Polenth Yue

To be clear, I wasn't the person who counted up the names on the ban list and crosschecked them with forum names. My aim in discussing the banning was to make people think of what's not working, so that it can be improved. A lot of my bad experiences could be solved with one simple change: up the click distance to 10m so that people don't need to enter parcels in most cases. I feel for people who want people to come inside and look around, but maybe that could be handled with a sign system. "No, just the candy" or "Yes, come in and look around".

I like the theory of the event and I've had solo fun, but overall it's made me feel more disconnected from the community as someone who was collecting candy. I've been banned from more places in the last few days than the rest of my Second Life. Today's one, I thought it was an orb at first, but then realised the owner had manually banned me for stepping onto the porch to click the bucket. I've generally felt less and less welcome at houses as the event has gone on. I think there should be a rule that you can't place a bucket if you have security on. Also a reminder that placing a bucket will result in visitors on the parcel and it's not in the spirit of it to ban them as they turn up. Some people really didn't make the connection that the bucket would mean visitors.

I have a lot of candy and I've seen a few versions of the list (it's a notecard, not the pin/bin thing). It didn't have many places that I hadn't been and missed off a lot that I had visited, so I don't think it'll impact the top ten very much. You really need to be good at searching each region for that. The top hundred might be skewed by the list though. For anyone that'd like to find a bunch in one region, Lost Caves has been the best I've found so far.

I'm not really into the idea that you must have one reason, and only one reason, for doing something. I enjoy exploring and hunts. I like contests when they're things I can do, so I'm trying for the bears. I've been playing mushroom spotting in the fantasy areas. There's no reason why an event can't be a bit of a several things. What it's not is an open house where you can look at people's decorations. Even a lot of houses with buckets have security running and the owners ban anyone who stays too long. I avoid standing on the parcels and won't go inside unless there's a sign saying I can and the door is open. I was banned from a house today for being in the garden of the house next door (I saw the other house suddenly go red on my mini map and checked to see it was a specific ban by name). I'd been banned for walking on the path near another house previously. I'm sure as I revisit areas, I'll find I'm banned by other random houses because I visited the region and appeared on the visitor counter. A quick glance at my profile might suggest I really have no interest in your adult furniture or sex life, so you can relax a bit people. I'm just there for the buckets and won't enter other parcels unless I accidentally lag over the corner or something.

I was autobanned for walking on the path next to someone's house. I never stepped onto it as it wasn't a hunt house. I got to 176 yesterday and I haven't visited most of the regions yet. I found a bunch that said they'd been clicked zero times before I clicked them, though jumped to 2 or 3 after I clicked them. I don't know which number was correct, but in theory you need to find a bunch of buckets that only ten other people find to get the top bear. I'm hoping people settle down from creating masterlists after the first day. I'm not sure that everyone got that it was a contest to find the most, not a set of targets to reach to get the different prizes.

You live in the same region! But if anyone is really stuck, it's in my picks and the gift is right by the official candy bucket.

I just have a couple of bits of decor to finish off tonight, but my gift is out as well as the official pumpkin. My gift is a mysterious surprise! (Okay, it's mushrooms, it's always mushrooms.)

🍄

I was sent v5.0 of the bucket and waited to see if there'd be any comment on that, but not seen any notices, discussion or followup notecards. Has anyone heard anything? Do we need to swap out buckets? I see the thing now and will replace, but is it a functional thing or just land impact? Will we get candy from v3.0 or need to avoid old buckets?

Cthulhu now has a generic number name. Maybe they're saving the name for something with more tentacles.

I managed to get in by selecting a different start location. It's not working well though.

It's been discussed here before, but it's been going on for years, so you might not find a thread in the last week or something. It's not usually clear why it happens. I've had random colours set to adult when the others aren't.

The link you need for an item disappearing as you tried to load it into the marketplace is "Create a Support Ticket" at the side of these forums. I do suggest you are more concise in your ticket. Skip the part about them not working a real job like you do and the whole thing about merchants hiring customer support staff. Just provide details about what happened and what you've tried to get the item back.

They're big signboard vendors. One with the HUD and one for the candy bowl.

I'm suddenly trying to decorate my Linden Home in time for the treat or treating event. Then I will be going out to get candy and earn at least one special bear (if you've not seen that announcement, worth checking the Linden Homes forum... you don't need to be premium to take part). I tend to like cute spooky stuff more than horror gore. I read horror, but it's not what I'm looking for in Hallowe'en.

I've never found that marketplace adverts do much and the last announcements group I was in didn't really have customers (just other merchants sending notices that nobody read). Take part in events. You make money and advertise at the same time.

The reality of the longer downtimes of past games was that people would hang out in chat rooms and forums complaining about not being able to play. They didn't go out into the world. "Ready Player One" is pretty typical of LitRPG stories in having a nostalgic view of the way old games operated. But those things were dumped because they didn't work, not for any other reason. Permadeath and letting people kill each other freely being two other mechanics that LitRPG loves and didn't really work. To be fair, it's a fiction genre, so they only really want to make a good story rather than a good game/virtual world. You should keep that firmly in mind before you start trying to use LitRPG books/movies as design blueprints.

Someone who likes the houseboat vibe, but wants the space of a house and garden, might want to live near houseboats. Different things for different people.

The online gambling sites are to blame for that and are the extreme examples. The church that needs a new roof is not to blame for that and is a trivial example. That's what I mean when I say that context matters. You don't show any signs of seeing that. Everything is binary. Good or bad. Right or wrong. But the world (and Second Life) really doesn't work like that.

The debate reminds me of people who'd get angry about churches having raffles at fundraisers for roof repairs. Gambling was always completely evil in all ways, so there was no room to see a difference between the roof repair raffle where you could win a box of chocolates and betting your life savings on the horses. Second Life's issue is that we have no way to split between the trivial random-pet-rock games and the more extreme examples. It was down to how the machines were used, so the ban ended up taking them all out. It may have unintended impacts on things like 7Seas in the future, despite the fish being token prizes. Basically, this is about banning gumball machines for having multiple flavours, because some other system took someone's life savings. It doesn't help to brand the gumballs as the problem, which is what happens if you take the stance that random prizes are totally evil in all ways and context never matters.

People are going to be hesitant about investing in something that might get banned in six months. Maybe these machines will take off once everything is stable and it doesn't look like they're going to be banned, but I don't see them suddenly being everywhere by next week. I haven't actually hit a shop with one on a hunt yet, whereas a lot of those shops had gachas. Complaints seem based on the theory that these will be as big as gacha, rather than it being a reality at the moment. I don't really have a moral view on them either way. If they contain little pets or the like where every prize is great, I might play one. If only the rare is worth something and the rest is junk, I won't. Much like I did with gachas.

Fill it with mushrooms.

That coast borders a big empty space on the map, so could be that they're building along to link it to a new theme area.

Other than a joke inactive gacha machine with smoke pouring out of it, I've not seen any gachas on hunts since the deadline. Events I'm signed up for have changed to comply with the new rules. I'm sure some people aren't bothering with the rules, but most realise it's happening whether they like it or not. It's better to work on dealing with it rather than hoping it'll all go away. Most people weren't out to get people with gachas and still won't be out to get people with any new things they try. There are always exceptions to that, but the idea that the majority of creators are trying to scam people is really not true.

I'd suggest widening your circle a bit. It sounds like you were very focused on that one group, so you aren't sure how to function without them. Go to other events. Visit other communities. Don't look for the perfect friend/group, but instead look for a variety of places where you can have fun with different people. If one goes bad, you'll still have the others.