The new Skill Gaming Policy officially arrived in Second Life yesterday. However it arrived with an apparent late twist to who is authorised to participate. The last blog post on the subject stated :
If you live in a jurisdiction where skill gaming is permitted and you plan on playing these games in Skill Gaming Regions in Second Life, you should not need to do anything differently. However, adding payment information on file now is a good way to help ensure you’re able to play as soon as Skill Gaming Regions are live.
However it seems that there had either been an omission or Linden Lab decided they needed to be a bit more careful regarding who can participate. On August 29th, after some venues had been approved, a change appears to have been made to the FAQ. The change to the FAQ is a sensible one and one that really should have been mentioned before. The change to the FAQ points out that to participate you must have current payment info on file and you must be 19 years of age or older. On top of this you can’t be connecting from a prohibited state or be a resident of a prohibited state.
The change to requiring current payment info on file is likely to throw those who wanted to go play on their alts, although those who are determined to do so know what needs to be done to allow them to access Skill Gaming Regions.
Now you may still see skill games in places around the grid that don’t appear to be approved. Some places may well not be approved whilst others are still going through the approval process. The latter are allowed to keep operating as long as they respond to Linden Lab’s correspondence on their application.
The approved operators, creators, games wiki page does not seem to have changed much since August 21st. At this stage it’s hard to fathom how many people actually want to run these sort of operations under the new terms. I still believe Linden Lab are doing the right thing by regulating this market but I do have sympathy for those impacted by the changes.
This appears to have been a testing process for both Linden Lab and applicants. However in a few things matters should settle down and then we’ll start to get an indication of how successful a process this is or not.
I am in Europe, Skill Games are legal overhere. When I attempt to teleport to a gaming location I get an error message and they won’t let me: “Teleport failed…..you must meet certain criteria….”.
Looking up the region on the map (Gaming and Casino), they are almost completely empty, while there usually always have been around 20-50 people.
Sorry, but I am still NEGATIVE about this new policy and especially about how the Lindens did it (No individual notification to the skill game operators, no clarification when asking support whether certain games might be considered a skill game, a huge price increase and requiring expensive attorneys for creators and operatiors).
You may need to enter your payment info again for access, the information needs to be current. This was one of the late twists.
I do have sympathy for those impacted by this new policy but they really needed to regulate this market. There are parts that I don’t agree with, such as some of the fees and this has clearly been a learning process for LL and those who have applied.
I still wonder if LL have had an enquiry or two from some professional gaming companies, they would certainly not want to enter unless the market was regulated.