SecondLife THEYR world YOUR imagination

Ok i just wanted to drop this, i am sick , very sick of one thing in this game, i can live with it but i really want to point it.

Does peoples here have no ideas?

I mean, i am seeing it all the time, someone create something innovative and a few days later you see 10-20 other peoples that decide "oh its great i want to create one too".

When a sim owner create an original game its usually for making peoples come in his sim, enjoy something special and unique
WHY THE HELL arent the other scratching a bit theyr head and think about SOMETHING ELSE, i know we cannot pattent ideas, and hopefully, but i am sick of seing some peoples that seems unable to compute an idea and in theyr egoism décide that the "game" must be theyr

we saw this with bingo
we saw this with tringo
we saw this with clubs

there is some good examples of exclusive places where you can have fun and that looks no others but well ... its exeptions

What kills me is you spelled 'innovative' correctly.

But yeah, people rip each other off all the time. In art, its 'inspiration' in commerce its 'gimmie a piece of that pie'.

Pretty much.

When you think about it, true innovation - or even diversification - is a dying breed in mainstream Second Life. Not many people seem to have the willpower to make something unique - and those of us that do tend to keep it to ourselves as the "popular" ideas continue to draw in people we don't want to be around.

This is, in my opinion, the biggest problem to tackle overall: simply incenting people to be unique. We used to have this with Show and Tell events, but unfortunately they were gobbled up on the events browser.

This is all interrelated, really. The "old" system worked with the old userbase; the old system is not working with the new userbase of consumers and socialites.


It'll get better. But first, we'll need to learn how things really work.


What I've noticed is while the main grid suffers in many areas, the dawn of the personal sim has begun to bring people with like interests together. While the Events Browser is sinking under the weight of Same Old Same Old, web-on-a-prim looks to replace it quite handily. While clubs suck in socialites with the promises of easy money and profits, many acknowledge that artificial incentives are fundamentally flawed and will one day evaporate.


Here's my prediction:

Fast forward to a year or two from now. Social niches have brought themselves together.

You rez yourself into a park, overlooking a quiet village. In the center of the town lies the web terminal prim, which allows for easy access and creation of events. Browsing this, you find a building event, and bookmark it. You notice that the sim owner is charging a L$20 fee for attendance, which will go toward the winners and event fees.

Simple enough. Such a sim is already in existance now - and all I've done is "cut off" the noted nuisance from view. They'll still exist... but will have gravitated to their own niches and away from yours.

But what does this accomplish? Citing simple psychology, the reason so much "copy-cat-blanket-marketting" goes on now is simply because Second Life's design has led it to a stage of impersonal behavior. I've cited this as "consumerism," but that is only a part of it.

Simply put, it's a bigger and better incentive to "steal another idea" and "generate a lot of traffic" than it is to be original. The reasoning is obvious - since dwell equals cash, and marketting a new idea equals risk, taking a proven dwell-getter equals less risk and more gain.

Now, clip to my example. Suppose everyone has gravitated to their own niche of 5 or more "personal sims." Since everyone knows everyone else in that environment considerably better, they'll probably know what's real and what's a derivative. Witchhunter impulse kicks in, copycat "hey look at what I made" is shunned from this community.

Already that's a disincentive to copying that doesn't exist in a larger-scale world. To add to this, smaller communities will offer larger market share to the original creator... meaning copycats will have a harder nut to crack in that community. Their only recourse? To go somewhere else.



See where I'm going here?

My prediction is Second Life will splinter into literally thousands - perhaps millions - of smaller worlds. It's almost a natural instinct for some of us. Of course, you'll still have people who will transcend these worlds, but their ideas will need to be very strong.

I feel this "natural evolution" will play into the evolution of Second Life itself nicely. Philip has mentioned his want to have sim "versioning" - what better way than this? Others have wanted space sims, under the sea sims, other worlds entirely, and other ideas that are just not supported with one single, continuous grid.

But they can be if the grids are many.



In the meantime, the only recourse is really to stick with your niche and fight it out. With luck, this will prove to be an important lesson in psychology to pass on to future residents.

well personally i noticed the increase of what i call "bad behavior" in the private sims owners

its some kind of sedentarism, i mean some peoples that own a sim narrowed theyr SL experience to theyr own sim and it lead to "dammn this thing sim owner X has set up is cool i want one for MINE"

Some, not all. I can still name no fewer than 10 personal sims doing something interesting or "different" off the top of my head.

It's getting there, and a lot of this still has to do with Dwell being The Big Thing in the minds of some landowners.

I'm still banking on Web-on-a-Prim and the release of the server code to be just the panacea we need. My new forum title says it all, for both ways it can be read.

On a completely random note, yay 1,500 posts. Do I get a prize?

... don't answer that.

But the guy who invented Tringo not only coins money himself for patenting and selling his invention, people pay something like $12000 or $16000 for Tringo and similar games in SL, so it's not as if there is any "stealing" of ideas at all.

I imagine it's one club that copied one other club that Kyra is talking about. If the proliferation of Tringo games in SL and on the events list is described as "copying" or "cloning," it's copying that has been done with payment. It's mass culture that people found to give them income in this game...to become YOUR customers at your dozen shops, Kyra. I think it's worth having respect for customers like that who need money to buy clothes, accessories, animations, vehicles. In fact, the top content-producers and merchandisers to the masses who find them to be "people we don't like to be around" ought to think a little but more about how to enrich their content. In past eras in the real world, business tycoons used to sponsor the arts as well, whether film, dance, painting, theater, and there are SL equivalents to these areas. Such a huge gulf between your customers, the unwashed who just go to copy-cats clubs, and your high-end boutique stores and your life on secluded and gated communities you hideaway from to collect the payouts from your mainland vendors to sell to the unwashed masses is a set-up for rebellion in most settings.

I find the vision of SL splintering into a million words truly chilling and even frightening and I wonder how LL envisions their own role in presiding over this fractured, and even fascistic world. Fascistic, because it's main impetus isn't to create civilization, isn't to try to get along with others and devise dispute resolution measures or rights-protecting measures, but simple to go off to a private sim, mist up the sides, put the ban list on, create my filtered, combed admit list and high-end custom content and only be with "the people I like to be with". One imagines at least a few of these "every man is an island" concepts concluding treaties between each other to view each others' high-end custom content, but their prime motivation will be to keep out "the unwashed masses". The unwashed masses will then collagulate on the mainland grid, some turning to griefing in frustration, others leaving the game, with most perhaps resting for a time in ugly-filled and grief-filled newbie areas until they can migrate to a better life either in semi-zoned or zoned sims within the mainland or the private sims.

The idea that every man's home is his castle, and each individual piece of property is a sacrosanct bastion of individuality against the state, common in RL in liberal democracies and even under some authoritarian regimes, got thrown out the door in SL because they could not or would not establish some basic norms of decency to protect these smaller parcels. (Now they are simply transposing the concept to the private island and flipping the old adage "no man is an island" to make every man an island -- but it's a much more costly endeavor now.)

They could not seem to find a way to combat the problem of one person putting up a giant laggy club on a 1024 with strobe lights, utterly wrecking sim performance and the view for those on 32k or 65k on the rest of the sim. With just a few tweaks -- making people pay for their draw on sim performance as they pay for land tier, or making a few more Rules of Conduct (tall eyesores built exactly at the property line are discouraged) and dispute resolution mechanisms (finding ways to move small clubs like this to more appropriate areas near telehubs that are only better for their businesses).

In fact, I suspect some of the problems people fled from the mainland they are going to bring right with them to the private islands. Already there are clamorings about the building codes in some private islands. And last night when I went to one private island to fly around, I didn't find a single soul on 2 of them. There were beautifully-constructed houses, but not a soul. No life. Some of the owners seemed to be online but went elsewhere out of boredom in their own gated community, I guess.

When Jeff says it will take a strong personality to unite all these fractured fairy tales all over the grid, he's right -- and it might be the sort of strong personality you wouldn't want in a liberal democracy. It also leaves the burden on LL for devising unifying principles or themes or activities, and they may not be up to such a momentous task not only for lack of staff time but because they may not agree among themselves about what social vision they should be promoting.

Jeff, what means of mass communication or in-game communication do you intend to use to alert people to these niched web-on-a-prim where they will go and find these lovely cultivated private sims with the wine and cheese party on lot 1 to celebrate the new fashion line, the building class on lot 2 for intermediates, the clever Harpers-like word game on lot 3, the book club on lot 4 (I'm assuming the new splintered worlds are going to have more high-end cultural events than Tringo and nakie av dances).

And what happens if 10 or 20 lumpens show up en masse by accident because they are hungry for content? How do you keep out the masses? Do you make the sim with the web-on-the-prim members only in the land group or deeded group?

Jeffrey, you're right but you could also say exactly the same thing about Real Life. Success will always breed imitation (reality TV, anyone?), and innovation will always be the riskiest path for any business entrepeneur.

Some examples -

The music business: David Crosby gave an interview to PBS a while back ( The Way The Music Died ) wherein he notes the cycle of most musical genres, which begins with innovation but inevitably proceeds through over-commercialization and then death. Only new innovation keeps music fresh, and only the risk-taking companies are willing to fund ideas that haven't proven to be enormously popular yet.

The game business: The astounding success of World of Warcraft (over 1.5 million subscribers the last I saw) is attributable to two things, in my opinion: One is that the game itself features the simplest and most successful elements from other MMRPGs which have come before it. It is NOT an "innovative" game. It is a combination (or imitation) of all its predecessors, polished until it gleams. More cutting-edge games that take risks are never going to get the kind of high powered corporate funding that Blizzard got for WoW, because investors don't like taking risks.


I like the idea, but frankly all the publicity about the few people who are making real-life livings in SL has skewed the demographics in SL. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to over the last couple of weeks who came to SL hoping to make real money. Some, like me, didn't realize that opportunity was even there until we'd already been sucked in by the thrill of the virtual life, the community and the innovative ideas.


If you've read Alvin Toffler (Future Shock ), he predicted this over 40 years ago.


You can also make sure stuff you sell is always no copy and/or no trans depending on how super-secret and special it is. The 'magic bullet' one scripter created was that kind of unique, but he accidentally sold one that was modable and ended up generating hundreds of copycats, thus destroying the market for his special item.

I think the larger answer is to never give up trying new ideas. Jeffrey's analysis of the SL community isn't far off, but I think he's downplaying the real creativity of a large segment of this bunch. There are always new ideas waiting to happen.

Cindy

I'm wondering, given all the attention to copyright and securing content-creators' rights in SL, why someone who accidently clicked off the mod on a proprietary script couldn't manage to get action taken and get the script shut off and returned to his exclusive use.

The premise of "Future Shock" in part was that the shock of the new and the "future" would force people to retreat to conservative patterns and we see this in spades in SL where all kinds of niche lifestyles in fact involve not the latest achievements for, say, women's rights in the 20th and 21st centuries, but a retreat for women back to the Dark Ages of being chattel.

Here's Jeffrey Leach's review on amazon.com of the new edition of "Future Shock" which has many lessons for SL:



One of the ways people deal with the "future shock" of the modern world is to come to SL and create medieval worlds on private islands. The very technology of the future is what enables them to escape to the hallowed and comforting past.

Long before David Crosby there was the "Golden Age" of the classical heros and tales and exploits and monumental buildings and then the "Iron Age" of mass replication. It's inevitable that "iron ages" follow "golden ages" in games as well.

Oh yes. This is going to be fun.


It's not copying that's the problem here. It's simply lack of diversification. You posit this as the proliferation of "loss leaders;" I post it as the spread of a single "good" idea to the wrong ends.

The point of Tringo, as I see it, was to be fun and enjoyable, and more importantly to make Kermitt filthy rich. Simple enough. However, it is used in many areas as a facade for XXX club arrangements, or just plain "as a dwell getter." Where's the incentive to go any further? Surely, this must be the ultimate evolution of Second Life!

Right.

This mass behavior works because we're in a period of rampant anonymity in a lot of ways. But the world grows smaller... and we already see this behavior on the internet. Hell, this is it right here!



They don't. LL's end goal, as stated multiple times, is to relinquish control of Second Life unto itself, and build a market for themselves through it.



Niche behavior does not imply isolationism. My view still allows for a larger, "main grid" if you will, but I see this area reserved more for socialites. Really, my idea is no different than what's going on now, plus exponential growth, so leave the ranting at the door please.



In my opinion, it's all about finding the right niche. Not everywhere will flourish in your eyes - the point is you should have the right to choose. I feel that people will.



This completely and utterly misses the point of my stated argument, so if you wish to quote me, or indeed even paraphrase me, give me the courtesy of doing so in context.



That is one horrendous run-on sentence. But this is not the point.

www.google.com



Social Darwinism takes over in this case. It is not so much about "keeping the masses out" as it is "keeping those interested in," as is the case with the present internet. If Linden Labs had trouble "keeping the masses out" at large, we would already be at one-million-plus users.

This does not imply that all those users are not what you consider "the masses," but it does suggest that those who enjoy what they're doing, stay. Such will be the case with smaller sim culture.

Of course. You will never find me calling this is foolish from an economic standpoint.



Right on point. I've used this exact argument in several previous threads. Sentiments mirrored.




Not necessarily, but close. Ideas are free reign, and once an "idea" is discovered, usually there are people smart enough to weasel out how it was done. My stress is not on this, but rather on its behavioral impact.





Spot on. I agree. And I do definitely downplay creative potential, allowing for a "worst case scenario" view. It's what I do.

Oh, Prok, I do so agree with your every sentence in your first post here, and it is oh, so saddening.

coco

P.S. And your second post.

P.S. - as I read through this, this is really astounding. First I read Jeff's analysis and object to several primary assumptions therein, and plan to rebut them later. Then I read Prok's analysis, and agree sadly with most of it, particularly the history of the game portions. Then I get to Jeff's next post, and lo and behold - IT IS AMAZING! I didn't realize that when I was reading along so nicely and soberly Prok's post that I was . . . in fact . . . READING A RANT!
Wow.

Unless you know Kermit personally, then it is unfair to say his main point in making Tringo was to make him filthy rich. Firstly, a sum "in the low five figures" is hardly filthy rich. Secondly, the most successful creators almost NEVER create in order to become filthy rich (though that may be their secondary goal). They create because they get excited about their idea. They create because they must. And the most successful among them create because they want to please others with their creation. Only pure businesspeople have being rich as their primary motivation.

coco

excuse me thread wasnt aiming about pointing a person to make money or whatever but the LACK of willing to crerate unique places.

I have never owned a sim and will probably never but the fact someone had an idea to make his sim interesting i will personally consider to make something ELSE even if the idea rock.

i remember of 2 sims in sl one was created and was very nice and the second one seems to take all the caracteristics of the first one (probably because the owner of the second sim was amazed of the first one but wanted something simmilar he would OWN)

you cannot own everything cool other make so why not inovating instead of doing mimetism

And now, to Jeff's ideas.

"This is all interrelated, really. The "old" system worked with the old userbase; the old system is not working with the new userbase of consumers and socialites."

What new userbase of consumers and socialites? Where the heck are all these supposed one-dimensional parasites? True, I have found several people who enjoy what you might call "playing house" - by using their boughten Lindens to buy goods to decorate their sims and relax in them, and really don't build things with prims and scripts themseves.

But I would tend to call them "regular players." In fact, I do call them regular players - meaning those who like running around in the game, but find the learning curves for building and scripting too hard, too tedius, or too dull. My theory is that those are the very players who don't hang around long enough, and LL needs to give them something to do.

Do you not also socialize and consume? Me, I like to build things, and do. I like to create, and do, both here and irl, where I create for profit, and hope to profit from it here, too. But I also like to have my house in Azure Islands, and I also like to socialize. I would be more of a consumer, except I lack the money.

So where the heck is this dichotomy coming from - the us and them thing - the valuable, creative intelligence people who count and need to have their own conclaves, versus the shallow socialites and the mindless consumers?

coco

I agree with you Kyrah but we're hopeless idealists if we think this will ever change. It has some good points too though... any good idea will have a very limited lifespan before it's imitated a hundred times which forces the innovators to keep innovating. That places an unfair burden on the truly original but it does keep them from resting on their laurels. I think it's something we just have to accept as a given because it will always be the way of things, first life or second.

Kyrah, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Besides, all anyone ever needs to do to get the acclaim and the biggest money from a wonderful new idea is to be FIRST with it.

coco

P.S. And keeps them from resting on their laurels, as Chip said! very good point

Kyrah, that's where capitalism comes in. You can NOT maintain a large community dynamic like SL without some sort of incentive, and the most powerful incentive will always be financial (others exist and are valid, but none are as pervasive as money). The unique places and ideas you desire will come as a result of having an incentive to create them.


I wondered too, but this was 6 months ago and his response was simply to release his scripting as open source to destroy the thieves.


It's been a few (LOL) years since I read Toffler, and while he did say that, he was also talking about how society would not become more regimented as a result of technology (a major concern in the '60s), but would rather become more modular -- exactly what Jeffrey was noting. Off topic, he also indirectly predicted terrorism and computer viruses as society came to rely more and more on technology that was easily disrupted.

SL society is undergoing a rapid modularization, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I belong to a number of different "modules" already, each with different views and interests. Most SLers are cross-modular folks.

Cindy

I don't think it would be a violation of TOS/CS if you named sims.

This is an interesting point, and one that I am very aware of.

In RL, I am big into the hobby robotics scene, and the same metrics hold there. Now, if you design a new high-tech product, you can expect to profit from it for a year or two, until the copy houses in Taiwan or wherever come up with cheaper mass produced copies.

The only way to get around this is to provide a level of value that cannot be easily copied. In the robotics world, the only way to do that is to have highly innovative software. Typically, this has to be a "total is greater than the sum of its parts" kind of arrangement, or, as someone else said in this thread, a smart programmer will just figure out how it is done and copy it.

If it isn't at all obvious how to reproduce a piece of functionality, then you have an innovation you can reasonably hope to profit from. In the niche of building brains for autonomous robots, doing something like that is the holy grail, and its certainly what I'm aiming for.

I don't know how to translate that into SL yet, though...

- Jon

And to finish my thoughts on Jeff's comments:

1. -------"When you think about it, true innovation - or even diversification - is a dying breed in mainstream Second Life. Not many people seem to have the willpower to make something unique - and those of us that do tend to keep it to ourselves as the "popular" ideas continue to draw in people we don't want to be around."-------

What on earth - do you mean people are sitting on terrific ideas just to make sure nobody else comes in? What do you mean? Private word games? Or what?

Anyway, I am one of those who does have the willpower to make something unique, if you accept my own terms of unique (a product niche that is underserved), and I'm sure not going to keep it to myself.

2. I don't think you need to give people incentives to be unique. The incentives are there. People either think up unique ideas or they don't. And some of it is pure luck.

I hear so much about this vaunted "show and tell". I would go show and tell if I had something I wanted to show and tell about, but I'm making my things to sell. I think if show and tell has declined, that is probably because it itself was a fad that saw its day, and that worked well in its time. I don't think it was "gobbled up" in the events browser, any more than any other event could be considered to be "gobbled up," including someone's individual presentation of Tringo.

3. -------"While clubs suck in socialites with the promises of easy money and profits, many acknowledge that artificial incentives are fundamentally flawed and will one day evaporate."-------

La de da de da de da. Game shows and money balls and club contests will NEVER evaporate. A vision of only a certain sector of business being valid (building and scripting), while all others aren't, is ridiculous. What people want, people get. And people want more than just buying scripts and sofas and animations. They want excitement, contests, etc. These are NOT artificial incentives - these are ENTERTAINMENT. A valid sector of business.

4. Living as I do on a private Sim, I really don't think they are the end-all and be-all that you envision. Even IF they were populated by like-minded people who stayed together and socialized together, instead of moving out at the drop of a hat - which they simply are not and probably (to my sorrow) never will be - the very existance of the mainland is a lure only the most dedicated hermit could resist.

5. -------"You rez yourself into a park, overlooking a quiet village. In the center of the town lies the web terminal prim, which allows for easy access and creation of events. Browsing this, you find a building event, and bookmark it. You notice that the sim owner is charging a L$20 fee for attendance, which will go toward the winners and event fees.

Simple enough. Such a sim is already in existance now - and all I've done is "cut off" the noted nuisance from view. They'll still exist... but will have gravitated to their own niches and away from yours."-------

What Sim is this that is already in existance now? Who lives on it? Is it yours? What is the noted nuisance you have cut off from view?

6. -------"simply put, it's a bigger and better incentive to "steal another idea" and "generate a lot of traffic" than it is to be original. The reasoning is obvious - since dwell equals cash, and marketting a new idea equals risk, taking a proven dwell-getter equals less risk and more gain."-------

As Prok pointed out, people don't exactly "steal" Tringo or Bingo. They buy it and they use it. (Unlike in other venues, where special scripting knowledge isn't needed, and knock-offs are easier, and thus more "stealing" of original ideas goes on than does here.)

And what is this attitude against dwell? What's wrong with dwell? Dwell is part of the game. And as far as I can tell, a group of scripters and builders - bent on destroying the success of anyone else - is determined to undercut this incentive for entertainers and other businesses, and is determined to rid the game of any game-like accoutrements, so that it can become their personal playground for making real-life money off an ever-changing parade of consumers checking in and checking out.

That's why you WANT things divided into scripters/builders and consumers. That way, nothing ever happens here but a few people making sofas and scripts and everybody else buying them (lining your pockets) till they of course get bored and head off to another game.

Well, guess what - I'm not at all convinced that's what the Lindens intended. Personally, I think their PROFIT is dependent on not turning this into a platform/playground for a bunch of scripters and builders. Their PROFIT is dependent on making SL the place to be - for everyone. And that requires their continued involvement, and their continued eye toward keeping things fun, and keeping it as a game. A game that is specifically FOR everyone.

7. -------"on now is simply because Second Life's design has led it to a stage of impersonal behavior. I've cited this as "consumerism," but that is only a part of it."-------

If the design has led to a stage of impersonal behavior, it is merely because the design has attracted more players than it did at first. More players means more impersonal behavior. SL will never go back to what it was in the beginning, and if it does, it will be because it is dying; i.e., not bringing them a profit.

8. -------"Now, clip to my example. Suppose everyone has gravitated to their own niche of 5 or more "personal sims." Since everyone knows everyone else in that environment considerably better, they'll probably know what's real and what's a derivative. Witchhunter impulse kicks in, copycat "hey look at what I made" is shunned from this community.

Already that's a disincentive to copying that doesn't exist in a larger-scale world. To add to this, smaller communities will offer larger market share to the original creator... meaning copycats will have a harder nut to crack in that community. Their only recourse? To go somewhere else.

See where I'm going here?"-------

Yes. You are describing the way it used to be in the beginning.

9. -------"My prediction is Second Life will splinter into literally thousands - perhaps millions - of smaller worlds. It's almost a natural instinct for some of us. Of course, you'll still have people who will transcend these worlds, but their ideas will need to be very strong."-------

And your hopeful prediction is that it will go back to being that way.

10. -------"But they can be if the grids are many."-------

I like the idea of different grids, as the game grows. But then - you will just have the same things you think of as problems growing and replaying in all the individual grids just as they have in this one. Unless - of course - you, personally, control the whole grid.

coco

People copy cuz they want a quick buck.

That pretty much sums it up.

My advice would be - make it cheap. Not only will more people be able to buy/use it but the "worth" in creating a knock-off is much less of an incentive - after all what's the point in creating a knock off, that may not be as good, and making it more expensive? Of course that idea goes against any thoughts of maximising profit from your endeavours. Personally speaking though, that's never really bothered me in SL.

I live in the burbs. I think Maslow has it all wrong. Especially for guys (who are IMHO, more superficial than us women)... here is Bergman's hierarchy for the suburban male:

(from base to pinnacle)

(1) Base: Good Job / Family money - you need this to get money. Lots of it.

(2) Money: This is just a means to an end. But you desperately need this. This is the step where most people never reach.

(3) Cool Car: You need this to show your status. And move to the next level.

(4) Hot Girlfriend: Nuff said. No man wants to be showin off a fugly. Or banging one.

(5) Big House: The Pinnacle. If you've come to this step you are a success and have all the toys one could want. Enjoy!!

Hope this provides some insight. No, I'm not a psychologist.

1. chip has noted that SL is driven by fads and that is true. So is real life. I don't care whether you are talking about clothes (why else do designers pick certain colors each year?), dieting methods, or venture capital investments.

2. I agree with prok on the tringo issue. Kermit made a product and sold that product. Lots of people thought Tringo would be a hit on their land and bought his product. They are all mindless copycats? I say, if you like tringo (i've never played), go for it, and if you think it will make you successful, go for it. That lots of people are hosting tringo -- why is this so wrong? It hasn't hurt my SL enjoyment. There's still lots of interesting places to go -- i'm discovering them all the time.

3. truly original ideas are rare. Much innovation is a new blend of previous ideas/influences, and there is nothing wrong with that. Besides, many so-called original ideas are FAR from it. "I made a swimming pool, and anyone else who makes a swimming pool is copying me!" As if tons of other people AREN'T going to come up with the idea to make a swimming pool.

4. some people like to fit in, others like to walk their own path. why judge?

There's room enough for all of us. That's one of the things i love about second life.