More Second Life Nonsense

During my time in 2L in ‘05, the USD spent stats were so obviously inflated. Its only now, as their hype machine has gone into the stratosphere, that it really, really annoys me. I haven’t yet pinpointed the exact moment when the world turned against Second Life, but its definitely turned. Now I’m going to rub sandpaper over my eyes to remove your choice of images from my retina.

Know where I can get a good deal on angry mob supplies?

That picture…Oo….and they say walking into people mudsexing is traumatizing…

OMG, that pic. Why do you hate America?

I really hope you looked up that picture, and didn’t just have it on file. Shudder. So many SL nightmares…
I have a build there to help promote my webcomic, but there’s a store next door to sell outfits for ageplayers. Very creepy, and in a PG sim no less, but any complaints I’ve made to Linden Labs are ignored.
I’ve now come to the conclusion that Second Life is the same as the low rent neighbourhood I live in. Artists, perverts and government corruption all living next door to each other.

Holy Crape, that’s a disturbing picture.
I’m glad you got me interested in Runescape and not Second Life!

Ironically, the best thing about SL may very well turn out to be the fact that it’s giving virtual world high visibility. Of course, that may turn out to be the worst thing, too…

It’s inevitable, if SL continues to capture the publicity, that one of the anti-game politicians or organizations will get wind of what really goes on in SL. The stink will cause real news organizations to take a real look and the positive publicity will turn negative …

… And one day I’ll tell someone I play a game online and immediately have to defend myself, saying it’s NOT LIKE SECOND LIFE. Or I’ll start to shy away from mentioning online world participation because of it.

It could happen.

Fascinating, but not entirely unexpected. It’s hard to know what to believe about SL any more, but even casual explorers quickly discover the world LL describe, and the one they run, are two very different places.

I was generally, (and perhaps naively) positive about the potential of SL, but this kind of spin really irritates me - far more so than anything individual ‘residents’ might get up to. Don’t know about anyone else, but I’m certainly starting to turn on it as a result.

(Ohhhh…there’s three furpeople there! I thought there were just two, on a tigerskin rug!)

I have never played SL. I may, sheerly to mock the world it makes.
About the pic, it’s true, that is a large amount of SL’s use.
I just hope that Earth Eternal doesn’t get too perverse.

I’ve been playing SL for 3 days, and have already spent nearly $75 USD. On that note, I would like to add a few details to this conversation. For one thing, it’s advertised to be a virtual simulation game, but in a virtual game, why are people having to spend real money? I’ve played Ultima Online, and The Sims Online, and have never ever, EVER had to spend 1 dime of my real money to earn virtual money. You of course have to pay a monthly fee of $10-15 to play the game, but earning money in the games are pretty easy. You can actually become a virtual millionaire in-game in only a few months if you’re good. But SL is much different. It says you don’t need any money, but without any money, you’re stuck in a horribly ugly avatar that desperately needs a new hairdo, skin, eyes, body shape, clothes, and shoes. after purchasing these things, you have already spent all of your start up money, and spent some of it on clothes that don’t even look good once you put them on. So now you have to buy some more money so you can get some more clothes. You go onto the website to purchase money, and there you type in the amount of money you are willing to spend, for example, US$5. For that, you get about1250 game dollars. that sounds like a lot to you, so you go ahead and purchase the money. while looking around for a new outfit, you notice that most of the high quality clothing for sale costs about as much as you’ve got. So, in actuality, one virtual outfit is going to cost you about $5 in real money. Ok, so you spend the money, because you’ve learned that nobody will take you seriously in the game unless you have an attractive avatar. Next thing you know, you’re broke.

I learned that the only way anyone is making any money (besides the big shots) is by owning a business. They create virtual objects and sell them over and over and never have to restock. And they are selling these things for way more than they are worth. I have built plenty of 3d objects in extremely complex 3d editors and rendered them into The Sims 2, and I give these things away for free. I spend days making one object, and just give it away for free. Some people might build a website to see their Sims 2 objects, and make you pay a membership fee, but we’re talking about maybe $5 for a lifetime membership and you can download everything they’ve got. that’s the way it should be. This is digital money we’re talking about. It’s nonexistent. It’s unlimited to the creators, and they can make as much as they want and sell it all for much more than it’s worth.

this is one of the biggest scams I’ve ever seen. It’s not a simulation game, it’s a pyramid scheme online. To anyone who reads this, never spend any real money of Second Life. It’s all going to the same person, the one who’s making millions by drawing in suckers.

I spent some hours on SL and was quite disappointed. Frustrating, Buggy and Crash-prone software for what exactly? In my travels around the virtual map I found the largest activity to be adult role playing (Sex with VR dolls). Pathetic really. I visited some supposedly scholastic areas and found links to other supposedly scholastic areas that linked to the same empty areas that I came from. After a couple of visits I had inexplicably been banned and was no longer allowed to log on. There was no explaination for this and no response from support at linden labs whom I emailed from their support website. The only thing I can say about my experience trying out Second Life is, at long last, I have seen Pigs Fly (And have Sex too).

Well…Alrighty, I’ve been playing sl for over a year now, and yes, I did start with nothing, but..rather then being an impatient person imediately disreguarding the idea of working WITH the program to earn linden and build myself into something facinatig, I worked with prims, scripts, met designers, rl artists who are amazed with the limitless creativity envolded in sl. and as for the furry part…i infact joined sl to se the furry side of it, i admit it, yet, after ess then a month, relizing ho small and limiting the furry part of sl is, i broadend my horizins through every part of sl life, from the roleplay sims, combat systems, building contests, dances, rl art shows, web designing learning in the 3d enviroment, and so on.

Speaking of scammed, recently had my credit card number hijacked for real.
All the bogus charges on my card? Linden/Second Life.

What every one of you fail to realize is that you’re passing up a great opportunity to give the ’snaggle-tooth’ on some pretty stupid “gamers”

There’s a farm for you all to harvest and the noobs who spend 75 bucks could’ve spent all that buying ugly poorly made garments that I made in 15 minutes and one of those kinds of persons comes along every other week. As for the choice in furry, I support yiff because the furry population is imo the largest consumer group in small-medium sales and often spit out some of the finger equipment in the game, for example; populated clubs that have actual players playing and talking and buying and yiffing and having fun.

I giggle at those individuals who sit in chair for 19 days earning 3 Linden an hour or whatever to populate some b.s. casino. L2Build. Building is free, make your own damn avatar and your own damn clothes and stop buying shit if you noobs are gonna bitch-fest like you got RIPPED OFF by somebody. QQ, cry more. If you don’t like spending money cause you don’t know how to make a few squares and circles then go play world of warcraft.

I’ve been playing on SL on & off for the better part of a year now, I’m not into furries, and I’ve got to say… most of you folks crack me up.
1) The furries are a highly-visible but ultimately harmless minority.
2) This is a game for socializing and creating, so adrenaline junkies get bored and leave (this is a Good Thing).
3) As Bucked CHocklit said, it’s another world - earn your stripes, don’t just expect to know and have everything when you 1st log on.
4) Too many Americans have this hypocritical “ewwww, other people are having sex, get it away! get it away! ohh, you want me? let’s do it!” attitude - grow up, folks (note, I’m American)

Oh, and Rhyke? You’ve never been, but you can validate what it’s like? You’re funny.

You state that Furries are the largest interest group in SL… I find that nonsense. I, myself, am a furry, and find many places where the lkifestyle is shunned, and not nearly as many where it is embraced. Yes, the most common custom AV is a furry, but that is because it’s one of the only things you really need a custom av for is, well, furry! If you go to the wrong place, yes you’ll see plenty of furry, but in my experience, there is far more human interaction going on. And the sex in second life, while predominant, is generally not just “I TPed and saw an orgy!”. Sure, occasionally something like that could happen, but unless you are actively looking for it, its not as likely, since there are specific places for sex in SL, as well as your own homes to do whatever you like in.

Wow, I just had to comment on this.
The security threats present in an application like SL are immense.
With the internet (webpages), you are forced to think before you click the post button when talking to people, in SL, the instant freedom of speach will mean that information being stored from everyones conversations can be data mined from hackers, which later turns to fraud on a huge scale.
Also note, that conversations in second life can be listened to at will by those with the right knowledge.
My advice, get out before you do anything you’ll regret. There is no line, the virtual world can & will effect your real-life if you’re not careful.

Ya, I agree, all that you wrote is just a way of looking down on it. I can point out everything on any game / world / system and only talk about the negatives, and make it seems like garbage. Furry sex is not the main thing in sl, you dont need to spend 75 dollars in 3 days.. my god what did you do? say “I cant build a cube and want neat things so i have to buy it” Go look around, theirs soooo many freebie things, scripts, groups to talk to and learn. the money market in secondlife is actually one of the very few games / worlds that i know of where the creators of the game want a market. Most markets start when someone playing wow says, “hey, i want some money for my 100 hours waisted here, So im gonna sell it on ebay illegally!” They designed a world for artists to show their work, for you to be able to make a buck, legally via a economy monitored heavily by the lindens. And the most that linden labs really takes from users is for land, If you dont plan on owning land, then you basically can live freely in secondlife… And the land structure is going to change soon anyhow, making it cheaper to own land in the end… You have the ability to express yourself by building whatever you want, or just sit around and talk to whoever. Keep in mind its near 2am my time, and i just ran across this very biased post on secondlife, and had to respond. Wow.. that image is interesting, cant say ive walked in on anything quite like that… I bet u had to go somewhere and spy on someone to get that image.. Or you found it online off of some yiffing page.

-Cheers

I too “play” SL. I say it in quotes because SL first off is not a game. It is a virtual world that happens to have some games in it. Yes I play a furry in SL and you can guess what kind. But I have maybe spent 25 dollars at most in SL and that was just to get a jump start so I could look at how these things were scripted and put together. I have since become a fairly competent designer and haven’t had to spend anymore money than my original and well worth it investment. I have fun in SL and talk to people though I do avoid the Yiff and sex areas. (Not into porn) and I find the areas that don’t have that kind of stuff far out number the areas that do. Also for those that would like to avoid those porn yiff areas just stay out of the sky and near the ground, that should help you a lot.

Like to throw in my two cents…

1) I figured, based on the horrible “popular” list and the like, that I might as well look around at some of these sex “hot spots”… I found exactly *1* that was populated with any significant number of people, and most of those where guys. The rest, 95% where human form, 3% where some sort of bot/camper in some lame area, and 2% where just wandering around, but not doing much. I had to really ***look*** to find places that actual SL people did actual SL sex in, and I still only found 3-4 sims that both cater to it, are not a tiny number of Gorian areas, and people actually can be found in. Where ever the image above came from… Its no place I have been. lol

2) Not everyone can design/script well, if at all, so there is “some” legitimate annoyance at how much you have to spend to get good quality items. If you plan to involve yourself in combat systems, RP, etc. you need DCS equipment, or some variation, and its not trivial to get that by making it. However, I am using flexi hair and legs from one furry vender, with a free flexy tail, and a free everything else. So, you can get “free” even for furry stuff. Its just not always going to be exactly perfect for what you want (imho, too much of the designs are almost as plasticky as the stupid furry head and tail you start with).

My real gripes have jack to do with the stuff that people here, who spent 1-2 days wandering around the botted high-profile, garbage heaps of SL, if they bothered spending that long, saw, but that a) you its damn hard to find stuff beyond that initially, b) the stuff you can find is… not that impressive (sorry Linden, your “see this” list of things you hand out stinks, and some of it isn’t even accurate) and c) Too many groups that have some sort of RP are either over restrictive on character types, over bearing in their “theme”, too narrow in that theme for all but very narrow groups of people to have an interest, or too “combat” oriented.

I have yet to find one that fits my vision of things, and I have looked every place from the so called elven empires to CARP (though not seriously in the later case as an RP place). The only one so far I didn’t get told “at the door” that I would have to become something else, besides a fox, or conform to some silly sub-group, because their combat/rule system only allowed X, Y or Z, and if you look even a little like Z, you *are* Z, has ironically been the Arizona Tombstone area. I don’t doubt I will get grumbled at staying as I am if I apply, but I am going to try for a sort of “fox/coyote” persona, complete with script to magically change everything from my clothes to my weapons, while hidden in a dust devil. I mean, they have Indians, I don’t see why I can’t become the local “Indian legend”. lol And, how the heck hard should it be for someone to RP that they can’t “tell” I am a fox until I do something to trick them, or the like?

Its an idea, and the best I can manage so far, in an environment I wouldn’t mind spending time in, instead of under the thumb of some horrible set of rules that don’t just limit what I am, or deny it, but force it to be something else. Until someone comes up with a better option…

In any case, some people here need to get their immature heads out of their tails and ask themselves if maybe their “bad” experience didn’t have more to do with their attitudes and how they “looked” at, for, and around the world, not the world itself.

I’m in SL for the live acoustic music and because my profession is working on using it for meetings and contacts, but frankly, SL is run in a completely unprofessional manner and is guilty of borderline direct scams when they sell land - evidently they need cash so bad right now that they will add load to their servers even as they block logins because of load - that drives down the value of the land they previously sold. So the most active users see hundreds of dollars in losses on small lots.

The also deliberately do not permit renaming of avatars (how long since even simple databases allowed changing of prime keys?). This, of course, results in those that are unhappy with their first avatar dumping large amounts of non-transferrable items when they start with their new avatar. Oh, yeah, more real dollars given to Linden Labs for buying duplicate non-items.

Finally, they have back up inventory data bases and can track items purchased by avatars that are later abandoned. Why does the State of California permit them to act as if these items are of no transactional value and don’t require an abandoned property report? Just because their TOS says so? Doesn’t work for other businesses.

LL profiteers on the results of the decisions they make to not support their own users. The users need to wake up from their addiction that makes that possible.