[When did voice chat come in Second Life?]

Somewhere during 2007. I still remember being on the beta grid back then, I've never seen so many Lindens at the same place and same time ever after this again.

[New Gacha Policy Discussion]

6 minutes ago, connorboy26 said:

Beautiful, thanks for the economics lesson.... and the show of empathy requested. Must be hard being a wank all the time is it?

If you want my sympathy for that your business is now running down the hill, go looking somewhere else. Business is business, it sometimes calls for tough decision and sympathy brings you nowhere. Linden Lab understands this good enough, because they are still in business. So the question is do you?  Whatever.

[New Gacha Policy Discussion]

A welcome and long ov

6 minutes ago, connorboy26 said:

I think the thing we need to focus on is the loss of income for many people that will directly effect their real life situations. I have been a gacha seller for 5 years and fortunately, despite a major investment, it has been more of a hobby rather than something that places food on my table. But there are creators and resellers who will be hit hard in an already tough COVID financial market. I just think if you didn't like gacha, that's your prerogative, but I would hope that people can be sensitive to the fact that to pull a business with just a month's notice is going to devastate some people and if you're only on here to talk about the perils of gambling, perhaps save it for another day.

Well Linden Lab has always been acting that way. Welcome to Second Life!

Furthermore: the only constant in business is constant change. If you are unable to adapt and it hurts you, then it's your fault to have not diversified your income streams in time upfront.

[Buy Fee Change Discussion]

11 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Opensim regions have gone down in price for those who rent them and the code to run the servers is mostly updated by one developer who works for free. Other than the parts of the code meant for extracting money from the residents, there is nothing in S/L that Opensim does not have. It kind of hints what the development money is going towards.

Oh this is wrong on so many levels, really... first of all Opensim does not scale well. It's pretty much unlikely that with the current code base it would be possible to run a grid as large as SL on Opensim base. 

Then Opensim has stuff, which SL has not and sounds good in theory, in reality it's just an utter mess. Like Hypergrid teleports, three or so different iterations around, and all of them have their own set of problems which lead to a big fragmentation of the Opensim space. Indeed something which SL has not, but fragmentation makes it painful to use and pretty useless.

And of course there's stuff SL has, which Opensim has not, like a good and quick physics engine. SL uses Havok, Opensim's physics engines are really low quality compared to that.

SL has pathfinding, which Opensim has not. And most of all Opensim is was too fragmented overall, and has not really a lot of people. So that's the most important thing SL has which Opensim has not: lots of people.

16 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Why do people seem to forget that LL is in business to make money?  

Nice try of derailing, but no one forgets about that. It's not about that LL tries to make money, which always is quite clear in that world. It's about that they are increasing fees in a type of manner and scale which is completely unparalleled before without providing any visible added value to the platform, so it just makes them look like the money grabbers which at the moment they are.

[Buy Fee Change Discussion]

I don't care with which quirky and skewed lie fairy tale justification the lab might come up with in order to justify this increase.

For me this is just pure money grabbing, nothing more and nothing less. I am unwilling to buy any L$ at all as long as this ridiculous scheme is in place!

[Last Names - Finally Here]

It's good that it has finally been launched, by the price tag coming with it is just ridiculously overpriced. Especially for something which you would get 10 years ago for free, and nobody asked for its removal back then anyway. It's pure insolence.

LL should have instead made it maximum around the average price of a common state of the art mesh head or body for every resident, and cutting the fee in half if you got three month or longer premium status. Something like that.

For comparison: if you want to rename one of your characters in Blizzard's cash cow MMORPG World of Warcraft you've got to pay 10US$ for it.