Ciaran Laval

December 2, 2012December 2, 2012

Tyche Shepherd’s Private Estate Survey November 2012

Tyche Shepherd has published the findings of her November 2012 private estate survey, which took place on December 1st. The survey uses a random sampling of 5,000 private estates to draw its results.

I’m not going to publish the findings in full, as Tyche already does that, however I’ll highlight a couple of points. The survey estimates that there has been a small drop of 0.1% in terms of tier income this month, down to US$4,316,000 +/- US$54,000, whereas last month’s estimate was US$4,319,000, so it’s down by around US$3,000. The survey uses known grandfathered rates for its results but doesn’t include any academic discounts or obviously, any deals between Linden Lab and landowners as these aren’t public knowledge. The figures are also rounded down to the nearest US$1,000.

The top ten landowners account for 27.4% (+/- 1.2%) of privately owned land, which is down 0.3% since last month. The movers and shakers seem to be Zoha Estates, who are estimated to be up 0.5% and RGF estates who appear to be down 0.8%.

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December 2, 2012

World’s Collide As Virtual World Resident Takes To The Stage

So a man walks into a bar, he drinks a couple of pints and then along comes the singer, her name isn’t Pearl and she’s not standing up to play the piano, although her job is entertaining folks. Now there’s something familiar about this singer, but he can’t quite figure out what until he hits a Kevin Bacon moment and he realises this singer is Lady Sakai’s mate!

Now fortunately it’s way too early in the night for alcohol to be giving the impression that a Second Life avatar is on stage. However there is concern that a paradox may be caused in the lines of time, space and virtuality that could cause one world or another to implode.

He glances to the stage where the computer running the backing tracks has broken, uh oh, is it all going to go tits up here in the bar and I’m not even drunk yet!

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November 30, 2012November 30, 2012

Unhinged Merchants – A Look At Ailsa Muliaina’s AMU

This City of Heroes shutting down business has upset me more than I thought it would, I haven’t played for a while! Although it would have been nice to go back for a last hurrah. Anyway, let’s go back to Second Life for another look at Unhinged, which made the destination guide as a featured event. The fundraising side has been quite successful so far. I’ve covered some of the partying but I haven’t covered the merchants, yes you can shop at Unhinged too! There’s plenty of time to shop too as the festival runs until December 15th.

Now I don’t do fashion, so I picked art. I don’t do art either, I’m artistically challenged! However my eye noticed that Ailsa Muliaina had a stall there, well I got the blogger pack first, then I went to the stall! Aisla, whose inworld brand is AMU has a set for Unhinged:

An Image Should Be Here — AMU Sketchy Gatcha

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November 30, 2012November 30, 2012

City Of Heroes – Going Dark

The residents of Paragon City will after tonight, be wondering, where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods? Where’s the street wise Hercules to fight the rising odds? Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed? The answer of course will be that they have all been slain by the corporation, it’s always the corporation that gets you in the end.

City of Heroes, the first super hero MMO and arguably still the best, pulls its plug tonight, to much dismay from its remaining userbase and stirs the memories of those who particpated in the past.

Originally developed by Cryptic Studios for NCSoft, City of Heroes launched in the United States in 2004, to high praise, coming to a computer near you in Europe in 2005. City of Heroes wasn’t the most challenging of MMO’s, but it was fun, lots and lots of fun, but it has been around for quite a while now, many a company would be happy that their game was still allegedly viable eight years after launch, but not NCSoft who decided enough was enough.

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November 29, 2012

Scaling Down To Save Tier Requires Major Collaboration

Another interesting coment came up from Inara Pey’s blog post (see previous post for link as I don’t want to spam pingbacks). Adomaw Lupindo raises a really interesting point about tier and scale:

Do you think that LL’s Mesh discounting was an indirect way to offer tier reductions without changing their product pricing scheme by passing on the work to the content creators? I’ve asked the opinion of an estate manager and what that might mean and it was pointed out that even though people could in theory cut their prim needs by a max of half—it doesn’t give them more or the same amount of landmass to play with that on.

Linden Lab have, over the last year or so given us opportunity to reduce our land impact (prim count in old money) numbers. We can now create 64 x 64 metre prims natively in the client, whereas the old maximum was 10 x 10, unless you were using workarounds, such as megaprims, which as far as I’m aware were never officially supported. We can use tricks and techniques using the convex hull shape to reduce the land impact score and we can buy or upload Mesh. This means that your 117 land impact allowance on a 512m parcel goes a lot further, so can everyone tier down? I mean tier is the bugbear (and is too damn high). The answer of course, is no, not everyone, not even the majority I’d guess and that’s an issue of scale.

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