Why does LL detract from the new user experience to protect ruthless capitalists?

So the other day I invited a friend of mine to join SL... here I was telling her about how cool SL is, how it's the ideal place for a creative person like her, and that she could make a lot of money here... so she asks for the URL, and I give it to her, with the following remarks:
1) "Oh, uh, careful out there, it's full of sex and nudity everywhere. Hope that's ok with you."
2) "Ah, and btw, if you buy first land, don't sell it. People will try to rip you off."
3) "Also - don't buy anything. Everyone's out to take advantage of you, they resell freebies."
She ended up not joining SL after all
When will LL realize that absolute freedom is anarchy, and that they should NOT follow the ToS very strictly unless they are willing to continuously search for and document abusive behavior in them?

You say that like its a bad thing.

-Ghoti

Don't blame Linden Lab for your terrible salesman skills! Heck, I'm surprised you didn't warn her about getting pregnant when standing in close proximity to pink balls.

Absolute freedom is heavenly. I'm sure they don't have a police force and resmods in heaven.

Maybe not, but Heavens forums have resmods, and their equivalent of the cornfield is hellish, or so I'm told.

I think you sold her a point of view, not warned her about "the way it is".

Sex everywhere? Not really. I explore a lot, but coming across anything overtly sexual is still uncommon.

There are those trying to get a new resident to sell thier first land for a pittance, but as fasr as I can tell, they're the minority you'd expectthem to be - and there are folks working to educate those same new residents so they won't get ripped off.

As for the scum reselling freebies... well, same as the first land situation. Scum like that really are a tiny minority, most little shops you stop by are folks giving the sales thing a shot with thier own stuff.

It's not a perfect situation, but no situation ever is. SL is no more a "wretched hive of scum and villany" than is RL.

Wow, Eggy. What an amazing presentation. I can't think of any reason why you failed to convert that customer.

Anyway. Here's a DELICIOUS cheeseburger I grilled up just for you! It's got mushrooms and swisscheese, too! I see you're very eager to eat it, but let me tell you a few things, first.

1) The cow who died to make this meat probably had an air hammer smash through its skull as a means of execution.
2) Mushrooms are a fungus. Kind of like mold. They grow in dark places, often on dead things that smell bad.
3) Between all this beef, mushroom and cheese, there are a lot of calories in this meal. Especially if you have that beer with it! Consume this combination too often and you might die of a painful heart attack as your wife watches you, life fading from your eyes, terror written all over her face as she screams into the telephone for an ambulance, realizing that she'll now have to raise your children all alone.

What? What do you mean, you don't want to eat it? It's delicious! Come back here!

Or, my own favorite example, which sounds more appetizing: a steak, or the heated muscle tissue of a castrated bull?

But we still love you, Betaboy.

We need a Worst Case Scenario handbook for SecondLife

Scenario: You just teleported to a freind telling you check out this rockin' new club, and when you arrive, the full blinginess of the scene brings your computer to a seizure-inducing halt.

What to Do:
If you can still use the interface, try disabling Particles, and other non-essential rendering options. If you're running Local Lighting, Shadows, Ansitropic, etc, turn them off and restart.
If you wish, you can flee.

A year ago, I'd have turned off this and that, turned down settings to improve my fps and so on... These days, I'd log out and do something else. Apart from a few people, SL isn't fun any more.

What customer, she's a friend of mine, a designer by trade. It shouldn't be up to new users to slalom around SL avoiding all the crap out there, they have a reasonable expectation that the environment will be safe for them. Just like in RPGs where you can't kill people in cities or going PK is an OPTION.
Well, in SL there is no OPTION, there is no way to avoid people who are out to get you. The minute you make a new account and show up at the welcome area there's people trying to get you to cyber them or hire you to go to a club and be a "dancer" or "escort". You know what someone told a friend of mine at the welcome area once? "You look expensive", as if SL was this big virtual brothel where it is somehow a reasonable expectation that the first woman you come across will be a whore.
You cannot release a single square of land without some scanner baron swooping down on you to get it, you can't own a parcel of first land without people harassing you, offering a whole L$500 for it - whow, DOUBLE YOUR MONEY!
You buy a nice piece of land, then someone buys a single square to put a horrible sign on it and set it for sale at a ridiculous price, so as to extort you into "buying the view".
eBay has policies in place to fight scammers. Why does LL not do anything about SCAMMERS?

What world are you living in? Surely this isn't the same one I've been inhabiting since August 2004.

The griefers are just expressing their creative side. Come on Eggy, griefers are people too. thank goodness virtual land extortionists have a place they can call home in SL.

Was there ever a time when a person could rant on these forums and be talked down by nice people that cared about each other? Gosh trying to imagine it made my brain short seven nodes nodes nodes nodes short seven short:

Eggy, when did you get so cynical? Yeesh! Freedom has its price, and it's worth every annoyance in my opinion. Why didn't you tell her about all the good stuff? Sounds like you were trying to turn her off from SL before she got any chance to discover it for herself. Advice about what to avoid is good but methinks you overdid it. I've never participated in any MMOG that didn't have a lot of scamming dickheads in it that you had to watch out for. SL is no worse than any other, and that's amazing considering that it has something no other MMOG does... honest to god freedom with no velvet ropes, predefined paths, or cow fences.

PS. When are you going to contact me in world so I can pay you for my vendor mods?

I love this idea, Burke! Write it!

coco

Write it, and not only will i buy it, Ill let you chuck a vendor on my land.

You were unselling Second Life to your friend. This is analogous to self-effacing behavior but in this case you were doing for SL. The points you made to your friend are valid however they might have been better shared once your friend actually got an account and had been through the tutorials etc.

If car salesmen gave you quotes of the following you would never buy a car:
-# of accidents per year
-# of fatalities per year
-the impact your car will have on the environment
-the potential results of lack of exercise due to the convenience of your car
-car insurance rates
-the worst accidents ever recorded in history

Truly a shining example of model citizens. Car salesmen, those loveable people, world reknowned for their honest, transparent behavior!
We should definitely have more people like car salesmen, and encourage everyone to adopt a similar attitude.
What I did or didn't do is BESIDE THE POINT. She would have found out eventually, and like so many people, she would have run away screaming.
Online games and environments are generally a safe environment that can provide clean entertainment for the whole family, not a haven of corruption that tries to tempt parasites and losers with the possibility of making an easy buck off of the unwary.
If LL can't make an online medium as safe and regulated as everyone else has, then they will fall behind their competitors eventually.

Well, it's clearly the same world *I* have been inhabiting since 2003, when some clever people put the free donation script inside a box and textured it with "Win L$20k!":
/120/9a/7445/1.html

Not to mention the insane amount of threads we've seen recently
Long before the Bush Guy, there was a guy named Chance Small who also bought tiny squares of land and set them for sale at L$1600. LL plays the ostrich, stuffing its head in the sand and saying, as always, something that is technically correct but completely beside the point, like "people have a right to resell land for the price they desire", while ignoring the INTENT of people, which is the only thing that matters. It doesn't matter WHAT you do, as long as your goal is to defraud someone. When will LL raise the bar? Right now SL is a haven for scammers and all other sorts of parasite. I would like to believe they can do better than this.

I think a lot of us forget what its like to be a new player in SL - we've been around long enough to see lots of examples of the bad or seedy side, and we forget what made SL so exciting to discover in the first place.

If I had gotten Eggy's warnings before I joined, I probably wouldn't have signed up either. As it was, I came in cold, with only the vaguest idea of what SL was about - that you could create anything, import textures, make clothes, and explore what other people have made. My first night inworld I ran into a sex ball shop, but my discovery only really made me think "Wow, they're serious - you really CAN make anything here, huh". I was too facinated by the buildings and landscaping and thinking about being able to get my own land and make my own stuff to give sexballs more than a cursory thought.

When I got my first land, I sold it for about $L2k and was stoked I had some money in my pocket. Yeah, I probably undersold, but it didn't faze me in the least. It was the difference of a few $US dollars after all, and this was when you still had to buy Lindens off GOM or IGE.

The joy of SL is in the discovery...same with just about everything else in life. There's every chance your friend could have signed on and had tons of fun, griefless days on her first land plot surrounded by other goofy noobie builds and she wouldn't have known the difference. Sure, you warned her about the bad stuff that *could* happen, but taken as a whole, I think a lot of us would agree that our positive experiences in SL far outweigh the bad - or else we probably wouldn't be here.

Eggy, aren't you the same bloke who told me I didn't know how to sell something a few days ago in IM? Sheesh.

"Here, try SL, but don't log in, or else a land baron will gang rape you and stab your kittens with high heels."

Yes, sign me up for 3, please.

HAY GUYZ SL SUXX IF YOU JOIN IT YOU'LL SUXX TOO K

bye

This is how I would have handled it (I guess I'm an opti-realist):

1) "Some people are into sex and nudity. LL allows a lot of freedom. But if you're not into that stay away from the strip clubs and you likely won't run into much."
2) "Before you sell your first land, research the prices to try to get more for it. It's an opportunity to make money."
3) "Don't buy anything at first. There are a lot of people that give things away for free. Get to know these and save up your money for something really special."

I fully encourage you to go lobby Mattel to get them to start a Care Bear's version of SL... then see how many grown adults are willing to use it. There's a reason most of us don't limit ourselves to Sesame street and Run Spot Run media... we've grown up enough to know we can make our own choices.

A pamphlet for new residents, mentioning Mature zones, First land's real value, and resellers would work just as well to protect those who care to protect themselves.