Arielle Popstar

Well yes sweetie, you and many others made it about gacha's being a predatory sales tactic, so pointing out there are plenty of other content and creators in regular marketing venues doing the same, is on point.

The demo had both the outfit and the accessory but when I went to buy it, the accessory was not included. Nothing stated in the ad, that it was not. You are promoting a double standard for marketing so it's not whataboutism.

Not much different from a pile of regular content that is deceptively marketed and not worth the price paid for it but we not seeing anyone looking to get those cleaned up and banned. I just got burnt for 399 on an accessory that was like that. Only thing I can do with it is trash it and the outfit it was for. 800L$ down the drain. That is just an example from the past week. And yeah, I just was pulling on one gacha at a place that gave me 5 duplicates in a row but being it was only 10L per pull, it was only a 50L loss and I could even maybe sell a few if I was so inclined, unlike the 399L item that is No Transfer. From that perspective, Gacha's are no worse then regular content and it is buyer beware.

Maybe so but your post also gives credibility to the rumours of S/L creators and developers being quite cutthroat among each other when the opportunity presents itself. This thread has been eye opening in that regard with the long line of business types arguing to bury Gacha's and anything else that looks like it. And of course if one is willing to do that others trying to make a few dollars in S/L, can such be trusted to do good to their customers?

The bigger picture is how as a population we see ourselves in need of saving and as in the case of climate change, virus and vaccines, etc we have demanded to be saved from those and give those who promise solutions money and power, even to the point of subjecting us to lockdowns, quarantines, carbon taxing, forced vaccines etc. Then we cry because those who promised us safety and security, did so at the expense of life and liberty. This goes beyond party politics, race or gender.

Isn't it then somewhat ironic that those who see themselves as lacking the power and agency to protect themselves then support and promote those who will, showering them with lands, power and finances to save the powerless with. But power corrupts and what starts as saving the powerless turns to preying on them.

But that is because of how you choose to look at this. As Profky already related from the Gacha creator here, the focus is about selling to resellers rather than end point consumers. A reseller likely cares less about having complete sets and is more interested in whatever is resalable whether common or rare. Undoubtedly rares would be nicer but too many of them and the value for a resale drops. Even for me as an end user consumer, I did not have to buy all the parts of a couple of outfits and was happy when the rares popped up after 5 or 6 pulls and therefore only needed a couple more pulls for a common I wanted. The rest I could just buy from a reseller if it is something I really wanted. To me after thinking on this a few days, the Gacha's are worth quite a bit more because of their uniqueness and quality but even more so becauser they retain their value and may even be worth more then their original price depending on the demand. Fatpacks and other regular catalogue items are worthless the moment I buy them because their value is completely dependent of the value I place on them for the time I use them. I looked through my inventory this morning and it struck me how all those No Transfer items I have bought over the years were totally without worth because I would no longer be caught dead in them in public. If however they were transferrable like a Gacha, they would still have potential value to others, especially if a quality item/outfit. What all your math is not taking into account, is this intrinsic value of an item when it is transferrable and additionally what you didn't take into account is that in a typical fatpack, 75% of the items in it are throwaways because of colors/textures I would not use and copies for bodies I do not own. When a fatpack is boiled down to it's actual usable items, it increases the cost of each dramatically and worse, in a year I would not be caught dead in the outfit because style and fashion has moved on. So the typical end user has hundreds if not thousands of worthless products in their inventory that will never again see the light of day. A Gacha on the other hand, may well still be of value to others. Unless you factor in those aspects, you cannot legitimately judge the value of one vs the other.

As best as can be determined, there are no actual law changes but seems more some hazy framework that leads some legal types to think there may be future issues with Gacha type sales though there still seem to be plenty of other games out there advertising themselves as being Gacha style games. It's all very mysterious.

"We realize that this announcement may leave the community with questions. This forum thread is going to be monitored and we will answer any related questions in there. "

Posting in this thread is taking it up with LL as the OP specifically says it is to discuss the policy change. From that perspective you might have noticed there has been changes already to the extent that the new policy will be enacted with consideration of the Conveyor belt system. The only thing the hammer has fallen on is the term "Gacha".

Well the justification I see for Gacha's in those cases is that for a small amount of L$ I get the chance I might get the item instead of having to pay the fatpack or full set price otherwise. I much rather invest 150-300L for a few Gacha pulls than having to pay 1000L+ for getting the full set which includes all the items I didn't need to obtain the one I do. The math is certainly better for Gacha's in some cases.

So are you anti gacha so that you will in future have less temptation to deal with?

But then it should not be used as a justification for limiting Gacha style vendors. If it becomes about it being an addiction to certain people, then it would only be right to also address it for those addicted to shopping, slex etc.

I have a shopping addiction in real! My recovery has been to substitute S/L to get my fix. Costs me oodles less and it stores so much easier!

Typically the fatpacks are mostly copies of the product in colors or for bodies I will never use and there can well be a predatory nature to them when only the fatpack itself includes a hud option that does more then just change the color of texture. Some examples from the past include a panty or bra removable button, poses etc. The fatpacks are guaranteed to cost 1000L-2000L whereas the parts of a gacha I want may cost me significantly less. The parts I don't need I can sell, trade, give to alts or friends, none of which I can do with the typical fatpack parts.

That is true but there is a reason for that. To legitimately take copybotted content down, the original creator has to file a DMCA notice and though plenty have been notified of their products in various places, few have actually filed even in the bigger grids. A few years ago one of the commercial grid owners went so far as to track down the creator of a popular body and even filled out the relevant notice of where the content could be found and yet the creator chose not to put signature or mark on it to make it an official DMCA notice. Without that the Grid owners hands were tied and he could not remove the body from circulation.

Just trying to define terms here so we are operating from the same page. Difficult to have a meaningful discussion when we have differing definitions of the relevant terms.

So your objection to Gacha's has nothing to do with LL's stance on the matter and is more of a personal one?

So you are ok with the conveyer belt system as LL's legal reps feel that it would be within the constraints of the legal framework?

From one site explaining the difference I get this: "The difference between Gacha game and Loot box is that the gacha game is actually a collection of cards, toys, characters for earning points in a game in the real world, and on the other hand, a loot box is a specific item available in games which has surprises and other surprise elements when a person reaches a certain level in a game." https://askanydifference.com/difference-between-gacha-game-and-loot-box/ Gacha's in S/L are not a random surprise but one of a specific set of items listed on the advert. Lootboxes from the sounds of it could be anything from a chair to a house to teddy bear. That is not how Gachas are done in S/L.

And yet as Provky and a few others have pointed out, most of the legal fuss has been about lootboxes and not gachas, especially in the way they are done in S/L. At this point there is no specific laws against Gachas. What i find interesting though is that so many of the anti-gachas in this thread talk about the need to follow LL's guidance on this new policy and yet when an alternative method is suggested that LL considers to be valid, then the anti gachas turn on LL itself for even considering such a thing. So it really is not about what LL or the Law states about Gachas but some other motivation which I am starting to wonder if it is some Creators looking to quash a competing marketing strategy. The end result will just be the consumer having less choice.

But I did know it was going to be something that is in that Gacha pack. At 25-50L per pull, it is worth the risk and if I get a duplicate then the Transfer permission allows me to resell it or give it to an alt or a friend. That is unlike the other regular outfit I mentioned earlier where the misrepresentation of the No Mod/Transfer accessory made it totally worthless to me with no ability to sell or even give it away. In terms of value for my money, the gachas is worth a lot more in having those options even if they are duplicates. And on top of that the fact, the duplicates only cost me 25L vs the 400L I paid for the useless accessory.

The top considering its quality would likely have cost 300L per colour from other creators so to my mind, I have 12 pulls for free and the odds of not getting something else of value in one of those is pretty slim. Not much of a gamble when looked at it from that way. Majority of the complaints I have seen in this thread seem to be more about some creators going overboard on the odds of getting a rare rather than about the moral implications of gambling. Maybe there needs to be some regulation rather than stopping that marketing technique altogether.

I bought another outfit right after the Gacha one at regular pricing and it had an accessory on the same board which I assumed came with the outfit and it even did in the demo but when bought the outfit, I realized it didn't. I paid another 400L for the accessory and then realized it was a different shade then the outfit itself and clashed horribly. Caveat emptor right? I paid a total of 700L for something which is going in the trash and 125L for 4 items which are worth way more than what I paid.

As long as every item is worth at least what I paid for the pull, it is not a gamble. I may not be getting what i really wanted but at least I did get my monies worth.