How many of you have moved to escape UGLY??

How much more would you have people pay? If you own land of any consequence that alone makes sl the most expensive vr world on the market. The prim fees are land fees. You buy land to own prim rights. What you do with those prim rights is your own choice. Land in a virtual world is not like land in the real world. You are buying your right to use those resources. In the future I do believe that SL will have script limits and lighting limits. However, charging extra for them would make the fees for using sl ludicrous. These elements of SL can be used in tasteful ways and those folks should not suffer an additional charge.

In my mind it is a very abstract idea. It really has nothing to do with the born on date and more to do with how much one person thinks they have a right to tell another person what to do. It seems that once some folks pop the newbie cherry and move on to the granduer of middle SL age they feel that they have some inherant right to drain the lizard in everyone else's fruitloops. After a couple hundred "you're a great builder" points in the profile they believe that they can do the "your building is teh suxxor" dance on their neighbor. Some buildings are going to suck. People are going to join SL with no prior 3d experience but with a butt load of moxie. They should be cultivated not belittled.

Prokofy,

I have read post after post of yours in this thread, and while there is some that I agree with, I see one major problem. You keep perpetuating this myth of fuck you hedonism being only relegated to established players. You have this odd fixation on older players in SL as somehow being against you and your plans for world domination. The things you so often attribute to older players happen across the entire spectrum of players. Are there players who have been around since early beta who are complete cliquish assholes? Absolutely. It has nothing to do with how long they've been in SL, they are just assholes. The same could be said for players that are a year old, 6 months old, even some fairly new ones. Did they have to be here since beta to somehow dominate? Nope - look at Anshe Chung - she has been in SL for less than a year.

Whether in SL a month, or in SL since it was called Linden World, there is no elite society of older players that go unchallenged until someone like yourself comes along like a ray of light to shine the truth on everyone. That's what strikes me most about your posts is this weird reverse arrogance, where you call groups elitist and arrogant while proclaiming to have some inate understanding that everyone else lacks.

It's all in the perception. Every group that comes in following an early group has preconceived notions about that group. There is an entire group of early beta players that I have always had the perception of being cliquish. The thing is, it's not a clique, they just had a shared experience that binds them in some way. Groups that have weathered the dramatic pace of change in SL (which slowed down in the past 6 months - the change from version 1.0 to 1.4 was dramatic, especially 1.0 to 1.1) tend to feel a certain protectiveness about SL. That is understanable. The introduction of an excess of money into SL after version 1.2 changed the tone of SL forever, for better or worse.

Has most of my circle of friends been in SL for a long time? Yes, the majority have because I brought a lot of them with me kicking and screaming. However, my involvement in the forums, in mentoring, in being an instructor, and in my own site has introduced me constantly to new players who I adore, and whom I have gone on to become friends with. Anyone who limits themselves to only associating with a certain group in SL is missing out on what makes SL so interesting and constantly evolving.

You are really doing everyone a disservice by perpetuating this divisive fallacy about older players, and I am not even sure your reasons for doing so. Second Life has one of the closest, most self protective communities I have ever seen in an online environment, and it has weathered players like you before, year subscription or not. I don't want to see you go anywhere, as I think you are creative and I often agree with some things you say - I just don't understand why you have to couch it in so much bourgeois bullshit. To each their own, but just as you claim to be pushing back against the "fuck you hedonism and feted elite", people will continue to push back against your illusionary us vs. them world.

I agree with you, and I actually do feel that no one has the right to tell anyone else what to do with their land. The down side to that has been players with the mindset that just because they can do whatever they want to, it doesn't mean they have to be a stone cold jackass for not taking anyone else around them into consideration. I have no tolerance for someone abusing a player because they don't like their build. Taste will always be subjective.

However, I will always have a problem with selfish fucktards who come into a sim, buy up a small plot of land and build a club/casino/mall to extract as much dwell/profit out of SL, while making the sim unusable for those players who also own land in the same sim. It is why we desperately need limits on resource usage, not just prims. I never had a problem with Club Elite being a giant ugly box. Was it to my taste? Hell no. What I had a problem with was it making Federal unusuable for nearly a year for anyone else who owned land in the sim, when the lights from it would discolor buildings around it, when the security scripts would teleport players home who weren't even on their land, etc.

Someone's right to do what they want on their land stops at the point where it destroys the enjoyment of those around them. Prokofy speaks of fuck you hedonism as being some kind of oldbie trait. It's not at all. There is a pervasive feeling of entitlement by people who think that anything goes, if you don't like it, move. While we can all do what we want with our land, there is something to be said for coexisting with those around you and not just being a self centered jackass.

In light of what Isis just wrote I would like to point out that Prokofky stated that he wouldn't have neg rated anyone when he was new and then goes on to illustrate how he has become increasingly liberal with neg building rates (in another thread) and increasingly anxious and frustrated with other people's builds. Is that not like saying "your building is teh suxxor"?

So I guess it really boils down to; someone spends way too much time focusing on other SL'ers birthdates. Bye Jove! Watson I think I see a pattern here!
C'est La Vie.

In light of what Isis wrote I would like to point out that Prokofky stated that he wouldn't have neg rated anyone when he was new and then goes on to illustrate how he has become increasingly liberal with neg building rates (in another thread) and increasingly anxious and frustrated with other people's builds. Is that not like saying "your building is teh suxxor"? He is a few months in now after all, does this make him a 'junior-semi-oldbie-know-it-all?'

So I guess it really boils down to; some folks focus on other SL'ers birthdates quite a bit. Bye Jove! Watson I think I see a pattern here!
C'est la Vie.

Well said. I wouldn't express this in terms of "rights" because it's a clash of privacy and ownership rights, but I'd express it in terms of common consideration of other people and good neighbourliness.



Well, ok, maybe it's not just oldbies. I see it in some oldbies. I've seen it less in newbies. It's common in online games in general, from what I've seen. I'm afraid I can't help but thinking of it in terms of Dostoyevsky: "With no God, anything goes." By God, I don't mean necessarily a religious idea of God, but I mean, with no higher common principles, it's just every man for himself and anything goes.



Yeah. And I've said that, and been nuked. And it's because I'm not for just saying it as a pious platitude, I'm for pushing back against this attitude through a variety of measures, ranging from politely asking questions and suggestions to negrating, depending on the severity of the problem where it "destroys the enjoyment of those around you."

Now, I know there's a million swarms of entitlement me-first bees who say, oh, that's so SUBJECTIVE, why, one man's enjoyment is another man's hell blah blah blah. And oh how NEGATIVE to put a negation on a pixel! One that could be undone! But something must be done.

Come on. We all know the different between an orderly pretty sim and a sim destroyed by one lag bomb. There's nothing for it. We'll have to start showing live examples to get this consensus built.

.

I personally cannot relate to a number of social hierarchies such as "pecking order". I can have them explained to me in great technical detail time and time again, but then I will pat my heart and feel absolutely nothing there. I just cannot relate.

I have great reverence for a number of "oldbies" who have done great things to contribute to the SL community, AND who are nice people. Thankfully, I have met quite an ample amount. If one has been around with a trusted reputation (as they say) for an extended amount of time, then both of those factors put together mean a lot to me. Age alone? Depends on the individual. I realize how much I stand to learn from those who have come before me, and how they have experienced prior versions of SL that I have never so much as set my eyes upon, let alone used in the social context of a day-by-day process that gradually unfolds over time.

It's apparent to me that in this digital era, there is a type of technocultural shock that occurs with the seemingly exponential cascading of subsequent generations. Siggy clued me into this when he earlier mentioned something about him being from the "Gen X" of SL. We were all new and hopefully wide-eyed at one point, and when the hardening and closemindedness gaps our creativity and squashes our imagination for future possibilities, then really, the young can remind us of a proverbial "return to innocence" and get us reenergized again. I speak with no authority on this subject as I am still "fresh off of the virtual boat" in some ways. Still, a few more months, and I will have been here half a year. A few more after that, a whole revolution around the sun.

My personal objectives include being kindly and gracious, and even with my propensity for neon colors and kraziness ("k" requested by Taco ), I am mindful to respect -- and beyond that, appreciate -- the architecture that is grounded in real buildings such as the work of Juro or Lordfly. Even if I don't personally like something, I will strive to see what someone else likes about it, and why it makes them happy. I like to see my fellow avatars happy. There is much beauty in this world, and I tend to get used to things after awhile. Good communication is important, and neighbors who feud without having had a prior polite dialog..... well, probability indicates this does tend to be grounds for stirring up trouble, turning mountains into molehills, and many other proverbs that our kind have seen time and time again. Redundancy.

And this too, shall come to pass.

Something like that, anyway, y0!

I agree that scripts and lighting need to be restricted via limits much like prims (if not moreso), though I do not agree that there should be some extra charge for them. Profsky, I believe speaks out of both sides of his mouth on this one. In one case he is stating that the "elite" try to hinder others and in another case he wishes to hinder the "elite's" vision of sl. But this is about ugly builds and I still believe that for every 3 ugly boxes one creator will end up being an amazing builder. Maybe that is just my naivete speaking but I do believe. We cannot as a community denounce all "ugly" builds because often times it takes ugly to get to mesmerizing. I just don't want the newcomers to believe that they cannot construct and ugly build in an effort to reach beauty.

And as a side note...Torley you are an amazing individual...you put us all in our place. For that, I thank you.

Well, Cristiano, you hit the nail on the heaad there. That "close, self-protective" stuff is EXACTLY what I mean by those who circle the wagons and send out posses and this notion of "it has weathered players like you before" with its undertow of threat and menace is EXACTLY what I mean by that fuck-you quality. There's an attitude that this close, self-protective community has eminent domain, and that it can chew up and spit out "players like me" like King Kong with Fay Ray.

Baloney.

They can't.

Cristiano, as I think about it, maybe you're right that there should be a separation between the oldbie techocracy and creative intelligentsia that are the "feted elite" -- they often make a big grandstanding show of not even owning land -- and the oldbies with the fuck-you hedonism who build huge and say everybody get out of my way. But I'm not starting a jihad against either group, I'm just trying to characterize attitudes for the sake of discussion. I know it has an cartoonish feel to it but it's just a style. It's not singling out any one person.

I want to make people think.

What you fail to understand is that you became a member of that exclusive club the moment you first arrived in the welcome area.

These two are not analogous. One is purely subjective. Your notion of what a 'orderly, pretty sim' is not the same from person to person. The other, I think we all agree that quicksand like sims are no fun what so ever and unacceptable in a pay service environment.

What is this consensus building you speak of? Do you want suburban housing developments or something? If so, no thanks, I live in one in RL and that is part of what I come to SL to escape from, among other RL periphery including community planning authorities.

Thank you. A lag bomb could be beautiful. I have seen a few absolutly astounding builds in my time that with a few key scripts become a sim tar pit. I have also seen (and built) some way ugly builds that have little or no impact on the community but are treated like a herpe on the lip of jesus. The ugly builds and sometimes the consuming builds are all just a part of the evolutionary cycle. Even Chuck Jones said that you have to get through those 1000 peices of bad art to get to that one peice of good art. SL is young and so are many of the residents. Let us all get through our bad art before we start casting stones. Let's help one another before we pee in each other's cornflakes.

What you mistake as the "feted elite" is something far less sinister - friendship. In your thread with Pahoa, you encountered people pushing back strongly because Shadow, Crimson, and Pahoa all collectively have built up some strong relationships, and when someone you care for is having a problem, you are there for them. You don't have blind allegience to them, but at the same time, you support your friends. That kind of respect, loyalty and friendship is built up over time, and is earned. You don't walk into an environment and demand respect and then get it. You can demand to be treated respectfully, but respect is something earned and also lost. I am sure you will find over time people doing the same for you, and I think that is a good thing. That is the close, protective community I was speaking of.

Isis,

You have made far too many urinating in cereal references in one thread

But I lerve pee. I am a pee freak. Didn't you know that? Everyone who has been in Sl for more than a year is a urine and cereal fanatic. pfft You must not be in the true inner pee/cornflake circle.

I once drew a circle in the snow... oh nevermind

Yes he is one of the "I know everything because I have been here for 3 monthers" He, in another thread, thrashed ever so hard on a build next to his land. Now all of a sudden he is on the side of the ugly builder.....hmmmm...makes ya wonder. And they called Kerry a flipflopper.

do tell...anyone else get the 30 second rule or is it just my lame ass. By the by it takes alot of pee to make a circle at least for a chick. But you elitist bastards were granted ginourmous bladders. The rest of us can only draw a line in the snow. And you better not build anything ugly on the other side of it!!!!!

Ironically, you just described a build near my store in Meribel

Nolan, the sport on the forums always seems to be: let's try to trap. Let's pounce. Let's try to catch a person in a contradiction, trip them up, eat them alive. Let's take their words, and even if we have to exaggerate and twist them, let's fling them in his face and say "I told you so". But that's not debate or intelligent use of rhetoric, and I know you're capable of that.

If you read the other thread, y ou know that Prokofy has made a grand total of 7 negrates in his young life. I see oldbies with triple that in a year, and I did that in a quarter -- 2 of them were mistakes in a laggy club, 2 were genuine griefers about whom complaints were accepted by the Lindens, so that leaves like 1 over a pernicious bouncer security script and a grand total of 2 on builds that make a nuisance. In fact, these get reversed. Even allowing for the 2 negrates I've made about obstructive nuisance builds on 2 alts, 2 of which were reversed, we're not talking about some "liberal" wild negrating policing menacing the land. And why the fear of negrating? It's just a conversational opener. For the life of me, I can't get this squeamishness and skittishness over the negrate.

As I think of it, I realize that in TSO, there was a more liberal understanding of the "glove". This was something where if you wanted to rate a person negatively, to show he was a griefer, or an enemy, you clicked on him, chose a menu that delivered an animation that involved throwing down a glove like a gauntlet (hence the term "gloving" and then the production of a "red link" (hence "redlining" or "redlinking". This was the opposite of the friendly green friendship balloon you could award someone if you liked them.

In TSO, gloving was a sport. People did it even to their best friends just to watch the animations, to have at least one red balloon in their repetoire and to get the ensuing skills of being able to stomp, etc. when you collected enough gloves. Some people deliberatedly gloved to get the simoleons payouts -- Maxis had a system where if you were notorious and made enemies, you got on a top 100 list of bad people and made money -- you were rewarded. Mobs like the SSG would glove all over the place and if you stood up to their tactics, you'd get gloved too -- at one point I had gloves fanning out for pages and ppl were scared to let me on their lots -- but I never did a single griefing action like pissing on a lawn.

So I view negrating in the same spirit. I don't understand this frantic peacock approach to the reputation. I even marvel -- how come nobody is negrating me back? Don't they like an interaction and a conversation? They are so damn serious! They can always be reversed. I've reversed most of those I've given. What on earth is the big deal?

Sigh.
Yeah, it was an elaborate plan.

This is definately not about sport for me. I am not enjoying this. It's become very tiresome.

Just more hyperbole about people conspiring to make you their pariah.

Did I force you to say this? You seem to be describing a gradual change in the way you view other people and their builds over a period of time, kind of like what you are accusing this supposed hierarchal clique of doing. You sound downright irked. FYI, I do not view someone who has been here 4+ months as a newbie, if they decide to stay that long they usually have found a niche of some sort.

You know those "annoying red blocking thingies"? They are allowed by the land tools. Don't like'em? Tell the Lindens. Your issue is with them, not the players that turn their allow/ban list on. Don't try to pin that some non-existent group of prima donnas. I have been in this game for a good while now and I can honestly say that I have seen more newer folks with those red bars up than older ones. I usually just chalk it up to a newer player playing with the land management toolset.

Did I make you say this? This was the paragraph I was referring to in my response where I quoted Isis. The one I "trapped" you with. Do you realize that many oldbies are proficient at only one or two skills as far as scripting, animations, texturing, building, organizing large events, hosting games, making clothing, etc. goes? We're not all by default just because of our character creation date some kind of uber-elite designers and programmers et al. Some oldbies don't have many skills at all or simply don't exercise them. Socialites if you will.

I have read the other thread thoroughly. I saw Pahoa bring an issue to the forums and not name names or personally attack. I saw some people giving her hugs and such. Then I saw you enter the thread and immediately become very indignant towards Pahoa bringing it to the forums, even though you had done it yourself before on at least one occasion that I can think of, possibly two. You then inserted some generalizations about the supposed status quo in SL. This was unsolicited and unprovoked. At that point no one had really taken issue with you, one had made a statement but it was to whom ever the anonymous person was, he did not seem to know it was you. As a matter of fact the people making innocuous statement like *hugs* and such soon departed the thread. When a couple people took exception to your generalizations you grew ever more indignant, and started to toss out more labels and 'observations', which then started to snowball, the snowball grew, proportionate to the amount of labels generated. You then claimed you were being ganged up on, by a group of some inner circle elite oldbies, when in fact it was a fairly even sampling of character creation date folks that were talking issue with your suppositions. Myself, I think you invited the attention. The "love fest" comment alone was enough to justify response.

I have given a grand total of 13 negs (3 in building) in a little over a year and a half. So you're well ahead of my pace and I would suspect Chip's, Cris', and others here that disagree with you. If we were so malevolent would we not be doling them out there was no tomorrow? After all, they are only a buck and we have more money than Bill Gates, being oldbie royalty who partake in "love fests" with the Lindens.

I was a founder and subsequent subscriber of TSO. The difference between TSO and SL is enormous. I think that TSO is a paper airplane and SL an F-15 when comparing the two.

You're going to have to realize that this is not TSO. Nothing like it. People do tend to take things a little more seriously here because we all created it, every one of us even the person that joined a day or two ago. So people are a little more sensitive to "tagging". That's what they called it when I was in TSO by the way. This is not a mindless arcade treadmill of greening up non-stop. People have more at stake here. There's a lot more of a personal connection between us and the world, especially with respect to one's own creations, because they're not some prefab junk like thay gave us in TSO. Hell, the prefab houses here blow away a lot of the buildings in TSO.

This is all kind of pointless. You're likely not going to change your mind nor are those who disagree.

This thread was, after all, a simple question about whether or not you had ever moved to get away from a build that you found ugly. It was not a solicitation to express your views on some sort of supposed upper echelon of SLers.

Holy crap, i thought i left this thread?!

Well my two cents is that i barely remeber the last time i moved. But heck then you could classify everything as 'ugly'. Thats SL for you, if you wanted something abit more seamless and coordinated; try There or some MMORPG. *shrug*

Nolan, I find your posts thoughtful and persuasive. I think you have a point that the discussion about the "oldbie elite" is too confusing when intertwined with an individual neighbour dispute. I'm going to ponder and refine my initial perceptions about the oldbie feted inner elite core LOL, but basically, I think I'm on to something, and the few who have shared this belief publicly in that or other threads indicate this isn't just my personal paranoia.

And I personally would never take lying down a public, long rant with allegations about me in world made without my name indicated, *especially* when an architect who endeavored to douse the flames in fact made it abundantly clear the thread was about me because anyone could click on her work in-world and see where it is. And while I saw no reason whatsoever to take that minor dispute into forums, once it's there, it's important to push back. But let's not derail this thread with the disputes about my character and belief launched in that nearly 6000-view post with its highly illustrative title "they don't get it" -- speaking volumes about a haughty and condescending attitude all too evident on these boards. Go over there and contribute, or start a new thread, "Is Prokofy An Asshat?" or what-have-you, that might be fun. I quite agree that TSO is different than SL for all the reasons you say, and if anything, it's SL's being queasily too much like RL that makes me wonder about it.

Let's try to stick to our topic at hand here, which is "did you move to escape ugly?" Pahoa moved to escape ugly. I bought to escape ugly in a new sim. I try to help people who want to escape ugly. I see people moving to escape ugly all over town. MOVING TO ESCAPE UGLY MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND! In fact, from my admittedly benighted newb perch (4 months when you haven't mastered the skills definitely makes you a newb), it seems to me like "moving to escape ugly" is the salt of the SL earth, the core of its being. It's what fuels the land baron business, it's what makes the Lindens able to keep rolling out new sims, in fact, they ought to call this game MOVE TO ESCAPE UGLY!

I don't know if you ever played Monopoly, say, with your little brother when you were a kid. We used to make up all these ad hoc rules. Like if the dice hit your house, you had to pay "damages". And sometimes a gum wrapper or a coin fell on the board accidently-on-purpose and that was "damages". And geez, you never wanted to land on those ugly, sorry-assed props like Baltic Avenue. I just googled those properties and found a description that makes SL sound even more like Monopoly than I thought: "Monopoly, the never-ending real estate game in which players try to outwallet each other with a bevy of expensive hotel charges and voodoo curses that cause their opponents to land on "Income Tax," has long been Parker Brothers' trump offering. With 40 different "spaces" that can either lead you to rags or riches, your goal is to collect as many "monopolies" as possible, buying little green houses and charging your friends thousands of dollars to sit on them along the way..." etc.

People who don't get involved in playing Monopoly in SL and moving around from square to square, hoping all the while never to land on the jail space (i.e. get banned by the Lindens), are happier, so they say. Some are jaded older players who tiered down and wax bitter over their beer about the slings of outrageous Monopoly-like fate in SL. Others are simply so wealthy in RL from their RL computer/design/whatever skills that they laugh at trying to make money in SL and just noodle around firing off stuff and riding around in cool vehicles and trying to crash sims with neat stuff. But the bread-and-potatoes of SL for the masses is "let's move to escape ugly".

We've got close to 50 percent of our poll now showing "moves to escape ugly". I'd love to see a RL-like weighted and accurate poll sampling of SL residents to see what percentage play the game of "move to escape ugly," all the way hoping they land on Park Place...or best of all, Boardwalk!!!

This fellow estimates only 35 percent of the world's Monopoly games ever finish. They get really long and cantankerous. The brilliance of the Lindens is that they've kept this particular Monopoly game going for going on 2 years!