Calling Card Removal

I just wanted to comment on this little tidbit, as last night I had a discussion with a friend who was leaving SL because he was losing 2000 calling cards, which would remove him from the top of the heap and therefore negatively effect his stipend/bonus whereas he was going in the hole financially.

I completely understand how people who are on the leader boards can get upset when something like this is done. Although, I don't think this was/is a non-expected issue. Honestly, I don't believe you can rely on non-existent players to keep you in a position of leadership.

Rightfully so, you have the choice to leave the community, but I also think you could make up the calling cards again if you truly wanted to.

Now, one thing did bother me about this, my friend also stated that not only were the calling cards being removed, but any ratings these players who are RIP are also being removed from the person(s) they might have rated. This I don't understand. The person who did the rating had to pay their own Linden Bucks to rate the other person. Therefore, this service was paid for and therefore shouldn't be removed because someone goes RIP. Let's take a look at a real world situation. Let's assume that Haney Linden was voted into the Football Hall of Fame. Now, three years from now, three of the people that voted for Haney die tragically in a shuffleboard accident. Do we remove those three votes from Haney and "Un-induct" him from the Hall of Fame? The same thing shouldn't happen in SL. Because someone is gone RIP, doesn't mean their votes no longer count, it only means they're dead, but their opinion should still be respected.

Lastly, and this will be a touchy subject to all, and I apologize up-front for any offense people might take.

Everyone on a Leader Board is getting a bonus for being there. That's all good and well, and I frankly don't care about anyone getting a bonus. But, everyone getting those bonuses should realize that is exactly what they are, a "bonus". You shouldn't rely on them week after week to get you by. If the bonus is what is keeping you from going under financially, I would strongly suggest you find a way to make yourself non-dependent on the bonus. Otherwise, one day someone is going to knock you off the leader board and where will you be?



Bob "The Builder" Bunderfeld

IMHO, anyone who worries THAT much about cards, ratings, money, and their rank in the Leader Board, is very welcome to leave.
Some people come to this game to enjoy themselves peacefully, make friends, explore the world.
Others see this as some sort of competition. When all you care about is being #1, everyone else becomes an enemy who prevents you from getting to the top.
This game would be a far better place without a leader board. When you let your "score" influence your way of playing you will eventually become a rate miner, a tax evader, a card fiend, in a mad effort to climb the ladder and stay up there. If you have something to prove to the world you should seek therapy instead of online gaming, or perhaps spend more time proving your worth in the real world instead of here.
It is obvious, but I should cover my ass by outright stating it, that the opposite is in no way implied or true.
I have many friends up in the leader boards who are very nice people and got there just by being good builders or clothes makers or whatever, and not even actively caring about their rank. I'm not that poorly placed myself anyway.
Let us all be vectors for friendship, tolerance and understanding, instead of greed and petty rivalry.

I forgot to add, I very much agree with the removal of ratings for expired users. It makes rate mining a bit more difficult and I believe rate mining is the worst problem with this game right now.
Unless you get regularly rated you will lose all your bonus money to the rate miners who neither deserve nor use it.
I lost over $1300 bonus(35% of my income) just for going on a short 3 day vacation, which is silly.
I purposefully dont have any source of income other than votes and donations. All my objects and events are free for everyone to enjoy and I intend to keep it that way forever.

Eggy, I think you might have misunderstood what Bob was trying to say.

Its not about the cards...its not about the ratings...what its about is being able to do what you want and have the fun you are talking about and by having those cards and having those ratings one can afford to make larger wonderous builds that people enjoy seeing and tinkering with.

Unfortunately for those of us that build and create things and script for people we need monitary methods to offset our work. If we are building we dont have time to run a store advertise or even make product to sell. Some of us do it for the love of the game and building. Like you mentioned some of your friends that are higher on the leaderboards. I know several of them and from what I see its a 50/50 split but 9 times out of 10 the ones that are doing it for the love of the game are gaining recognition for their efforts. The ones that are competing for "Status" normaly only live on the boards a short while because they cannot maintain the "Love of the game" and get dishearted and quit working at it because they deem this too much like work.

I see what Bob is saying and I tend to agree with him in this respect. If a person rates you and then they leave the game. Their Rating shouldnt leave, that money was spent to rate you and give an opinion of you and your work effort. Its a just reward for a job well done. Taking that away from us is like saying ..."That person is dead and their opinion of you is not of any worth." to me that would be like you telling me that my grandfather that dearly loved me and gave me all his advice in life, that all his advice, love, mentorship and opinions are no longer relavant now that he is dead.

Remember we are talking principle here so please dont take that as a personal offense Eggy its not directed at you its directed in a sense for everyone to understand.

Kinda the same principle on calling cards too but calling cards are really more like telephone numbers so not as important IMHO.

Ok I will hush now.

Shadow

Bob, are you sure you didn't mean 200, rather than 2000 cards? James Miller lost a good 200 calling cards and I haven't heard a complaint from him on what has to be a big hit in weekly stipend. There are a lot of great new residents coming in, and a great opportunity to meet new friends and rebuild the card collection.

Well, it could have been 200, I dunno You know mean when it comes to numbers.

Remember everyone, when fine tuning your alignment on objects, use the 1/1000th digit in the Position Parameters of the Axis you wish to move. For you who aren't math wiz's like me, that's the RIGHT most digit after the decimal place



Bob "The Builder" Bunderfeld

LMAO...even at 1/1000th bob the prims are still going to have that flashing texture look because the prims are fighting over who is going to be seen first...LOL

Well, there will be times when overlapping is going to happen.

But, for the majority of the time, overlapping DOESN'T have to happen. There are ways to make like objects fit together perfectly, if you work at it.



Bob "The Builder" Bunderfeld

I understand what you two are saying shadow, however, rating bonuses are proportional and not absolute.
If there are 100 total ratings in the game and you have 10, then its the same as having 20 out of 200 or 50 out of 500, or 500 in 5000.
The vast majority of players who rate and leave are newbies. Those who usually get the most newbie ratings are the ones who rate mine. Decent, hard working, talented people, will keep their high ratings since they are rated by everyone, not just the newbies who come and go. Rate/card miners who chase noobs and get most of their ratings out of them will be the ones who suffer from this change.

Actually, come to think of it, a system where the bonus you get from ratings would be proportional to WHO rated you instead of just the amount of ratings you have, would be a very good fix for rate mining. Being rated by Steller Sunshine would be worth gold, since she was the first user ever, and the newbie ratings wouldn't be worth much.
The older members would know how to rate carefully and adequately. Raising the cost of rating would also help.
It would go like this:
Calculate the value of the rating based on how many days the person has been in the game, and store it.
This value should not be changed so the value of the rating wouldnt grow with time, or be recalculated if you change the rating to negative and back.
If you rated someone positive early in the game and then a few months later change it to negative, a new, different, stronger value should be calculated for the neg rate and also be stored and unchangeable.
This allows the older and more knowledgeable members to help the Lindens police abusers, since a neg rating from, say, Steller, would have a drastic effect on a person's score and bonus.
This also eliminates the problem of being neg-rated "en masse", since older and wiser users arent as likely to engage in such juvenile behaviour.
Since the value of you rating someone would increase with time, it also encourages people to delay rating, to get to know each other before rating themselves, and ratings would be fairer and better thought out instead of the current crap we have where people card and rate each other before talking.

Ok Eggy...merited that your Idea is a decent one. However, Not everyone Rates a Noob. For instance I hardly have any ratings for myself I rate everyone else based on initial contact first apperances. If they look decent and carry themselves well with in the crowd they are in I rate...apperance. If they speak to me when I say hello to them I rate them on attitude. Building I wait on till I see what they have built or if they have built anything.

But back to the point here. The system you are talking about then would be biased at this point because of the old system. For instance there were a lot of players I knew in beta that are no longer with us because they could not afford the monthy premium or they were returning to college soon. So with that when they scrubbed all those accounts all my lost friends now that means that those valued opinions of those members were nothing to anyone else except me. Because of this I lost ratings...Eggy you know me I dont rate mine its not my style. But still yet you also know what I am capable of and when I dont get the ratings to support the builds they stand half erected and unfinished because I am struggling with taxation.

To come up with a fair rating system at this point would be hard to do. If you based it on how long a person has been in the game that would be unfair also. Why because maybe a person hasnt done anything in quite a while and not contributed to the overal populace. I know of one that I can honestly say that about that bought a lifetime membership but hasnt been seen since opening day on the 28th of Jun.

So Eggy even with the system not being absolute at this point resolving the rating thing is bigger than any two people can debate.

BTW...most enjoyable debate so far.

I would lean towards doing away with the rating systme all together. It's a nice idea in a perfect world, but I can see how it is misread, abused, and honestly a bit of a sureral stretch even for this game. I mean, look at it.. the first catagory is "Top Score". I metaphorically look at this as ratings symbolizing weapons. Your av is loaded, and can run around "shooting" people with ratings to get a better "score". If anything, it almost implies that there is a need for trigger-happy individuals, despite any way one wants to look at it. Hell, we might as well add other catagories to it too. I'd love to see one on "Avatars Killed" up there... I can obviously see some of the marketting stradegy just on "Residents Reffered" alone. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice idea... but the system stinks. Do away with earning any type of monetary bonus on ratings and see how often people rate then. There is that percentage of the community that uses it the way it's intended... but diversity also affects us here.

Just my two pennies.

--Water

I agree with you Eggy, at least that last bit about being vectors for friendship and not rivalry. Honestly though I have yet to see any real rivalry amongst the people at the top of the boards. I used to be up there quite a bit a couple months back but I've slipped a lot since then because I've been busy making things... but from my own experience in making clothes, I expected there might be some resentment when I jumped full force into selling clothes. I discovered the opposite to be true. Everyone has been very helpful. We trade tricks of the trade. We send customers to each other when we don't personally have what they need. I've given away proprietary templates I spent close to 30 hours making to my fellow clothing makers free of charge because I thought they'd find it as useful as I have. Certainly the potential is there for people to become obsessed with their ratings and being very competitive, but I have yet to see that personally.

I don't think anyone that I know among the leaders are overly competitive. (and I certainly don't know them all) They're people who have lofty aspirations of what they want to accomplish. They build on a grander scale than stipend and bonus alone will support (I currently lose $5k a week on tax day), and so they work very hard to be able to maintain what they have. And if they weren't making something that people liked, or providing a service that people need, or making fun things for people to do, no one would be paying them. They're on top of the leader boards for a reason... you simply can't get there without being a benefit to the community. That's the beauty of the system.

And what Bob said about not counting on bonus money is sage advice. Mine just dropped by over $1000 this past week. Ouch. Guess I better get out there and meet some of the new peeps

That's the whole problem right there, Chip, screaming at ya. When you are busy making new content to benefit the community, instead of being rewarded for it, you drop drastically in ranking and bonus because while you were doing useful stuff someone was harvesting newbie ratings.
I understand the need to encourage socializing, but exactly how many friends (and ratings) is someone supposed to have? Or are we supposed to go meet the noobs and be their friend for the 5 minutes it takes them to rate us?
Our bonus shouldnt be dropping like that. I have better ratings and far more money than a certain friend of mine who is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest builders of all time, just because she has been busy with RL matters. Is she no longer a good builder, is it?
IMHO the bonus should drop only when im neg rated and maintain itself when my ratings stay the same.

Eggy, in retrospect to what you just said is that not the same thing as what bob and I have been trying to portrey here.

If I have a rating at one point my bonus and stipend should be this. I shouldnt suffer because someone else decided they didnt want the game but I should suffer if someone decides that they want to rate me negatively.

Just a thought or question eggy let me know what you think.

Shadow

Chip, the other designers all rave about your stuff, and even pass out landmarks to your place. Now if you'd only do a few more unisex or men's items I could shop there too! On the newb front, we've had a lot of really nice new residents come in, the last few days - along with one or two unbelieveable jerks - and don't worry, they get landmarks to all the stores; from Sexy Loungerie to Plasma Rifles, we got you covered.

I believe dead ratings should be cleaned up just like the cards and everything else.
I believe, but cannot prove, that the rate miners would be far, far, FAR more affected by the cleanup than any of you decent talented folks.
Its really up to the Lindens to do the statistics, as we have no access to the data on how the rating cleanup would affect people.
What I was arguing against is the rating inflation that is greatly accelerated by rate mining.
With the present system, you cannot merely be good and have a high rating, you need to have a high weekly influx of ratings or you will fall behind.
So either you go out and actively try to get ratings, which is rate mining, or you start losing money because, and here's the important part, you are too busy actively working on content for the community's benefit!
Who should we strive to reward here, the ones who produce valuable content, or the ones who instead spend their time chasing newbies to get ratings out of them?
That's basically the problem both me and Chip have had. When we are busy working on important things we dont get rated and our income drops drastically.
With the present system, if there was no rate mining, there would be less inflation, and we could devote our time to projects without worrying about our income suffering from it.
If ratings expired, we would probably have a lot less rate mining and the people like you and chip who are talented and productive members of the community would be properly rewarded.

Oh, ant btw shadow...
Due to the proportional nature of the system, if the rate miners get more hurt than you, you will actually be able to gain bonus money by losing ratings, and climb a few steps in the leaderboard. The financial impact should only be negative to those who have abused the system, and positive to those who havent, even if everyone will lose some ratings.
Again, the real data is in the Lindens' hands, but this is naturally to be expected in such a system.

Thank you eggy now I see where your going with it and it does make sense what you said. My mind has been clouded the last few days because of my current delima both in game and out. But I agree with you now that you have cleared up what you were saying before either I was confused or misinterpreting what you were saying. But now I agree and see what you mean. again thank you.

sometimes one brain cell overides the other only cause its got it pushed up against an eyeball....

Thanks Eggy.

I'm in total agreement with you on that Eggy. I really wish that change over the week didn't factor so heavily into the bonus. That's what causes the most fluctuation. Hopefully the new easier rating features in 1.1 will be a help for those of us that aren't overly social. I'm also hoping that the dwell system will help to. Just have to wait and see.