RC Questions

Assuming for the momment that your sim could be moved entirely intact with no risks, what is the difference between moving your sim and redesignating it, remembering this is a virtual world?

And as for the assumption, keep in mind that when I say 'support', that is the level of support I am talking about. This is virtual property. It should be possible to move without damaging it, and LL should be making these moves seemless. If they do not have the tools to do so yet, they should develop them before implementation.



Given the criticism I have taken regarding my opinions over an account when it was a couple months old, it seems unlikely a week would be considered enough time for a meaningful decision.

I dont think the issue of renting mainland from a landlord has been addressed fully. The presumption seems to be on mainland its an adult business that owns their own land that would be offered a free swap.

On private islands, if the Estate owner does not change the sim to Adult, then presumably some other estate will have adult land you can move to.

Moving is a big hassle, and none of us really wants to do it, but its gonna be forced on some people.

It is virtual land. Pixels. People are criticizing suggestions of censorship based on the fact that avatars are not real, but people are so attached to virtual land that the concept of moving from one plot of virtual land to another is considered a major issue?

Personally I do think that the arguement that avatars are only pixels have some merit, but I do not believe there is no emotional connection. As for the land though, it *is* just pixels.. why can't they be reformed in the same way with different location values?

Or the 20% of american teen agers who have a credit card in their own name. They dont even have to borrow ID to get Payment info on file, just use their own.

I am a little baffled why this thread has apparently turned into a discussion about/rabid defense of one specific, hypothetical alternate implementation of a ratings system and enforcement.

And I find it symptomatic that most, if not all, proponents of the new policies defend some imaginary interpretation of what the headline "LL restricts adult content in SL" *could* mean, not what LL is actually saying they are going to put into effect and enforce.

This is not to pick on Alexander; I just used his quote as a lead-in. I am, in fact, merely repeating myself from the very beginning of this thread (post #3).

I'm not going to argue the first part with you, because it is such an expansive and touchy subject. I will say that regardless of whether one can or cannot detach emotionally in VR environments, it is still a choice they make to act as a result of some kind of attachment they have formed. We choose to use Second Life, we choose to stay in a place that makes us uncomfortable... The entire process is opt-in consent.

So addressing the part I quoted above... The issue is that Linden Labs has specifically said that it is impossible and it is not an option for those of us who own less than an entire sim. Even despite that, there is no way I'm going to qualify for a free move. The last thing the Linden's want is for the entire mature mainland to move to Ursula. That presents a huge problem for the Lindens and those "potential millions" who wish to purchase products from content creators, but also dictate what they get to sell to them.

If Linden Labs said they would move my small plot of land, build in tact, to something similiar on the Adult continent for free, I would only then have the problem of lost opportunity to advertise a possible future product to PGers and Mature residents. Well that and friends that are not verified would need to be in order to visit.

If you can prove mineral rights, or even can prove an ability to dig for them, then I think you may have a point.

I do understand your analogy and I agree LL likely has liability, but shouldn't any claims be settled after the dust is settled and values are not being driven down by hysteria?

Rental property owner will get all the new tenants who want to be renting adult land from... where? Either there will be a sudden market for PG rental property and a shortage of adult tenants, or the tenants will decide to stay adult, or new adult tenants wil appear. The first would mean a temporary correction in the market as landlords adjust to the changed market. The second would be no change, and the third option likely represents a new influx of adult tenants.



That is not the stated intent of the new rules, and again, for the record, I am critical of LL's approach to the advertizing issues too. Those need to be resolved before the plan should proceed.

The extent of staff and customer losses, so far, is simply being assumed to be bad. Other aspects of RL adult entertainment which are more restricted than SL do just fine and still have patrons.

Not sure of the extent to which trying to set up PG sims next to adult ones work or will work... there are a lot of assumptions flying about, and the Lindens seem too clueless to understand most of the questions.



And that invalidates my opinion how? If I say LL should do this a certain way, that does not mean they will any more than if I joined the chourus of 'LL stop this' that they would suddently stop this.

LL not agreeing with me does not invalidate my arguements any more than it does yours or anyone else's.

From what I've been able to gather, the short answer is, "Yes". -And that's actually just as true for those who do own land.
The slightly longer answer is, "Depends on just what sort of events you want to run and how you want to describe them (but we're not going to tell you the rules until we decide you have violated them), and whether you can manage to go under the radar".

My response on that is that this plan should be shelved until they can facilitate such moves properly, unless legislation forces their hand of course.

Key words there 'if she puts her mind to it.' It is not a given that just because a kid will answer 'yes I want to see this, I *am* 18, honest!' equates to them being willing to go into their mother's purse or father's wallet, and using their parent's id.

No it will not stop those determined to get in, but it would stop many of those merely considering it.

Then please go vote for Jira 2727, which specifically is a call to halt this plan until such flaws are sorted out.

If I'm gonna be honest with myself, at this point SL is soured for me. I just can't feel excited about how these changes are gonna hit. The community will be changed forever. There is the scary notion that at some point Lindens could very well back out half way through the process (think open spaces sims) and some people will have gone through a lot of upheaval for nothing. There were people who bought open space sims full price a day before they decreased the cost. I can't feel confident that the same thing isn't happening here or some variation of "the shaft". The saddest thing will be if those "millions of potential new users" try SL out and then leave once again because this new version of clean wasn't clean enough.

The most/biggest emotional connection seems to be on the side of Linden Lab.

*We* have no troubles with pixels.

LL has troubles with pixels. We have *fun* with pixels.

Also there is our work and money involved and a product/ service we *bought* and for which we pay maintenance fees.

So, pixels or not: this is a major issue, because LL touches our work, art, expression and property. What they do is wrong, with or without our emotions.

But to repeat it: LL started to *feel* emotionally bad and sick with our creations, or just with the eventuality that we *could* create this or that, even while some of us didn't use the full spectrum of all given potentiality on mature mainland. Linden Lab feels uncomfortable with our freedom.

We are very ok with our freedom.

So, if you point on emotions, then point first on Linden Lab's emotions!

LL started to be in panic-mode and making trouble. Not we.

Linden Lab's emotions are here the problem.

We are ok with our creations/with our freedom. LL is not ok with it.

I don't own a whole sim?

I have neighbors who might not want to move?

I don't want all my land moved?

I want to stay close to some landmark or build that isn't going to move? That I paid a premium for my land to be near?

And of course it's still moot because your alternate plan isn't being implemented any more than my alternative plan of implementing SVC-205 and letting people keep their adult content in their privacy zone.
I wasn't sure it would be, either. As it turned out, it was. But I didn't say "a week", either, that just happened to be what they implemented back in the old days. Picking on it for that reason seems a little churlish, given your own position on the current plan.

If you notice, many of us complaining have been in SL for quite awhile, we know the effects caused by these decisions, so it's not hysteria, it's fact, proven time and time again.
If you can make something better in a good way, why not do it in a good way thats as little of an inconvienience to as many as possible. But then again, I'm pretty sure your someone's alt, I'm just waiting for you to say something that tells me who's.
Oh, and my "Mineral rights" are MY rights to do what I want with my land as LL has told me I could do for the last....going on 4 years.



Umm...what? maybe i didn't state it clearly enough for you....Rental properties will loose renters because of being forced to change to change to adult, if they have a mixture of adult, mature, and PG renters. If you want to sell PG, it's only common sense that if they want maximum exposure, they will need to move their shops to PG land, or rent a new spot on PG.



First the "Stated intent" of LL is all over the place. This isn't about "Advertising issues" Why the hell would a PG content seller continue to sell on an adult sim if the ower has to switch? PG people won't be able to go there, Mature people won't be able to go there. Only Adult.
Second, the market is going to be all over the place. Adult tenants will of course, all be forced to move to "Adult Land" If there is truely only a 4% that will be effected by this, then isn't it safe to say that 96% of the business will move to where their customers can actually reach their business, and only 4% would replace them?



It's not really assumed. Not if you know the track record these changes always have. Granted, not every place will be hit really hard, but most will. Mainly the main land places that will need to relocate. Some will need to completely rebuild. If you haven't ever built large scale, then that could be why you don't understand alot of the complaints about moving.



I think they actually know on this one and just don't want to admit it. Their largest customer is going to benifit from this, and they won't do anything to hurt her. She is their number 1 advertising tool.





When you say they could, and they have already stated that they won't, that invalidates it don't you think? I know this from experience. I don't know why your even arguing this part honestly, other then it just shows your inexperience with LL, or maybe, people will agree with you because you keep saying the same things over and over and over....kind of like brain washing. hmm

The reason they won't buy back land is because then your gone. Your no longer a paying customer. If they have yanked you enough that they have to refund you, they know your gone, and ain't gonna come back. If they make you keep land, they are still keeping you as a customer. If you sell the land to someone else, they make it a profit. If you just let it go, they make an even bigger profit. Win win for them if they won't refund you.

Anyways, I'm going to be out of town for a couple of days, have fun and play nicely with the other inmates.

People spend months selecting a parcel of land. They may spend YEARS collecting adjacent lots and modifying a 5000-prim build to match the terraforming. They negotiate with neighbors, they learn the local geography, they establish a 'location' for their businesses, they hand out landmarks, people circulate those landmarks, they develop an understanding of their traffic numbers over annual and seasonal cycles. It requires investment decisions, terraforming decisions, marketing decisions, building decisions and thousands of man-hours of labor. Then you (or LL) come along and blithely suggest that the person have his 'location' expropriated - to be moved somewhere else BY FORCE - based on some arbitrary US-centric sexual definitions!

This is far from the most important issue here, but it keeps coming up:
I just have to ask: Do you own Mainland? If so, for how long? Did you have to battle adfarmer/extortionists to recover the experience? Did you make friends with your neighbors--maybe even the ones across the sim border?

If virtual land is "just pixels," it's pixels that represent a lot of hard work, and pixels that have as much a social aspect as do avatars themselves, representing as it does a community of neighbors with histories of shared experience.

There are all kinds of pragmatic considerations, too: Lag. Land value. Specific infrastructure. Some of those may be preserved in a move and some won't, but the overriding fiction--the singular fantasy that fills LL's coffers--is that virtual "land" is *more* than pixels. That fantasy works really well, too, but every time LL forces its customers to see "land" as interchangeable server space, the more tenuous becomes that fantasy.

That endangers LL's bottom line. Maybe they've calculated correctly this time. Maybe they even got it right when they reformulated the OpenSpace product line. The fantasy isn't infinitely malleable, however, and each time they ignore that, they do it at their peril.

I was one of the lucky ones to get a forum suspension for speaking out although I did get an apology from her 7 days later after pursuing it.

But she was a lousy Communication manager, however that may have not been all her fault based on LL's MO

Can you let me have a copy for the SLapt.me wiki, I will of course credit you on the page, can you drop it to me in a notecard or email (In my 1st life tab) or let me have a link to it if thats ok with you

Presuming we accept a new 'Adult'/'Xtreme' continent as a given, Linden Lab has to overcome two major problems: 1) defining 'Adult'/'Xtreme' and 2) getting people to move there. Unfortunately, Linden Lab is taking a brute force approach to the problems. I believe there is a better way of doing things.

Give Ursula an 'Xtreme' rating. Don't use the term 'adult' because it is impossible to define 'adult' objectively. The only clear and objective definition of 'adult' throughout most of the world is legal age, usually 18+. All other definitions of 'adult' are subjective, arbitrary and problematic. While 'Xtreme' can't be defined objectively either, one intuitively understands it better as a subset of 'adult'. To use a fancy expression from Philosophy, the definition of 'Xtreme' has higher 'Intersubjective Agreement' than 'adult'.

With that in mind:

Offer land in Ursula to existing mainland residents who DEFINE THEMSELVES or their businesses as 'Xtreme'. Odds are high that most residents whom Linden Lab wants to move will do so voluntarily based on their own self-definition of 'Xtreme'. This saves a world of pain for everyone.

With that in mind:

Use the carrot instead of the stick. Offer incentives (fee tier for a year, an escrow service for internal parcel swaps should businesses conflict etc.). Market Ursula as a garden instead of a ghetto.

With that in mind:

Sell the remaining land via auction (full sims, various sized parcels) to all residents who are account verified (CC/PayPal/Aristotle/alternatives).

While this strategy is not perfect, I believe the desire for perfection thwarts most strategies. Far better, in my opinion, for Linden Lab to encourage 70% of the target group to move cheerfully than force 100% to move begrudgingly. With patience and a generous incentive structure, Linden Lab may see 95% of the target group move voluntarily within one year.

Thanks

Summary of Issue MISC-2727 Discussion:

(Thru comment by RichD Tomsen @ 01May09 11:13am, to be posted at slapt site momentarily)

Halt the implementation of Adult content changes due to the following reasons:
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1) The given reason for this change is the request of a small number of users. Making everyone who did not want this change adapt is unfair.

2) The discussion so far has missed the vast majority of the SL population. Blog and forums is only read by 5-10% of the population, and all discussion to date has been english only. Meetings have reached only a few hundred people out of an active population of 500K - 1 million.

3) New Adult mainland Continent has problems:
a) Segregation of Mainland into Adult continent while not requiring Estates to do so, or separating Mature and PG on the remaining mainland is unfair to one group,
b) Having different standards on different parts of the grid does not achieve the intended goal of "a predictable experience where you see what you want to".
c) Moving only businesses and clubs will lead to lag, as those are typically more populated than residential areas.
d) If Linden Labs guesses wrong on how large to make that area, it can lead to land speculation or drops in land prices elsewhere.
e) First come, first served move plan will result in inefficient layout. Small parcel moved first will block later larger ones.

4) These changes will have the opposite of the intended effect in several ways:
a) If there are customers to be found on non adult regions, businesses will seek ways to reach them. Making search less useful will result in more active means of advertising (spam). Unadvertised adult content will be located in high traffic areas, when people are not actively looking for it.

5) Verification system fails technically in many ways.
a) Many children have credit cards in their own name, and can thus verify via payment info
b) Others can borrow adult ID (with or without consent) and verify with it
c) The Aristotle database is known to be corrupt and accept dead people's ID
d) It is also known to fail with correct adult ID
e) Even after verification, some people cannot access adult features once online

6) Second Life does not properly explain adult features
a) Registration fails to advise people that the service contains adult content, and has a separate teen area.
b) 1.23 client messages when attempting to search for adult content are vague and do not explain how to activate adult settings.
c) Current and draft Terms of Service, Community Standards, and Knowledge base articles are out of date, confusing, and out of line with community standards elsewhere (movies and television ratings for example)

7) Search changes fail in a number of ways:
a) Mixed-use parcels cannot be properly advertised since the system uses a combination of region rating and word filters to determine what shows in the results. This forces stores to have multiple locations, or lose some customers.
b) Adult word filter works badly, and hiding what the actual list is ensures people will use it badly. There are many ways to get around the specific word list.
c) Only the input is filtered, the results still include adult items
d) Filter list unfairly concentrates on sexual terms, but not violence or drugs.

Definitions of maturity levels and how they are to be applied is unclear.
a) Private vs Public is poorly defined as of yet, but only public adult content is being asked to adapt.
b) Words in search, words used elsewhere, the objects referred to by those words, and the actual activities are all different.
c) Answers provided so far by Linden staff contradict each other and published and draft documents.

9) Land was sold with certain product features, and to change them after sale is an unfair business practice.

10) Offering move assistance to only some people is discriminatory.

11) Existing rules are poorly and variably enforced. We don't have any expectation that the new rules will be handled any better.

Consider the following alternative actions:
-------------------------------------------------------

12) Linden Labs now offers private grids. Let those who want certain restrictions or special features move to a private or alternate grid with those features, and leave the existing majority who are happy with the way things are alone.

13) Actually survey the player population and find out what people want, then provide those things

14) Make mainland vs estate changes comparable by:
a) Creating new PG rated continent, and/or
b) sorting and rezoning existing mainland to create similar rated blocks, and/or
c) Allow re-rating of mainland regions to adult

15) Allow parcel flagging as adult rather than region level, so that people don't have to move. Hide objects and avatars on such parcels from players who are not set to adult level in the client.

16) Allow a lot longer for voluntary moves to new regions, before making new behavior mandatory.

17) Allow anyone affected by new maturity definitions to move on the same basis as some people are being offered now. This is more fair than offering it to some people and not others.

1 If the intent is to restrict underage access to adult material, provide parental lock feature.

19) Provide a content filter. Currently nothing stops an avatar wearing a prim body part, or going naked, or activating an adult animation anywhere, and these changes will not make it any different. A content filter would at least allow people not to *see* such things if they don't want to.

20) Provide adult activation by other than online means as an added layer of security: physical paper mail to the account holder's address as confirmation for example.

Brought to you by SexGen(R), Xcite(R), and many other fine Adult Products....

....and Here's Lex!


That's just a joke, guy. I've actually posted more times than you have in the thread, and you are only the #6 poster, but seriously, we have reached the point where we are just going in circles. That's why I just posted a summary of the JIRA comments to the JIRA issue itself, here, and on the Slapt Wiki. If I had the stomach to mine all 23,000 forum posts, I would try and summarize that too, but I dont have time for it.

There comes a time to stop talking and move on to the next step. I think the next step is engage the Lindens and the wider community. Tell them:

"Look, we have talked it over, and we don't like your plan. Here's why, and here's what we think you should consider instead. You can agree with it, or say no, but you can't say you didn't know what we wanted or never thought of it, cause here it is. - Signed, your customers"

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-2727

Now has 4136 votes, making it the top all time issue.

I dont expect it to change anything (i'd love SL to be a democracy) but at least we made ouselves heard.

Gomez

Somebody should screen shot this and add it to the SLapt wiki to keep them from changing it later and claiming it was never that, should people decide to sue.