Stipened and dwell comments

I'm not sure if what I heard is true and to what extent, if they are.... my comments to this is WHO'S "BRAINY" idea is it to reduce stipends, take away dwells etc.... My opinion is, why should clubs/casino/landowners want to have events and give out money/prizes if it costs them OUT OF POCKET real life money to fund them? It seems that would get expensive w/out the dwell and stippend some people will not be able to participate in the game as much. All I know is.... eventually SL will come to a halt by everything being taken away....much like "There" which I don't go to very often since there is VERY few ways of making the "Tbucks" in world w/out purchasing them FORGET THAT Taking the means away from game players that make money here and landowners using the dwell to help with paying for events the economy will eventually become useless here. SL is my escape to come and have fun and for someone to "escape" RL only to come to SL and have to spend most their time "workin" in world is not much of an escape. This is only my opinion and may or may not be true for everyone but it is how I see how things may be in the future for SL and it's economy. I love the game but this just seems like it will do nothing to improve things in SL in the future and will only hurt the game and I think eventually people will leave the game because of it.

Yeah!
Stop payin' for entertainment! Sneak into movies! Nick cable from the neighbor! Read that magazzine in the store! It's so unfair that they charge for those things - I pay m'taxes! What else to they want? So greedy!

Thing is... nobody is forcing people to run things and give out prizes.

I've been to a number of events where the majority of the 'prize pots' are actually contributions from those attending, rather than being filled by the host/owner. I'm sure some do, but most I've been to haven't.

I pay out $35 a month in tier and fees to play SL. I'm lucky if I sell L$200 of stuff a week from my store, this week I got L$15 from dwell.

Why? I don't have camping chairs, and don't intend to either.

I play within the budget that I allow, and that's all anyone should do. If you're spending out $300 a month and making nothing back on it... then perhaps you need to reconsider why you're here.

Lewis

I go to events when they're fun. If they have cool hosts, a nice dj, atmosphere and a fun crowd. If I want to go somewhere I'd go even if there were no prices to win. I don't use dancepads, camping chairs, ... cause they're silly. I do think stipends should stay because they drive buyer incentive. I don't think dwell should drive events, I doubt the fun places get enough dwell anyway to pay for all their events. Personally I tip a lot, I hope others do too. If they do the tips are bigger than the costs. Second life will become real fun when the people who log in do so for having fun. Clubs hosts, Dj's, ... should all have fun doing the things they need to do and with a little help they should at least break even. There will always be room for business people who want to make money if they're serious about it and don't do it for just a few US$ a month. Sure it means those who are just in it to have fun may need to put in real money but if there would be so much free fun around in the world we wouldn't be trying to have it here.

There are many, many successful businesses on SL that don't use camping chairs. I really don't like camping chairs, but don't blame your failure to be monetarily successful in SL on them.

I still don't understand why clubs don't charge a cover charge. Maybe I'm mistaking how the lot access works.
Can't you lock a section of a sim to a specific group? And can't you charge for people joining the group?

Wouldn't it be say to lock the club's parcel during events to a specific group. Then those who want to attend, buy into the group. At the end of the event, close out the group.

There are quite a few clubs that have plenty of traffic for events with no money balls. A cover would let the host provide a pot if they didn't have a 'sploder and larger pots if they did one.

I would happily chip in $50 - $100 to get into one great event, or $10-$20 for good daily events. Have the house keep 5%, give the Host 20%, and raffle off the remaining 75%.

Again, maybe this isn't how the groups and permissions work, but it seems like a good idea to me. The most difficult part would be providing the patrons with their money's worth of entertainment.

My Visa debit card will not hook up to LL's servers (the bank told me it is as I am in Australia) and it costs me 20 bucks US everytime I deposit money into paypal and convert it to US currency. I agree with Asherah. This is not the right way of going about things. Some of us just simply cant afford to throw money out the window every time we need to get extra Linden dollars. The old way worked well... If you wanted to die of boredom sitting and camping you could. Now that Dwell and Stipends are being taken away I think I will be sleeping on the side of a road somewhere. I cant afford to deposit 40 bucks into Paypal only to be charged another 20 by the bank for the 'privilage'. I wonder what the backlash on this is going to be like.

-Benethar-

Stop using paypal and start buying PrePaid Visa Cards.

http://www.visa-asia.com/ap/au/cardholders/cardsservices/index.shtml
http://www.visa-asia.com/ap/au/cardholders/cardsservices/getcard_australia.shtml

That would completely defeat the purpose of having a debit card to begin with. I dont like being in debt as I live week to week so I cannot afford to go shelling out uber bucks just on the off chance I may need to use em on SL. After all... If I cant afford to pay the line rental and DSL charges then there is no SL to begin with. But thanks. And if they wont accept my Visa debit card then who is to say they would accept a prepaid? They are after all the same thing. I have money in my account I can use it. I see no difference.

-Benethar-

Me, I'm not sure why so many clubs exist in the first place. You can set up a club for practically nothing. You can rez it in a sandbox and not even pay tier, and I've seen people do that. There's so much competition it's insane.

Charging an entry fee for a club would be a hell of a change, I'm not surprised that people aren't willing to test the waters there.

I think what he's saying is that he doesn't get much dwell because he doesn't use camping chairs.

Businesses that don't use camping chairs tend to get their money on sales.

I would say that's not quite true, because of lag and the 40 avatar limit the competition is actually lighter. With selling products, if there's a competitor in the market they can sell an infinite number and take up all the space in the market instantly, but with running a club or casino the world effectively caps how big any individual can get.

Also running a club is seen as a good way to get social status quickly..

Benethar; you might see whether any of the other sites that sell Linden dollars will take your debit card. Three that I know about are IGE.com, gamerzfix.com, and anshechung.com. Their rates aren't usually quite as good as Lindex, but if the fees are less, you'll still come out ahead.

Actually I didn't say I had a 'failure to monetarily successful in SL' - as my game play style is not in any way involved in making a profit or even covering my monthly fees, my 'failure to do so' cannot actually be considered a failure at all.

The sad thing is that if I bought a *ingo set or some other multiplayer game to put on my land, my dwell (and therefore popularity) would shoot up considerably.

There needs to be an shift away from 'quantity of people on a parcel of land' through to what activity they are undertaking. Measuring different keypresses and mouse clicks (to defeat scripted movement and timeout override) would be a better way of measuring activity, for a start. This would measure movement, chat, buying stuff, etc.

One way of measuring popularity - avatars on land - cannot be used to measure all properties fairly as it is so easily gamed (camping chairs or dance pads). So what can we have as a solution?

Lewis

Interesting round of opinions here - good to see. I personally think both dwell and stipends should stay. It encourages the new players to move to better accounts and it helps the land owners. I do see some problems with the ‘camping zombies’ (as someone once referred the L$ campers, kind of stuck in my head now - no ill will towards those who do this). Although there aren’t as many as there were in last fall and winter, they are still out there and, in my opinion, has severely damaged the integrity of the games ‘find’ options. Since their dwell counts into traffic, you get a very inaccurate search. The Lindens should develope a way to exclude campers from the traffic count in the ‘search’ in ‘Find’ window. I do, or should say did, once judge a place in the search window by its traffic. If I teleport to a spot i picked from the window and see campers I don’t even bother to look for what I was search for in that area - I just zone to the next on the search list.

Not really. Instead of the problem of one "market killer" product taking out all the competition, there's the problem of that you can set up a club on a "First Land" sized spot for next to nothing, or in a sandbox for nothing. There's people with some really cool "throwdown" clubs they can rez on a land for an instant "flash crowd"... all they need is a friend on premium or renting someplace they have a media script, or even just "point iTunes/Winamp at http://...".