Stopping Developers Incentive?

Secind comment first.You are so far off here it's insane. This has nothing to do with whether I appreciate it. I drop hundreds of Lindens at a time into donation boxes at places I hang out. I spend my time building stuff for people as much as for me. For free. I've helped someone with a build and THEN paid for some of the stuff they needed to finish it off, because I get off on making stuff.

I've never had anyone tell me they were entitled to my generosity, and I don't believe I'm entitled to yours. But I'm not sure why you think you're entitled to my Lindens, either. In any case, you're welcome to my dwell...

Oh man.

One way of looking at this is that no, it's not SL's economy. It's the real world's economy, it's the economy that's paying for Linden Labs and the grid. No amount of exchanges in Lindens will pay for a single server, unless those Lindens can be exchanged for US$.

Another way of looking at it is that the real world economy is the best way we've found to motivate people to do stuff that's valuable. And these indirect payments that are inherently impossible to implement directly in SL... unless they go and make our Avatars get hungry, tired, cold, sick, and thirsty (which would be a perfectly viable way of solving the prolem). Without some analog of these payments, you're not going to get the kinds of things in SL that these payments buy in RL.

Another problem is that SL isn't a capitalist society. It's a socialist one. It's the closest thing I've seen to the society of Iain Banks "Culture", ever. Your avatar has no needs not immediately met by the grid. The only things you need money for are luxuries, and you can make all the luxury goods you want by sheer effort of mind. "From each according t his abilities, to each according to his needs".

Left to itself, I don't know what it would end up looking like, but there's no guarantee that it would be anything any human would recognise. In fact, I'd bet money against that.

So to make it profitable for Linden Labs, they have IMPOSED economic costs on certain things, and economic benefitrs on thers, and are trying to tweak it so the result is something that's attractive to people who are used to the things the RL economy produces. So when there are problems witht heir model, they can (and alas, do) do a lot worse than trying to emulate the RL economy.

If I have to pay cover to go into your club then the only thing I need to do to be fair to the club owner is to go somewhere else. I'm receiving no value from him, he's receiving no value from me, what could be more fair than that?

I've dropped hundreds of Lindens in the donation boxes, or tens of thousands at the landowner's own stores, at all the places I hang out.

But I honestly can not imagine what you could possibly be offering at your club that could be worth a L$100 cover charge to go in. I'm not asking you "what do you offer" to be snarky, I'm asking because you really believe there's something inside your club that's worth L$100 more than what's outside it, and I want to know what it is.

In RL, the only thing you're paying for to get into a certain club is prestige. Hobnobbing with the "right" people. The drinks are the same, the music is the same (live concerts being the exception), its a bar with some big dude at the front checking to see if you're wearing the right clothing before he lets you in. Its all about creating the atmosphere of "This place only lets in cool people - therefore if they let me in, I'll be cool too". Its amazing how much that can drive people.

Argent, I'm lost. I know you are arguing with points that others have made, but just what are you arguing for? I can't tell anymore.


I'm being serious, I'm lost. I don't know what you to happen now.

I think that a lot of the posts here have hit on a lower level problem. Namely, that the problem isn't DI, or dwell, or anything similar. The problem is tier.

Bluntly, it's fast looking like LL is going to have to try to develop an economic model that doesn't rely on tier. The basic problems being that:

a) tier penalises the people who provide the content that makes the game attractive to users;
b) many people then want to make up for it by making back that tier via in-game income, which is made by methods including dwell, and having people buy items with their stipend; when these "printed" L$ are sold for US$ they lower the value of the L$;
c) tier scales very badly, because as the game grows, the value of creating stuff on the grid diminishes because more stuff already exists and the quality (and thus "necessary work" bar rises. LL unfortunately did this backwards: the earliest tier was effectively cheapest of all, although risky (4096 accounts) and the price has risen over time, not fallen.

I don't have a club To put things in perspective, $100 is equal to about 4 cents usd. I can't really think of any venue that wouldn't be worth that, honestly. If I didn't enjoy myself I just wouldn't go back to that particular place. I'm still only out 4 cents

I'll bet I could put together an av that'd hang with the best for no more than L$1000, without ever leaving Pixeldolls. I could make one that wouldn't scream "newbie" for under L$50 using the boxes at Yadni's and a couple of photoshopped textures.

4 cent's would be awsome... in RL. This IS NOT RL tho. 100L is 100L. Basic account's get 50L a week, which mean's, if they have no other source of income, they have to wait two weeks just to blow they're money on sum club that really had nothing to offer them really.

Premium account's get 500L a week, so for on week they get a chance to be a regular to that club 5 time's a week. Whoopy. I don't think as many people care about that rl money part of SL as you guy's think. What I care about is the 100L I have left to my name, not that it's only 4 cents.

Actually it's about 37 cents

hehe, okay then... 37 cents doesn't have the same punch, but my point is still the same. I'd chip in 37 cents to enjoy someone's hospitality.

(this is why I'm an artist and not an accountant)

Premium accounts exchange real money for L$. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same.

Why are you paying so much for so little?
And what do you tell them at the same time?

I didn't come into SL expecting to get Lindens for free, and I didn't expect to start out making big bucks, and I put my first AV together on my signing bonus and stipend, and I help lots of newbies get set up without spending a lot of money.

Just because a viewpoint is popular, that doesn't mean it's valid. Four years ago, the viewpoint that's led to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was TREMENDOUSLY popular. Now the cover of Time asks how Bush can *salvage* his presidency, and the unpopular viewpoint of 4 years ago is now on the rise. No matter which side of THAT debate you take, you have to be able to see that the popularity of an opinion doesn't make it a valid one.

The above was brought to you by Godwin's cousin Steve.

With all due respect to one of my most favorite people (Chip, the liberal I adore.. hehe), I think he is just naming examples from his perspective. But Chip is a skin and clothing creator. Not an event host. Those of us who like to host events and attend clubs I'm sure can be creative enough to come up with ideas to draw people in. I see it all the time and it is why I visit new clubs regularly. Some more creative than even me can give examples. And just *think* of the ideas that haven't even been tried or thought of yet due to there not being a reason.

I'm arguing for rational economic reasons behind any changes that they do make or that people are urging. Being 'fair' is not in itself a reason to do things different UNLESS that unfairness leads to problems.

So, for example, the economy of SL should be modelled more closely on the economy of RL, because it's tied to the economy of RL and it's being expected to produce similar results. So there should be McJobs, not because it's fair to the person holding the job, but because these jobs can be made to directly benefit someone other than the employee within the context of the SL economy. There should be a mechanism to model the money spent on necessities as well as the money spent on luxuries, not because I want to be fair to people who depend on the DI now, but because that's turned out to be a useful part of the real-life economy. There should be negative as well as positive feedback loops and limits to prevent outright gaming the system... not because camping chairs are unfair, but because they threaten the ability of LL to continue to support SL.

Um, that would be about 40c. But there's also roughtly fifty quintillion clubs in SL and I've been to 2.013% of them and none of them have been worth that 40c... and I don't have forty quintillion cents to spend finding that out.

(disclaimer: 50% of the figures quoted in this report are obviously ludicrous, if you use this report for forward planning and lose fifty quintillion cents you're a moron)

Also: L$100 might be US$0.40, but it's also half the entire discretionary monthly income of most of the AVs on SL.

I know Mike Godwin by acquaintance, and I also know the guy who really said what became known as Goodwin's Law. His name's Richard, not Steve.

This is a point you bring up often. I'm not a thick person, but I'm having trouble wrapping myself around what you mean or why this would be desirable. Could you elaborate exactly how this would work within SL. More specifically, some of your posts seem supportive of DI, but in others you seem to say the current DI was broken (i.e. camping chairs). What specifically would you replace it with or change about it?

an old question in the hotline
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so i wonder what the new plan is.

It already exists in SL. It's called dwell. When you spend time in an area, if you were YOU and not your av, a certain amount of that time you'd have bought a drink, or a meal, or gas, or antacids, or something else that doesn't exist in SL because avatars don't have bodily needs. Instead that's simulated by having SL spend that money without you.

So I got L$33 from group bonus on my 4096 last night. That's my share of the sales from the coke machine and hot-dog stand that would have been there if the avatars who were scooting around the lagoon on inner tubes or flying from my skybox airport really had to eat hotdogs and drink sodas. There's LOTS of places in RL where those kinds of vending machines pay for upkeep of the grounds they're on, in SL they're just simulated by dwell.

I'd modify dwell to more accurately model the kind of spending it replaces. Someone who's on a fifty buck a week discretionary spending budget wouldn't be buying sodas or hot dogs, he'd have packed a lunch. Someone better off would have spent the money in the airport restaurant that it'd be silly for me to actually build because nobody would buy any food in it (see also, avatars don't eat). That's the change I'm urging... that dwell better model this kind of "background" spending.

Camping chairs that had to attract 5x or 10x as many free accounts to match the dwell of the paying customers in a more interesting sim wouldn't be nearly so attractive.

Honestly, that is first time your idea has made any sense to me, Argent.

haha, methinks you overthink things just a wee bit, Argent

Why do sum people post as if camping chairs were used by basic account's only? Have any of you actually camped? It's NOT just noob's/basic account's. I should kno, I camp! And no, it's not an AFK graveyard. Again, I speak from first hand experience. I've made alot of awsome friend's camping at VGI. Not sure how it is at other place's, but most the place's I've been to have a thriving camping "culture" of sort's. People talking to each other, making joke's, etc.

Camping chair's aren't even the problem. The problem is the content developer's crying to LL about how they're not being more creative to get they're customer's back to them instead of those people running off to camp. It's not the camper's fault you guy's aren't creative enough.

I would be willing to bet you couldn't. A decent skin costs over a thousand. And your second position include photoshopping, a technical option not available to everyone who plays. And yes there is some very cool free stuff. its fun for about 5 minutes and then you want to have the same things everyone else has. If free stuff were all that an a bag of chips, most content creators would be out of business.

Also a lot of people happily pay for this stuff. My point was not to say you couldn't do Sl on the cheap, my point was to say that a lot of club goers spend a lot of money to do nothing more than hang out. The so called Tekki-wikiati, lol, want everyone in the sand box and poop the clubs as limited content welfare sites. A lot of posts I see somehow relelgate clubgoers, tringo player and chair campers to the level of uninformed. Like it is some huge shock that people might enjoy these activites and build communites around them.

Do you really think that the fact that none of this stuff is at the top of the popular places list is really about money chairs, money balls and dance contests?