Da5id Weatherwax

Or play a game you're good at and where the house's cut is built in only when you cash out. If all your gains at the table come from other players, and the house doesn't "have a seat" at the table (ie a dealer or croupier that you're playing against) you just figure in the (known)house percentage when you cash the chips when working out if you're up or down on the night. Blackjack, the house has a seat, you're all playing against the dealer more than against each other. Poker or Bridge*, they don't. If I lose my table buy-in, that's to other players not to the house. If I gain on the night then all I have to worry about is the fixed "tax" on cashing the chips - so you only do it once just before you leave town. If you're coming back to play another table tomorrow, keep it as chips. * I'm not a poker player, at any poker table I'd lose my shirt. I AM a competitive bridge player and "less competitive", shall we say, players of that game at moderate stakes tables in Vegas have contributed several grand over a few years to my collection of bad spending habits. I typically played tables with a 2-5 grand buy-in, with my regular partner who was a higher-ranked player than I in the competitive Bridge world ( I say "was" because by the time our partnership parted ways I was higher ranked than he, and still am). When playing together we just "clicked" and the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. I was accused of card-counting at a Blackjack table once and I answered that accusation by having the floor boss check which other tables I played "I'm a serious bridge player. I don't count but I can't NOT be aware of which cards in which suits I've already seen. You've got at least seven decks shuffled together at that table by the way, I've seen that many aces of hearts since the last shuffle. I play Blackjack for fun, not for profit" He said that provided I kept playing something each night but it wasn't Blackjack, the casino would comp my meal. I said "thanks very much, I'll take you up on that, you wont see me at a Blackjack table for the rest of my stay" I spent more time at the bridge table (when one was open to buy into) and when I figured in the comped meals it turned out to have been a VERY profitable week.

If you have a LOT of time on your hands (I did, through a period of unemployment) you CAN cleanly reverse-engineer a devkit for a body without ripping anything or benefiting from anyone else's rips. You won't be fitting your clothes skintight and it will take a LOT of work, but it can be done. It involves spending long hours (like weeks) in a T-pose wearing a "neutral shape" and painstakingly fitting as many thin cylinder prims as you can cram in around your body as closely as you can by distorting them using regular prim-twisting skills and following where your intuition tells you edge loops should be (avoid using wireframe view to help with this if you can, you want your end result to be as completely "clean-room" as you can manage, viewing the original in wireframe steps a little too close to "using the creators IP" in some jurisdictions). You're not going to be able to approximate a head that way of course, and neither will you be able to achieve a high enough resolution approximate bento hands or feet, but you will be able (after you have pounded your head THROUGH your desk, wall and every other hard surface within reach) to end up with a bunch of prims that together approximate your body in a "neutral shape". The prims are yours and you are not breaking any rules by downloading them. There are tools that can do this and get them into blender. In their absence, you can do regular prim-twisting in blender too, and you can "export" them manually by noting their parameters and their localpos and localrot within the linkset and creating them in bender one by one. Now in blender, load up an SL avatar skeleton, scale the imported prim shapes to fit it and then fit a mesh around the prims. Finally, now that your desk, wall etc have been repaired, replastered and redecorated you get to wreck them with your pounding head again by rigging the mesh you created to the SL skeleton and tweaking the weights such that it scales and collision-fits "close enough" to your body when uploaded to the beta grid and worn that you see no excessive poke-through when wearing different shapes and running a bunch of different anims. This will be another effort stretching into weeks of full-time work. Start to finish I would expect the project to take about 3 months as a minimum. Longer if you suck at rigging as badly as I do. However, if you can achieve a satisfactory result you will have a low-res devkit for your body without using any of the creators IP or ripping anything. Under the terms given by the creator I would not ever qualify for an official Niramyth Aesthetic devkit, I have no store and no interest in joining the fashion marketplace, but doing it this way I can make stuff for myself, rig it to my legally-reverse-engineered devkit and be "close enough" that it "mostly fits" and requires only tweaks to the weights to look acceptable when I wear the items on the avs I have based on that body inworld. Couldn't claim they are "rigged to that body" if I ever sold any of 'em but since I don't sell or otherwise distribute them that's a moot point.

I'd do it by ENDING the line with a character that indicates a continuation follows, because that will cope with both "read the whole nc and eat lots of memory" approaches and "read it when needed" approaches - so that the script knows to stop reading a "line" when it encounters one without the extension character at the end. (yes, old unix guy used to escaping newlines with a \ to make my scripts more readable)

I guarantee you that the most successful "gacha replacement" scripts will stretch the limits of the policy's letter until they creak and, if you're lucky, you might find its spirit in a dumpster on the other side of town, provided you get there before the garbage truck... As a scripter, I intend to avoid these like a dose of the clap. Won't make them, no matter how much anyone offers me for the time to do it. Aside from how I feel about this particular marketing method, I dont want my name on "the script that made LL go nuclear." I've enough honest projects on my plate without swimming in waters that murky.

To follow on from this.. Yes, I was looking it as a game operator, but one informed by being a math-geek as well as an ex-carnie. I knew from that combination that the "perceived cost" of a full set or of a particular rare was going to be MUCH lower than what an average punter would actually pay to get it. Now, I explicitly did NOT model it mathematically, I knew the formulae around the coupon collector problem - in fact in one of my college stats courses I was challenged to derive some of them from first principles! - but instead I focused on an entirely empirical approach, creating a disgustingly simplistic model of player behavior based just on how I've seen punters playing games I operated (or shilled for, my task being to wander from game to game and if the operator tipped me the nod to step up, play and "win", then go dump the prize back in storage and start over.) The simulated players "should" have been clustered around the median number of pulls to get a whole set (once they had, they were coded to "lose interest" and just make infrequent "casual pulls" for "fun") but I'd built in extra enthusiasm for when they could "see" more items on the conveyor that they hadn't already got and a LOT of it if they could see the ONLY item they hadn't got... Sometimes the control code let another player "snipe" the item(s) the "enthusiastic" player was actually aiming for and it was more likely that another player could gain control of the machine before that item was up the more items to go before it there were.... This pushed the simulated players number of pulls from being binomially distributed around the mean to peaking just under 1 standard deviation above the binomial mean and having a more substantial tail towards higher numbers of pulls (looked more like an up-shifted poisson distribution), which, from experience as a game operator, is exactly what you see in people... The closer they think they are to a "big win" the less impact a loss has on their thinking. The math only makes sure the game operator can't lose. The psychology makes the real profit.

Thank you @Kirsten Linden - The posts of mine you found it necessary to clear out were pure ridicule of another poster and I accept that it was needed to clean those up to tidy the thread. Can we have the REST of the ad-hom attacks and conspiracy theories by one particular "respected forum member" cleaned up too?

That would, in my opinion, (and yes, I know it's JUST my opinion) be a step too far. It gains nothing in terms of "exposing a vulnerability" that the basic math does not also encompass and short of providing a "how-to template" for the unscrupulous it does not contribute materially to the awareness, on LL's part or on resident's, of the problems existence or severity.By the discussion in this thread LL are aware and they are the ones that must take any action required to eliminate it. The limits of "responsible and ethical disclosure" have been reached. To use an analogy, you and I know - as presumably moderately-capable coders - how it would be done to rip assets from the game without that being either detectable or preventable by LL. We do not do it and do not give those details on here. I fear publishing a script as you describe would be stepping into the same ethical grounds as publishing a ripper patch to the source code of a popular viewer.

I truly appreciate what you are saying here. I can see how the perceived value of an item to its recipient may not be reflect by the cold hard numbers. To hark back to my references to carnival midway games, I still have a prize I won on one nearly 40 years ago. It was a memorable day and one where those memories will be treasured and are revitalised every time I see that item on its shelf. In pure numbers it is next to valueless. To me it is priceless. However, those cold unfeeling numbers and the way in which they do manipulate purchasing behaviour are a significant factor in whether - for example - conveyors should be considered no different from gacha by LL. Is it "gambling"? Is it "deceptive pricing"? These are things LL must decide, because that will determine if they allow them on the grid. To my mind they come too close to my personal line, as I believe is evident from my comments on this thread, but in the ultimate analysis it's LL's decision based on the best advice from those more expert than I. All that is around us in SL is, at the end of the day, numbers. It is a stream of data and it is shaped and characterised by the code that manipulates those numbers. There are ways in which LL have decided it is unacceptable to shape that reality. They have decide that gacha fall into that category. My contention here is that they were right to do so and that conveyors fall into anathema under the same test as gacha do. I may be wrong. Heck, LL may be wrong in ascribing gacha to that category. But the reality in SL is going to change. LL need to decide the direction of that change on the basis of all the evidence, even those parts of it which you, or I, may not like.

Just to add to my "little test" reported above, I modified the "player" script to stop pulling altogether when they had the full set and the "controller" script to run the game until 50% of players had filled the entire set. Assuming a "somewhat fair" pricing of the individual items, say 2xpullPrice for the commons and then doubling the price for each of the four tiers of rares we get a "fatpack price" (undiscounted) of 88x the pullPrice. Even with an "unrigged" script the average number of pulls each of the players that "filled their set" in this simulation had to make in order to manage this was more than double this number.They always ended up paying close to 3x the fatpack price to fill the set from pulls alone Each of the methods of rigging it I'd coded increased that number by close to an order of magnitude. THIS, not any moral, religious or spuriously-other objection is why gacha (AND conveyors, since I believe I've just demonstrated that if gacha are gambling, so are conveyors) are something I object to. It gives the illusion of being cheaper, by offering a chance to get an item for cheaper than market value but the real odds actually make the set many times more expensive. This is why I describe it as a bunko game. Because that's exactly how every bunko game on every midway works.

F, no... I'm not sharing the code, easy as it was to write. Any competent scripter could do it and it wouldt ake longer to type than it did to create the design in their head, but if they want to be part of that that's on them. I choose not to be.

As a proof-of-concept I slapped together a few scripts - all based around a 10-item FIFO fed by a list of 22, items, with odds 18x5%, 1x4% 1x3%, 1x2%, 1x1% I made one that randomly fed it with the odds alone, then I added "modifiers" One that restricted the 4 "rarer" items to only having one in the FIFO at any time. One that wouldn't add a "rarer" item to the list unless the last "player" had made more than 4 pulls out of the last 10. One that had both of the above. Then a "player" script and a "controller" script. The player script had a 50% chance of being "interested" in the next item, increased by 10% if the announced display contained a "rarer" item, increased by 10% if the display contained at least one item they hadn't already "got" from the set or by 20% if the display contained more than 4 items they hadn't "already got," If the display included the ONLY item they hadn't already got, "interest" was hard-jumped to 90%. If a player already had the full set, their interest was hard-jumped down to 20. The controller script registered all the "interest" from player scripts, and if the last player was "interested" gave them an 80% chance of the next pull, if the last player wasn't interested or failed the 80% check it picked one of the "interested" players and randomly assigned them the next pull to them. I then dumped a controller, a test script and 20 "players" into a prim and let it run. The FIFO sequence still "looked" random unless you analysed it more deeply but the modified scripts drew more pulls in a row from players with identical "interest parameters. Now, this was simplistic and NOT a good model of the complexities of human gambling behaviour, but it illustrates the concept of a "rigged conveyor" that would be almost impossible to detect very well.

Since it's been brought up by others and I've referred to it in the past my own position as a "creator" might be worth elaborating here- I do, after all, often make "custom stuff" for folks... Yes I used to sell popular kink gear, pre-mesh. There, I've said it. I made bank, ok? The primary selling point was the scripting making it more visually interactive than most with the users RP and a few clubs in particular loved it. That was the business that I closed around the time mesh hit the grid - I just wasn't good enough at making mesh back then to build products to the standard I was prepared to sell. Looking at some of my earlier products rezzed inworld for nostalgias sake that was probably a pretty low bar but my mesh skills didnt cut it at the time. My skills have improved since then. These days, I make custom meshes for myself and for other musicians. Primarily duplicating RL instruments inworld at an efficient complexity level and that LOD gracefully. The ones I make for other musicians are always gifts. I do it out of respect for their art and recognising that sometimes it makes a difference to see yourself playing the SAME instrument on-screen as you have in your hands IRL adds to the experience as a performer. I know it does for me and it's a "because I can" thing. I have also stepped up to make custom meshes and scripts for other folks if I became aware of a need on their part that I could address. I never set a price, I say "here's the finished product, check it out and if you feel some payment is in order, just pay me what you feel it's worth and can afford" - MY time on it is for the love of the grid. but I have to say my faith in human nature has been bolstered by the generosity of SL residents I've made stuff for in that way. In that regard, I'm still a "merchant" in SL but I've tried, in recent years, to approach it more as an artist than a salesman.

Prokofy, normally I would not engage with you at all on here as our respective histories indicate that we would seldom, if ever, agree or even find common ground. I see little point in what would rapidly devolve into "arguing for argument's sake" and beyond this reply you will therefore receive no further response from me on this thread. However, having said that I have some responses I must make regarding your post quoted here. Firstly, holding up a mirror to the post as a whole suggests that if my position is unduly harsh then so is yours. This is human nature at play, I suspect and the objective truth lies somewhere in the middle, uncolored by our respective life experiences. Secondly, I take issue with your assertion that I am "no longer in business" in SL. I may no longer be an active asset creator for sale into the marketplace but I assure you the business of performing live is a business, as much in SL as it is IRL. I put in long hours working on it offline and it is because of those hours that even though I perform in a niche genre my SL still turns a small RL profit. I have marketing issues to address as much as I ever did in the past and those decisions directly impact my bottom line as much as they do for anyone selling inworld assets. Finally, I may not post much but I read daily - including your comments. I confess to briefly plonking you in the past but no matter how vehemently I disagree with them your comments are usually thought-provoking so, after some reflection, the ignore tag was removed. A paucity of posting on my part does not indicate a lack of interest, just a willingness to keep my yap shut until I have something substantive to say. Our opinions differ on the main subject of this thread. That's fine. I hope we can each respect that difference, you certainly have my word that I will try to. You do you, I'll do me and at the end of the day LL will do what LL do without either of our opinions counting for much.

Now that you have elaborated on the details of what you meant by your original comment, perhaps I was unduly harsh. I've no objections on moral or other principles to the existence of bunko games on carnival midways or to gacha in SL. I play the bunko games myself when I'm on the midway as a punter, but I do so knowing they are rigged and in many cases knowing exactly how. Some of them are fun anyway even knowing I'm getting ripped off. I play cards for money. I will usually put a bet on the Grand National each year. Objecting on any kind of moral or ethical grounds to gambling per se would be a just a tad hypocritical, I think. What I DO object to is them being presented as "fair games" when so many of them are not. Also to the twisted sophistry that tries to claim that gacha are not gambling when they demonstrably are or to claim that their increased profit is somehow not "gambling income".

This argument is demonstrably false with minimal scrutiny. If there is enough money and enough people in that "small community" to pay the increased profits from selling through gacha, then there are enough of both in that small community to pay a similar amount for the items priced up-front. Unless what you're actually saying is "This community wont pay that much for what I make unless I hide the true price behind a gambling mechanic to make it look cheaper than it is." I was right in what I said in my earlier post. You're part of the reason gacha have to go. ETA: Italicised line above has been addressed by Kricket in a subsequent post and I must "correct the record" and say that I am no longer firmly of that opinion. I stand by the remainder, however.

I couldn't care less why a SL business chose to personally insult me without any actual justification. I sure as heck DO care about never doing any business that would support them in SL ever again and making sure I don't promote them by wearing their products! I actually had been a decent customer before that conversation. It all went in the trash irrespective of how many $L I'd spent on it. Edited to add: And if that genuinely is the reason, I'm doubly glad I trashed it all because of the dishonest business practices. Considering that I was asking BODY makers for a devkit so I could make things that worked with the body, not competing bodies, I am happy to see the bullet hole appearing in their foot.

welcome to the world of microtransactions. Yes, that's how it works. Not just for creators of inworld assets either. If I am playing a RL set I prepare the setlist in advance, I rehearse it for several hours, prepare and load my lighting cues for the planned show . I load up my stage rig, go to the venue, I set up my gear, hook up to the house PA (or set up my own if the house either doesnt have one or its so crap I'd prefer to eat the expense of hiring one myself), run a soundcheck and I run the show. For an hours set there is about 5-6 hours of work, not including travel time. If I am playing multiple RL gigs in a single week I'll reduce the hit from prep and rehearsals by playing the same set at all the venues. If I am playing a SL set I prepare the setlist in advance, I rehearse it for several hours, prepare and load my lighting cues for the planned show. I setup my gear (apart from the lights) in my studio space, fire up the stream and run a soundcheck, tp to the venue, rez my SL gear and run the show (the USB footswitches plugged into my laptop now control lighting and anim cues on my scripted gear rather than the identical functions when mapped to my lighting control software in RL). For an hours set there is about 5-6 hours work and travel time isn't a factor. If I am playing multiple SL gigs in a single week I'll reduce the hit from prep and rehearsals by playing the same set at all the venues. See much difference there? I sure don't from the perspective of actually doing live music in "both lives". I've got the same expenses in time, wear and tear on gear, spare strings, periodic trips to the luthier to keep my instruments in decent shape. Except a big difference is the pay scale. I sure dont come even close to RL returns in SL, from the same number of hours worked. Then we get to the argument about gacha making more money than regular sales. That extra income is gambling income. It's money your customers are paying over and above the actual inworld value of what you created because of the gambling mechanic. You may not personally be knowingly using a rigged gacha script but do you really want to be in the same box as "merchants" who are? You make more from using gacha? How about charging that higher price up front - and honestly - and seeing if your products still sell? If they do, then you can be thankful your business will not be impacted by this change. If they don't then your increased profits from gacha aint really all that honest and you're part of the reason that gacha have to be gone.

Or try getting your hands on the devkit for certain bodies if the only persons you want to make clothes for is yourself and your significant other... I've never ripped a mesh for the purpose of creating my own devkit for my body, but its so trivially easy if you own the body I bet others have. "You don't have a clothing store so we ain't giving you the kit" "Of course I don't, I'm not making items for sale, I'm wanting to make unique items for myself and my partner" "Only legitimate merchants get our devkits. We think you're a crook, we're banning you from our store." I've actually had that conversation without much in the way of paraphrasing. I've never been so tempted to download a ripper viewer in my life. I didn't. I trashed the body and went and bought one of their competitors offerings.

Just about the easiest game on any midway to rig. I know of at least 5 ways to do it and most booths operate at least two of them simultaneously.

This. 100%. I mentioned in another couple of posts my brief episode as a carnie. This is EXACTLY the sort of thing would have bunko operators drooling. The essence of a bunko game is that it looks "fairer" than it is. It looks like you've got an even chance when in fact it is controlled by the operator to a degree you wouldn't believe possible. Sleight-of-hand to rival Penn &Teller, "technicals" (looked down on by old-school operators as too simple and, more to the point, too easy for an observer to detect) visually deceptive designs, the lot. A game that looks at least somewhat "fair" (best and most profitable of all are the ones where an observer concludes that sufficient skill can beat it, but in fact it's nigh impossible) is, in fact, rigged seven ways from Sunday. Of the first 10 "conveyor belt" type scripts written to operate these vendors, I guarantee at least half will be rigged. The percentage of rigged ones will then increase as time goes by until most of them are. Don't want to get ripped off? Don't play bunko. That 3-foot-tall teddy bear with the slushy message on its tshirt you want to present to the object of your romantic interest is NOT going to be yours unless the game operator has been reading the crowd and decides that it's time for a "big payout" to happen and none of his paid shills are around to be given it. If you ARE given it, it will be shoddily made and you'll be given the one that has been trucked across a dozen states for three years and will never, no matter what you do, stop smelling of diesel. Above all, NEVER play "money bunko" where "winning" the game gets you something of actual value. What you get will be both less valuable than it looks and cost you a lot more to get your hands on than you thought it would..

The only thing "to be continued" is forum whingeing until the Lindens manage to peel their fingers away from the collective facepalm and hit the "delete thread" button. Gacha are toast. They aint coming back after this "grace period" ends. Anyone trying to bring them back via some "clever" workaround to the rules is going to find themselves in something deep, brown and malodorous. And for heaven's sake can we just STOP trying to argue "but it isn't gambling" please? It is pure random chance like a slot machine or a roulette table. There isn't even an element of skill in it like there is to most card games and I hope nobody is going to argue that playing cards for money isn't gambling? If I sat down at the same table as a competitive poker player, I'd lose my shirt because he's better at the game -ie better at judging the odds to minimise his risk of loss and maximise his chance of a win. That's still gambling. I would suspect that, as a compitetive bridge player - a game where "competitions" are decided by playing "duplicate", you win the contest by doing better than other partnerships who are given the exact same hands to play as you are - if I and my regular partner were to sit down and play for money with most of the folks on here we'd not go home with less than we started. (our best nights playing moderate-stakes tables we went home having nearly doubled our $2k table buy-in, our worst were rarely more than a couple of hundred down) Even with that level of skill modifying the random fall of the cards it's still gambling. Gacha are one-armed bandits and they are configured for stingy payouts. Walk up to a gacha machine with $L in your hand and your odds are usually worse than they would be taking your RL dollars to the pull-tab booth in your neighborhood dive bar. It's gambling. And its gone.

And where did I say anyone was "tricked"? - A bookie on the high street taking bets on the ponies (yes, here in the UK that's legal) isn't tricking anyone, you walk in there you know you're gambling. If you deceive yourself into thinking you're not that doesn't change the rules the bookie has to operate under. You're not getting tricked in any way. Gacha in SL DO make a lot of their profit by capitalising on the "gambling urge" that seems to be a part of human nature. No trickery involved. (except when the games are rigged, which is more often than you think - I've seen some of the scripts used in gacha that major vendors use. The few I've seen and analysed the code of were ALL rigged with "house odds" that wouldn't pass muster in most regulated gambling jurisdictions) The point in my post that you quoted was that this isn't necessary to make a profit selling your creations in SL. Merchants were doing so successfully before gacha became a thing and they will continue to do so after gacha is gone. The only folks going out of business involuntarily will be the ones who depended on the gambling profit margin from those "house odds" and forgive me for saying but they are the merchants I wouldn't buy from with YOUR money, let alone mine.

You are aware that buying $L with real money from anywhere BUT the lindex exchange is a TOS violation, right? LL banned 3rd-party exchanges and their use ages ago... so "normally" is exactly where @LittleMe Jewell is talking about.

oink, flap...

To all the "bedroll lawyers" looking for ways to "work around" gacha being banned... DON'T. LL have REAL lawyers on the payroll. They are better at this than you are. The more you try to "sneak around" the rule, violating it in spirit but maybe not in the letter, the more likely a much more draconian edict is to be imposed - not only taking your "workaround" offline but also impacting other merchants who haven't pushed the boundaries as hard as you did. When the dust settles, its the edgelords pulling this kinda stuff will end up blamed for urinating in the well....