Alternate money sink ideas to help save dwell and other bonuses

Linden Labs seems to want to remove all of the means for players to earn money and fairly soon only people with extreme skill at building or scripting will be the only ones earning any money.

With dwell bonus going away there will be little reason for people to run dance clubs, strip clubs, arena contests and many events (tringo / slingo) that dont result in objects being sold.

What this means for SL is that people without content creation skills will lose most their jobs in Second Life. People like dancers, bouncers, DJs, and standup comedians will no longer be able to find work, since the crowds they draw to the land (creating income for landowner who pays their jobs) will no longer generate money to the given landowner. Our favorite games like Tringo, Slingo and Primtionary will get the axe next. These events will no longer generate dwell, so the land owner will no longer have a reason to pay a host(ess) to run such events.

A MASSIVE market is gonna colapse slowly if not instantly. Since LL wants to reduce the total game currency in circulation a MUCH MORE LOGICAL solution would be to just increase the money SINKS instead of killing the money fountains.

One way to do this is to make the upload fees for various things based on the content being uploaded.

With sound files its fairly trivial for the client to calculate the playtime of a clip to be uploaded. There should be a base fee of 5$L, and a surcharge of 1$L per second in duration of the sound file to be uploaded. At the same time since the fee paid is based on length we should be allowed to upload sound clips up to 30 seconds in length. What this would do is for a standard 10 second sound the cost would be higher, but with more lengthy segmented uploads the cost would even o ut. Either way the fee would be exactly based on sound length and fair with only a minor increase in average cost.

With textures we all (should) know that textres are converted to sizes that are convienent for the system to handle. That means that the height / width is scaled so each dimension is a power of 2. Taking that into consideration the fee you pay for uploading a texture should be directly proportional to the size of the texture to upload. My proposed rate would be the uploader would pay 1$L for each 32x32 pixel section. The average texture size is roughly 128x128 and at the rate Im suggesting the fee would climb only slightly to 16$L. Textures at this size are not too horrible of either a bandwidth or vram resource hit on the players PC so the price is fair. A texture at 256x256 on the other hand takes up 4x more bandwidth to transfer, and 4times more VRAM to cache in the users video card. Since the fee is based on size this would translate in the uploader paying for what they use or a 4x increase in price. 64$L upload fee for a texture of such size. This also means that people using smaller textures would benifit. So the overall money paid increases reducing the circulation and helping the Linden vs USD ratio, and uploaders now pay based on the resources that both the Linden Labs servers and each player will have to suffer from their choice in oversized textures. We end up with benifits in ALL categories again.

The exception to this suggestion is screenshots. Since people rarely spam massive screenies all over the place and they are a social bonus more than a resource hit screenies should remain at a flat 10$L fee.

I dont consider animation files a massive resource hit and dont think paying a fee based on frames of use is fair (mostly since each frame only has data on what joints moved rather than a solid state of all current values). I do however believe a flat 25$L is still a fair-use charge. Leaving at 10$L also good.

Another money sink would be BRING BACK NEGATIVE RATINGS. They should still cost 25$L. The limitations would be that the only way to give a neg rating would be a checkbox you could select when filing an abuse report. The money would IMMEDIATELY be deducted. If the abuse team decides that action needs to be taken regardless if its a verbal warning or a punishment, they will increment the offenders neg rating in the appropriate category based on what violation was done. If no action is taken the person filing the AR would get the 25$L automatically recredited (or not).

My last idea is that all site-to-site teleportations should cost 1$L. This would have been better to impliment as an alternative when we still had telehubs. But if telehubs ever make a comeback its worth consideration. Exceptions should be that teleporting home, and accepting a TP invitation should never cost money. Nor teleporting when your avatars height is above some several thousand meters as that is the only way to recover from some greifers orbiter scripts. Personally i think it should be implimented even now with telehubs being a thing of the past. I would pay. It would also encourage players to purchase vehicles and flight enhancement scripts in turn boosting both the economy with increased sales, and reducing circulation with the fee based teleporting.

I'm not saying that these proposals would be recieved with loving arms. Or that they would even be accepted quitely by the tiniest portion of the community. What i am saying is that these changes would increase a few needed money sinks, and for the reasons listed above stimulate the economy and possibly reduce some of the asset costs that LL has to incur with textures and lighten the load on outdated video cards.

Please if you wish to comment NO FLAMING or emotional outbursts. If you have an opinion state WHY you have the opinion, and provide a SOLUTION of your own design along with what you think the effects would be from its implimentation. If you cant do either of those things then please keep your comments to yourself.

Please vote on this propsal also. The link is...

http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=1368


EDIT: 0915pm 13 May 2006 Game Time (1am 16May EST)

The following discussion pages has many complaints from clothing designers due to the fact that sometimes a given texture needs uploaded MANY TIMES because of seam alignment issues that are not discernable in the preview option. To compensate for this failure in the preview feature and so that my texture pricing doesnt slaughter their ability to design (we ALL want nice clothes after all) I am adding the following:

At any time during the same login session after uploading a texture, you have the ability to UPDATE that last uploaded texture by using a second menu option.

"Update Last Texture Upload"

Doing this will allow the user to choose a NEW texture to upload that must be the exact same resolution. This upload will REPLACE the data currently using the asset key of the last uploaded texture. Since this would only be an UPDATE and not a NEW UPLOAD the upload fee should be completely waved, aka FREE. The designer has already paid the fee and is not using additional storage space on the server so should not be penalized for ensuring that the content they are creating is of the highest quality possible.

hi there yeah i agree that other methods should be used other then removing dwell. as a new player starting out that means there will be little to no way to earn money and i might as well stay as basic because i would have no skills.

clubs and casinos etc will die and i have many many friends who don't create anything but who earn their living as escorts or hosts to events etc these people will essentially be unemployed and their game is ruined. I have been thinking about this dwell bonus leaving and can only see how it will ruin the game for a large large number of players.

In short i see no good coming out of it only bad. This game has few ways to earn money its not like other games with systems in place to give you money if you complete a task

Right now I earn my money from those places because i am still learning i sell very little of my items and it seems to me that linden labs will in effect be removing good chunk of the game play in the game which revolves around socializing

Yes its some of those social aspects that i care about keeping. Not so much having brothels in business as having places that someone can put time and effort into making it a place to attract people just to be there.

Even on the business end of things removing the dwell income bonus will probably deter a lot of people from going to s ubscription accounts. Why purchase land to create a place of beauty for all to see if it will have no benifit. With dwell a suffeciently beautiful park could attract people as a hangout increasing their enjoyment, while providing the land owner an incentive to create such a place. Thats gone now..

I agree on all points but one. The P2P charge. I live on two islands and don't use the TP home function. It would suck for me to have to pay just to go home. Or to island hop for that matter.

Also, I wouldn't mind seeing a charge put on prims above a certain triangle count. Curb the twisted torus mess that damages PCs.

Don't you realise that you, a customer pays for a developers uploads as part of the items price? If my upload costs increase, my prices will increase to cover my costs and you foot the bill.

IMO, Charging for uploads will be the straw that breaks the camels back and forces content creators to increase prices (which have remained rather static). I wouldn't be suprised if some start pegging prices to the USD as a way to guarantee a fixed real world income per product.

Hello hyper inflation!

Congratualtions. You just exploded the price of most clothing designs. Clothes typically have 512*512 textures, making for an upload cost of 256 lindens per texture, compared to 10 under the current system. You just murdered the clothing market in a stroke.

Trep: yes i quite agree. I was actually thinking of mentioning private islands as another exception but just forgot to write it out in my original statement. The whole mention of p2p teleport fees was intended strictly when both origin and destination were not islands.


ninjaFoo: upload fees are a one-time use. Thus the recouperation ammt a designer or content creator should charge should be non existant if they intend on selling it to more than ONE person. thats effectively a non issue.


Warda: if you've never checked the resolution of your MONITOR is only 1024x768 pixels. A 512x512 texture can take up over a quarter of your entire screen without losing quality. If a texture on clothing that on screen is only a few dozen pixels across is attempting to use a 512x512 texture that is EXACTLY something that should be prevented and is part of the issue i mentioned about forcing more responsible resolution choices during upload. You have proven my point, not disproven it. That is appreciated.

Right now the upload charges are completely negligable, I don't even notice that I'm paying them and have very little income =S
As such I like the idea of having a way of discouraging massive textures of doom except where needed by charging more for them. I'd probably go for file-size over texture dimensions though, as a 256 x 256 lossy compressed texture (ie you uploaded as standard .jpg) will be similar in size to a 128 x 128 lossless compressed texture (.tga files I think do this). So rather than simply being texture size, it's OPTIMAL textures, as a large texture full of text if compressed as .jpg can be very small in file-size and thus inexpensive on bandwidth.

I'm still for p2p charges as well. I would have them too restrictive though, I'd say that direct TPs should cost money to enable (like listing a parcel in find places). If they are NOT enabled this way, then you can pay extra when setting a landmark in order to make it p2p.
Setting a home location, or setting a landmark on land that you/your group own would of course be free.
This way actual p2p teleporting is still technically free, but enabling it costs a reasonable amount, something low like L$10 a week.

That same texture also has to cover the back as well. At any given moment, you are typically only seeing about a third of each texture, the rest being to the sides or rear of teh other avatar. And while a 128*128 texture will look good at a distance, once you get close up to someone, say at 1:1 talking distance, it will look quite awful.

In any case, the SL engine pre-bakes all clothing textures into a 512*512 texture and send teh client teh whole avatar clothing as a single texture, so your point is utterly irrelevant to clothing resolution anyway. The clothes will always be sent to you as a 512*512 texture, regardless of what resolution they were uploaded at. Clothes designers upload at 512 because that way there is no loss of detail in the texture baking process that LL uses.

Haravikk: I know that the SL client is an OpenGL renderer and OGL is optimized for textures where the dimensions are powers of 2 (that is why the client converts all textures prior to uploading). I've also been told by dozens of people that they are converted to a single lossless picture format prior to upload as they are stretched to fit dimensions. Basically this means that your texture dimensions does determine the filesize. And even if the textures are stored in a lossy format, they have to be loaded into VRAM lossless due to OGL restraints so larger textures are still exactly size proportional to the clients resource use thus the higher fee is still warranted in my opinion. If you have a rebuttal to this (IE: if im wrong) please let me know. But this info is what im basing my justification of size based fees on. A Linden comment on the picture format issue and lossy vs lossless would be nice.

re: the textures i do textures now and the way i earn money to upload them is by accessing dwell fees and various events that rely on dwell. If the money to upload textures i do make is taken away it forces players to either

a) buy money from linden labs to upload which realy is kind of hard on some players
b) not make anything?

anyhow most textures i make honestly are umm half or less of the size of 512 with the only exception being something like a sign or something like this which really isn't going to be a texture and honestly if paying a bit more for a large texture saves dwell i am all for paying it. Once its uploaded i can use it over and over again.

You haven't designed much clothing.

you can upload the same texture with minor tweaks many many times to get the seams perfect, you can easily spend 40L$ just uploading and tweaking.

Warda: nice to know about the baked resolution. I knew they were all prebaked but was unsure of the end resolution. Regardless if ALL your clothing is uploaded at 256x256 resolution the final result will still have consistant final clarity. For reference a 512x512 resolution image at the rate i suggested would ONLY cost 256$L. Thats a one-time fee. You would still recoup that fee in the first 2 or 3 sales at current market pricing for clothing. Real life manufacturers dont recoup their costs of manufacturing nearly so fast. So i still see it as a reasonable rate in the end. When you then take into consideration that only certain portions of a texture are used in certain places when mapped to the SL AV mesh, that means your shoes AND pants use one texture upload. It means both your upper and lower body textures (clothing) have a 32x32 area in the bottom corner you can use to paste some OTHER image in to use on something and all you would need to do is set the texture scaling / position values. In the end its not an obscene cost to clothing designers and it would STILL in all other markets (buildings, attachments, etc) encourage wiser texture choices for upload.

ninjaFoo: thats what the preview box on texture uploading is for. And why the av meshes are available for free download for you to do more extensive testing on prior to upload.

edit:

I may disagree with you both, but you are giving information and stating reasons along with your opinions. Thanks for keeping an intelligent debate rather than a flame war =-)

edit2:

The SL texture preview option for clothing does need to be expanded a bit so that you can select an upper and lower body texture at the same time to see how well the two align in comparison to each other. But i consider that a secondary feature that needs added regardless to my proposal being implimented or not. Thus that one aspect shouldnt keep THIS request from going thru and why i dont consider it a valid argument against this idea.

And as every clothing designer will tell you, the preview is close to useless when it comes to checking your textures. Its just good enough to stop you uploading the wrong file by mistake.

The AV meshes are a nightmare to work with. There are a lot of things you only discover once you have uploaded and got them on your AV. You really can upload what you think is the perfect texture only to find the AV has chewed it up in all the wrong places.

What better way to nip new (usually poor) designers in the bud than by punishing them every time they discover another SL AV gotcha (and there are a lot of them!)

Its clear from your comments that you simply have no idea what you're talking about.


I also feel I should add that SL is built upon the creativity of its users. Thankfully LL will never do anything that puts a brake on that creativity.

ok, clothing textures. Yes, no matter what resolution you upload as, SL will send a 512 texture to anyone seeing the avatar wearing those clothes. What this means in practice is that textures uploaded at 512 or 1024 will look equally good (1024 is little more than bandwidth wastage though). Those uploaded as 256 or lower will show increasing levels of blockiness in the baked form as you lower teh upload resolution.

As others have noted and I too will attest to, you will ofdten upload a texture several times before you get it just right for a given clothing design. At 256 L a pop for each texture, a full outfit could easily set you back a couple of thousand thousand lindens before you make a single sale. That would put off a great many new clothing designers from entering the market, leaving us with only the old establiushed outlets, who could then put up their prices quite a bit, both because they have no new compeotion due to teh high entry costs, and a higher price they can justify because of teh excessive upload fees. the result is the clothing market will stagnate.

I do agree there should be a higher cost for uploading large textures, just not at teh plainly ridiculous rate you suggested. Perhaps so a 512x512 texture is set at 10 lindens, and scale by area from that base (so a 1024x1024 texture will cost 40 L to upload). Your base texture resolution of 32x32 is actually inferior to the original Doom game, which is coming up to 20 years old now. I like to think technology has advanced a bit since then and we should be able to use more detailed graphics as standard.

Why? LL are commited to reducing handouts in world, so this would simply be a developer tax. Unless it serves some economic purpose there is simply no point.

Really, uploads should be free.

By larger textures, im thinking specifically of stuff bigger than 512x512. Realistically, the only reason to use textures that size is for stuff thatll be going on 10 metre prims. I know technically you can use some clever techniques to use only parts of a single texture to paint multiple facts of a single primset, but that practice isnt all that widespread.

of course, Id also want to counter the higher cost for large textures with a lower cost for small ones. This way, developers would be encouraged to think more about bandwidth efficiency for the people who see their creations. Not so much of a price scale that it becomes punitive (like teh original proposal), but enough to be an incentive to think that way.

Are you people really this insane?

Each of these "sinks" still puts the money off onto the consumer. Why not instead of making my life a headache to pay for your strip club, just cut me out of it and charge them? If I never walk into your club, why should I have to pay for it? I don't ask you to pay for my teir when you've never purchased any of my content.

Every single pose I make is uploaded around 10 times, animations are more so. I'm a prefectionist and that's what my customers like about me. Poser is crap. You move the arms, looks fine in poser, but are broken or twisted in SL. I would have to up my prices. Big headache. The consumer, in the end will be the one to pay.

If no one will go to your establishment because you have a cover charge, it because you are crap. Not my fault. If you can not find sponsorship from a content creator, then you shouldn't expect us to pay for you crap idea via sinks. Why should I have to fund your unmarketable ideas?

heh i'm replying as a consumer and because your post is rather full of flames. If i don't own a business and many people in this game don't own businesses. They have a house where they have parties and show movies (i show movies old movies and we have fun and no one spends a dime and i don't take a dime...) My roll in this game is mostly consumer as a new person. This game is not the real world everyone should be able to have fun and i mean everyone. Also realize that most of those consumers right now this moment rely on dwell and other small bonus systems to accumulate their funds. There is a large large hole in this game and its for those people who don't create only consume things. Those people must get jobs of some sort as there is no system generated job. NO they don't use camping chairs they work as hosts, hostesses etc. for people who own business who rely partially on dwell to pay their employees. If this was a game only for designesr you would have no one to sell anything to and there would only be content makers and no one to actualy buy the content you make.

please realize that in the end i will be a content creator but heck i am new to this game and i see the very few income streams i have open to me being eliminated. I'm not into the brothel scene and i usually stay away from a lot of those night clubs because they just sell porn (although there is nothing wrong for those who want to do that it is a legitimate idea just not my vision) I make my money on contests or dances once or twice a week, dwell and the strippend. If those things were not in place i would never buy a single item becuase i would not have the linden to do so as i don't believe in buying all my currency as its far to expensive a thing for me to do. Anyhow those dances and contests will be hurt by removal of dwell and i don't see why people shouldn't pay a bit more maybe not as much as proposed for a large texture.


If a massive texture was say 40L to upload that is not that bad really. I do know when someone is looking at it without looking at both sides of the issue. If you want people to buy your stuff they do need money if the only source of new money for nwe players is to go and purchase it i think you are going to see a serious drop off in your sales.


just my two cents but this isn't a full economy in the real world and i don't see why people who want to have parties and run gathering places which is the largest majority of this game should have to close up and never buy anything due to lack of funding. Those people buy your clothes and i think they would pay 50 lindens more per item if need be if they really really want it and if its as good as you say it is don't you?

I didn't read the whole thread (I'm a little lazy), but I completely agree with increasing money sinks. LL recently released a more accurate chart of money creation and deletion.

L$ Sources and Sinks
................................................2006 April
Description...................Sinks (L$)...........Sources (L$)
Classified Charges........3,824,573............................0
Dwell Bonus..............................0...............4,865,302
Group Creation Fees........485,600............................0
Land............................1,741,246....................57,187
Parcel Directory Fees.......721,740............................0
Referral Bonus..........................0..................398,500
Stipends...................................0.............49,935,550
Upload Charges............5,771,940............................0
Other...........................5,240,106...............4,021,346

Look at stippends, L$50 MILLION created. Look at dwell, 4.8 Million. Stippends outweigh dwell by a factor of 10. In order to maintain an economy with that kind of money creation over destruction IS NOT to kill dwell. It is to increase upload costs, classified charges, and land fees (I assume that's what that one is), and increase anything that counts as "other."

I'm sure someone at LL noticed this? I hope.

I posted concerns left and right for a need for a bigger hole in the Linden sink back on 04 but its not till a Linden suggests it do people listen bah! anywho here are a few of my ideas tear them apart as you wish

1. A charge for event posts . Oh know many strongly disagree but I dont see how a 50L cost to post is gonna kill a person. I have my venues post how many events a day and I would gladly pay 10-50L for posting. It will help drain some L and also help cut back on the venues who spam events.

2. Charge for more groups or picks for profiles . If you want to be more expressive with your profile in sl which many have wanted then they would gladly fork over some L for say 5 extra groups or 5 more picks on their profile. Our profiles are basically our 1st impressions to others. Id gladly pay some L to be able to have more groups or add more friends and ads on my picks section of my profile.

3. Charge for putting land up forsale yes yes they are gonna make L for selling it why not charge a simple fee for posting the land 10-50L is not gonna kill the profit of selling your land. This will help eat up some L and cut back on those who buy up land just to cut it up into a cajabillion smaller plots sell them at 1L per M more just to ad that they want to buy more land


I have many others but I wanna see these get torn up first hehe

I agree charging people to go to your venue is a dork of an idea sorry there will always be the new player who will go buy up 100k and open a club with naked people and cheap rental stalls then host big money events with no cover charge while your venue will be charging to enter pfft yea they will pick u over that new linden pumping club! Now lets let that linden spacehip land and think of reality where cover charge might work in the real world but you know your butt still goes to the cheapo no cover charge clubs and bars in the real world as well.

Now to charge for uploads I think yes increase for the type of upload. 1. if u dont pay pfft then those who do will make money off the benifits of it. 2. for cloths maker there are plug ins for gimp and such that allow u to view the cloths before upload so look into that before u spend a cajabilion on uploads. 3. if your and uploader abuser then fork that L over hehe Im so sick of the 100 picture googledup "by my ART" vendors in sl. Yea Im sure that ART you sell is your own. Granted there are those who do upload their own work kudos to you

If as a clothing designer you make so few sales that you would actually need to increase prices.. THEN DO SO. I have no moral issue with a designer covering their costs and if your clothing is good enough people will still buy it.

But the clothing market is only ONE market in Second Life. And -YET AGAIN- if your argument is that you need to tweak the outfit textures a dozen times and keep reuploading.. that is showing a weakness in the texture preview capabilities. It has nothing at all to do with the fact that larger textures costing more money will create a LEGITIMATE MONEY SINK helping to preserve the type of bonuses that lead to a DIVERSE set of options for what people can do for enjoyment.

The fact is in the numbers. How many textures are transferred from the servers to the clients for displaying clothing as compared to for displaying structures, vehicles, attachments and other objects? With most regions capped at 30 avatars (some higher i know but you rarely hit those levels for an -average- moment) and with avatars consisting of 4 baked textures (upper/lower body plus head/hair) thats the equivilant of 30 1024x1024 textures AT MAXIMUM to be needed to display people. There are hundreds upon hundreds of other textures transferred for the land / prims / particles.

All of those textures used by those objects (at least future ones uploaded) would help create a fair use money sink based on the resource hit you are forcing both server and clients to incur for your texture choice.

Draco18s Majestic: i noticed the new economy data. Now what id like to see is for the stipends category to be broken up to say how much of that stipend is BASIC accounts and how much of it is SUBSCRIPTION accounts. Those 2 numbers would mean more to me than stipends as a whole considering prems earn 10x more money than basics.

i amke stuff and upload adn even host
so i would be ready to pay more for bigger file and to post an event

and i do agree that sl needs a bether way of dealing with money then cuting here and patching there

and as for dwell and that stuff it aint because you dont use it that its not a good idea

1. find a reasonable value for your product or service and charge accordingly

2. There really isn't a 2nd step...

~Lefty