MALRIF- By the desolate state of the arena, one would be hard-pressed to imagine that on Sunday evening a major tournament ocurred to celebrate the release of Rifkin Habsburg's Second Life adaptation of a Reiner Knizia game, "En Garde!"

The celebration was also the launching pad for the sale of the product. Of the 30 avatars attending, 16 went into the tournament itself and a majority of them bought the product, which sold well for its first day on the market. All in all, it looked as if En Garde would enjoy a healthy commercial life on Second Life.

When Linden Labs released their newest update on Monday morning, however, certain issues started cropping up. By 7:30 p.m SLT,  Habsburg was deactivating the fencing mats on the Malrif sim and releasing a general notice to his client group explaining that Second Life's newest update had rendered the game inoperable and that any customers seeking refunds should message him.

Habsburg briefly explained that his game took advantage of an advanced technique to move the avatar around- this technique is called using a call function named "
llSetLinkPrimitiveParams."  The new update makes it impossible to manipulate the avatar using this. The call function does virtually everything as far as changing a prim's properties.

But Habsburg, who spent four months and USD $300 developing the product in Second Life, isn't the only merchant who has been inconvenienced by the new update. Business owners Ilana Debevec and Homer Horwitz declared that a sizeable number of their products no longer work after the rolling restart on October 1st.