A serious (but likely unpopular) question

I see nothing wrong with limiting the number of items allowed in inventory at any given time.

In TSO you can only own a limited number of object. If I wanted to buy a new shirt I had to delete one from my storage.

At least in SL I can sell stuff or place things in a prim box to save storage.

Another idea would be to have a GOM style system to hold objects rather than just money.

This may have less effect on your DB load than you might think. If you have a large inventory it quickly becomes savvy to pay $9.95 for an alt to hold stuff for you. Then 2 alts, then 3 alts...

The best way to reduce inventory is to give the residents better inventory management tools. No one wants a massive inventory where it's difficult to locate things (at least I think most of us don't). This add's value to the SL client rather than devalueing the SL service.

I'm not totally against increasing costs to cover inventory, but it's not a decision to be made lightly. I think the psychological effects of SL pricing are far more sensitive, than the technology. It becomes much harder for the community to "sell" SL to friends and co-workers when we have to use the word "Tax" in our vocabulary.

Well what the hell, I say impose item inventory limits and put in a cost to rez prims (like a sales tax) and why nit a fixed surcharge on every vendor to make of for the negative impact all those malls have on the SL landscape.
I think that people should be able to buy excess storage space by adding a surcharge onto their tier. Furthermore people who have excess storage shold be able to sell or lease this storage as part of the game. however storage shouldreally be dumped on the market by LL in 100,000 prim lots to be resold to the customers (LL would only have to cread servers deadicated to storage and assign use of that server to one account initiall, sotrage could then be distributed like land).

While we are at it, i think the secondary financial market is underdeveloped, perhaps the lindens can creat a toolset that allows us to lend money in game and charge interest on repayment, and allowws us to boot defaulters. And really the business toolset should also be developed so that big players can invest in each others enterprise, why not a Stock market and a bond market..that way we can for corporations with shareholders and invest in all these sims.

Frankly we are undertaxed in LL anyway..it would be nice to have flight surcharge and airport use charges in place, as well as road tax, a water tax, and why not have all vehicles be registered, and pay a registration fee to LL? In addition streaming video causes lang and thus a fee should be assesed agaisnt all creators, providers and users of the streaming video. Oh and since communitcation is subject to surcharges in the real world, why not have each Im sent cost $1 linden. Adult Items should also be subject to a "sin tax" int eh same way tobacco and cigarettes are taxed now.

And of course Courts. SL needs a court system badly. then we could enforce zoning laws and contracts and the court should have the power to terminate or suspend accounts of the unremitting or the non-complying, or those who continually irritate the forum users.

Oh and the value of the linden should be kept above $4.00 per thousand no matter whqt the cost, and if people can't aford any of this they are welcome to get a job, after all SL is a toolset and a way to model a realworld economy and is not a game or any from of entertainment

Bleh. I'd prefer client side storage and tools. I think most would as well, even if what you outline is a mirroring of how land is handled, but for inventory.



Treat money like land? That would certainly complicate things. Make them more 'real', but I'm not sure about more enjoyable.

I doubt seriously LL will ever permit residents to kick one another off the server.



Maybe it's me, but I detect a note of sarcasm. (chuckle)

I get your point, but you seem to miss mine. The point of asking the question wasn't to make things more real, but to make things more manageable. If you have followed what's happening at all, then you know that a point of crisis is not far from upon us.

Your zestful take on realism misses the simple reality that, should that crisis arrive without a plan to meet and resolve it, things are going to get very ugly, very fast.

Perhaps that doesn't bother you. Personally, I would prefer to avoid it.



Heh. You lawyer you.



Now this was just a pure troll. Shame on you. Don't you know gaming the forums is no longer a viable past-time?

I would like to ditto this statement.

Andrew, the mess I call an inventory is punishment to me all by itself, you don't need to add a tax to make me wish it were clean. If inventory management were not the nightmare that it currently is I don't believe we would be having this discussion. I would LOVE to have a neat inventory.

But as it stands now my inventory activities involve moving items around one at a time. The process can be very slow and laggy. I need to rez an object (even if it has a semi-descriptive name) in order to be sure I can safely delete it.

As it stands now, SL inventory is a frustrating SL experience. Adding a tax would make it frustrating AND infuriating.

I think that LL is workind on a solution to the storage crisis, they are likely to impose a prim limit with a surcharge for over prim. Its a nice compromise.

My Zestful take on reality was indeed intended to highlight all the ways in which we are comperably taxed IRL. We are under taxed. And of course If you pressed me seriously I could make the case that all the increased revenue from taxing the bejeezus out of SL could be put inot subsidies for the entertainment and event creators to serve as sort of Linden Labs sponsoring the arts (PBS anyone?). I suppose that in some way I did take a stab at the idea that SL is some sort of real world economic simulation for people to make money. But then I have never made and secret of my opinion tha tthis is a game. However a few more taxes would not only make it a better game, but a more realistic economy!

And Cienna, a troll expects a response and is concerned about the reaction and wants to drum up controversy. You know me, I could give a rats ass, I post jest to see my own bad typing. Besides, Gaming the forums is not frowned upon, personal attacks are! I carefully avoid those. And if people take me too seriously and get thier knickers in a twist..so be it! There has to be a game somehwere in SL. For some its Tringo, for me its the forums!

Awww.. Jake, do you need a hug this morning?

Now now, no need to get prissy about the 'troll' thing. If I were serious, I would have been much less polite. You know that. (giggle)

As for the rest -- I don't think people here want that level of realism. I too, think that compromise is the best one -- but those who have gotten used to having their cake and eating it too are not going to be satisfied and LL should expect fallout from any change.

As for having fun, my barrister friend, you should hike yourself over to the 'Death From Above' thread (which I am deliberately not linking). You would go into Law School conniptions on the possible arguments.

I did not mean to sound prissy about the troll thing, just unapologetic. I have not weighed in on the death from above forum yet. No argument is worrisome to me, its just a case of how much am I being paid to win it. I know at least one time I took both sides of the argument! like I said I just like to see my own bad typing.

In any seriousness, I think LL has been working on the problem and I expect we will see some solution from them. I base this opinion on comments made at an around the time of the last great lock out. I think you are right to be concerned, and i appreciate andrews response as well as everyone elses commentary.

Now I am going by to being my Troll self and am trundling up to Death from above to argue relentlessly, and from there to pursue wild women in prim heels and lingerie, thank god for the poseball.

A few of you, including David and Aimee, have made the very cogent point that current inventory management tools suck. And yet Andrew L. now admits they're discussing punitive measures (taxes, extra costs) for bloated inventory.

It's like putting a 10mph speed limit on a steep downward incline.

I don't have a problem with having to pay extra for more than a set inventory size. We already pay extra for owning x amount of land, and the land itself has set prim limits. We pay $10L per upload of sounds and images (which can quickly add up when you're starting out).

So, fine, charge a little extra for those of us with huge inventories. But NOT before you've actually given us a way to get our inventories under control on our own initiative. Give the users a little power to do our own cleanup before everyone is punished for not having the right tools. It could well be that much of the problem is due to the lack of inventory features rather than 30,000 packrats.

And if you do start charging on inventory size, be prepared for legions of basic alts to create another entirely new problem for Linden data storage. Which takes more storage -- a new avatar with skin, hair, and newb clothing or a few hundred prims and scripts?

theres alrady an indirect "sales tax" of sorts related to sales.

More people buy items - leads content creators to want more/bigger stores (malls / etc) - leads to more tier paid.

Inventory is one of the few fun things the average non-content creator HAS in this game! Making people pay for that pleasure just takes away something else fun.

The more I hear, it's pay for this and pay for that. "What would you think of charging for putting events on the calendar?" is one I particularly hate. ("Hey, let's make it harder for the players to have fun!" Or, "Let's change the auctions so only rich people can afford them." Or, "Let's take away event funding. Make em have to work really hard in order to have fun." "What would you think of charging to have an inventory?" is just another in this line of punitive sticks.

Better to raise the monthly subscription fee if necessary. Instead of all this constant futzing around to see who needs punishing next, or what needs squashing next, or what group can we stick it to next, and then try to justify it all as fair and natural somehow.

As far as I can tell, most changes just benefit the content-creators to the exclusion of the average players and the event-running players. As if all that were required for game satisfaction would be the ability to enter the environment and lay eyes on somebody's cool vehicle and go, "Oooo".

Plus there's the niggling detail that one doesn't even necessarily get to keep one's inventory, as things go poof and there is no back-up system.

Believe it or not, most people are actually NOT chomping at the bit for the thrill of arriving into some sort of quirky game environment where there is nothing to do except get charged for this and charged for that and essentially nickled and dimed to death every time you take a breath, while content-creators laugh all the way home from GOM.

Less stick; more carrot. Or nobody's gonna wanna play except a bunch of masochists.

coco

P.S. My inventory is a thing of beauty. Totally and gorgeously organized, all of the over 8k items in it. I just wish I could back it up on my computer, not just to protect it, but also so I could show it off to others.

I would love to have a job organizing people's inventories for them. But to do so, I would have to log in as them for a time. I guess they could change their password after that, though. Hmmmm.

coco

With the upcoming changes, maybe you should start an Inventory Bank - allowing people to store items on your land for a small fee?

That wouldn't solve the problem and it most certainly wouldn't be fair to all. What about those 9.95-ers that have no need/desire for a large inventory? Why should they be punished by higher fees?

There is always screenshots

I completely agree with David and others. The tools we have to manage our inventories need to be improved. My inventory is a mess, because I really can't stand to use the tools that we have.

I am all for the external external backups on our PCs.

I keep multiple copies of some of my items on purpose, because they are too important for me to lose in the event of asset server error.
/108/fa/51556/1.html

I also keep "archival" copies of things. Things with sentimental value that I don't use much if ever, and previous versions of active projects, to be used for regression testing and so on. There's no need to keep these things on the live server, but there's nowhere else to put it right now.

How about we try improving the tools before we legislate new policy?

Hey, while you're at it, you can also add a tax for objects rezzed! That way people wou ... oh wait ... didn't you guys drop the taxation system for the land tiers?

Oh I understand, if you change the name of the tax, it's completely different, ok, so if you add a levy against objects rezzed then ....

I believe better inventory tools will be forthcoming. I might have seen a demo of multi select/delete working a few weeks ago Also, someone is working on a export/import system where you would be able to make local backups of stuff that you created and own, but that won't be in 1.7 (or if it IS in 1.7 it will be incomplete).

I would expect the free inventory theshold to be adequate for most people's needs, however I don't know the average size of inventory, nor what the inventory size distribution curve looks like. I'm sure that if we were to try to implement such a system whoever was in charge of setting the values and costs would try to pick reasonable values. You know the phenomena where 10% of the population use up 90% of the resouces? I supect the inventory size distribution would exhibit that behavior.

Someone who wanted a large inventory might opt to just pay for the extra storage. I'd also expect the price of such a service to be affordable enough to be used by many while still providing incentives that would convice many others to maintain a reasonable inventory (i.e. removing V1.03 of ObjectFoo when they are currently working out the bugs on V3.25).

Anyway, this isn't on the roadmap that I know of, just something that we've discussed and are thinking about.

Edit -- removed a superfluous word

Why don't LL just save our inventory items data to our clients instead of servers in the grid?

OOO, Sachmo, thanks! Why didn't I think of taking a screenshot. D'oh...

coco

P.S. I don't wanna store anybody's stuff, but I would enjoy organizing their inventories!

The main reason why this would not be possible is because not all of your inventory is fully permissive -- we would only be able to store stuff that is 100% owned by you. However, if we did allow you to store your own creations locally, then you could then modify them locally and possibly re-upload the result as a new item.

Time for LL to stop worrying about permissions and consider giving people aggressive access to DMCA.

For one, you can't stop people from copying textures / build structures. You can only protect LSL scripts.

However, in the future, you're going to need to be able to let other people host LSL scripts. So, there goes that as well.

Add some functionality for people to do key-server type authentication that they can host themselves (so, if I buy a license then it hits my 'key server') and rely on obfuscation of byte-code for copyright protection.

Once you've done all this, you can fully move everything to the client / local sim and get rid of the asset server / centralized inventory server.

And yah, anyone can host their own servers to! Wouldn't that be great

Whereas I agree that inventory sizes are nuts (mine for example) this is due in large part to the absolutely atrocious inventory management tool.

I will be amused when this is implemented, followed by per letter typed charges (a service) and per minute connect time charges (a service). Then we'll have all our names changed to the form 123456,789 and it will be like 1985 and Compuserve. Retro is very "in" these days.

No wait, I've got it sussed: they are following the major airlines in pricing policy. For an additional $5 you may purchase a floatation device in the event of a water landing.

this is just totaly beyond stupid!!! lets see you use tiers instead of taxes to beging with or so it was said. things are going a little to well in SL everyone is happy so the next idea? lower everyones stipends and stop event funding. OH GREAT IDEA!!! next lets see people don't pay enough in SL now the lindens are raiseing island costs!!!! now whats next oh yes TAXESSSS!!!!! this inventory tax goes through what next object rez tax? teleport use tax? oh I know how about a IM tax!!! I don't know about everyone else in SL but I am no millionaire!!!! and at the rate things are going thats going ot be the only people who will actually be able to enjoy SL, this isn't Second Life its Real Life the rich get richer by taxing the poor everyone welocme to Second Life!!!!

Question those of us that do build and create things already pay ALOT to upload textures, clothes, poses/animations and evreything else, oh I know 10L is not much till you upload 10 outfits here 10 textures there, now besides paying ot upload them we will be charged to store them as well???!!?!?

If Inventories are that big a problem then put in a place a way for residents to use there own resoureces abd save or backup stuff localy, however I am sure there will be a charge for that too!!??