Unskilled jobs? Pay volunteers first.

Torley come back into the mentor group please we need you!! )

As much as I have seen you help others in sl it's a given


Torley Torley Torley!!

Lindens make Torley a mentor already

Give volunteers land....


the more we have, the more we do..

the more we do, the more we learn..

the more we learn, there more we teach..

the more we teach, the richer the experience..

I'm not sure I could handle no longer being the weirdest on Help Island

Listen to what critics are saying!

"OMG this toga looks STUPID"

"Can you believe Blue is some people's first impression of SL?"

"What the HELL did you say?"

"Blue, stop it"

"Blue I really don't think that teaches anything useful, funny yes.. but useful?"

I think so to Toy and I'm happy we have HI, I have been mentoring more and I'm glad I have

what toga what did I miss now..and I was just there lol

Totally.

...Wait a second, I've not bought any guns either! Help, I'm having a gender crisis!

No, unfortunately, it isn't that simple. There must be some people who, even if they do "get off their ass" and even if they do enjoy creativity, can't produce anything worthwhile. If that wasn't true, there'd be no skill or talent in art, and it would just be like mining coal.

There's also factors you haven't allowed for, like market saturation. If someone wants to build something that requires the participation of others to make sense, and there are too many already on the grid, then they can't do it. You can say "they just need to differentiate themselves" but unfortunately people can't have original ideas on demand.



And what would be so terrible about that?

Well, you do have a point there, come to think of it! And vehicles.

I was thinking clothes were the main huge universal deal, but now that you mention it, there aren't nearly as many clothes for men, even when they are interested in them.

coco

All part of my plot, Lecktor, all part of my plot. Makes it easier to pluck them out of your face and eat them, with some fava beans and a nice chianti!

coco

I think one of the problems with giving volunteers land, or paying them in any significant way, is that not everyone can be a volunteer.

You can't volunteer if you have had a warning on the message boards, for example.

coco

Yumi, I'm not trying to be argumentative, I understand the point you are making but what is your rebuttal to the simple fact that upgrading to a premium membership solves all the issues you are bringing up? Someone who wants to be in SL, has no skills/does not want to learn skills/feels like they have no chance in the marketplace and does not want the stain of honor to buy Lindens can just upgrade to premium for $9.95 a month (or $6 a month if your are willing to pay a year in advance) and collect a nifty $500L a week (=$2000L a month, =$26,000L a year.) Where is the dishonor in that? Would these same people refuse to play WoW for $14.95 a month? Or any other online world/game that charges monthly because it is not right to have to pay?

It all comes back to being unwilling to pay to play. Everybody pays in some way or another, whether it be a premium membership, buying Lindens or taking the time to learn skills and making things (and it does take time, very few people become master SL artisans right off the bat).

Nothing in life is free, everything costs either time or money.

And THAT is why a significant number of people don't say even a quarter of the things they would like to say. The maturity and ability to self-edit, work well with others and practice restraint is a requirement for participating in the volunteer programs.

:x

SUM UP SUM UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! POINTLESS

Well, I'm glad you explained that to me. It goes without saying that I am immature, with no ability to self-edit. Not to mention that I can't work well with others and have no ability to practice restraint.

That explains the WHOLE THING.

coco

Simply that it doesn't

If the main appeal of SL is creativity, then upgrading to Premium doesn't solve that. It gets you more money to benefit from others' creativity but it doesn't enable a person to create things themselves if they couldn't have anyway. As I said previously, effectively, they're using SL with the editor shut down. That's not too appealing, and in that context, most things in SL are a bad deal to be paying US$ for.



WoW offers a completely different experience to SL, so it's not a fair comparison. It's not a question of whether it's right to pay to play. It's a question of whether the play is worth the pay.

Bear in mind also that it's a relative thing. Suppose for a moment a version of WoW where, when you created your account, the game would randomly pick for you whether the maximum level you could reach would be level 120, or would be level 60. Once that was set, you could never change for the lifetime of your account, and your details would be remembered so you couldn't just cancel and create again.

Do you not think that the people limited to level 60 would quit, or not want to play? Answer before you read below.

Well, I picked those figures for a reason. WoW really is, in fact, capped at level 60 for all players. The change I made for my imaginary version wasn't adding an obstruction - it was adding extra bonus opportunities (that is, for some players to get to level 120). But see what happened? The presence of those extra opportunities and their restriction to certain people meant that suddenly playing up to level 60 became reduced in value even though it would have been identical to the real game of WoW that people play now. By the same logic, as long as there are artists and similar doing well, playing SL as a non-artist will seem less valuable, because nobody likes to be inferior even if the inferior position is still fun.



Sure. The problem is that at the moment, the value in terms of "bang for buck" of buying L$ is significantly below that of making things and selling them. (Ie, if you spend some number x of US$ on L$, you'll get far less than you would have done if you'd done US$x worth of work making things.)

Um . . . no. I spend hours on hours on hours making things and learning how to make things. And perfecting the things I make.

I wouldn't even want to THINK about how much this earns me per hour. But I do know that I could have saved a YUGE amount of time over the past 8 months if I'd bought Lindens instead.

And I suspect a lot of other content creators would say the same thing.

Not that I care. I don't care because this is my hobby, and I do it for fun and satisfaction. (And it's a lot cheaper than scrapbooking!)

I also think you are oversimplifying things somewhat when you assume there exists a cap to the ability of any single individual in SL. There are an infinite number of ways to branch out into specialties, and probably nobody ever gets to the end of their ability to do that, unless they are mentally or physically challenged in such a way as to prevent that.

Just about everyone will find that, if they want to, they can make something. And I would even go farther to say that just about everyone can even sell something. Or some service, or whatever,eventually.

That means - with the possibilities being endless - that it's more a matter of wanting to try, and being persistant in trying, and trying another thing when the first one doesn't work.

coco

How many people do you know are having their computer, interent access and electric bill subsidized by The Creator of The Web so that they can enjoy it without having to get a RL job?

Come on people. The opportunity is there to make money in SL. If you don't want to, but you still want $L, you need to get it some other way. A RL job for instance - there is no shame in wanting to be a part of SL, but not be a profit generator - many people have decent jobs in RL and can proudly say that it is enough to fund a leisurely SL. It is a wonderful place to be in life if your hard work can provide you with the means to do something you love.

And for the record, there is mining - go to Minerva and mine product and sell it to other players. It's time consuming, menial labor, but you can do it with no skill.

Create those service industry jobs. Successful business owners need people to serve as customer service reps and salespeople so they can get to work on new and innovative products. Business Manager. Be a greeter at a mall - show people how to find what they want and how to buy it in that mega mall. Sell ads for the Metaverse Messenger. Model. Take pictures of events for people. Find out what people need and provide it.

Given how you see SL advertised, it shouldn't be a great surprise to people that they are expected to earn their own $L.

If you spend X time on a RL job making X US$ (and BONUS - lots of us already do this activity called RL Work), most people will get much better value for their time than creating an object and selling it in SL. You can then spend 1 minute translating that into $L.

The problem with buying L$, basically, is that in most cases when you buy things in real life it's a good deal compared to making it yourself. In SL, where the seller has no per-unit costs, you don't have to pay for means of production, and they producer isn't benefitting from economies of scale (except in a small way on tier), this isn't necessarily the case any more.



Exactly. Value for "saving time" only counts if you would otherwise have been earning US$ during that time. If you did it for entertainment, then your time was traded for that entertainment.



Sure, but OTOH doing just about anything in SL is driven off a limited number of skills. At the end of the day there are only so many commands you can enter to the UI.

That's not the point. The point is that if you use that US$ to buy L$, you'll get a worse deal than if you found an artist who didn't know about SL, paid them the US$, then translated what they made into SL and sold it.

They must be of the starving artist variety. They must also not have any internet access and desire to turn around and do it for themselves, leaving you with nothing. It also devalues the time it would take me to find this artist to well below my going hourly rate.

This sounds great, but isn't really very workable as compared with using $ I already earn at a job I already have. Either way, It would still be paying for $L. You could easily just contract a current SL creator to create an item for you to sell exclusively, which I endorse.

"Exclusive provider of the Lippmann Seigebot Add-on Product as designed and created by ET" or some other such thing.

That isn't the point, again. You take the $ you already earn, at the job you already have, and then you can spend it on L$ on Lindex, or you can spend it on RL art to upload into SL and sell. Assuming you can market it, that'll probably get you much more L$.

Trading US$ for L$ to buy content will never be popular until the L$ prices line up with the real world US$ market for content. And unfortunately, the real world US$ market for content is not nice - that's why there are starving artists, after all. It reminds me of the argument between Scott Kurtz talking about giving away PvP Online for free and Scott McCloud with his micropayments based webcomic that... oh, I don't know what it's called. (Wonder why.)

I agree the number of skills is limited. And even some of the people heavy into those skills, I've seen, get tired of the frustrating inherent limitations of the skill set itself after a couple of years, and lose their enthusiasm for the whole thing.

And yes, my value is just fine, since yes, it is entertainment.

But if the per-unit material costs are low (i.e., nuthin!) then the labor costs are INTENSE. My husband has watched me on some things and said, "I could have built a whole real-life house in the time it took you to do that."

And I say yeah, and when you went back the next morning the boards wouldn't have mysteriously moved over an inch! And you wouldn't fall through the floor cause some of them have mysteriously gone phatom! And the nails wouldn't all of a sudden fall out of the entire house cause you have clicked wrong, or lag happened, or some bug (I still haven't figured out this one) causing to all become unlinked!

In other words, a lot of building isn't entertainment, it's ridiculous amounts of frustration. Even when none of the above bugs are happening.

I wish, for example, there was some way of DOING A DANG ROOF so you could CUT it. Just that! That's all I ask! But beyond that, there could be this whole thing like in The Sims where the roof automatically cuts itself to go on anything!

But anyway . . . well, I forget what my point was.

coco