Money, money, money, money, MONEY, money, drama, money, money....

So, what else is there to do in Second Life?

Like, y'know, fly a kite or something?

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This space is reserved for non-monetary debate in General.


I'll begin.

Are the sandboxen doing their stated job? Do we need more of them in Second Life as the population grows? Alternate solutions?

How's the prim system doing? Any improvements you would make?

Let's hear what mentors have to say. Are you still hosting classes? Why or why not?

What do you think Second Life will be a year or two from now?

Do you think Linden Labs is doing a good job with (non-financial) issues? Are they advancing the platform too much? Are they catering to "cool features" too much? Why or why not?

How much for the kite?

I'd like to see prim limits and avatar limits in sims go up. Otherwise, I think things are fine.

I don't use the sandboxes. And when I see how much the police blotter is filled with ARs from sandboxes, I'm probably not going to start. It's why I have a premie account. I play with prims on my own land. Sadly, when I had a house I could often not create the things I wanted because I ran out of prims. Solution: delete prims, get a smaller house or buy more land. None are very good options.

I want to address the question about the future of SL, though. One of my dearest friends in SL has been here since the beginning, and has seen the changes. Discussing it with her has confirmed my gut feeling that SL has and will continue to naturally evolve as the subscriber base grows. SL will move away from being a small, elite (in a good way) group of scripters and builders into a more popularized, dumbed-down world. It is already happening. The rise of the Tringorati is the first symptom.

Success in SL will become contingent on appealling to the lowest common denominator, just like commercial network TV. Second Life is on the cusp of the change, moving away from a brilliant content-creation platform into the realm of games like Sims Online.

I'm not passing judgement on the transition. I've seen too many game companies abandon cutting-edge, niche ideas in favor of a more popular business model. It's how things work. But at the same time I can understand the sadness of people like my friend, who remember SL as it used to be.

Don't be a wuss Jeffrey, post those all as seperate threads!

Just my humble opinion...

I think we have a LOT of folks out there that are terrified of change.

When the bulldozer is coming at you, and stepping out of the way isn't an option - hopping on board is a lot more productive than trying to dig your heels in & hold it back.

<Lordfly Digeridoo> MoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoney MONEY MoneyMoneyMoney MOOLAH MoneyMoney money cash bling MoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoney bling cash. Bling bling. MoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoneyMoney cash money bling dollars currency. MoneyMoneyMoney greed currency. Money.

I think the titles assertion that SL is 8 parts money and 1 part drama is off.

I think its clearly 7 parts money and 2 parts drama

Answering without reading other replies, in good survey scientific method:

1. Not sure what the sandboxes are supposed to be for, but I have found them useful to go through my inventory to look at and get rid of a bunch of house parts I would't have the prims to review on my own land. The ones I have been to are crowded with debris, though.

2. I think we should be able to have more prims on less land. I wish, too, that linked prims counted as one prim!!

4. Judging by the chart on mmogcharts.com (I think is the url), it should be reaching 80k people in a years time. Or somewhere around there; I haven't drawn out any curve.

However, the changes I have been in on and see coming now seem to be mostly for the worst. The changes in making the mechanics of the game work are for the better. But those that are social in nature are turn-offs to me. For example: Draconian new rule for forum participation; flip-flop on the bounce scripts, making the exploring I had looked forward to increasingly not worth it; land and/or tier soon costing more (I think) for groups to put on things like Touchstone Fair; removal of subsidies for events with nothing in place to make up for it (such as increased dwell); auctions going basically to the huge landholders; wanting to make players pay for having extra inventory; less First Land available, and then only at odd times; the idea of charging to put your event on the event schedule; the desire to make that schedule more exclusive; i.e., only for those events considered quality enough, with no yard sales or Grand Openings, etc., ; and those are just off the top of my head.

All these changes or changes to come seem to me indicative of being total out of touch with the average player, and the average player is what is needed for the game to grow; hence the 80k might well not come to pass.

All these changes or changes to come seem to me very elitist as well, and moving away from democracy (in terms of free speech, inclusion, etc.) and toward the worst aspects of capitalism (such as monolopies, increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and making it harder for the have-nots ever to become thehaves).

Whether or not these things will prove to be turn-offs to everyone remains to be seen.

5. I'm not sure what you mean by "advancing the platform too much," unless it means making dumb mistakes in an effort to reach the vaunted appelation of "metaverse" - as if that means anything anyway besides just the regular old Internet with fancier graphics.

I don't think they are catering to cool features too much. The streaming video, for instance, was worth every minute of it. It may be true that we haven't quite figured out its best uses (and/or our computers can't really handle it), but I still think it was hugely important.

As for doing a good job with non-financial issues, no. I don't think they can see anything besides numbers. (And I'm not so sure they do a good job with the numbers/financial issues, either.) This is epitomized by the fact they think of us in terms of creators and consumers alone. They seem to have a truly difficult time understanding the need for entertainment content.

On the plus side, they make every effort to communicate with the players, and to include them in a lot of the decision-making and also let them know what is coming up, or might be coming up.

They don't have good people skills, though, when they marginalize another player, or make fun of another player, in front of other players, at Town Hall meetings, for example. Or allow other players to do the same thing en masse. That isn't professional. And what happens to one of us can happen to any of us. Similarly, they need to make sure one group of players doesn't wind up stifling the opinions of others, such that too many become afraid to post on the forums, or make them feel unwelcome at Linden gatherings, which should be non-political and open to all.

coco

Edited to add: I see hardly anyone has answered ahead of me anyway.

Unless you're speaking of the forums, in which case it is 7 parts drama and 2 parts money.

lol I agree with Juro!

coco

Or maybe

5 parts drama about Land and money

3 parts drama about Griefers and how they cost you money.

2 parts drama about the FIC .. and their money

2 parts drama about LL going out of business

1 part drama about drama

Shaken not stirred - watch out stomache here it comes.

Good one, colette! But I would say it is at least 10 parts drama about drama.

coco

Oh irony.

Anyway... I think they're seeing more growth of late than they have in a while and in many ways, it's scaring them. They're too reactive and that isn't always a good thing. But growing pains usually pass and I'm sure things will settle down.

Irony my foot, Miss Cienna. Did I exclude myself from that equation? Are you excluding yourself? Because to do so would be in dire error.

coco

This isn't Linden Lab's doing... it's people who enjoy playing "The Sims" finding our world.... to break Jeffrey's no money talk rules It just mean larger markets for content creators.

As far as I'm concerned, this is far more fun to read than endless streams of GOM, tier, and copyright threads.

Keep 'em coming!

I got a feeling that LL is perfectly pleased to receive all those Sims and There players. In fact, I betcha they are perfectly ECSTATIC about it. I would even go so far as to say they have encouraged it - which does make it very much their doing.

Gah - I have now proved that a person can spend practically all day on these forums.

coco

Twelve drummers drumming,
Eleven pipers piping,
Ten lords a-leaping,
Nine ladies dancing,
Eight maids a-milking,
Seven swans a-swimming,
Six geese a-laying,
Five golden rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a partridge in a pear tree!

Honestly, if we didn't have to pay for our area, I wouldn't care about money in sl at all.

As it is, profit is probably tertiary. If not less so. As long as it sustains the land, that's all that matters.

Hell, I'd be all for exempting certain areas from recieving dwell or traffic payments, if it meant a lower tier cost.

We're one of the most successful businesses in SL, but we didn't even intend that to happen.

Someone should make a huge waterpark, with slides and stuff.

Check out this cool chart graphing MMOG active subscriptions.... poor poor TSO... poor poor There.... notice the positive slope for SL...

MMOG Active Subscriptions

Someone tried in JAVA island at one point. It fell through fairly quickly. One day it was there, the next...


Closest I know is Spitoonie, but they're recently closing their doors.

Any thoughts on sustaining "community projects" of this sort? I know Numbakulla is recently seeing a LOT of help from residents, keeping it alive. The problem is many of these places are not very well-known, in part because of the incentives of the Find system.

I refuse to believe that monetary concerns alone are keeping these places out of the limelight in Second Life. Hence the point of this thread.

Yeah, Sachmo, I've been following his charts for two years. I notice they have the most recent month up, and TSO continues its downard slide. There, on the other hand, is actually gaining a little, surprisingly, and has never gone down at all.

coco

Correction: We are coming on to the next reporting, in July. Nothing new reported on TSO since January.

There lost a significant portion of its membership, so it not showing any downward activity is not accurate - given the fact that many beta users have full lifetime accounts, it may be due to the fact that the accounts still exist. It has gained some traction now that it is being updated, but it is way off its original peak usage during beta.

Also, the membership you purchase for There, or at least in October, was a full year's worth. So even though I haven't played There in a couple of months, I'm still going to be registered as a member number. So, the way that There does it is an unreliable method to chart in comparison to memberships of other games. A more accurate picture would be of active memberships, i.e. who still plays their membership? But that would be a hard thing to chart.