LL Holds A Party — You Are Probably Not Invited
by Pixeleen Mistral on 11/03/08 at 7:57 pm
Why would anyone ever want more than 25 groups anyway?
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
I stopped by the Herald offices to empty the cat litter box, sign a purchase order for another 55 gallon drum of virtual ink, and retrieve the copy of Pighed Stonecutter’s book “I, Avatar” that I loaned to Jimbo Quality, when I noticed the red drama light on the iMojo wire blinking in what appeared to be an up-tempo bossa nova rhythm – never a good sign.
This meant either Linden Lab’s experts at community building are at work again or the iMojo had caught another round of the Soul Bossa Nova virus from downloading an iffy version of copybot testclient. After playing the video below for the iMojo phone, it tested negative for the virus, so I scanned the Second Life blog for clues, and found this. The would-be game gods have decided to party with the krill residents – assuming those resident pay at least $125 USD/month in land tier fees, and are not on the teen grid, and have fewer than 25 group memberships.
more fun than the Linden concierge party?
The gods must be lazy – or something – since Harmony Linden felt it necessary to announce the super-exclusive party to everyone via blog post – prompting 150 mostly unhappy comments, largely from the less well-heeled members of our society who are excluded from what is likely to be the Lagstock event of the month. But it gets better – or worse.
I will give Harmony style points for the unintentional yet exquisite irony of this statement:
“To make the logistics of this easier, we’ll be adding all concierge residents (who have less than 25 groups already) to a new Special Event group over the next week”
This places those residents at the group membership limit in a bit of a bind – who do you snub in order to open a space for LL’s party invitation?
I am constantly amazed at the persistent and strangely arbitrary limits the Lab has placed on its world. Why is it that we can only have 25 groups – yet any resident can create untold numbers of plywood cubes? Why can’t we have unlimited group memberships – just like we can have an infinite numbers of objects in our inventories?
Seeking guidance, I asked Unverified Linden – an LL developer with no billing information on file – what would be the most perverse group limit to lobby the Lab for – perhaps we should start a grassroots petition. His answer, “go for either 129 or 513, but 32769 would be perverse as well”.
So there you have it – if you are tired of being limited to 25 groups, join the Herald in demanding room for 513 group memberships and make the LL developers squirm.
Frankie Antonioni
Mar 11th, 2008
I think I will settle for 100 groups.
Angel
Mar 11th, 2008
65
lol
Mar 11th, 2008
Let’s ask for a limit of 666 groups.
LOLANGEL
Mar 11th, 2008
Angel you anti American faggot why don’t you just get the fuck off.
anon
Mar 12th, 2008
I DEMAND LONG SIGNED DOUBLES FOR MY GROUP INTEGER VARIABLES
WILL NOT SETTLE UNTIL 1.18973149535723176508575932662800702e+4932 GROUPS ARE AVAILABLE
Patchouli Woollahra
Mar 12th, 2008
I think the reason why Unverified was so particular about those numbers was because they happened to precisely be summations of one + powers of 2:
128 = 2^7 + 1
513 = 2^9 + 1
32769 = 2 ^ 16 + 1
Which is a pain because it necessitates an exponential amount of extra data for a very small number xD
Peter Stindberg
Mar 12th, 2008
Ts, ts…. you don’t want to join in “a flashmob created by bloggers against the lab”?
Bob the Tomato
Mar 12th, 2008
I’d join the group in support but I don’t have any spaces left, sorry.
I’ll let you know what the party was like. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. FIC all the way baby!
Winter
Mar 12th, 2008
Regardless of the elitism of the Dark Linden Gods – thanks for the YouTube. Bought a smile to my afternoon.
anon
Mar 12th, 2008
“I think the reason why Unverified was so particular about those numbers was because they happened to precisely be summations of one + powers of 2″
The maximum value of a signed int is 32768.
Just Me
Mar 12th, 2008
Along with a larger number of groups, I would love to see 4 or 5 group “categories” , so I can file my group memberships. For example, I would probably have
Friends
Clubs
Shops
Business
Miscellaneous
as my categories. And, 25 in each category would work very nicely.
Melissa Yeuxdoux
Mar 12th, 2008
I should know better, but…
The maximum value of a fixed-width binary integer is one less than a power of two; also, the ANSI/ISO C standard insists that “int” be at least 32-bit, so a C compiler with 16-bit int is not standard-conforming.
Angel
Mar 12th, 2008
Wow is 65 an Anti-American number? Should I have asked for 47 instead? Do I risk being sent to Guantanamo?
Crap Mariner
Mar 13th, 2008
It would be nice to have 50 or 100 group slots, but 25 is what they’ve chosen to limit people to, and I’d rather work on something productive than waste my time bitching about it. Plenty of folks doing the bitching for me, eh.
But, if you want to hear bitching for bitching’s sake, fine – I’d just settle for a 26th group slot to handle this one.
But then… if they know who the Concierge-level folks are, can’t they just check against THAT for access instead of using Groups?
Maybe alter the code for “Payment on file” so that there’s a flag for “High roller” or “Spends a lot of bucks” or “We got you hooked, sucka!” or something like that? Then use that access flag as the gatekeeper for these things.
Why do I get the feeling I’m going to be closing group chat for that group over and over, trying to make the “The sim is full!” and “I can’t TP in!” and “Where are you?” and “Hi!” messages go away like I have to do with LME?
Combine that with RFL backchat and Saturday’s shaping up to be a hum-dinger of a noise day.
IntLibber Brautigan
Mar 13th, 2008
I’m sure all the sims will be Havok4 enabled, maybe even Mono enabled. If Mono enabled then lag should be minimal, which would be a fantastic first for any event in SL, though I’m sure every female will be wearing their best 1000 prim hairdo, uberflexi/trans dresses, and AOs that conflict with the animations in their shoes, nipple rings, etc. Who knows. Perhaps thats why they’ve organized the party now, though as I recall they do them twice a year.
While it might be more polite for LL to only contact concierge level customers privately via email (actually they did do this as well), I think the publicity thing is primarily a sales pitch to motivate loudmouth influence-mongers to want to pony up more money so they can compensate LL for taking the time to listen to them drone on about all the things they need to ban etc. Its not elitist, its called paying your way in second life.
Oh and Prok: I’m not bringing Maldavius this time, so you should be safe, unless other guests want to take up the past-time of dancing on Prok’s head.
Gershom
Mar 22nd, 2008
It has always puzzled my why the number is 25. 25 isn’t a power of 2 so it can’t be that. And since most limits in data processing are power of 2 related, 25 seems rather arbitrary.