Day: December 7, 2018

Strawberry Singh Is Running Her Annual Second Life Mesh Body Parts Survey

Strawberry SIngh blog 7 Dec 2018.png

I haven’t been paying attention and I completely missed that Strawberry Singh is running her annual Mesh Body Parts Survey! So I took her survey and I posted my answer to her question, “Which mesh body and head do you currently use and why?”, in the comments section:

This is going to be a rather complicated answer, because I have main male and female avatars and an army of alts 😉

My main female avatar has a Catwa Kimberly head, with a Maitreya Lara body. But I also have a female avatar with a (freebie) Akeruka head and a Maitreya Lara body, and another avatar with a LAQ head and a Maitreya Lara body. As you can see, I tend to prefer Maitreya! I also have a female avatar with a (freebie) Akeruka head and a Belleza Freya body, which I use as a dancer to earn tip money 😉 I like the fact that the Belleza Freya body is more voluptuous, curvier, than the Maitreya Lara body.

My main male avatar has a Catwa Daniel head and a Belleza Jake body. But I also have a male avatar with a Catwa Stanley head and a Signature Gianni body. I have been very happy with both.

My alts all have freebie/dollarbie heads and bodies as outlined in my blogposts about where to find free or inexpensive mesh heads and bodies for male and female Second Life avatars:

FOR MALE AVATARS: https://ryanschultz.com/2018/10/04/second-life-steals-deals-and-freebies-free-and-inexpensive-mesh-heads-and-bodies-for-male-second-life-avatars/

FOR FEMALE AVATARS: https://ryanschultz.com/2018/09/24/second-life-steals-deals-and-freebies-free-mesh-heads-and-bodies-for-female-second-life-avatars/

Anyway, no big surprise, Maitreya Lara is by far the favourite mesh female avatar body at 42.3% of poll respondents so far, followed by Belleza Freya at 10.62%. I swear, the creator of the Maitreya Lara body, Onyx LeShelle, must be carting home money by the wheelbarrow! For male avatar bodies, it’s pretty much a tie between Belleza Jake (27.46%) and Signature Gianni (31.7%). 

As for Bento mesh heads, Catwa heads are by far the most popular for both female avatars (35.46% of poll respondents) and male avatars (a whopping 47.96% of poll respondents, almost half the market!). Other popular female mesh heads are LeLutka (20.76%), LAQ (10.98%), and the brand-new Genus Project heads (10.09%). LeLutka is also a popular male mesh head (13.87% of poll respondents).

So head on over to Strawberry’s blog and take her survey, and leave a comment! Tell her Ryan sent you 😉

Strawberry SIngh 7 Dec 2018
Strawberry Singh’s User Icon

UPDATED! Sansar on Steam: The Earliest Reviews Are In!

Have you joined the RyanSchultz.com Discord yet? More details here. 

Early this morning I decided to check what the reviewers on Steam are saying about Sansar (scroll to the bottom of the page), and overall, the news is pretty good! Thirty-one reviews so far (25 positive and 6 negative):

Sansar Steam Positive Reviews 7 Dec 2018.png

But, as I had feared, there are some thumbs-down reviews as well:

Sansar Steam Negative Review 2 7 Dec 2018.png

Aah yes, the “but there’s nothing to do” crowd. Somehow it seems to escape certain people that you can create your own experiences and host events in Sansar, as many people already do. Don’t expect it all to be handed to you on a silver platter, my dear. If you’ve been in Second Life for 6 years you should already have learned that. Next!

And the “grainy and blurry” comment in the second negative review? Excuse me?!?? Are we occupying the same Sansar? One of Sansar’s strongest points is its strong support for good graphics and beautiful lighting. This person must have horrible internet bandwidth or a slow computer. Or maybe he’s just a troll.

Argh, I can see that I am going to have to limit my perusal of the negative reviews. It’s gonna give me an ulcer!

However, I was very pleased to see that Linden Lab is already actively responding to negative reviews:

Sansar Steam Negative Review 7 Dec 2018.png

Linden Lab is going to need to keep on top of this. A good response can do a lot to mitigate a bad review (even though it still brings down Sansar’s overall rating on Steam).

By the way, if you are not running Sansar on Steam (i.e. you have not downloaded and installed it from Steam), then you will be unable to leave your own review or participate in the Steam Community for Sansar. Over time, that community may become more active than the official Sansar Discord server.

Also, people should know that if you install Sansar from Steam, you must use the Steam Wallet to buy Sansar dollars, and Steam gets a cut of the transaction. If you download the Sansar client directly from the Sansar website (outside of the Steam ecosystem), you can still buy Sansar dollars the same way you did before, and Steam does not get a cut of the action. That’s an important distinction to think about.

As yet, there’s no incentive for me to uninstall my current, non-Steam Sansar and reinstall it via Steam. I don’t use Steam very often and I don’t feel like giving them a cut of my transactions when I buy Sansar dollars.

And I don’t intend to post reviews; I will leave that to other people. Besides, I already have a blog where I can praise or chastise Linden Lab at length for their decisions regarding Sansar, as you might have already noticed. 😉

Interesting times ahead! And it looks like the Steam reviews page is going to be hopping with activity! In the short time that it took for me to write this blogpost, an additional three Sansar reviews were posted: two positive and one negative!

Are you thumbs-up or thumbs-down on Sansar? Feel free to leave a comment.

aziz-acharki-592558-unsplash.jpg
Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

UPDATE Dec. 8th: Peter Valencia (a.k.a. Theanine) has left a comment with a very useful tip for those people (like me), who might want to post a review but not actually use the Steam version of Sansar:

Some longtime users of the platform may have tried to leave a review, but to do so, they need to have run Steam Sansar for at least 5 minutes. However, if you still have the old Sansar installed, you get the error message telling you to first uninstall the non-Steam installation of Sansar.

What some might not know is that you don’t even need to login. You can just leave it open for 5 minutes with that error message still displaying. Then you can post a review. That’s what I did. I won’t be using Steam Sansar either (at least for now). I just installed it and did the trick above so I could leave a review, then uninstalled it.

Thanks, Theanine! 🙂 I have tested this and it does indeed work, provided you have bought at least $5.00 on the Steam store.