The Alphaville Herald

Friday Night Lottery – 100 Sims Win Extreme Makeover!

by Pixeleen Mistral on 07/10/06 at 11:33 am

100 lucky winners get object free sims!

By Pixeleen Mistral, Herald National Affairs desk

Jeska Linden announces the lottery winners

Friday, Linden Lab took the extraordinary step of holding an impromptu world-wide lottery, with special prizes – or surprises – for up to 100 lucky sims. Each winner received not only several hours of grid downtime, but an entire free sim – or object free sim – with total removal of all builds and objects in the area. Sources close to Linden Lab suggest that the lottery was held to combat an epidemic of Grid Crash Fatigue Syndrome among the metaverse population. Experts say that after avatars have been exposed to several grid crashes a week over a prolonged period, Grid Crash Fatigue Syndrome – or GCFS – can become a serious public health threat.

After waiting for the now routine prime-time grid crash and recovery, eager Second Life citizens rushed back on to the grid to see who won the lottery. The Herald was contacted by several ecstatic Dark Life players who were lucky enough see their sim wiped clean. After the initial excitement of winning the lottery waned a bit, the players’ swords and shields drooped as they realized that there were no rats or castles – or anything else – in their sim. “WTF? all we have is grass here!”, exclaimed one happy lottery winner. As players thronged together they held a happy celebration saying “lindens r teh suxxor”.

While the Dark Life players pondered how to get loot from non-existent monsters, we were contacted by Jeska Linden, and then kicked from the game as the sim was taken down. Unfortunately, a few complainers spoiled things for everyone else by asking that their builds be restored – and so all the lottery winner’s extreme makeovers were taken away. It appears that while the Lindens held the lottery hoping to cheer everyone up, the sad result was that some citizen’s GCFS may have become acute. Treating GCFS is a tricky business.

Today, there is no permanent cure for GCFS, and the causes of GCFS as not completely understood. Some experts maintain that simultaneous exposure to high level of virtual world media PR hype combined with intermittent failure to perform on the part of the world may play a role. While GCFS causes are not well understood, the symptoms include heart palpitations when blue boxes with linden messages appear in-world, night sweats, an irrational desire to back up user-content onto the user’s own machine “in case something goes wrong”, general irritability, uncontrollable desire to ban others, headache, fatigue at being logged out with no warning, unreasoned fear of alt accounts, and nausea. If you or someone you know is suffering from these symptoms, please seek help. Join in the fight against GCFS!