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

Just out of curiousity, whatever happened to building things you liked because you like them and eating the cost?

Why does every place have to turn a profit/break even?

What happened to just paying your fee to LL and just building what you want to and who cares if it's popular or not?

One of the greatest builds I've ever seen was the giant stone man on a toilet. Used to pass him every time I went home when I lived in Shipley.

He served no purpose. He didn't generate any income. He didn't even generate traffic.

But I was always glad he was there.

Perhaps if most the clubs didn't have more folks in camping chairs than actual patrons during prime time, it would not have become necessary. Its even worse for malls, when I started, you could tell a good mall by its dwell....now, if its top rated, it is most likely either half-empty or all slutwear...but has a dozen full camping chairs to render dwell meaningless for its original purpose.

Clubs and malls should consider this what it is....a self-inflicted wound.

You have a point, but... well... let me work towards it.

See, I've paying between forty and sixty bucks a month for the past several months for content .. mostly avatars and airplanes .. on SL. What I expect in return is a virtual world that contains lots of cool places where I can go flying (without being hurled from my plane because some idiot thinks running an aggressive 'security script' when he's not even online is somehow a good idea), or exploring, or just hanging out with people. What I'm getting is one where I'm spending another $50 a month for land so I can create that place without being encroached on by malls and gambling places and residences with aggressive "security" and just plain ugly builds.

I don't think it's unrealistic to expect that a "virtual world" contain a certain amount of cool stuff that's paid for automatically out of the $10 a month I'm paying for it. I DO think it's unreasonable for LL to expect people to create compelling builds *at their own expense*.

So...

Content sells on SL because there's a world to enjoy that content in. Vendors are taking the people who build that world for granted, and I call that "expecting something for nothing".
Why? It's happening. Not "nothing but malls and sex clubs", no, but the proportion of public space in SL that isn't "the biz" is going down all the time, and it's only the bubble that's keeping it from going down in absolute terms. The internet as a whole has gone the same way, so why do you expect that using an internet-like economic model in SL will have a different result?

I completley agree with these ideas, but I also feel that new basic members should generate some sort of dwell for their first month or so, so their not completley useless. I also think that theres alot of other things that could be done if dwell were completley removed.

Everyones expecting vistors to give donations to mentioned 'entertainment based enviroments', but donations are really not a stable source of income whatsoever. Players tend to gradually donate less and less over time, or atleast from what I've observed.
Its also a two way street. Sure some people that make a profit may have an interest in setting some land(or money) aside for non-profit purposes, but doing such is just as much of a choice as basic members giving linden in charity. Neither are assured, and I've seen more than enough businesses just pocket every last cent of profit without consideration However, whom has the most leeway? I'd assume itd be those actually making money in SL.

IMO there really should be a distinction between those that intend to actually make a profit, and those that just want a way to cover their asses in regard to service costs. If you really want sl to turn to a capitalistic miniUS that so many seem happy about, perhaps businesses should start being hammered with restrictions? Perhaps you could be gracious with your 'wealth' and have a little of it set aside for non-profits? Hey, its what we do in the real world. Its called income taxes. Right now its like everyones expecting low-income familes and the homeless to fund their own damn city park.

I say they need to be seprate entities entirley. Having a restricted amount of non-profit only landspaces which would be atleast subsidized by the runaway capitalism on sl doesn't seem like a horrible compromise to me. The lifeline for busnesses should be linden. The lifeline for entertainment should be traffic. Right now we only have the former. Cheaper non-profit parcels, so long as one can generate traffic. Thenagain, someone will probably find a way to game that too. It can't be avoided.

Support the whole society that made business profitable.

Perhaps they don't want to all become nasty little VR hypercapitalists as so many of SL's exaulted 'premium' members seem to be or are trying to be? (I am premium, btw, but see more wrong with the attitude of the ingame business folk than with the basic account holders).

Really, why SHOULD they spend the cash? To keep the business folks going? To support the rather phony 'economy'? Perhaps they do not go premium because its a game to them not a replacement for RL or a way to cash out their free time for a few $$$?

Lots of reasons not to have a premium account...some of them are even Linden made! For instance, due to LL's refusal to zone or enforce TOS on various clowns ingame (folks building clubs in the middle of residential sims, idiots with so many active scripts they bog down the entire sim, the bush sign maker, etc), I found a NICE and self-sufficient private sim community. I downtiered back to the $9.95 a month account and dumped my land, and just as soon as I can relocate my store, I am going basic. Why pay LL to get anarchy when I can pay less to a private sim owner for more land....with the benefits of zoning?

The same thing that always happens to it, whether it's builds in SL, websites on the internet, eccentics building cool stuff along rural highways, unmaintained public parks, any kind of art for art's sake. It becomes so rare and evanescent that it's remarkable when it survives.

Unless someone steps in to pay the bills and take the burden off the artist, they vanish.

I've picked up and maintain a couple of old websites that I thought were important enough to keep alive, when I was able to get to them before the original creator gave up. Hundreds more have been lost. In SL, the same thing happens. The only things cast in stone are the ones on land belonging to the old "lifetime" accounts, and there are no more of those. Everything else is cast in wax. Now it's being downgraded to "jello".

Odd. That is exactly the reason I did go premium. Minimally restrictive TOS are difficult to find. What would be point be in owning land if the guy next door could decide he did not like what you did with it and call over the nanny government to tear it down.

And yet dropping dwell is moving SL away from being a venue where "a hangout space really is OK" to one where selling products and renting land is the only thing that's rewarded, and just creating "a hangout space" containing "your own stuff" costs real money as well as time.
People already are. They don't last, though, unless they're both willing and able to spend the time and effort building and running a business as well. If they just want to create stuff like they did on a MU*, then it better be something they can do in a sandbox somewhere.

Depends on how far you have to go before that happens, doesn't it? I mean, that's a really great anarchist soundbite, but I would be astonished if there's anywhere in SL where your build could be deleted purely on the word of one neighbor, for no reason at all, which is the tone of your comment.

Even in Dreamland that's pretty rare, and if Alliez Mysterio's terms of service are too restrictive for you, I can't imagine what the hell you want to build and I'm sure glad you're not building near me.

Fewer and fewer clubs in RL have a cover charge, and for virtually all ov them that charge is a lagniappe... they HAVE to be profitable without it because they can't maintain one long term. Even Disneyland doesn't make it on admissions: it's the franchises that fill in the gap. Drinks, meals, snacks, parking, hotel rooms, ... you know... dwell.
Cite, please. The complaints I remember from the creation of LindeX was that it was killing GOM.

Argent I do give your posts a lot more consideration than many others, even if I disagree sometimes. My experience is just different to what you describe. Of course I see some of that, but I explore a lot when I want a quick break from building, or I want inspiration. The places I seem to end up, I'm seeing more that's amazing than there is ugly. I just don't see this declining state. I see growth, good and bad, but without one outweighing the other in my perception. I've been visiting the builds in Great Builds of SL vol 1, I've been picking a sim and then flying across a few to see what I can discover. I'm generally in a state of wonder. I observe all sorts of strategies for funding the interesting things I see.

Vendors are building the world as much as those physically building. They are adding to the world just the same, there's as much that's compelling for sale as there is in the 'built world', however you want to describe that. I see plenty of hybrids of the two as well.

I've visited your land, seen what you've made, and I saw talent and imagination. Could you not for example, whip up a few things for sale that are interesting and selling a little to offset some costs, maybe pay for some of those avis if not the land? I know you may not want to have a 'business' as such, and I understand that, but you could make stuff you enjoy for kicks and think about putting in a box for sale as a consequence, not a reason. That is in essence my way of working, build for enjoyment and and let the money take care of itself to whatever extent it does and go from there.

I don't think dwell ever really did achieve the sort of thing you are talking about, for all sorts of reasons. In my experience, it was a fairly small amount of money, certainly not empire building. While I was working on one custom job, I was a member of their group, and they had extremely high traffic, only a few members in the group, and by simple arithmetic, the total wasn't a whole lot. If you were getting an appreciable amount, I'd be interested to hear that and what it allowed you to do. Was it so much that you couldn't find another way however?

Yep, so it's in Linden Labs interests to promote developments that attract paying customers. By paying people who attract paying customers some tiny fraction of the money they're earning for Linden Labs.
Right now I'm subsidizing Linden Labs, and I'm subsidizing Luskwood, and Chage McCoy, and Lost Creatures, and Dwellget, and Whinge Languish, and Alliez Mysterio, and Cubey Terra, and Alynna Vixen...

Not a whole lot to most of them, but there's enough people like me that it all adds up to the cost of sims like Lusk, Abbotts, or Taco.

The nicest of those sims, really, is Taco.

But most of the money I've been sending there way has been in dwell, a fraction of the ten bucks a month I'm paying for my account. I suppose they'll change the name of Dwellget and get the vendors to pay for their stalls.

Oh, you guys going to keep Perry?

This is true, but I disagree with the dwell definition. DisneyLand realizes that people want other things besides the rides when they get in, so they made other things that people would want (food, parking, hotels rooms, etc) What's to stop venue people with inventing their own things for people to buy, say club T-shirts, promo work of guests...I'm not saying what to do, but there is certainly ways to mirror this in SL as well. Clubs just have to stop being a black box with a dance machine in order to be worth a fee in your eyes, and that's fine with me. Just makes me wanna work harder.



Oy, I can't search through the archives for 2 year old posts while at work. If someone's willing to do it, then yay, if not I may try to when I get home.

LL never promised dwell. Back when I had Galleria City they were talking about "the day" that dwell would end. They never promised dwell was forever. From everything they ever said about it dwell was always temporary.

Briana Dawson

I'm lucky... I don't need to. It's not cost effective for me to spend the time running something like a real business in SL when I can get a better return on my time spending the same hours programming... and it's more fun than dealing with customers in SL. I've got a little store, but I'm really playing at a business... to really make money at it would take work. Customer support. It'd be like being in sales, or a manager, I don't do that.

And I don't need to.

I don't need dwell, or DI, or the reputation bonus. I need a world that contains the kind of people that do need the feedback... properly designed... that these things simulate. And so do the people who have been arguing against it, even if they weren't directly benefiting from it, even if they think they're better off without them.

Linden Labs needs dwell, and DI, and the reputation bonus. If they want an economy that's rich in the monetary sense, they need one that's rich in the sense of complexity. The real world economy is a mass of complex and competing drives and one of the things that keeps it in balance is that there's a variety of feedback loops, not just one, and wheer one weakens another gets stronger.
I agree, it didn't do nearly as good a job as it should have, because it didn't measure something that was of value to Linden Labs. It should have been based on paying customers, not just warm bodies.

Yeah, just what SL needs, another pointless popularity contest that consists, ultimately, of who can give the best (virtual) oral sex.



If premium members are paying just to visit places, then perhaps they may need to reconsider their being premium members. As a freebie account, I can go pretty much anywhere that's not locked away from me by overzealous security scripts or by hyper-anal twits looking for the slightest excuse to throw around their virtual weight.

As for the numbers you suggest, I've not done the math, but that seems to be more of a payout than the now-ended dwell payment system was, which is a not-insignificant reason why pocket lint from my RL pants can probably get L$100 off of Lindex or whatnot.



Even if I was a paying customer, if I had to bother with real-world concerns like hunger imported into a virtual world, I'd be unlikely to be a paying customer. What purpose, exactly, would making food a requirement serve? I may be missing something, but it seems like you're trying to create something to the general effect of camping chairs under the now-dead dwell-subsidized system, only not making it voluntary.

Also, dwell and RL food places are not in any conceivably rational way the same or directly related. As for your use of "subsidise" in the context of your suggestion, I'm feeling an Inigo Montoya moment coming on...

The people who create areas because they want to are already doing that. I'm kind of at a loss to figure where you're getting the idea that the existence of dwell is keeping anyone who wants to do this from doing it.

Some of them, you and I are both apparently among this group, can afford to do that out of our own pockets. But removing dwell won't suddenly make more of people like us, will it? It won't suddenly make more land, will it? Where does this come from?

So does Discover, CVS, Continental Airlines, and every other company with an incentive plan. Properly designed, such plans are tremendously profitable. When they're not, smart companies can redesign them so they become profitable. The only no brainer here is the question "is Linden Labs a smart company"?
This isn't about "paying poor people to play a game", this is about "asking people who are providing volunteer labor to pay for the privilege as well".
I already pay for and sponsor quality content. Why haven't you already been doing it?

I'm willing to bet it will. Sl always attracts a certain group of people with a certain mindset. That hasn't changed. As some places close, new places will open. Such is the way of SL.

....besides, permanant things are boring in a world dedicated to change.

You mean "people who make certain types of virtual content". There's no physical content in SL, and people who build stuff on land are just as much "content creators" as people who sell prims in boxes.

What do "events" have to do with this. I'm not paying my US$40+ a month to Linden Labs for "events", and it's not "events" that I'm worried about going away because of the loss of dwell.

The experience of the Internet indicates that the free market is much more interested in bondage rape factories than unique and interesting websites. The first guy I ever knew who was actually making real money from a website... and this was at Usenix, an industry group that included most of the people who actually created the web and wrote most of the web software... was running a porn site. Why do you expect SL is going to go a different direction from the Internet when you make its economy more like the Internet as a whole?
How does providing less money... even slightly less money... to people who create original content encourage them to do more of it?
You do realise that they eliminated dwell... not free accounts? I'm missing a connection here.
I've called free accounts free riders, and I'm not going to touch your "crystal light" with a 10 foot pole, but I have no idea where you're getting these conclusions from.

Getting rid of DI was supposed to get rid of camping. It didn't. Getting rid of dwell won't either. It'll just push a few more original content creators over the edge, and increase the blandness of Mall Mall Mall Shop Shop Shop Casino Casino Casino Banline Banlines Banlines something cool Mall Mall Mall...
The real one.

I don't see anyone assuming that.

The argument against the elimination of dwell is that regardless of your motivation for creating stuff you can't do it if it costs you more than you can afford, so reducing the cost for people who create attractions that bring in paying customers to Linden Labs is valuable.

Dwell exists in RL. When you go to a movie, you pay $6 for a ticket and $8 for candy, popcorn and a soda. That $8 is dwell.

If SL is going to eliminate dwell, then they should make avatars get hungry and thirsty, and make planes and cars run out of energy, and make you buy this stuff from landowners.

sl sux lol we should all quit lolol

rofl