When new, hot and high-end matter more for avatars than uniqueness and recognisability; CW: long (over 2,600 characters)
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Does anyone remember when avatars were made to be unique and recognisable, even after outfit changes? Changing the body and/or the head was out of question if it turned out impossible to make the new ones look like or at least similar enough to the old ones.
It seems like these times are long gone in OpenSim. Second Life's "fast fashion" has arrived here. It doesn't matter anymore what your avatar looks like. Especially consistency doesn't matter anymore. After all, why should avatars be recognisable by their looks if they're already recognisable by the name tags above them?
Instead, what matters more than everything else is how new, how high-end, how highly detailed and how expensive in Second Life everything on your avatar is. After all, you don't have to pay for it anyway. Leave the paying to the freebie merchants who export the new stuff right after buying it. That is, unless they manage to copybot it for free instead.
Nobody invests any time into fine-tuning their shapes anymore. Instead, folks pick a mesh head and then one of the shapes that came with the head. If anything, they make the shape even more extreme: even taller, even longer legs, even bigger boobs, an even bigger butt. Anything beyond that isn't worth the effort if they're going to replace the head anyway when the newest LeLutka EvoX heads arrive in the stores a few months later. This is also why so many OpenSim avatars look like they're unmodified complete avatars out of the box.
Second Life users tend to cling to the content they've bought for as long as they can get away with. After all, they've pumped a five-digit amount of Linden Dollars into everything, and they don't want to let it go to waste, at least not that soon. Except, of course, for those who can afford to throw everything away in favour of all-new stuff twice a year or so.
In OpenSim, they've often got much higher-end content and much more of it. But they haven't paid anything for it. So it's easier to let go of it the moment something newer and hotter and better arrives. It doesn't matter that your brand-new head doesn't really look like the six-months-old head you had last. But it's newer and probably better.
Of course, in addition,
this post by @juno still applies as well. But another reason why especially many female avatars only ever dress like for an Ibiza club party in summer is: Why bother with searching for clothes for different styles or purposes if you can't be sure that your mesh body won't be painfully outdated in two or three months?
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