TSO is back, SL style

i got that email two weeks ago and have tried it and so far there is no forwards compatability to speak of with wide screen monitors. I tried for two weeks to get help on making it so icould SEE the game (everything was so tiny) and had no luck with entering manual switches and numbers. I finally gave up and shrugged and tossed it aside. Yes its an attempt to mirror SL however they have not as of yet made it compatible with newer machines. One day maybe they will make the window resize properly to fit present and more and more popular wide screens but not today.

This gets a little involved because there are many potential meanings of the word "success". What do you consider it to mean?



Right, but this is more or less exactly my point, because even if a creative person doesn't do this themselves, others in the world may still do it and this will have an affect on how the creative person is treated and the experience they have in SL. Remember that even if a person is basically creative and is prepared to do the work, they still need to have a reason to choose SL to create in, rather than in Photoshop or Lightwave or Flash or etc, etc, etc. And community is a big part of that.

What I mean is, I could decide not to try and make something because there are many people out there better than me. Now even if that's a bad way of thinking, some people probably _will_ decide that, and moreover some of those people will feel bad and excluded and that they are missing out as a result. Unfortunately we can't have a psychologist waiting on Help Island to remove people's foibles that may hurt their enjoyment of the system, nor can we stop them going and telling their friends both in-world and out-world that the creative market on SL is sewn up and there's no point trying it (and, if your friend told you that, I'm guessing that your response wouldn't be to ask them what evidence they had!)

But the thing is.. even if they do make something they might then experience that nobody ever shows up. Because even if they aren't comparing themselves to others, their potential visitors/customers are, because they are choosing from the whole run of SL what area to visit. Yes I know that there are people who deliberately target newer areas but I think they are in the minority, I've observed and heard from others that the majority of consumers are relatively new with few preconceptions and thus select from all of SL at once.

And while yes, they can still create.. but it gets tougher and tougher to do it when it seems you're just being ignored and nobody cares, and your tier fees are nibbling away at you, and deviantart or other similar communities start to look better and better value...

Yumi, one of the problems is that you always approach the idea of content creation from a profit expectation perspective. I would bet that very few happy and successful content creators started out with a plan to build stuff and make bank. How many times have we had this exact same circular argument? You say SL costs too much for people. Then a bunch of us remark back that it's free, you don't need to spend a dime. Then you remark back that people want high end stuff and it costs too much, people shouldn't have to pay to have nice stuff in SL. Then a bunch of us remark back that you can always earn the money for your luxury items by creating content and it making SL pay for itself. Then you come back with this exact same arguement that not everyone has the creativity, not everyone has the time, not everyone has the business skills, etc...

What this always boils down to is that you expect things to be handed to you. Life doesn't work that way unless you have a trust fund. No one ever needs to pay any money to enjoy SL. If people want high quality designed items, they need to pay for them and stop whining that they shouldn't have to. Some people will discover that they have a love for creating things and will make them regardless of whether or not anyone buys them. Some people will have combination of creative ability and business sense that allows them to be very, very successful in SL. Everyone has equal opportunity, but you cannot expect equal outcome. Life just does not work that way.

But that isn't true. What I'm saying is that people getting started creating content want to have _some_ opportunity to get some positive feedback from doing it. If someone starts creating art for the first time and nobody wants to look at it and nobody shows any interest or talks about it then eventually it's going to be rational for them to stop. Sometimes they will plod on regardless, and on very rare occasions that'll be the right thing to do, but more often they will turn out to be Dennis Greenidge ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exWHFj_T9Qw ) .

In fact I suspect the reason why people think I'm only talking about profit, is because the "culture" of SL is now so much equating positive reinforcement with profit that people think they are the same thing. But I don't mean that at all. I mean things like people making comments about your work, maybe helping out, expressing an interest, that kind of thing. Again, it's a similar reason why I help out with the newbie show and tell events. Yes, they do pay a L$ prize but that's quite small, the main value is that newbies know that if they do make something there's something where they can have an audience for it.



Before I joined SL, when it first started, everything was L$ so it was always about creating things. (And that shows why some reinforcement if necessary, if everyone would have carried on creating anyway for the simple joy of it then why did the Lindens bother including L$ and the old leaderboard system in the first place?) Then when I joined around 2005, there was a sort of transition period, where generally people were being suggested to buy L$ but it was still generally felt that the L$ system was to incentivize people to try creating things. Now it seems that it has completely bifurcated, and you have the people who _only_ create things, and the people who only pay for L$ and buy them.

And I'm sure that there are people who are happy in both categories but what I'm trying to say is that this wasn't checked before it happened. It wasn't what the Lindens did their market research on. The big businesses didn't check that being a pure consumer in SL would be a fulfilling experience. Now, I'm not saying that they should have done or that it's their fault or responsibility. But the end reality comes out to be that we did have a person here posting that they were unhappy in SL because they could buy a hot tub but then all they could do was sit in it, and than subsequent to that, in a poll on this very forum, just under 20% of voters suggested that this might be contributing to the dropout rate of SL.

Likewise, creation was designed to be SL's competitive advantage in the online entertainment market, too. People love to point out that you don't have to "level up" on SL, which I agree is a good thing - but if all there is to do as a consumer is to chat and look at other people's artwork - then, well, you can do both of those on WoW without ever even meeting a monster. (Although, true, the community on WoW is nowhere near as good.) And, you can't on WoW, but on some other games, you can even make a house out of prefabs on the same terms. On Ryzom Ring you can even create a complete mini-adventure game of your own, while on SL that involves a US$2000 downpayment...

So, is creating this consumer class equivalent to SL sleepwalking over a cliff - do we really know? Do we have any real information ? And if it is, could we stop it?



No, it's not as simple as that. SL isn't life. SL isn't mandatory. You should be grateful for the ones who whine, they have been motivated to stay in SL for some other reason. The ones who don't whine just quit or go to other virtual worlds.



What about the people who came to SL with only creative ability and had their businesses evolve? Many of the known names in SL are in that category. Is their day done, now?



The opportunity to paint a picture in a room surrounded by people who will point at your painting and snigger and laugh is not the same as an opportunity to paint a picture in a room surrounded by people who will comment and advise and cheer if it's good. And the problem is, if you just put an easel in a room with some other people you don't know, you don't know which one of those you're offering...

Wait, are you two intentionally plagiarizing Ayn Rand as like some sort of roleplaying thing?

Ayn Rand didn't write about a world where anyone who wanted to stop living could just go and do something else. By her standards anyone who quits SL becomes an unbeatable "looter".

I don't think very many economic philosophers have written about that kind of world, either..

I started downloading the Sims Online (it's still called that once you start downloading it) and the darn thing is still going.

This is the worse downloading ever.

It requires that you be in 16 bit color mode during the download. What is up with that? During program operation, sure, if it's ancient code written for fossilized computers, but during the download process?

And it keeps restarting, or having a problem and it requires that you click or press in order to proceed.

Well if you aren't paying attention it might sit there for hours before you click again.

Isn't this the same company that is supposed to put out Spore?

*boggle*

*looks at the EA downloader on her desktop which runs fine without any such limits*

*tries desperately to think of some reasoning behind this*

*boggles again*

Hey mon, we're jammin'.


It keeps giving me the message about switching to 16 bit color mode. Maybe it has to do with running fullscreen versus in windowed mode or something.

Are you making pie?

No, I am making preserves, which is called "jamming", hence my joke.

I had gotten the impression this was supposed to be free, but I got an email from EA that says "Your fourteen day free trial subscription to The Sims Online is about to expire, but you don't have to miss one minute of fun!"

It clearly states on the ea-land website...

"I would like to introduce you to EA-Land, a world that is free-to-play.. Yes, free."