Selling my items without owning a shop

Hi everyone,

I'm creating a couple of items that are really nice, but now I realize that I don't have a shop to sell them (*ooops*).

My question is, how to sell my items without owning land and building shops ect.? Asking others to sell my things in their shops? Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks
- Peter

You can sell them at

SLExchange

or

Gigas

or

SLBoutique

Malls! The rent is typically cheap enough that you can depend on your stipend for a couple of weeks to keep the stall, while you find ways to drive a few customers to your vendor/product.

There are also a few free places left to sell, such as the Janus free market, and the occasional flea market event.

You can sell for free on my land - depending on what all you got to sell.

Contact me inWorld.

Hi Peter,

You can look up Damien Fate's profile and check his Personal Picks page for the location of his shop. (Sorry, I can't remember the coordinates.) He sells a device called the Mirada.go-shop, meant to be worn as an attachment, which will rez a slick-looking personalized vendor for anyone who touches it while you have it on. You can carry your product line around with you

The price is a little on the hefty side ($500L?), but I haven't seen anything else like it. As soon as I get a couple of more little doo-dads lined up for sale, I intend to invest in one.

-- jj

about renting from malls, is there a discount for the lag-factor? i would guess the bigger and more popular the mall, the more lag and I for one will tp out of a laggy mall in a heartbeat, there's so much out there to see I will not wait for a laggy place!! I guess it's just a numbers game, people like me who experience lag will jet but someone else catches it at the right time and has a great shopping experience...

for gigas to work you need to own land to put down a server/datahold

You don't need to *own* land. You could easily just ask a friend to host it for you on their land. Same goes for SL Boutique. SL Exchange offers a hosting space in Abbotts.

I'd strongly recommend selling at these websites. Unlike malls, where you pay a flat rate (and often a very high rate) regardless of whether you sell anything, Second Server doesn't charge for selling on their website, and SL Exchange only charges a percentage of what you actually sell.

Hope that info helps.

When you sell through SLEXchange, which is great, you still need to place that black box in-world somewhere to upload items from the world. I believe SLEX will place them for you somewhere on their land, but it pays to have even a tiny display space in-world of your very own, because you can then get a landmark for it, and put it on your "picks" and make yourself a walking advertisement for sales of your product.

I can offer $25 rental spaces per week which fits the area needed for the SLEX boxes or a vendor or a sign. Or $50 boardwalk or stall space as well. I can also offer placement in FINDPLACES for $30/week which is the normal game price, or for free if you are paying a higher price for rental areas. Being in FINDPLACES is important to be found by other players because in-game advertising capacity is poor -- classifieds columns are available on this forum, but not on the game, just for land for sale.

Some people who have joined our group have put in 512 tier only, paid no cash, and gotten land in a commercial area that they can use for their store or their wares and signs.

I think when you get something for free, you get what you paid for. "Free" can sometimes mean that the person is forming some kind of beholden relationship with you, where you might feel you have to do a favor. "Free" is often not the best commercially visible space, obviously, because all those that offer "free" are those who fully understand the value of prime commercial sales space at telehubs or other popular spots. Still, try doing "free" at the start until you can get your feet wet.

However, it's worth going beyond that. When you use "free," you never understand your business. You don't realize your true business costs in the game and you may not have the best retail space. It is worth going to Anshe or Blue or other's malls, looking at their less expensive slots for $75 or $100 a week, and testing that market for a week (or come to me and get something for $50 in some of the same areas). The big mall owners have volume so they can offer better opportunities for you -- they have events at their malls which gives traffic.

I think the important thing for new people to do is to study the range of competing services, and not consider that nice older people who offer you free space are necessarily the best thing for themselves or for the game in general.

Keep in mind that Prokofy dislikes and mistrusts it when anyone does anything nice for anyone without charging money. SL Exchange has free spots to host the "magic box"... no need to go and rent land from someone.

As for malls... many malls charge exorbitant rates for stalls, and almost all malls have little to no traffic. You really have to do your research on which malls actually get shoppers.

Keep in mind that Cubey believes many things should be simply free in the game because he subscribes to the tekki wiki school of SL management, but he isn't adverse to selling his own talented wares for real money. SL Exchange has free spots to host the boxes, but they aren't visible, high traffic sales areas, so anyone starting a business should also grapple with the issue of traffic and sales. They can have their newbie vendor eternally positioned on some beneficient oldbies' old land they aren't using, but they aren't getting prime retail space that way, they aren't gaining real business experience, they aren't getting any taste of real costs in business, etc.

I charge $25 and $50 a week for stalls, so I can't really buy that they are "exhorbitant". I rent from others that charge $75 or $100 and they give a lot of traffic and exposure that helps sales.

The idea that malls don't get traffic and sales must be some persistent delusion you are suffering as a byproduct of some other overarching ideological belief about malls.

I don't know where to begin on this. Of course malls get sales and lots of them. That is why there are lots more malls all the time, and why they will fill up fast, and why people who rent space in them leap at the chance to rent more space in each new ones. Their sales information and their spam lists and so on are jealously guarded. Walker Spaight tried to get some of this information even in aggregate anonymous form so all of us could benefit from a real study of these issues. We agree they must be studied. But he had huge problems getting people to cooperate. I await the results of his efforts in this regard.

I have studied malls up close and personal. Have you? Honestly, your nastiness and slams have no place in this discussion. You have ardent beliefs, not backed up by presented field research.

Absolutely not averse to it. Neither am I averse to giving things away. I do both, and so can and will others.

Really it's hard to figure out what your position is exactly. When you started your rants in the forum, you were opposed to "content barons" charging money for their creations. Now you're adamantly opposed to free content... for no reason you can explain adequately.



As you know quite well the SL Exchange magic box is not a vendor and needs no visibility. You can place it under a rock underwater and still have the same usefulness. It's a server for web sales -- that's all. You don't need to rent space for it because you can get space for free from the very company that offers the web shop service.



So you'd advise new users to throw money into a dozen unproven malls just to get burned and gain business experience? Better to take the time to learn which places are best. Ask around. Ask who actually sells for an objective opinion, not those who rent the spots.



That's a fine price. To be a good location, you also need traffic and shoppers with spending money. How's your track record there? Honest question... not a rhetorical question.



As someone who builds and sells vehicles, I've looked into malls, and found that few if any result in actual sales. I'm currently testing the waters again, and have made absolutely no sales at all in the last two weeks at malls. I admit that maybe mall-goers are looking for clothes and not vehicles. All I can tell you is what I've experienced first-hand.




Uh huh. Thanks for the personal attack and for introducing the "nastiness" into an objective debate. I've done my research several times over. There are hundreds of malls in SL, and only a tiny handful will lead to sales. Yet most charge exhorbitant rates.

To the new seller, your best bet, when starting out, is to sell on the web and advertise your product's strengths.

Hey cubey, which malls lead to sales?

I'm glad you aren't adverse to it. The giving away of a lot of free things is troublesome to me. The few oldbies glutting the market/visual space with their freebies, some of which are hideous to look at, prevent the emergence of a brisk newbie market, ever changing in first-land homes. That's a shame. I'm sick and tired of looking at Siggy Romulus' free and virus-like replicable freebie on every first land plot, ditto a lot of others. It's important that somebody say this, without him feeling it's an insult, because it's not his fault, except that he put the stuff out free and it replicates like a virus and kills markets and creativity.



Really, it's hard for me to understand why people think that I made up the term "content baron" because I never made it up, it was some grumbling newbies who were in all those threads that came up during the big economic changes in the previous patch. I didn't use the term. It seems an adequate one to me. It's hard for me to figure out where people come off ascribing to me the view that charging a lot for content is "wrong". I'm happy that people charge prices for which they find willing buyers. Very happy. And I'm happy to complain if I see that some of them are monopolists charging a lot and getting sales only because they have people dependent on them, that's not a free economy.

Many people ascribe to me all the views they hate, just because they need a figure to do this with. But I am not for socialism, and I am not for rapacious oligarchic capitalism either. I'm for a liberal free market.

I am opposed to the *extent* of free content in the game because it kills creativity, kills markets, and is especially pernicious when the makers don't really put it in the public domain, where it could be modded, but merely let it spread endlessly around for their glory. It's not a world you'd want to live in, in real life. It's the cans of tushyonka in the window. Please, somebody, somebody out there, come forward, and tell me you understand exactly what I mean about cans of tushyonka...



As you know quite well, the items you put on SL Exchange by using your black magic box, are also items that you can keep in the world and sell and have fly-by or walk-in traffic from buyers. So as you know perfectly well, if you place an item with rocks under water, you won't sell them. So I make the very valid point that if you have a store, where you put the black boxes AND your SLEX items, as I have done and some of my tenants have done, you not only get the place to put the black box, which could have been under water, sure, but you also get the place to display inworld the things that are *in* the black box in the first place. You don't need to rent space for your black boxes but why not combine the display of those items in-world with the black boxes? It also makes it easier, as you modify colours, textures, etc. to upload those items right on the spot.

Honestly, your zeal to somehow catch me in contradictions or trip me up or somehow shame me into crying "uncle" is unseemly. I'm making normal points about normal things. About a normal market economy. And you are whining endlessly at anyone attacking your socialist technocratia.




Oh, puleeze. I said they should test the market using a $25 or $50 or $100 stall or little store for a week or two. I didn't say they should throw their money around to a dozen unproven malls.

And honestly, I'd have to seriously wonder about your idea of "a dozen unproven malls". Any mall run by Anshe, Blue, etc. are proven. They are near telehubs, they have lots of sales, everybody keeps coming back, and you do not know what you are talking about. Tell us about your own sales and your own mall areas and we can have some light on this conversation. Stop making up stuff and putting fake stupid ideas in my mouth like a newbie should shell out thousands to dozens of malls.

I think a newbie can hear from lots of people, without those oldbie feteds stepping on their competitors in the thread by constantly trying to discredit and trip them up.

It was ok to hear from you or Merwan about the freebies, which come with those invisible strings that can often come with those who see themselves as the arbiters of all matters commercial in the land, like some tiny town-fathers circle in the old-boys' club. Give me a break. I have just as much right to stand up and say a newbie can rent from me or Anshe or whoever (read my posts and they are not just infomercials for me).

Quote:


The $50 stalls in Alston are usually completely sold out. Some come as free vending spots for tenants included in their rental cost, and some are sold on the open market. The people selling there have remained for months many of them, some taking out long-term leases because they get sales. We are next to a popular fishing game, and next to 3-4 residential communities on fairly new sims, but far from the telehub. So we made an alternative commercial area, far from telehubs, but serving this community and generating sales for me and for them. Seems to work well so far.

In another area, there isn't enough settlement yet to tell whether the stalls will sell, or will generate sales. I put out even my own amateurish stuff and it sells. Others have sales and have stayed. I think those who have rented me have sales, or they leave and go elsewhere, as some chose to do, but then they are replaced. I don't have all the space rented out in my stores, but I am competing in a very fierce market. It's a learning experience for me and I'm willing to put many more months of effort into studying it.



Well, Cubey, what can I do to change your mind? Why don't you take an absolutely free unrented floor in my tower in Ross on Pharos Island, that's 1200 square meters, and put your wares there for 2 weeks, and see if you sell anything?

I don't pretend to get the traffic and sales that other mall owners do on my sim, but their expertise and Tringo games and whatnot help generate sales for me too. So try it, and you lose nothing.

I think people don't buy vehicles at malls because they tend to go to large vehicle stores where all the vehicles are spread out for people to see and seven try. I have a few tenants that have those kind of bigger display stores on roads, i.e. "strip malls".



I didn't make any personal attacks here, and it was you who introduced the nastiness from the first round, just due to previous stored-up hate to me. I simply do not agree with you that only a tiny handful lead to sales. I just don't see it at all. I know my own shopping patterns and the patterns I see in the places where I rent or rent out or sell. I just don't know where you are getting this. But to end this debate, we need Walker to be able to complete his investigative journalism project in this heavily secret medieval society we call Second Life.



SL is an immersive world, and the world where people will use your vehicles, especially the flying ones. That is where you need to be selling your items, not on a website somewhere. People should have a lot they go to where they can get rides in your vehicles and also purchase them. Rent a big lot like that from me and try it out, what can I tell you, that's what I think you need. And I will give you a mall floor 2 weeks for free ifyou want to test out your theories and mine.

It's truly bizarre how you can object to giving away free things and helping other players. Isn't it better to help someone than to demand money? And if these free items are so heinously awful, why do so many people still use them? If they're so bad, wouldn't it be easy to look at them and improve on them? And let's not mention the fact that, despite what you like to say, many freebies are given away with full permissions. Even if they aren't, the object creator is well within their rights to protect their items from being ripped off. Are you in favour of ripping off designs?




Don't make me sift through endless tomes of your diatribe just to find this. Your first and most striking position was that "content barons" (whether you invented the term or adopted it) were lording over other people by charging money for their creations.




Actually it *is* a world we live in in real life. Lots of people give away free items, and in many cases you can't simply modify those things and resell them for profit. Free items:
* help those who don't wish to build their own
* can't afford expensive items
* provide ideas for new content creators

A free item can't possibly kill off an entire sector of the economy just because it's free. If there's room for improvement, design your own and improve on the design. Sell it. If you don't want to create things, then the freebie is a boon.



Have you even *used* SL Exchange? Because it's obvious you have zero understanding about it. This is only a side issue, of course, but if you're going to keep arguing it, I have to point out that you are, in fact, worng. The black box does not sell items in-world. It only serves objects from web sales. Placement of the black box is completely irrelevant and doesn't require any traffic. You can't buy items from a black box if you tried. I personally hide my black box in a non-trafficked area.




OK, so black boxes have nothing to do with in-world sales and need no rented space. Why are even debating that point? I know you rent space to vendors yourself, but you really shouldn't misrepresent these things.



If you relentlessly spout disinformation in an open forum, someone will be around to disprove you. You can't expect to attack entire segments of SL and invent discord where there was none without opposition. Since you arrived, you've done nothing but attack and berate. You've spouted half-truths and lies in an effort to win over forum readers to an invented cause. ...




... which this quote illustrates nicely. You have no real fight here, Prokofy. You only want to set yourself up as some kind of crusader for the downtrodden, so you invent an enemy, spout your garbage, and accuse anyone who disagrees with you. It has to stop.

You could put your energies towards building your land business or helping people legitimately.



I've rented at those malls and have made no sales there. That's not made up.



I think any new player could do very well by asking older players for advice, and could easily be led astray by conspiracy-mongering fools who invent facts for made-up arguments.



"Invisible strings"? Such as?

See? You throw out these accusations and never ever support them. Total fiction from the imagination of Prokofy.





Thanks for the advice, but you're not correct. Many web shoppers buy vehicles. Yes, an in-world test flight is good, but the web is far more accessible than any shop for the simple fact that there's no travel time and it's searchable.

I don't know, Cubey, it's almost not worth arguing with you, because you want to keep it at such a nasty tone.

I do, too, perfectly well understand SLExchange, duh. I have an account there, and sell items there, and have sales. It's great. And I find it very convenient to have one of my stores have the black boxes AND the things that are *in* the black boxes *together* to simplify uploads and to have the same things visible in world as on the SLEX. And I have tenants doing the same thing at times. This is my experience. I'm explaining my experience. Stop ranting to me that I'm stupid and don't get it about the goddamn black boxes when I get it, and am making a different point about them. But if you refuse to see it, well drop it.

I never, ever, said that content barons charge too much. Please cut and paste that quote, and bring it here and prove your point. I did not invent the term. I did not say they charge too much. I have criticized the practice of creating monopolies on certain things like rental scripts which I think yes, are monopolists' prices, but that's a very specific point about the renting function, and functions like that I think should be part of the game mechanism for a liberal economy, it's a separate matter as to whether scripters should sell their products, they should.

I do provide free things in this game myself, sometimes giving a free rental space to a newbie for 30 days. Freebies have a role to play. I think there are too many of them in the game, and too many of them kill creativity, kill the incentive for creativity among newbies, kill the need for creativity, and kill creativity in those who spread them like viruses. They never return to the issue of making newbie houses because they have no genuine feedback from sales. They only get lots of people clicking on their junk cuz its free. That is a virus, not market feedback.

Loss-leaders have a role to play in any store and any economy. But you are for having way too many of them, and I am not oppose to them radically such as to remove them all (you're trying to portray me with that extreme view by making it out that I think there shouldn't be any free things and then adding the emotionally-manipulative point that I think "you shouldn't help people in this game". Of course you should help people, and helping them creates some good customer basis. But it shouldn't be endless. I'm for knowledgeable people charging money for their services like education, and for paying them for their time. I just think there are too many freebies in this game, and too deeply embedded a culture of hatred towards commerce, and those who wish to move the game space to a more commercially competitive space. And too many of these so-called "freebies" are not in the public domain, where you can modify them and improve on them and spark more creativity in the game, so they are not so free.

Your experience with your vehicles is just your experiece with your vehicles. Stop trying to spread that on others who sell different things and have different experiences.

Cubey, I remeber back when I first started in SL and saw some of your free tiems..... I thought they were nice and you were also for doing this. No the point is, when I got established, through hard work, and I wanted to buy a plane guess who's plane I bought?

Yours of course and have bought several others since then and have always been happy with them. It's a great way to advertise and it actually increases sales not diminishing them. I also make many free items, and through that I have gotten many good jobs.

So I cant see any harm in doing it and will continue to do so

Smoochies, luvya. What a perfect way to ensure that content barons keep their grip on market relations forever, and kill newbie ingenuity and kill genuine feedback from the market. The newbie helplessly copies the freebies available like a virus. Then *of course* he goes to buy the no-longer-freebie because He Loves Big Brother. Did he have a choice? He is railroaded along to that "choice". That content baron ensures that he keeps his grip on the world.

It may increase sales for the few that have the staying power and the previously subsidized position to flood the market with freebies, sit back and absorb the loss from that, then reel in all the newbies they've fished out of the newbie soup. Honestly, it is not a good thing for any economy. Thriving economies need not old boys' networks and suckups, they need freedom. And freedom means freedom of choice, and freedom not to have to enter into an unwilling relationship with someone just because they are subsidized and a monopolist.

Fortunately, in the area of vehicles, there is no shortage of competition, including newbie competition, because many newbies fasten on the making of vehicles as their first project. But...they face a tough time breaking into any "market" because they aren't as good as the freebies distributed so amply among their ranks by the oldbies, so they can't even sell to each other, one of the really discouraging things I find about this game, that helplessness of newbs even to sell to other newbs because the markets are so glutted with freebies, and freebies that never get any genuine market feedback as to their actual utility to newbs or anybody.

So their incentive is broken, and sure, they take the Cubey Terra freebie and go on to buy the Cubey Terra expensive item later, whereupon Cubey Terra forever after has them in his clutches I get.

I dunno, shoot me for wanting to live in a world where there are more than just Cubey Terra freebies and Cubey Terra for-pay vehicles?

Do you honestly believe what your saying? Do you really think so little of newbies they cant think for themselves? Honestly, I have seem scores of them, even recently come into SL, and doing a fine job, finding a niche. Making sales. Making friends. Give the newbies some credit they cn think for themselves and dont need to be falsely guided.

Yes, I do honestly believe what I'm saying because I see many newbies discouraged from selling anything because they think the freebies are better and they think it is too hard to break into the market with the expensive mall stalls. And I find that they really spread their wings when they can get a cheaper stall or have a free chance for 30 days. I'm recounting my experience, which is just my experience. It seems very important to you to undermine the legitimacy of my own experience that I see with my own eyes, just because it is different from what ever you see. My points about newbies being discouraged from making sales (like the fellow who started this thread wondering how he'd bring his wares to market in this difficult game) should not be mixed with some putative "hatred" or "thinking little" of newbies.

You're trying to make a very emotionally-laded and manipulative point, which is that because you don't agree with my take on the newbie/freebie issue, that therefore I am guilty of thinking ill of newbies, not giving them credit, blah blah blah. Where do you get off doing that? I'm only a hop and a skip from being a newbie myself. Geez.

Don't you see that in fact you ARE falsely guiding them when you give them a Cubey Terra freebie, then guide them to Cubey Terra's expensive-items store? Geez. At least I'm for having him buy from other newbs in a freer economy where people stop glorifying freebies and sapping initiative.

So, in otherwords...

Wait, hold on. I've actually gotta piece together this logic...

Giving away free items and being helpful and polite...

Leads to more sales than people who don't...

Leads to the newbie being somehow "forced" to buy the "content baron" (Read, person who gives stuff away for free) 's items...

...

Leads to... umm...

Ok, forget it. I can't even actually FOLLOW that logic. It just doesn't compute in any rational understanding of how economics works, PN. And I listen to college professors spout politics on a daily basis, I'm a master of trying to follow convulted political and economic 'logic'.

Look, in all your rantings, I just want to ask you something.

Honestly.

Do you even actually know who Cubey IS? Yes, I'm his friend. I won't hide that, so don't laugh and point and shout "Ahah, but your FIC too, of course you will stick up for him!". Yes. I will stick up for my friend. But I won't lie to do it, and if you even dare to accuse me of that, we're done here. With that said...

Do you have any conception of how many of the people who make vehicles today Cubey, (or Apoth, or I) have helped along the way? Stifle competition? Cubey (and the rest of us) ENCOURAGE it... help people sell their vehicles when they make them, give away free scripts and free samples for them to pull about and figure out, hold building contests for vehicles, you name it. Other than getting out of the market entierly he (and we) couldn't do anything more TO help other people to be innovative and creative.

And the Aerodrome group is not at all unique in that.

I'm not even gonna weigh in on the content barons and such malarky. You and I don't agree, PN, and we never will. I refuse to get drawn into the arguement, because frankly it's not worth my time. But I will speak up when you start demonizing and offering forth libel such as this. Your an inteligent individual, PN, for whatever else I might think about you. You don't need to resort to this stuff.

...I've been alive a little over a month.

I've been given some cool stuff. (Thanks to Mae Best and everybody who made my first night here so incredible.)

I've also bought some cool stuff.

Now, I'm making some cool stuff. (Well, I think it's potentially cool.)

If I can get my cool stuff to look and act cool enough, I may even sell some cool stuff.

Nobody's railroading me anywhere. I don't salivate when the psych major rings a bell, and I don't push a bar to get a food pellet every time the red light above my cage goes on.

-- jj

Your forgetting everyone was a newbie at one time or another, some make it some fail....... blming the fialures on those that dint fail is a bit presumptuos. SL mirrors RL in the aspect if one works hard and jeeps at it they dont fail. Ones that dont are predestined to fail. Not because there's free items out there, not because of anyone or anything.

I also was new at one time, at that time you could go hours and hours and never see a soul at the welcome area, had to get out and make friends to learn things. I kept at it, building and building and finally started making a few small items that no one else had and they sold quite well. I asked around where I could place them for sale. Initially I did them in flea markets, then advanced to buying land, and more land. Bouilt my own store, offered anyone to put items in it and did reasonably well. So, I guess Im one who stifles newbies. Wonder why I do so much to help them.

Cubey has said that as a "mall owner" that I can't be part of this discussion because I'm offering cheap stalls for those entering the market, and that is being an "interested party," yet he can offer free stuff, lure newbs to his store eventually (as Toy points out) and get them buying his expensive stuff. Now, I ask you, who is the interested party here?

Reitsuki is hilariously arguing against me by this small-town insular argument of "don't you know who Cubey *is*" as if that is really relevant to an economic discussion about how you make a free and liberal economy. I don't know have to know who he is nor be intimidated into silence just because he is older and a talent and all the rest. And the next argument he uses is "but he's my friend," as if I'm supposed to never argue with anybody's friend, especially if their friend is THE Cubey Terra.

Giving away free items and being helpful and polite is ok, but I think what the oldsters have to look at here is their vaunted notion of themselves as the do-gooders and the saviours of newbiekind. Your freebies sap initiative. They prevent the development of newbie markets. They help enable this clientalism whereby oldbies "apprentice" newbies in content creation or in buy-sell relationships, and that is stifling, and that is a medieval guild society. There needs to be more competition and more authentic market signals that come from purchases, low or high priced, that can determine value. These aren't abstractions, they are realities -- the newbie first-home market is crap because there are too many freebies that look crappy, bring down sims, and don't facilitate either newbie or oldbie creativity and value of the building trade.

There's some crazy idea that the person who gives away items and gets glory as being a giver-away-of-free-items is not only doing better as a person and getting glory, but is getting sales. But I think that status quo received wisdom really is due for a challenge. There are people who sell their goods, sometimes loads of them for lots of money, and they don't saturate the market with freebies that devalue everything and they make a lot of money and the newbies and the oldbies are happy with their products and have genuine market feedback for their whole sales relationship.

Yes, giving out a freebie to lure someone into your store is a "nice" thing to do and sets up a long-term relationship that doesn't *have* to be one of slavery but I do raise the problem that so often is *is* one of *lack of choice* and a sense of being railroaded.


And the Aerodrome group is not at all unique in that.

I'm sorry, but I disagree with you here. The high and might tone you are taking in this discussion, drawing yourself up to full height like grand dragons and saying "Don't you know who we ARE?" is like some drama. I'm glad you're talented and can make cool vehicles. So let people pay for them. And let them develop them too. You don't need to flood the market with freebies and keep your grip on it. Let it go. You will have sales and they will have sales and it will all be a better place. You don't need to "help" people to be innovative by being in constant tekki wiki educatory mode (often accompanied by condescending mode to anyone who even questions that whole set-up). Just run a school and charge for lessons. And sell vehicles and charge for them. And have a few loss-leaders but don't flood the market with all this freeness like a constant beta test. It is death. It is death for this game, and this vehicle as a WWW for other worlds to appear.


Huh? How many times do I have to say that I didn't invent the term content baron, I have no gripe or grudge against the "content barons" because I think it is absolutely fine that they charge money and have customers. That's why I don't want so many freebies. When there are less freebies, when there are less oldbies ready to fly into a touchy insult-mode rage every time someone questions their positioning in the game, there will be more content-creators which will create the necessary competition for there to be less "content barons" in the sense of people brooking no competition, and therefore no natural market corrective and incentive for change and improvement.

Libel? Where's the libel? Huh? I'm criticizing the practice of giving away too many freebies. This is an economic posture which I believe is not supportable. I'm urging people to sell their wares. I'm urging them to stop guilt-tripping every mall owner or space-renter as somehow a gouger and not a legitimate service-provider in this game. I'm urging people to stop believing that just because you give something out for free that we are supposed to endlessly bow to you ever after -- have the guts to put it out for sale and see if anyone buys it.

The Lindens coddled and socialized you all with socialism, and you replicated it by your patronizing and cloying attitude toward newbies. Newbies are people with high-end computers and in many cases $9.95 a month to play this game and don't need the cloying pity that you dish out to them. They can go buy some money on GOM< or save up a bit to buy some things in the game and get themselves started in business in all kinds of niches that could develop when you all can let go the fierce, clinging grip you have on this economy, which you want endlessly to circulate your freebies to maintain your visiblity in world, which you want endlessly to buy your high-end products, which you want endlessly to bow before you in endless gratitude for being the noble types to help newbies. Please, spare us.