Nathaniel Flores

Quoted for emphasis. These are not the same model. They may be both based on the same model of RL automobile (because GTA's autos -are- based on real world designs, they are just altered slightly and renamed), but they are quite obviously not the work of the same modeler if you take a moment to get over the kneejerk reaction and really look at the differences. These kinds of witch hunts don't help the cause of people concerned about IP infringement. The first fact that has to be established before you can even start screaming "thief" is that the work is actually stolen. The accusation fails on the basis that there is no evidence this is the same 3D model of this car. To continue to scream about it after that is proven will appear reactionary. I don't claim to have knowledge of whether the SL creator made this from scratch or ripped a model, but if he ripped a model, it's not the one in the comparison photo when you really stop and examine it. Moo is absolutely right that there are too many differences for this to be the same model. Moo Spyker wrote: Those are NOT the same model nor are they the same textures. It may look the same but it was not extracted. Look closer at the details. Not saying its alright just saying its not extracted. It was a remodel. Differences are as follows: 1. different polygon counts, most notable above the wheels 2. 4 lines across the grill on one, and 5 on the other 3. different wheel texture 4. different body texture 5. mirriors dont have the same poly shapes 6. white line across the side of SL one 7. interior seats appear to be different (hard to see from the angles) 8. head lights are vastly different 9. extra lights on the bottom front of the SL car 10. arm holding the mirrior up While they look very close you can tell its not a direct extraction. The SL one was modeled by someone else.

A lot of times sculpty load times depend on the size of the sculpt map image. 64x64 sculpt maps rez pretty quick. Someone that used a 1024x1024 image as their sculpt map will have the sculpty take a long time to load. I am not aware of a reason 'older' sculpts would rez faster than new ones unless you already have the old ones in your viewer cache or something.

So should Customer Support so that they can instruct someone how to do so when told "I don't want to be billed for next year, please cancel my premium account". Better yet, they should have the ability to do the transaction themselves so they can assist the customer instead of blowing them off and leaving them to get their account frozen when they lapse. The OP admitted fault in not properly getting their account set back to basic, so the high-horse proclamations are no longer neccessary. Doesn't change the fact that this is a bad policy and should be changed, and is most likely preventing customers from signing up premium, which hits LL right in the wallet. They really -really- need to take a look at this if they are so worried about their income streams.

Yes, I happened upon Falcon one day in the Beta grid and he said the colors reflect, um... what exactly did he say, it's a reflection of their 'cost'.

The people saying "well you should have downgraded, then, there's a place on the website to do that", while factually correct, are missing the point. An avatar can be had for free by anyone that signs up. There is therefore no monetary value assigned to having an avatar account, and therefore no valid reason the avatar account should ever be held or frozen for 'nonpayment'. A "premium" membership for Second Life confers certain benefits: The ability to own land in your own name, supposedly better access to customer support (for all the good that did the OP), and a periodic L$ stipend. the payment arrangement is pre-payment, you pay ahead of time for the following periods' access. When I payed my annual membership it was paid before I had premium access at all. It's not like you have premium access for 30 days and then a bill comes due; you pay, and then you get premium access. So when a membership lapses, LL not only revokes the premium membership and the benefits of it (It is well within their ability to reclaim the land holdings, return the prims, and even back out a stipend if they have to, and downgrade the access to support) they also remove your access to the item everyone else can have for free if they just never bother to pay for a membership. This amounts to a paying member being subject to a penalty for being a paid member that no free account is subject to. It's not fair treatment of paying customers, it's bad policy, it's harmful to the company's bottom line, and it should be changed. Whether the OP followed the proper procedure to downgrade their account and is now screwed is secondary to the main point that this is a bad way to conduct business. Add to that Customer Supports' apparent inability to instruct the OP as to how to downgrade the account when the request was made to not be billed for the next cycle, and that's two strikes on the Labs' part. Strike three is that when the account freeze occurred and the customer complained, some effort should have been made to resolve this in a way that wouldn't leave the customer feeling abused and angry enough to complain loudly to a large audience. A better policy would be, say, a 30 day and 15 day notice of expiration, explaining that at 12:01 am of the expiration date your land will be returned to Governor Linden and all prims on the land will be returned and your stipends will cease and your access to support will be returned to the basic level, and then at 12:01 am on the expiration date if you have not made your membership payment all of that occurs and your account is reset to Basic. There should never be any reason that your avatar account which, again, is free to anyone who signs up, should be locked out. Leaving the avatar account in place costs the lab nothing in comparison to all the free accounts, they would not be expending any additional resources supporting the land and the stipend and they would save an awful lot of negative word of mouth (this is far from the first time this subject has come up). They would probably even gain more Premium memberships. From a customer service perspective this policy is short-sighted and foolish and I hope the Lindens will finally see a need to change it, though I'm not going to hold my breath.

Ladies and gentlemen a textbook example of negative word of mouth created by a frustrated, formerly faithful customer who feel that their customer support issue was handled poorly or insensitively. Word. Of. Mouth. A satisfied customer will tell a friend. A PO'd customer will tell -all- their friends, and anyone else who will listen, on every channel they can access, loudly. What on earth does it -cost- the lab to resolve this in the customer's favor, as opposed to the negative word of mouth and possible loss of revenue from people who go "Whoa... maybe I should rethink this whole premium account thing, that sucks." Do the math. It might cost them writing off one annual membership vs, what, 10 of them? 20? 100? And that doesn't take into account saying "Ok, if you can cover the 1st month's delinquency as a penalty for lapse, we'll restore the account" if you must. I have never understood the rationale for confiscating the account if the membership lapses. Returning landholdings, sure, remove the benefits of premium membership and revert the account to basic. Basic accounts, as has been pointed out, run no risk of losing their avatar.... why should those who -pay- to have a service that is labeled 'premium' have the potential to be treated far worse than an account that essentially accrues no direct benefit to the lab? Why treat your paying customers worse than the freebies? What sort of sense does that make? Who would want a 'premium' account under those conditions? As a penalty for paying to have an account and getting behind you take away the very thing that everyone that signs up gets -for free-. The avatar and the account. Rodvik Linden, what say you, sir? From a service perspective, from a happy customer perspective does this policy work for you? How many paid memberships are not being realized because of this policy and people shying away from premium membership for fear something will happen and they will lose their account and everything they paid for to customize and upgrade it? The policy makes perfect sense in the absence of free accounts but now that there are free accounts this only acts as a penalty for being a pay account. This is partly why my once-Premium alt was downgraded the moment I heard about this policy. I didn't want to risk losing the account if something happened and I couldn't make the payment.

Prim attachments can be frustrating sometimes both for consumers and creators, just due to the wonderful diversity of avatars. It's hard to create prim clothing that will reliably fit everyone and mostly they get targeted to a few basic shapes. It sounds like what you are doing is editing the full object and resizing it all at once. For multiprim objects, the only edit 'handles' available are the corners, (the gray ones at the outer corners of the object' and they will only adjust the item in all 3 dimensions at once, so what you wind up with is a bigger object with the same overall proportions, which leads to the ill fit you are describing. Since you are able to edit the object at all, what you can do is tackle the thing prim by prim. This is a much more involved process and easier to mess something up, which is why if your object has 'copy' permissions I would recommend you make a copy of the item to make adjustments to so that you have the original in your inventory to go back to in case you goof. The individual prims can be resized on each axis independently, so you will be able to make finer adjustments to the fit. You might have to move some of the attachments (buckles, straps, studs, etc) around a bit to make it look right again, and since you will be working with small objects it won't be the easiest thing ever, but it can be done, and actually doesn't make a bad intro to learning how things fit together in SL. To get down to the 'prim level' on the object, select it, edit and in the 'build' box, click the selection for "edit linked prims" (I think that's how it's phrased, I don't have SL up right now). Then select just the prims you want to edit and go to work. If you made a working copy of the object to make adjustments to, you will have plenty of latitude to mess up so don't be overly nervous about it. If you mess up unrecoverably (ctrl-z can be your friend), delete that copy and copy the orignal again and start over. If this is your first excursion into editing individual parts of a multi-prim object you might find it easier to start with something that is only a few prims just to get the hang of using the editing functions. Alternatively, you may try contacting the creator and see if he/she might be able to help you fit the object. Some smaller scale creators have the time and ability to do custom fitting and some don't, so that's not guaranteed, but it's worth a shot. Be friendly and polite, and try to understand if a busy content creator just has too much on their plate to fulfill your request. Hope that helps.