Opinions on age degradation of prims/creations?

I vaguely remember a vaguely similar idea from somewhere a long time ago.

Prim Mines and Prim Farms.

The idea was that prims should not be free. Instead, you should have to go find them or grow them or some such. This would create an economy around prims. Noobies who don't want to be sex workers could be prim hunters or prim farmers, instead.

Same thing here: when prims wear out, you would have to refresh them somehow.

Mutated 2 headed avatars

Cancer, heart attacks, polio, small pox, ebola etc.

Tidal Waves

It would never work the way people envision.

The bottom line is that ...

Somehow people have to spend enough real US dollars in Second Life to pay both Linden Labs (mainly through land) *AND* Content Creators.

Any attempt to circumvent that is doomed to fail.

...because nothing would make my day better than to see the beautiful house my Aunty, who is largely gone from SL, sort of fade away. :-/

Mari

In some long-dead thread, I suggested half-jokingly that "natural disasters" could sometimes strike, wiping all prims in their path. The idea was really to enable a form of "urban renewal"--clearing out parcels from all those premium members who haven't visited for years, but haven't bestirred themselves to cancel their credit card auto-renewal. Anybody who was still active could just re-rez their stuff from lost+found, or take the opportunity to consider a different build.

(I know, not the same thing at all.)

Hi Ray,

It's actually not such a mad idea. In RL it's called planned obsolesence.

It was a very widespread practice particularly by producers who enjoyed an oligopoly . However in modern day Britain it is considered a breach of consumer rights and will be investigated by the OFT.

I'm not really sure how a widespread implementation of this practice would affect the economics of SL. I suspect we miss out on the negative externalities like excess polution and dwindling raw materials.

By not adopting the most obvious types of planned obsolence however, we do create an incentive for more creativity and technical improvement, because if something doesn't wear out then consumers will only buy a new version if it offers increased value.

From a marketing point of view you might be able to add value to a product range if an obvious measure of age affected the value - only of course if functionality remained intact.

As an example certain items are more desirable if they appear brand new, and again certain others appear more valuable if they appear very old.

It's a very interesting idea ..

I kinda like the idea... as an option.
As a permanent, default thing? Ummmmmm no.

But there are crazy possibilities to be explored if this was a feature!

Ummm... My car is in for a break job, my porch needs a new roof, my driveway is disintegrating... I deal with enough of this in RL. I would want to have this in SL... why???

Exactly! Why create unnecessary problems for consumers?

Good point.

As for making this optional, it would also need to be obvious when buying, and I would refuse to buy anything with this "feature".

What's the problem we're trying to solve? Not enough problems, so create some?

QFTEATAW

/me is not quite clever enough to decode QFTEATAW.

Save that idea for a.......wait for it.......here it comes............GAME.

So someone pays 50,000 Linden for an item only to have it decay because they had go offline for 5 months to care for their dying grandmother?

Why is extraordinary pressure needed for content creates to make new things?

I would not even think twice about leaving SL if i knew my high priced or primmy art objects were going to decay over time. What a waste. Well i probably would not leave but it would change everything. Why even spend money on things now?

Remember we BUY things here for its perceived permanency, among other reasons - it is part of the price tag.

Quoted for:

Truth

Emphasis

and the American Way.

Prims don't decay but they do change. i.e a basic prim rezzed 3 years ago does not act exactly the same as a prim rezzed today. About a year ago I went to rebuild some older prefabs, when I tried to blend new prims with the old prims I found that the cuts on the old prims were not as precise, old prims seemed to shift position slightly when linked/unlinked and the physical response of the prim were allot different to a 'modern' prim. As my customers mod allot of my builds I ended up rebuilding everything pre 2007 so that all of my products were using the 'current' primset. I remember posting on the forum about this at the time and someone knowledgable told me that since SL came out of beta we were now using the 3rd generation of prims. Dunno if that is true.

I wouldn't buy anything that degraded over time in here.