Friday, April 3, 2009

The Continental Adult

There is a lot of bruhaha about the new “Adult Content” continent that is in the works over at ‘The Lab’. All in all, I don’t see what the fuss is about with the populous in general. Sure, some content creators are gonna get the shit end of the stick, and I feel for those people – truly. You try to carve out a nice little business, maybe not so much to actually earn real money, but to at least have your SL pay for itself, and them WHAM! the Lab brings down the hammer on ya’.

Several questions have been raised, and took a while to get answered, at least in the forums. Whether the answers the Lab Lackey’s gave in the forums will hold out and become fact remains to be seen. My biggest question, which I’m still a little wary of, is what happens to land owners? What happens to my friend, who owns a region in which sets the Forced Feminization University. It’s a nice region, very pretty, bordering the water. It has a beautiful inlet. I live there, and love to sit on my dock, and watch my whale and shark swim and play in the water, listening the the soft lapping of the waves against the dock, sipping my morning coffee, or sunbathing. What’s going to happen? Will she be required to purchase new land on the new continent? Or will The Lab swap her out new land square meter for square meter. Add to that the question, will she get land that borders on the ocean again? Or will they stick her in a mountainous region (or somewhere else where my poor whale and penguin will find a hard time surviving)?

Here’s the way I look at it. The Lab created this place – this wonderful world where anything can happen. I truly appreciate their efforts. Sure, I might bitch and moan about the quality of service and what-not, but  all in all, it is a wonderful place. With that in mind, It is my contention that this world, and everything in it belongs to The Lab. Sure sure, they give the spiel about ‘your world your content’ or whatever. But in reality, they can remove ‘your creation’ with a few clicks of a mouse button, by simply deleting it from the data stores – case closed.

So, it’s The Lab’s world, and their business, and I believe they are free to do with it as they please. If they want to move all the adult content to one continent, so be it, let them move. Hopefully they will do all the heavy lifting, but I would not hold my breath for that. I know, for instance, some of the items at FFU were non-transferrable, and still belong to the previous owner of the region, she left them there for use. What happens to those items? Will they just be gone forever? It is a shame, because while the current region owner had edit privileges, that does not include moving them across continents I don’t think.

Another concern is the quality of service on this new continent, and quality of land. Will they just toss out a flat barren dessert and say ‘have at it’? Or will they actually try to make something people would want to be on? No word on whether the new land which will house my friend’s region will have water, or if it does, will it be big enough to support my whale, shark and penguin. One encouraging thing they’ve said is that they will not double bill people for both pieces of land while the people are moving their stuff.

Some people who have successful mainland regions are moving to private islands. That has made me wonder if that is something The Lab considered, and factored into it, get them a few more bucks in the process. Another thought that came to mind is if the regions of the new continent will be on new servers, or if their going to use older, less powerful, less reliable servers for the Adult Content areas. They are already segregating them, and those of you who remember the segregation days of the good ol’ US of A, will remember that the facilities for black people were very poorly maintained – if at all. I can’t help but wonder if they will do that with the AC land. Give it the crap hardware, and say ‘oh well, who cares’, even though they profess they do not want to get rid of adult content at all. Of course, when they banned ageplay the claimed to not want to get rid of child avs, yet last year they banned the child avs from the birthday celebration.

I can absolutely see why The Lab wants to do this. They want to, according to an interview with the CEO a month or so ago, allow youngun’s onto the grid – for educational purposes. Also, it would make for a more friendly business atmosphere, to not have a kidnap and rape facility right outside the windows of your corporate build. Plus, speaking completely selfishly, I would not mind being someplace far far away from the intolerant asshats who don’t agree with what I do, and how I do it, and think it should be removed from Sl post haste.

All in all, it’s going to be a good thing. I have no doubt the implementation process will be a complete clusterfuck though. And, by the way ‘clusterfuck’ is NOT a candy bar. There is no chocolaty Clusterfuck – peanut clusters with a nougat fuck center.* I’m sure there will be plenty of pissed off people during the move, but in the end, it is going to be a good thing all the way around. We get our own continent, where people have to be age verified or have payment info used – which I’m sure will cut down on the griefers – and people who don’t agree with the constant raping and pillaging and slavery won’t have to even think about it.

Thanks for reading, and as always, feel free to express your comments or criticisms.

 

*Thanks in advance to Dan Cook for not suing me for stealing his stuff.