Stopping Developers Incentive?

Oh please spare me, I have given out several hundred thousand L$ in the past year to support new players. My point is that going somewhere and just going afk for the night is stupid - not to the people using the chairs, I don't blame them for wanting money if people are willing to give it away. It is incredible lame of the club operator. Dwell was meant as a measure of popularity. Artificially inflating it because the places so desperately wanted to win the Developer Incentives just ended up putting the final nail in their coffin. People go to the places thinking they are popular, and instead, it is just a bunch of afk zombies not saying a word. An interesting and popular club doesn't need to resort to that - at least with money balls and contests, it encouraged people to be active and have a good time. The money chairs are the absolute bottom of the barrel in SL, and are not sustainable in the long term.

I don't care, just felt like responding to Cocoanut. You are right they are a failed business model, and they took the developer incentives right down with them.

Lets all get in the festive spirit guys - its coming up on xmas and all - WWJD?

Lets all sing a xmas carol and get all uplifted and shit....

(jingle bells)

Flying to Tringo... it's just 3 sims away
Shit I can't fucking move... that lag is here to stay
Look at that bitches head - half rezzed with curly things...
...oh holy shit I'm blinded now - turn off that fucking bling... OW!

Tringo Hell, Tringo Hell, a new way to get paid
I'll win that pot, and keep the lot, then teleport away HEY!

No more dwell for Tringo Hell, thats what the Lindens say...
..no money balls, or camping chairs, pack up that shit today.... HEY!



Merry Farking Christmas.

It wasn’t the camping chair phenomenon that brought the DIA down. They were on their way to the grave anyway. Camping chairs just put the spotlight on the fact that dwell (traffic) is not a very good measurement if the activities of a resident do help Linden Lab in achieving its business goals. And – let’s face it – that is and has always been the purpose of the developer incentive.

The DIAs purpose always has been to motivate residents to create (or do) something that makes Second Life more interesting. But this "interesting" is not a goal in itself. What Linden Lab wanted was more revenues, more (paying) residents – or residents paying more (tier). Simply measuring how many residents spend how much time at a specific location is no indicator for that. It was never! Camping chairs just made it obvious. And so the time for this absurd form of subsidy is over.

I am not against motivating residents to make Second Life a more interesting place to be - or for paying them, when they do this. But any new system would have to be based on a much better measurement of how residents activities actually influence the cash flow of Linden Lab. Any other model will soon go the way of the dodo - or the old DIAs.

Good god it took them long enough. Bye Bye dwell. Of course with any change people who benefited from it will be upset. Siggy pointed out the Cannabis Cathedral. If people saw money chairs there they would barf I'm sure. It wouldn't happen. Goodbye dwell, goodbye negative ratings or gamed ratings. Hello stupid classifieds (sigh). Some incentives that actually worked would be nice.

Ok, I haven't seen a clube do camping chairs yet. Just casino's so far I been to that do them. The one's I goto are far from AFK graveyard's. Very active group of people. Always someone there to talk to and joke with. Some casino's I been to people AFK'D for the moneyballs. No difference there really, just less of a chance to get money.

The place I goto I could EASILY blow 1500-2000L a night on and IF I'm lucky to not crash I make a 300L profit from camping all night. For me, yea it's a failed model, for the guy running it, I would think he might disagree with you there guy.

You wanna bitch about sumthing that ruined SL, bitch about Tringo! There used to be a ton of great event's till that game came along. Now all I see is tringo/slingo/flingo/gringo or w.e other variation it has now. I don't even bother looking at event's anymore. I already know what's there. CRAP.

For some perspective, here is a post from Doug Linden at the top of page 9 of a thread about the developer's incentive before it came to be.

When you get into the pop places list you see your sales skyrocket because of all the extra traffic. You can charge 3-4 times more for vendor rent. What's lame about that? Blame the system put in place by LL, not those that uses it to its full extent.The DI isnt large enough to have any major impact on the income of those places. Losing the DI will have no noticable effect as long as they keep the dwell system as it is. It's not the DI itself that is the goal, but the listing that gives 'valuable' traffic. DI was just a nice bonus on top. I can agree with what you say, but as long as the dwell system is as it is, there will be no change to this practice. It is simply a matter of buying yourself a good listing. The trick is to keep expenses lower than your income. As long as it is still possible to buy your way up the list, it will be done. That totally depends on the business model that surrounds them. This is marketing in practice. If the money you give out gives you a listing that leads to 10x more income but only increases your expenses by 9x, you win.

The only way to get rid of this 'problem' is to redo the dwell calculation system. Maybe the best would be to simply remove it.

Oh, and let me just add: If they do away with the dwell system, I think they should use the L$ they save to pay their mentors and class instructors a decent SL wage.

Educating and helping new creators along must be the best way to get new, compelling content in here.

I'd say you have that exactly right. People create or profit by LL's rules here. What's lame about it is LL has made a world where money counts for more than creativity frequently. Possibly they have seen in the case of dwell this isn't a good choice.

Insulting LL's customers doesn't help solve the problem, nor does it make them more likely to stay.

I've seen business games where you start out with $10m capital. In many modern racing games you start with a high-end car. And in most MMORPGs, you can look like whatever you want, but there are few enough options that skill doesn't come into it and everyone else is limited in just the same way. Paradoxically, all the addition of extra options does is to provide extra ways in which to fail to look like what you want to.

A group of folks actively playing Tringo and having fun beats a group of silent, AFK, zombified campers anyday!

The measurement of dwell/traffic was supposed to measure "fun" or "engagement". If an active player liked something, they would stay there and would be counted! Zombie campers aren't there for fun or engaging content, just to rack in money by abusing the system(using mouse clickers, programs to avoid autologout, or aything to keep them in the chair without actually using SL, etc).

If rafts of people enjoy Tringo events, then bully for them! I think that's great! They are having fun!

I think the logic, though, is that arena gambling games are dwell-supported money handouts in exactly the same way that camping chairs are, they just engage people more and cost less. It's still the case that, if they didn't pay out, people wouldn't show up, and that's I think what the problem folks are complaining about is. It will be interesting to see how well the offline Tringo game sells, so that the game can be judged independantly rather than in the "free gambling" context.

Heh.

I would very much like to comment on this statement. I'm just afraid I might get fired if I do.

That's great, but if everyone was like you there wouldn't be anyone filling the McJobs in the real world.

Though I have to wonder who it is that buys the things that I see for sale that look like a 7 year old made them.

Do people actually buy "a sculpture, it looks really cool" kinds of things, or are they just sitting there filling up the spaces in malls?

Dude, I know that. Most of the SL population are free-riders on Basic accounts who don't buy US$ on LindeX or IGE, make product, or rent land. But the ones like me are the ones actually making it possible for SL to exist.

If someone's actually paying US$ for their cool prim hair, more power to them... they're not the ones I'm talking about. See, the issue at hand right now isn't people who are paying their way, it's the people who paid for their prim hair by dancing in a club and taking kickbacks.

SL is not a game. It was never intended to be one. There will never be an artificial way to make L$ that's not related to someone's real world skill or the exchange of real world value.

Even if Tringo was a good example, I didn't see Kermitt Quirk in any of the recent DI posts - so much for creativity

You don't need to get rid of dwell to get that result.

That's incredibly lame of the vendors, then, if they actually think space in a sim containing money chairs and the associated deadhead lag is actually worth that. This reminds me of the balloon built around Telehubs that just collapsed.
Yes.
No.

But from the outside it looks exactly like one. Which is why, when people expect stuff when they come in, it isn't "laziness" or a "sense of entitlement" or anything similar - they're just thinking of a game.

And if they come in and decide that they can't compete with the established and practiced businesses, and they don't want feel like second-class citizens compared to those who run those businesses, then they quit. Or they might buy L$, but they certainly don't tier up beyond a private house - that they'd be better off renting because of the prim allocation system.

The only reason to do work in SL as opposed to RL is that it's easier in SL. That is rapidly becoming no longer the case. If you have to compete with someone with a year's practice, then you probably need that year's practice yourself - and after that your competitior will have 2 years. This isn't saying it's impossible, but it is going to become less popular, so the number of people tiering up to run content businesses is sure to fall, leaving people tiering up to have houses (much smaller tier) or to run rental land (which is cancelled out by the lost tier that would have been paid by the renters). Which is why I think tier will not be sustainable as LL's primary income for much longer.

Someone who's not paying US$ into the Linden Economy, or producing goods that bring US$ into the Linden economy, isn't a customer. They're a potential customer.
If that's the kind of game you want, that's the kind of game you should be playing. Second Life isn't that sort of game, and if it was that sort of game I wouldn't be playing it.

Maybe not. But that was the purpose of dwell. And as dwell did not fulfill this purpose the logical consequence was to eliminate it.

And I still fail to see the sense in paying a bonus/commission or whatever you may call it to someone just because many AVs spend time on this someones land. There is not much correlation between the business objectives of Linden Lab and dwell.

The fact that they engage people at all is such a huge difference that they don't even belong in the same category.

And if you won't "first give a little water to the pump", then you lose all that potential.