Existing users, 
...not what it says and... - Gwyneth Llewelyn
1) PayPal/Credit card verification is just to check on your age. Basically, if you're under 18, you'll be routed towards the Teen Grid (for the ones in the 13-17 age segment), if you're 18, you'll have access to the Adult Grid. The only legal way to do that is getting the required information from either your credit card or PayPal. That's why you need to use either to create your account.2) While accessing is for free, Linden Lab is a 3D content hosting provider. If you wish your content to remain accessible on Second Life after you log off, you have to pay for the privilege. This is where Linden Lab makes their money from. As you might imagine, it costs quite a bit to mantain a 1000-server farm and the required 60+ staff members to run and operate it. Be glad that you can access that all for free! How many companies allow you to do the same??
3) From a long examination of messages related to Second Life posted elsewhere, I can only say one thing. The 100,000+ happy users have no more time left to tell their experiences on the many many websites. Most of them concentrate on their Second Life-related blogs instead ;) or are simply too busy having fun to make any comments elsewhere.
By contrast, the 100 or so people that I found out in about 20+ websites, voicing their hate messages against something they never really tried out, seem to have free time enough to make half-rude, half veiled comments. I even found someone in one site blatantly lying about "his account being cancelled without reason". When confronted with the facts and asked if he was lying or not about his "experience", he just answered "everybody is entitled to one's opinion". Sure. But these are public boards, and readers interested in having information are unable to know what's true and what's not.
So far, after 18 months or so, I just read 3 (yes, three!) posts of very discontented people who managed to write a consistent and fundamented view on why Second Life does not interest them. We're lucky at VersionTracker to have one of those posts. Their arguments are well-thought of and reasonably to the point. They also happen to be quite right in several points, although, to a degree, what they said might be true of earlier versions (Second Life is constantly improving).
So, these are the odds — 18 months, 100,000+ happy users, 100 inflamed, anonymous users who post unfundamented messages ("just their personal opinions") and 3 very well written negative appraisals of Second Life, fundamented and correct to the point. That's a pretty good record. While it's impossible to please <i>everybody</i> — whom are you going to believe in?
Please understand that I'm never claiming that Second Life is <i>perfect</i>. It has <i>lots</i> of flaws and bugs. It has a steep learning curve of about a week or so. Things could run smoother, and the client viewer should be much better at guessing your computer's settings and be more conservative with those (it tends to overestimate your computer's hardware and believe it can be used with higher settings — which you have to painfully reduce, step by step, until you get a good experience). It should also deal better with faulty drivers and older cards. Don't use it on an eMac or iBook with a 32 MB graphics card and 256 MB of RAM — it simply won't be any fun. All these comments, which were reported here and there, over and over again, are <i>true</i>. Nevertheless — you <i>can</i> use it on a miniMac, a G4 iMac or PowerBook. You just must be very patient and tweak both with the settings and make sure you're running the minimum possible number of applications at the same time (no Dashboard!).
I understand that people don't have patience these days, and expect their old 750 MHz G4s with 128 MB of RAM to get 80 fps on a free virtual reality platform. Well, this is the real life — you can't.
Sunday, December 18 2005 @ 12:28 PM PST
...not what it says and... - Aetnaria
They have Paypal/credit card verification to help establish an age minimum. Mine was charged nothing when I verified with it.Reply to This
Tuesday, November 22 2005 @ 12:19 AM PST