My little rant....

Thanks for your side of the clubbing story, alice. As you can see, the helpful people with good reputations on these forums are more than willing to discuss your experience. Even those who aren't noted clubgoers, such as LordFly, are trying to contribute to your discussion in your terms. Sometimes there's questioning involved, and assumptions to be challenged, but we're all in the SL economy together, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

I don't know how club owners can continue for months competing with each other for customers by paying out more than they take in. I understand that you need to do that to get a start, but if club owners are always competing with each other in giving away L$ prizes how are they ever going to become self-sufficient? The people who build and script for a living don't give away their products with free bonus money just to get customers. Is there any way club owners can be like that too, or is it too competitive a field?

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Huh??? *Clutches sides with laughter*.



*Rolls eyes*. Back-handed Slander Watch, come in please lol.

I'm helpful, and I actually have a good reputation. You'd never know that from the forums. But it's why I am able to run a business.

Its an interesting stance you take Prokofy, I thought your comments were a little unnecessary there as it would seem that Akane was trying to DISCUSS the issue at hand. Sometimes it can be hard to post replies withought getting all defensive I guess... and yes, i think I may have reacted the same way in my initial post (although to a lesser degree).

Akane, you are quite right, a scriptor does not give away what they do for free...and they certianly do not give away L$ to attract people... but i think there is a big difference between the two forms of Business.
As a club owner, I rely on a number of things to earn my income...as i have stated before, i think you need to multi task a little to make any money in clubs. The essence of it is "people". When you look at a mall, it makes its money by the small amount of dwell, and the rentals on its property... a scriptor makes his/her money buy selling the object they have created as do clothes or skin or hair makers. Clubs pull in a much bigger crowd than these shops or scriptors however, and because we are in the hospitality field, we can rely on tips, gambling , the small amount of dwell...and whatever else we can pull in.
Its a difficult balance...I know that I have stopped a lot of the bigger giveaways... but when there is a crowd... I do tend to reach for my wallet lol. I am working at about a 4% loss right now... and that would be a profit if it werent for the lag (that i play a part in creating...lol). There ARE clubs who can get away with not giving away big prizes... and I think they are just the well established ones. As well as other reasons... a lot of people go to THE EDGE plainly because alot of people go to THE EDGE. I guess we all hope to be able to achieve that sort of reputation..then we can sit back a little and maybe start making some serious $$$$ lol.
The sad thing is...with the current mentality of clubs doing what we do, we can probably never get around to the way most RL clubs operate...which is to charge a cover charge. If the club owners could all sit down together and make an agreement, that might change things... but there will always be one or two who would not charge...then the whole thing would start again. Yes it is too much competition i think... and that changes on a monthly basis...i think if you have good hosts... and create a place where people truly have fun, you CAN survive though.

alice, it's just that Akane was bashing me in another thread, so the remarks are carried over from that thread. Pay no mind.

The point is, she couldn't be more wrong about scripters charging money.

There are plenty of scripters who give stuff away for free! Loads of it! Like the video scripts, to name but one recent widely popular one. Honestly, there's way TOO much of that freebie stuff as I've noted in other threads. Her notion that scripters only charge money for what they do, while you are engaged in loss leaders, is just plain not supported by the facts. Some scripters don't charge enough for what they do; some charge too much; these are all factors that come from a closed society, a limited and heavily regulated market, and the allergy to commerce rampant in the guild society.

I'm fascinated to see you having figured something as closely calculated as a "4 percent loss". It shows the incredible power of women in business here and what they are willing to achieve, and what they are willing to endure to make this game space work.

Clubs get a bad name not only for their low-brow culture and the mafia/weapons/drama they seem to attract, but for their lagging sims. I've dealt with this myself so I sympathize. On the other hand, a lot can be done to reduce the lag in a club and some club owners work hard at this, i.e. reducing texture sizes, lights, etc.

Alice, as multi-use complex owner, I agree that a club, by itself, cannot survive in the current SL climate. A club owner must be willing to diversify and solidify other forms of income in order to continue incentives and advertising that bring people to your club.

Prokofy is correct: There is a very powerful, anti-commerce minority in SL who want to see every club, casino and commercial enterprise fail. There also others who forget that whereas clubs/casinos/commercial enterprises are not subsidized, builders/scripters/fashion designers and the like receive what is called an "in kind" subsidy. In order to build/script/be a fashion designer, you are not required to have any land. They do it all without the need to actually spend money, Lindens or US$ on their projects.

They tend to forget that little facet of the game.

They also tend to forget what it was like to be a newbie, wandering around this great new world and realizing that weekly stipend will barely get you through a day, with all of these nice things around. They hate the commercial properties give incentives for people to come visit them, yet they also decry anything on the events calendar that even remotely smells of commercialism.

Don't give up, Alice. Hang in there and we who own commercial properties will persevere.

OH MY GOD YOU DON'T LIKE STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM? HOW DARE YOU?!??!?!?!?!?!omgwtfbbq!!!!!11111one

I don't go to clubs because usually they're very very very laggy. Purely technical. I do occasionally attend a club if a friend invites me and wants me to hang out a bit.

Seriously. It's not that big a deal.

I'm always fascinated to study this phenomenon and try to figure out why it is so. There's a book out by a woman who's name I unfortunately can't find, it's on my shelf somewhere. It's about the hatred of the marketplace in some societies, and the association of the marketplace with some minorities, like Jews, Koreans, Nigerians, etc. Liberal, open, free commerce threatens some old-world conservative societies that were established on guild systems or systems of elaborate trading, bargaining, favour-banking. So I think at base, this anti-business problem in SL is just like the anti-business problem in RL -- fear of active, entreprising minorities -- the kind of fear that turns to the hatred of a Kristallnacht, the "broken glass night" in 1938 prefiguring the Holocaust when Jewish shop windows were broken.

Another RL analogy you can see is the kind of civil wars that develop between, say, the Janjawid and the Darfurians, the nomads and the pastoralists, some requiring horses and herds to make a living, others requiring land and planting seasons to make a living, and their fights over scarce water and other resources.

To transfigure this to SL, we have to think what is scarce, and what is sought after, and what people could fight over. Telehub space is the first thing that comes to mind -- it's why it is expensive. Content creators will tell you they loathe tacky telehubs and use only their own little boutique stores which people find by word of mouth and using FIND PLACES or reading the classifieds.

But that's only where some sales take place -- a good many do take place at telehubs, and even some of the top creators with their own stores also like to have multiple telehub mall locations because it does bring them visibility and sales.

In one sense, yes, content creators don't need land. Some top ones brag about how they are only on basic accounts -- it is part of the myth of ascetisim and scorning of land, homes, clubs, etc. that these content creators like to keep alive by styling themselves innovative, creative, rebellious spirits who don't get tied down to bourgeous notions of land, which they inevitably describe as "picket fences" or "suburbia".

In this sense they are like the worst of the worst "Bobos in Paradise," since they might have more land than even the most bourgeois suburbanite, and may have, if not picket fences, even uglier red ban lines LOL.

Yet even content kings and queens can't spend all their time in sandboxes or mooching off friends. Like Jake often says, his ownership of land is what enables them to have no land LOL. They knock around not only in sandboxes, but at other venues where they can more quietly test out their creations. Some of them have even suggested LL should make offline prototyping lots and tools available so while they are at home or work unable to log on to the game, they can work their building of homes or clothes creation, then upload it later to show friends -- usually in some kind of private gathering like a Tupperware party. Of course people showing off their kewl fab shiny SL buildings or groovay clothes would be horrified to think they are merely continuing in the fine American tradition of the Tupperware party or the Amway get-together, but...there it is. They fear and shun the marketplace... possibly because they got their glut of it as teenagers roaming aimlessly around the soul-less malls of suburban America.

Ultimately, I"m thinking that the essentially artificial split between the landed businessmen and the landless artisan class or content baron cannot last, because the content baron knows at some level that he needs customers. Customers need land to live on and decorate their homes -- with those things that the content barons make. Customers need to go to Tringo to make money, to clubs to make friends and find lovers, and to stores and malls to decorate themselves and their homes. These are all laudable and normal human endeavors.

Content royals can't exist forever in their abstract Platonic universe, co-axialing planars or WTF they do in buildings in SL's complicated build-mode, or niggling little details on dinkly little doll clothes for SL avs. They have lived "without feeling the earth beneath their feet" as Mayakovsky once describes those people in his generation that others might call the Bolsheviks. Sooner or later, the rebellious and "rootless" content kings and queens settle down in their private estates -- it's usually when they get rich enough to want their own chill pad palace that they begin to have a little more understanding and appreciation of their masses of customers.

Scripters fall into a bit of a different category because they can either be terribly practical, making gadgets that help normal SL living, like a notecard giver, or making sex balls. They might make kewl vehicles, which are less useful and needed in SL but are more like sculptures and show-off accessories, not unlike bling (given the poor physics and sim seams).

Or they might be terribly impractical, just scripting all kinds of nonsensical goofy stuff in sandboxes or on giant islands or their free 4096s.

LL spent a lot of time securing copyright and other rights for content creators, and now they need to do the same for land ownership, which will benefit everyone from the modest 512 owner to the owner of an entire sim.

Good morning Alice. Welcome you your Second Life. You will notice here that everything is exactly like the real world, except for the things that are differant.

...

Ahem...

Annnyway...

Second Life is an interesting beast, people complain about every aspect of it, yet never leave unless outside forces make them do so. (The terrible RL monster...) Nothing wrong with this, since even I feel like whining on occasion, but you have to talk much of the talk on the forums with a grain of salt. A grain weighing about a metric ton.

SL feels nothing like what the forum goers make it sould like. Griefing is relativly rare for most people, you get situations like this login issue once in a blue moon, and people are generally friendly (even the ones who sound like baby-eating monsters on the forums).

Please though! Come by and say 'Hi' some time to Botany Black and myself at The Commons. We enjoy talking to new people warping their minds a little.

G'day!

There is also a very powerful, pro-entertainment majority that enjoys getting something for nothing. Those folks would beeeee *drumroll please* your average clubgoers.

I would estimate that probably 90% of all the clubs out there are NOT turning an overall profit (ie the owners are putting more money into it then they are taking out). The main reason is that everyone refuses to charge a cover charge for spending 400 AFK hours dancing the night away. It's not hard; SL has had the capability of having a cover charge since like... 1.2?

But no one does it, because everyone has this attitude of "well I should get my entertainment for free"... either that, or most clubs aren't providing a reasonable quality of service that would be worth charging for.



If you're going to sell clothing, you need a storefront. Unless you're extremely charismatic (HI aimee ), you're going to need your own little shop of horrors. That costs money.

Fashion designers throw hundreds of lindens out the window as they upload, adjust, re-upload, re-adjust, and so on, making their clothing *juuuust right*.

The same can be applied for scripters; gotta sell your gadgets somewhere.

Builders are an interesting category... we don't normally need a storefront of any sort, because we're kinda roaming, and our business spreads by word of mouth. It still helps, however.




Everybody has a different newbie experience, depending on when you came on board. When I joined, linden dollars were good for one thing: rezzing prims. I didn't have enough money to build my house ($L10 per prim, you see), so I went to trivia events and won some prize money. From there I built up my linden reserves, bought some land, went into business building things, and so on.

Anshe Chung, arguably the most successful MMORPG businesswoman EVER, started off on the ten dollar basic account. She modelled for magazines, made a few clothes, bought some land, and went from there. Now she makes more linden money in a week than I will all year.



No, I hate the broken events system. I hate seeing Tringo, Sexy Contests, and other cynical wastes of eyeball space, crowding out "good" events (subjective, I know) like reading clubs, trivia, show and tells, building contests, dogfights, and so on.



Everyone's in business for themselves in SL.. you folks are not an elite vanguard. I'm a commercial entity just as much as you are.

LF

Do you sponsor or perform or host an event like this Lordfly?

Do any of your friends?

I didn't think so.

Why do you think that is?

Yeah, contradiction indeed!

This is what often puzzles one about the anti-business and anti-club elite. They have their own businesses and their own clubs, but they are anti-business and anti-club for others. Because....well...you figure it out.

I think the big issue here is that someone can dislike something without opposing it. If you ask these people if they "oppose" the things they dislike and think they should be shut down, I think most would say, "No."

It is okay to dislike something. I would hate it if everyone loved the same things I do, how boring would that be?

Tonight at 6 PM PST, Grignano will host a drinking event, hosted by me.

Thanks though.

LF

What's hilariously enlightening is when Prokofy plays glaringly obvious word and mind games. Like changing the word "dislike" to "hate" for dramatic purposes. He must really think we are all stupid, blind, or both.

I challenge you, Prokofy Neva, to find me one quote, other than one of your own confabulations, in which someone used the word "hate" in earnest, to reference to an event.

How is a "drinking" event different from Slingo/Tringo/Sexiest Avatar? Seems to me, it would run in the same thread of events.

That's where you're wrong, Loki. They not only dislike them, they'd like to see them go. They don't want to have a list with Tringo. They want to be able to completely filter out Tringo and make it go away.

There was a message on the Future Salon list that just had a very telling phrase "SL's excessive malls". Many people believe there are "too many" malls or "too many" clubs. They don't realize that malls come and go, fail or don't fail but if they fill up, people need them.

You don't seem to get what happened. A small minority of people bitched bitterly to the Lindens about "too much Tringo" and "the mallification and clubification" of SL. They hate the commerce, especially related to land. They resent it horribly that there are games, clubs, and malls in SL because it flies in the face of their notion of what SL could be -- a more aesthetic content-creators paradise where the masses, if they are to exist at all, are to be consumers but never seen and heard, and are to stay dociley on their first land in their Siggy Romulus boxes somewhere, never to mar the landscape with dancing in clubs or shopping in malls..

The anti-club and anti-mall types found sympathy with some if not all Lindens, because the Lindens want this game to have a higher-class profile.

So the Lindens responded by curtailing the posting of events, limiting the properties they could be posted from, liming the numbers of events per day, providing subsidies only for educational or "useful" events, etc. etc.

So this is not just some idle chatter. The trend makers and opinion setters who are featured over and over by the Lindens in fact have their ear, and in fact do influence them, and influence them to make changes to the game that are anti-club (events changes, reductions of ratings, and reductions of stipends), anti-land baron (end of advertisements of private island leases on Land Sales list) and anti-mall (reduction and or glacially slow deployment of telehubs in the new continent).

From their lips, to the Lindens' ears.

That's why it is worth debating them, to get them to see that by killing off Tringo, malls, and clubs, they may be making an aesthetically more purified world with all kinds of Liebensraum for themselves and their more aesthetic events on the list -- but they'll be shooting themselves in the foot because they will be depriving their very customers of the income they need to buy their products.

In making these largely punitive actions -- cutting off, reducing, restricting -- in part because they caved to the minority anti-commerce opinion -- the Lindens didn't think about how they'd get that income replaced for people to have an economy and buy the "better" products of the FIC. They were just too harsh and hasty and didn't think it through.

The ingenious masses and the genius that always produces when you allow the masses to thrive responded with Tringo's invention and spread after subsidies were cut.

But in some uncanny warped notion of what is good for the game, the Lindens reacted to that very natural and normal compensation for their pulling of subsidies by punishing it.

It's extraordinary.

What's needed now is for the Lindens to end their restrictions on commercial events and let them thrive so that businesses can become the sponsors of events, and also then create the subsidies needed for the arts.

It's a social event, true... the main difference is the requirement is folks in the Real World are encouraged to bring their own (real world) alcoholic beverages and hang out. It's fun, basically.

My main point was that prok was bitching about how me and my "teki-wiki-featurati-literati" friends don't host events.

LF

*rolls eyes*

Lordfly hosts an even in-world where the people are RL-drunk, and this is called an improvement over Tringo??? Huh? You have *got* to be kidding!


Um, where are all those poetry readings, short-story writing contests, build-offs, architectural appreciation tours, I dunno, *something*???

*rolls eyes*

Lordfly hosts an even in-world where the people are RL-drunk, and this is called an improvement over Tringo??? Huh? You have *got* to be kidding!


Um, where are all those poetry readings, short-story writing contests, build-offs, architectural appreciation tours, I dunno, *something*???

Where are the high quality events you run, Prok? Or are you too busy being a prolix pain in the ass to actually contribute something positive to the world?

I don't like clubs too much, but maybe they are a necessary evil. Or maybe there are better ways to distribute money.

Hi Alice

First of all you should be aware of one thing - most people who post on these forums on the subject of 'clubbing' or 'events' could write their entire knowledge base about those subjects on the back of a postage stamp.

Secondly those same folks miss the entire point of the game inasmuch as Second Life can be exactly what YOU want it to be.

I run a club & run it at a loss and I'm happy to do so (although event support would be welcomed) I'm not here for a 'job' I already have a job and a very stressful one at that,I come here to relax.

When I first began in SL I landed at The Edge where a lady by the name of Jenna Fairplay taught me the ropes,gave me a lot of stuff and set me along the path to.......whatever I wanted to be.

A lot of people miss the most important point of all about clubs......they are a huge pool of knowledge and are a great help to new players.In a club you will find scripters,builders,Skin makers,Clothes makers etc etc.In a club you will find people from ALL walks of SL life and thats their strength.

Folks will also tell you clubs are 'anti business' - is that why people like myself and Jenna Fairplay have started off MANY people on the road to sucess by giving them a free space to sell their goods when they couldnt get a start?

Clubs are also very often tight knit communities with friends of long standing, many of the people with me now are folks I met on day one at The Edge,and we're still together.These communities ebb and flow as new people come in and others move on to other things but usually everyone comes back to visit to tell you how they are doing and to spend time with old friends.

I put my heart & soul into my club and I believe I've made many friends because of it and that to me is worth far more than L$. I admire many of Second Life's Commercial community too and have friends among it and I have NO problem with what they do because it's how THEY have fun. You will read a lot of trash about clubs in these forums from idiots like Prok but read between the lines and all will become clear.

If you want to know what goes into a club ask someone who KNOWS. Have fun in all you do Alice & have a GREAT Second Life.

I ran a club for about three months and could talk about that -- I do have the experience and I do understand the patience, work, effort, networking, and costs that go into it.




Oh, I've run LOADS AND LOADS of high-quality events, Ardith. I'm afraid you're going to find yourself on horribly shakey ground if you try to attack me on this score.

For the months I ran the club, I put on architectural contests, first-land, first-home building contests, "best waterfall" or "best landscaping" type of contests, visits to architectural sites, etc. etc.

I would stage various happenings like the best lighting costume/av or lighted objects in a Zorastrian Temple festival.

Now, I've put on various happenings like on Saturdays, I started an event called Moth Swarm where people gather at the Moth Temple in Iris, lay out sacrifices before the merciless god Autoreturn eats them LOL, then we dress up in moth outfits made by Osprey Therein, and swarm around the new continent, laying dwell eggs LOL. It's just a fun thing to do.

I put on a Real Estate 101 type course called "What is Tier" occasionally.

I have a game I host called Land Auction Futures which is a lot of fun -- you can learn about how the land auction works in the process of playing it. You guess the outcome of the actual Linden land auction and bet against others.

I put on Land Raffles that allow people a chance to get a free 512 without a purchase price, and use those occasions to answer people's questions about land.

I sponsored a MayDay Fair with all kinds of interesting games, contests, free vendors, etc. etc. that has been running the last two weeks in Ravenglass and has been really a pleasure to see -- some very creative objects got made by Foolish Frost and others, i.e. May pole, arena fighting, etc. etc.

I sponsor a discussion about the burning issues of the day called THAT DAMMED PROKOFY in my Sutherland Dam club where all those people who dis me on the forums are invited to "continue the conversation in-world in chat" as Jeska often admonishes.

I'm constantly thinking of new ideas for events, and put on little happenings or discussions all the time. We have a lot of fun.

Some of these events are low-brow, mass culture kind of things, like Yard Sales. Others are more serious economic discussions or artistic-merit type of contests.

I also encourage all our tenants to use the events spaces on all our properties to do their own events, i.e. some of them have plays or games or discussions or themed groups of various types that convene on their own properties or in the commons spaces.

A key way in which I've encouraged higher-quality events in the game is by selling my land at very low rates to non-profit groups to make community centers which put on events.

I don't pretend to be some culture vulture and arbitrer of SL taste, I just do my thing. Works for me. What I don't do is gripe about lack of events and slam others for the kinds of events they chose to do.

I'd do even more if I and my friends and tenants could log into this game more easily lol.

What do *you* do Ardith?