Complaints About Dwell/Money Chairs

Agreed. It's noteworthy that Anshe has stated that Philip's number he quoted for her income is simply untrue. Given my agreement with the points you've made above Cristiano, I tend to believe her.

There's no doubt about that, Jake. Most of the long-time hardcore creators here started when there was no way to make any money, purely for the joy of creating. That's all well and good, but people just noodling around will never create the kind of immersive content people are clamoring for. It requires too much money and too much time and since so few are willing to help defray the costs, ultimately people are unlikely to be that charitable for long. Look how fast private island sims come and go. Developing for NWN is far simpler than developing things of equivelant complexity for SL. NWN is modular. You pick out pre-created modules and assemble them. The hard work has already been done for you. Comparing SL to NWN is apples and oranges.

I have to disagree with you in this regard Chip. Look at the fan community of the Sims/Sims 2. Look at sites like the Sims Resource or the Well Dressed Sim - the quality of content being created for those sites rivals anything done in SL, and actually surprasses it - and everything on those sites is either free, or part of a small (like $5 month or something) fee. I don't think Jake is totally off the mark, but I also agree with you to a large degree. However, there are established content communities that produce high quality content just for the love of it. Why is SL so different?

I think you nailed "why" in your last post.

I certainly dod not think there is anything wrong with playing with dolls, I enjoy it myself immesley, but that is the activity that I most liken to SL. we have an avi, most of the content created are clothes for our avi, houses for our avi, clubs to hang out with out avi, cars to ride around in with our avi, pools to swim in, giant battle robots to ride around in. But ultimately, in my observation, SL is playing with dolls. I did not mean to imply any negative connotation, od that Sl was some how less sophisticated because thats what we do. I don't think it is intolerant or fails to see other's view points, it is justa reduction of Sl to it essential elements.

Age might be a factor. SL is mostly populated by adults who have real jobs and responsibilities to attend to. Unless there's an incentive to invest hundreds of hours in development, what percentage of people can afford to do it? How long will they stick with it?

Um, again, look at the sites, Chip, the content is not being created by children.

I guess I don't focus so much on the avatar. I go long periods without even changing clothes, because, well hey, I don't need to. I finally got my first skin a couple of months ago.

I focus on social interaction, building things for the sake of self-expression (mainly), and to make a little spare change where I can, which pays my tier and puts some gas in my car.

Sorry if I attributed negativity to your post, but it just came across as "This is the way it is people.", to me at the time.

Thanks for the response Jake.

Okay, then maybe it's because developing attractions for SL is expensive, frustrating, limited, generally thankless, and like trying to hit a moving target? Maybe it's because the platform isn't capable of realizing the kinds of things people really want to do? I stick to developing products because I could never achieve my bigger visions until the platform is more mature, feature rich, and advanced than it is now... and I charge money for them because I can't afford to spend $195 a month to noodle around. I don't think it's wrong or unfair to only let people use my products who are willing to help defray my expenses. I'm not psychic so I can't tell you why anyone else feels the way they do, but if some of the most popular places in SL feel they need to pay people to spend time there we obviously have a problem.

Well, he hires himself to build more content. The ice skates came about because he made enough money from the roller skates to justify the time and expense.

Technicality, but, there is one other.

Project Entropia

Read as: Virtual Casino in the guise of an MMO.

I am not saying I agree with the mentality at all - and yes, there are signficant costs involved (though you hardly have to own an entire sim to sell content in SL). However, I was just holding that out as an example of people creating for the love of creating, and the love of the environment. There is nothing wrong with making an income off of it - if people find value in it, they will pay for it. I don't like the entitlement attitude anymore than you do - but I also don't think it is as clear cut black and white as "if you make stuff, people should pay if they want it". It's a complicated issue, made all the worse by Linden Lab's stupid "get rich now!" cheerleading.

You'll get no argument from me there It seems to me the things that most make SL unique and cool are not the things that get played up in the marketing. To be fair it's not all LL's fault. 99% of the media coverage of SL focuses on the same thing. That's probably inevitable since the concept of real money for virtual content is still pretty new and so it seems to be the aspect people find the most interesting (in an incredulous sort of way). I truly hope that'll hurry up and not seem so novel or strange to people. Aside from that, who can deny that Anshe's or Kermitt's stories are pretty interesting and at this point really are novel.

I definitely think one of the most important things LL needs to focus on is managing people's expectations through the way they market SL. Unfortunately the vast majority of SL's marketing is from the press and not LL. Like you I tend to cringe whenever I hear Philip go off on the "make real money" spiel. Places like Amazon make money on the web, but they're only a miniscule part of what makes the web so great, and they exist peacefully beside everything else. Personally I think the "problem" being debated in this thread is mostly perceptual and not really any different that the culture clash in the early days of the web between people who saw it as a great economic opportunity and those who saw it as the ultimate self-expressive free-for-all. A decade later both are thriving.

Having created for both you are right. But to be fair the content creators on the NWN platform tend to create whole worlds, so i would say that time and effort spent on making content for the two platforms is simillar. In truth my purpose was not to point out that SL is just like NWN, but rathe to say if you build a strong deadicated commnity, content will be generated whether people get paid or not. I mean SL players on the whole tent to be drawn from the more creative end of a very imaginative hobby that requires a lot of intelligence. And people are passionate about it-thats part of the reason i think forms get volatile-there are very few posting here that do not care about SL.

I know that the SL master plan certainly calls for developers to be rewared for thier efforts, but my impression from some of the linden comments is that we lose new members as fast as well get them. I think the money chairs prove we don't need hugely sophistiacted content to keep people in the came, just a relatively small amout of disposable income.

A small amount of disposable income is easily purchased on Lindex, people who I have referred and brought over to SL do as well. Small content will not cut it, I continue to purchase content from others, my biggest issue is not finding enough diverse quality content and thats what I hear from other avid consumers.

I think Chip is correct that is more to do with peoples's perceptions about SL's Marketing and when they first enter SL.

The people I referred to SL I was sure to inform them this was much more expensive enviroment/game then we had come from. I reffered them immediately to GOM and helped them learn how to purchase money, let them know once they tested SL upgrade to premium .

Most of them have been here a year now none of these people are content creators and have never expressed a complaint about having to purchase money to play the game.

New users who come on thier own get a much different education when they ask about how to get money. If they look at events, popular places everything is screaming FREE Money just sit and collect.

I am not a fan of There I played it for a while and it was not my cup of tea I went there from TSO I asked like every new person how do you get money are there jobs like in TSO? Answer no you go to the website and buy money which I & every other player in THERE does.

I am not saying we should'nt give help to new users but if this is what they learn in thier first few weeks on SL why should'nt they keep expecting everything for free?

I don't know.. the more I think about this the more unsure I become about the complaints. I'm still sad that camping chairs are so popular, but other things make me doubt.

The complaint that "camping chairs dominate the popularity charts", for instance. Isn't the nature of SL such that, at any given moment, there will be something that is most popular and that thing will start springing up in multiple locations, propelling those to the top of the dwell list? Before camping chairs it was *ingo, perhaps it will be something else in the future, but there'll always be something.

And the money in the camping chairs is not "free money". Even if it was paid as dwell, the reciever of the dwell has to spend it on the chairs where otherwise they would spend it on something else or cash out. If the L$ are being generated, anywhere, they affect the market value of the L$ no matter who winds up holding them. What happens if someone came up with a popular event that doesn't pay out, collects a large amount of dwell, and Lindexes it all, driving down the market value? Are we going to put a top limit on the measured popularity of event sites?



Most new users don't know about the Events list at the time they ask how to get money. Purchasing L$ for money is the first thing the game's help interface tells them about. And most of the newbie helpers - at least, the ones in the NCI who I've hung out with - mention premium membership either at the top of the list or near the top.

I am glad the interface has this now, however it really has not been there long enough to impact the incoming player base and change the overall mentality of players in game that takes time. While I am sure that newbie helpers mention it , if 1 week into the game you are being educated to go sit in a money chair to earn free money then how much impact does that have?

Why should I pay for a premium account or buy money when I can get it for free? Why should I go to an event and have to pay or contribute to support for it when I can go sit at xyz and get money for nothing?

You dont think one of the first things the new users once they figure out how to move is press the find or map button? I think the objection people have about the money chairs is that people a great deal of the times just go park in thier chair and go afk then complain that there is nothing to do in SL.

I have talked to a few people who have used these and ask what they do, these were some of the answers: Im not at computer I go sleep, I go do other things at home, sometimes Im not even home my computer is just on with me in the chair, I go to a web game site and play games on the web, I am in im yahoo or some other im program.

So instead of playing a game inworld or chatting to people in world they use sl to make money and do these things elsewere.

This is a good point. What is the purpose of the stipend for free accounts? Well, it's to allow the free accounts to function as part of the Linden Economy. SL is a simulation of an economic system, and things like stipends and dwell are there to provide a simulation of the effects of economic activity. A stipend is your paycheck, it's where the money you're supposedly making at the off-camera job comes in to the system. Dwell simulates all the little payments everyone makes all the time on things like food and gas, the humming core of the living economy that would be downright boring and annoying to have to do in SL. Oh, sure, it's there to provide an incentive for people to build things to get traffic, but that's the same incentive that leads to people building corner stores in real life.

So really, as well as looking at Lindens as a reward for the players, you have to look at how it flows and what people do with their money and what they do to get more of it, and whether what you're emulating by the way LL distributes them is actually something that's got a good parallel in the real world.

In the real world, you have low wage jobs. The SL equivalent of the low wage earners are the basic account holders who don't have or don't want to apply building skills. Low wage jobs represent a surprisingly large part of the economy, and many of them have a direct impact on the lives of everyone. Clerks and waiters, cashiers and bellboys, in SL these jobs are done by scripts. But apart from a few exceptions (like Eliza in Colony 6) these scripts don't intract with you. You're not going to sit there and talk to a script, or go back to a store because a script was so much fun to talk to the way you may stick with a restaurant because of a favorite waiter.

SL needs this kind of job, and it used to have one. The reputation bonus meant that just being an active part of the game would get you tips, if you stuck at it. And it may have removed more Lindens from the economy than it put into it, over the long term... and if it didn't before, it could be capped (the maximum reputation bonus ANYONE could get would be limited to a few hundred lindens) to keep people from benefiting hugely from gaming the system.

Yes, it would give money to people with free accounts. But it'd give them money for something that benefitted SL, rather than turning sims with money chairs into lag holes.

Well, if they have a popular event that paying users enjoy, that encourages those paying users to play SL, and keep paying. If they're getting that dwell from freebie accounts sitting in chairs they're encouraging freebie accounts and doing nothing to get more paying users into the system.

Which one's going to do more for the value of the Lindex over the long term?

Maybe the amount of dwell an account generates should be based on the economic value of that account. How much money it's earned (one way or another, there's no way objectively to tell an IGE Linden purchase from a gift from a sale through a vendor that doesn't use "Buy" boxes) over the previous month, up to some limit. That would not only counter this problem but it would also better simulate the economy... people with more income have more disposable income, tend to spend more in the little background noise of economic transactions taht dwell emulates.

Maybe what we need is more subscription levels. Have L$ tiers like we already have land tiers. If people want $5000L every month, they can pay a few bucks a month for it. If they start making L$ in world or decide the don't need that much they can tier down, or up, or have no monthly fee and get just a little. At least then, psychologically, new users are already connecting RL expenditure with L$'s.

Right now people with graphics, animation, and programming skills have a far easier time of finding a way to gain an income in SL than others. No denying it. That's not likely to change until the platform evolves enough to enable more types of things. What those things will be I don't know. How limited or unlimited are the demands for a virtual world likely to be? You'd think providing entertainment would be a shoe-in. I don't for the life of me understand why that sector of the SL economy isn't dominant, but it all seems to come back to a culture where most people just don't want to pay for stuff unless they have to.

This would make sense seeing how I know people and even I originally only went premium just for the extra weekly stipend because I can't build anything, don't know how to use photoshop, and can barely script. Alot of people only goto premium for the L$ and not the land ownership privalages (many just buy their first land to sell for extra L$ when they first go premium).

Chip its because things are backward and unlikely to change as far as I can see in SL the larger view of events is were can I go and get something free instead of where can I go and have fun. The mentality seems to be that we should pay to entertain people, creating a fun entertaining event in itself does not seem to be enough. Last night I went in search of some fun places to go & socialise, 12 out of 15 the places I went to that had people were money chairs with people afk.

I went to a game that looked like could of been fun I cant recall the name atm but since no pay out was involved guess what no one there. The first thing I hear when people look at any new games is there a payout? Not is it fun and how do I play, what a sad state of affairs.

I dont know what the solution is but I have played in a variety of worlds were there was no economy involved and people played games just cause was fun not for what you would get.

I played VZones where there was a simplified economy and people bought things for their avs and as gifts and played games were nothing but prizes were given and had a fantastic time. Same with There my issues with leaving There were mainly the lack of being able to be creative as well as socialise rather then having to buy money.

Linden Lab really needs to do more to differentiate the value of a premium account. People scream when you suggest that premium accounts have things that the free accounts don't, but there has to be some incentive - and you can't expect every single thing for free, LL does need to have an income.

I agree with this to a degree but wouldnt this add to the problem of the economy being flooded with L's that LL is currently trying to stabilise?

My complaint is that I sat in one for like 6 hours at the Feted IRC Treehouse, and then it didn't pay me!