Is 'THIS' the future of Second Life ?

Ahh the bomb was dropped... The all knowing one has arrived.

Time for a new thread, all the answers have been made here. Somehow the future of SL and all virtual worlds is known.

Then you did not read all posts it seems.
What I said is that there is nothing wrong with free accounts, but that we need a way of verifying the real person behind the avatar as soon as money is involved anyway. So have people verify to be able to transfer, and they still can be a free account.

Yes I am premium and yes I have established myself (though not as well as the OP ). As a premium I should indeed have benefits over free members, and I do have them. My stipend, my tier free 512 parcel, and my access to support. So no complaining here.

So to summarize:
Keep free accounts.
Require to verify after at least 2 weeks.
No transfer option if not verified.

- Yes, there still can be fraud, identity fraud that is. My guess is that most people dare not to go that way just to copybot in SL.
- Yes, textures can still be uploaded to a website, just as they can now. No difference there, and most webhosts remove sites with illegal content.
- Yes this throws up a barrier. But a barrier that anyone can overcome (provided they come up with a working verification system of course!).

In my opinion it it the best way of fighting the fraud we experience in SL though. Any fraud, whether it is land scams, copybotting, or selling empty boxes.

Thanks a lot, just received it in-world!
Wa working my ass of on my own scripts, this saves me so much work

How do you verify the user of a computer?

You can't short of a dna scanner or implanted chip.

As I keep pointing out about age verification: There is only data verification, there is no user verification possible.

You can't, I know. You can however connect payment information or ID information with the person behind that computer. Try buying stuff at Amazon and commit fraud for example.

As I told a few times before: Yes I know identity verification can be circumvented. People can and will commit identity fraud. But what I say, is that it will stop a big percentage of the frauds.

See, why you go and give Nina a coronary like that?

It happens, same with ebay and many many other online retailers.

Hell it happens in person too.

Edit:

As i reread your post:

I know you can't verify, but you can verify...

You can try to verify, but it is not going to work.

All it does is create hinderances that drive off legit users, the ones intent on making an easy buck by stealing content and selling cheap knock offs will continue to operate regardless of the hops you try to throw at them if they can still profit from it.

But! You will drive off legit users by making things too annoying for them.

If you have to send in a notorized identy package to LL in order to create an account, listing all your personal information... subject to verification by LL hired investigators prior to account activation (at your cost) it would prevent all fraud and content theft...

But it would also do it by simply killing off second life's user base.

I, for one, will never buy any plants, trees, shrubs etc at anywhere other that at Lilith's Heart Garden Centre.

I have completely landscaped many regions now (that have illicited very kind praise in these forums) and I would not consider buying anywhere else.

The attention to detail, the sheer quality, scope, and after sales service is second to none.

I was only advising a business in SL yesterday, as a matter of fact, to ditch all the Linden plants and trees around her Wedding Venues, and go for the very best (Lilith's) and set herself apart from her competition by only going for the highest quality products available in SL for all her needs.

btw you can often tell the fake copies of Lilith's products, they have a slight black-line edge to them, as the transparent texture was not applied to the thin face of the prims.

Keep on Lilith, your loyal customers will not desert you.

Rock

It would be nice if she stopped using 1024x1024's...

Ah, thanks for that. I had no idea. Maybe that's something Lilith can mention at her stores. I will certainly tell anyone I see who owns a stolen Lilith plant that they have been duped.

You should read my posts more carefully for example, before making blankets statements like *all*....

What are you basing the statement "the free accounts are what keeps SL going* on... I haven't delved into the metrics myself - would be good to get people's perspectives on the tangible benefits they provide.

I like the no barrier to entry for creation method plus governance when you sell - it's why I think RL verification (with a workable and usable method unlike the current one) works for all scenarios I have been able to think of.

Those verified accounts are still free - I think people have been saying that too above....

Tell that to the backbones and the ISPs. They want to charge you twice for your bandwidth when you use Google because Google isn't paying them directly. The whole Internet is based on shared responsibility for infrastructure. In Second Life, that infrastructure is at a much higher level than on the Internet as a whole, but that's true for all kinds of services. Back when the Internet was really starting to open up there was a completely different networking scheme being pushed for "real commercial" traffic because the unnacountable Internet was never going to be useful for business. It was a connection-oriented one based on the OSI protocol stack, where you would effectively "dial up" services and pay in a really accountable way for every minute you were logged in, for every email, every upload and download, many times over, all itemized on your bill.

That kind of "internet" would have maybe made more money over the short term for MCI and British Telecom and the rest of the gang, but it wouldn't have led to the explosion in online services and businesses we see now.

The level of abstraction that's appropriate for a given infrastructure depends heavily on what that infrastructure is.

The point is, you pay for them just as indirectly as you pay for Sprint's routers and Google's disk farms and Microsoft's mail servers.

They don't cut them because they don't have to.
I'm one of the ones paying for it, I've been a landowner since 2006, and I'm not complaining.

Sure, and it's the non-premium accounts who are paying for a lot of that.

There's no indication that the Linden "funny money" is in any danger of collapse. They're selling all of it that they care to print, and they're being responsible about how much they DO print. Content theft is a problem, but it's going to be an even bigger problem when you're sitting on your OpenSim trying to sell content that the pirate with the OpenSim next door is reading right off his servers. You'll be paying 1/4 as much for land and storage, but instead of slightly lower sales you'll have no sales at all.



How about a one time fee for each account?

Two bad ideas don't make one good idea.

You can have a small "site" in Second Life for L$100 a week at any number of malls, or sell your stuff on XStreet for free. If you want a bigger presence, you rent land, and it's not tons of money. Unless you want to rent a whole bloody sim for a shop that doesn't need more than a 4096. It's like the companies that built up downtown Houston in the oil boom with all those cool skyscrapers... when I came here they were going up like mushrooms. So many of them are out of business now.

They're not.

If you think you know a better way to do things, talk to people who are willing to set something up that actually works the way you want. I'd love to see more variety. But so far none of the "businesslike" server farms even have the facilities to support "Argent Stonecutter". Let alone "Argent Rankadlinensur".

No, it's not deflation. It's an exchange rate. It's a sign that the Linden economy is relatively stronger than the US economy. If the Linden Dollar was going down, indicating less demand for goods and services in Second Life, THAT would be a bad thing for sales.

Good. The "land biz" has been through two bubbles already. The result is a glut. If the next bubble holds off for a year we'll all be better off.

But none of those sites are selling to end-users.


2006 was the *only* increase in rent for any regular land. I'm deliberately ignoring the openspaces: they were massively underpriced to start with.

Now you're complaining about a price *drop*.


I spend a lot of money in SL. I've spent hundreds of dollars just on avatars, let alone clothes and land. And unless you can get small creators interested in making the kinds of things I want available in your Opensim, you won't get my business. TANSTAAFL works both ways. You don't want my business, you don't get my money, and if you're paying more for your storage than Linden Labs... that's that whole infrastructure thing.

If you just want offline building, you don't need a sim, you just need a 3d graphics program.

Those are all great things, and I think OpenSim is a great tool for that, but there's not much money for the Second Life content creators that matter for people like me in that business... it's all work-for-hire stuff for builds nobody ever sees. It's a completely different business than a virtual world. Second life is in the virtual world business, they're not competing with Poser and Maya and Turbosquid.

I wrote my first virtual world, text based, in 1982. I've been *Argent* in virtual worlds since 1984. I'm not in the first generation like Bartle or the people who did Plato, but I've been involved long enough to not be impressed by someone who has only been around since the Monica-Clinton years.

Based on the fact there are far more free accounts than paid, and they spend lindens on clothing, avatars, land rent, etc. I know of many who have no payment info on file, no premium account... and yet have spent hundreds of us dollars on renting land, avatars, clothing, furnishings, landscaping, scripts, etc.


As for verification: All LL can do is verify the data they are given, they can not verify the person giving the data is the same person listed in the data. Nor can you verify who is currently at the computer using that account.

I had gone off the idea of 495USD creator accounts but now I know there are loads of freebie accounts wandering around spending 100 of USDs, makes me more certain that they should pay something for the resources they are using and purchase a premiere account - at least.

How else will LL be able to provide cheaper land ?

Land prices are cheap.

The bubble burst, and now land is at a low compared to when I started.

There is a surplus of land out there just sitting empty... because no body is buying up the surplus.

And they LL gets a percentage of those lindens: when they are bought from them, or when the currency traders buy more lindens.

You seem to be blindsided with this hate of free account. They are not going to pay for an account, they will quit. Many of those I know, make all their lindens in world. Because they can't afford the rl cash to buy lindens. They are creators, dancers, models, artists... those are the ones your ideas will send away.

If they can't make the lindens to support their fun without having to spend over a month's salary for the ability to sell their items... SL will lose a very good portion of it's creators... leaving only those established ones... who will watch their profits die as the population dies.

I agree that everyone should pay something to use SL, I am a free basic right now, but as a former Premium, LL has to make Premium attractive to people like me, who don't wish to own mainland, or land at all, for that matter. The 300 Lindens just doesn't do it.

They *ARE* paying for the resources they're using.

They're keeping the shopkeepers who are paying for the land in business.

That's how economies work.

Not to mention for every snapshot they take linden labs gets 10l

Everyone pays the upload costs, those fees are a big money maker for LL in regards to storage and bandwith.

Consider the file size for a single image is about 1 megabyte...

10l x 2000 snapshots (my friend's count right now) = 20000 lindens in upload costs. That is about 83usd. so about 2 gigs of data for the cost of a 500gig sata drive..

So some of that also goes towards bandwith, figure say half.. so still an 80-100gig sata drive.

Now think about how many uploads occur a day...

Edit:
As for your inventory: it's mostly UUID links to items on the asset server

Each item is really a text file of data, as such it might be around 1meg max for 256 prim mega constructs. But everyone with that item... doesn't use 1 meg of data by having it! They have a 1 kb (max) UUID link to it

So my inventory with everything in it is at most 2mb. The contents are maybe a total of 120mb on the asset server (guestamite). But take my aventity husky, it's one of their more popular ones... but if every one had a full data copy in inventory the asset server load would be in gigs... vs maybe a couple megs for the items, and a couple megs for the UUID link data.

Sweet. Your posts really rock sometimes.

I am all for Free accounts, I think they are marvelous.
What I am against is - fully featured, ANONYMOUS, free accounts.
Annonymous accounts should NOT have access to SL's commercial permissions system

' The ability to set permissions is such a powerful feature. You can create but you can also destroy another artists work by releasing full permissions versions and you can do this and more, anonymously and for free. '

Land is extremely expensive !

These are the kind of land prices we need :

open sim - 19.95 USD tier per month
Homestead - 29.95 USD tier per month
Full sim - 49.95 USD tier per month

Perhaps the above price model could enable SL to go mainstream.
Feature-clipped free accounts would encourage people to upgrade.
Premier accounts and Creator Account helping to fund cheaper land for all.

Wrong. Totally wrong. You might as well say "anonymous accounts shouldn't have a pony".

Anonymous accounts shouldn't exist, and they shouldn't NEED to exist. Using the same identifier for the in-world character and the account, and limiting the number of accounts you can have, is why anonymous accounts are needed for immersionist role-play. Linden Labs knows they can't properly lock down anonymous accounts because they know there will be push-back from the many residents who legitimately need them.

Futzing around with the capabilities of free accounts is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

Wrong. Totally wrong. You might as well say "anonymous accounts shouldn't have a pony".

Anonymous accounts shouldn't exist, and they shouldn't NEED to exist. Using the same identifier for the in-world character and the account, and limiting the number of accounts you can have, is why anonymous accounts are needed for immersionist role-play. Linden Labs knows they can't properly lock down anonymous accounts because they know there will be push-back from the many residents who legitimately need them.

Futzing around with the capabilities of free accounts is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.Why? Why do you need a whole sim?

Do we have metrics on that my thought it always if we can narrow those free accounts to see which ones could not validate RL data who spend hundred of US dollars as you state.

Whilst I agree I *could* validate my data, then pass my password and details (and then access to my sensitive data to a third party who will then copybot stuff, in my name. Guess what, if I gave my pin number to somebody I am liable for the money they withdraw from my account. Because there is accountability, I am less likely to do that I suspect.

If the other case, and again I have taken somebody else details (and that's why the current validation system needs to be improved) if linked to PayPal they would also need my password and access to my email address linked to my PayPal to validate.

If Credit and Debit card, bank issued, why not use the VISA processing validation we use for online purchases, the ones that validates you? I see that sometimes - could that work for the PayPal gap countries.

And for the final population of Free Accounts who cannot use PayPal in their country and do not have a credit card and debit card - what % of user is this - I really wish Linden could mine this metric as if they could, and it was a small number they would either (a) figure a method for that specific population (b) agree that population is not going to work (sorry).


Bringing me back to my original point. Keep accounts free. Keep building free and accessible. Just increase accountability.

Repeat this till it sinks in: There is no way to verify anything but data given to LL. There is no way to verify who or even what is at the computer.

Or are you proposing that all creators and sellers have to start using rl names instead of avatar names to take away all anonmity for them? Course there is nothing stopping somone from using fake data that verifies as legit.

I've had website content stolen, filed a DCMA... and had the letter come to me that they used the same registration info I used on my domain to register the copycat one. Since it was all done online, I had no recourse against the theft because the hosting compay was a free one.