Suggestion: A General Questions forum

I, being new, have many questions about secondlife that don't seem to be clearly detailed anywhere on the site. It seems odd that these forums appear to lack a place where people can ask questions that don't fit in other forums.

Where do I go for answers when the FAQ fails?

Great idea! We need plain, easy to understand forum categories. As simple as they sound, "General Discussion" is simpler than "New in Second Life" and "Events" is better than "Parties, Soirées, and Assorted Happenings".

"Off Topic" is a category we still need. And as you have suggested, "General Help" would be a great one to have.

In the meantime, anything specific we can try to help with?

Yes.

I read through the faqs, and even tried google (Which yielded the 1.4 changelog - far more useful than the FAQ) but I can't seem to find-out:

A: What is the smallest area you can have? Is it the 1/512th sim listed as the base rate?

B: Are non-premium members able to purchase property, or is the free trial all that's resricted in this regard? If so, why?

C: If applicable, why is there no charge-free plot of land - such as an everybody-gets-one plot that's 1/4th the size of the smallest tradable plot?

D: Is there any way to make my client cache textures and data between logouts?

E: Is there any resource where I could find details about the game of a more technical nature? Such as the language and libraries used, which publicly-known algorithms are in use, how many servers SL is running on/what kind/what OS, etc...

F: If I choose not to be a member of SL, would I still be able to access these boards?

Omega Prototype asked:Non-premium members (like you and me) can buy as much land as we like; but charges start the moment we take possession of it. The charges are according to the tier structure you mention. At the first tier ($5.00 a month), you can own up to 512 square meters. So:If you can find someone to sell, you'd be able to buy as little as 16 square meters. The catch is that this will place you in the lowest tier, at $5.00 a month as mentioned above. Once you're there you will still be able to buy another 496 square meters with no additional charges (so most people end up owning something close to their tier limit). Note that if you go over your tier allocation, even by one (well, sixteen) square meters, even for thirty seconds, you will be in the next tier, and will be charged accordingly for that month.Somebody has to pay for all of those servers sitting up in San Francisco!

But there are lots of public areas in Second Life, including some that are specifically set aside for building. Although the builds are usually deleleted periodically you can copy your stuff to your inventory when you leave and then get it out and work on it again the next time.I'm not an expert, but I assumed that it did. Do you have a reason to believe otherwise?There are several white papers on the web site here; and searching through the back posts on this board can be useful. If you can't find what you want to know, you can always ask!Parts of them, some of the time.

What exactly are you up to, young avatar?

A. The smallest area you can own is 16m. But, the smallest tier you can pay for is 512m, so you would be wasting your tier if you only held 16m. 512m of land can support 117 prims.

B. Trial users cant own land. A Basic member (one time fee of US$10) can own land, but you will have to pay a monthly fee for the tier you select. The minimum is 512m for US$5 a month. As a basic member, you only get L$50 a week stipend, or allowance. If you choose to be a premium member, you get a L$500 a week stipend and a base land tier of 512m. Premium account is US$10 a month, or as low as US$6 per month if paid in a lump sum as an annual payment.

C. Everyone has to buy the land they own. Unless they are given land as a gift from another player. You can buy land in L$ or US$, in auctions. Most land is sold in world for L$. You can apply for a grant directly from Linden Lab and pay L$512 for 512m.

D. I dont think so. The world streams to you constantly, some things you have seen before load faster than others.

E. Maybe. This technology page is a start. Someone else might have a better answer.

F. Guests have access to some of the forum categories, but I dont think they are allowed to post.

To be brief:

I can't afford to pay for a subscription, and if there's no perminance save for my person then it feels too hollow to be worth the price of the flat fee. Hence the reasons for asking about land.

If I choose not to join, then I may want to visit the forums to keep tabs on things, and see if there is a chance of swaying opinion in favor of making the changes that would make membership justifiable. I also have no objections to offering and discussing suggestions for improvement to games that I don't play, and services that I don't use. (I'd say excepting playbalance, but that hardly applies to a social game.)

More questions:

G: Are premium accounts charged a different rate for land ownership?

H: Can groups share property? Is it considered group-owned or shared by the owner for purposes of selling, trading, and fees?

---Edit---

Ah, the downside of long posts.

When I asked question C, I was reffering more to USD costs than linden purchase price.

G. Premium gets a better stipend and a base land tier of 512m. If you need the in world money to buy clothes, boats, goods or services, the premium account is a better deal. If your a skilled builder, or plan to be, you can make most everything you need for almost zero money. You may need to upload textures to make your builds look unique. Texture uploads are L$10 for each one.

H. Groups can share land. Officers have the ability to sell group land. It is possible to be a basic member with no land tier and have a place to live on group land. You will have to search for the groups and see what they have to offer members. Working towards group goals could earn you some group land to live and build on. But, like I said, it depends on the group your involved with.

Amendment to G. If you dont need the in world L$, its a better deal to be a basic member and just pay US$5 a month to own 512m of land. The US$10 per month for premium comes with a built in base tier of 512m of land and a bigger stipend.

Everyone has to pay more per month if they choose to own more than 512m of land. It is proportional to the amount of land you choose to own. You can pay US$25 a month for 4096m, or as much as US$195 a month for an entire sim, with many degrees between these two.

If your ambitious, you can make and sell goods and make far more money than the L$500 base stipend you recieve as a premium member.

Great suggestion on the forums. IMHO they are a bit out of whack at the moment, because too many people post too much junk where it doesn't belong, and there hasn't been much enforcement lately. If there are any topic police, they are at the doughnut shop.

I'm a bit out of touch here, but don't they still have the $10 one time fee? I think the primary reason for this one time fee was to have and admittedly crude chance of age verification. Other than that, the more resources you consume (beyond just hanging out with other users) the more you have to pay. SL by comparison with some of the other system is fairly expensive (in servers) I think, with each of those squared on the map being run by a separate machine... what is it, over 100 now?

If you are unsure about what to do at this point I'd suggest just doing the one-time-fee for a while. there are some people (but I don't know who or how many) that are "renting" out land to people who can't buy land the normal way. In the cases I've heard about the "rent" is $0 (US money) and the land owners are either doing it out of good-will or to accumulate dwell bonuses (a reward you get for people hanging out on your land).

I'm even considering doing this as I am away from my SL PC most of the time and I hate to see the space go to waste.

Regarding the cache, I think a number of people have suggested they can do a better job of cacheing (sp?). It actually has improved a lot already. If you are a previous user of AW, or perhaps There, you are probably used to things being cache almost totally with only time-stamp comparisons being used to determin what needs to be updated. This is much harder to do in SL because everything is dynamic... that is, everything is subject to change by scripts that are constantly running. Ownership of content is also very important in SL. Comparing with AW (my earlier experience) people could easily steal each others creations by examining their own cache after using the program. It was also possible to MODIFY what was in cache to do mischievous things. To get into a "locked" building for example, you could replace a wall of the building that was in your cache with a non-solid version of the wall (or simply a much smaller object) and the server part of the system didn't know any better than to let you wander on in (because collision detection was done on the client machine). The goal of SL is to avoid such anomalies, which means there will always be a lot of chatter between your PC and the servers. In other words: It isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Regarding public algorithms etc, SL is not open source, nor do I think there are any plans to make it so. Much of the scripting that makes things work in-world is written by users though and some of that is publicly available (there is a scripting forum). Here and there you will find references to components that are used in SL (such as Havoc for physics). If you hang around long enough you will probably pick up more details by word of mouth than you are likely to find out in the forums. They forums are a bit hard to search because of so many off topic posts as well as the fact that words less than 4 characters (live AV, SIM, REZ, LCD) can't be used. It might be better to stick to the technical parts of the forums where there isn't so much clutter and just scan through the subject matter there.

PS: I realize that while this THREAD isn't off-topic, all the Q&As including mine are... but then, I'm not so sure whare they should go either.

*thumbs nose in general direction of the Krispy Kream*

Re: Cashe: Couldn't those problems be avoided by the client doing an MD5 check on cached objects? If it doesn't match, it gets redownloaded.

Also, aren't scripts compiled before use? Could scripts be cached seperately or not at all? Besides, many of the objects in the world are simple walls, windows, and scenery - no (custom) scripting.

Better cacheing would save on bandwidth.

Re: Public algorithems: I don't want to know the nitty-gritty, I want things like design philosophy. Besides, I said public algorithms - stuff that they didn't create in-house, but is well known digital methodology. ^^

Back to the title of the thread. I really want this forum. It would let me be the hero who solves everyones problems in one post. This would be great and would make the forums much more useful for new and old players.

It would make looking for answers easier too. Many ask the same questions and may find what they are looking for without even posting.

The way it is now, if I have a general game policy, TOS, interface, or land ownership question, it ends up in the general forum. And these are the questions that tend to be asked the most often. A questions forums would probably focus on these, rather than specific scripting and building issues, because those already have dedicated forums filled with pro's in those areas.

Edit: For Spelling

Even better, we could make the FAQ actually be comprised of FAQs. Currently, it's a tad... thin, so to speak. Googling "secondlife" and reading the changelogs is far more useful.

Except for one line on the account type selection page, I had no was of knowing anything about basic accounts and land - Even then, that one line left me with the impression that land was free (In $USD, at least) for premium and completely unavailable to basic.

Same here. I had to log into the knowledge base to find that. It used to be very nicely placed on the old signup page. The site is hard to use.

There's a lot of talk about land here, but Second Life is still a vast realm of opportunity and land is just a part of it.

All you get with land is a private place to build (and actually, only an occasionally private place to build), and a place to leave your stuff up for other people to see (and be able to find again) while you are off-line.

So, in theory, if you're buying land, you're going to put up something that people will want to find and see. Sounds like fun, but it's actually a tall order. I'm not there yet.

You do have a permanent inventory, where you can store the stuff you build while you're off-line. You're going to have to find a place that allows public building in order to work on it, but there are enough of those.

If you build something that looks really cool, I'll bet you can find someone who will let you leave it up on their property; but here's the catch: nobody is going to pretend that they think it's really cool just to be nice to you if they have to give up a piece of their land in the process. You're going to have to deliver the real thing.

There are even some people who draw money out of SL and make a kind of a living at it. They're all really good.

If you make really cool things that people want, they will pay you for them. If you've got something that will sell, you won't have any trouble finding a booth in one of the malls. If there's a shortage of land in SL, there are way too many mall booths, and they come cheap. But nobody is going to buy your stuff just to be nice to you. It has to be the real thing.

In order to play you're going to have to make a contribution. Money is the usual way to do that; but not the only way. That's part of what people mean when they say that SL is not a game. There's no pretending. At least there's no pretending about whether you're making a contribution or not.

By the way, I got pretty substantial bonuses for bringing new people into the game. I don't know whether they have changed or not; but I bet you could pay your 512 sqm tier fee as long as you were bringing new players into the game (oh, and don't use the option to pay in L$ -- you will get a better rate if you take your L$ out through GOM, convert it to US$, and pay the tier fee with that).

Why not stick around for a while and see how you settle in?

--Almarea

We've been whining to bring back "Off topic" and "General Discussions" since they were axed...I'm not optimistic.

Ah, but a place for newbie to go to get help is neither of those.

No, but if they put those back and let all the CR*P accumulate in them rather than in the various places it's accumulating now, then it would be easier to find technical answers, and also easier for them to justify deleting tons of meaningless drivel that makes things so hard to find.

OR, they could just eliminate the forums entirely and let the "fansites" sort it all out as mentioned over at sluniverse.com, but... I don't think they REALLY want to go that route. As chaotic as things are now, they COULD actually get worse.

Time will tell.