Freebie of the week

I participated in my first hunt game recently and thought it was fun to be involved but I wanted something continuous involving my store so I came up with this little idea…

I have this sign up near the store entrance and you’ll be looking for the red & black gift box stuck on one of the vendor posters. Since this is the first week I’m going to cheat a bit and go ahead and show you what item it is, you’ll still have to find the vendor poster.

The paisley top from the floral tunics collection. The gift is just the top, I made the leggings and socks for the photo and they are not for sale anywhere but if you want them just drop an IM to me and I’ll send them over.

New Sim!

About a week ago I took the leap and got my own sim! I’ve been working on totally rebuilding the studio there sprawling over a complete half of the sim. I plan on opening it within the next couple weeks but don’t have a definitive date as of yet. Stay tuned….

Cheaters take the fun out of it!

I’ve been running the weekly photo contest at the studio for the past couple months and for the most part its been a lot of fun. This was the first week switching to the judging format which had to be put in place because the voting system was a total waste of time. The final straw was a couple weeks ago while I was on my building platform and my photostudio greeter, which sends me a message whenever it greets a new avatar, started going off like crazy. I raised my draw distance and cammed down to the studio. What I saw was an avatar rez, raise its arm to vote, disappear and then immediately replaced by another avatar doing the same thing. I already had about 50 avatar names on my greeter in the past 10 minutes. Anyone who uses SL knows it takes at least 1-2 full minutes to log in (on a good day) so how was this possible for someone to relog a new alt (50 of them?!?!) so quick. The constant logging stopped as soon as I tp’d into the studio. I terminated the board of the cheater and started really moderating the contest.

My intention when starting the contest was to create a fun environment in the studio and I had let the contest run its course each week without moderation even though it really bothered me the people who were winning the votes had really horrible photos.

I kept changing rules….winners can’t enter the next week, you can’t use your profile pic, you can’t use the same pic two weeks in a row. It was really taking the fun out of it for me as I was constantly terminating boards. I started paying closer attention to my greeter messages, checking my offline messages more often and was catching so many people using bot programs and alts for votes. I knew they were alts because upon checking profiles they were all empty and had the same rez dates. It all became very time consuming and not very fun. I thought about just removing the contest all together but theres a small handful of people who are really enjoying it, even though they never won because they’re not cheaters.

I researched photo contests more and more, discussed the situation on the SL forums and every single person who replied on there said the voting system does not work fairly, even when its a pay to vote contest. So thats the back story to why I switched it to the judging system which is not what I wanted to do but I’ll give it a shot for a few weeks and see how it goes.

Whew, that was a long rant!

I did it!

I had been wanting to create a blog for Second Life stuff for..well, years. I finally did it and am having fun creating the page, its kind of a rough draft now and will hopefully be good on the eyes after some tweaking as I learn all the goodies wordpress offers.

Basically this will be for updates on new releases at my stores and photostudio in SL. My avatar name is Ange Jacobus and my store is creatively named *Ange’s*. Maybe the asterisks are the creative part? They looked neat at the time. I started out making shapes in SL around July 2007, I was still fairly new and learning. My first shape store did decent in my expectations, I’d sell around one a day and that was enough to make me happy. As I learned how to use photoshop for more than just cropping images I got interested in texturing which led to clothing. I rented a larger land parcel on a private estate and set up a bigger shop to include some clothing items with my shapes. I had no where to take my display photos so I put up a skybox with some pose balls and backgrounds which led to the idea of opening it for public use…with the thought that it might increase traffic to the store if people came to visit the photostudio. People loved the photostudio! They loved it more than the store and I wasn’t selling much but I was making enough to cover tier and take care of a little bit of a shopping habit. It seemed I always had people at the studio and was getting IMs from people asking for help or just to tell me they liked the place. I really enjoyed that so I expanded the studio and eventually had to get an even larger parcel of land. I stayed with the same estate company for a little while then as sales picked up I decided it was time to tackle land ownership (boy is that addicting!). My friend and I purchased half of the Instiga sim on the mainland for our stores. I’m still there with my store on the ground and studio in the air. Both are constantly expanding and it seems I think more and more about going in on a full sim. After going through a RL busy period where I wasn’t creating new content I am back with more time on my hands. In the last month I’ve been updating my existing items while still creating new content. Glad to be back 🙂