Offline dwell to prevent camping

Ok, here's a proposal for discussion.

It's become apparant that camping's going to be a reality that isn't going to go away easy. Only if 'sort by traffic' and 'popular places' were removed will there be no value in having camping chairs. So, instead, I'd like to propose a way of - instead of eliminating camping - making it universal.

Each user will get a "send offline dwell" command. They head out to a land parcel and issue that command. From that point on, anytime they are not connected to SL, they generate dwell for the parcel they designated as if they were online, standing on it. There is no default and the setting expires after a week, so the user has to log in and reset it. Scripts get a way of detecting how much offline dwell an avatar has generated - possibly as a scaled value rather than an amount of L$.

Advantages here:

* Sites with camping chairs can instead switch to offline dwell farms, meaning that users can log off rather than staying seated and thus not consume server load and sim resources.

* The "goldmine" of offline dwell becomes accessible to locations that don't have camping chairs. ("If you like this store, set your offline dwell here!" Since there is necessarily always more offline dwell than online dwell, this will prevent the skew of popularity towards locations that have chairs.

* The dwell:L$ ratio may need to be adjusted to stave off inflation, however those L$ will again be better distributed meaning that those folks with non-camping locations may actually make more L$ because of the extra offline dwell they are getting that they weren't before.

Um. Yumi. They'll killing Dwell altogether.
See, SL has gotten big enough that it doesn't need to support greedy, dwell gaming assholes.
While there will still be camping chairs and stupid events, there will be less incentive to do so.

When?

The vote box, which already exists, could be put to some real use with something like that Yumi.

It only allows us to click it once a day.
It would have to be scripted to pay the voters who click it instead of having them camp out all day. And maybe keep them from clicking other vote boxes for that time period.

That would need a link to a search catagory in the Find button of course. And a set of tools to manage outgoing payments like some chairs do already.

Even if people only voted for the highest paying owner, which would be the entire point, then that would be no different than online search engines. More money = higher listing.

And it's given to the community so money is spread around. Not a classified section to who knows where.
It would seem better than the clutter of chairs. Yeah I can see that maybe.

I think it would only catch on if there was a big push for it.
I suppose getting rid of the camping is a big enough push.

If people would rather have a system like that instead of chairs then it could happen.

But that would take some lindens helping out by linking the vote boxes to the search of course.
I dunno.
I guess if enough people want to see the camping be replaced, by somthing that is more acceptable for everyone, then a vote on the feature would pass.

Otherwise if they complain about camping and didn't vote or support something to fix both sides of the "camping problem", well, then thats their problem isn't it.

* I would suppose there needs to be a limit to how many can vote on one area maybe. Otherwise people would just vote for the highest payout, leaving all others blank.
Then again owners can only pay out so much before going broke. So a flurry of getting to the vote box before others would happen. That would make it more like a game.

Hmm Maybe no limits would be better just like camping is now. But compressed into that votebox. (Besides owner set limits)
I dunno.
I'm not really worried about it. heh

This is an interesting idea Yumi, but I would not support it because it perpetuates the silly notion that people sitting idle on your land (or in your proposal, chosing to log out on your land) should benefit you in the form of government handouts. I am not entirely against the idea of Dwell because I believe that content creators that provide useful and entertaining places within Second Life should be compensated in some way. But it's hard to see how camping chairs or any variation thereof are providing anything that would warrant a handout from Linden Lab.

Exactly. The idea is to let people who are providing interesting things other than camping chairs, benefit from offline dwell in the same way that camping chair owners do - except more, because they don't have to pay money to the campers.

Where did they say that?
SL is about the size the Internet was in 1980, back when it was called the ARPAnet. It took... like... 20 years for the Internet to get big enough that the kinds of things LL said they wanted Dwell and the DI to support to be advertising-supported, reliably, to the point where you could get enough from people visiting your website to pay for the traffic. Been there, done that, got the bandwidth bills.

Yumi, I think what you are suggesting is that by visiting a parcel and then logging out, you are in essence voting for this parcel ... and the longer you stay logged out the more your vote is worth. As for the first part of this, I think a more direct way to vote or rate, such as the way that Sean suggests, would be better. As for the second part, I am not sure that we want to pay people based on how long other people stay logged out of Second Life.

You have to remember, the idea behind dwell is to encourage content creators to build places that are interesting and keep people engaged in the world ... not logged out.

But keep thinking about alternatives to dwell, because you are right: it is being gamed to death and LL has expressed an intention to change things soon.

Having come from EVE Online, where macrominers kill the economy by generating insane amounts of in-game money by AFK'ing several computers at once, I've got to disagree with this idea. It's too easy to exploit.

The last thing you need is a Chinese sweatshop of game money farmers (yes, they exist, to the degree China is passing laws against it that force MMORPGs to make Chinese-only servers if they want to provide China service) logging in with free accounts and bouncing off. As it is, if they figured out the system they'd be doing this with dancepads. You can evade the logout timer just by placing something heavy on one of your arrow keys while AFK.

The last thing we need is for the L$ to drop in RL and IG value due to a flooded market. I'd say your solution is to can Dwell altogether so that shops and services must earn money based on merit. Giving someone the opportunity to farm Dwell in any way, be it this way or the one that exists now, could result in an economic issue that ruins people who use SL as any form of income (like myself).

So, if I've got this right, we're rewarding people for having other people... not be on their land. In fact, we're rewarding people for having a bunch of other people not even be logged into SL.



Absolutely amazing.

No!

We are allowing people who do not have camping chairs, to get reward on the same scale that camping chairs owners get.

They still have to persuade people to choose them as the target their offline dwell.

It means, say, that if I think your robots are great, I can set Templar Botworks to recieve my offline dwell, and you'll get that extra dwell (for a week) as if you were a camping site and I was camping there - but without you needing to install camping chairs or pay for it. As opposed to the current situation where the camp chair farms take an unfair share of the dwell because they can tap into the market for idle/offline dwell and other locations can't.

It seems to me that turning abuse of a system into a norm is always a bad idea.

You may as well replace tic-tacs with Xanex. The effect would be the same on SL as it would be IRL. You'd have a bunch of really bored, listless people.

Sorry I read it 3 times and I don't get it at all.

Dwell or Traffic is supposed to be a metric of where avatars spend time at - thus determining a popular place.

If your offline, you're offline. Is it supposed to be telling someone where you'd be if you were online?

I simply don't get it at all.

Sounds like an overcomplicated system that doesn't accomplish anything and doesn't address the problem at all.

Many people depend on dwell to help pay for their sims. watch your language.

However it is not functioning that way because of camping chairs.

The reason why camping chairs attract extra dwell is because they target the time the user spends inactive or idle on SL. Since for most people there will be more of this than time they spend active, camping chairs at the moment have an advantage.

Since it is going to be difficult to ban camping chairs, and they may remain economically attractive, an alternate possibility is to let EVERYONE get access to that inactive/idle/offline dwell instead of reserving it only for camp chair operators.

So your solution for fixing the broken vase is to break it even further?

Impressive!

I still think replacing camping chairs with camping sex balls would be more entertaining.

Brilliant!

Don't be silly, Enabran, that would be stupid.

The solution is obviously to break everything else in the room so you don't notice the broken vase.

yes yes yes I know how and why camping chairs are used.... but your solution for using you OFFLINE time is - well - for want of a better word... retarded.

It doesn't fix the prob at all. It adds a layer of complexity that I don't see as fixing the problem, merely compounding it.

The prob is self fixing as they chairs become less economical with the Dwelloper bonus coming to an end.

HAY GUYZ WHY AREN'T WE TALKING ABOUT OFFLINE DWELL

I'm spending my time contemplating my navel.

Found any lint in it?

Um.. No. The entire idea is bass ackwards.

Briana Dawson

tsk..bri. stop going on and on and on about something girlie. just say what you think and quit beating around the bush.