Is Dwell doomed?

One wonders if what they want to do is end all forms of Pay/Dwell/ Free money and move to a strict conservative work ethic model where people get nothing and only ones who can do anything are those who have money already.

Hum.

When I am in Second Life, I do not hear people talk on these matters at all. They instead are too busy socializing and buying products. No one cares if people are """Gaming""" dwell at all...it is a Non-issue with 95% of Second Life.

In other words, the only ones who care about this whole affair are the Forum Dwellers.

So you speak for 95% of 90,000 people?

Amazing. Someone should vote you Free Money Giver Person for second life.

LF

No all I am saying is around that many people could care less

1. Well, if anything is prone to "gaming," then a voting system definitely would be. Whoever is friends with the most people would be getting the developer incentive if it were based on this.

2. Plus, I tend to look at the dwell thing as a whole other game entirely from the one I'm playing anyway.

I don't get any dwell that I know of. Well, a few bucks here and there, but not enough to pay any attention to where it comes from.

Dwell is something that helps entertainers, and possibly those in real estate. It is not something that helps a content creator. Content creators don't NEED such help in the first place, as we get bucks off selling ITEMS. And people don't spend all that much time buying their items, either, so I would guess that whatever dwell we get is pretty minimal, compared to entertainment.

Entertainers, though, don't get bucks off selling items. They are in a whole other part of the SL universe as far as me and my little SL content creator lifestyle is concerned. The ONLY thing they get is dwell, plus donations and tips. Let them have dwell.

3. I think you are comparing apples to oranges to talk about rewarding "interesting" or unique or artistic things, as opposed to talking about rewarding popular things.

That is really hoping for way too much. Do you really want to limit SL to the equivalent of the little art movie house, and limit the big chain blockbuster megahits? Do people have to prefer sitting through "My Dinner with Andre" instead of "War of the Worlds?"

If one is complaining that the popular things which are being rewarded are not the interesting, unique, or artistic things, then one is merely buying into the possible hopeful original Linden notion that people would naturally flock to spend hours looking at the interesting, artistic things, and not naturally flock to spend hours playing games, dancing, and socializing. That people can - or at least SHOULD - prefer "My Dinner with Andre."

Or - in terms of money balls and money chairs - that they wouldn't naturally want to spend time earning money the only way they know how, or want to do. (And it's a heck of a lot better way to earn money than selling your AV's body, says I, who began SL earning all of my money in these fashions, and made a good and honest living of it, too.)

So really at the root of this whole issue is the desire that people flock to interesting, artistic things. Which they do, actually - they just don't spend hours and hours there. They also don't spend hours and hours at our shops shopping for our goods, for that matter.

4. So what we have are three groups of people:

. those who provide interesting, artistic things, but generally things which doesn't take hours and hours to enjoy, or "consume"

. those who provide physical content for others to buy (which don't take hours and hours to buy)

. those who provide entertainment, such as clubs, and such as what Travis provides.

Out of those three groups, there is one which is not screwed at all: The content creators.

There is one which is screwed, but still can at least get dwell: The entertainment providers.

And there is one group who had better be doing it just it for the love of the thing, since there isn't going to be much other reward: Those who provide interesting, unique, and artistic things - such as Backstage, say - which probably can't hope to get enough dwell to recoup much of their costs, or qualify for Developer's Incentive (if that goes by dwell; I'm not sure.)

And if you take away dwell, to try to remove reinforcement for popular things that produce dwell - like money balls - you will just make life even rougher for the entertainment group, while not really making life any better at all for the builders of unique and artistic things. People go to see those interesting places, but they only stay just so long.

And people selling physical content could care less either way; we're getting paid no matter what, just through our own efforts.

Most people are not like me, I don't think - they want to come onto the game, be with other people, be entertained, have a good time, etc., and somehow they don't consider having a good time to be building things, or learning to script, like some of us do. And if they make a little money while doing so, well hey! So much the better.

I think those people should all get to have their fun, however they define it. And tinkering around removing dwell and the like just hurts those entertainment and service venues which depend on it. And without the entertainment - however popular and non-arty it may be - believe me, we have no game, and no people to buy our things or look at our arty, unique builds.

Sorry to be so inarticulate and wordy (I'm tired), but I hope you see what I'm trying to get at.

coco

Hm. Dwell and the Developer Incentive. I'll bite.


So we have four distinct issues at play here, sans the trolling:

1) Visibility
2) Accurately Guaging Throughput of Residents
3) Recouping Expenses
4) Giving (New) Residents Utility from their Experience


Personally, I see dwell as failing on all counts with thin exception. I'd favor a more organic solution than the artificial social engineering the program currently is.



By point:

Visibility

People want their business to be seen. But why, as residents, do we need to be subjected to everyone else's idea of popular stuff?

Find Places should actually let us... find places. In a decent manner, similar to Google.

Popular Places should be a combination of relevancy and paid advertising. Again similar to Google, with the concessions they have made for "Page Rank" behavior.


Roam Search is roughly what I'm thinking of, though it needs to work seamlessly with the client. And actually "talk" to the servers.




Accurately Guaging Throughput of Residents

Meet Google Analytics. A (non-invasive) adaptation of this software would be very interesting.




Recouping Expenses

Well. The real solution here would be to let us host our own content so we don't need to pay $195/sim-month.

Failing this, recoup should function the way it usually does: through donations, sales, or finding a sponsor. Even if that sponsor is Linden Lab (as in the case of my land).




Giving (New) Residents Utility

This one is tricky. Without the artificial incentive, people might have to start making their places interesting to garner attention! *gasp*

More likely this would just convert the dwell events into online casinos, with less exposure unless you're looking for... an online casino. That is the point, is it not?



Ultimately, the system in Second Life should allow people to find what is interesting to them, not someone else's idea of it. We desperately need a good search tool and incentive that doesn't mash everyone into the same pot.

To me, that means doing away with dwell and moving a step backward to what makes the web work. The web was made by companies like Google and Yahoo, simply by allowing people to find what they want when they want it. This is the way the system should go, IMO.

So cap the ratings payout so that it just acts as an incentive for people to engage in courteous, social behaviour. Max payout would be (say) 500L a week, with a curve so that getting an extra 50L is practical for just about anyone, 100L is acheivable by many, and 500L means you're trolling for ratings.

So modify it. Dwell maps into the real economy as if it were the continual maintainance spending on food, gas, overpriced popcorn, and so on that's "edited out" of SL because it's just plain boring. Now, some peolpe just plain spend more of that than others... My suggestion would be to make the dwell you get from an av would be related to that av's max income (from any source) over the past week... again, with some kind of curve applied. That way your freebie accounts would only net you (say) 1/4 the dwell of a Premium, and someone who buys 5000L a week on LindeX is worth twice as much again. Cap it, so that Anshe isn't worth a million dwell...

That way you'd get an incentive to have symphonies as well as bingo halls.

This wouldn't explicitly ban money chairs, and yuo wouldn't ban freebie acocunts because they'd still be worth something... and you'd have to tune the curve as time went on... but it would work.

Yeh, a friend of mine spent some time recouping a LindeX buy he made by using these chairs... and it was like he vanished. He'd still IM and come visit if I wanted to do something, but one time he didn't answer and I went to check on him in the dance hall... it was scary. It took me about 5 minutes just to get across the hall to where he was so I could park my av there and wait for him to wake up...

Um, it gets talked about a LOT. Like: stay clear of these sims, they're full of camping holes and other dwell ghettoes; or the friend I mentioned in the previous message...

Agreed, I hear people talk about the pod people a lot.

Although dwell is clearly being gamed, I think eliminating it could be worse, as every single build on the game would then have to either charge money or become a vanity build.

I think it'd be better to focus on the nature of events. Most people in real life do not spend all their time playing Bingo or other gambling games in the hope of making a profit. The things they do go to, like clubs, enhance the social atmosphere and they're prepared to pay for that. In SL, clubs tend (from what I've seen) to have the same social atmosphere as everywhere else, except it's slightly worse, because they're busy and therefore laggy.

What would be best is if some way could be found of enhancing the social atmosphere, above both that normally found on SL and that normally found on online talkers, into something that people would be willing to pay for. This might be difficult: again, some newbies I've talked to find SL *inferior* to online messenger services for socialisation because typically they have no interest in SL's unique features and on online messenger services they don't have to worry about being "ugly" if they can't afford or find the right custom items. I'm sure that some innovation can be developed this way. What is a bit unfortunate is that the scripting interfaces we have offer very little in the way of commands that can make use of the social experience.

Yes, I'm starting to that that's the solution. Let the market decide what's sustainable on the grid. At the same time, I think the Lindens should make more content themselves. If the world really needs free attractions, let the Lindens build them. That would give the Lindens a way to demonstrate SL's abilities, and also provide an extra incentive for them to improve the content development tools.

It's not as simple as that, though. Taking money isn't the only thing that's valuable to the market, but without dwell, it's the only thing that'd be valuable for paying back tier.

Otherwise what? You go shopping for your new outfit or gadgets or whatever to, um.. go shopping again with? Or hang out in your Premium prefab house, which only your friends ever visit, and they don't care what you look like anyway?

Well honestly that seems to be how it works in the rest of the World. People like to shop. People like to play games. People like to decorate their homes. People like to show off their clothes to their friends. People like to have sex in king size water beds with leopard print sheets under mirror ceilings (well some people). I don't see why Second Life's economy or population should be any different than the rest of the World.

/rant on
Ya know, some people DO spend a lot of time playing Bingo, or the lottery, or other gambling games in the hopes of making a profit. How many people in the 29-100 crowd spend all their free time clubbing? Heck that lost it's luster for me when I hit 25 or so.

And from what I can tell about the "nightclubs" (I am being general here, I know not all of them are this way) on SL - they are either so clique-ish people really don't want to waste their time going there or they are bling-infested, possible seizure-causing lagfests that people are better off not patronizing since they won't be able to do much of anything anyway.

I don't know any place in RL that PAYS YOU to come and sit in their chairs and do absolutely NOTHING! I also know of no clubs that will pay you to come and dance on their dance pads either...

/rant off

Agree completely. Who knows though... remember the amusement park? or the boardwalk? or the original games sim? They all dried up or vanished due to lack of interest. Jetball is a freakin' blast but how often does anyone play it? Sad.

Dwell is a subsidy. Dwell - and the exploitation of this incentive by camping chairs - is a good example for the problems with any kind of subsidy. After a short time clever businesses will allways find holes in the rules for the payout of this subsidy. And then they will "milk" the state (in this case Linden Lab) with some business model which is far away from the intent that subsidy had, when it was introduced. There are enough RL examples for that. Now we have a nice one in SL.

I am not sure if the society of SL needs dwell anymore or will need it for long. It had its purpose in the earlier days of SL. But now? Dwell is an incentive by Linden Lab for creating something that make residents stay - stay at some site in SL, but the real intent is to make people stay in SL, of course. This goal is understandable given the business model of LL.

I would like to doubt, if dwell - "physical" presence of an av - is an indicator with a high significance for this goal. If we compare SL with the web, dwell might be comparable with PIs (page impressions), formerly "hits". But the time of measuring the success of web campaigns by PIs alone is long since gone. Because most companies don't profit from having people just look at their web pages and ads. They want transactions or at least generate leads!

I don't know what could be measureable indicators for residents activities that are beneficial for LLs goals. But I am sure that dwell ain't that indicator.

Conversion from basic to premium would probably such an indicator. Or any activity which makes residents choose higher tier levels. But how to measure the effect of any resident activity on these conversions?

Because people in SL don't have physical bodies, they don't have to work or pay money to maintain them (and it would seriously impact the fun of SL if you did). So what Dwell does is emulate the money people spend everywhere they go for stuff that would just be plain old boring and annoying. The stipend really simulates the part of your income that's "displosable income", stuff you have once the fixed costs of your life are taken care of.

So dwell simulates the way the fixed costs of living are spent. It shouldn't go away, but it should be tuned. You can my previous post about that, but the bottom line is that it should be scaled based on who's spending time there. People who are wealthier buy more overpriced snacks, so you should earn more dwell for having them on your land. And people who are wealthier are going to be harder to bribe with small payments to game the system, so you won't get such blatant abuses being the most profitable solutions.

On-location movies looking for extras?

hehe I stand corrected

I don't understand why Linden Lab would want to simulate a part of the RL economy that doesn't apply to Second Life. They put L$ into the SL enonomy through the stipend. In turn the premium accounts which receive the stipend generate the US$ that LL needs to operate Second Life. Premium members are constantly buying L$ and therefore investing in Second Life (it seems similar to China and Japan buying U.S. currency and bonds).

But if dwell were a simulation of the state providing money for the "costs of living" to people who couldn't otherwise afford it, wouldn't that actually be a simulation of welfare? That seems like a strange thing for a profit-seeking company to include in a service.

I assume by "the amusement park", you're talking about Four Seasons.

Well, it's still there, although it has camping chairs now.

If there were no dwell, then it probably would have been wiped, because it's half a sim plus and apparantly doesn't charge money for anything (oh, sorry, it costs money if you want to buy your own version of their rides).

Any who supports it being there? Ice Dragon, the same outfit who seem to be taking flak for running a Tringo/Slingo/Camp chair island which would presumably have to be nixed entirely if it wasn't for dwell.

No, he's reffering to LindenWorld, the old Amusement part that was where Luna is today.

Good sign of chronological ordering.

We did have Spittoonie for awhile too, and it was grand.

People who lose track of time tend to go INSANE.

http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Linden_World
http://history.secondserver.net/index.php/Spittoonie

After the mention above I went and found the Jetball Arena in Rizal. And woo, that looks pretty fun! (Especially with all the adverts for ancient businesses I've never heard of )