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Gachas are very popular in Second Life.
In short it is a system that combines a lottery with shopping.
A shopkeeper puts a bunch of things into a machine, display or poster and every time the customer pays an amount they get one of the items inside at random.
The odds of getting some of these items is rarer than others, making a few of them ‘rare’.
I guess this makes it more fun and exiting to some people to try and get some of these items.
I can sort of understand why this is entertainment for some people, but to say I hate it is an understatement.
Let me illustrate my situation.
Somewhere on Flickr I see a picture of something I like, something I want to buy, but it seems that I can only buy it at a busy Gacha event.
So I set my graphics to minimum and rush to the place, fighting myself trough lag and crowds I finally find the machine I want with the things I want to have.
I throw money at it and get a bunch of items I don’t want and one or two I do want.
But the item I really like of course refuses to come outside.
Eventually, broke, I give up and go back home to see what I got.
Most of the things I bought turn out to have no edit permissions, no copy permissions and have a land impact I can’t afford.
I ended up with a folder full of useless things I didn’t want.
I guess I can resell them, spend ages filling up marketplace with even more stuff in the hope I one day get rid of these things.
In some cases I can sell them on in my sim, but that uses up prims.
When I try to look for these Gacha items I want on marketplace myself, I realise that most people who do sell these things on can’t be bothered to share the land impact either.
Is everyone drowning in free prims in their regions or something?
Am I the last person in Sl to whom it matters if something is 2 or 20 land impact?
But even if manage to find the item you want, you still get something that rarely has any of those permissions I consider to be the ones you should almost always get; edit & copy.
I found the ‘rare’ item I wanted on marketplace, paid trough the teeth to get it to find out it is way too big, one of those items made for giants of which there are still so many in SL.
But without edit permissions I can’t make it smaller and even if I could the animations would have to be tweaked as well and I might break it… and it would be gone for ever.
I can’t even change the textures or tweak them and make them a little darker, I can’t even delink that little added thingy I hate but uses up so many prims.
In short, the whole Gacha system is very customer unfriendly in many ways.
As a little game on its own that offers you the chance to get something you want for perhaps cheaper than it is for sale, it could be fun.
But if the items inside are not also for sale with proper permissions, it mostly is just very frustrating.
For me anyway, this is the last time I fall for this trick.
No more Gachas for me, both as a customer and a shopkeeper myself.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 