Stopping Developers Incentive?

Because it's a reversal of the status quo. As I've said, things like camping chairs have set a 'norm' of gimmickery and payout. Reversing that is going to hit even those who haven't ever exercised such gimmicks right in the gut. Meanwhile, the former 'camping chair' magnates will just move on to a more direct gimmick of take, like slot machines with horrible odds.

The DI doesn't go to the customer of the "theatre" or the "grocery store"... it goes to the "theatre" or "grocery store" itself. It's not a "crutch". Consider... NOTHING anyone buys in SL is a necessity. Nothing. They're all luxuries. But in RL, most people spend a huge chunk of their income on things like food and gas and insurance that just don't happen in SL. They're avatars. They don't GET sick.

Dwell is the equivalent of all these little untracked transactions. It's not a "crutch", it's part of the real economy. It shouldn't be removed, it should be tuned to better reflect that part of the real economy.

I always though that the ability to make joining a group cost a fee was put in for just that kind of thing. Restrict access to group members only. Make the group open enrollment but with a fee. At the beginning of each month, boot out everyone but officers. Easy. The only hard part is finding some way to let people sample the goods before deciding to join the group or not. You could even lower the join fee over the course of each month so that people who join in the second half of the month don't have to pay for the full month.

ok. This is kind of what I'm getting at. I never liked the idea of 'dwell', but SL was, unfortunately, *built around it*. Lots of people don't like Wal-Mart, but if you closed them all down tomorrow, the US economy and to some extent parts of the world economy would collapse.

Linden should have nipped this "gaming of the dwell system" in the bud a LONG time ago, when we were all sounding alerts about it.

Instead, it was ignored, and now instead of just putting a band-aid on a scratch, the economy is going to bleed when they pull the blade out.

The economy became too entrenched in DI and dwell, and formed norms around it. Yeah, those are going to have to re-form, and I think in the long run, IF it's done right, that can happen... but whooo crap is it gonna send some shockwaves through the grid, no matter how you look at it.

So it should go to the people who make the most money?

That's only true if it's gamed -- because then they *make the most money* BY the DI going to them.

We could have never gotten as much DI as the places with camping chairs - because that was their model in whole; for us it was just a factored in portion of the whole.

Now, of *course* this change is going to hurt them a LOT more than it will hurt us, but it's still going to hurt a lot of people throughout because the response is going to be more charges and more gimmickery - or just a lot of people closing up shop.

The point is that LL can't take this, or do this, lightly. It could cause a serious clusterf*ck if they don't do some damage assessment first.

(And this means newbies too. Since camping chairs have existed, nobody has bothered to establish opportunities for newbies. We're talking serious structure and social change here.)

Dwell gaming should have been addressed a long time ago. Since it wasn't, the entire grid is going to pay for it now.

Newbies lose revenue streams to buy products. Businesses lose sales that formerly went to newbies who got L$ in camping chairs. Less buisinesses exist, less variety, less production, less content in world.

Who are the winners?

The L$ leeches who gamed dwell for this long time and got away with it, taking advantage of a loophole to extract L$ from the economy and manipulating LL's incentives.

It's all cyclical. And it's going to hurt a lot more people than "barons".

Personally.. I'm really excited this is happening!! And the lindens do say some replacements are in the works. I'm sure they will, as always, work with residents to see some good rewards come into place.

I also hope this will lead the way to more community support (businesses especially) supporting/sponsoring events and places. As well as hopefully some charging for events and such.

I remember when Anshe was charging 100$L for her classes. I was a *huge* supporter of that approach. I'm one of those tired of others paying me to come to them. I'd rather pay those I think worthy of me coming to them. I know I"m not the only one.

Pendari, in such a case you're going to have to convince the boatloads of 'free accounts' to hit that Lindex button and pay L$100. Right now that isn't the norm. It probably SHOULD be, but when people think that L$250 is "omg expensive" after they've paid US$0.00 for their account, I dont know what to say.

SL culture has got to change fo this to work.

Good ridance.

I know that a lot of good places get their load lightened by developer incentives but a lot of bad places do too.

The original idea behind DI was to award creativity. Looking on the top winners of this I can say that it failed. All it really took to get on DI was a place like Ice Dragons which just runs tringo events all day and has camping chairs.

Hopefully whatever they replace it with will be better but even if it's nothing atleast we're not rewarding the people who just run 20 events a day with "FREE MONIES!!1" in the title.

I dunno Artemis. Maybe anonymous voting. And I guess it will be nice to not see "fake popularity" anymore on the lists. Maybe we'll get back to real content and real merit, but the economy is going to take some kicks for it.

I'm repeating myself because I want to make myself clear: I'm not a big fan of DI and I've always yelled about it being gamed. I just hope LL's heart is in the right place -- (i.e. the community's best interest and not the raw bottom line.)

Can you cite any examples of this ever happening?

developer incentives to be replaced by infospam!

dwell wasn't broken. all the facists on the forum were broken.

Voting of any kind, even anonymous, will get gamed in a heartbeat. People will be buying votes instead of buying butts in chairs.

The elimination of the Developer Incentive Award is due to slower and slower growth in the percentage of residents that pay tier fees.

As of December 1st, of 90,000 SL residents only 5,900 residents, or 6.55-percent of the total population, actually paid tier fees as they owned more than 512-sq.m of land. Approximately 7-months ago this figure was closer to 12-percent.

As the largest portion of LL's revenues are generated by tier fees and as LL is failing to meet its own revenue targets this is, quite literally, belt tightening.

The explosive growth brought on by free Basic accounts is meaningless when one considers that they failed to upgrade their account status to Premium and also acquire parcels large enough to require tier payments. [The net gain from the previous month was a mere 400 more residents paying tier fees while the total population grew by an additional 10,000.] The Developer Incentive Award, in and of itself, was not enough of an inducement for a vast portion of residents to upgrade and the costs associated with free Basic accounts (bandwidth, customer support, etc.) have become burdensome.

The flipside though is that those residents who have taken on ownership roles in SL and do pay tier may reduce the total size of their parcels to offset the added expenses brought on by the elimination of this subsidy.

The fundamental problem is that there is a readily apparent and easy to implement solution to incentivize land ownership: Make it clear in resident profiles whether they are a Basic account or a Premium account (Basic accounts would feel social pressure to upgrade). However, LL, at its own peril, continues to decline to do so (Better to go broke running a "classless society" platform than create actual shareholder value and meet and exceed revenue targets).

allright well yah i can't say this comes as a huge shock... honestly if you did a string compare against the top 50 places in the incentive list looking for 'free' 'money' 'sex' 'casino' you'd prolly come back with at least 45 query hits...

yah, we can afford to take the skin, we're lucky that people have liked our avs enough that this isn gonna be killer, its just going to double our tier, which is whee fun... I duno as one'f the only places thats consistantly gotten up there, without bs events, camping chairs, money balls, etc etc, the incentive program did frustrate the hell outta me cause i saw essentially people taking advantage of the whole program, at everyone else tryin to do well's expense...

remember, 'dwell' or 'traffic' or whatever is graded based on a 'curve' so when someone cheats or 'games' the system, its everyone else who suffers. luskwood will keep on keepin on... other places, places that were expanding like mad, buying up sims one after another.. i don even wanna think how this affects them... i've talked with other sim owners just barely skating by on retail space rent and some incentive stuff... they're pretty well screwed...

will i be sorry to see OMGCHAIRFREEMONEYBALLSINOMALLCLUBSIM! dissapear? no, honestly, they weren adding anything to SL, they were leeching from it...

will i be sorry to see friends who just laid out a grand and change, or more, on new islands, suck them up as they realize their only real cash flow to cover those costs is runnin dry? yah... i will...

what sucks for us is we'd just finally figured out a program for recycling our 'surplus' lindens every month (those we allocated to pay tier or events that werent used (mostly cause of DI) into charities and suprise gifts for friends, etc... had a good 6-8 hour long good solid 4 way discussion between all our founders and started doin real good with it... guess thats the last check that the aspca is gonna be gettin from us for awhile sigh

I can cite the fact that the developers incentive started in the first place Shwan. You as well as any of us that have been around awhile know that the Lindens do try new things based on input. And if it doesn't work they try something else.

I know I feel for you, and my other friends that may be hurt by this temporary reward being taken away, but I can't help but think it will make you all once again REALLY be at the top of the heap against those who used cheap crap to get to the top of some list.

I also know you have your tech reasons for being upset with the Lindens Schwan. But I don't think it should play in this issue. You have every right to be angry and trying to recoup.

But this move is something that should have happened ages ago. I'm sorry if people came to depend on it. I'm sorry I came to depend on not having tier for land. I had to give up a lot of land I earned by Linden $ when that change took place. I learned then, this world is always evolving. And I"m sticking with the theory of not putting eggs all in one basket. I have to. Because I believe we are evolving fast. And the recent moves I think were things that should never have happened to begin with.

It is of course just my opinion Schwan. It doesn't mean I fault you your own, nor think I am 100% right!

what get's classified as cheap crap?

It is an opinion based thought. Therefore.. cheap crap = whatever YOU think cheap crap is. I know what mine is, but I never tell others specific because to each his own.

This is the psychological problem with micropayments... the difference between $0 and $1 is MUCH bigger than the difference between $1 and $2. Think of it in different terms: if you've got $100 to spend, you can get 50 items costing $2, 100 costing $1, and an infinite number costing $0. The difference between 100 and 50 is much smaller than the difference between 100 and infinity As soon as you're spending that $1, suddenly the shopping instinct kicks in, you're giving up one of those 100 "thing-buying" slots you have and you need to make sure that what you're getting is worth it.

And - yes, I hate to say it, but for a lot of MMO-gamers L$250 is expensive even if they got the account for free. There are MMO games that they could play entirely for free (Anarchy Online is an example). Yes, that game asks for money eventually for the add-on packs, but then it's to get funky unique in-game abilities, not to buy a shirt.

There's other matters too. I commented to some friends that too many of my forums were coming about from the sensation I was getting when I visited places and thought "buuut *I* wanted to make thaaaat!" and most of them said they thought this was universal. I asked around some groups and got more support for the idea it was something everyone in SL feels. Now, whatever the value of feeling this sort of thing is, it can't be really considered a good thing that feeling a negative emotion that has to be "dealt" with is a universal phenomenon on SL. Yea, I know, "it's how life is", but it's not usually how entertainment is.

True, that got proved with that Seburo photo contest a few months back, where default animated pics of people standing there with guns in their hand that looked like they took 2 minutes to make won first place over creative and detailed pics that took a long time to make. The difference there is that the person who made the former picture had a lot of people she could coax to vote for her pic while the latter just had the talent of the picture going for them.

Voting wouldn't work.

Nice analogy. Walmart is what you get by gaming the RL analog of dwell: provide necessities and luxuries in the same place, in quantity, and get people's discretionary spending along with their fixed expenses.

The real world is more resilient than SL. So you also have places selling higher quality necessities, more expensive luxuries, and providing other services that you don't get in Dwellmart. In SL, there's no countering force (even less of one once SL killed the reputation bonus instead of nerfing it), and you don't even have to provide anything to get the income.
I'm not encouraged by the possibility that it WILL be done right.

No, it should come from the presence of the people who make the most money, and go to the entertainments where they spend the most time... up to a modest limit. Even the richest people don't toss gold coins into the crowd, and Anshe's not going to game the system for the "10 dwell" her avatar would be worth.

so basically you have no qualified reponse to schwanson?

Chip I normaly agree with you but, here I dont. Where in the definition of "Developer" does it say " They were meant to be a catalyst for development of richer, more interactive attractions and destinations."? Whos to say that gaming sims and dance clubs are not richer more interactive attractions? The true definition is: Growth, increase, to cause growth. Now again your opinion of SL and others may differ, not everyone is wanting to dance in a club, gamble, play tringo or sit in a chair and watch a movie. Cleary its someones idea of fun if not then why do so many top pop list places have these features. I think the DI has served its intended purpose. To "Grow" the population of the game. To create and incentive for growth. Becasue this is not your personal opinion of fun does not make it so.

Point is we dont make the rules, we only play by them. So the rules change again. People will then think of new ways to play with the new rules. You may like whats next even less though. Im sure many will whine about whatevers next too.

Welp I saw this one coming.

Good for you LL. DI was being gamed by many and you saw your investors money being thrown away on camping chairs and such. Unfortunatly there were a few good places that were caught in the mix. But we can't worry about that when we are trying to make profit. As a business it was a smart move. I respect that.

I also see how the future support of LL twords it's subscribers will be built in systems that will benifit the company overall. Listing developers for example, again smart move and it won't cost nearly what the DI did.

I'm sure many will view you as a cold and heartless company but your not. Don't let em get you down after all it's only profit and loss statments that stand between the sucessful business and a chapter 13.

For those of you suprized by these statements don't be the ppl in the forums conviced me long ago it SL has nothing to do with feelings, and everything to do with profit. SL had a heart in Beta but it was lost in the shuffle of updates, bugs and revisions to policy.


Happy Hoildays

Mar