Ciaran Laval

February 12, 2014

Enter Sandbox – Take My Hand, We’re Off To Never Never Land

It seems very likely that the freedom people have to create local regions or islands within Second Life with different forms of governance will result in many different utopian ‘experiments’. This is something that will be fascinating to watch, and may even inform decisions about the real world.

Philip Rosedale 13th April 2006 – INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP ROSEDALE, SECOND LIFE

In my opinion the solution is focusing a lot more on letting players make and be content for each other. Battlegrounds are an excellent example of an Evergreen style of content where it’s the players themselves that actually create the content. Auction houses are another example. So are things like storytelling tools in SWG.. or the brilliant music system in LOTRO. Building systems into the games that let the players interact with each other in new and unique ways gives us the ability to watch as the players do stuff we never anticipated. We’ll see a lot more creativity in action if the players are at the center of it. Imagine an MMORPG of a massive city.. and the Rogue’s guild is entirely run by players. Where the city has an entire political system that is populated by players who were elected by the playerbase.

John Smedley 11th February 2014 – The Sandbox MMO

I’ve opened with the above quotes to demonstrate firstly that eight years is not as long in technology circles as many think. Secondly it’s to emphasise that sandbox concepts are spreading and are going to create virtual worlds galore. John Smedley is the president of Sony Online Entertainment and in the blog post I’ve linked, makes excellent points about the power and potential of a sandbox MMO. Sony Online Entertainment are really starting to impress me lately, Everquest Next Landmark will allow user created content.

They are also dipping their toes into the water of allowing players to sell content. They are bringing together some of most wonderful concepts of Second Life in a more controlled environment, but they also recognise the beauty of such an environment.

So why is it that when we see talk of sandboxes and user generated content, the media shy away from talking of the ultimate sandbox that Second Life is? Why is it left to people such as Draxtor Despres to highlight the many wonderful use cases of Second Life via The Drax Files? Part of the problem of course is the mainstream media who don’t want to talk about the brilliant sandbox that Second Life is when they can create seedy headlines instead. This is why people don’t realise there are Orcs in Second Life!

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February 12, 2014

LindeX Trading Limits Changed?

LindeX trading limits appear to have changed, without announcement, this month. Back in January someone on the official forum asked why one of their accounts had limit of buying USD$30 whereas the other account had a limit of USD$2,500.

However as things stand today, there is no USD$2,500 level, it’s USD$2,000. These limits are for residents rather than business owner accounts. The same USD$2,000 limit also applies to how much one can sell in a 30 day period.

This appears to be another unannounced change by Linden Lab and one has to wonder why Linden Lab are quietly going around changing policies without seeming to want to tell anyone.

I don’t know if any of the other limits have changed, but where this could be problematic is if someone has been selling around USD$2,500 a month worth of Linden Dollars and now finds themselves limited to USD$2,000 without any notification or worse, if they’ve been dropped down from the business owner trading limits.

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February 11, 2014February 11, 2014

Linden Lab Provide Tax & Account Documentation FAQ’s

I’ve previously blogged about the confusion regarding Linden Lab’s requests to users regarding tax and account information. A big part of the confusion came from people being sent requests for information that they had never been previously asked for by Linden Lab and wondering what it was all about and what exactly they needed to do.

Yesterday Linden Lab posted an updated blog post about the issues, but more importantly that blog post includes links to two very useful FAQ’s:

Linden Lab Official:Required Tax Documentation FAQ

Linden Lab Official:Required Account Documentation FAQ

As you can see there are two links, this is because people can be asked for additional information for different reasons. The tax documentation is a requirement via the IRS and as explained in Linden Lab’s original blog post, will be sent when people reach certain transaction thresholds via processing credit and sales on the LindeX. Linden Lab are required to file a 1099K for US residents who make more than 200 transactions and those transactions in total are above USD$20,000.

If you’re not a US resident then LL are not required to file a 1099K on your behalf, but if you’re getting the tax documentation request it probably means you’ve crossed the US resident threshold and they require the documentation to explain why they didn’t file a 1099K on your behalf. They need to know you’re not a US resident.

One important point to note is that if you have several Second Life accounts, their combined activities are counted. There are more important points to note, merchants should familiarise themselves with these requirements as one day, you may need to provided information to Linden Lab.

Another important point to note is that the 1099K Linden Lab file is not the same one Paypal will file. There is going to be some double reporting, I’m not at all sure what people will have to do in these circumstances but I’m sure the IRS will be able to help.

Whilst looking into this issue I discovered this was a standard threshold on services such as Paypal and Steam too, so this is something that has been on the cards. The difference was that Paypal and Steam provided a lot more information on this matter, so it’s good to see Linden Lab providing a lot more information now.

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February 10, 2014

Introducing New Users To Land Beyond Linden Homes

Mr Altberg is apparently late getting to the office today, so I’ll wish him luck with his delayed flight and hope that he doesn’t have to work too late to make up for it. There has been a lot of commentary, advice, queries and so forth for the new Linden Lab CEO. Amidst all the talk, hope and good will a comment about Linden Homes and premium membership struck me:

Maybe I missed something when I signed up for Premium in May 2013, but I don’t recall ever being offered the option of 512 OR a Linden Home. It was more like “welcome to Premium membership, here is your Linden home, pick the one you want.”

Linden homes work well, they have really good occupancy rates and people are obviously ok with the process of finding and selecting one. Indeed I can recall posts about there not being enough availability of Linden Homes.

One bonus of a Linden Home is the extra space and prim allowance you get because of the way they don’t actually sit on the parcel your prims do. Another bonus is that there is no cost for a Linden Home parcel inworld.

However where matters get a little foggy is that people don’t seem to understand there is another option, that of acquiring a blank mainland 512 and using that instead of a Linden Home.

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February 8, 2014

One Small Step For An Avatar, One Giant Leap For Virtual Worlds, One Black Hole Still Exists

On the 10th October 2007 the Reuters news agency in Second Life published a news story : IBM, Linden Lab seek open borders for virtual worlds.

IBM and Linden Lab said on Tuesday they will work on ways to let people use a single online persona in different online services.

Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages.

The idea was that you’d be able to create an avatar in one virtual world and take that avatar to other virtual worlds. This was an extremely interesting development. There’s a quote in that article from then Vice President of business at Linden Lab, Ginsu Yoon:

“When you talk about avatars going in and out of virtual worlds, we truly believe that expands the market …..It’s not a situation where there is a fixed pie and everyone is fighting for slices. It’s really key to making the market bigger.”

So Linden Lab were interested and within a year, further exciting developments would be unveiled. On the 8th July 2008 … I think .. American dates are arse about face, yes I’m sure they mean 8th July 2008, anyway on this date, Hamilton Linden revealed that a major breakthrough had been achieved in Virtual Worlds :

This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007. These are still early days, however, so amid all the excitement, we thought it would be helpful to clarify exactly what we’ve done — and what still lies ahead.

There was even a video, directed by Torley. The existence of the video of course led to accusations that the whole thing was faked, that the OpenSim grid landing never really happened and people pointed out that a flag was waving when it should not have been as there is no air in the OpenSim atmosphere. Others suggested that there should have been a crater or at least some imprints from the landing from one distant virtual world to another. However I disagree with the conspiracy theorists, this really happened and here’s the video to prove it:

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