I am so very proud of our team and happy to announce the Nocturnals pre-orders are ready! I'll be honest, this was a long hard road, even harder than our original launch!

There has been a lot of pressure on us all to really deliver something amazing with no compromise in quality. I think we set the bar pretty high with our initial launch and now we know we have a lot of expectations to reach. On top of that, this could quite possibly be the most anticipated product launch in the entire history of Second Life! Whew!

So now onto answering all of your burning questions as best as I can. More...

Where can I preorder? On our original Roo sim and our Nocturnal sim we have been working on the last couple of months. Now I know you're all very excited to get your orders placed, but you do have two weeks to order, so don't all rush the sims at once. Also, SL vendors can only process payments so fast, so if dozens of you are all crowded around trying to use the same vendor they will undoubtedly break!

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Roo/85/85/21

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Meeroos%20Nocturnals/118/127/24

What is the price? We have no current plans to change any prices on any of our products. The original preorder was 5100L, so that's what this one is as well.

What can you order? There is only one preorder package option that will be available. In 1914 Henry Ford is alleged to have proclaimed, "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." Things are much too crazy for us during the preorder actual delivery day and since part of what you're paying for is the 3 day head start, any extra delays during that period make for very unhappy customers. If you accidentally decline your preorder or SL otherwise eats it, we won't have to stop and figure out exactly which product you need resent. Things will just run much smoother and faster.

What do you get?
1 Nocturnal Geode (like the original chest)
6 Nocturnal Nests
4 Weeks of Florofruit, the diet for starter Nocturnals
3 Day head start of the official launch date
2 Limited Edition Nocturnal Homes
1 Limited Edition PJ RooU (Bipedal Mesh Meeroo AV)

Will I get 3 breeding pairs? Probably not. Our starter chests have always been "gatcha" style. Due to meeroo genders and personalities, we do not guarantee that you will get any breeding pairs. Just as with our original launch, we want to encourage players to interact with each other and begin trading nests amongst their fellowship members. You can trade you know, you don't have to buy/sell nests, especially starters that shouldn't have much difference in market value.

Will there be a "lottery"? The up side of our "gatcha" style chests, is that there is a little genetic diversity in the genes of even starter roos to seed the gene pool. This means that there can be varying coats and traits that come out of the starter chests. Inevitably, some will not be as common as others. With our original launch, some player's tried to capitalize on this and engage in the secondary market immediately. This is a free market at work, "we" never made a lottery, that was created by "you" the players. It takes two players to agree to make a sale and even if we wanted we have no way to stop a player from buying a starter from another player. Please keep in mind, they are still starters so that should be a pretty big clue that none of those traits will be particularly hard to breed out in a few cycles. As with our original launch, if the secondary market decides that some of these starters are worth more than others and start to resell them on the first day, we cannot help it.

When do you get it? This point always ends up confusing a few customers, this is a PREorder, which means you will not receive any products at the time of order. What you will get is an IM from our servers letting you know we have confirmed your order. It will look something like this:

[06:28] WWoM Nocturnals Preorder Vendor: Your Nocturnal preorder for 5100L has been recorded. Your receipt is: 502e471010e197.67289994. Please save this code for your own records.

If you happened to crash and didn't get your IM, never fear. If you click the green gem on your HUD's You page, you can check on our web site. If you scroll to the bottom of this page, any preorders you've made will be listed there. If you believe you paid the vendor and there is no receipt found, you can file a ticket and we will check our transaction history to see whether or not the payment went through. It is Second Life after all, and it's always possible something glitched or the sim crashed while processing your payment etc. As with anytime you're making large purchases in SL, I would always recommend double checking http://status.secondlifegrid.net/ first, if they say to not make any purchases, don't !

Will preorders be available on the marketplace? No, since there's nothing to deliver at point of sale, the vendor is just recording the sale on our servers. From what I've read on the SL forums and seen through JIRAs filed, the ANS functionality via Direct Delivery on the MP is not 100% reliable yet. There is no need to rush the Roo sim to place your preorders tonight, you will have at least two weeks to order. Also we may open other temporary preorder locations on the grid, if so, I'll update this blog with their SLURLs.

On delivery day, the preorders are sent out 100% at random. We can only send out so many so fast inside SL and so we can't tell you exactly when you will get your preorder. Also if you ordered multiple times, you will not get them all at once. Each preorder to deliver next is chosen from the entire list remaining at random.

The limited edition mesh AV is going to be a special case. We haven't used our delivery system in over a year to send stuff out to the players and LL has made critical changes to the scripting functions used. Most importantly, in an attempt to stop griefers, they have throttled how fast objects can be sent out on the grid. So my current plan is this: the day before the preorders are to be sent, we're going to send the mesh AV. This will let us do a dry run of the delivery system and see if any problems will arise. If people don't get their AV or accidentally get extras, we can fix it. Please note, if there are any major issues with delivering the AVs this may make us postpone delivery of the preorders for a day or two until it can be resolved.

How many times can I preorder? You can preorder as many times as you like. You can make your preorders any time during the two week window.

Can I get a refund? Sorry, No. We are not offering refunds on preorders. This isn't the sort of preorder like "well you'll get it sometime when we're ready." We are 100% ready now and committed to deliver. Please don't purchase if you aren't 100% committed and decide at the last minute you should have used that money to pay your tier or something.

Will other size chests/geodes be available? Starting on the the full launch day, we will put out the original Vashara chests and Orlex's geodes of varying sizes. We haven't sold the original starter chests for a long time, but we do get requests for them, so we listened!

The dates we gave yesterday for ending preorders before the 1st of the month have already gotten some negative feedback. It seems a lot of players get paid on the 1st of the month and want to participate in preorders, so we may extend those dates a few extra days. Please give your feedback in the comments.

-Tiger