Ways to make money

Ok, so not all of us are gifted scripters or can create content that others would want to actually buy.

So how do we go about making money?

Basically at the moment, we have two choices..... either to buy some (which for many isn't always possible), or to sit in camping chairs for hours on end doing nothing.

Having been used to Sims Online, where you work for your money, I feel that it would be a big help to many players, especially new players, if there was some way of actually earning money in game which didn't have to come out of some other player's pockets.

It's highly frustrating seeing great content and having to work out how many weeks worth of stipend I'll have to wait (assuming I don't upload textures or sound) until I can actually afford it.

Steps are already underway to get rid of the money given out for having corpses sitting on your property for hours, as people have 'gamed it to death', so we need a replacement and it seems a great time.

I know that any good scripter could make a 'money giving object' that rewarded people for doing something (in exchange for popularity and dwell) - but this is on the assumption that the owner has the money to give out in the first place.

Lewis

I think that some of the dwell you shed should go to the people around you as well as the landowner, since people you hang around with are people who are encouraging you to stay in world and keep playing SL. Combine that with making the shed dwell a function of your character's contribution to LL (premium accounts, people who buy lindens, people who earn money in game by creating content, landowners, ...), and you'll be able to make money just by being nice to people who Linden Labs benefits from you being nice to.

That's what campers really look like, to me... The Idle Dead.

Time for some of the goths to get Camping Coffins and Camping Graves going...

I believe that the best way for this to happen is to have more services actually possible within SL.. to create a functioning economy. People need to have jobs... not everything should (or can) be automated.

But that aside, I have two ways money could be made by people that would help make SL be more interesting and are way better than camping:

One would be a courier serice... you have to drive a vehicle accross SL some long distance on major roads to deliver some goods... with no flying or teleporting allowed. The point of this would be to make more people driving around and give us all someting more interesting to look at than barren roads (we'd see vehicles driving on them! Wow!). These couriers would be paid to drive from place to place, and all those cars and trucks we have stored in our inventory would stop going to waste. (There really should be a optimized driving mode when yorue in a car - your view is through the forward window and the vehicles' polygons are reduced as much as possible while keeping it looking the same way. I remember how you could import a 3D object file to some 3D-editing programs years ago and it gave you the option of reducing the number of polygons when importing, but the object still looked the same. We could have this happen temporarily with objects in a number of cases.)

The other thing people could be paid for wold be to allow ther own computer's processing power to be used, in some small degree, to do calculations neccesary for SL to function better: distributed computing (they do that on the Internet with the SETI project and some other stuff, and supposedly Kazaa was doing it but people didn't like the fact that it never asked permission). If SL uses %5 of your computers processing power, you could get a certain amout of money for the amount of time you allow this, and SL would run better and faster and more interesting things could be going on. Of course this would mean changes to the server, but it would be worth it!! (the socket/connection for this could be seperate from the main SL socket connection).

I think I'm going to repost this message as a separate thread, too.