Da5id Weatherwax

I guess, @Finite and others, the bottom line is that there always have been - and always will be - ways to model your business and sales strategy that do not depend on tickling the "gambling thrill" button on your customers. If you want to cater to customers on a budget there are myriad ways to do that with the legit ways of marketing your items in SL, while still providing a tangible benefit to folks willing and able to pay a premium price. As an SL merchant, nobody really needs to tilt the odds in their favor on a gambling game to make a profit, Not if their products are actually any good. Even cheap mediocre ones WILL attract buyers and over time will make money over their development costs. Not being able to tap the well of gacha profits isn't going to put anyone out of business in SL unless they either CHOOSE to cease trading or simply haven't the nouse to adapt... and if either of those is the case there's dozens of other residents will say "Huh? This is gone? I wanted that.. how can I make it?" and become creators in their own right, in the new market. Even if LL decided to (and could) erase every gacha from the grid in the next rolling restart, this would still be true.

It was a way for customers on a budget to get hold of a fully functional item. If all they wanted was one or two in their homes, they could get that cheaper than buying the copy-perm version, but accepting the risk of loss if the grid munged it.

No they wouldn't. If they want to sell them as NC/T they can. Back when I ran a business I would set a relatively low NC/T price for an item and sell a C/NT version for 3x the price. the NC/T versions were non-upgradeable unless you transferred the original undamaged item back to me with your upgrade request and I blocked them from redelivery using the vendor system I was running at the time. Anything with copy perm was redeliverable, upgradeable and you could rez as many as you like but it was only yours, you couldn't pass it on or resell it. (edited to add: all my items were mod perm but they were all heavily scripted and the rule was "if you break it modifying it, you own all the pieces")

You can make every item in your inventory that you want to available to the marketplace for listing with a single drag and drop. Particularly if its in your inventory already packaged for sale. Creating those listings is a matter of writing them, but you're doing that on the website. For related items in a gacha set you create one and copy it, and then paste it into the next listing doing a global search/replace -99% of the text is the same- you would then just do a global search/replace for /green/(mocha|teal|russet|orange|eyeBleedingPsychedelic|whatever)/ or for /skirt/(shirt|jacket|leggings|/jewelry)/ etc. Trust me, as a guy that used to manage a store inventory of over a hundred items, the current way of doing it is WAY faster and easier than how we USED to have to and even the old way wasn't too hard.

I wouldn't say I'm on a particularly tight budget in SL but my SL pays for itself or it ends. I have one item still on the MP, created long after I closed down a profitable business in SL in the awareness that it wouldn't be profitable any more with the changes coming to the market. These days I make my tier from performing, my content creation is limited to little one-off custom scripted items for folks, making and scripting my own stage gear and duplicating my RL instruments in SL (and doing the same for other musicians for free because my budget doesn't run to tipping them as lavishly as they deserve). And I don't play gacha. I've been a carnie IRL and I know bunko when I see it.

WHAT "batch upload for marketplace" is this of which you speak? If an item is being sold inworld, via a gacha or any other method, IT IS ALREADY UPLOADED TO THE GRID. It does not need uploading again. It just needs dropping in a folder and that folder copying to your "merchant outbox" in your inventory. Boom, it is available for you to create a marketplace listing for it by signing into marketplace and going to edit your store.

I closed MY business down when mesh was introduced. At the time I wasn't good enough in blender to make stuff worth selling and building the kind of stuff I made out of prims was immediately obsolete because the LI was, to use a classic SL-ism "too darn high" - Now I am but I haven't the RL hours to keep up. I have an ongoing project to fully update what was once my flagship product and bring it back, since nobody has yet made one like it, but I've still got about 500 anims to make and a few thousand lines of script to write and optimise before it is even close to done.

The items are already uploaded to be sold in the gacha are they not? All that remains is inventory shuffling - heck the whole shebang can go into a single networked multi-item vendor if you really want to do it in minimum time and with a truly sucky shopping experience for your customers.

My apologies - in that paragraph "your"/"you" was generic, not specific to you as the person who prompted me to start writing and whose words I quoted for that reason. I could probably have worded it better.

The one LL's legal counsel had in mind when they advised that gacha had to be gone. That's the only definition that matters. Not mine, not yours, not anyone else's.

I am sure some areas that ban or heavily-regulate gambling do so on a moralistic basis, certain US states spring to mind in that regard, but in the majority of jurisdictions around the world gambling - as a potentially addictive behaviour - is regulated as a potential public health issue in the same way as drinking and smoking. Most places do not outright ban gambling but there are rules to be followed and the "games" must be approved and the establishments licensed, to the extent of - for example - setting a minimum overall chance of a payout on a slot machine in order for it to be legal in a particular jurisdiction, setting rules on places licensed as gambling venues to include ensuring they only run "fair" games, also an awareness of "problem gamblers" and mechanisms to restrict their access, in the same way as it is not legal in most places to continue selling alcohol to somebody visibly intoxicated. Gambling is legal but to make money from gambling one must be in compliance with strict licensing requirements and not operate a game in a way that would violate them. This, then, is the problem LL face. Because they cannot certify the compliance of every resident-created script running a gacha machine, because they cannot comply with the other regulations as a "gambling establishment" - not least because gambling "on the internet" is itself totally banned in many jurisdictions, simply because internet gambling sites usually CANNOT be in compliance with local regulations everywhere - Anything that is ruled to be "gambling" in any jurisdiction where they operate or wish to operate cannot be on the grid. Period. If it is already on the grid and they become aware of it falling under these rules, it has to be gone, as expeditiously as is practical. To do anything else risks significant liability and their legal counsel will advise them accordingly. If they do not heed that advice they are violating their fiduciary responsibilities to the stakeholders in the company and for individual directors that can sometimes rise into the zone of criminal penalties in addition to the civil ones they would also face. Folks who like gacha, whether as merchants profiting from them or people who like to play them are - predictably - looking at the imposed rules for loopholes to try and get as close as possible to the existing experience and profitability as they can without actually violating the letter of the rules. But LL has real lawyers on the payroll. They are better at "rules-lawyering" than you are. The wider open you crowbar those "loopholes" the closer you get to your new solution being banned too. Disagreeing with the rules is your right. Non-compliance with them is not. Nor do LL have any obligation to heed your disagreement if it contradicts the advice of their counsel - in fact it is quite the reverse, if they are advised by their legal counsel that a rule must prohibit an activity they are required to ignore any objections from any of us and implement the rule. And that, said the cat in the hat, is THAT.

Your definition is too narrow. It's a game where you can lose by getting an item of "lower than average value" or win by getting a "rare or popular item of higher than average value" and the odds are stacked to favor the house. You dont have to lose ALL your money to have been gambling. I can sit down with you at a moderate stakes card table and (assuming we're playing one of the games I'm better at than you, of which I'm sure there's one) take HALF your table buy-in off you, then cash out and leave. You havent lost all your buy-in, but you've still lost, right?

Ok, lets break this down to rawest principles... 1: $L are directly convertible to and from $US and so to a regulator they are "real money" assets, in spite of any "in-game token" language. Anything you pay for with $L will be viewed as a "real money transaction" by those regulators and their enforcement arms. 2: loot boxes, ie random rewards for a fixed payment in-game, which can be purchased with "real money" are being regulated and/or banned at a swift clip around the world in many jurisdictions including several US states. These jurisdictions almost uniformly class such things as "gambling" and draw their regulation and enforcement authority from the laws that exist almost everywhere to control gambling. Loot boxes for real money are regarded as equivalent to slot machines. 3: Gatcha machines are loot-box vendors in which the chances of a particular item and the relative value of the items it is possible to get are completely outside LL's control. 4: Whether such a definition as in #2 above is right or not is irrelevant. It either is, or is becoming, the legal lens through which such things are viewed almost everywhere. As such, LL MUST become compliant with those laws and regulations. Since they CANNOT regulate Gatcha machines to the extent required for their existence to be compliant, due to their lack of control over their configuration, they are gone. Period. 5: Merchants who "make more money from Gatchas than I ever would selling the individual items" are not victims here. They are the "poster children" for the predatory nature of a gambling-based sales model, setting the reward odds to "favor the house" every time. If selling the individual items as known items for a price commensurate to their actual value leads to lower profits, that difference in profit level is entirely due to the odds favoring the house in the gambling element. As such rather than protesting they should be allowed to continue fleecing their marks it would be better to zip it, quietly fold their tents and go looking for the next bunko game that hasn't been caught yet. Any Carnie knows how that part works.

I would not support removing teleportation. However the addition of a kind of "slow teleportation" might be interesting - fly or sail across the edge of an isolated sim into the void and you vanish. You can't see the sim you just left and folks there can't see you although the map tiles of live sims would show on your minimap which would lock to max zoom-out - you're in a private instance (a minimal simulation thread of open ocean is spawned for you to keep track of your movements and keep your aircraft/boat (if you have one and are not simply body-flying) running and behaving normally. This instance keeps track of how far you've gone and in what direction. There is a multiplication factor on your speed, although to your view you are still travelling at your normal rate. Encounter the boundary of a "live" sim and you are inserted into it at the nearest feasible point and the private instance shuts down. (handoff between these private "travelling instances" and sims would be more akin to a tp-with-your-vehicle than a sim crossing) Go beyond the "map bounding box" (smallest rectangle that contains all live sims) and you loop back to the opposite side with your vector intact. Exit your vehicle or TP and it is returned to your inventory and the private instance shuts down. Encounter a region you can't enter and you sail/fly through it like it wasn't there. "Void navigation" would be a skill SL pilots and sailors would learn and long-distance race events would be likely decided by who was the better navigator and held closest to the shortest-time course....

And unlike SL where staff are known by the "Linden" surname you will recognize FB staff by the fact their names are their employee ID numbers, all of which begin with 6....

You sound like somebody I'd love to spend a sunny afternoon in a beer-garden somewhere with, just gossiping and "setting the world to rights"

I'm a RL and SL performer, so my main has LIMITED RL info and the same pic I use as my forum icon. The two alts are "utility creations" and have no profile anyway - they dont exist outside my workshop unless I need to take one of them shopping for new clothes so that they can try on demos before my main buys something as a "gift" for them. I'm not secretive in limiting my RL info, I just prefer to give it in conversation rather than on a rando lookup. It would take no effort on anyone's part to track me down to the city I live in, my RL name and my age to the nearest decade. A few folks in SL have my RL phone number and even more have at least one of my email addresses. My RL "digital identity" is subject to the kind of monitoring and additional security you can imagine an old geek would set up, and I'm pretty much cool with the effectiveness of that and my ability to maintain it so meh.

Yanno, after plonking his sad self, the thread without any of his comments apart from what other folks quote is actually a good laugh....

I've read enough. Here's your plonk. That term originated in the unix world too, on one of the oldest "internet" tools ever (actually the tool - and the term - existed before folks started referring to "the internet" but hey..) Are you old enough to remember it?

swing and a miss, buddy I dont DJ. I play live. No recorded sounds in my sets at all. Ever. No backing tracks. Even teh harmonies on my songs ate produced live courtesy of a nice Boss stompbox. So, pray tell me who am I impersonating? I have nothing to hide, even my forum icon (which is also on my inworld rl profile tab) is real I do have two alts, which exist purely as models for stuff I built and haven't ventured outside my inworld workshop in 10 years. I would offer to tell you their names if I thought you were worth the trouble.

If somebody is putting in the effort to run a second av during their performance and they can make it work well enough to cover both "jobs" and get them both tipped, where's your problem? I can't do it, I can't even type responses when I'm performing, I respond on-mic or not at all. Both my hands are busy on the guitar, I need USB footswitches to control the scripts that run my lighting and anim cues. And why do you care if it's an alt or not anyway? Is it taking away from your experience any? If that were NOT an alt would you appreciate what they were doing well enough to tip them? Then why not tip them if they are an alt? And before you go off in incoherencies about viewer logs and analysing them with ordinary unix tools, please be aware that there are probably people on here who know them better than you do. I've been using them for nearly four decades and back in the day got a few patches accepted by redhat and there are certainly folks on here that know them better than I do! I doubt you're THAT much better-placed

Nor am I. I'm perfectly OK with skin if the person showing it is doing it of their own accord. I'll look and appreciate with the best (or worst) of 'em. I just choose not to intrude my gaze on somebody unclothed, no matter how beautiful I might otherwise find them, if they have not chosen to be unclothed. It's a respect thing.

And for clothing the rigging data loads last. At crowded events this means it's quite possible for somebody to TP in, their viewer to be busily downloading everything to rez everybody... and you to be completely nude to them until the rigging data for your clothes makes it through the queue to them and your garments snap into place on your body. If you've got the covered parts of your body alpha'd out of course, this isn't a concern. But folks seem to be doing that less these days. I've decided to look away from the screen or cam in on an empty piece of floor for a minute or two to preserve folks modesty more than once.

Whatever it is, you share it with our Highland lassies. The rolling pin is bad enough but if she reaches for the skillet then it was offski time 5 minutes ago!

An independent being that is capable of both cognition and self-awareness, the famous dictum of Descartes "Cogito, ergo sum", however they may express it to themselves, is a person. Whether they are human or not is a matter of biological hair-splitting and, in some folks eyes, moral judgement. If that colours how someone else relates to them, that is a problem for the one doing the relating, not for the person being related to.