Competition for SL?

unreal tournament is basically a garden variety 'capture the flag' first person shooter. its not a persistant world or whatnot.

LOL! I love that video! And now I can understand what he was screaming!!

But then again- are we sure he wasnt some underage German kid trying to get into Second Life??

Well we download everyone as we see it anyway, don't we?
And I suspect we could initially narrow down to 50 brick textures, 50 or so wood textures, etc.
How many of those textures out there appear to be duplicates of each other?

I seriously doubt whether he was actually playing a game, all staged I suspect.

That kid most likely is suffering from Tourette's Syndrome or ADHD. I have never known anyone with either, so I wouldn't know for sure.

I'll take that as sarcasm.

If the texture actually matches up with something else inside the cache it wont double load. However with clothing/skin it reloads as its a baked texture which needs to be cached as its streamed live downloading a new pack would be a major task for most people who dont have the data there to store that much information... The short just of it yes in a sense you are downloading it but only what you are caching is used for reference which in SL is limited to 1 gig of data (ok a little less then 1 gig but the point stands....) However downloading a texture pack each time you load in even without repeats would be a major hassle and everytime someone brought in new textures you'd need to download the pack.

This would also completely squash the permission system in its entirity for anything that is textured and would not allow the downloading of the skin/clothing files either way because if someone changed it would be a major hassle as they'd need to continually need to parse several textures in 1 go and bake them in the proper order which would likely put more strain on the client side of things. This is why most games are static you have the textures for clothing and stuff preset all the items preset lists of what they refer to texture wise and then load them from stuff that is currently on your hard drive hence why most mmorpg downloads out there that are larger are at minimum 1 gig after install some going as high as 8 gigs or so and these worlds dont have near as much data in them as the SL world does....

And yes about data back up it would be feasible but they'd need to entirely rewrite stuff and these are people that are guessing they know how the system SL is using is working so it's hard to say if it would work proeprly or not and let permissions remain intact.

does SL have anything to worry about? hell no.

SL and EU are 2 totally different types of game, and anyone trying to compare them have not played EU long enough to know what its all about.

the people here talking about "well i popped in a few times" and "omg its terrible to download", don't listen to them. EU is a fascinating game in its own right, but as mentioned here, these 2 different types of game both serve different purpouses. yes, the pull of EU is the posiblilty to make RL money. i also personally think that EU has a stronger cash economy than SL, because of its fixed rate of 10PEDS to 1USD.

i have played EU for well over a year now, and i enjoyed my time greatly. i have only just recently found SL, and i love that too. for very different reasons. EU has the best community in the world. everyone there is so passionate about the game, because there is real money involved. SL is just awesome, you can do *anything* you want in here. someone said here they were dissapointed because they couldn't build on the land in EU. wrong reason m8. land literaly goes for at least 10kUSD+, mostly way more than that (highest i've heard is 50k). its not there to look pretty. its an investment. owning land means charging hunters and miners percentages of the things they loot, so you basically get a daily income. the better you manage your LA (land area), the better the returns are.

there is a lot of discussion going on in our own forums atm about wether china coming in is a good thing or not. in sort, they are a poor country, and EU is a VERY expensive game to play. MA balance everything, and there is speculation about wether they're going to keep the economy as it is or alter it becaue of china coming in. they are being given their own plannet btw, which is what is so weired about it. check the discussion out at www.entropiaforum.com, as well as the game most there don't like SL, its prolly same here, but to those who like it, it is awesome

has SL got anything to worry about? nah, im here because SL has somthing EU can't provide. it'l stay that way.

zammy can i go d/l and play that game without needing to spend money? i'd love to give it a go.

Me too. The ability to upload your own creations. If SL goes into "corporate sensibility" limbo, there will be another SL-like platform along soon enough to scoop up the majority of their former population.

It may even be SL itself - the client is open source so LL can't control who uses that nor to which servers it connects. There is already an attempt to write an opensource server (OpenSIM) which is coming along at a reasonably pace, and with the client opensourced they can't be accused of reverse engineering to write that.

So if LL took an action such as merging the grids or banning all adult content, that might provide enough of a community to build their own SL based on the existing client source code and OpenSIM. What may be worse for LL, is that OpenSIM can in hindsight avoid all the mistake LL have made, and potential build a better SL (e.g. more resilient asset servers) than SL!

this is what i am actually waiting for.
ive lost all faith in ll. great product (despite the problems), but as an outfit LL leaves me sour. so im hanging out for a dutch hosted sl.

Do we really want a world full of techno dance clubs populated by blue-haired everlasting newbies?

Sorry - only joking - no offence meant! Actually, Damania and Amsterdam, the 2 best builds I've seen in SL, are both Dutch.

EU's main problem and why so many people dont like it is simply because its to hard to get started MindArk has no real idea what a friendly to novices to the game environment is about and its quite apparent. You say the community is great most of the players i ran into were quite smug when asked if they could help you had to take a day or 2 just to find out where to got to sweat stuff. Things cost to much for the average gamer and it becomes rediculous in any light to actually have a weapon because of the absurd difficulty involved in getting started.

Yes the set 10 PED > 1 USD is good but its also a bad thing and there are differences in the economy. You dont actually sell your ped to someone else from waht i've seen midnark themselves do however you aucition of Items for PED or USD. I was around the game back when it was Project Entropia Though i suppose the non ped > usd with other users might now of changed with the banking stuff i dont know im pretty sure it has still stayed the same looking at the page. Also the default price for weapons etc from Npc's and the like is set to an absurd rate for a novice to get started sweating to gain enough to buy a weapon let alone ammo can take days at a time. Its a shame really that MindArk doesnt make it more friendly to novice players.

And the main reason the people of EU dont like SL is because its not really a game you dont go out and hunt monsters and the like they are still stuck in that era. (took me almost 10 years to get over mmorpgs like that.....) I no longer see the appeal of them EU tries to be different but they turn people off with how you have to get started. If it were easier to get into it'd catch on alot wider.

I agree that SL has nothing to worry about for all the people screaming this or that is going to be an SL killer when you actually find the data out about these things they have for me for a good while now been a HUGE let down. I want to see competition for SL but it has to be real competition. Im not willing to give up ANY aspect of SL at all in something else that comes along I think that goes to say with most people here really.... Its not just scripted objects its being able to build in real time being able to make your own animations and textures and having several layers to do your own textures on your avatar. The body morphing the sliders allow and lots of other aspects that just if cut out would make me turn away fast.

EU may be good to the people that are heavily into it but its hard to get heavily into it because its to hard to get into as a new player. Needless to say i would as i said above like to see competition for SL but something that is going to be only in china or only on windows to me isnt direct competition especially with alot of aspects of SL (lots of mac and linux users in SL ) anyways. Enough of my rant both have their good points to the people that play them and MindArk could make things easier....

it is true, MA are very secretive about the mechanics of the game. this is because, as well as adding a sense of mystery to the game (remember, we are enhabiting a newly discovered plannet and there are many things yet to descover), if they told you how to play, you would get all the loot and this sounds pretty stupid, but nobody wants that: not MA, and not the other players. remember, this is a real cash economy game, so knowing the key to success is an extremely big deal. knowing what to hunt, where to hunt with what weapons, for how long to guarrantee proffit is a secret many would pay an arm and a leg for. so instead they leave it for us to try and discover how its done.

long ago, before my time, you did used to be able to sell your PEDs externally, and even auction precious items on ebay etc, pay through paypal etc, but with the way the ingame trading system worked, it was very easy to scam people, so to protect both the players and themselves MA stopped all that, and now only transactions can be made through MA. deposits and withdrawals are to be made through MA itself. they are also bringing out a new ATM card out that you can actually use to withdraw cash through an atm machine and pay with the card as though it were a visa.

anything that is bought from NPC's are actually rock bottom prices, and are bought for TT (trade terminal) value. ingame, EVERYTHING has a markup, except the tt items. the tt items are what noobs buy to get themselves started up. there are no cheaper items than the ones that reside in there. one of the rifles i consider the best ingame (opalo if anyone wants to try it out) costs 3.2ped (32cents isn't it?). if you sweat for about 5 hours, you will be able to afford that and enough ammo to go on a very small hunt.

this probably doesn't seem worth it at all to you guys, but the even the smallest mobs in the game can loot very big numbers. people in EU always complain every time a day old noob loots a 3kped exarosaur, or gets a 5k mining tower on his 10th bomb. now getting these is very rare, but it happenes often enough to make the system fair. remember, sweat is worth RL money too (tiny amounts, true, like your camping machines in SL), so you can't expect to have everything laid out for you.

one important difference between SL and EU is that in EU, almost every action you do costs money, wheras in SL you have an infinately wide range of things to do for free. this is because almost everything in EU has the potential to make you money, wheras in SL, only the very smartest of ideas in SL will get you somthing for nothing. these games lie on the opposite ends of the extreme, and is somthing which very few ever understand.

it also allows them to unfairly game their own system, like limiting the success of sweating as time goes on, so n00bs trying to earn money without depositing US dollars find it so increasingly tedious and difficult that they get their credit cards out. (and i'm not talking about dry animals here but...

"The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
The sweat aquiring failed
You took 86 points damage.
You are dead."

the ability to do so is returning, thanks to the banking franchises sold to Anshe Cheung and others. Anshe is already converting PEDS to Lindens and vice versa (minus a transaction fee).

I still say that if MindArk wish for EU to be seen as anything other than a Casino dressed up as an MMORPG, they need to completely change their business model. They might even get popular. People criticise the number of concurrent users in SL considering the actual number of residents, but Entropia Universe has 600 concurrent users online at the busiest times - out of an entire userbase of 600,000 - which is seriously abysmal by comoparison. Do they even turn a profit?

(When I joined SL in May 2006, they had around 150,000 registered users in total and concurrency maxed at between 6000 to 8000. Compare to the above.)

Yep that pretty much described my experience a few times in the 3 times I logged in there, and the weird key layout had me stuffed too, I spent the entire first session running against walls till I ended up out a door and running off unstoppably through forests of things higher in level wounding me, till one of them finished me off.

That was my experience as well. I ran around for about 30 minutes, talked to a couple people (their chat system sucks...chat from someone 100 yards away comes in as clear as someone standing next to you) and tried to get sweat for about 45 minutes, then logged out and uninstalled it for 10 minutes.

Sure didn't make me want to whip out my CC!

The sad thing? Its easier to get sweat now then it was a year ago but its still hard as hell lol. Yeah EU will never get popular without a change its a very specialized circle of Mmorpg players that enjoy it and know heavily how to get into stuff. Honestly though for most people they need to whip out their credit cards or they wont really get into it. Sitting there for 5 hours gathering 600-700 bottles of sweat to trade in for enough PED for a weapon is kind of rediculous and you can make money in SL without being overtly smart its just a matter of looking for it....

I take issue with the concurrency stuff that people get mad at LL about..... WoW has 8 million signups but they dont give a concurrency rate to you or the like. All game companies do this type of thing boast number of signups etc... Number Of Logins over the last 60 days is usually a bit more active or averaging the concurrency of a month to figure out what the average concurrency is. Consider EU or Back in the day Project Entropia has been free to play for a long while now. Alot of people have alts put thru to diff email accounts etc. There is no real accurate account thing. (even some people on WoW have account alts... not jsut character alts). This is how the mmorpg market and mmo market generally work....

i am actually in the middle of withdrawing my investment from PE. not because i've had enough and want to pack it all in, but because i've found that i am just as capable having fun w/o a CC and living on peanuts. and btw, the sum of money im goingt to take out is bigger than the one i put in.

i know that numbers are not at all impressive when adding up the people who regularly log on in there, but deposits have actually increased lately (MA have recently released their financial reporty bank type thing, the one all businesses do, im not much into that stuff so i don't know anything else other than that..).

86 damage eh? what were you sweating lmao. no wonder u were outta there

I think the thing is its so absurdly hard if people want to get into it alot and actually make money from it they need to invest. When you have people like Anshe making system to work from EU to SL yeah stuff is going to go up. But for how long?? The main question to ask is what will the future of these worlds hold Especially if this Bragg guy wins his case. I dont know if he realizes it or is bitter or what but what will happen from him doing this is a game like EU or SL where someone invests money in the game and then does something to get banned (like getting auctions that arnt yet up for official auction thru a page that may of been published but not available for public view and then being caught....) will try to run around and sue these types of companies. Thats what i find absurd about this.

Clamoring for rights that he really doesnt have that if the site had a firewall in the back end would of been considered a hacking attempt and using a exploit (or in this case a work around to gain access to a page not in public view) yeah ok he had money invested but HE was the one that did something to put his account in jeopardy. Its his own freaking fault he got banned and honestly as a lawyer the guy should know better really... (im only 21 and he has to be old then me and I know better) And what about the companies right and other consumers that dont want to deal with idiots running around being able to cause all kinds of problems for other people and the company. The honest and right thing to do for the guy would of been to report the explot to LL and not take advantage of it instead he chose to take advantage of it got caught and paid the consquence.

As far As competition for SL goes i dont know that we will see it for awhile especially if Bragg does win this case because it will be to risky for another company to try and upstart and have to deal with similar antics from someone like t his. The fact is if any part of SL is cut out of something designed to compete with it it simply wont compete.....

LOL...yeah I posted about Hipihi & Entropia last week, but it was in some guys' Blog and had the keyword "There" in it, so I guess nobody looked at it.

When you get to the newbie areas, the only thing you can really due to avoid "sweating" yourself stupid, is to buy armor & weapons w/ real $...I played for about 3 days and got rid of it.

I wonder how the exchange rate is between Entropia & SL? I might check that out later...

Uh...do you know what the case is about so far? The only things that have gone against LL so far is that the judge ruled that the customer doesn't have to continue in arbitration because the arbitrator is also one of the involved parties.

Most companies already know to get a neutral 3rd party for arbitration...many go through the BBB. This is just a silly mistake on LL's part that doesn't really have much effect on the overall case. It basically says "no, I CAN sue you".

They also have ruled that Bragg CAN name Phil Rosedale as an individual defendant in the case because of his public visibility in promoting SL. Another mistake usually avoided by the CEO of a higher profile company.

These things don't spell ANYTHING for virtual worlds that it wouldn't spell for any other company.

I think LL will ultimately do fine.

1000 L$ = 35 PED

http://dreamland.anshechung.com/dse/dse.php?fct=PED_ACCOUNT

You might have to create an account to view that page.

To withdraw (or indeed deposit) PED you have to enter your Entropia avatar's name on that web page, followed by the amount, then login to the game and wait for an Anshe bank official to meet you at the New Oxford Teleporter.

And oh Zammy, I was experimenting on huge three headed things that seemed placid at that particular (80+ damage) moment. Upon revival, I returned to the scene of my death and he slammed me with 120+ damage before I could so much as fart out of fear.

I tried entropia about 6 months ago and gathered all this sweat and wandered into some area where there was a tax and the hours of work I had done went poof. I then gathered more sweat but then could not figure out how to sell it. I wandered around for another session and then gave up unsure of how to proceed. I gave it a good go and the scenery was kinda interesting, but I could not find a sole where I was and the people I did find all one of them didn't want to talk to me. So all alone with my sweating and dying and whatnot I kinda gave up. I was also borred as hell