Bloomin Campers Again

LOL. You'll get no argument from me on that.

no your example really was at least once removed from apples to oarnges

Business ethics is a lil bit deeper than if a store plays loud Christmas music.

Business ethics and Wal-Mart is more things like them benefiting from Chinese sweatshop labor.

Or delebrately undercutting attempts to unionize in their stores.

LOL. You see? Taxi service included

And ty for the comment about my furniture.

Don't they give you something in return for your money? Are they lying? All they are doing is drawing people into the store. Advertising is designed to do the same thing, just using a different method. Once you are in the store it's up to you whether you stay or not. You aren't kidnapped for pity's sake!! And as for being "trustworthy enough to give your money to", if the product is good and what you want, what difference does it make?

Camping is a dirty word here and I don't really understand why. Someone in another thread said that [camping] uses up SL's resources. Oh come on. We ALL use up SL's resources. Some of the same people bemoaning camping probably have overbloated inventories too that create drag on the servers. If you point fingers be careful of the ones pointing right back at you.

I know of a camping spot where regulars wile away their time and have formed a close social group. Sometimes it's quiet there and at other times there is lively chat. Two of the campers who met there are even getting married. The site owner drops by frequently and chats with everyone. Who is anyone to say that's bad or an illegitimate use of SL's resources?

Maybe I'm too new or too optimistic, but I think that's still here. The part where it pays off is a little thin, but otherwise it's not like there aren't innovators, artists, and fine craftspersons at work here. But to be honest, if they're in it for the money, it ain't easy anymore.

(It *is* amazing to me, though, that there's still money in it for the crap. I suppose there's some modicum of business skill required to run the average sex-bed / t-shirt / lifted-image-texture / boxed freebie scripts mall, but the barriers to entry are negligible--it's certainly not rocket science to spawn a few dozen libsecondlife bots. And we see a grid filled with this business model, so why is there still any margin in it at all? All I can think of is that this must be an incredibly inefficient market, where competition just doesn't work because there's a reliable supply of clueless customers. Otherwise these businesses should have saturated the demand for lowest common denominator commodities a long time ago.)

The problem I see is that the mechanisms aren't very effective for learning about content that actually contributes something new. It's really word-of-mouth within the community, aided by the occasional accidental discovery. Is there an external publication that actually provides credible comprehensive information about new content? (Maybe it exists, but somehow all the ones I've found are either too busy trying to take the "economy" seriously, or are exercises in competitive self-congratulation.)

The idea is that the most effective response to camping chairs/bots (and the rest of the Malling Of SecondLife) isn't to deny the masses their WalMarts, but to find a more effective medium for publicizing creative content. It might even motivate the creators.

Club B has not cheated anybody. They have just used resources at everybody's disposal to their advantage. Even if they didn't use campers, their advertising budget is still more than Club A's would have been. It MIGHT be cheating if something prevented Club A from using campers themselves. Everyone has access to the same system if they have the money to pay for it. I'm not saying that it's an ideal situation, but demonizing campers over it is just sour grapes talking.

Excuse me? Yes people in real life do that. New restaurants do that; they invite friends and family to an opening to boost the crowd. Everyone knows that the best places to eat are the ones with traffic. Theatres do that because you get a better show if actors play to full seats rather than empty ones. The energy is just better. Stores and events give away free passes or offer 2 for 1's to get traffic in their stores. I don't see how any of this differs. And none of it is "fake".
EDIT: I didn't notice that some other posters responded with similar points. Sorry for the duplicate...but I'm saying it anyway.

Who the hell are all these people saying things like I have sour grapes and I'm whining because I can't compete?

I mean seriously you don't have a clue what you are talking about.

My objections to traffic have nothing to do with my individual Second Life business. I never bothered staying on the front page of the results of my business area (which I was one of the early founders)

My stuff is a niche within an elective area anyhow. Broad Appeal was never gonna happen.

My objections to traffic gaming are really really simple

We have one Pay for ranking system - Classifieds. Whoever pays the most wins.

We were supposed to have one popularity based ranking system - Traffic. But it was corrupted to.. wait for it .. Whoever pays the most wins

Two systems that are "whoever pays the most wins" are redundant.

But the customer .. wow .. who'd have thought they mattered .. often doesn't know the TRAFFIC system is just bought and paid for.

Now to all those who think im just extolling sour grape wine go eat some apples and oranges and kiwi fruit.

Phil H Linden already!

I may have quoted you in that post, but I wasn't speaking of you personally. So please don't take it that way. But you have to admit, you are feeling unfairly attacked...precisely what people who camp feel...or how people who aren't "premium" members feel when some landowners say to throw out the basic account "riff-raff". This is our society it seems, and campers are relegated to the welfare class.

But Colette, no insult was aimed towards you.

This is not a popular opinion amongst those prevented from entering their own property (or simply lagged to death when doing so) by the presence of campers. I do like the comparison with large inventories though, very funny.

I have myself heard of these fabled campsites where people while away the hours chatting and socialising and learning to build and script and so on, but I have to say that I have been in SL quite a time now and I have never, ever heard a camper say anything whatsoever to anyone. Ever. Not once. I am sure these places exist but they must be vanishingly rare.

so question? If the amount of prims that a parcel can support can be restricted, why couldn't the amount of avatars in a parcel also be restricted?

I used to camp on dancing poles in Hawaii and made a few very good friends there. We talked to each other since there was nothing better to do, and helped each other out. We'd go shop, etc. We've generally grown beyond that by now, but it was a good thing. We weren't zombies taking and taking out of SL - we shopped, rented homes, and put the money back in. This is the ideal for camping - it gives the business owner a boost and injects money into the lower tier and spreads it around. I can't see the use of having 50 bots running except to take and take without putting back in.

Lets see if I understand it - "exploitation" means paying someone $1/hour when before they were getting US$0.50/hour?

Unions are the center of all virtue in business? There has never been a been a corrupt union? Jimmy Hoffa has risen from the dead?

Could it be that the Chinese really want those jobs and the people who work at Wal-Mart aren't forced to at the point of a gun?

Business ethics has a whole lot of aspects, but it means nothing unless you really put your customers first!

It could be; it isn't, though.

There are fairly sound reasons why it would be a bad idea to restrict avatars on a parcel by a strict formula, too (this is not a new idea and has been around as long as I have, and probably longer). Someone with a 512 on a fairly empty sim would be unable to have any guests, for instance, if LL divided up the 40-avatar limit by parcel area. Some sort of more complex resource allocation system would be required than that. Either way, though, there is no apparent move towards doing anything along those lines, and no concrete, well-supported proposals.

As I said, I'm sure they exist - even Torley used to camp apparently and has written about learning to do things there. It's just that I have never seen any of these places, which either means that I have been quite seriously unlucky, or not been paying attention, or, well, that in terms of all the campsites out there they are rare.

I am not one of these moralising work-ethic types who think that there's something "wrong" with getting money from camping and dammitall you should be out there making shoes and running a shop, and if you can't or don't want to then you should just put up with it etc etc. Most camping is harmless to me and beneficial to the campers. It is just that I am sceptical of some of the claims I hear made, and certain places and people really _do_ cause immediate problems, regardless of the broader issue of distorting search results.

Dont get me wrong Marin, I started in SL with camping as well. Though soon I found out that putting a few dollars into the game made much more sense. Money trees are a nice way to contribute to newbies, is not. Because money trees are actually ment to "feed the noobs", whereas camping pads are ment to boost traffic. Simple as that.
And people who camp relegate themselves to the welfare class, many even are member of "welfare island" or something like that. Proud title is Welfare President I believe. They live their second life on the goodwill of others, so the title is well chosen.

My not too popular view: Give people 2 weeks to try out SL as free member, after that make them pay. With the right to run 3 alts with 1 premium membership. Want more, pay more. No more free rides. Want to play a great game/platform? Sure but there is a fee.
Want to run 20 alts in a farm? Sure but pay extra for them. I wonder how that would influence SL

Greetings, Marcel

Well to me that is exactly the point - the number of avatars IS restricted just the same way as the number of Prims!

However for some reason it is the number of avatars camping on my neighbor's land that is to blame for the lag, not my 100,000 prim skybox.

I essence I quite agree with you Marcel. Personally I would be willing to pay a small fee for my access to SL, but not as it stands now, where all you get is the right to buy land. There are a few folk out there who currently turn their noses up at non-paying avatars, precisely because they have to pay and others don't. But what incentive does anyone have to become a premium unless they are also planning to invest in property? If LL decides to change the system, then so be it...but in the meantime the "elite" should give the rest of us some slack. The griefer and bot problem may need another solution.

Just to run some numbers, one sim is 65,536 square meters. Dividing that by 40 yields 1,638.4 square meters. So, you'd need a plot that was 1,648 square meters (must be a multiple of 16) before you're allowed to have one avatar on it.

A big change to a system where people buy packages of hard drive space, CPU time, and bandwidth might not be a bad idea.

--Hugsy

Not too good for shops, events, clubs or even cuddle sessions.

In SL, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound. So to speak. That 100,000 prim skybox is meaningless until the server is describing it to 40 afk people. When someone comes along to actually admire and/or use said skybox, they can't enjoy the experience because the server capacity is being used by people who most of the time aren't even there. All for the sake of inflating traffic numbers. Is $30L an hour more important than someone else's use of server capacity?

To put it in perspective, that's about ten cents usd. If someone in RL offered you ten cents an hour to take up a seat on a city bus, or to sit in a restaurant to make it look more crowded, would you think it a good deal? I think most people would tell them where to stick their dime. Why people in SL don't find the proposition rather insulting is quite beyond my limited powers of cognition.

No.

No one stays at a money tree long enough for it to affect traffic.

It is just about 95% simply a nice thing to do for new players. I know, because hardly any, IF any, of the names that have appeared at my money tree have later appeared on transaction history. I don't recall ever seeing a sale where the name was one I recognized from a money tree person.

I like having a money tree because I used to fly around them, too, when I was new, and I always had a very positive view of those nice people who provided them. I probably never bought a thing from one of them, either, but I have a nice memory of those places!

Occasionally you get a fan letter from a player, thanking you for your money tree. (In fact, one recently sent out a letter to a lot of money tree owners, thanking them.)

I sort of enjoy the money tree, too, because it's like people I don't know and never meet, but I get to "know" them as their names pop up on my screen while I work. I think, "Oh, there's so and so again." And then I sort of "know" that person for 30 days or less. Always a new round of people is churning in.

Once a person popped up on my screen that had a very charming name. About the 6th time I saw them, I IM'd them to tell them I loved their name, probably startling the heck out of them! lol

So it's just a little indulgence, really - a way to parcel out $500 a week to other players. No one, oldbie or anybody, thinks of you as at all gaming any system because you have a money tree.

coco

I fully fully agree.

But that is exactly what I mean At the moment the only reason to become paying member, or premium as they call it, is the right to buy land. In my opinion they should change that to pay to play. Which would increase the benefits substantially But it would make SL a lot fairer, since one way or another the paying members pay for all.

By the way, I am premium and do not own a square meter of mainland. Since renting out my tier plus the 300 stipend equals my yearly payment, it doesnt even cost me a dime in the end. But somehow it feels right to be a paying member since I get so much fun out of the platform. Though it doesn't make me feel elite, for that I do have my Forum Cartel membership

Greetings, Marcel

There are those who aren't.

I remember when I was new, I thought it was almost kind of DEMEANING to go to all that work for a few bucks. But I did it anyway, and was grateful for the opportunity. I think I got about $650 doing that, all told - and I only did it once a day, visiting no tree more than one time a day. (And I did it at U.S. night, which was not the optimal time, at the time.)

But there was a good side effect of it, too - I really saw a lot of SL that way! Especially since back then, there was no P2P.

And man it was hard for me, too, on my old computer. I would have to wait ages to move, and for things to rez in. Sometimes it was a race between me and a money-tree picker as to who got the dollars first? And I invariably lost, as he'd be gone along with the dollars by the time stuff rezzed for me, lol.

coco