Dwell Abuse

To me, the issue is totally without ambiguity, which makes it an unusual one.

This is how I see it:-

If you use alts or pay people to stay at your property, then you are gaming the system to gain dwell, and this is wrong.

If you use an attraction to keep them there - even if it is just a money machine, then you are doing nothing wrong at all.

In the second case you are offering something to customers, which is what sl is all about, I would have thought.

i really don't agree with that general concensus that having a free money machine makes it all okay.

In the inverse i would say thats simply providing an excuse to have people do that. Why doesnt every club in the world put one out, load it with a whoppin $100 a day and completely cover their dwell gaming antics then? after all its not 'bad' cause there is an attraction now.

Dwell is not supposed to be about people sittin around doin nothing. Whether its idling out, waitin for free money, or anything else... the meter is supposed to show where the popular places to be in SL are, and reward the people who make the time and effort to do such with credits against their tier costs.

by antagonistics own arguments essentially all her work is worthless. no one really uses the casino machines, all those designs etc are just so much useless junk... it might as well be a blank plot with chairs put up in a circle around the money machine. You could even make it look like a lil shrine to dwell with a little statue and everything. Because thats what chaos theory gaming *IS*. It has alot of potential to be more, but it isn't more. Its a bunch of people sitting on the wall, waitin for free money, and a build that has the one of the highest dwell rankings, that really honestly its dubious whether it, in its current incarnation, should get at all.


What the end result really is is that the build qualifies for a large amount of dwell... and it does it by encouraging people to just sit there, breaking the games own mechanics, and game antagonistc for some lindens, who in turn games the whole system takin a large share of lindens away from well.. the rest of SL... after all dwell is graded on a 'curve' and if someone skirts the rules or mechanics to get ahead... everyone they pass are the ones who really get screwed.

Its honeslty not personal in that i fully believe this happend accidentally, this was a sort of spontaneous evolution of the pinnacle of whats wrong with the current system. But its gotten to the state now that it *is* no longer a 'good' thing. Antagonistic knows exactly whats goin on, and alot of the people sittin on the wall do too. And the fact theres a script there that throws lindens to the wind doesn really make the whole situation 'good' it jus makes it more complicated

You just couldn't leave it alone, could you? Very well, I will correct your numerous false statements for you.

Makes what OK? The original statement of the thread was that I was abusing the dwell system. Abusing the dwell system implies that I am artifically inflating my dwell employing such methods as logging on alts to sit there. I have done no such thing. Never have. There are people who do, however. Perhaps you should look for them.

Are you implying that people should not sit on a wall for hours in SL? Here's a newsflash: the way dwell works, if someone spends 100% of their time in SL at one place that place gets 100% of their dwell. I would be far better off if the wall sitters only stayed logged in for 5 minutes and then logged off. They don't. They stay logged in for long periods of time. This costs me L$. There also seems to be a misconception that they are the ONLY people who visit my place. If they were, my dwell would be nowhere near as high as it is.



First of all, in may case it's more like L$1500 per day that goes out. Not L$100. L$100 wont even come close to covering a full day. And guess what? Many other places *do* have a free money machine. The people who sit around and soak the money do so because thats how they want to spend their time. You assume that because you wouldnt spend your time doing that, it somehow invalidates their actions. It doesn't. As base as it is, people like getting free money. Deal with it.


Which arguements are those? I never made any such statement nor did I imply it. You pulled that straight out of your ass.

Excuse me? How do you think I make the money to give away? From dwell? *cough* You need to work on your math skills a little bit there. I give away L$1500 every day (roughly). My dwell payment is L$300 tops. In truth I dont even know what my dwell payment is recently because I have never counted on it as part of my business model. But for the sake of argument, lets say I get L$300 in dwell payment each and every day. I give away L$1500 each and every day. That makes me L$1200 in the hole. Multiply that by 30 days in each month. That makes a whoppping L$36,000 I gave away on a month WITH NO EVENTS. When I hold events on a regular basis (which I will be doing again soon), that number gets a lot closer to L$100,000 and sometimes over that I give away every month. But for the sake of this argument we will stick to L$36,000 every month. My developer incentive last month was about US$45. At GOM conversion rates, thats about L$15,000 tops. My total land tier is 1 sim. So I pay L$36,000 in order to get L$15,000 worth of developer incentive. Now consider that my land tier is for 1 sim. Thats not exactly a profitable model, and your agument falls apart. So where does my money come from? DUH! The games. I am finding it hard to believe I have to explain this & spell it out. Recently (the last month or so), profits have slipped greatly because of outstanding debt combined with the fact I am behind schedule with new game development. however, I am not in the red and I don't even take the developer incentive or dwell into consideration as part of my model. It's too unreliable.

In addition, this might come as a shock but some of the people who sit on the wall actually know how to use alt-zoom and play the games while they sit there.


As I pointed out above, you pulled that assertaion straight out of your ass, with no regard to facts. I am guessing your "research" into the matter consisted of flying by once in awhile and seeing people sitting on the wall. You are going to have to a bit better than that, hun.



I built Chaos Theory to the point it is now by hosting events. A lot of them. A lot of the residual dwell does not come from wall sitters but from people who still come by to play. Again, do the math. The numbers clearly show that there is no possible way you are correct about how Chaos Theory makes money. I give away way more than I bring in, with regard to dwell. You claim that I suck money from the system with my free money machine/dwell combination. The opposite is true. I *give* far more money out than I take in when dwell is the only factor. Your statement, once again, is completely false. The numbers disagree with you.


This sort of implies I should change my methods because the Lindens have a broken system. I say bunkum. Petition the Lindens to change the way dwell works. I didnt create this to game dwell (it pre-dates dwell!) and dwell compensation itself has little impact on my model (well except for when I actively hold events - then it helps pay for a pretty good chunk of my tier ... but thats as it should be, yes?)

In short, you are using false assumptions to imply I am doing something that is somehow wrong. The truth is, that while your ideals are noble, your research is very lacking and your conclusions are completely erroneous.

Can we please let this die now?

Antagonistic Protagonist

Something just occured to me lol. You know what the net result of this is going to be? People are going to read these posts and think that what CT does is an easy way to make money. I predict we will see an even bigger influx of newbies building actual dwell traps. Sooo, the net result will be that even more cases of *actual* dwell abuse will pop up everywhere. After all, we basically just published a guide on how to do it: create many alts, log them in for 10 minutes, on you land, then log them off.

lol

-AP

I honestly can't see a difference between hiring people to stay on your property and using a money machine *if* the primary reason that people are on your property is for the money machine.

I guess you could argue that free money is fun, but that argument isn't very compelling to me. It might be more compelling if the people were running around doing flips saying "I won, I won!". Actually, that might be fun to watch.

But if the result is the same, I'd say the actions are the same. Intent is hard to fathom and both actions are potentially harmful to the future of SL.

I'm not sure that either one is inherently wrong, given the dwell system that is in place. I mean, they are both legal. And I can understand why people would do it. I don't really blame people for using the system. It's like using tax loopholes.

The dwell system is flawed.

BTW, there's an interesting article in the current issue of Gamasutra,

"Soapbox: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really!"

lol, I can see it coming. You go into a place and it asks you for permission to run animations on your avatar. Then, every time you win something, it triggers a random "I won" animation. lol

Shack,

<<I honestly can't see a difference between hiring people to stay on your property and using a money machine *if* the primary reason that people are on your property is for the money machine.>>

The difference is that the question does not become one of cheating the system; it becomes one of whether the attraction is good enough. And that is a matter of opinion, not fact.

I just read the first page so excuse me if I am talking out of line.

Some of you might be confused as to how dwell works.

Dwell is only accumulated after the first 5 min you dwell somewhere, and is based on what % of time you spend at any given location. Each person has only a certain amount of total dwell points to be distributed among the amount of places that day they spend 5+ min.

This mean if I sit on my land for 5 min then I log out, that one plot gets all my dwell for the day. If I sat on the same plot for 24 hours then logged out, I wouldn’t get 1 point more of dwell for my effort.

Also what’s the big deal with people dwelling where they want to, even if it’s for the purpose of raising ones own dwell? From what I would imagine if you want to sit on a wall do it. If you want to run 10 computers pay for all the alts and dwell away, pay for it and do it,. I don’t see how you can "cheat" the dwell system in this manor.

Any REAL establishment that has REAL entertainment WILL have a higher dwell then even 10 people sitting on a wall, idle or not.

I love you all! But come on!

me too... sent shivers up my spine.

the only difference between paying people to sit on a wall, and giving money to people to sit on a wall... is that you can give them a hell of alot less than you'd need to pay them to do it. Kinda funny the way it works out.

and antagonistic i've spent alot of time lookin, and know some of your neighbors as well.. and honestly thats all any of us have ever seen going on there, people sittin on walls.

again i don't claim that the problem is even with what you are doing, what you are doing has evolved quite naturally to work within the current system. Its the system that really is the problem. The evolution that has taken place with the people there on that wall is just a really good example of how flawed that system is.

On that, we can agree.

-AP

So the Dwell System is one you don't like. THEN TALK TO THE LINDENS. Ask them to fix it. Quit accusing people of gaming the system. If -I- gamed anyone by sitting up there on the wall (as seen in the original screenshot), it is Taggy that I 'gamed', by accepting her Free Lindens.

ANYONE with the ability to use Google can find a Mouse Mover that will fool the client into thinking you are active. I connect to SL on one of my systems, and work on another computer reading the forums, working on email, doing my day-to-day business. Having it log me off just because I got engrossed in an email or some work was frustrating.

If this is the way I choose to spend my time in SL, who is ANYONE to tell me it is wrong. In this case, the ONLY people that should be telling me it is wrong would be the Lindens (if using the mouse moving software with SL is 'wrong') or Taggy (for 'taking' her free money). Taggy seems to be fine with it, and I have not heard any complaints from the Lindens.

My personal ONLY complaint is that my character's picture was posted on the public forum in a derogatory manner in which Taggy and those of us pictured were accused of abusing the Dwell System. And Hank has apologized for that. I apologize in advance for reading Hank's apology and hearing scarasm. That is wrong of me. I was getting very upset at people for using my innocent actions as a means to attack people, including myself. So I read things into it. But I choose to take it at face value. Thank you, Hank.

Now, let me say this (and this is for everyone that is being 'down' on this subject):

How is my way I choose to spend MY US$10 a month on keeping my premium account on SL subject to ANYONE's approval?? I don't use GOM, and while I have THOUGHT of using IGE to convert some EQ1 Plat into L$, I have yet to do that.

I am on Second Life because it sounded fun. It's a pleasent world, with some very friendly people. Do you have to bring the ugly parts of Real Life into the world with you, really? Causing people grief on the forums is as bad as griefing in the game. Please THINK before you post.

If we just all go around griefing each other, then all you are going to have in Second Life are griefers. Everyone else will just go away, and so will Second Life. Do you really want that? I doubt it.

It this WHOLE thing was merely something to point out HOW Dwell MIGHT be abused and point out some example cases, fine. Present it in that manner, as a postulated case. You could have mentioned CTG or the mini-golf course out there which was giving away free money (EVERY 2-4 MINUTES!!!) or any number of places and said: Go to X in the game on any day and you will find people sitting on the walls doing nothing for hours on end. What are they doing there? Is this legal? Is this Moral?

A couple of the places I have idled in I idled in because the MUSIC they play there is the sort I like. Is idling someplace that has GOOD MUSIC on stream there Gaming the Dwell System?

I am part land-holder for a club in game. Do I go sit in my own club to push up the dwell? Well... yes, I did for a while... but watching the way the numbers differed for just me showed me just what dwell did and didn't do. So I quit that. It's not worth it. It is more worth it to get good events, good music and good people to come to the club.

Now, thanks to the arguement here in this thread, I am spending less time in the game. I'm not wandering around any more shopping. I am not exploring the world looking at the great builds. I am not socializing with friends on line, and I no longer sit on CTG's wall. I hope you folk are happy...

I know I am. I'm getting more done in Real Life. I am slowly beating the SL habit and seeking out new ones. Yes, I will still be in SL. Just now I have so much less incentive to learn LSL. Less incentive to figure out photoshop so I can make that great bustier that I thought of the other day.

And now running Bingo late night is my bag... and giving away lots of L$ myself to the players.

Thank you all!

Kyim
(BTW, this message has been written under the influance of sleep deprevation and the starting of what feels like a BAD cold. I blame my health for my bad mood and crankiness.. so there!)

As I understand it all u can control is how your own fixed dwell for the day is SHARED amongst the places you visit.
Exclude any visit of less than 5mins. That done, your dwell is shared around in proportion to your stay in each location.

Which means that to give your friend 90% of your dwell allowance, you must be on his land 9 times longer than your total elsewhere.
99%, 99 times longer etc.
Quickest way to help your friend is to go nowhere else at all, and stop 5mins 1 sec with him.

My guess is some people sit doing other things - using SL as an open chat client to their friends sitting on a wall, always with the possibility that something or someone extraordinary might turn up, giving something to see.

Might be a bit of a waste of the worlds bandwidth (transatlantic pipe?), but I don't know the economics of that, and whether it matters.

Within SL, I think the dwell formula is fine. Bit surprising, but you can see the logic. Different people are able to spend different proportions of their time online, and in assessing location popularity then surely how they apportion their time, however much or little there is, looks like the right sort of measure.

Sorry if I've repeated comments from above. Criminally, I have not read quite ALL of the preceding thread.

From what I read for rules on dwell and what I heard from a Linden, an AV can only give the same amount of dwell to a location per day whether it is 5 minutes or 24 hours. That is what the rules on dwell say. I asked a linden why do club beat themselves up for hanging onto guests and extending events for long periods of time. The answer was that she didn't really know other than maybe if a club looks busier it will do better. If the myth of hanging out at place all day does not affect dwell then clubs are doing it the hard way for no particular reason.

Hey, no one ever said SL club owners were either logical or intelligent!

well the real reason is if a club lets someone go somewhere ELSE at all that day, the club gets less and less dwell the more time someome who works there etc spends somewhere else. This has led to some notable standoffs before between club owners who want their employes to not 'share' that dwell (thus lowerin the clubs share) and employees who jus wanna go enjoy the money they were paid

Dwell abuse DOESN'T exist you fools!

101 Class on how to Abuse Dwell


Step 1: buy at least 1/4 of a Sim

Step 2: Learn to script

Step 3: Create Robot that can use the Freeze Controls on your property

Step 4: Have said Robot Freeze every avatar that flys over the land no matter the height

Step 5: Wash Rinse and repeat Step 4 untill Frozen avatar has been on property for at least 5 minutes.

Step 6: Wash Rince and Repeat all for new Avatars flying over.

Class Dismissed.

First off this proposed theory cannot work thank ghod as there is no interaction between land tools and scripted objects. If this were the case There would be some major issues with gaming dwell as I described in the aformentioned pun.

Folks, thing is dont blame a person for using the tools available if the system is borked. If anything get the system fixed. But be wary of what you ask for. You see what happend with Chance small and the Land thing. In essence people pull your collective heads out of your collective 4th points of contact before crying wolf about dwell. The system is borked figure out a better solution for it instead of crying about it.

Im gonna let this thread die but i am going to postulate some questions here soon. Sincerely, Shadow

There is a program that people use that stops the auto log off for inactivity.

Yes there is, but you can't use it to abuse dwell.

Spend your days elsewhere in SL? Want to ensure maximum of your dwell points goto your friend/customer/boss? Then just idle your off hours to increase your dwell points on a piece of land.

Or just spend five minutes there, log off, and get the same results.

Provided you haven't been on yet, and won't return on that day.....