SL is a scam.

it is steep for what you really get, but hey buyer beware you know the price and what your getting for it

scam? no
pricey? yes

*yawn*

LL is a business. Businesses want to turn a profit. Helloooo? That doesn't equal to a scam.

I am a landowner and I purchased a parcel of land that I could AFFORD to pay the monthly tier on. It costs me about the equivalent of going to the movies once a week for a month. In other words I stayed within my means.

SL is probably not for you. Whatev. There are thousands of residents who, although we complain alot, are enjoying SL everyday for many different reasons on many different levels. You just won't be one of them. *shrugs*

Sol

SL itsself is not a scam, it is an amazing 3D space with amazing capabilities, like nothing else you will find around today. Linden is a scam though, and the grids and services managed by them. Indeed, a very big scam.

I've played a lot of games in my time, including several MMO's. One thing that is consistent in all of them, as it is in RL, is you can't go into something fresh and new and expect to be able to buy your very own island on your first day. Not only that, but you also can't expect that this island (or whatever) will not cost you some manner of maintenance fee.

SL is a virtual meeting place for people from around the world. In the process of "playing", they can also buy and sell stuff. This makes perfect sense since our entire world is based on a market economy. You can't take two steps out your front door without having to pay something to someone.

In the game, people set up shops and sell stuff to other people, and I would imagine a good many of them are making money that equates to cash in RL, as well. Yes, SL is a capitalist system, and people like it that way. If you could play a game...and make money from it...wouldn't you? I've been searching for a game that PAYS ME for a long time!

And yes, LL is out to make money...what business isn't? You'd be a very poor businessman if you spent all your time, effort and money to create something, never to get a dime out of it.

Like others have said in here already: know your limits. You might want to have that fancy island, but if all you can afford is a log cabin in the hills, then don't go trashing the system just because you don't have the finances to buy everything you want. I'd love to have a 60" plasma HDTV in my living room, but do I have the $4000+ to pay for it? Not in this lifetime! Is it Sony's fault (or Samsung, or Visio, etc.) that I'm poor? Hardly!

See how you feel a year from now, when you discover how little service you are getting for your big tier payments and downpayments and how bad SL businesses are doing, because of cutthroat scamming and misleading population figures. Sure if you are a good scammer you can copy the methods and be one of the handfuls of people who actually make money. Start a bank. Clean up from the naive. Make a ponzi scheme. Learn to be a spammer and scammer. Go to all the many beautiful EMPTY sims with gorgeous malls full of stuff from creative people, who put in many hours of work, wondering if they need camping chairs and bots to get some traffic. Learn how to trick people with real estate--be one of those who make money. Wait till you make some AR reports and get a form letter 2 months later. Labor on your creation so they can be stolen by copybots, with no protection from the tos. Learn how to skim off Lindens like LL skims off cash, with the best of them.

From my travels, I can see a lot of people "abusing" the system...case in point, the ad farms. But I also see a lot of shops and malls that appear to be renting space, and doing quite well at it. Are you saying they aren't making enough to cover expenses, let alone a profit?

I don't like spamming or scamming any more than the next person. I tried following one of those "HippiePay" (or whatever it's called) kiosks that takes you to a neverending stream of survey questionaires (I'm still trying to field telemarketer phone calls from that one). It's not worth it. I also tried a stint with the camping, but I can think of a hundred things I'd rather be doing in the endless hours I'd need to sit there waiting for something that's better paid for with RL cash. The most excitement I got was using the OS HUD and picking up a lot of goodies from lucky chairs (most of my stuff came from those).

Since you apparently have a longer experience in here than I, maybe you could give me an objective opinion... My observation of people owning land and renting space in shops and malls gives me the impression that, if one could keep the rent flowing, one could make a good bit of cash income. I was thinking of building up a "business" of ownership and renting out space, making some extra money for myself. Would this be feasible, or am I getting the wrong impression of SL? It seems clear that SOMEONE is making money....

Just take your time before sinking any real money into this. For me that is anything more then $125 US a month for tier. Ask many people and read what people who have businesses, especially businesses like you are planning in SL, say. If it sounds too good to be true---it is. Realize too, there are legal things coming up as well as technical changes coming in the future, that could reduce your investment to zero without an eyelash being batted by LL. Sometime I run into my old newbie posts on blogs when I was making assumptions that LL was dedicated to protecting the residents---very naive..... This isn't like a strict Blizzard Co. that goes after scammers. This is more like the internet wild west, with steam roller treads and talons.

So SL is about the Schwag so damn what and it is a business it is what they do in a business. Its all about the Schwag, Nikes all about the shoes and their profits. Why not have it be about intangible objects?

Soooo, let me think about costs.. LL host 2-4 sims per server.. connect that all to the internet...
A typical webhost runs a Virtual server and hosts around 50-200 websites on that, and connects that to the internet...

differences.. 1x100mb connection can run 50-200 websites, yet can only just run 2-4 sims.
The Virtual servers involved for websites do not have asset servers creating a network or numerous interconnection so you can gluide seamlessly between the variety of websites hosted, or pass over assets between them. Both are user content, but only SL is creator content beyond Web 2.0 specifications.
Webhosts usually offer email... SL gives you email, IM, main chat and voice. Websites can host and stream media, so can SL. You can also make media in SL, not sure of any websites that do the same. SL is interactive, but so are some websites, however, do they also let you do creations on the fly? Or are they more predictable and pre-defined? Can you sell those creations, or do they disappear when you are finished?
SL supplies and supports ongoing software for all its webhost residents, webhosts mainly supply freebie 1 click installs that they don't pay for nor do they offer any support.

When you look more closely at the overheads for running SL, you can see the math quite easily. So for a basic webhost from a data center, a single virtual server (not dedicated) the cost for running it is shared between 200 users at around 8-10 USD per month, so basic SL costs in comparison would be 200x10=2,000 USD per month, best case senerio for SL, 4 sims each paying 300 USD only equals 1,200 USD... on that very simplistic basis... where is the scam?

Some people have this delusional idea that any business that tries to make a profit is a "scam".

This has always confused me. What do those people think businesses are for?

A scam surely would indicate being told one thing and given another? SL clearly presents it's user account options and land-pricing system.

You could argue that "Your world, your imagination" is a scam, as you don't own the world. I can't just delete my neighbour's stuff because it looks horrible. But it is true in a sense as pretty much anything you can imagine building you can build in a sandbox somewhere. The "Your" really is the plural your, referring to "us", the residents.

The closest SL gets to being a scam is that it paints pretty pictures of being a care-free online world and can build and design etc whenever you want. When in fact the up-time of SL is actually shockingly bad a lot of time. But then they never claimed it was open 100% of the time either.

Bullshit.
I have half a sim, several of my friends live on at no cost, and I'm not rich by any measure (unless you want to get into developed vs third world).

Different people have different budgets, I guess, and some bite off more than they can chew. Maybe the OP was simply trying to live the grand life, but then both eyeballs popped out of their sockets when the bills came in.

Well, it sounded "too good to be true" from the very beginning. To be able to buy virtual real estate, build a virtual mall, rent virtual space to virtual retailers selling virtual goodies to virtual people, and rake in mounds of virtual cash...which could then be converted to REAL money in the end. Adding up the weekly rent figures from one such mall I found, and projecting ahead for the whole month, then converting to US$, one could actually make a small profit above and beyond the LL fees (a "game" that pays YOU to play it). Multiply this by the max amount of land one account could own, and you have the equivalent of a 9-5 job that brings in more than my wife gets at her job in a nail salon.

The trick would be to build up the financial investment of SL land holdings and keep it rented. Maybe even to create an alt or two and max them out to multiply your earnings even more. I would imagine there are people in here already doing exactly that.

I've only been in here about a week, investigating what potential SL has for making money. Some people try to call it a "game", but I know games better than most, and this isn't even close. At best, it's a glorified chat room, embellished with virtual reality 3D graphics and a type of market economy for your VR "citizens". It can be a great outlet for artistic creativity, and I've seen a lot of fine examples so far, but it's still nothing more than a place to meet, chat, and if the mood is right, have virtual sex.

Nevertheless, even with the great visuals and the too-good-to-be-true money-making potential, the service itself is so flaky that I wonder if it's worth the effort to stay here fighting with the login server for yet another week.

Today, I got booted twice: once for some kind of maintenance this morning, and again shortly thereafter due to some server error (probably brought on by the aforementioned "maintenance". In fact, most of my "logouts" were from either a software crash, a server error, or lag dropping me out of the picture. Even now, I can't log back in, and the error message I get corresponds to a recent blog entry talking about an "inventory not available" error...and they can't fix it till probably tomorrow?!? What kind of service am I paying for that has so much downtime and such ridiculous errors popping up?

For a while, I thought perhaps it was just coincidence; maybe I got in at a bad time and they're having a string of unfortunate events. But the more I read this forum, the more I come to understand this is apparently the norm for SL. It's a bug-ridden, over-bloated and poorly-tested VR simulation with too many things being added while the existing stuff goes unchecked for stability. All the while, LL rakes in THEIR cash and we can't even get in to make ours.

@ Rebecca
I don't know what kind of "issues" you meant in your last post that are coming up in the next year, but I don't think I want to wait that long. I'm already getting fed up with the lousy service this thing gives. It might have some pretty pictures, but if I can never get in to see them, or to "do" anything with my paid membership, then I doubt the other ideas I had for it are worth this level of frustration. I've seen messages from people with much more invested in it than I have, give up and leave SL for these reasons. Maybe I should take the hint before I get that far.

The original post in this thread talked about "scams". I don't know about that, but what I do know is for the money we pay, we deserve better. We deserve a service that works -- consistently -- and provides a secure platform to conduct our business (and our pleasure) without worry that in 5 minutes we'll be booted out and can't get back in for many hours. I've played MMO games that cost less money and had some very enjoyable content. They may not have had the user-supplied creativity, but they also didn't crash every 10 minutes.

MMO's also store ALL their content on your hard drive. To do so with SL would require more than 1 Petabyte of Hard Drive Space. Good luck getting that! Good Luck with pushing all that through your connection too.

MMO's are also Static. Nothing changes much. The difference is, in SL that club next to you today can easily be replaced by a Castle tomorrow, a store the next day, an empty lot after that, and a house after that.

The fact is, that huge hardrives will soon be common. One can easily imagine that in the near future the data will be on ones own computer in some way. I would guess, first your own land or nearby region, and your objects like a solo player mode, and eventually the entire grid.

Data is very small and technology will make it smaller, but it will remain a rocky road as the technology changes, and bandwidth improves, but mostly the real world business models used by various companies will determine how this plays out. This means investing in technology one way or another, or pulling the plug.

Before the Internet was commonly used, there were online networks and clients written, to log into these separate networks. Later, when the internet use exploded, then all those companies working on clients for independent networks, were basically put out of business, by the internet, except a few.

Same thing will happen with 3D worlds, providing the real world remains relatively stable and habitable and technology doesn't explode in our face.

Clearly, if a free and open virtual world grows it will end up with many real world advertisements, businesses and resulting billboards, spams, crashes--just like the internet. We already see that.

If the virtual world is driven by the world of avaracious business, then how will it be? If there is no protection for residents, with financial disputes, then how will it be?

If companies can set up their own servers, that is their actual property as well as owning a common interest in the world itself, then the virtual world, could develop much faster, but if big business takes over the virtual world, then there is no advantage for those earlier adopters, adapt with SL, other then to work for them. Welcome to First Life, THEIR world, not your imagination.

Hmm, but if the castle content was 50% default textured 10x10 wall & floor prims it would mean you'd only have to load half the castle rather than every individual prim every time you visited. Would 5Gb worth of default wall, floor and ceiling prims be so bad, they could even download as you saw them to save a big download at once.

Perhaps ifyou could "lock" prims like walls that weren't likely to change color, size or position, the viewer would only upload them the first time it entered the sim rather than checking continually to see if they had changed like doors, windows etc.

We are paying for high speed internet so we can download the same stuff we saw yesterday.

See, thats what I was thinking Tegg. If there was a way to consolidate the majority of textures it would cut down on some of the bandwidth being used.

I've also seen many builds where the textures were a HUMONGOUS size!! Well over 1024x1024 just for the most simplest of things.

There's also the route each packet takes to get to the servers & back. It can change from 1 second to the next, which can also result in a delay.

Working on my MCSE & CCNA puts the whole thing in perspective of how it all somehow manages to work. All the server/client back N Forth acknowledgements etc etc. Its all fascinating stuff!!! The more you learn how it all works just makes it seem all that more amazing.

I've also heard of someone who individually moddeled every screw, rivet, nut, and bolt on an avatar he was planning for mass-sale under the premise of "it looks more realistic."

Not to even MENTION the fact that each prim would have a texture on it.

My home has been designed to use only a handful of textures overall, just using colours to add variation where necessary. It's amazing what you can actually do with a few basic textures and a little tweaking. I think I use no more than 12 or something in total for my build, with maybe four or five visible at any one time (so they download first).

It does actually make such a difference to rez times. I can't stand going to a low-lag server with hardly anyone in it and having to wait 20 mins for everything to rez anyway.

LOL! Now thats a good example of "I have no clue on the basics of 3D Modeling content".

One thing that can also help: If you use a specific set of textures for a project, make 1 texture with all of them on it. This will knock back the time it takes to Rez, as the Client only has to load in 1 texture instead of dozens.

In other MMOs, yeah, they download a bunch of data to your machine because it doesn't change from one login to another. Certainly, in SL, there is a common set of textures that are used by a large portion (not sure if you would call it a "majority" of structures, plus a LOT of often-used pics used in shops (how many times have you seen the same Ronja's Silks signs around?).

If you could download these as cache items and only re-download them IF something changed, you could save a significant amount of time for images to show up in any new area you visit. You may see more of a need to change prim layouts (the house that is now a castle or mall), but the textures (often 512x512 or 1024x1024 images) probably take up most of the bandwidth (and time) to download and could be saved from one login to the next.

I know from my travels I see the same signs and boxes of items for sale in one area that I saw 50 times in as many other areas, but I still need to wait for each one to re-download when I arrive in a new location. It's a pain.

A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle.
tr.v.scammed, scam·ming, scams, To defraud; swindle.

[Origin unknown]

How many people buy Lindens?

In essense, LL can "print" Lindens and exchange them for real money. Nice work if you can get it. They are in the position to skim off real money in a very deceptive way.

The essense of a scam is to enrich oneself and trick people into making them think they are getting something of value, when they are not, or make people think that they own something they really don't.

On one hand it is said "the linden is fictitious" and on the other hand they can be cashed in for RL money. On one hand it is said you "own" land and in reality you don't. So it's flim flam, double talk, is it not?

That many aspect of "money" and financial markets and business in real life can also be said to be "scams," is besides the point.

Quote: It's all about business and selling and making a profit. SL's land pricing scheme is too expensive and forces any land owner to pay tier fees in perpetuity.


SL is from the US of A, so of course its modelled on the capitalism model of the states.
What did you expect?

True, I'd like a utopia where everyone co-operated, jobs for all, states looks after all our social needs, healthcare and pensions for everyone - wait that's the socialist state system.

(Communism has never existed in reality, its a concept by Lenin, the working examples were socialist states)

Ever heard of a country thats used the socialist system that didn't get corrupt and run out of control with the protected citizens living lives worse than capitalist cattle?

Korea, CCCP, China, etc.

Oh don't bother arguing -I run a totalitarian system - you will be shot at dawn.

Whether it's capitalism, communism or socialism, if people in general or individually do not agree to have a moral or ethical compass, and protection from those who don't, then it will fail and become corrupt.