Night of the Living Dead -or- Second Afterlife®

I read recently of someone reducing the speed of their cpu when using camping chairs so that the L$ earned from the camping chair was not lost to electricity costs.

Having never encountered camping chairs in-game, my curiousity was piqued so I went looking to learn more about them. They are not hard to find, one merely need to look for a stack of a dozen or so green dots stacked at one point on the big map. What I saw was simply the most offensive thing I'd ever seen in-game. I'm pretty hard to offend: furries boinking in open fields, goth clubs with fountains from which you can pretend to drink blood, signs advocating congressional action, or anything else that someone somewhere finds offensive doesn't really trouble me.

However, I was really creeped out by my little excursion. I have attached a screen grab of one such camping zone. In the five minutes I was in the area waiting for it to rez, not a single of the campers said a single word in chat, nor, given the camping pad poses, did they move at all. I dropped in on two other sites which looked exactly like the one pictured. I have to imagine an opium den looks rather similar. During the 20 minutes of my tour I heard one interchange which went something like:The most lucrative - as read from the text of the chair - was someone who had been sitting for 2 hours and had "earned" L$125. Please note that that is roughly equivalent to about US$0.50.

So why do I find this offensive? Because I saw three dozen players logged in doing absolutely nothing in order to obtain fifty cents. This is what I saw at only 3 sites, although similar piles of dots were all over the map. At a time when the system is becoming nearly unusable due to massive player overload, why is Linden Lab implicitly encouraging this conduct which

1. Uses considerable system resouces to provide a non-experience to (presumably) non-revenue paying customers
   
2. Exists simply to game the dwell mechanism presumably to bump the camped sites up the popularity lists
   
3. Expends resources that players who are actually trying to play might like to use

I think I know the answer, so that is sort of a rhetorical question. Someone at LL believes that it is better to show good census numbers to somebody at the cost of the usability of their world.

Dopes.

I think the homepage says it all.

Residents: 111,061
Online Now: 4,659

Only 4% of the 'playerbase' is online, at what is probably near one of the peak times of gameplay.

How many of that 4% are actually actively playing whilst they are online?

Of course 'over 100,000 players' is a big thing - but I can spend an hour wandering round the most popular places and have conversations with less than 10 people, because everyone is camping.

The welcome area is busy..... full of people dropping notecards "please come to my club" on every newbie they see.

What sort of impression is that giving to the new player?

Lewis

Some of the camp chairs require that you stand up to get paid.

Some have implemented time limits and kick you off. I don't know if that would mean you don't get paid or not.

This might mean that some of people are actually present, at least to the extent of checking in from time to time to stand up, get paid, and sit back down.

When you go to many places, such as the welcome area, there are a number of avatars not being moved with the arrow keys, mostly in default standing animations.

In both situations the avatars present can be busily engaged in IMs with no visible trace.

What is the big difference?

They should have a...

SEX CAMP!

Why sit? Why dance? when you can have SEX and get paid for?!?!?!
ROFLMAO

*imagine walking into a massive room while ppl are doing sexxxxxxxxxxxxx*

now that is a fun place to make money.... lol

Here's a way to tell if campers are using a mouse mover to avoid timeout.

Put an "Impeach George Bush" sign blocking their view.

If they don't start a new thread in the General forum complaining about it they are using a mouse mover program.

Can I use them for plinking practice?

Ive been saying this for ages

best drama mashup ever.

To respond to the OP, I think the Lindens have realized this, and I imagine that part of the reason the Dwelloper Incentives are going bye-bye is because of the insistence of lame gaming attempts (camping chairs, money balls, tringo/slingo) in order to get a bigger piece of the DI pie.

I hadn't realized how much the pool of developer incentive had grown in both amount and number of recipients. Still, at an average payout of US$100 should you happen to be one of the 118 selected, is this really the motivation behind camping chairs? I thought it was to boost your standing in the find box and thus receive more sales from nearby shops and that was where the real money was. I don't know that we'll ever know if DI was sufficient motivation in itself, but it is probably just as well that it is going away.

Interesting choice of terms "mashup" (incidentally, your Lady Maddona mashup was most entertaining). Because I think that the impeach signs and DI stem from the same cause: the apparent phobia that LL seems to have regarding qualitative judgements. The DI was originally based around dwell as it was a "non-judgemental" determination of "contribution to the experience". It is the same lack of intestinal fortitude that has caused the profuse sign flak; I know opinions differ wildly on whether freedom of expression should prevail over quality of experience, but I haven't seen even the most adamant proponents of signage say that they think it aesthetically good. To my eye, freedom of expression and the ToS are just fences that LL is hiding behind to justify not having to make a "this is not good" assertion.

I find it ironic that this is the same firm that declines to compensate mentors, helpers, and instructors for fear that it may cause people to join any of the voluteer groups for reasons of compensation because that motivation would - of course - be horrid.

As someone else said somewhere else here, LL certainly has a great deal of confusion about what they are trying to be and why.

Thanks for helping me to understand this system slightly better.

Camping chairs are not just "non-content". They do have some benefit. Amongst other things, they redistribute the dwell income from popular sites - which would otherwise probably just get cashed out - to poorer/newer people who are more likely to spend it on items or rent, and thus energise the economy.

Cashed out to.... cashed out to.... cashed out toooo...

That's right! People who aren't content creators who would be using the money to keep the economy going!

You can't "cash out" on Lindex; the money is recycled.

Sure. However,

a) there is no shortage of L$ for people who want to buy them on Lindex;
b) the people who sit in camping chairs probably aren't people who buy L$;
c) if those L$ that are given to campers were being cashed out, it would lower the L$ value.

Greater number of active consumers = more active economy.

And? I just woke up; pretend I'm a moron and explain what it has to do with camping chairs.



And so their contribution to the economy is next to nothing anyway. $L250 over several day's worth of effort is a drop in the bucket, considering $US 100,000 changes hands every day. If camping chairs go away, freeloaders will either a) finally use their money to support the SL grid, or b) move elsewhere. Either way, I'm not shedding tears.




An extra thousand lindens being put on the Lindex a day is hardly going to depress the value.



yyyeah, but if these consumers are spending the equivilent of 50 cents a week, their economic contribution is nil, indeed pointless, in the sea of SL commerce.

It means we don't need more people to be selling their L$ instead of giving them to campers.



Not really. I talked to someone who runs a bunch of stores selling items with an average price of about L$500 (US$1.50). She pays island tier with her total sales. 50 cents a week isn't much, but there are how many camping chairs on the grid? A hundred, a few hundred? Those people will buy a hundred 50 cent items, whereas if one person had all that money, they'd only need to buy one for themselves.

It's still 50 bucks over a week with those hundreds of poor beleagured, non-producing souls. A drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things.

Introvert, the way you cropped that piccie, it's a nice panorama. Almost invites a letterbox and scanning from one end to the other, with suspenseful credits coming up.

Change the balance in here and things do tend to get rebalanced...

I don't think you can assume this. The majority of payments and businesses in SL seem -to me - to fall into the "salami slicing" model (ie, get a million people to pay you $1 each and you're a millionaire). For that "today's trade in SL" figure, probably the majority of it is a few big land sales, while content sales are relatively small sales but made to lots of people. In that case, giving small amounts to lots of people is likely to increase them.

Good points Intro.

I don't get the idea of "economic contribution."

How is it that a person who doesn't make anything, and may not own any land, is "a freeloader" who is not using "their money to support the SL grid" . . .

. . . but someone who is items and using the income to cover their tier and their membership (if they even have tier, and even are premium), and pocketing what's left over, ARE somehow "supporting the grid," as if it were a charity?

Seems to like the later group are making money OFF the grid. And off that "freeloader" who is sitting in camp chairs to make money to buy their products.

coco

It did occur to me you could have a bondage/fetish club of some sort, and use camping chair scripts for the people tied down to the bondage equipment.

It then occured to me that there is no shortage of real live players willing to get tied down to such equipment, and unless you have a fetish for tormenting non-responsive AFK people my idea is rather poor. It still beats camping chairs though!

camping chairs = SL welfare.

Earning money for doing nothing but sitting on their rears. Anyone know of an employee script that would track employees over an entire sim? I would be willing to put some of these folks to work in "The Sewer"

There's at least one camping area that's set damage and people take shots at the campers. I don't know where it is, but I was talking to a guy in-world and he wanted to know how to improve his shield because he kept getting hit by bullets at the best camping area he'd found.

I had to laugh! THAT is the kind of camping area that could actually be worthwhile.

(oh, and, there are sex-ball camping areas too)

"Econmic Contribution" == "Anything that makes SL more attractive to paying customers", because "paying customers" are why SL is there. DI is supposed to go to attractions that attract more paying customers. Instead it's going to attractions that turn paying customers off, because there's more non-paying customers and they can be bought cheaply.

Camping chairs are the SL equivalent of paying people to click on your Google ad.

LL should have simply "scaled the dwell", and discounted basic accounts living off stipend and not renting land so they weren't enough of a contribution to the dwell to encourage this kind of abuse.
It's possible they're not. They may be a helpful volunteer who hangs around the welcome area and give newbies good advice and makes SL a better place for everyone. But the ones sitting on camping chairs aren't doing that, they're just clicking on Google ads.
Because they're making money by selling things to people who are, by and large, paying customers... people paying money *to* Linden Labs. Not people being paid *by* Linden Labs.

Camping chairs are in my opinion a symptom of the 'free basic account' policy.

It's attracted a type of person who is a 'something for nothing' merchant.
Attracted by an online 3D virtual world they can use free of charge, these individuals cannot, or will not, pay for anything.

They are determined to exist on nothing but their L$50 a week, whatever freebies they can scrape up, and whatever they can glean from camping.

Who can blame the venue owners? Here is this greedy mindless herd of people who will sit on their arse for hours at a time for a pittance! Why not take advantage of them? They'd be fools not to.

Frankly SL has no need of, or place for the 'freebie underclass'.

What SL needs is people who will come into SL and PAY THEIR WAY. By creating, trading, offering services, whatever - OR by simply putting their hand in their pocket, so to speak, when they want some Lindens. i.e. want some cool stuff? Buy US$20 worth of L$. I mean, $20, what are we talking about here? £10 sterling? A couple of drinks in a bar? Couple of packs of cigarettes? A couple of cheap cinema tickets?

Between the griefers and the freebie underclass the 'free basic accounts' idea has been one of LL's worst ideas. It's changed the world - for the worse.