UnilWay SpiritWeaver

If I were a 3D modeler and making a new body for SL... I would make that body and some addon mod kits for custom looks (larger and smaller tops, intimate parts, non-human legs / tail / hands / feet). Then I'd make somewhere between 20-40 outfits in themes - regular everyday, work, formal, kinky. I'd release the body copy/mod and FREE. Then all the kits and outfits copy/mod and at varying price ranges. More everyday items cheaper. Then I'd put out a free dev kit (I'd include it with the body so everyone got it), and free PSDs for all the parts (set these out so even people who did not buy one of my addons could get it's dev kit free) so people could actually become resellers of just textures / applied textures. I'd also need an amazingly good HUD with great features, and some top notch CSRs / bloggers... And then I'd hand out the body and the dev kits for at least 3 months before releasing anything - and give people free event space for month 1 at my shop. Then be like reborn and have a monthly event every month... to keep those third party people engaged (but after some saturation point I could start charging small event fees if that's normal, trying to make sure it was always cheap to put your stuff at my event, but using it to help pay bills). I'd do this because otherwise... I'd stand no chance competing with existing brands. A new entry is not going to make their money on the body because you can't get away with selling that high. So use the body as a lure to get people to buy your other stuff - which means launching with a LOT of other stuff. Even doing all that - my odds of success would not be good. It's not easy to convince people to switch.

Yeah. I spend 60% of my time in SL trying on new outfits and looks that it's almost certain no one but me will ever see. I spend another 60% doing that to my SL home.

This is with deformers and butt size at 0. Likely still more than you desire. BUT you can dial it down from where people often have it. That said - there is a slight belly bump there, but I like that as it's more natural. I've been reading there are even better deformers out there than the ones I'm using - so I may adjust this soon. The chest is Waifu and that's likely the opposite of the direction you're aiming for. But I think even though Waifu is only a few months old it's reBorns main competitive advantage - the other brands all put out addons for smaller tops, reBorn went into the space that only had third partly competition. The only third party competition that actually had any real support was Mounds - which is a third-party addon for reBorn. If Maitreya had put out a large bosom top in addition to it's small bosom options back when Mounds was new - reBorn as a brand might not still exist, even though most reBorn users don't use either Mounds or Waifu - it's the space in which reBorn largely lacks much competition (there is a 'giant top' third party option for Maitreya, but it hasn't been updated in years so it's UV map matches to Maitreya 4.x, and has a seam on Maitreya 5.x, and it has a somewhat unnatural shape).

LaraX will have to be very smart to not become it's own worst competitor. They need to rapidly get third party support going to a comically absurd degree to convince Maitreya folks to switch. They also need to convince a very large and loyal fanbase to stop being loyal to the thing they know and try something new. It's a New Coke problem - and they better have the formula right or folks might just go buy a Pepsi... Or hide out in bunkers with cans of old coke (thankfully for the customers - your mesh body doesn't get consumed like a can of coke - but that just makes the sell even harder for 'New Coke').

Yeah. I've had good luck with the deformers for reBorn so it works for me. reBorn did one very smart thing: they avoided competing with Maitreya. The body is all the shapes you can't get with Maitreya, and rather than do small and flat chest they did larger chest. That means they're appealing to a different set of users rather than trying to take users away from Maitreya. Gen.X curvy "Almost" did this - but there's the issue with the materials and they didn't do any body-mod addons. And back to the original topic: It all just comes down to taking a LOT of time for very few sales. There are survey bots out there that claim what bodies are being used. More valuable for a merchant though is looking at what's selling "in your shop". Some merchants split sales by bodies for a few things to be able to gauge this. Others put up polls in their shop. And I imagine there are also some using scripts to detect the body of people who visit an inworld store. Those bots after all - can't capture data from almost half of SL: Bellisseria. But even if their data is flawed, it's still "trending in the likely right direction." So a merchant needs to look at "it takes me X hours to make a fit for body Y, for which I will likely get Z sales." And that's their wage right there. Is it enough?

If the original poster hadn't used the word Communism as a rando bogey-man as if the word just meant "anything I don't like" (it may mean something very horrible, but it's not any something horrible but a specific kind of horrible) then... I'd be right there with them in feeling. That said, the days where SL venues demanded everyone have a 23-meter tall avatar or get out are mostly gone. A large number of people have scaled down in recent years because it's one of the few ways to avoid t-Rex arms or tiny heads AND if you scale down your furniture to match your scaled down avatar then you effectively get 10-50% more land impact out of your SL land. So... 'going down to a normal height' has kind of become "the new thing" for almost 3-5 years now. So... these days if I find some venue that feels you need to be a giant to enter, it's probably some place that isn't keeping up with modern SL meaning the stuff inside is going to be as dated as sculpties and flexi skirts. I'm not missing much just going to the next place in search.

Yeah I think I meandered off track there with the history lesson - I was aiming for an advice piece to the original poster about why they aren't seeing much for Gen.X but then started to ramble. I was very strongly in favor of Gen.X when it came out so... the resulting mess has been deeply disappointing to me.

It actually went rather poorly on that score. When Gen.X launched they had a month long event in their store with a lot of good brands in there. Some of the best of those brands never put out another Gen.X item. It didn't help that the body was comically expensive so I suspect the vast majority of people who went to the event looked around, tried a demo, clicked buy and freaked out. Sure they've had plenty of sales since - but its too late. Those brands saw poor sales and walked. Contrast this with reBorn. They also do an event in the region of their store showcasing supporting brands. But they do it every month, and it's not all the same people though a lot of them do repeat. That's a good opportunity both for the merchants that support reBorn as well as the users. The regular price of reBorn is not as cheap as I'd like, but it's a lot cheaper than Gen.X was. So people are willing to get it. I wasn't there for it's launch event - I have no idea how well they conducted that. But clearly they didn't goof it up like Belleza did. When Gen.X was coming out it had ALL the right advantages. Major brand with diehard loyal fans looking for an update, LOTs of merchants wanting to get on board, and good marketing hype over the features list. - The fans got overcharged. - The merchants didn't get the sales they were hoping for. - Per a claim in this thread new merchants can't join in easily. - Some of the features announced for launch were pulled back for 'updates' which then took almost 2 months to arrive. That sadly shouldn't be a surprise. Belleza used to be the top body, for almost a year before Maitreya came out. But then Maitreya came out and had multiple updates before Belleza even got it's first update. Maitreya had piles of promotions. I recall hearing Maitreya made it very hard to get a developer kit - but at that time Belleza simply shut down handing out ANY kits. Belleza handed the top spot to Maitreya. And then no one came along for several years with a product that could compete well - until Legacy, and now reBorn. Legacy and reBorn are a LOT smaller than Maitreya, but they're playing "the game" right so both have carved out a segment of the community. Belleza got a second chance with Gen.X, and basically dropped the ball again.

I can't be the only one who wishes there was a version of this build there all year round. All the stuff in Millbank is really cool and I wish there was a 'non-horror, just ruins' version to goof around in during the rest of the year.

That's true in Belli too. I very often cam over to a plot and all I see is the mole supplied house, but about land says the place is jam packed with prims. No idea how frequent that is, but it's often enough to easily find one. Given that the only part of SL where you can 'not worry at all' about getting your freakiness out there is basically Zindra - because even on A-rated estate land landlords love to put in covenants that make Belli look like an anarchist's convention - skyboxes are all over SL as Zindra can be pricey (unless you're OK with a "landlocked" parcel where you put in a skybox just like you would have over on M rated land).

I have my viewer set to jelly anyone over 80,115 (why the 115, because the darn setting is a slider and it never wants to settle on a round number so it's always 80,000 + rando wiggly fingers). I'm rarely above 40k myself but that's no longer from intent it just seems to end up that way. That said despite repeated attempts by Linden Lab to make a formula for this that correctly evaluates someone as "that jerk messing things up for the rest of us" - the complexity formula isn't actually that useful for measuring anything other than drama. Some low complexity stuff now and then can be graphically rough and some high stuff can be 'meh, no problem'. The complexity formula is still just a guess. Another issue can be not just how good your GPU is, but what brand of stuff you have - I've had things that would flat out power cycle an expensive top end GPU MacBook pro have absolutely no impact on a cheap HP laptop that didn't even have a real GPU. That said, nVidia seems to handle things better more often than Radeon for GPUs, but I get better results on an AMD CPU than on an Intel one. But all of that also has to take into account the age of those machines. So... Complexity is really mostly a drama score.

Just use an experience and have everyone who goes East of Zindra end up in the Cornfield wearing a straightjacket while the song "I don't want to set the world on fire" plays on repeat.

This trick still works. No idea if it's a bot that shows up or an account sitting in front of a pile of monitoring scripts spamming a refresh button - but it still works.

Lupita Infante - she's been around for a few years but is a new discovery for me in the subgenre 'Romanticas' of 'Regional Mexican' music. Which is kind of the 'Country Music' of Mexico (and by extension popular throughout Latin America). - Note, the 'cowboy hat' originates in Mexico.

Firestorm is where I've done my tests. It doesn't fully work.

Yeah it's complicated. "Right to Roam" is also different across Europe: PS: Even in the USA this is not consistent. In California there IS a right like this as applied to the coastline. You cannot block access to a beach. That trips up a lot of those 'tech bros' who move out to California from other states, buy a mansion, and wall off the beach like they think they're in New York or something.

In the spirit of a thread in the land forum. This is dedicated to all us "short avatars" in SL:

It doesn't really work though. I've sat myself and alt there side by side before and on one of them I will toggle every option to stop broadcasting what I am looking at, and on the other one I will flip on every "I'm crazy and paranoid" option and yeah - the paranoid alt can see what SL says the other alt is lookin at. That noted - it's very often NOT what's in my camera, but it does have some relationship to things I have done to my camera even if it's showing something I was never looking at.

That's actually not as crazy as it might sound today. That was common back in the era of MUDs and MUSHs - the 1980s precursors to MMOs (MUDs) and SL / OpenSim (MUSH).

https://www.dictionary.com/

I noticed that this new batch runs extremely close to that odd piece of mainland that sticks out sideways and looks like "rando estate land" because it was made by an estate company years back. Hopefully that means ranch will get either coast in that direction or connect to mainland there. - Yes, that's actually mainland. Near as I know it's the only piece of mainland that doesn't pretend to be a continent.

Don't even need to be logged in to see it: https://secondlife.com/land/lindenhomes?lindenHomesPage=1 As I type this Ranch is on there. I hope we hear back from the original poster if they were able to use this to get into one...

Some of those questions needed a "maybe" answer but I get that "maybe" isn't a very useful data point for an event planner. I used the "other" section of the last question to add a note about some earlier answers because I didn't see anywhere else to put a "comment". But I get that it's hard to make a "chart" of responses to figure out action items when people's responses are paragraphs of 'stuff'.

The Teegles at least are usually real world horses. But they're crazy expensive and basically you need empty regions to have the land impact to rez one (well no, they're "just" 40 which is not too much more than many land vehicles, but it feels super high when you're thinking of putting one on your linden home).

Oh and... this works like a vehicle so here it goes: animesh mounts from Teegle. These are way too land-impact heavy to use on my Linden Homes (40), but I have one kept out on my mainland plot. You can use it by either sitting on it or wearing it. Usually they're horses. But I got the Chocobo instead (Strider). And if we're talking about things that work like vehicles... the popular mermaid "Tala AO" appears to work like an SL vehicle rather than the traditional 'use flying to simulate swimming' system - making swimming as a mermaid work very smoothly unless the "flying" systems: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Mermaid-AO-Tala-AO-Bento/21618017 (The tail in this pic is Riptide from {Aii & Ego} - that same store sells another tail that will NOT work with most mermaid animations.)