Just another unauthorised virtual world fansite
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Fantasy Faire 2013 will officially open its doors tomorrow, although I may know a route through a secret passageway hidden in a mountain to get early access. This blog is going to go deep into Fantasy Faire and to get the ball rolling, Draxtor Despres has a special edition of The Drax files highlighting Fantasy Faire, Relay For Life and a discussion with Fantasy Faire organiser Zandar Greene.
So I decided to sell a sim and a homestead as part of my tiering down exercise. This went better than expected, for a start I hadn’t been paying attention and didn’t realise Homesteads sold on the second hand market considering Linden Lab’s USD$100 transfer fee put a big dent in the resale value, I didn’t think that would sell, but I noticed some past group notices and tried my luck and yes there is a market for second hand Homesteads.
However, Linden Lab are extremely efficient when it comes to sim transfers these days it seems, well efficient to the extent that they ruined all my plans by being so damn efficient! Things started well, three minutes after I went to the pub someone asked me if I was selling a sim, unfortunately this meant I was in the pub and didn’t see the message and by the time I got back to them, they’d bought a sim. However a new opportunity was spotted and someone came to look at my sim:
Mystery Avatar: How much? Quick! It’s for the wife.
Me : Twenty shekels.
Mystery Avatar Wife: Wait, transfer time, minus delay, minus Linden Lab having lunch, we’ll give you fifteen shekels.
Me: Done!
Mystery Avatar: What? What are you doing, We’re supposed to haggle.
Me: No no, it’s ok I’ve got to…
Mystery Avatar: What do you mean, ‘no’?
Me: I haven’t time — I’ve got to sell a Homestead.
Mystery Avatar Calls Wife.
Mystery Avatar Wife: What is it?
Mystery Avatar: This bloke won’t haggle!
Me: Ok ok, seventeen Shekels.
Mystery Avatar Wife: Are you telling me it’s not worth twenty shekels? You asked for twenty shekels!
Me: But you said no!
Mystery Avatar: Of course we said no, we’re haggling, you’re supposed to haggle! Tut tut. Now try again, we’ll give you fifteen.
Me: …….Fifteen? Did I hear you right? Fifteen?? This cost me an arm and a leg — do you want to ruin me?
Mystery Avatar Wife: That’s better!
Me: Nineteen and I’m giving it away.
Mystery Avatar Wife: Eighteen.
Me: Seventeen.
Mystery Avatar Wife: Sold.
Me: …….. Hold on, damn they’ve gone!
So we exchanged ticket numbers and went about our business and the bloody thing transferred in twenty six hours, that’s right, twenty six hours, not five to ten days!
I haven’t sold land in Second Life for quite a while. I purchased land many moons ago, when you could pay 15,000 Linden Dollars for a bog standard 1024m parcel. Those days are long gone and I knew that the land market had crashed.
So this week I looked at my bills, looked at the return I’m getting from Second Life and decided it mght be time to tier down. I’m exasperated that Linden Lab seem to have made no obvious attempts to address the tier issue, which remains too damn high. I know I know, cutting tier would be economic suicide right now, it’s better to slowly lose income than cut income too quickly and risk everything, yadda yadda yadda, but Linden Lab need to realise that their pricing model is outdated, that their options, are outdated. There aren’t enough payment options.
By the same token, my inworld business models are outdated, I haven’t moved enough with the times, the fact that my business models are no longer working is my fault, not Linden Lab’s. I mean sure, it’s easy to say they should lower tier, but they haven’t, so it’s up to me to do something about that in terms of moving on to a new business or pulling out. I’m currently in the middle mode of deciding it’s time to cut back. My decision to cut back is long overdue, especially as Linden Lab won’t budge on the tier issue, but ultimately, it’s my fault that my Second Life business isn’t doing as well as it once was.
So anyway, I decided to cut some parcels and test the water with selling some, rather than flat out abandoning, as I have tier capacity to hold parcels, it seems silly to abandon without trying t0 sell. However, I didn’t realise how flat the land market currently is. One parcel I cut, is admittedly rubbish, so I decided to sell this 512m parcel for L$120, it isn’t selling! Goodness knows what price the land bots kick in, although I will have time to test this.
The Linden Dollar is in many ways ahead of its time, it’s a micro transaction medium that allows people in Second Life to purchase goods and services without having to signup to a new provider everytime they want new goods and services and of course those micro transactions mean people can spend pennies electronically, something the wider Internet is crying out for, particularly in the newspaper industry.
However due to its nature of being a license to use, rather than a real currency, it hasn’t gained the traction it could. Which brings me to broadcasting. We have in Second Life, Second Life broadcasters. People will setup their own shoutcast stream, play music, provide televisions that show inworld shows, but why don’t we have film direct from a film company or music from an authorised radio station? There’s scope here for companies to not only delve into new areas but certainly in terms of film, there’s opportunity for those companies to bring machinima to an audience outside Second Life.
Fandor are a company whom broadcast films, they have a subscription based model but unlike some of the larger companies, they look for films the mainstream companies won’t, from their blurb:
“At Fandor we believe our job is to connect amazing films with audiences who will love them. Most of our films fall outside mainstream channels and we love that, because there are plenty of places to watch those films online. We specialize in shorts, independents, film festivals favorites, classics and international films.”
Many Machinima films are shorts and they most certainly fall outside mainstream channels. Fandor are also San Frnacisco based and have at some point, maybe still at this point, employed an ex Linden. There’s potential here but I suspect the mechanics aren’t quite right for them to make a deal with Linden Lab to allow their films to be shown in Second Life, although getting films made in Second Life to Fandor may be less of a challenge, it might just not appeal. However going forward I think this is the sort of strategic alliance that does have potential.
Continue reading “Official Music And Film Streams Aren’t Quite Ready For Virtual World Deals”
There’s something afoot and it involves missing prims! Inara Pey has reported the issue in her update on Interest List and object caching but the problem seems to be spreading and the location of choice to spot the missing prims appears to be Tempura Island, as exemplified in a thread on the forums.
Basically what happens is that some prims aren’t rendering, you’ll see something like this:
If you look closely there’s a girl hanging in the air where there should be a prim, well the prim is there, hence why she looks like she’s floating, she’s not. Now if you look even more closely there’s a Linden in the foreground trying to figure out what’s going on, you get bonus points for spotting a Linden in the wild these days.