Limiting theft by limiting creation

I wore one for a while and it made zero difference, except one person said "Hello very small Yumi" instead of "Hello Yumi". I bet they'd have agreed to just say those words for L$10..

Have you tried hanging out in Raglan Shire, instead of with whatever philistines you currently hang out with?

I haven't, but we're not talking about me personally. You've recommended several areas. How many of these areas are there? What total user capacity can they handle at once? What % of the users of SL can fit into them?

This sounds interesting. I must visit, if you won't mind a wolf wandering around. BTW - the pick in your profile for this is broken. I get a "No valid parcel" message.

Perhaps, but we're ONE of MANY non-traditional non-human areas, too; plus, we don't advertise all that much. I am still amazed at the number of new people who find their way to our shores.



Whatever comes up that we want to talk about. The Darkwing Duck guy probably will want to talk about cartoons or comic books. The robot might bring up MechWarrior or maybe the Terminator movies/series. The fairy will likely want to talk about, well, fantasy stories and fae folk. Maybe not; maybe the whole group decides to talk about health care in RL, or about Sunday's football game (admittedly not a topic I would contribute much towards; razor-sharp talons and inflated objects don't work too well together ).

I don't expect people to talk about things related to their avatars in such a grouping, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised, or deny the possibility, either.

Not at all.

Oh? Must have been borked from one of the moves, or perhaps a past reparceling. I'll fix it.

Here's a SLURL:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Limbo/128/128/22/

As many as there are intelligent and creative people to fill them. It's the people who make them what they are, not the grid location or sim name... a Tiny Flash Crowd can happen to anyone.
Given that they can happen anywhere, maybe sixty thousand or so, before grid-wide lag gets too bad.
100%, by definition.

Ok.. so.. if there were 660 such areas, they could handle the influx to SL... in one week.. (assuming they're one sim each with the avatar count maximised).



Right. But then.. if he wants to talk about cartoons or comic books.. then he can do that with a plain avatar. You might get a brief clue from the fact he's using the Darkwing Duck avatar, but was the L$400 spent on that av really worth it when his first few sentences will communicate the exact same thing?

Well, if you wore it around people who already know you and are used to some other form, they may not treat you any differently. They have already "gotten to know" the person inside the avatar. Once most people get beyond that point, changing forms doesn't (and shouldn't) automatically make people change the way they interact with you. I mean, you didn't change your personality when you changed your avatar, did you?

If you did, then yeah, I would expect you to have to drop a few subtle hints to those who knew your "old" personality, if you no longer wanted it to be representative of the way you wish to be treated now.

_Can_ happen, but what is the % chance of it happening to any particular avatar during an SL session of.. well, maybe half-an-hour or so? Or if you want them to stay on longer, well, how long are you expecting them to hang around waiting?

Thank you. Much appreciated. I will be sure to visit sometime

You can run 66,000 people through one mainland sim in a week, as long as no one stays more than around 6 minutes each. Yes, playing with numbers is silly.



He could, but I find it entirely appropriate for him to wear an avatar to reflect his likes and dislikes, and perhaps even his personality. It wouldn't be awkward for him to "fall into character" at any point and espouse some really horrible cartoony crimefighter superhero puns. If he was wearing a human avatar and did that, I think most people would look at him like he grew another head.

Please do, and feel free to explore not only the Isle regions, but the rest of the Fantasy continent to the East. Lots of very lovely builds and people populate it.

Depends on the person. I've got a pretty good track record of starting wacky hijinks [tm] at the drop of a waffle, if I'm in the mood.

I don't *want* them to do anything in particular. If they want to hang around in mundane avatars talking about mundane things, then I'm not going to insist they do something else. You're the one who's trying to change the grid by sitting around waiting for it to change, not me. That trick doesn't work for me... I'm not the Buddha.

I don't think so. Very few people will ever say "well, if you want to do/be that, you've got to pay for the avatar first!" So.. why pay for the avatar?



And what % of the population is a "cool kid" of that type? More importantly, what % of the SL population CAN be, at once? This is just the "performance" problem again.



You're saying that if somebody buys an exotic avatar, then for that to make a difference they'll have to find a group in which it does, which (compared to the vast numbers on SL) is comparatively rare. You then said such groups can happen as "flash mobs" at any given moment, but how long are you expecting someone to wait around on SL for one of those moments to come?

..and I most definitely am not saying such, either. You're talking about how people treat other people wearing a particular avatar. If someone has gone to the trouble of spending some amount of L$ to get such an avatar, or even the time to make it themselves, AND wear it around other people, I think that it is worth showing consideration for their efforts. That's all I am saying.

I agree. But if that consideration doesn't come in the form of doing something, that you would refuse to do for a person who had _not_ gone to that trouble.. then what does it really mean?

I'm not a "cool kid". At all.

As many as want to be. If you don't want to be, that's not my problem.

No, I'm saying that it's up to them to make a difference, and if they happen to be stuck with a bunch of mundanes with no sense of humor it's going to be a lot harder. When that happens, and it occasionally does, I go somewhere else. Most of the time it doesn't take more than a couple of tries to get away from the nattering nabobs of negativism.

I just said I'm not expecting anyone to wait for anything. You want a vivid Second Life, you have to make it happen. It's not hard, anyone can do it if they're willing to take a chance on looking foolish.

If you have the ability to "start wacky hijinks", as opposed to having to go along with what others are doing, then you are playing the "cool kid" role in that group..



.. and as you said earlier, if you can't find things that you want to do that _don't_ require you to be the winner/leader, then you're going to be disappointed in social games. Well, starting things in the way you describe, generally does require that position. You are acting as a leader, as someone "better" than those who follow you.



And the ability to "make a difference" rests upon a competition, and therefore someone will have to lose, guaranteeing a 50%+ failure rate.

Go ahead and tell me how you can have a "vivid" SL while remaining a face in the crowd. Because if you don't want to be a face in the crowd, then you're demanding to be special/a leader/a winner...

You have an amazingly low threshold for "cool". Or a pretty low opinion of the people you're hanging out with.



Most things don't require you to be a winner/leader.

Ever hear the expression "class clown"?



You've lost me. Going along with wacky hijinks [tm] is losing? This is a game where EVERYONE is a winner!

Nobody's "a face in the crowd" as far as I'm concerned. Second Life is the opposite of Global Thermonuclear War... "the only way to lose, is not to play".

When I think of people needing to verify.....I think of things like some merchants doing bizarre things on Xstreet....and I think of the repeated stories on here, of how someone got ripped off, and it boils down to "buyer beware".....as a merchant I relate that to Ebay, since I have experience there....and I wonder how Ebay would have survived with anonymous merchants. The marketplace is growing here. The wild west option can't function effectively endlessly....if it were even functioning now....other issues going on, besides content theft.

It sort of sounds like you think that I am talking about "profits?" ...bottom line?....no, not the case.... it effects you, and whether or not someone has an enjoyable experience shopping, setting up a home, buying a tux to go dancing, supporting live music events with profits from a store, the simple act of logging in next week and contributing to the population, being nice to people inworld because you're happy, and not pissed off about getting ripped by a merchant.....stuff like that.....and in that case, I totally agree with you, that there won't be any customers left....and there won't be any people left to have fun with.

It's not always about the store - most of us selling stuff have a ton of fun here, outside the store. That's what kept us coming in the first few months.....most did not just stop that fun when they started selling product. You may not see us out and about....but we're there....Alts. haha NPIOF alts at that!

I use the term "we"....that doesn't mean everyone, of course.

I get bent about separating content creators or merchants from people doing other things....when there is a discussion on here. I don't consider myself a creator....I slap textures someone else made, onto a shape that LL supplied. But even those that are making amazing creations....I bet they appreciate SL for the same reasons that you and I do....and a lot of those reasons have nothing to do with bottom line profits. It takes a HUGE amount of effort to make those, with such little numbers being involved. They would HAVE to have something else in SL keeping them going every day, to even get to that point. We are not different people at all. Our concerns do not come from entirely different angles. Generally.

Being a "cool kid" means the one who wields social power.



But you referred to "starting wacky hijinks". If you're starting it, you're taking the lead. Which is being the leader. Which is the situation I was referring to in all my original posts where I talked about resentment among groups, and you introduced the idea of competition by saying "well, of course everyone wants to be the winner".



It is if they're always ferrety hijinks started by someone else, and your L$3000 dragon avatar is mouldering in your inventory.



Every time you take the lead, you make faces in the crowd of your followers.

Convincing water to flow downhill takes more power. I'm not Robin Williams in a ferret suit.
Don't put that on me: you were talking about competition before I said one word.
If you want draconic hijinks, why aren't you wearing a dragon avatar, so I can hide under your wing when that crazy robot comes after me for nipping his power cord? Hell, it's not even been a month since I was last hiding under a dragon's wing!
I'm not taking the lead, and they're not my followers.

The selling isn't an easy overnight fix but I think it coulod be done, I wasn't thinking of transfers of objects being limited at all, just money transfers, perhaps it would be possiblie for un unverified to recieve money from verifeds only so verified business owners could pay staff or donate to noobs but unverifieds could not sell content to the majority of the population.

I would never refuse to treat someone the way they want to be treated, if their avatar didn't reflect it. They would have to communicate such for me to know beforehand, of course. That's another great benefit to wearing the avatar, in my mind.

If a wingbrother decided to wear a human form most of the time, and I met him in that form, I may not recognize his bearing as a wingbrother, but if he asserted it in some other way, I would show him the consideration of respecting it as if he had worn the representative avatar.

If I met him in his Dragon avatar, then he wouldn't have had to explicitly assert it.