*********did You Know?*********

number of difficult issues have arisen within the operation of Second Life, both as an online game and a virtual world.

Linden Lab is currently being sued by attorney Marc Bragg [3], claiming Linden Lab defrauded him of $8,000 worth of property.


The nature of roles and enjoyment in the economy: Because there are no entry-level jobs, and creating content requires the user to have real-world talent, many users find themselves with very limited amounts of money and the source of enjoyment for such users is not clear.


The role of the in-world currency: Linden Lab has been criticized for marketing SL as a viable business channel for making real money, while at the same time including provisions in the Terms of Service which give Linden dollars no legal value, so that (for instance) Linden Lab is not required to pay any compensation if L$ is lost from the database.


The effect of changes made by SL's developers upon the in-world economy: Certain changes made or proposed by the developers have had the effect of creating new markets, but also have on occasion destroyed or removed the value of existing ones, or given the market leader at a particular (often arbitrary) time unique advantages that entrench them as a market leader in the future, thus creating a coercive monopoly.


Favoritism: Some have complained that a group of residents referred to as the "FIC" (Feted Inner Core) use their connections with Linden Lab staff to trigger policy changes that are beneficial to themselves at the expense of others and that these policies by Linden Lab staff are arbitrary and selective. The phrase "Feted Inner Core" was coined by Second Life resident Prokofy Neva. I


n addition, users who own large amounts of land (and thus pay larger subscriptions) are generally seen to have greater influence on Linden Lab due to the financial loss in removing them.



The balance between users' ability to edit the world and their ability to damage or disrupt it: Second Life has been attacked several times by groups of residents abusing the creation tools to create objects that infinitely reproduce, eventually overwhelming the servers.


The land sales system: Building any permanent in-world object requires the purchase of land and an increased monthly subscription. A number of people deliberately "play" the land market for profit, leaving other people who just want to build resentful of being forced to pay extra money to a middle man. Also, the high monthly charges have resulted in buildings being focused on those which can make money in-world, reducing the variety available.


Lack of zoning: With minor exceptions, Linden Lab has not placed any zoning or content restrictions on what land owners can place on their real estate. This has resulted in a wide variety of architectural variations, frequently with mixed success. Part of the problem concerns the amount of activity/resources from objects on business property causing lag for neighbors of that area that use it more of a personal manner. (example: a business property could use objects that take up a lot of loading/rendering time or communicating with the servers, thus causing lag for others that may not be on the same property but nearby due to the nature of Second Life and everything in a certian distance must load "in case" you are planning on visiting that area.)


The lack of zoning is also a prime target for graffiti, deliberately obstructive and/or offensive content with the intent of defacing the local view. Such proneness to vandalism has been leveraged on occasion as a low-level form of extortion, destroying the quality of the local view in an attempt to force neighbors to buy the offending parcel of land at greatly overpriced value.



Land cost: SL real estate is seen as expensive and very limited in terms of primitive count and size, considering the in-game (and real-world) cost associated with land ownership.
The Mac version is just a port of the PC version, so no matter what Mac is using it, it will never match the PC version in terms of graphics.


Some people have petitions, but none are big enough to make Linden Labs make a Mac version to take full use of the resources. While some of the Alpha Builds of the Universal client are available and make better use of the Mac's system, some users have still noticed a difference.



Adult content on SL. It has been complained that while the Adult version of SL can contain mature content (swearing, nudity, etc). It has started to get associated as being wildly associated with sexual based "jobs" and the sheer amount of sex-based entertainment that occurs in Second Life in comparision to more of a PG Based content of some other "Free form" MMORPGs.


As well as the ease of crossing over from a "PG" zone to a "Mature" zone for those who may or may not want to get involved in that kind of entertainment

******* Yes I did. *******

The only thing that slightly surprises me is that the land cheat is still pursuing that lawsuit - although of course as you didn't provide the URL of the source you copy/pasted from, we can't tell how old the article might be.

Lewis

I don't get it. You must have joined like in the last 6-7 days and you're already an SL Community, Economy, and Welfare expert???

Jeeez they're growing up so fast these days.

Troy

So you just joined and you're thinking about all this? Hmmm...

********Do I Care?*********




Edit: how many brain cells does it take to copy & paste a Wikipedia article?

You go Kiari!

omg sl sux we shud just quit lololol

thx for sharing these amazing insites i never wud have known about any of this

im going 2 cancel now

lol

Actually no, I've been playing since beta, Alt account. Devon Cassidey was my old account.

Plagiarism isn't cool. Especially when you get caught.

What is the point of this thread?

omfg flip you KILLED ME WITH THAT ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH

mmm same person I ejected from my sim on Tuesday night for extroardinarilly irritating teenage behaviour.

Oh noes, it seems that from the OP's *ZOMG! SL BAD!!* we all should just quit, eh?

Let the rolling of the eyes commence!!

yep, as you can see..SL is FULL of problems.

And your point is?

It's "difficult" to run ANY company. That's why most people don't do it. I challenge you to find any business anywhere in the universe that doesn't have difficulities. Again, your point is?



So?

Newsflash, anyone can sue anyone else for anything, any time. If you run any type of highly visible enterprise, sooner or later you will be sued, whether you've ever done anything wrong or not. That's just what lawyers do, and they're always eager to do it.

Hell, my company was once sued because a customer deliberately misused a product and ended up damaging his countertop with it. The guy was obviously at fault, but he wanted us to pay for his mistake anyway, so he sued. It didn't mean anything other than that the guy was a moron.

The same is true in this case. Read the facts of the case, and it's pretty obvious who's in the wrong. This Bragg fellow essentially hacked the system to try to steal land, and then when it backfired on him and cost him money, he decided to sue.


No entry level jobs, huh? What do you call this? And this? And this? And this

Those are just a few that I picked at random from the first page of the Help Wanted forum. There are many, many more. Granted, they're not all jobs everyone would want, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Note that none of those jobs requires any experience of any kind beyond a basic familiarity with the world. That is the very definition of "entry level".

If you want to get even more rediculous than that, until the recent change in the dwell policy, people were getting paid to sit in chairs. Is that not "entry level" enough for you?

Anyway, SL's no different than RL in the fact that those with more skill, dedication, and drive will always do better than those with less. Call that unfair if you really feel the need, but that's the nature of capitalism. It is what it is. Most people in RL have "very limited amounts of money" too. Again, what's your point?

And as for your "source of enjoyment for such users is unclear" line, maybe it's unclear to you, but again, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Clearly, those people ARE enjoying SL or they wouldn't be here. It's not all about money, you know. I was enjoying SL on a daily basis for months before I ever decided to open a business in it. I didn't have any money inworld back then, but I didn't care. I've never had a need for it, other than to upload textures. I've been here 2.5 years, and I can count the amount of items I've ever bought on one hand. Money isn't what makes it enjoyable. If you can't see any other "source of enjoyment" other than money, I weep for you.



First, it's not the TOS that makes Linden Dollars are valueless. It's the law. LL is not a bank, and only banks can create money. For LL to attempt to do so would be highly illegal. Linden Dollars are a product, and that's all they are.

Second, whether or not virtual inworld currency has real world currency value has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not one can make real money in SL.

For a comparison, Parker Brothers has made millions of real world dollars selling Monopoly money, but that doesn't mean Monopoly money has value as currency. Monoploly money is a product, just like Linden Dollars. Now, you might say it's different because Parker Bothers doesn't promote playing Monopoly as a way to make money. Of course, that's totally irrelevant, but for the sake of argument, let's assume for a moment that they were to start doing that. Let's say they decided to market Monopoly as a business opportunity the same way LL markets SL as such. What would they actually be doing?

Well, the first thing they'd have to do would be to suggest to you that you trade goods and services for Monopoly money, and that you then sell your accumulated Monopoly money for real money. Each time you traded something for Monopoly money, you'd be bartering, which is exactly what you do every time you trade something for $L in SL. You're trading one product for another. No money has changed hands yet.

Now, when you sell that Monopoly money for real cash, your business now has income for the first time. The Monopoly money itself is still inherently worthless as currency, of course, but as a product it does have some value, whatever you just sold it for. It's the same with Linden Dollars. When we sell L$ for cash, we're selling the product we aquired from our inworld SL bartering. That doesn't make Linden Dollars currency. They're just a product we've aquired that we're then selling to someone else who feels they're worth buying. That's it.

Now, let's say this thing takes off, and lots of people start trading stuff for Monopoly money. Would Parker Brothers then all of a sudden have some kind of obligation to back Monopoly money with real cash? Of course not. Regardless of what it may be worth to those who choose to buy it, it's still technically valueless, and Parker Brothers doesn't owe anything to anyone just because they happen to be the manufacturer of a product that people like to buy.

Linden Lab has no such obligations either. Just because you might feel that your Linden Dollars are worth some made-up amount of money doesn't mean they actually are. They're worth whatever someone wants to pay for them at the time they decide they buy them, and that's it. To Linden Lab, it's worth nothing, and that's all there is to it. They have no obligation to buy back their product from you, ever. Just because they like to talk about SL as a business opportunity doesn't change that. One has nothing to do with the other.


Again, this is no different than RL. The world changes. Sometimes some people are positioned to benefit from such changes. Other times people lose out. There's no right or wrong in that.

For a comaparison, consider for a moment the humble buggy whip manufacturer, an example often cited in economics classes. Making the whips that carriage drivers used to control horse teams with was a viable industry for centuries. Then the automobile came along, and all those buggy whip businesses were gone withing just a few short years. Their product was obsolete; their niche no longer existed. Those that could adapt to making other products to fill other niches survived, and those that couldn't simply went out of business. History is filled with countless examples of this type of thing. It's just the way of the world.

The exact same thing happens in SL. Let's say I create a product that fills a certain niche in SL. I'll do well for as long as that niche exists. When the world changes to eliminate that niche, however, I'll have to change too or else I'll be left behind. That kind of change is inevitable, no matter what particular niche we're talking about. Sooner or later, everything becomes obsolete. You either change with the times and adapt what you're doing to fit the current state of the world, or you go extinct. Again, there's no right or wrong in it; it's just the way the world works. Whether it's the real world or a virtual one like SL, the same universal laws of economics and evolution apply.

Forgive me for saying this, but the fact that you see fit to somehow want to fault LL for that is laughable.



This kind of thing always makes me laugh. Show me the proof of such favoritism. You can't, can you? You wanna know why? Because you're not there at the conference table at LL when decisions are made, so you have no idea what factors go into them. All you can do is speculate. A million changes to policies and other things happen all the time that you never notice, but when one or two of them happen to be endorsed by someone you don't like or of whome your envious for other reasons, it's easy to cry conspiracy. That doesn't mean anything's wrong. It's just unfortunate human nature to overlook the postive and focus on the negative as much as possible.

Even if the claim is true that certain people have built relationships with the LL brass so they happen to have their ear, so what? You want Phillip to know your name, make it a point to say hello to him next time he's inworld. Got an idea you want him to consider, send him a well-written E-mail. In other words, do the exact same things you would do to build a relationship and gain influence with any other human being in any other situation. It's really not a big deal.

If your idea is good and it's well presented, I'm sure it will be given some attention. If all you want to do is complain about how others have more influence than you, you'll never have any influence at all. Again, that's just how the world works.


Yes, this is a problem. Could LL do more to prevent it? I don't know, and neither do you.

What's your point though? Lots of online services have been attacked. It doesn't mean anything other than to illustrate that there are unscrupulous people in the world who will exploit any weakness they find.


I'm just as "resentful" that I have to pay rent for my apartment when all I want to do is live it, but you know what? My landlord got here first, and he owns it, so he decides what to charge. The world isn't free. Neither is SL. Again, is there a point in this?


Uh, how do you know variety has been reduced? You're totally making that up. You have no way of knowing what the world would or wouldn't look like if land cost less.

Back when I started in SL, I was part of class studying online worlds. LL gave us the use of 10,000 square meters of land for the semester. It didn't cost us a dime. You know what the class built on it? The same stuff everyone else builds everywhere. There was a night club, a mall, some houses, some historical builds, some futuristic builds. It was no different than anywhere else. The fact that it didn't cost money to maintain didn't make it more varied.


"Wide variety of architectual varaitions"? Wait a minute. I'll resist the temptation to delve into poking fun at the gramatical sense in a phrease like "varitey of variation" when I ask didn't you just say variety in buildings was limited?

You can't have it both ways. It's either widely varied or it's not. Which is it?

Anyway, as for the more important point, where exactly are you getting that objects on business property cause more lag than objects on non-business property? I'll agree with you that a busy club with a lot of people in it can be taxing on the neighbors in the same sim, but that has nothing to do with objects. Generally speaking, all objects take the same amount of "loading/rendering time or communicating with the servers" regardless of whether they're for business or personal use. The things that cause a lot of lag are badly written scripts and overuse of big textures. Both of these are equally prevelent in business builds and personal builds.


For at least the tenth time now, what's your point? Yes, there are a few malicious people in SL who like to build obnoxious things in order to try to force their neighbors to buy their land. Zoning wouldn't change that. No matter what rules might be implimented, there will always be those will walk the line between what's allowed and what they can get away with, and such people always find ways to annoy others if they can. How about blaming the people themselves instead of blaming "lack of zoning"?

The only thing zoning would accomplish is a stifling of creativity. For my part, I decided some time ago to turn my home in SL into a museum and a store. The museum exists as a public service, and the store exists as a means of generating revenue to pay for the land. Were zoning in place, I would have had to move in order to build these things, which would have been difficult enough to disuade me from doing it. As a result, the "variety" you complain that SL lacks would have been even further diminished.

No other place in SL is like mine, and it contains a lot of things that were the first of their kind in SL. Why in the world would you want to impliment rules that would have stopped me from building what I did when I did? That makes absolutely no sense. SL's about creativity and freedom, not about telling people what they can't do.


By some, maybe. By others it's also seen as inexpensive and not very limited. Not to keep sounding like a broken record, but again, what's your point?



This is true of virtually all video games, and similar applications. The biggest drawback to the Mac has always been its relative isolation compared to the PC. If you happen to like the Mac, great. There's nothing wrong with it. I'm not personally a huge fan of it, but that's just me. In any case, like it or not, most computer applications are written for Windows first. A great many games and game-like apps don't even have a Mac version at all. SL does though, and by all accounts it works very well. Your point?



First we had "varitey of veriation" and now we have "associated with being associated with".

Anyway, I gotta keep asking, is there a point here?

Yes, some people in SL choose to create sexually oriented content for it. So what? I don't know if it's really true that we have more of it here in SL than in other online worlds, but if we do, I'd say it's nothing more than a testament to the fact that we have more creative freedom here than anywhere else. People like what they like, and lots of people like sex. In any kind of free system, you're always going to have it. There's nothing wrong with it.

To each his own though, and if you don't like sex, there are tons and tons of areas in SL where you can avoid it. I live in a mature sim, surrounded by a dozen other mature sims, and I hardly see it. Clearly it's not so overwhelming as you're trying to imply. If you see it everywhere you look, I would submit that it's because you're looking for it. It's called self-fulfilling prophesy, and it works every time. Perhaps you should read The Crucible some time. If you go out looking for witches to burn, you'll always find them.



This last part is not a complete sentence, so I'm not sure where you were going with it. You seem to be enforcing my point though, which is if you don't want to see mature content, you can easily cross into a PG region. There's no one and nothing to stop you.




Wow, it took a long time to respond to all that. I didn't even notice the time. There's a couple hours out of my life I'll never get back. So, was I just feeding the troll here, or did you actually have a point in all your ranting about nothing?

The only point I can see is that you don't like SL, so you're digging up whatever potential negatives you think you see, and publishing them totally out of context in order to try to make it look like something worse than (or at least other than) what it actually is. That's an awful lot of energy to expend into something you don't like, wouldn't you say? I mean, purely from a cost/benefit standpoint, wouldn't it make more sense just to find something else to put your efforts into?

Actually, that was in the responses to the original post.

If you had to go get your new account because your old login was failing, it might be because your last name would have been "Cassidy."

Anyhow, I vote for pie.

Okay chosen few, you shut me up...

*looks to the left, looks to the right, then pounces on Margaret* I have NO idea what you're talking about!

But I luv you anyways. :3

Actually, he shut Wikipedia up. Just sayin'.

Chosen, perhaps you should post your response to those issues on the Wikipedia page from which Drifter plagiarised, found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life#Issues_.26_Criticism

Regards,

-Flip

I've posted some of this on the wikipedia discussion page, in the Rewriting the Criticism Section area. It was hard to post all of it without sounding too argumentative, which is obviously not what wikipedia is for, but I did manage to squeeze most of it in. I suppose it's only right and fair to have a criticism section in the article since criticism is a legitimate part of fully describing anything, but man, what a rediculous list of nonsense.

Ahhhh. My favorite analogy to explain to my wife how I make real $$ in a "game."

Yes, it's true -- anything can be used as a currency, providing that at least two parties are willing to honor it. Real life currencies such as the USD, the Pound Sterling, the Yen, the Deutschemark, all are considered "legal tender" because they have the support of a government behind them, and therefore you can take a wad of bills in to any bank in the world and they would be required to honor that currency.

But, as I said, anything can be used as a means of exchange. If Chosen and I decided that we were going to consider pop bottle tops to be worth L$1 each, and use them as coinage, we could. Doesn't mean anybody else would honor it.

But if a bunch of people decided to do it, and it became accepted, then it could become a widespread means of exchange... that's not really so different than the L$, it's just something that LL put out there and said, "here, use this to represent money in-world," and then permitted the exchange of that perceived value for a real-life value.

Monopoly money is a great analogy. Poker chips don't have any real world value, either -- you can buy them at Wal-Mart for a couple of bucks for a big box. But the ones you get in Vegas or Atlantic City or Monte Carlo can be worth millions.

P2

Same person who is now banned with mutliple warnings from most of the Fur Valley Sims for advertising a scam group and shooting people at random