Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Answers to Questions

Actually the last thing the residents want is efficient packing into Ursula. An efficiently packed Ursula means anyone owning less than a full sim will be sharing their sim with the maximal number of other occupants with little or no room to grow their current land.

An inefficient packing however meas a much greater change that even a 512sqm landowner may end up the only land owner on a sim with both performance benefits and the ability to increase their land.

From LL's perspective - an inefficient packing may require much more servers up front - but the temptation to existing landowners to grow their holdings if surrounded by free space is high, plus eventually all that spare land will (hopefully) get sold off an auction.

Matthew

To Blondin and the lurking Lindens

I'm not going to quote the entire posts here, but I suggest that you go back and re-read what Brieanne Bomazi and Valerius Constantine have said over the weekend.

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To sum up, there are some damn good suggestions on how to make this land swap work better. First come first served is a terrible, terrible idea.

Please acknowledge this.

Yeah. Just don't do it.

Prostitution is not permitted most places in real life. That doesn't stop it from happening.
I predict that some locations on the non-adult mainland will end up being red-light districts. Landowners will want the traffic, and will come up with ads that don't contain dirty words.
For example "Meet girls here!!". They won't have poseballs or dance poles, just serve as a meeting place for freelance hookers, who will then go in private to finish. If anyone complains, they will say "What? I didn't do anything, they just showed up".

The term "escort" is itself an example of this from real life. Most places in real life don't allow advertising for prostitutes. So "escort" has become the innocent word that everyone knows means "hooker". Once we know what the dirty words we can't use in ads are, people will figure out a non-dirty word to use instead. After a while we will all know that "live girls", or some other phrase will really mean sex workers.

Its permissible in NUMEROUS places, just not in the US. its 100% legal in SL, and has been for YEARS. Now they are up and changing the rules.

507 uninterrupted posts?!? Where are you Blondin?

The straight path is usually the easiest.

Here you simply build Ursula and make it the G rated land where all new accounts form, all corporations and educators go, and the teens move into. There are no complications with current customers as there are no current customers with land on Ursula yet. There are no complaints from current customers because nobody is being moved against their will or bothered in the slightest. As more and more folks swarm to SL, Ursula will grow and grow. Keeping it squeaky clean is easy because everything risque is AR'd. No sexbeds, no ball pits, nothing naughty at all. Easy to enforce. Everybody wins.

There is also the winding path that is harder.

What you are doing, LL, is trying to force all the sex into one area too small to support everyone you'll have to move. Even if you do move all the sex businesses, you'll have a glut of unused land on the mainland - land that the corporations won't want because people can still cam into houses and see sexbeds there. Enforcement will be a Byzantine set of volumous rules and loopholes, covering the rating of the sim, what sims are adjacent, and whether it's a private home or a business (like the sex appears differently somehow.) And that's assuming people stay. For many, this was the last straw and they've gone to do other fun stuff with their money.

Your goals CAN be met by making Ursula the new G continent and making all new accounts go there. They may not leave Ursula unless they verify. This is easy to do, fast, fair, and gives your new users (and prudes) their happy new predicatable experience. Plus you can advertise it as "A New Continent for a new Generation entering Second Life!" which sounds fantastic.

The path you are on now will not seperate content, will not satisfy anyone, and will not give any users, new or old, a predictable experience. Your current direction does not and cannot meet your stated and unstated goals. Whether it's combining the grids or making the place look nicer for an IPO, this plan will... not... work.

There are many paths you can take. The easy path will accomplish your goals. The current path you are on will not. Many of us are shaking our heads, wondering how a leading edge company like yours can be so shortsighted as this. Your goal? We don't mind the goal of improving the grid. What we take exception to is this backwards and ineffectual way you are attempting to reach said goal. Only a loser decides on a course of action and then sticks with it regardless of the facts, evidence, or results, refusing to change his mind because then he'd be "wrong".

The only way one can be "wrong" here is by making your current customers quit.

I stand corrected, I meant prostitution is not permitted in most places in the United States. It still happens anyway.

And this adult content change will not eliminate it from the non-adult SL mainland either. It just means land owners will be more creative in how they advertise and run their land.

I understand that some *existing* businesses that are successful based on the current rules will lose money. But in the big picture of SL as a whole, the sex trade will still happen, and it will still happen all over the game. It will just look a bit different.

He's dead Jim, you take his tricorder, I'll get his wallet

I have not seen any comment about this whole move is a conspiracy to sell more land and get more tier, so I will post it.

They are obviously dumping a bunch of sims into the Ursula continent, adding to the total mainland size. They probably have a bunch of servers sitting around from the openspace regions that have closed. So as a business they want to put those servers to work. One way is to *force* people to use them.

Once the people forced to move have moved, that will leave a bunch of holes on the older mainland. These can now be bought by neighbors who have wanted to expand, but did not have parcels to buy. The left behind mainland sims will also be less laggy to the extent that busy places have moved out.

So, Blondin, if you are not dead, care to deny that this is the reason behind things?

That's probably the most sensible thing anyone has said lol

Got it in one, most likely. Costs them nothing to whip out all those Ursula sims, because they re-use the ones from the abandoned OpenSpaces sims. Someone was looking at a room full of abandoned servers, and said "If we force them to move in the name of making improvements, we'll fill all these servers up ASAP, and the land left behind will sell fairly fast. We'll get the servers back into use and make a shitload of money! Great plan! Make it so!"

This is a new economical experiment of the Lindens: creating income with no efforts.

And just who are they going to sell those remaining empty sims to? Me? Don't hold your breath. Any of us still rubbing our heinies after the Voidsim debacle? We're still awaiting the Prep H from our last dealings with LL, thanks. Corporations? If they are so worried about "gasp - the sexxors!" then they won't set a toe in the SL waters. Neighbors wanting to expand? The mainland is already a sea of yellow - if the demand was there, then the for sale signs wouldn't be. The Educators? You mean those folks who teach kids that aren't supposed to be on the Adult grid in the first place?

Just WHO will be buying these empty parcels on the mainland when all the naughty businesses have been moved out in the newest guise of apartheid? Everyone who wanted to create a place in SL and has the money to do it is already here, and LL is kicking them in the crotch, over and over again.

Their sea of abandoned and for sale land on mainland is about to become much larger. For while they will sell each neighbor maybe a parcel or two more, that's chump change compared to the costs of the new ghosttown called Mainland.

Maybe they'll bring back First Land.

Ah, but you see, a lot of the parcels people will be forced to abandon are prime real-estate. Not just little 512's next to a griefer sandbox, but large parcels in attractive, well-established "neighborhoods", many of which are in sims that virtually NEVER have an opening, because once you got land there, you held it forever. Until forced out a gunpoint.

I seriously wonder how many Linden employees are sitting there, with their alts and bots primed and ready, waiting to pounce on the Ursula landrush and flip land for mega-profits. Or to scoop up land in the most desirable Mainland sims, that will still have a decent resale value in a year or so, after this has all blown over.

First Land was a great idea, it just needed some safeguards to prevent abuse. A lot of people upgraded to premium accounts just for the land. It was a great way to learn building...especially low prim building.

In a way the demise of first land reminds me alot of what they are doing now. A blog announcement and a lot of ignored posts from the community.
Despite some great ideas from the community on how to implement changes to make it better for everyone, LL bulldozed ahead with tunnel vision. Oblivious to the community.

I hope I'm wrong on this and that Linden Labs are actually listening and not just trying to keep us mollified with nice words.

Linden Lab is still collecting tier on all that yellow land. When land starts getting abandoned and not selling at auction, it's time for them to start worrying.

ok ive been away for just ova a week any new news?

They are only valuable if there are people willing to fork over money to go there. And while they WERE long-established neighborhoods, giving the boot to those who helped create it also gives the boot to the established setup. If nobody is willing to buy them, then they aren't worth anything.

Me, I put in trees, games, decorative towers, mazes to solve and seasonal activities. I like my parcel to be enjoyable for anyone happening to wander by, following the "old school" way of thinking about SL. But when the Lindens jerk me out, then all the good stuff comes with me. I'm sure that's true of a lot of established neighborhoods; the "bad" stuff pays for the "neat" stuff that everyone enjoys for free. When a couple of the guys there take their stuff and leave, the neighborhood won't be quite the same anymore without the merry go round or the skydiving or whatever.

Good luck finding someone who doesn't know what's transpired in SL over the past year and has the bucks and the interest to purchase the land in the freed up land -- now with 33% less interesting stuff than ever before! LL had best pray that the incoming noobs have deep pockets and mental deficiencies.

That's an interesting hypothesis, and sounds fine to me outside the urban core (provided LL plans enough sims for one per Adult landowner or something like that). Now that landcutting is forbidden, the greatest risk of land going to flippers is gone, so I guess when I raised "close packing" earlier, I was worried about nothing of significance out in the hinterlands: if they stay forever for sale or unbid at auction, who cares?

The city is a different matter, however. Although packing that space tightly may induce lag, it will make it more compelling as an "urban" environment--one thing that's conspicuously lacking in current SL "cities" except at a few choice corners where several adjacent bits of land actually all have builds.

Statistically speaking, there's one born approximately every minute.

Yes. Over in Resident Answers, BustyDusty got a Linden to give her an opinion on her "big busted dancers" strip club. The verdict: Adult Content.

This is disturbing on two fronts. First, LL has STILL not provided their definitions of Adult Content, so this judgement is against some nonexistent, or at least nonpublished standard. Second, by declaring a strip club as "Adult Content", LL sends a clear signal that their "only the most extreme content will have to move" and "2 to 4%" assurances are nothing but gas.

Sure, a strip club is sexual in nature. But no actual sex takes place at most of them. It's all titillation and innuendo. This is "extreme sexual content"? Give me a break.

Also you missed the encounters of several posters with Linden Adult Access tester bots, and their attempts to find out just how well the new access system is (or, more accurately, is not) going to work.

Construction on Ursula continues. It's kind of like watching the Death Star approaching.

Well... Just how big busted are we talking about here? I've seen some that were downright scary..

They swing around on those dance poles pretty quickly and somebody could get a concusion if they stood too close.. Maybe they've qualified for 'adult' because of the potential violence aspect of the club?

Kenobi: "That's not a moon, that's Adult Content!"

Solo: "But there's too much to just be Adult Content, the size of it... it can't be..."

Luke: "I have a really strange feeling about this..."

Kenobi: "As if thousands of souls cried out, and were silenced... ?"

Luke: "No, no, I'm just... getting... really turned on."

Kenobi: "Use the Force, Luke..."

Luke: "Oh I am, Ben... the Force never felt this good..."

"No... No, LOOK! The texture finally rezzed all the way. It isn't A Moon! It's HUNDREDS of Moons! The LL Staff are all there, Mooning the Residents!"

"Well, they are in the right place for that, at least. Scotty! Full power to the Penii Projectors! It's PAYBACK TIME!"