELLENT suggestion! Brings in more money, reduces the griefing issues involved, and offers more of a reason to go premium. Kudos to you for thinking of that.

Oh dear. LL is actually taking some of what we say into consideration? Wow, I had no idea things were that dire for the company. Forgive me a moment's snark, Jack. But after refusing to listen to even the simplest suggestions and forcing incomprehensible and ineffective solutions to problems that didn't exist down our throats for the past 3 years, you'll have to expect a bit of that until you've proven yourself once more. Case in point: those 16 and 17 year old children being thrust into the adult grid? Still a legal disaster waiting to happen, and those of us putting on our running shoes are still waiting to hear how LL expects to keep the kiddies from camming across borders and getting innocent people arrested on child perv charges in real life. Maybe LL is becoming more customer responsive? Maybe. The proof is in the pudding, not just the cool whip topping like Display Names. Let us see what they do next.

@darlene: They make a TECHNOLOGICALLY relatively stable platform, yes. But then LL screws up their accomplishments by changing the rules of how YOU may live YOUR second life every 6 months. Contracts? Worthless. TOS? Worthless. Rules? Worthless. The money you invested? Worthless. It is LL's inability to treat customers like customers and to change legal contracts (like OWNERSHIP) any time they feel like doing so that have driven the businessmen away. All the big money folks looked at how LL could take all their money without a refund because they changed the TOS to say that they could. And the big money folks said uh uh, and ran (not walked) out on LL like their wallets were in danger... which they were. When LL treats the grid like it's a game, where no money you put in buys you anything except limited licenses that LL can cancel for any or no reason, then they have no room to complain that the rest of us think of the grid as nothing but a game either. When LL gets serious about VR land ownership again, perhaps looking up the word Own in the US commercial code, then we'll take it more seriously again ourselves. Right now, nobody in their right mind is going to spend 1000s of dollars for mainland or new islands when they don't get to actually own anything. And as people lose sims and no newcomers "Buy" any of their own, the only direction for LL is down. Which stinks, really, because if LL had simply left people alone with their purchases and not stolen property or told people how they could behave on their property, SL would be double what it is today. All you have to do is look at movie profits -- in downtimes, people want to escape for a bit. What better escape can there be than a VR world where you can be anything and do anything? Within the limits set out in Vols. I through XXIII and summarized in the TOS compendium, with additional rules set out in books XXIV and XXV during weekends...

You know what they say about lies and statistics, don't you? I was wondering what change to the reporting would be used to paint over the ruin which is the current economy -- your chosen solution is simply to not let people know what the user to user transactions are anymore. And while your explanation on the surface sounds reasonable, it's telling that you only now decide that is important enough to warrant the change. Back when the data reported favorably on you, the problems with it didn't seem to matter much. But even in this cherrypicked and heavily massaged data, we can find a glimmer of truth. Care to examine the data with me? Here we see the quarterly User Hours Logged In. Comparing 09Q2 and 10Q2 (so the same period year to year is what gets compared, accounting for all variables like school and RL), we see that time people spent inworld shrank from 126 to 109. This is a reduction of 13.4% of the amount of time spent logged in since the same timeperiod in 09. So either the same number or more people are finding less reason to be inworld, or only 86.5% of the user base is left and spending the same amount of time inworld. Neither is good. I can only imagine what obsfucation you'll make to the numbers to hide the disaster the teens entering the main grid will cause to the mainland. But I'm confident you'll find a way to put a good spin on things; you always manage to do so. Sad that you cannot use the same ingenuity to improve your product and keep your customers happy that you use on your quarterly data. We'd all be wearing 3D glasses and be purchasing genuine SL Gloves for tactile feedback while we visited Zindra if you had.

West: As I understand it, the ban prevents people using Emerald from logging into SL. But anyone using Emerald who was already logged it is already past that point. So if the emerald user never logs out, ever, then they can be connected to the grid indefinately.

Face it - Emerald is provably crawling with malware and was written by griefers and crackers. Letting Emerald into SL when the lab knows perfectly well that it is malware would be the ultimate in incompetence. Emerald's downfall was the fault of the cracker kiddies, who may yet need lawyers to keep their buttery soft openings out of prison. Emerald fell solely because of some of the developers in emerald -- immature twits who don't care who they hurt or what damage they do just so long as they get to show off. Blaming LL for doing something smart for a change and taking responsible care to keep malware off SL is absurd. LL didn't make Lonely Bluebird DDOS anybody -- the phuxup Phox and his friends did that all on their own. And in doing so they revealed the cracking tools hidden in Emerald... tools that can easily be taken over by even worse troublemakers the moment Phox decides letting Russian mobsters pwn ALL your computers would be a lot of laughs.

Well, Wallace isn't history. He's survived longer than that. He doesn't "Communicate" with us either, which makes me wonder what his job truly is when he holds the title of Communications Manager. I guess this is the same sort of management that Pest Management refers to. Ever since he swore on a stack of VR bibles that there were NO plans to create something like Facebook in SL, only to have the company make the formal annoucement about it's Facebook-like webpage at Avatars United only an hour later, we've seen neither hide nor hair of him. I guess his job is safe because he feeds the cat.

I fear that you are too late. At the sciFi convention I attended this weekend, I met several people who had island chains as recently as a year ago. The islands are gone -- some sold but most abandoned. The folks said that LL's changing the TOS at the drop of a hat and trying to beat the enjoyment out of SL at every turn finally drove them to write off the money and leave. You had a unique product that allowed adults to play "Let's pretend" without consequences. There was NO reason you had to destroy that in order to experiment with other application ideas. But what is done, is done. And good luck to you in getting back the fun and more importantly, our trust. Without trust in your company, neither large businesses nor individual users are going to pay big money for your product. And that more than anything else is the problem with SL today.

More important questions are why would you want to, and why would anyone want to buy your character in the first place? Creating a new character is free.

If it is your land, just go to About Land and look at objects. You can then Return all the objects that do not belong to you.

This is a very simple thing to accomplish. 15,000L is way out of the ball park. Sounds like you found a Gold Provider who is accustomed to working with large businesses rather than simple ordinary folks.

Keep in mind that in SL and other viewers as well, you have to ENABLE the voice to work by going into Edit,Preferences,Voice and turning it on. Otherwise, you get nada.