Gachas to be banned in Second Life

Fionalein

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... and LL closed the thread for good...

Update: it just got paused again Patch just took a while to post a wall of text

Interestting excerpt of that wall:

Additionally, whatever comes out on the other end of this can no longer be called "gacha". Make no illusions or ways to circumvent getting around it, but "gacha" is gone for good; we should not call it that anymore going forward with any proposed idea to reincarnate it in some way. We have been seeing a lot of good suggestions on new, interesting ways to sell content, many of which we have given to our general counsel for further legal opinion. When we have that information back, the FAQ will be updated.
Guess we will see soon wether Nadi Vemo's Gacha in Sheeps Clothing idea will fly...
 
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Innula Zenovka

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I got into 3D modeling (blender) totally blind about 3 years ago and I've picked it up fast.

Turns out it's not as confusing as it would seem. SL's support for it is just annoying as heck, and the kind of things it requires you do in blender is not "normal" - 3D modeling is much easier than 3D modeling for Second Life's weird model format requirements.

I'm honestly shocked there are people who actually make rigged avatar mesh content. It's so non-intuitive.

But I do know LSL like the back of my hand - yet I know how to do no real world programing language.
So when someone comes to me asking for LSL work - I'm going to say yes no matter what it is. Just so I feel like 14 years of hyperfixation wasn't a total waste.

I will defend LSL as in my top 2 cleanest and most self-consistent programing languages I know.
But, in your defense, I know 2.
I had no particular programming experience or knowledge before I started with LSL, but I'm far better at anything analytical than visual and I've always found it easy enough to follow the instructions to make Excel, then Access and SQL, do pretty much what I want by reading the instructions, asking questions, and writing a bit of code.

I've never really found the Blender interface particularly confusing. It's more that I don't enjoy making models half as much as I enjoy writing spells and dropping them in inanimate objects to bring them to life (and several times discovering what the sorcerer's apprentice felt like when they run amok), so that's what I concentrated on.

I think I've used this analogy before, but I've always found natural languages reasonably easy to pick up when I put my mind to it and start to grasp their internal logic and structures, and I see LSL as a way of giving very specific instructions to very literal-minded prims. Then it's just a matter deciding exactly what I want them to do, and when, and writing their orders for them.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Yeah I fear that too, they already managed to make LL look into breedables.

Addendum: It does not seem to be the gacha fans alone. Apparently abolitionists like this Axel Naxos dude happily joined the bandwagon, ... voices in the thread already try to lure LL into looking into forbidden adult content. LL operates in India and Arabian countries. Any adult content is forbidden there, those morons have no idea what can of worms they are opening by asking LL to go after "that other" illegal vice before touching theirs.
To my mind, this isn't a particularly great concern. LL have the benefit of professional advice from both in-house and external counsel and it's that advice they're acting on. Their advisors have warned them about the legal and regulatory dangers presented by allowing the sale of gacha, not adult content, and it's their lawyers' professional advice they're relying on, not advice from disgruntled residents who are still at the anger, denial or bargaining stages of grief at the loss of their gachas..
 

Fionalein

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I really really hope he called it a "scheme" too when representing it to the lawyers... for the de facto new public face of the company Patch seems to be pretty careless about innuendos and subtle implications...
 
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Wesleytron

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A lot of gacha lovers over there don't realize they are making efforts to get fishing and breedables banned
I personally very much doubt breedables will get outright banned. The new rules could mean some of them might need to make changes to their primary product, but they will survive easily I think. So long as you know what the adult animal/fully grown thing you are buying at the time of purchase is going to look like, I don't think they will be affected.

However, if it's coat and it's eye colour or whatever other features it may have are random, then I do wonder if those could get caught by the gacha rules and may have to be changed, but I'd say that would be a fairly easy thing to do and it's doubtful, to me at least, that the creator's business model would be affected much by making that change.

There seems to be some talk about how paying for food to enable the breedable to breed might be seen as paying for randomised offspring which they think might fall foul of the rules, but that to me just sounds more like how they are marketed, and so long as the focus switches to buying food to keep the breedable you purchased alive I think they will be fine. At the end of the day, to me that seems more like just a kind of ongoing service activation charge, which isn't against any rules as far as I am aware.

As someone who doesn't do breedables though, I realise that there might be a whole economy built around trading the randomised breedable you got but didn't want that might be affected, particularly considering that Patch and the new FAQs seem to suggest that an item being transfer or not is significant, although I don't really understand as yet why that should make a difference.
 
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Noodles

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A lot of gacha lovers over there don't realize they are making efforts to get fishing and breedables banned as well, by showing how close they are to gachas.
Self importance can be killing.
Dang, I hadn't thought of that one. I don't do either, but at least that felt more like they were doing some sort of game. Though honestly it feels like some folks take the "fun" out of the concept with breedable farms that make RL Chicken farms look homey. But then there are others where the animals are wandering around little fields or whatever that seemed neat.

That said, I feel like Breedable could probably get away with it, since they ARE more. At some point, you can't just call every situation with an unknown outcome gambling. Spending money directly on a random object, gambling. Combining two things for a semi known set of possibilities after feeding them fake food? Eh... That's more of a game of some sort.
 
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Wesleytron

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Ah.. I totally misunderstood the concept. I was thinking more along the lines of throw your underwear into the laundry and then wait for the magic to happen...
 
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Innula Zenovka

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If anyone does decide to ignore Patch's warning and try to re-introduce gachas under another name, here's a suggestion

 
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Noodles

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Ah.. I totally misunderstood the concept. I was thinking more along the lines of throw your underwear into the laundry and then wait for the magic to happen...
Breedable Clothes, Bleachable clothes, same thing right?
 
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Khamon

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Honestly, LSL has always felt like a hack - and I used to code in MPI and MUF..... poorly documented and seems like a lot of trial and error.
Linden Scripting Language is a hack. Cory wrote the original interpreter overnight [o v e r n i g h t] then demonstrated it, with a garage door opener ha ha ha, for inclusion in the Alpha release. He did devote a whole entire week to the redesign that we use today. The first adaptation to LSL2 was the addition of lists and that took several months to debug. It only got hackier from there. It's a hacky hack.
 

Caete

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A quick observation I made: Is it just me, or are the most predatory of gacha creators indeed the ones who claim loudest that they will not to let down their resellers by re-releasing the gachas as fatpacks? I smell popcorn potential here, folks. Get ready for some Machiavellian twists in this apocalyptic drama.
Based on casual observations, I would not be surprised if a few of the resellers were alts or close friends of a few creators. I've seen full sets, multiples oi the rares, full sets for each body type up on the marketplace within an hour of an event opening. Maybe they were just lucky and super organized...
 

Caete

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Exactley - and once september starts the resellers are worthless, they won't be part of the future business plan anymore so can be dumped after they panic-bought all August.

One person we both know dumped 10K into a gacha machine because she wanted a super rare - she didn't even get a regular rare in those 100 pulls. Resellers of abusive gacha are part of the business model. They allow us to get the items we want (at horrid prices but at least reliably) but bear all the investment risk of the gacha flopping. They pay in advance and forward the cost to us by doing math on how much they expect to resell at all, how much they expect in exchange for their hard work and how long it will take them to break even. This used to work well until some creators started cranking up chances so much folks started giving away the commons for free right at the event because reselling a 100L pull common for a meager 5L on MP wasn't worth the hassle for them.

I admit the resellers are f*ed now, but stocking up on even more gacha seems a terrible investment idea for the near future.
But they won't be available any more!!! Surely I'll be rich come Sept 1st! I'm certain this time it'll work. I mean my beanie babies are almost back to being worth $1 !! /facepalm

Not that there isn't a glut of gacha stuff on the mp atm but it'll increase to insane proportions Sept 2nd. With many merchants pushing a month long all gachas up to 50% off sale and a minority saying screw that, all pulls 25L (Jinx, Culprit to name just a couple), everyone's inventory will be packed. It'll take years for the mp to sell down to the dregs. Hell as of this moment:
Used Items: 123721 items (lots of gachas amongst the trash)
Gachas: 901708 items

So we already have 1 million gacha items up for resell on the MP. I'd wager there's probably 2-3 times that in world with all the gacha shops, sim, yardsales.

Who will survive the gachpocalypse?
 
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