Why Don't People Pool Tier and Govern Sims?

I'd be interested to hear what other people think about this.

I think it's more of a polysci problem than a land and economy problem.

If it were just a land and economy problem, 10 people would get together when they each have let's say $100 or so to put in to buy a sim, and then after that, say $25 or less each to pay tier.

Why don't they do such an obvious thing? Philip Linden spoke at the town meeting, and again last night in the Welcome Area about maybe putting out bigger plots or whole sims on the mainland for people to do group projects like this more.

But...will they?

What prevents people from trusting each other and pooling their tier?

1. Still too much money -- many people don't want to spend $5 more on a game than the movie-like cost of $9.95, even per month and are afraid of getting stuck. Often there is a spouse or a partner somewhere in the picture putting some pressure on them that they shouldn't spend on "a game".

2. Can't trust people. 10 people getting along on the same sim at the same time is a near miracle. Can you trust them not to pull tier? Experience shows that if you have a situation where there is tier to donate, and people put it in voluntarily with no conditions other than getting the equivalent land, they can and do pull it out without notice, at least in part, sometimes out of forgetfulness.

3. Can't figure out why a group? They'd rather do their own thing and don't get any advantage out of struggling to pull together with others.

4. Hard to find likeminded people. More and more it's a question of niches. In this thread, Jared talks about having first tekkie wikis, then furries, then etc. -- it's a strange concept, like the corporatist cells or stratus of a fascistic state. Can't people get along?

5. What to do? You got those people together they paid tier, bought the land, built on it...now what? No one has flexibility, they have to go ON paying tier. Dwell doesn't cut it, stores don't cut it...they start wondering how to make ends meet?

6. No incentive. They got the ten percent bonus, but that only gave them, what, 6500 m2? Enough to have one of their number come in for free? or make a nice woodlands commons? But other than that, no one will really care if they live or die? And should they?

There are so many reasons why groups coming together could do well and enhance each other, without likemindedness or proximity even, just agreeing to share prims and watch FPS together. There are so many advantages to a group, not only in terms of prims and planning for avoiding script problems, dealing with griefers, etc. Yet...so many forces seem to mitigate against them...

To my knowledge, there are several groups doing just that.

Oh, of course, there are more than several. My point is why isn't this done MORE, like hundreds? So that there is more competition to land barons? And better sim governance even just on parceling and view corridors and lag?

If 2 groups or 48 groups did this because they are closely bonded friends or closely enmeshed business partners great, but we need to figure out how it could be replicated.

it can be pretty hard to buy up the whole sim. in the end it's easier to buy an island. my group tried for months. i know someone who's been trying for more than a year.

Perhaps part of it is because SL's grid by nature is chaotic. It's sort of like surfing the web by following the friend's or business partner links most websites provide, you never know what your going to get.

Maybe it is also a result of the fact that in RL, we do not usually take an active part in the development of our neighborhoods. Sometimes, we do get to pick a new development, and even the floorplan, but we don't have much influence on the theming, road planning, where the park is, etc.

So, when you toss a bunch of people into a world with virtual space, I think that the resultant chaos is a indicator that many simply have never functioned in a community development role. We get a jumble of styles and interests as a result, because there is a freedom enjoyed in SL that we don't get in RL. Many of the things folks build in SL would not be tolerated in RL.

I am actually ok with that, as long as no one is lagging the sim down, because I like being suprised. I have pretty much lived in middle upper class suburbs my entire life, and it's honestly a bit of a welcome relief.

I predict though, that this will change over time. I think the longer SL is around, the more uniformity you will see. The same thing happened in the US many, many times in the past 150 years. Cities usually started disorganized, a cluttered hodge-podge (some remain that way) with little or no zoning, steadily moving towards some semblence of order and uniformity, save for the occasional church steeple, although if you're where I am from, they are more than occasional.

Interesting question... it is one that our group is trying to work on now.

You listed many of the reasons that I am concerned about donating tier to a group. SL changes so quickly. People change focus, leave game, leave alliances, move to another interest on the turn of a dime (or faster).

To me, donating tier does show a commitment to something that might not be there tomorrow or this afternoon because you weren't in the loop at the second a decision was made to make a change. It does require trust and a strong bond with others in the group. And, it does mean that you have to remain static in developing your own interests unless you want to go up in tier.

I prefer to buy land within the sphere of the group. That way, the unpredictable changes that are made allow me a little more reaction time and consideration of how I might want to handle those changes.

Guess it comes down to a sense (however fragile) of some personal control in my SL life.

Group pooling of resources requires a group. To keep an active group going there needs to be an ongoing game or goal that all the members have in common. Since there is no game or goal except what people make up for themselves, most groups only last as long as the goal someone made up, and generally not even that long.

So what we'd need first is some real games to play that large numbers can actively participate in, and that don't get accomplished in the first two weeks of trying. Hmmm... any ideas?

I remain dedicated to the idea that you don't need some really complex or overarching "goal," or "game" or "quest" or "shared vision" etc. to just have a group that manages a sim, counts prims, and prevents lag.

I continue to do this with rental groups but of course, my biggest problem is the vulnerabilities in the group tools, i.e. malicious officer recalls, tier-pulling without notification, accidental sales, sales distributing to the entire group and not the person who paid for the land, etc. etc.

Still, I have more than 100 people in one group, and dozens in other groups, that don't know each other or have any shared goal or game, they just want views, prims, and residential living.

I think lack of information and education about tier and what it is explains one obstacle, many people, even with college educations, do not immediately grasp how it works. I know, because I went through this myself, getting the difference between tier levels I'm paying for as a removable maintenance fee and the land of the same size which I cover with that tier allocation.

I guess I continue to remain puzzled by we couldn't find 100 people with 512 to spare -- many people have at least that much! -- to make a forest of 51,200 m2.

I think one of the biggest reasons there are only so many groups that actually own land and pool tier is the trust factor. How can we truly trust a digital image? We don't really know who is behind that AV and we don't always know their motives. Plus, SL does not provide even minimal protection against malicious or even absent minded group members.

Until there is more transperancy in the process and more protections by the Lindens for group owner's, you are going to continue to see only a few groups pooling their tier and owning land.

I agree that lack of trust, and bad behavior by a small minority, is a real factor.

HOWEVER, it is not so bad that we have to wait around for every -- a year? two? before the group tools are fixed to take action.

we're really hitting the nail on the head here... There's definately a people trust thing going on... I have to work hard to earn $100 and hate seeing something like that leave my wallet in unpredictable ways. I'd rather own my own land and pay the extra money per meter rather than pe a part of a group and risk my vision for a 10% land bonus.


~Lefty

donating tier is a loss leader. it is cheaper for one person to carry the entire tier and charge players a portion then it is for people to donate tier individually because of the regressive tier system.

groups who are donating individually for a large amounts of tier are throwing money away.

Jauani, that's a land baron's perspective. It's flat, bottom-line oriented, unimaginative, and too profit-oriented for it's own good, overlooking the essential Yes, shocking that I would say that, hmm, when I'm supposed to be an ebil land baron myself? But there it is.

Your statement assumes that everything in life is just about $195 and whether you go to $292 to get the half sim for $97 or whether you get another individual to put in $125 for the half sim.

Of course, you could save $28 by having the one individual tier up past $195 to $292.

But by bringing in another human being for that half sim, to pay $125, you in fact are getting something far more than the saving of $28 you get on your own.

Another human being on the sim is worth way, way more in terms of human capital or social capital on a sim. That human being represents labour, if nothing else, and prim-sweeping, if nothing else, possibly on a time zone when you're asleep.

But obviously more than that, he means ideas, contacts, building, sharing, collaborating, cooperating, and many more things. It is priceless. Getting 6 or 10 such people to share a sim and shoulder the tier, even if vastly unequal, i.e. with one still holding a lot of it, is golden in terms of building the fabric of society.

I'm much rather have several human beings on a sim working on something together or even just loosely bonded under the idea that the sim is residential, low-lag, etc. than save a dollar. Because it means the work is spread out, and that it is not one person carrying the burden. Your model leaves one person carrying the burden, and if school or work or some other RL issue intervenes, they drop that burden. By spreading it out, it ensures people don't have to do things like lose their land, take losses, tier down, bail out.

Land barons who buy up private islands or entire sims on the auction can turn around and offer slices of land for less and even have really dirt=cheap parcels compared to the mainland. That's going to work for some people.

But at the end of the day, it becomes contingent on one person or one company of a few people, and I'm more interested in seeing how you can grow solidarity among people around a few common denominators. And I'm interested in leveraging the buying and organizing power of people as they cooperate.

You're also continuing to think only in terms of "sims" or "half sims". You find it pointless to have a plot here or 6 plots there. But in fact, you should think not of just parcels or sims, but the groups of people who occupy them. My groups cross sim frontiers and that way have a binding power that is helpful in making them more flexible. A person can stay in the group, but move to another sim, say, if he or she breaks up with a partner or folds a business or just wants a different view. People can try different options. In the way tier is portable when you just buy and sell land on your own, tier in a group is also portable and you can transport it across sims.

I have a lot to learn about the business and what works in SL and a lot of work to do in developing my own groups' land. But I see this as a very productive area to work in where costs at least can be met and where ways can be found for people to get along on sims.

I continue to think that what I have achieved in six months is a great accomplishment, I continue to think the land business is a legitimate and good business that helps establish and improve civilization.

prok, you don't understand what i am saying.

if four players made a group and bought a 16k m2 anywhere, grid or non grid, it is cheaper for them if one of use donate the full tier and each player sent that person USD or L$ equivalent than if each player donated a quarter sim. here is why:

75 $ for a quarter sim
25 $ for a sixteenth of a sim times four = 100 $

this is my point and i don't understand what all your platitudes about human beings really address. neither do your assumptions that i am thinking ont he scale of a sim. firstly the reference to sim predate my post in this thread and i did not make any reference to sim scale tiers.

in almost any scenario it is beneficial to lump tier payments to LL into one account. in fact if friends trust each other than for their own personal land they should group it for the purpose of saving money. that is if this amount of money is a valuable saving to them.

Jauani, I understood already what you are saying, but you are not seeing my point which is about what individuals are willing to do in a game.

What they aren't willing to do is to get together with 3 other strangers, pick one of the strangers to spend $195, and then send that stranger $48.75 on Paypal. That's the reality. What they will do is spend $75 on their own and pool it with others, however. In time, they might move to the singleton arrangement but they cannot start with that, especially being new.

So sure, 4 people *in advance* can get together and pool their tier.
Let's say each one gets $75 worth of tier, that's 16,38, or one quarter of a sim.
That means that 4 x $75 = $300, the four people collectively are paying $300 to get their 65,536.

I quite recognize that if just one person gets that $195 tier and that 65,536, then there is a discount there of $105, quite a significant amount. The singleton paying the entire tier of the sim can turn around and collect $48.75 from each if he likes, or he can advertise a deal of a quarter sim for $75 (as a number do) in which his advertising spiel is "pay the same as you would pay the Lindens" (although of course it's not what *he* is paying the Lindens).

I got all that.

But my point is that one person might not want the burden of $195 month after month. BUT four people may be willing to accept the burden of $75 month after month -- it's burden sharing and in burden sharing, the amount of the burden can get greater. It gives each one of them more flexibility. One of them can drop out. For that $26.25 that each individual "saves" by giving it to the singleton tier-payer, by paying it himself, he gets flexibility and security.

People are much, much more comfortable paying Lindens the tier than anything else. They can pay the Lindens tier on their own credit cards, in privacy, without having to deal with a third-party site or individual grabbing all their information. They don't have to worry about GOM rates fluctuating or IGE payments being slow when they need to pay the LL tier payment in-game. They just set up a tier leve., set up their credit or debit card, and let it run every month as a hobby expense without having to think about it.

And trust me, that's what people like to do! It makes them feel more secure. Especially at the lower levels of tier where the discount is much less anyway. They'd rather pay the Lindens $5, 8, or $15 in tier they can see going in dollars from their credit card, then find LL $3750 in the game.

Sure, I could go to them and say, you know, let's all realize that my tier bill is "x" and you can all help pay it by feeding me Lindens in the game, instead of paying LL your US dollars. Well, in a sense, that's what the bulk of the rental business is anyway. Most people pay smaller amounts of $250 or $500 a week in Lindens because it just works out for them to pay part of their game stipend.

Try to understand this about people's psychology and comfort level and security, too. People feel comfortable spending amounts up to their "free" game stipend (that comes as part of their $9.95 monthly or $22.95 quarterly cost.)

What my plan enables people to do is to trust each other when they are strangers and have no reason to trust each other in a game on the Internet. They trust LL to handle their credit card properly. They deal with LL. They get the tier and put it in our group. Then the only risk is to me, for them pulling out their tier prematurely. It means I have to keep extra tier often as a "cover" and that defeats the advantage, of course. But if this were done on a wider scale it could work.

It is a way for people to cooperate on sims. That's all. It isn't meant to be some money-making machine -- it won't be, and will either break even or even have to run at a loss depending on how much of a tier cover backing the tier donations you would want.

the problem of group land is not who to pay the tier to. it's the equity in the land and trusting whether someone will sell it out from under your nose if there is a disagreement. if you can trust someone with your 400$ share of a quarter sim, you can probably trust them to pay you their tier share on time.

what is the benefit of my donating my quarter sim to a group and paying my quarter sim tier anyway? why wouldn't i just keep my land to myself and my friends could keep their adjacent plots to themselves?

what you describe offers absolutely no advantage as far as i can see except the 10% bonus, which everyone collects anyway by signing up an alt and their spouse into sl.

you are making up an anecdote. people are rarely interested in donating tier seperately into a small group. the only cicumstance i've seen tier donated by several different people is where most group members donating were already at a sim+ tier level and so no more tier savings could be realized in any manner. so you idea is only beneficial if all members are already at a sim+ tier (or half sim for negligible loss).

Why expect that of them? I don't make people who donate tier officers, I just have them join as members. They are happy, I"m happy. They can't access my land to sell it -- and why should they? They didn't pay the purchase price on it! They are just paying the tier on it! And I provide them the land access for their tier, and hope they won't pull it -- and 95 percent don't pull it without warning. I've only had one case really of a malicious tier-puller, the others were in part stupidity in not thinking how it would be the result of leaving a group, and others were just too new to understand tier.



You get the ten percent extra access to land for the group in this fashion, and that can be useful especially for buying up prim plots or protecting water.

I agree that at the level of an entire quarter sim, most people would rather do their own thing. Most tier doners I've had are at the level of one eight (8192) or lower. Most are 512s saving for bigger lands. But people can find that having a group helps them communicate, pool all the prims for the group's use to make a commons, etc.



Well, actually not everyone wants to sign up an alt or have a girlfriend or whatever. Many people just want their one account and don't want to bother with group maintenance. But they like to get the advantages of the group:

o group dwell payouts from all the lands held by the group on all sims
o sharing the burden of the $30/week FINDPLACES payment across the group
o group messages and propositions
o a common way to hold prims on all the lands
o sharable objects, i.e. buildings that people can take turns modifying, objects that groups can use, etc.



As I said, most people find an advantage at the level of 512-8192. And I could see where it would also be to their advantage to go even higher.

Again it is not just about a literal tier discount, and not only about dollar savings. It's about cooperation on a sim, leveraging work in a group, finding secure ways to make payments but still get an advantage, i.e. not paying the upfront purchase price of land yet having access to land for single residential living or joint projects.

prokofy this thread is become and advertisment for your services now the scenario you posted was where people go together to by land together, not that of your personal business practice that you seem to be defending/advertsiging.

1> in your initial post you describe yourself why group projects are difficult on the grid.

2> if tier donaters are not officers, they are at the mercy of officers to manage their land. this is incredibly annoying. another reason why island land is better for group projects.

3> i don't understand why a thread about people getting together for group projects and complaints about the limits on the group tools for grid land has become a defense for your highly unsustainable business model. eventually all your clients will move on and you will always be chasing more.

your rental community works because you enjoy doing it (non profit practically) and you want it to be part of the grid. if anyone wanted to own that much land to serve that many people profitably, grid land would not be the place to do it. for you to charge a fiscally viable rate to your clients would require you to charge at least what LL charges, probably more. because of that, what you have created is a philanthorpic contribution to create some sense of community for new players on the grid. it is not viable as a charter for player groups, nor is it an effective business model.

you can't use your personal example as an arguement of something that works because clearly it does not. you make it work by pouring your own time into it for the benefit of your clients.

is the 10% bonus YOU recieve from your tenants' tier donations (is that on top of rent?) provide you with enough leverage on the land trading market or the donationless rental market to make it profitable or sustainable? i highly doubt it.

Indigo is a group-owned sim, and we do exactly what Jauani is advocating to lower the cost. Technically, Flipper owns the whole thing, and we each pay him quarterly for our respective share of the total tier fees. This comes out to be a lot less money than if each of us were to pitch in land "officially". This is really the only smart way to do it. Otherwise there's simply no benefit to all living together, other than to fight lag, which is something every land owner should strive for anyway (not that most of them do).

I agree that trust is a big factor here, as Prok has brought up several times now. We all trust eachother completely, and as Prok pointed out would have to be the case, that relationship took time to build. However, it wasn't nearly the giant obstacle Prok seemed to assume it has to be. It took time, sure, but not much. I think what's missing from Prok's viewpoint on the trust equasion is the simple principle that in order to be trusted you first have to trust others.

Did Flipper take a risk when he bought Indigo? Absolutely. Did it pay off for him? Positively, many times over in fact. Are we all taking a risk by assuming he won't sell the land or arbitrarily kick us all out? Sure. Are any of us worried? No way. The reason is simple. Flipper was wise enough to trust other people to join him in building something worthwhile, and as a result we trusted him back. The rest is history. You see, for the most part, people act how they're treated. Treat someone with mistrust and suspicion, and the way they'll act around you will be untrustworthy & suspicious. However, treat them with trust, respect, and kindness, and they will in turn be trustworthy, respecatable, and kind.

In psychology it's called self-fulfilling prophesy. We produce the results to verify our preconceptions. If you assume you can't trust people, you end up subconsciously acting in such a manner that causes them to betray you, and then your hypothesis is confirmed. You can't trust people. On the schoolyard it's called monkey-see-monkey-do. We recipricate what we see in others. You catch the hint that someone doesn't trust you, you feel hurt by that, and so you end up cosciously or subcosciously doing something to get even. Put those two constructs together and you've got a formula to create whatever relationship you want to have. Abuse people & they'll become abusive. Love them & they'll become loving. Trust them & they'll become trustworthy.

Now, does this work every time? No, of course not. It does however work most of the time. For my part, I'd rather err on the side of belief in people. Remeber, even Darth Vader did turn away from evil and destroy the Sith, as was prophesized. Why? In no small part because his son never lost faith in him.

It can be hard to keep that kind of faith sometimes, but on the whole it feels a lot better to be trusting than not to be, and it usually pays off. That doesn't mean naively throwing caution to the wind is ever a good idea; you still have to have a head, but in general I find it's better to trust & run the risk of getting burned every once in a while than it is to live a lonely life of suspicion and distance.

If you don't get what I'm saying, or if the Starwars analogy wasn't good enough for you, go pick up a copy of "All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten". It's pretty hard to argue with. Here's an exerpt for you:

Chosen Few,

I have an open door on my land groups for donating tier. The trust is a default. I take them sight-unseen. I try to watch for any signs that they might pull tier, especially if they are very large donors and seem risky, but there is an open door.

I couldn't get any more trusting than I am, which is to allow automatic tier donation and automatic taking possession of the land after joining the group. I don't even have to be on line to talk to you. Usually I do because you'll need some custom settings and/or instructions.

So all your lecturing, pontificating, citing of kitschy books, etc. are missing the mark. I do trust people LOL. My groups are open for tier donation. Most people prefer to pay cash because a lot of them just don't understand tier, or they don't want to upgrade to a premium account, or they don't want to pay anything more for this game.

You're describing running a sim with a few friends. I'm describing running 7 land groups with a few hundred strangers occupying land or vending space on 33 sims.

Jauani, PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE ANSWER TO YOUR INCORRECT JUDGEMENTS AND CONFIRM THAT YOU HAVE READ THIS ENTIRE POST.

if Neualtenberg gets to hog Land and Economy, I can hog SL Polysci, hmmm? But seriously, my point is not to advertise services which I know are a hard sell anyway, but to find out why people don't do this themselves. I find that even couples or even 3 friends don't bother to make groups and pool their land when they could be doing this! I'm constantly explaining how groups work to people to get them through those hurdles that they do face in first grappling with these tools.

It's true that members who are not officers have to call you to name the land, set the autoreturn time, set the music URL, and deed the radio or video. But you can give them temp edit for landscaping and planting, and if they agree to autoreturn and setting prims to the group you don't have to worry about griefer or stray prims. So honestly, you come once on the first day they rent, and you often never hear from them again for months afterwards.

My "business model" is the same as yours or any landlord's, Jauani, people pay me more rent than I pay LL tier, duh.

But *as one option* I offer the tier donation. I do this because I think it helps build group cohesion. It gives long-term tenants in particular a way to save some money. It helps stabilizes the sims with longer-term residents. People often make a combination of tier donation plus cash.

It's an experiment in international Internet living, Jauani, why must you keep knocking it?



Most of the land is for-profit rent, the tier donation is just one program.

Since you're an officer of the group now, could you please look at the land list, fly around a little and click on boxes and lands and note that: a) only a relatively small number of people donate tier in lieu of cash and b) most properties have rents on them that are more than LL tier, adjusted for the 10 percent bonus and the large-scale tier discount?



I think this remains to be tested. I don't think the private islands are completely free of problems and issues and I think there will remain a sizeable population interested in living on the mainland grid.


I do that. I'm also mindful that for some communities, you have to charge less than that because people won't pay more than what is in their pay packet.



Could I say *once again* that you are making a distorted judgement about my business without sufficient knowledge of it, even having become an officer in the group? Look at the group LOL. Geez. Look at the list of members donating tier. Then get back to me.

The rest pay cash. So I believe that it is an effective business model, to have a mixture of for-profit and non-profit and have some people paying tier instead of cash. It makes for a lot of flexibility.



Your notion that it is "not working" comes from a distorted notion of it. Could you readjust that statement please? I pour time into it, but I also make enough to pay my tier, and have some left over.



There's surely nothing wrong with ME receiving a 10 percent bonus of tier from a tier donation. That's what rent *is* Jauani, it's RENT. So let's say someone donates 512 and I get 50 m2. What can I do with my big 50 m2 donation now? Go wild and buy some 16m griefer squares from Chance Small? There isn't enough there to have some huge leverage.

But let's say i have a half dozen people in one group, and I get an extra 1024. That enables me to go and buy a 1024 that we need for prims, or to secure the view. Since I am constantly engaging in those kind of prim-builder or defense-buy actions in the groups, no one could possibly say I'm sucking up tier and then roaming the sims to scarf up more land on the backs of the people. That's what you're trying to imply here -- but which is it, Jauani? Are you accusing me of being a bad land baron because I don't make enough profit? Or are you accusing me of being a bad land baron because I make too much profit? Isn't that quite a game?

The purpose of this program for tier donation isn't to get some "leverage" on the land market. And it isn't much of a position against the "donationless" market. It's *just one program* Jauani.

So once again, Jauani, please:

1. Log on to your game.
2. Open up the group Ravenglass Rentals, of which you are now an officer.
3. Scroll down the membership list and see who is donating tier and how much.
4. Look at the rest of the land, fly around, see what the rental boxes are, whatever.
5. Fly back here and say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize."

Even if I could realize my dream of making a Tier Nation to manage sims with lots of people contributing tier, it wouldn't have the losses you imagine and would only have the benefits.

Hehe, since this the Political Science forum, I feel I should add my L$0.02...

I'm *both* a member of Ravenglass Rentals and Neualtenburg - so it seems that I can almost displease 90% of the SL population which tries to look at my profile

Both models, I think, are "workable". The first one relies upon trust: that Random Unsung/Prokofy Neva is doing basically a good job managing a vast space with hundreds of rentees. Not much more is required, from the perspective of a business relationship. Prokofy mentioned that with the "extra tier" he was basically trying to capture better landplots or strategic parcels to have the view unobstructed or something similar; I had no idea, although I certainly see Prokofy flying around all the big sim just to help the rentees with any problems that may occur.

So, the business principle here is simple:
- find an open community where people simply want to rent space (with or without contributing to tier) without "land griefing"
- get someone to organize it all (ie. dealing properly with the setup, and with the abuse in-world), in whom you trust
- pay that person
- end of story

So long as all three are valid, the group grows and self-mantains. It works as well on the mainland as on a private island, I think.

This is the "benevolent dictatorship" model - hundreds of people just need to have someone in whom they can trust, pay him, and be free of any problems

Neualtenburg works the other way round and is infinitely more complex. Instead of a top-down approach - which works better, is easier to setup, and has immediate results - it's a bottom-up one. First, you get a number of people (who are not alts, family, spouses, friends, or a tightly-knit group/community) that basically do not know each other, each one with his/her personal agenda. Then you establish a common framework as a way to define each person's rights and duties. By doing so, you learn to trust each other - but, unlike the "benevolent dictatorship", where hundreds of people just need to trust one person, under this model, everybody needs to trust everybody else. Thus, it's not for the faint of heart! Also, it has way more bureaucracy - all sorts of deeds, agreements, finantials & accounting, besides opening up all transactions inside the group on public places, etc. It takes months to prepare before a single house is built.

And, of course, it only appeals to a tiny minority.

What is the biggest drawback of a "benevolent dictatorship"? When the dictator goes away, the land returns to chaos. That's the biggest drawback: succession. The bottom-up approach tries to solve it by letting each and every tenant have a voice for themselves; if the current leader goes away, you just elect a new one. Since you have tons of safeguards and mechanisms to deal with "fairness", the new leader will probably not need to do much more than be a guarantee of the bureaucracy This, of course, is what describes western democracies

So, unlike the "benevolent dictatorship", where the "dictator" has all the trouble - he has to buy land, sell land, control tier, "police" the land, hear complains and deal with them, clean up the mess that was left behing by a rentee that goes away, deal with griefers, and even be subject to "assassination attempts" (ie. people trying to eject him from the group) - the "democracy" model spreads the work among all its members. Of course, this means that each one has to do additional duties besides simply having fun on the rented/leased space

Sincerely, I'd think that the latter formula is very complex and really doesn't appeal to most - it simply takes too much time (I now have to deal with more emails per day regarding Neualtenburg than from my own RL customers!) which cannot be spent in "having fun in SL" (or rather - it's a special kind of fun, which is not appealing to everybody). The "benevolent dictatorship" model is much nicer on the rentees - they have all the fun, the "dictator" has all the work to do. And since SL is about change, this means that if your place suddenly disappears because the "benevolent dictator" is gone - well, you pick another one. So long as you don't have much to care about besides having fun, this model works pretty well.

My point is, it's easier to get a trust relationship just with one person (your landlord) than any other model that assumes a many-to-many relationship between several residents who don't know each other from anywhere. History, again, supports this model - feudalism and later monarchy (you trust your overlord and supply him with money and weapons, and in return he pledges to help you out if you have to deal with problems) were always there before democracy

Democracy presumes a large group of people willing to work together. That's much harder to do in SL because of trust.

I think that SL is slowly evolving from anarchy/libertarianism towards a feudal model - although democratic models are certainly being tried out. We'll see what comes out of this. I also think that the biggest challenge for "benevolent dictators" right now is dealing with succession - how they will keep the community growing when they are not in-world any more. History solved that with hereditary monarchy. I'm interested in seeing what SL will provide us in terms of a solution.

BTW, there is no intent of offending anyone with the designation "benevolent dictatorship". Replace it with "feudal overlord" if you wish - the concept is similar, although not absolutely equivalent.

Glad to hear you trust people. Now, kindly stop missing the mark, yourself.

Was I lecturing? No.

Was I pontificating? Possibly, but not exactly deliberately. Nice choice of vocabulary though.

Was the book I mentioned kitshy? Absolutely not. Kitsch implies bad taste. The things been a best seller for over a decade, and its message is nothing but positive. I'm sorry if you feel that advocating respect for people, common sense, moral center, and principle constitutes bad taste. That certainly explains a lot.

What I was doing if you care to know, since you chose to see it as something so completely far from what it actually was, was answering the original question of this thread, which is why don't more people pool together to manage sims.

Pardon me if my style of responding to such a question includes talking about interpersonal psychology. I happen to have some expertise on the subject, and I quite often talk within that frame of reference. That hardly constitutes "lecturing", "pontificating", or whatever other form of imposed superiority you might choose to call it. I could mention a few things here about what it means when people choose to view others as trying to act superior, but I have absolutely no desire to fall into an argumant trap with you so I'll let that one go.

Now, since the question at hand was why DON'T people come together to manage sims, and you DO manage sims with others, obviously you are not the people in question, so doesn't it stand to reason that logically, my post was not about you? I referenced something you said, yes, but only because it illustrated a particular point. After that, I moved on to talk much more broadly about people in general. For once, can you please just accept that it's possible for the rest of us to reference things you've said in relation to a particular question without then assuming that the response TO THE QUESTION must from that point on become all about you?

I've deliberately avoided posting in the same threads as you for precisely this reason. Please don't make me regret having a little faith in you on this one. You might have noticed I also referenced a comment from someone else, but he doensn't show any signs of having assumed my post was all about him.

To summarize here, the point of yours that I referenced appeared to be that most people don't trust eachother enough to pool their land together. My post neither supported nor challenged that point of view in the slightest. I simply referenced it and then went on to explain how people can build that trust if they want to. Since I'm part of a group that's done it, I felt it only reasonable to explain how & why we accomplished it. And since we were the first and still are the longest running such group in SL, I figured our example was one that people might find to be of interest. The subject of exactly what you may or may not be doing is another question, which is completely irrelevent to anything I was saying, so once again I repeat, it's not about you.


Well, first off, glad to hear you've got such a successful empire built up. Gongratulations.

Now, in reference to the topic at hand, the two things you're mentioning here are not mutually exclusive. "Running a sim with a few friends," as you put it is at its core no different from managing land with others on 33 sims or 33,000 sims. It's still about building relationships. The residents of Indigo weren't born frineds, you know. We had to work at it to become a unit, just as you likely have to work hard to keep your group(s) cohesive. For my part, in the beginning, I just figured the price was right, and Flipper seemed like a pretty cool guy. I had no idea that 15 or 16 months later, we'd all be great friends. It feels now like we always were, but we weren't. We were all more or less strangers in the begninng who happened to share a common interest, and who were all pretty good judges of character. We're only talking about a difference of scale here, Prok, between what you're doing and what we're doing, not necessarily a difference of kind.

For what it's worth though, and I know this is off topic so I'll only say it once, I'd highly recommend abandoning tier contributions in your groups in favor of straight monetary contributions. How you run your organization is your perogative, but I gotta tell ya, you're taking a much bigger risk than you should need to, and you're doing it the most expensive way possible. If you personally owned all the land in question, you'd not only have more control to ensure your group evolves in a healthy direction, and to combat lag, but it would cost everyone a heck of a lot less money, including you.

At first glance you might think that sounds like a bigger risk because anyone could just not pay, but in actuality the opposite is true. As you pointed out, the way you're doing it, you have to hope people won't just take their land with them if and when they go, or sell it out from under you. If you owned it all, that could never happen. If someone doesn't pay, just boot them. There are more than enough people who'd foam at the mouth for the chance to be that person's replacement and get land for less than the tier fee.

Just some friendly advice. Take or ignore it as you see fit. As I said it's off topic though, so I won't discuss it any further here.


Now, since this thread has been derailed long enough, and I think I've sufficiently proven it's not about you, can we please get back to the original topic? It's an interesting one, and a very important one. I'd love to see more groups of people work together for mutually beneficial land management. That's one of the single biggest ways by which we can all work to make SL greater, and it should be encouraged and supported as much as possible. For those people who actually did get the point of my last post, if you'd care to comment/question/criticize, I'm all ears. If anyone has any questions/comments about Indigo in relation to the topic, please feel free to ask. Anyone who thinks that what we've done economically and socially is worth replicating, and would like advice, don't be shy. If you think people who who share land are full of crap, go ahead & post that too. Anything, as long as it's about the topic, and not about tryng to twist it into something else. Whatever happens next, however, I will not take my time to endulge any more fantasies about who the world revolves around, and I'd encourage everyone else not to either.

Um, I can't help but Laugh Out Loud on this one. Quoting that kitschy hackneyed book ""All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Leaned in Kindergarten" is just a typical forum smackdown.



It's kitsch. It's a best-seller because it represents mass taste. Anyone with any kind of sophistication can see that. We don't need some best seller when we already have classics or world religious literature like the Bible to give us the same concepts about getting along with your fellow man. What a malicious sleight of hand, to take a critique of a book as being smarmy and kitschy, and then turn that into some dislike for "common sense" or "moral center". Bad taste is bad taste. How come I have to be strong-armed into acknowledging a silly best-seller to recognize the wisdom of the ages?



Every word that continues after "Pardon me" lets me know that you are exactly guilty of this pontificating.


I happen to believe that's a feint and a punt. I quite believe that you dislike me from all my previous posts and you just wanted to challenge me to a duel in this post. That's all it's about. I see your tone elsewhere, and I see that you are one of those "set you straight" types and I adjust accordingly.




*Shrugs*. And I merely replied that in fact I don't fit into that group of "non-trusting" people you established, for your information. It's not about you "Chosen Few".




Not much of an empire really. It's taken a lot of hard work and a lot of losses too. And that kind of perjorative and nasty attitude toward people who try to do something in this game -- that constant effort to "dumb down" and "corral" is one of the big brakes on progress here. I remember the first time I bought a sim off an auction, I had to listen to attacks and snipes and bashes for *gasp* buying a whole sim, as if this was a crime, as if this was an offense against morality. But the whole sim was for sale? On the Lindens' auction? So I bid on it. Now, what did I do wrong here? Not clear it with the right people and their friends first? I think that's precisely the issue.


Yes and no. Khamon Fate has talked about how people joined together with intensively bonding experiences, often with a sense of quest, a sense of shared purpose and adventure, and most importantly -- a sense of uniting against some outside force. I've noted that could be "the others" or "those who don't understand us" or "we're the intelligent ones surrounded by idiots" or "that Prok". You see?



In some communities where there is a theme or basically some non-profit slant to it, it will take more work to keep people cooperating, creating, sharing, doing.

On other sims, it's more a matter of just making sure the houses don't block each others' views because people just want to be left alone to play their game and do their thing with their honies, they don't want to be in a group, a collective, a shared project, whatever.



I suggest the biggest difference is that you've made this relationship evolve into a sense of intense bonding, of the kind that can occur on the Internet between people starting out as strangers from wildly different walks of life who might never have met otherwise. On the sims where I'm working, people sometimes develop those bonds but for the most part, it's a more normal and less emotional matter having to do more with just prims and views.



It baffles me to this day to find the resistance, hatred, and even fear of tier contribution. I just don't get it. I don't get to make a huge profit out of each and every person if I have some do tier contributions -- but, hey, since when is that something despised in SL? I have to laugh that you, who would use the word "empire" in one breath in a kind of perjorative undertow about "land barons" would then turn around and show all this "touching" concern about my business losses and expenses. I think what you mean is -- you aren't under control, Prok, and we don't like that.



Huh? They can't do that because they are NOT OFFICERS. I've explained that now until I'm blue in the face. Ordinary members cannot take land and sell it. They're just members.



This formula doesn't work as you suggested. So all the need to have friendly advice, off-topic or no, condescending as it in fact is, is way off the mark.

I'm just constantly amazed at the conservatism I stumble against in this game, the refusal to query, experiment, try new things, question. It's supposed to be this "use your imagination" playground, and yet I find profound reactionary attitudes toward something like this seemingly simple and innocent idea of pooling tier.

What is it about this that threatens you, Chosen Few? I just don't get it.




The way in which that can be done is to get people to pool tier. And that's what this thread is about, not about group cooperation. And we've established that people have wildly crazy notions of what pooling tier really means. We've established that you believe -- erroneously -- that it means "having someone sell my land out from under me". You have a group yourself, no? Then surely you realize you can be a member, not an officer and donate tier? Just to take one of the misunderstandings in this thread.



*rolls eyes*. whatever. The point is, you've not been able to say enough meaningful notions about what gets people together and keeps them together trusting each other than "just because I like him and he's my pal". So I await elaboration. Without all the side lectures and "let me break it down to you how it is and let me give you a piece of advice, sonny" stuff along the way, hmmm?

Oh sweet irony.

Almost as ironic as the person who is at the forefront of promoting distrust pontificating about people not being able to trust.

Another sleight of hand. I advocate distrust of a certain small but vocal minority. To elevate that to a public project of "promoting distrust" is well, Bolshevism.