When I first joined Second Life, I saw at the bottom of my screen "blah blah has rated you positively". I had no idea what this meant, but it felt good! Already I was getting praise just for playing the game! Then that same person said "if you right click on me and goto rate, you can rate me positively too!". And so I did, not realizing that there is a very large importance taking weight here.
I always figured it was just money straight from the Linden pockets, it wasn't until much later that I learned it came from a pool. Here's where my "feature suggestion" comes in for the Lindens.
I haven't been to Eden/Prelude, so I don't know if you're already doing this or not. But I think you need to stress to a newbie, as soon as you start talking about money or the various pie options, that the ratings system 1: Takes money out of a world-wide pool and 2: People should only be rating in their category if they are deserving of that rating. If I was told this when I first entered the game, I would not only be VERY wary of rating strangers, and VERY encouraged to build good things, look very impressive, and meet and talk with many people (building, appearance, and behaivor respectively). At least, this is what I would do in a world full of people who had the same understanding I did.
I think someone (Kerstin maybe?) suggested that everyone gets a fixed amount of ratings they can give. I like this idea, but I want to work on it, because I think it's very easy to be impressed with over 20 people's appearance, building, or behavior. I think that if we went through with this idea, the limit should be set as a certain percentage of active SL participants. As far as I'm concerned, being on for only 10 minutes every day isn't considered active. Instead this could be tallied up as how much time non-afk a person spends in-world (ok I'm getting a little too much into specifics, we can leave that for later if need be, back to our regularly scheduled topic)
So let's say 1% of the active population was 50 people (that's my guess of what I would consider the current active population). That would mean I can only rate 50 people on all 3 rating scales. This seems fine to me.
One last note. If you are especially concerned about rate miners, or if you yourself are a rate miner, I suggest you go through your list of calling cards, meet with each person you can, and see if they really deserve the rating you gave them on their 3 scales. I myself feel rather ashamed that I gave someone a positive appearance rating while they were still in their Ruth clothing =P
Ok, that's the end of my rant. And they all lived happily ever after. The End!
