An Out of Control Situation.

I was thinking that this would be based on ownership, so if they own all the plots (or are donating their tier to all the owner groups) they'd count as a single parcel as far as the quota's concerned. They'd need to have enough alts to hold enough tier for each separate plot, which would cost them US$10/month/plot... making it a lot less economical.

Quotas don't generally work that way in other contexts, but you're right... I oughta make that explicit: this wouldn't override the sim quota, it would be a way to keep small plots from using up all the sim quota at once.

1/16th of a sim is 4096 m^2. What kinds of places need to cram more than 10 people into that small an area? I have 4096 myself, and with half a dozen avs it seems pretty well populated.

But the numbers are endlessly tweakable. If 10/4096 is too small, put the cutoff at 15/8192 or 20/32768 and let smaller parcels grow to that limit, or make it 10/2048, 15/6144...

Or make it something enabled by landowner vote. Each parcel has a checkbox "enable parcel quotas", and if more than half the sim's land has that box checked you get parcel quotas.

I have a *basic* account, but not a *free* account... and I pay LL more than a *premium* account through Tony and Alliez.

What if the quota was something voted on by the landowners (see my other followup). Do you think it would be turned on in Lusk or Perry?

Report it as abuse! REPORT IT REPORT IT! I had this same problem in Enyo... and same land size too.. It's completely ridiculous, but if you report it as excessive use of sim resources and then contact live help! SOMEONE Will help you out!
-Britt

I'm with ya Loni... all the way... I tried to come over and buy some furniture from you the other day and couldn't even get into the sim.. *sigh*

Things like that are a disgrace.. Inconsiderate land owners such as this one, should be conveniently disposed of...

You have an overoptimistic view of what may be desirable compared to what is acheivable, methinks.

-If I'm not mistaken, the Elbow Room is well under 4096m. Its definately not a camping joint - and while you may not see 40 folks there, I think 15-20 isn't unusual. Note that when the Elbow Room first opened, it was on a 512m plot (hence the name).

-The Shelter holds its various trivia game shows once a day on a 4080m plot in Wingo. Attendance for those shows is usually in the neighborhood of 20-30 avatars, for one hour each day. The rest of the time, Wingo sits for the most part unpopulated.



This is completely cool by me if its done on new sims, or opted in by the current landowners in the form of a mutually-agreed upon covenant. However, introducing that to existing landowners on the mainland without each of their consent would be retroactive zoning, and not very cool at all. I'm all for resident governement as long as its on an 'opt-in' basis (so I can opt-out).

Just had to throw in one other piece of history for anyone interested:

The Shelter opened in August of 2004 on a 2048m parcel in the Fudo sim. Back then, the maximum amount of avatars allowed in any sim was 30. However, you could circumvent this limit by manually teleporting avatars inside.

Fudo was full of smaller commercial shops at that time, and had a large section of land that was vacant. Just to the north of us was Baku, which had a lot of activity between W-Hat's HQ, and One Song's Texas Hold-em casino.

Our events back then at the Shelter brought in 20-30 people, and the Fudo sim was often full because of the 30 avatar limit. I remember having to station people just at the sim border watching for stranded AV's unable to get in, and manually teleporting them across the line into Fudo, regardless of whether their final destination was the Shelter.

Around October of 2004, the large vacant parcel in Fudo sold, and a new Mature-themed club called "Pleasures" moved in. Pleasures was just as active as we were - creating one heck of a contention for avatar slots. Once Pleasures was active, the sim seemed to be nearly perpetually full, and with the child agents from Baku involved on top of it, Fudo became a lag-fest that was legendary. Even though the avatar limit was 30, it was not uncommon to see 50+ avatars in Fudo between the Shelter and Pleasures.

By December of 2004, the situation became completely unbearable - and we decided that it was in our best interest to move. We chose what was at the time a nearly completely empty sim - 'Isabel', and secured a 4000m plot near the Telehub there as our new home. The 'Sim Full' problems we previously had were gone, and the FPS we got there was incredible.

When 1.6 was released, the sim avatar limit was raised to 40, and the ability to manually teleport agents inside was removed. We rarely if ever approched the 40 avatar limit, so this change was for the most part invisible to us. In the past year since, I think only once or twice have we experienced a 'sim full' condition.

I posted a link to this thread in the Linden forum and asked for a response. Here is the link to it:

/invalid_link.html

Oh good, another glad-handing, smoke up thine posterior "we'll hold a meeting about it" non answer.

Fuck the centrifugal bumblepuppy and just act:

1. Kill Dwelloper Incentives immediately.
   
2. Kill dwell payments immediately.
   
3. Kill the calculation of dwell and its use for sorting in the Find listings

Voting booths were gamed, so you scrapped them and replaced it with dwell which was gamed even worse. Sure, there will be something else to game, but hasn't three years experience with failed measures of "value" taught you anything?

To cure the problem you have to remove the incentive to cheat. While there remains some incentive: DI, Dwell payments, Find rankings. You'll have people gaming them. Don't need no rocket scientist to generalize from that experience, do you?

I agree with Introvert 100%. To cure the problem, you have to remove the incentive to cheat. Developer Incentive will be gone by the end of this month. But I strongly believe the problem will continue to remain as long as there are Dwell payment & Find rankings.

Why Linden chose to address the DI without addressing Dwell at the same time perplexes me to no end.

The dwell numbers themselves are genuinely useful to many as a measuring stick. But if they were gone for everyone simultaneously, the reward (less gaming) may outweigh the cost (statistics). If Dwell went the way of the dodo bird I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over it

I know that is very uncomfortable have a land in a sim where you can not enter because is always full, but I have good news for you all. The lindens know about the camping chairs and they plan to do something about it. The first thing they will do is to cancel the dwell made by traffic. I copy this information from a thread made by Jesse Linden:

Quote:

"Reminder:

We are planning to discontinue the Developer Incentive program by the end of March, 2006. Our aim is to phase this change in so that any disruption this causes any resident can be mitigated to some extent over a transitional period.

The program phase-out will begin January 1st, with the overall award amount for December capped at November levels. The total amount paid out will then be reduced by 33% each month beginning with the February 1 payment and ending with the final payment on April 1, 2006.

The Developer Incentive program was originally created as a way to recognize outstanding content creation in Second Life. But as many of you know, the program has not been a total success in rewarding the wide range of Second Life creativity. Our goal will be to replace the Developer Incentives with new programs designed to support the full scope of Second Life creators."

I hope this solve the problem with the camping chairs!

Thats sort of correct.

Developers Incentive (or Dwellopers Incentive as it came to be known) was the USD 'reward' check that was made out to a small percentage at the top of the 'dwell ladder'..

Camping chairs increased dwell and for a low L$ payout bumped you up the ladder where you could hopefully get a slice of that USD pie. As such yes - I think it will help.

However I've not seen anything to say the daily L$ dwell will be phased out yet (I've seen folks talking about it but nothing official). Even so I don't see that being a big enough of a reward for most places to continue using them.

Time will tell - but hopefully a step in the right direction.

If it's off by default and it has to be enabled by voting it in, how would it be retroactive?

Maybe a "land vote" mechanism like that would be useful for other potentially contentious changes that are frequently called for.

Because dwell payments are actually an important tool that should be retained and improved, not removed.

To whom are they important? Is the server cost of calculating dwell statistics greater than any potential value?

I can think of two scenarios where they might conceivably be useful:

1. A place that is pleasing to be but cannot exist without Linden "subsidy"
   
2. As a means of implicitly collecting attendance "fees" without having to explicitly charge them

As I noted and Travis echoed, so long as there exists incentive to game the dwell, it will be gamed.

In the case of the examples above there are more direct ways of accomplishing the same good which are not gamable. The first would be through in-game philanthropy. For a time I was a benefactor of the SL Parks & Recreation Service most grandly and was patron of many smaller artistic endeavors. The second would be to charge explicitly for entertainment.

Yes, this would require a change to the attitude that everything ought be free, but we might see higher quality events as a result. When I see Froggy perform, I tip the hell out of him (in Lindens) which is significantly less than a RL cover charge to enter a bar and hear him play.

I hope I don't embarass Travis by noting that The Shelter is totally funded by donations and does much philanthropy in-game. The Shelter also has far fewer (i.e. none) Beg-A-Thons than does National Public Radio.

If there is some use of the "tool" of dwell that I am unaware of, I'd love to hear it. It is probably historically significant that voting booths and the dwell that followed was explicitly an attempt by LL to use quantitative measures to allow them to make qualitative judgments without the appearance of bias. The concept was fundamentally broken from the inception as you have to be able to say "this is good, this isn't" and no amount of automation saves you that. All they did was to buy themselves a Zombie Class. Too bad Marx never included that in his analyses.

The Linden vision is to do away with incentives and let the residents support what they want to survive. However, I don't think that Linden Labs is quite ready to kill dwell yet.

The problem with this vision is that a few generous people will support places like the Shelter, but a lot of potentially nifty places will die before people find out about them or will never be built to begin with.

OF course, that happens now; dwell payments are not high enough to make much of a difference for most small venues.

Well probably not a 'tool' or even of much utility to some - but I rather like the actual 'traffic' score on your land - it gives me an idea of what days folks frequent The WaterWorks compared to who visits the surrounds.. kinda gives me an idea of whether I'm going in the right direction with it or not.

Probably useless to most - the 'dwell' thing I don't give a rats about - but the traffic score I find usefull.

As I stated previously, keep dwell, only cut out the middle man with his exploiting fingers in the pie. You should make more sitting on your own land then someone's camping chair. Have Dwell count all traffic including your own.

A camping script also needs to be in public domain so a free account person can sit at a friends or even their main account. Sure its a lesser evil but it beats them all sitting on one 1024 while the other residents pay the price.

If I was LL, I would be pretty pissed off at these exploiters for ruining their incentive program with their underhanded exploitations. These exploiters made a mockery of their popular places list too and turned a free account opportunity into a afk server load mess. I really don't think LL is as complacent as some think they are but I also don't think they are going to come out and say it... They do go as far as saying "less of a success", but I doubt they will say "we were played for suckers". I wonder how they feel when handing a hundred bucks to someone who exploited them and ruined their grand plans...

Well LL, this is for you. You have to suck it up for one more month but that doesn't mean you have to be nice about it... You know where these exploiters are and you have a simple way to get your payback, a server reset. I for one will applaud you every time you reset a server. I will not complain or feel inconvienced in any way and I really don't think the vast at the keyboard majority will mind either. Make it look like an accident if you want, go ops You know you want this... A server reset a couple times a day will do wonders and you will feel so much better, I assure you.

3. To enable the Linden Economy to behave more like the Real Life economy.

#1 and #3 are the most important ones, and are opposite faces of the same coin.

In real life, very few "events" are paid for entirely by ticket sales, and many "free events" are profitable with no ticket sales. This works because the attendees pay for them through higher prices for food and drinks and other consumables that our human, biomechanical, carbohydrate-fueled physical bodies depend on. All over the place in every city in the world there are entertainments and recreational areas paid for wholly or partly through these purchases.

People are used to not having to pay a cover charge to visit a nice restaurant or a public park, to get "free" big screen TVs and even live entertainment in bars. People are used to cheap movie tickets and pricey hotdogs. People are used to having "free" boat ramps and beaches with kiosks and park stores.

On the flipside, Linden Labs benefit from attractions that paying users spend time at, not ones that paid "extras" spend time at. It's in their interest to promote attractions that are simply, well, attractive to customers. A build... it's like a website, and it's got the same problem as the web does... the people who do a good job are actually punished by having to pay for the product AND for the access to it. For years a popular site was the kiss of death, it cost too much to run and you didn't get anyuthing for it. This was teh reason people would give for using online services, because online services could actually pay creators with the money their customers were paying for access!

Getting people to pay for just going to "nice builds" isn't going to work any better than getting people to pay for going to "nice websites" did. Getting companies to sponsor online content through advertising and grants is possible, but it didn't happen on the scale that LL needs on an internet of 100,000 people in 1981, it really didn't become possible until the internet was a hundred times the size of SL.

Linden Labs is more like an "online services" company in this respect than an "internet".

Any economic system will be gamed. That's what economics is all about, finding efficient ways to game a system. The way to make it work to satisfy requirement #3 is to make dwell work like the regular purchases... of things like food and gas that don't exist in SL and aren't necessary for avatars to live... that people make in real life. The way to make it work for #1 is to make dwell represent the value of the build to Linden Labs, by measuring primarily the value of paying customers.

Luckily both of these things can be done with the same scheme because the paying customers can largely (albeit not perfectly) be tracked by LL, and these are also the people who in the economic simulation would be buying the more expensive consumables with their income rather than food-stamps.

By and large, if LL bases dwell payments on the value or wealth of the "dwell droppers", they'll be targeting mostly the same group of people and they'll be encouraging a wider variety of builds. They may not necessarily be the builds I'd like to see, but they'd definitely be builds paying customers like to see.

Premium accounts are more valuable. Make them worth an extra "point".
People who buy at least medium-large chunks at Lindex are more valuable and more "wealthy". Make them worth an extra "point".
People who have tier, or who are officers in landholding groups because they're renting, are again more valuable and more wealthy, make them worth an extra "point".
Basic accounts are less valuable, only make them 1/4 of a point.
Free basic accounts are even less valuable, make them 1/8 of a point.

Someone might end up being worth 2 1/8 points, because they're a free basic account but they buy through Lindex and rent land from Anshe. (how many lindens? how much land? I don't know... pick numbers). There's other things that can be added. Anwyay, someone who hits all the points could be worth 3 or 4 or 5 points.

And the bottom line is that your dwell hole with an average of 15-20 free accounts dancing on balls wouldn't get as much dwell as your nice build that averages two paying customers.

So is ANY OTHER mechanism to use economics to produce positive benefits. The market is explicitly a mechanism for making qualitative judgements using quantitative measures. To say it's broken is to argue for central planning and a command economy. Dwell is a direct reflection of a real component of the real economy that's essential to its health... the only way it's broken is that it counts someone spending $50.00 plus green stamps as being equivalent to someone buying $500 worth of groceries.

Would now be a bad time to mention I can crash a sim in under a second.

Maybe I should change my business plan....


"Sims Reset for a nominal fee"

I see Dwell used as a measure of determing a parcels popularity as a tool. But the payments... they are just another incntive to game the system for a buck. I run a club, and at one time ran Club ELite and Elite Island. I recieved some nice checks, but they were not earned by paying people money to sit in a chair. I agree with Travis that the solution is to scrap any type of subsidies based on dwell.

Granted, the losers in this are going to be thh Club Owners, as people are not accustomed to paying for the "product" they offer (entertainment). But most other occupations in SL rely on sales to reward them for their efforts. As a Club Owner, I would certainly accept some form of incentive program if they could come up with something that wouldn't be gamed. But I think a better solution would be for the Club Owners to find a better means of attracting customers than dishing out cash, and perhaps even the customers changing behaviour and actually paying something to offset the costs.

Just my two cents worth...

Well I just logged out.. Once again the dwell exploiter has taken over the sim and my land is useless to me. I have three times the land as this bozo and I can't enter my own land, it all goes to afkers in camping chairs. I want credit, I am paying for something I can not use. I am being made an ass here for paying for this. If LL wants to try to run this game with one small land owner in every single sim, then good luck to them when the electric bill arrives. I am very pissed off right now. Its not even prime time here... 4:24 in the afternoon and the Yucca grid is closed due to exploitation and a paying customer is locked out.

Ok, folks in Yucca there are a few things we can do to help deal with the casino. These were things I was told by a LLE just before I got the server reset at about 5:00 PM SL time.

First, everytime the server is full and you can't get in file an abuse report. Make sure to note Casino as the primary cause and that they are abusing server resources which it is.

Second, if you are in a position to call LL at their tollfree number.


Finally, do this. This is what I did to get a server reset after Live Help did not work. Run a find on Linden under the people tab. See who is online and check to see if any are Abuse or Liaision's. Ask if they are on the main grid. If they are explain the situation and request a server reset. If it is an abuse person, I would also suggest that they come look at the sim before the reset and watch it after the reset. If none of those types are on start talking to the others and asking if they can do a server reset.

Just remember when doing all of this be nice about it. Remember the folks you are asking for help are a lot more likely to try to help you even if it is only a server reset if you treat them with respect and nicely.

I hope this helps.