Either Philip's account got hacked - or dwell is gone.

What are your thoughts, Jenna?

Not affected? If all the clubs/casinos fail because of this, what incentive is there to shop for that new outfit, prim hair and jewelry if there is no one to show it to? If no one is buying then the designers will no longer have incentive to create (which is ironic in that this is what LL thinks getting rid of dwell will create more of). So most us may not be directly affected by it, but it will surely trickle down to all aspects of SL.

The incentive went the way of the dodo recently - this is the tiny payment given per day on the amount of traffic per day.

But one thing I did notice when they cut the payments for events - and then the incentive for Dwell - several people I do know that run actual events (rather quality and novel ones too) started getting more, and better, player provided donations and subsidies.

Captions being one that springs to mind had a huge increase in the amount of prizes and prize monies offered AFTER the cuts - as people who liked the event sprung to the fore to support it.

Personally I've been approached by different people for event sponsorship and have given away packages sometimes in excess of 5k L$.

The advantage to people supporting the 'arts' is that they get to choose what is important for them - what is fun and worthwhile - when there was just a carpet bomb 'get money for an event' we saw a LOT of people gaming it for money.

Overall I don't see residents supporting the arts (on a voluntary basis - the ideas for broad taxation and compulsorty sponsorship are lunacy) as a bad thing.

What if the physical content you make is that nice string bikini I was going to buy so that I could kick my feet up and relax at Matt's? Now I have no reason to buy it.

One good example of this is the Prim Worx show and tell ...

i dont think zonax is awake to comment (euro time) but the ppl who attend the show and tell regularly put money into the total prize, and thus making the prizes into the thousands of linden $

i beleive he has a 500 or so $ budget on the event and its not uncommon to see the total prizes upwards of 6 grand from players who like and support the event, it works well and everyone enjoys it (and really enjoys it if they win heh)

I'm a small club owner. I pay for event prizes with the small traffic bonus I was getting every day (about 160 - 200 lindens). Now I will be forced to either buy lindens, or compromise the atmosphere of my club to pay for event prizes by putting in casino games or some other cash income source, or (sadly) close the club and sell the land.

I can't see how this drastic change can be good for Second Life from the customer point of view. Think of the effect on the "fun" of the game when a large number of clubs close. What about the DJ's, Host/Hostesses and Dancers who make their SL livings performing? When they have no jobs and then no money what will this do to the economy of SL? Not everyone in SL is a graphic designer, 3D modeller and/or scripter, why does this large portion of the customer base have to be penalized? I agree that camping chairs and the like are bad news, but couldn't there have been a limit placed on traffic bonus payouts instead of penalizing a large percentage of the customers by removing traffic entirely. I believe that a cap on the max traffic bonus would have still had a stimulating effect on the economy and would have allowed the entertainment industry in SL to continue to function and keep SL the fun, social, place that most of us have come to enjoy and love.

Mr. Philip Linden, please remember, your business is an entertainment business, your customers are your lifeblood, if your customers aren't being entertained they will find another venue where they will be entertained. NO CUSTOMERS = NO Second Life.

May you all have a wonderful day!

HELL YES WOOOOOOOOOO

I can't wait for this to kick in. I'm thinking long-term here:

- No dwell means no more money chairs or money balls or money moneys or chair balls or whatever the cool kids are using these days.
- No 'free money' means venues are faced with a decision: Make something worth paying for, or get out of the way.
- Once the free market decides what's worth paying for and what isn't, an equilibrium will be reached where there is much more interesting content vs. the current situation of one unique and interesting build for every 20 DANCE CLUB / SEXXX BARN / BONDAGE RAPE FACTORY / MONEYBALL FARM
-Joe Free Account is going to be forced into a decision: a) find a way to earn money ingame without spending RL money (which adds to the world by creating buildings / textures / totally sweet Family Guy sound clips / whatever) b) earn money ingame by spending RL money (either by upping to premium or doing the money exchange thing, either way putting more money into LL's coffers) c) get out of the way.
- This is going to result in more original content and less people who don't contribute anything. IT'S HARSH BUT IT'S NECESSARY PEOPLE
- Having more money coming into LL will be sweet, and having less free accounts that don't actually contribute anything will mean reduced overhead costs for LL, which means more money (plus the added income!) will be available for R&D, meaning:
- TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS WOOOOO Havok 2, bug fixes, new features, a thinger that has a button inworld where you press it and a guy comes to your ACTUAL DOOR and gives you a hug and a cookie, THE SKY'S THE LIMIT
- Also, having more original stuff to do will make the game more universally interesting which means players will be more entertained which means MAYBE JUST MAYBE people won't have to resort to being total dongbenders to get their kicks. Griefing will never go away but it'll get less prevalent and less noticeable when there's more interesting things to do then a) grief or b) bitch about being griefed

I know lots of folks are going to get all up in my Crystal Light about how DLURR YOU'RE CALLING FREE ACCOUNTS FREELOADERS ESCORTS AND CLUB DJ'S ARE PEOPLE TOO

I'm not calling them freeloaders PER SE, but good god people what kind of economy can subsist on 10% actual content creators and 90% escorts? People who lack the skillsets to make SL profitable enough to them to maintain their own individual preferred standard of e-living will either learn the skills they need OR learn to subsist on the stipend (which is not hard ok i did it for a good long time) OR get out of the way.

Mercenary? Oh yes. But accurate.

And besides, if you find that diamond-encrusted bling-script-having llShout() spewing 47 color particle spreading prim booger or whatever it is that you CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT, crikey, convert $5 to L$ and you can easily afford it. Things are better enjoyed when you have to expend some effort to get them, people.

Or, the tl;dr variant of the above: TANSTAAFL!

I agree with your analysis.

I call it the "All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go" Syndrome.

coco

I stopped reading on page 2, but let me say this...

so much of the arguments against the ELIMINATION of dwell presupposes that the only incentive for SL creators/host/land owners is to make as much money as possible.

Is money the only thing that motivates people in RL? The fact is that money is not the only motivation.

Take a look at the most compelling content in SL and you will immediately realize that it isnt the money that motivated the creator.

Dwell is dead, and that is fine. There are so many more important reasons to build content, relationships and communities in SL, and it's evident throughout the community.

Sorry if I am late to the party, or if some of this has been said already, the forums died as I was hitting 'submit' a few hours ago...

Thanks Nala, for making a post that motivated me to think about this and post myself. I agree 100%.

Dwell has been flawed for a long time. It worked somewhat ok when the world was a lot smaller, but these days, it generally helps foster an atmosphere of entitlement.

They should have done away with it long ago, to start the weaning, and to get people used to how it should function, not entirely, but similarly to RL, where you pay for your entertainment. Sure, you might find a free art gallery or concert in the park, but they aren't going to PAY you to visit.

I cannot think of another "game" that allows people such unfettered freedom and endless opportunity than SL, all for free or for very little money. You can make your avatar look however you want, build or have built a home to your exact specs, explore to your heart's content, start a business, dance the night away, visit with friends, sit on a mountaintop and meditate, and on and on.

You can spend 50-100L$ on some texture uploads, make clothes, and produce as many saleable copies as you like, for no additional cost! Same for architecture, and, if you're a scripter type, there is nearly no overhead, besides time, especially if you're working on commission.

If you choose to be here for entertainment, then have at it! But you should be prepared to pay a nominal fee at times. It's not going to kill you, especially if you're on a free account, to buy 10 or 15 dollars worth of L$ a month. If it is going to kill you, I dunno what to tell you, except "go play free poker online" or something, because even if your mindset is that SL is a game and only a game, you'll not find another (especially ones like it and at its level) for free.

SL is not a game, was never meant to be a game, and is not marketed as a game. The CEO and his staff have rejected that label on numerous occasions, what more do you need?

If you personally want to play it as a game (or sub-games), great!. More power to you, and I certainly wouldn't deign to try and tell you that it's not a game for you (please do the same favor in reverse). However, if, at the same time, you're going to stand there with your hands on your hips, and reject any notion to the contrary, then you don't get it, and probably never will.

Most of the the club owners and consistent event (entertainment) hosts haven't been paying you to attend out of the goodness of their hearts. Wake up, most are not some type of altruist - most are in it for the bottom line, which is money. Will a few true altruists suffer as a result? Likely. But, just as with several other mechanisms which have been replaced or discarded, it was done so because the programs never worked as intended to when they were introduced, and they were gamed to death by people who sit around and spend a lot of time figuring out just how to do that. Those would be people who view SL as a game IMHO...

Bleat bleat bleat. Whine whine whine whine whine.

I think I've covered all the bases there.

You forgot the cheese with it.

You're right!

Soon as stipends die i'm going back to basic. SL isn't worth an anual $75 premium, and Land fees. If they can give me a few good reasons to stay premium i will listen. >.>

Land isnt a good reason. i could easily RENT that (which i also do in a freinds sim)

Who said anything about stipends going away? We're talking about dwell bonuses. They're different. Stipends are money you get every week no matter what, dwell is (for now) a bonus you get every so often based on how many people spend how much of their time on your land.

Out of curiosity, is there any particular reason that you seem to be insisting that dwell (which seems stupid to me even in its general concept; no, I'm not an old SL hand, but I'm not stupid and do have some basic economic knowledge) is the only reason that free accounts exist?

As a free account, I have yet to spend more than a minute or so in any club, or even a single second sitting in a camping chair, or standing on a pose ball, or whatever. I've invested a fiver in some $L for a furry av (though I haven't found one compelling enough for me, and a call for commissioning a custom av seems to have fallen on deaf ears, though I'll grant you I've not been especially dilligent about it, either), but other than that, and a bit of money tree hunting for shits and grins (part of which was helping Carl Metropolitan clean up the MT list card from his "Making Money 101" class*), there's been nothing of my existence in SL regarding money. The end of dwell encouraging camping chairs means [MiB]precisely dick[/MiB], to me.

While I won't claim to speak for the majority, or even anyone besides myself, I doubt I'm the only one for whom $L is not the be-all and end-all of SL.




* More than a few of the dead money tree entries on that card seemed little more than newbie bait for clubs and casinos, without a hint of a MT ever being even remotely present. It seems to me that baiting the unaware/ignorant was quite possibly encouraged by the dwell system that's the metasubject of this thread.

I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying that dwell-whoring enables uncreativity, and once that goes away, uncreativity will make the SL experience of free account holders who want to be economically active beyond their stipend difficult. They can either become creative (and therefore profitable), or they can find another way to fund their economic activity (putting more money in LL's pocket) or they can find another game (therefore reducing LL's operating costs), or they can compromise. Any of the above counts as a beneficial outcome.

...or they will simply leave. That is not a productive outcome.

Pardon?

I don't think there's that much of a chance that this will get rid of camping chairs, as long as they are retaining traffic rating on the Find menu. What's likely is that camping chairs will move from giving free money to giving free copies of items, or discounts at shops, because those cost the item creator nothing.

It may have quite an effect on retail patterns. I spoke with a well-known content creator and they said that dwell in their stores was a major incentive to keep their products in their stores. Without it, once you are big enough to have a name people will seek out you might as well use SLEx, or "viral vendors".

Part of the problem with the "but, you pay for entertainment" issue is the psychological model. People don't like to feel that, no matter which way they turn, there's another hand in their purse. That's why places like theme parks IRL charge a single admission - because people are happier to pay that, even if it's more than they would have paid if they'd paid for each ride seperately. SL really needs a better way of supporting something like that. It's difficult, because there has to be some way of deciding how the money they pay should be divided up. But the fact that SL's content is provided by a large range of different people doesn't improve the end user's experience above the same content provided by a single entity.

In the game/platform angle the problem seems to be that it's been forgotten that the freely available entertainment areas add value to every piece of content on the grid. As I mentioned earlier, what's the point of having a good-looking avatar if there's nothing for that avatar to do?

Because everyone has a magic "creative talent" switch just under their chin which they can switch on anytime they want?



Only Premium membership puts more money in LL's pocket. Buying from the LindeX mostly helps content creators pay their tier, which does help LL, but it's not clear if LL will lose more from the dwell-based sites tiering down.



It doesn't reduce LL's operating costs. The server has to be there and maintained even if no-one is using it. Even if they replace it with a slower server, they still paid for the faster one.

i'm the other owner, and after talking it over with matt we'll be working on ways to make it work. we'll need to adapt somehow. business models will change all over sl. anything entertainment-related is affected. they'll either change or go out of business.

so yeah, we'll have some casualties. some very cool places won't adapt, or maybe the owners don't have the capital to make the transition. our place is relatively small which makes us better suited to roll with it. i predict green access lines or other third-party access systems will be the norm, and people won't think twice about paying a L$5 cover charge to a good place. and when that happens, clubs wll compete on quality, not prize money.

so i'm worried in the short term, but i think we'll come out okay.

I happen to be one of those "freeloading Basic jerks" mentioned in various places throughout the thread, and since it doesn't matter much, I'll voice my opinion:

S'good.

I may be close to broke much of the time, but I'd definitely be willing to pay for a quality event(It's only L$ after all). I haven't looked at the events list in months because I don't feel like wading through the crap(Lost my galoshes, you see). So if cutting Dwell means weeding out even a chunk of that crud and getting in decent events, then yeah, i'll shell out to go there.

Short term is going to be the deciding factor for many businesses, especially those that are counting on dwell to pay for their tiers. I wasn't, fortunately, so this won't change my business model at all. I had planned on growing only as big as my business will allow, supporting itself with some padding for 'just in case.'

I am mostly worried about places like the Shelter and the New Citizens, as well as places like Yadni's. These people help the newbies get adjusted to the competition of SL and help them avoid scams, spams and other pitfalls. Charging for classes might not be the answer either.

In order:

"...or they will simply leave. That is not a productive outcome."
Sure it is. If someone decides SL is not for them, godspeed you crazy emperor, thanks for enjoying the game as long as you did and enjoying it. Once they leave, they're using a tad less bandwidth, which means less bandwidth bills for LL (Yes I realize that it would take more than just one or two people leaving to make even a penny's difference for bandwidth.) and slightly less maintenance costs plus a slightly less overworked asset server etc etc.

"Pardon?"
I see two interpretations here: Not understanding that creative = profitable, and not understanding how they are supposed to become creative. The first is pretty simple, but for the sake of completeness, if you're creating content, there's a good chance you'll be able to sell same content to other players, therefore making yourself some L$. As for the second, ANYONE can become creative if they take the time to try. Yes, I realize it comes more naturally to some people than it does to others, but the tools are there, people. There are freeware tools for making animations and textures and sounds, and the inworld tools are awesome for making builds and objects. All it takes is practice and a willingness to work at it.

"several comments from Yumi)"
See above for the 'creative talent' switch. Yes, there is a switch! It is called WORK AND PRACTICE. As far as LindeX, I was under the impression that at least a tiny amount per transaction was shaved off by LL? I might be wrong though. Even if I am wrong, sure it's not putting money INTO LL but it's at least not taking anything OUT. And see above for the operating costs.

"freeloading basic jerks"
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against basic accounts. I was a basic account for a while, then I decided I wanted land, so I upgraded. I rarely buy things, so my stipend goes almost exclusively to random other people when I overhear 'oh man that x is so awesome but i can't afford it' because it's not like I buy much of anything. If there were an option to pay less per month and NOT get the stipend, I'd probably take it.

My meta-point here is that it all has to come from somewhere, folks. If you're perfectly happy to just use SL as a chat room with pretty pictures, and you (like me) aren't really interested in buying the hottest fashions or (unlike me) don't feel like owning land, by all means, go for a basic account. But if you want to buy things or go to special events or get more than $0 worth out of SL, you have to put more than $0 into SL. Big builds cost MONEY in the form of tier. Large events cost MONEY in the form of tier to have the venue and possibly other costs for licensing a radio stream / tringo things / paying a DJ / whatever.

You get what you pay for. LL is kind enough to provide basic access to the game for free, that ALONE is more generous than they have to be. If you're being asked to pay, say, L$50 for an event that's a couple hours worth of fun, please keep in mind that this is roughly 47 cents. Where else can you be entertained for two hours for 47 cents?