Could the Lindens block SL from stabilising as a goldrush economy?

It is the same game, just a different set of tools being used.


If ferret play is making people hundreds of dollars, someone must be interested.
So let me see if I understand you:

A) I should be forced to associate with ferrets, even if I don't want to? Just to provide them with social support? They need to build their own support. If they want it bad enough they will create it. Did goreans, vampires, furries, horse sex lovers all come here in mass, or did one or two come and start the communities they have now?

B) LL should anticipate every want and every need of all possible "communities" in order to support them? This last is why command economies never work. Central planning can never, let me repeat NEVER anticipate the needs and wants of the consumer. I take the risk of offering a product, be it ferret ears or a club playing Hip Hop backwards and at high speed. If there are no customers, I know I need to change my plans. If ferret ears or Hip Hop played in a way it can actually be listened to become the newest fads, then I succeed. If they don't, then I tried. Trying is more than most people do.

If we lose 3 or 4 ferretboys because they can't find other ferrets or they don't have enough sense to list ferret play in their profile or they cant think of a good group name for ferret lovers, then we didn't lose too much and they can go back to WOW.


I get up on stage when I convince a venue owner to let me play or when I build my own venue. There is a fairly large live music scene in SL, lots and lots of people playing rock star (or for most of them Folk Music Star).

It is the same game in the sense that it is still "Second Life". It might however be a completely different experience within Second Life, which the person might not enjoy. Perhaps they could succeed as a clothes designer rather than a club owner, but the experience involved is radically different, and perhaps they wouldn't enjoy that.



There are people interested, but they are not meet each other, or at least not meeting others interested in interacting with them.



Nope. Nobody should be forced to associate with them, of course not. What there could be is, though:
a) an increased incentive to associate with ferrets;
b) an increased incentive or more workable system for wannabee ferrets to stick around so that they can be in the community when it forms in the future;
c) a way for the buyers of the ferret outfits to claw back their money, thus ensuring that the people making the ferret outfits _have_ to work out how to create a ferret community - and since they have the most control over the ferret experience, since they provide the content, they're best positioned to do that.



LL doesn't need to predict the needs of every community. What it needs is to manage the free market so that it's encouraged to support the consumers right the way through - instead of being able to run with your money as soon as you have bought your ferret av, not caring about what you get to DO with it, because nothing in the market needs them to.



Ah, but we did. Because then the _next_ 3 ferret players are alone.. so they leave too.. and then the next 3 and the next and the next and the next and the next... and soon, there could have been a group of 300... but they arrived in bursts of 3 and none of those could gain momentum. Just thinking of a group name doesn't mean people will join and even if they do join it doesn't mean they will do anything. There are _plenty_ of RP themed groups I've joined which are just stuck because nobody can actually do anything - social consensus has failed, as I described above.



Ah, but you have switched to live music. That's not playing a rock star as an entertainment experience, that's playing actual music live in real life. Now that's a great use of SL, but it's not what I ws talking about. I was talking about a role-play experience.

If they don't enjoy being a clothing designer then they probably wouldn't succeed. Building and creating are not what keep most people here. Personal relationships are what keep people. Making friends, becoming involved with others. There is nothing LL can do to help that.


Then do we get LL to increase incentives to associate with everyone?

Why should the creator lose money just because the ferret couldn't make friends? How many communities should a creator be responsible for creating or supporting? Ferrets, cats, dogs and hippos? Or should he add in field mice and zebras as well? The building the community is the responsibility of the people that make it up.

How can it manage the economy without anticipating the wants and needs of the consumer? It can't.


If sitting on a pose ball and playing canned music while people pretend to cheer is your idea of role play then I hope you never get any power over SL.

Making friends isn't the same thing. I have some roles that I play or want to play from time to time and I also have several very good friends in SL but that is usually because I like them as people, not because they indulge my role. Our ferret might also make many friends but perhaps they do not want to play to his ferret.



By changing the universal laws of how the market works. Dwell and ratings were one such method. They made engagement and involvement into saleable, profitable products. They did not need to know exactly what people wanted because they worked from people's feedback, just like the free Market should. Other such methods exist.




I agree that this is deeply unsatisfactory experience. So when will a better one be created? Can we incentivize that? If not, can we warn users about it before the prim guitar maker runs to the bank? But to give that warning we would need to tear down "your world your imagination" because their imagination might have been to be a rock star...

Then he needs to adjust his desires and enjoy his friends or search for friends who want to spend time with ferrets.


You can't change universal laws. Dwell and ratings were gamed. A totally free market with no interference of any kind is the only thing that will work.



The prim guitars are mainly bought by the live music set. But the experience will be improved, if it needs to be, when the market decides it does. When enough people say I want to play rock star, someone will create the needed tools.

Yes, but such people might not exist - or have already left, because they couldn't find other ferrets either. You said that you have run a club - surely you had to deal with the problem that people won't stay around at an empty venue, so 100 interested people might pass through 1 at a time, but each one finds the club empty, and so leaves, and then it is empty for the next person. A club can organize events to get around this. But why shouldn't the same apply to SL as a whole, or communities within it?



Dwell and ratings were gamed, but that does not mean that no equivalent system that cannot be gamed exists.



How would the market know? If right now people were buying prim guitars in the hope of role playing rock stars but failing, all the guitar makers would notice is that sales were up - so they'd carry on making the same guitars.

Yumi, Again I agree with most of what you are saying here but I think you are dancing around your point and getting farther away from in trying to defend against the responses of the other posters.

When a content creator makes something, whether it was designed for a specific community or not, there is automatically a dissociation between the original purchase and the final use our outcome of the product or service. In other MMO games, i will use entropia as an example.. when you buy something it has an immediate and evident use within the game world.. ie a sweat collecting bucket will be used to collect sweat of the beasts.. there is scripting involved, design, and storyline that ties that piece of vitrual content to the actual game that is being played.

In Second Life, there is often no tie in between product and game.. you can create and sell whatever you can imagine after all. This is not a bad thing.. as other posters pointed out it allows for alot of innovation, and if the product or service becomes popular then the creators stand to make some money (win) and the players who purchase it have fun and are entertained with it (win).

What is lacking .. and the aspect of your argument i think you are dancing around is the there is too much of a gap between creator and intended use for saleable items in SL. Leading to a disconnect that is going to make it very hard for a new player to understand how to get from point A to B, B being a larger scale MMO type of game or role playing environment.

Items that are generally used and can fit a variety of social or RP situations can do well.. shoes.. clothing.. accesories can cross over from goth to furry to neko to whatever.. but the truly creative and original ideas tend to suffer because they cant get the widespread exposure that is needed to get people excited. The content creators are not by any means at fault.. we are enablers of other people's fantasies in alot of the cases.

From the point of view of an avid gamer (outside of SL) and a relatively successful creator in SL, i have wanted to create a masterpiece of a small MMO type of game which is technically totally possible in SL, but there are quite a few road blocks in the way.. number one being that I as one person cannot possibly do everything needed to pull of a convicing and immersive experience. I would need to collaborate..

now its getting into the real crux of the matter IMO of how to make SL a more fun place overall. All of these creators are making things that are only a small piece of the puzzle.. some companies (Rezzable comes to mind) have managed to break through with solid business plans, budget, and commitment to projects and initiatives. The companies who have done this are succesfull to a degree that is beyond any single content creator, and are also very successful in providing a better experience for new players.

Linden labs needs to recognize the power of user created content but also see the limitations. Alot of the user created content is up to professional game standards, but most is not understandibly. They should be developing projects and directories that pay residents to build consistant and highly interactive worlds, by using thier clout to manage, plan and design larger projects that will bring residents together.

A final analogy and then i will shut up

SL.. you have several thousand very good content creators in all fields from texture artists to scripters to designers to writers.. who are essentially spinning thier wheels and who are either creating for thier own sake, or who are fighting hard to make some money from it.

If you take a step back and compare the available talent and resources in SL when against a traditional game development studio what is missing in SL for it to become a premium virtual experience? The only big hole is in Leadership and management.

Aside from the Lindens there are very few large players who could mobilize thousands of creators (and pay them) to make a unified vision on par with something like WOW.

I truly feel if LInden Labs were more involved in world building that it would benefit everyone, from the Lindens to the creators to the new players. How can they expect the general public hobbyist to create worlds that will draw people, solely based on the creativity or experience of the worlds and the abilty of the users to market?

The SL economy right now is one of disconnection.. but it still rolls along, some doing ok, some doing quite well .. Imagine what it would be if we had 150k users on at any one time? More users is not going to happen untill there are more things to do in SL, and those high end experiences are advertised and promoted to the non SL gaming public.

This can only be done by Linden labs.

-w

It can't apply to SL as a whole, because then you get right back to being a command economy.


Simple, the people looking to play rockstar ask the creator if they know where to get animations or songs or skintight leopard skin pants. The creators suggests talking to B&B for the animations. The owner of B&B sees he is getting enough requests for "rock star" animations that he spends time making some in order to profit form his labors. The land owner friend of his finds out that X number of people want to play rock star and will pay enough membership fees to cover tier, so he develops a venue. The various creators of rock star toys hear of the venue as it grows and start to offer vendors onsite providing the profit for the land owner. Then the "So you wanna be a rock star" sim is born.

Spontaneous order is what it is called, Yumi. It is real and it rules most of our lives.

The beauty of SL is that there is no "unified vision" I can do or be what ever I want. Just as everyone else can.

The "general public hobbyist" has done quite well creating worlds here in SL. The problem isn't the lack of creativity of the in world creators, it is that there are too many "unified vision" games out there. They have sucked the creativity out of the masses who come here and say "Where is the phat lewt?"

Why couldn't we hit 150k online at one time (barring hardware issues)? Two years ago, when I started, hitting 20k was a big deal. If you can't find something to do in SL, then you aren't trying very hard.

I agree there is no lack of creativity in SL, but I think the avergage new person coming in may not be the creative people that have been in SL for a number of years. There are only a limited amount of people in the world who firstly are interested in creating digital or virtual spaces and secondly have the skills, or will have the skills within a reasonable exposure to SL in a hobbiest way. You are being really short sighted in my humble opinion. It will reach or has already reached a saturation point where the majority of users are coming in with different expectations than you.

Your attitude is holding on to some outdated speech by some linden 3 years ago.. wake up dude! It seems like you dont want SL to grow or change.

I see alot of different visions in SL, some that are very creative and innovative but it comes down to a factor of scale and volume. How does encouraging any kind of consitant or larger vision for in any stop you from doing what you want.. In the end you will win becuase with more users your little piece of heaven or whereever will get more exposure to others who may be interested.

-Why

That's exactly my point. But moreover, it's that some items are being sold where there is actually _no way_ to get to point B. That may or may not be the content creator's fault. But it is still true that newbies, who don't know yet that there is no way to get to tht point B, will go ahead and buy them anyway - thus enabling whole content industries to _potentially_ run based on experiences that don't really exist.

This is the reason for the suggestion of the "content clawback" - not to punish the creators, but simply so that they don't get sales that they didn't really deserve. And no, sorry, they didn't. If I put weeks of work into developing a super-effective refrigerator, I don't deserve to be able to sell it in the Arctic just because I worked hard. And if a prim guitar, or a ferret costume, or fairy wings, in SL are no more use than a refrigerator in the Arctic.. then, well, ditto applies.

Now, you can say it's an education issue.. that the new folks should _know_ that there's no way to point B.. but with the current structure of education in SL, that's unlikely to happen. As Chris obligquely pointed out, being negative doesn't make you popular.



Or because "exposure" isn't good enough - typically because the role can't work purely within itself. Magical/fantasy roleplay is very different if nobody is involved who is not magical, and if you want to play a rock star, it is unlikely that the major activity you want to RP is hanging out with other rock stars.



That would be an excellent idea, but they should also admit the limitations of a non-manipulated community. They should also incentivize people to create this, and that's the problem with the current model. You build your stage, but that alone doesn't make any money, so you put a prim guitar store next door. Then you realise that it's only the guitars that make any money, and all that happens is that people quickly realise that just sitting on a poseball on the stage is an empty experience. So.. you tear down the stage, but leave the store up. That way, the people don't realise that so quickly, and you still sell more guitars, even though ultimately even if they build their own stage they'll only find the same empty experience.

The SOLUTION might not, but the PROBLEM still can. Communities can still fail to form because even though 1000 interested people might pass through, the first person doesn't want to stick around and wait while they are alone, so they leave, and then the next person is alone, and so on and on and on. That problem is nothing to do with the economy, it's only to do with social behavior.



Do they? Or do you just think they _should_ do this? I think it's the latter. Some might do this but the majority don't.



Nobody would want to pay a membership fee for a club that simulated being a rock star. It's just too explicitly paying for the fantasy like a whore. I mean, in WoW, you pay money each month to have monsters you can kill to feel how great your character is. Do you think that would work if instead you clicked a button to pay 5 cents for a goblin to appear for you to kill? Of course it wouldn't work, even though it might be cheaper for some players. You can't tie payment in that intimately.

And even if people WOULD pay.. it would still be the "empty experience" you talked about, the sitting on a poseball while people pretend to cheer, the experience that you thought was so awful you would hope someone who supported it would never have any influence. So the only result was that the people would find the empty, dissatisfying experiience, and then leave.. only now they've paid for a guitar AND songs AND animations AND skintight leopardskin pants..

What is needed is that the person, before they even buy their guitar, is told, "the actual experience of being a rock star is NOT POSSIBLE in SL." And they must be told that in a way that they trust it. (That's in practice almost impossible.)



And if it fails as a ruler, it should be deposed.

So how do you change the social behavior except by punishing those who do not conform to your vision?

If a person wanting to take part in a certain activity can't be bothered to search it out, well then I wash my hands of them. We are all adults, if they don't have enough desire or common sense to ask questions, then we are not losing anything if they do leave.

But if they don't want to pay then who should? A person doesn't have to pay LL anything to be in SL. Should LL require premium accounts of everyone? WOW is a close ended game. You have to be what the creators decide you can be. Nothing else. If I went into WOW and wanted to be a robot, could I have an AV that looked like one? The designers at WOW have created everything in that world.

I disagree about it not being possible for them to live their rockstar dreams. It is up to their personality and creativity. after they buy the stuff, to determine what their SL turns out to be.

That is the thing Yumi, you can't depose spontaneous order, even the most totalitarian regimes have black markets and underground activities. The market always wins in the end.

Hmm, let's see, just from the top of my head.

For a). Instead of buying a ferret costume, you take out a monthly ferret subscription which gets you all the latest ferret gear given to you directly. But, the subscription fees are also pooled to create a prize fund. Everyone who interacts with a ferret can click on an item that ferret wears and choose to have their chat logged. The chatlogs are sent off to Ferret Central. Every month they are reviewed by judges and the non-ferret who made the most ferrets feel the most ferrety that month wins L$10000.

For b). Add timezone as a machine-understood part of profiles (this is LONG overdue anyway). Let people set their account status to "Waiting for...." and give them a field to specify what they are waiting for. When someone else arrives who is interested in the thing they are waiting for, SL sends them an e-mail inviting them to come back. Offline Building would also be a huge help for this - at the moment, the first ferret has to either a) build their ferret warren and pay tier every month while they wait for other ferrets to show up, which might never happen; or b) wait for other ferrets to show up, then ask THEM to wait around for a few weeks while he/she builds a good-looking warren (my own similar experience says they usually won't wait). With offline building, they can just build the warren offline, and then as soon as they hear there are other ferrets around, THEN they buy land and upload it.



Ah-ah-ah! They may seek it out, just not by the specific method you demand. Personally, "I bought X content and I'm disappointed I didn't get to use it; where can I buy more?" would not be the first question I'd want to ask. And the "you'll have your dream, if you just buy a LITTLE more content.." image is just one that the current market gives content creators a perverse incentive to endorse.



It isn't that a different person should pay, it's that any quid pro quo should be hidden. In the example above, the ferret subscribers subscribe to get ferret gear and the prize fund is incidental. If you instead asked ferrets to just pay L$100 directly to anyone who treated them like a ferret, then, eugh, that's far too explicit and nobody would do that.



SL is just the same for many consumer users, it's just that the designers are a disorganized group as opposed to an organized one.



Easy to say. But ultimately, it must come down to a) them playing live music, in which case, they are no longer within the virtual world; or b) them sitting on a poseball playing canned music while others pretend to applaud, which isn't living a dream by any means. No matter how great a personality you have and how creative you are, there's no way to escape the fact that it'll come down to one of these in the end.



True, but you can manipulate the market so that the spontaneous order comes out the way you want it to. Again, look at how "games" like SWG, WoW, or Entropia manage it. Yes, SL isn't a game, but it could try to copy some of the more desirable aspects of them. Otherwise, as I said to Aminom, we run the risk of finding that, at the point in the future when all the content anyone needs is already made, what's left of SL isn't actually appealing - as all that's left is sitting on a poseball playing canned music.

Bottom line for me is I don't see SL as having a "goldrush economy." I'm enjoying it far too much, shopping and all, for it to be wasted money.

This.

It's expendable entertainment money. It's meant to have "no return"

If people are buying things simply because they enjoy shopping for them, then that's great. The question is if people who are buying them as a means to an end, and then finding that that end doesn't exist. And if so, how much of the economy this counts for; how much of a perverse incentive that's creating; and whether or not those people should be compensated.

1) Very little
2) None
3) No

Solved those problems for you.

No, those people are adults (by TOS) and therefore responsible for their own satisfaction. If they aren't going to understand their market before investing, then they get what they deserve. Just like in RL.

And it's not even like understanding the SL "economy" is that hard. It probably took me an evening to realize that you're gonna lose money starting a club. Consider costs, look around at all the empty clubs already in SL, and do some basic math.

The actual experience of being a rock star is NOT POSSIBLE in any MMO. Not until you can plug a jack in the back of your head and rez FULL CONTACT virtual groupies in tight pants, anyway.

Goddamnit Yumi!!! Must you spin EVERY angle on SL into a negative? Sheesh!

Hmmm. Hundreds? Whinge Languish, Cheetah Kitty, Samara Nerd, Badinage Odets, maybe three or four more who I can't think of. Why? Because the market really does work... there's a limited interest in ferret avatars, so there's a limited number of ferret avatars available.

I don't think there's anyone making a Malaysian Palm Civet avatar at all.

Now if you want to be a cat, you got it made. In SL, it's always the year of the cat.

Hmmm. Hundreds? Whinge Languish, Cheetah Kitty, Samara Nerd, Badinage Odets, maybe three or four more who I can't think of. Why? Because the market really does work... there's a limited interest in ferret avatars, so there's a limited number of ferret avatars available.

I don't think there's anyone making a Malaysian Palm Civet avatar at all.

Now if you want to be a cat, you got it made. In SL, it's always the year of the cat.
Why on earth do you think ferrets are interested in money? You can't eat it, kill it, **** it, sleep on it, or hide it under the couch cushions.

Well, I guess you can hide it under the couch cushions, but socks are more fun.

Yumi, your scrupulousness is impressive, but I think if one put in place any sort of "brake" on content creation such as you suggest, you risk crushing what I think is SL's most important contribution to society:

SL is an unstructured dreamspace. All the places, their forms and the actions in them, are products of residents' dreams. If you tell creators that some dreams are OK and others are misleading, or incompetent, and therefore ebol, I think that would put a damper on things.

So what if people occasionally get stung when they buy a prim guitar only to discover that it has no animation and plays no music? The creator perhaps thought that their prim guitar was so beautiful it stood on its own, as an art object.

Personally, I regard every purchase I make in SL as a complete crapshoot. And, if a product surprises me by being either much better or laughably worse than I thought, well, the surprise itself is the best part of the purchase!

I think consumer protection law has no place in our dreams.
.