The Rampant Anti-Business Climate in SL

Wah !

(and wrong)

Forseti,

I find I have to be extra aggressive because of the presence of oh, about 6 people tops, who constantly provide that rabid, junk-yard dog quality to these forums. Bracket them out, and my responses to them, and you will find that I'm quite willing to be reasonable.

You sound like a thoughtful person who just hangs out in the game, perhaps in your little circle, perhaps exploring around a bit, maybe you have a network, I don't know, but I can tell that your quieter hanging out with friends, your quieter take on things is a direct result of your limited experience in dealing with a broader public.

I am not trying to pull rank on you here, because I'm new and gathering information, but I chose a business that gives me impressions from literally hundreds of people constantly. And I see all that, and I see how out of sync it is with the forums, the oldbies, the Lindens even, and I get very, very energized at the disparity, the disconnect, the internal contradictions, the shocking lapses of awareness.



Well, this is because it's my direct experience, and a multiplied, replicated experience? Maybe it's not yours.

I'd like to believe there are these wise and kind well-established creator, the "very good people" you describe who are "very open to new competition and new talent". I don't see them. I see forum fucktards who invade classifieds to destroy another's business, I see in-game fucktards apprenticed to sneering oldbies who maliciously try to destroy another's business, I see fucktards who invade every thread to hector and harass, who even come in-game and try to disrupt someone's Second Life. I see terrible hammerlocks on situations and people helpless to change them and walking out. Excuse me if I just said "fucktard" a lot, but if I hadn't *first* experienced the problem of fucktardery in this game up close and personal, without having it provoked, I would not have embarked on fighting it so hard now in the forums.

I agree that the absence of dispute resolution and constructive discourse is a hamper. But as I've found, it's hard to get anything but ridicule for that kind of effort on the forums. And in-game, it has the spottiest of results.

Honestly, my experience is my experience. Invalidate it if you must by attacks on my character. I'm telling you what I see.

Geez, that's a tendentious and false quote Daisy. LOL There's no such quote and I didn't say there is an anti-business conspiracy here.

I said there is an anti-business climate.

It is produced by deliberate policies by Lindens and residents.

It is also produced by unconscious or not-thought-through policies and unintended side-effects to actions by Lindens and residents.

Let's sort out the difference, and see if I have a point.

Is that going to be typical of the rest of your remarks as you invade this thread with your baggage from another thread where you lost the argument? Let's see if you can come up with real experience and good arguments to refute what I've said, instead of playing word games.

Prok I think people who do actually make a profit from the game, have been able to look at the tools they've been given, have asessed what can be done with the tools, and then work with those tools for their projects.

It sounds to me like you came into the game, decided you wanted to do X and then spent a ton of money for X without realizing that the game tools don't lend themselves well to X.

Consequently, your posts are long diatribes about how LL should change the game to accomodate you and your project. If you posted now and again about features you'd like to see added to the game, I don't think anyone would have a problem with that. But your threads are full of hatred for those who have had enough common sense to use the tools that they didn't ask for, but haved used wisely, and disdain for LL for not giving you what you need for your projects

The FIC are people who have taken a good hard look at how they can use the EXISTING system to the benefit of their projects. They are successful because they have made good judgemant calls as to what can and can't be done with the tools given to them. Don't blame them for that.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear

That really is a bit sad. You go hysterical, misunderstand a Linden proposal, and yourself generate market unease by pushing this misunderstanding in forum.

I point out (as others have done) that this proposal does nothing to reduce the price of a sim, because it is (as usual) a free, open auction.

Your response ? That this "change" HAS reduced the price of land, because OFTEN FEW PEOPLE BID.

Are you so blinded by ego that you can't see anything wrong with that argument ?

It's sad, because you do have some good and valid points to make, but you devalue your own arguments by twisting and turning in defense of errors, in your frenzy to maintain what I can only assume is a very fragile ego.

These are not personal attacks. I'm not interested in personal attacks. But I object to rational discussion being subverted by peoples emotional difficulties, particularly strident aggressive people.

Come on, now Prok, do the big thing. Admit it, saying that OFTEN FEW PEOPLE BID ON AUCTIONS is a comment on the existing situation, it is apparently a complaint about the workings of a free market, it ignores the fact that you dont need to be there, but can bid days in advance, but above all IT CANNOT BE EVIDENCE THAT THE PROPOSED CHANGE WILL DROP PRICES.

You said it, it was wrong, I guess you just gotta find some way to support it, even if it means resorting to nonsense.

Oh dear.

If I have misunderstood, please explain in one sentence how Ryan's proposal will reduce the price of land. Please don't invent some assumption that it implies MORE sims will be available. That was never said.

How can another free auction reduce the price of land, unless by the psychological effect of those who misunderstand, and then disseminate misinformation ?

Which you are trying hard to do, whilst complaining about the possible effect of your action.

Incidentally, I examined the "completed auctions" two days after this all blew up, and saw absolutely no price reduction. Sure it wasn't a "one auction freak" such as you so graphically describe ?

So you're upset that there are a features for a huge constituency that you aren't a part of?

Geez, Ingrid, why am I not surprised you are here?

You ought to be thinking in general terms about business in SL. Are you just a medieval-type artisan selling to other artisans and serfs, so you don't feel any pain in this anti-business climate? Have you apprenticed yourself in tacit or actual fashion to olbies who cushion you from awareness of anti-business sentiments by their careful but rapid easing of you into the center of the merchandising arena in Miramare?

No, what you had to do is personalize it, and make it about me being a "loser" or a "struggler" as one really pernicious asshole continues to portray me in-game and in-world.

But Ingrid, I rake in cash, I cash out on GOM, I cover expenses, and I have a good time. What's not to like? I sometimes barely break even. Some weeks I might take losses if I have too many houses blow up on sim seams.

Yet I surely don't look to this game to change, or for Lindens to fete me, or for anybody to do a goddamn thing to make or break my business. I see it primarily as an investment in an experiment, and an investment in an experience. I get what I pay for. It's golden. I treasure it. I'm sorry you don't because you need to needle, pick, snipe, and undermine.

Why don't you realize that I run circles around you as far as the data, impressions, anecdotal experiences that I get every day? Why don't you look to have that shared with you?

Do you realize that your houses just don't rent, Ingrid? Can you stand to have that market feedback? I love your houses. I had five of them set out on a beautiful coastline with fast FPS for probably 45 days or longer, taking a loss, day after day, instead of just buckling and putting out the usual Victorian or picket-fence prefabs. They barely rented. People couldn't get comfortable in them. They are nice sculptures, an idea of a house, but they wouldn't rent. Can you deal with that? *I took a fucking loss on your houses not because I'm stupid but because I believe in your houses and tried to defy experience as I saw it.*

Please Ingrid, try to realize that your constant slamming of me on these forums, for whatever weird personal reason (and I can gather what that might be) is simply unbecoming to you. And if you are going to get on here and call me a loser who has a failed business and whines about problems in SL, then I'm going to go on here and say: um, your houses don't rent. When they do, I'm grateful. A few do, sometimes, and I can justify my continue support of you and this style. The reality is, the masses just don't get or like good architecture.



That's what I do, Ingrid, that's what I do daily night and day. Duh. And I don't need you to tell me how to do it. I do do it. I do it in a business that everyone knows has such razor-thin margins that the "economics aren't good" as pundits and arm-chair auctioneers will tell you. Yet I do it just to gather experience and knowledge.



Well, and what if I did? But none other than Lee Linden and a ton of other Lindens recognize that the group tools are borked and need fixing and revision and weren't designed for land tools. They don't have a problem getting the overarching themes here. You are so short-sighted, evidently, that you can't see that it is OK to come in a game and try to do X and find the tools don't let you do X and then push for X.

That's what this alleged metaverse is supposed to do for us!



Someday you will thank me for jumping up and down and screaming as hard as I have about that idiotic-hippie-socialist-dope-smoking-Animal-Farm-Soviet-collective thingie called "officer recall". You'll thank me when you are in a group, as a project leader, which I hope you will one day, and some fucktard who wants to steal your land, can't do it because he can't toggle that switch on you, the group founder or you, the group investor.

I've posted in Features. What, do you think I"m a snivelling wimpie milquetoast that I'd sit still and do the fanboyz thing and post in Features which sinks like a stone and is never read?



Wait a sec. Call the Herald. This just in. Did Ingrid admit the existence of the FIC???? Gah.

Um, guess what Ingrid? I took the existing tools of the game and I pushed them and had a great time doing it and still do, it makes my life really interesting. It's frustrating and I complain about problems precisely because I still naively believe they might be fixed. If they aren't, I make do. I"ve made do a million times in this game.

If you have made good judgement calls about YOUR business with your FIC friends help, let me point out that it is my business that enabled you to have thousands of dollars of business for your prefabs. I don't mean to exaggerate my market share of your sales, but I wonder if you got the Lindens to spit out an aggregate sales report from transaction histories for Prokofy Neva's cash paid to Ingrid Ingersoll if you wouldn't just be a little bit nicer to me on the forums and in the games.

Perhaps I should rethink that business decision? Well, no, because unlike a lot of forum fucktards, I never let the forum crap interfere in a business matter if I can help it. (The exception might be some big business using their weight to slander my business reputation.) For example, I just got a house even from Nolan Nash, merely because it looked like it would fit somewhere and it was available for not a huge price. I'll go on getting your houses.

Why don't you ponder a bit about the thousands of dollars I've spent on you and your friends in this game, before you come on here and trash me as a loser who has a failed business and whines to LL to change it.

It's not a huge constituency Buster ROFLMFAO.

You just don't get it.

Look at the groups. Look at how many own land. See the nature of the groups. The groups are malls, clubs, etc. The groups where a bunch of eggheads are floating around scripting big weapons and vehicles are far less than the barons, clubs, malls, etc.

I dunno, Buster, are you getting out much?

I sure don't have to be part of the egghead tekkie thing at all. I'm not in the slightest bit jealous. That's because I know my own intelligence and know there are tons of others out there like me who could enjoy a game like this and bring a completely different set of cards to the table. They'd see things quite differently than you, although I appreciate that you are poised more at that intersection between liberal arts and technical arts, an intersection that becomes a vasty gulf for most of the technically-inclined.

WHOA. I said you didn't realize that the tools didn't lend themselves well to your projects. That's "trashing you"? That's "slamming you"?. That's calling you a "loser". NO. it isn't.

And yes I can take negative customer feed back, as you well know. I even changed some of my houses to accomodate some of your renters. I'm sorry they are not renting. I invite you to scrap them all and try with someone elses. And if they all rent, I invite you to tell me and I'll ditch every one of them and start over. Although I have to add, you've been one of the only people who have bought anything from me with such negative feedback.

I guess you felt the need to exact revenge, to slam my business in the forums as you PERCEIVED I have slammed yours. Congrats. You did well.

I don't think you are "pulling rank" prok, nor do i have any interest in attacking your character.

My circle of exposure may indeed be more limited than yours, and I have only been in SL since November. It is true that I am still probing the environment and business landscape in SL with experiments (and having fun creating at the same time). However, organizing the men's store in Riiki brought me in contact with a lot of designers, so I actually do have a decent sample set to work from.

I can understand there being a lot of complaints from the "average" player. Welcome to the human race. Show me a society where that doesn't exist (one that is bigger than 20-30 people). (yes Chip, can I have free beer for life? )

This online world is in a very nascent stage, so I certainly agree that it is the right time to speak up and try to influence its future and design parameters.

But again, speaking as a businessman and a RL entrepreneur, and having now spent many months exploring SL, I too see many impediments to business and many inefficiencies in the market, but consider those to be a result of an early, evolving system rather than a systematic anti-business approach imposed by the "founding fathers"

There is something that I don't understand about this post.

When I am setting the price and permissions of something that I create to sell, why would I consider anything but what I want to do? Why would I think about what is good for newbie creators, or SL as a whole? That seems silly. Because it is a game. I pay a lot of money to play it and I am going to do whatever I feel like doing at any given moment. Its called recreation.

This post presupposes that SL is something more than recreation, that what we do somehow really matters. Its a game and one day it will go away and we'll all be playing other games. In the scheme of things its not going to be of any significance that I gave away freebies or sold no transfer or no mod. Let's keep things in perspective.

Well, sure. That's a good argument. But so often people set themselves up here in the reputation ratings game as being "Good For The Community" because they think about what's Good For Newbies. So I call them on it.

Like, if Siggy Romulus has a newbie prefab on every single first-land on every single sim that is not on mod, so not a single newbie can ever, ever, EVER change the color of the siding on that god-awful thing, even.

I accept your argument as part of a pro-business climate, in fact as legitimate. You're saying "I get to do what I want in a climate of freedom and my decisions are what I feel is best for my business." I like that!

However, I can call on you to consider that crushing newbie creation by smothering them with freebies might be a bad thing in the long run.




Interesting you think that way. I guess when I cash out GOM money and pay for the games expenses, or don't, I think it is more than a game but the fact that I still call it a game is indicative.

I think it does have the potential to become something more and I actually don't think we'll be playing something so different after this, because whatever happens after this will have borrowed heavily from this.

This sure is a polarized thread. I think Ingrid sums it up best.

In general Prokofy, I tend to agree with you. I've posted about this in a few other areas, and mused about it on my blog.

On one hand I kept seeing Philip out there in the public carrying on how you could make real money from your inworld enterprises, while on the other hand continually undermining and taking away the very tools in order to get that accomplished.

I wish someone would decide exactly which its gonna be and then go from there. This say one thing and do another bothers me a LOT.

At this point, today I'm of the mind that this is all simply one huge experiment, and at the end of every day LL looks at us rats in the maze or blobs in the petri dish (pick one) and just laughs and laughs.

I don't think they laugh, but this is definitely one huge experiment. How could it not be? No one's ever done this before so there's always been an element of "hmmmm, let's see what happens if we push this button." SL has always gone through incremental changes and adjustments. Some stick and get added to, some fail and are replaced with something else. SL has always and will always be about constant change. Those who succeed and profit are those who are best able to adapt to those changes.

at least we are self-aware rats, and aware of the maze too. Thankfully, unlike RL, this is one maze that when you when tired or frustrated, you can turn off the computer.

this all is an experiment, because it is new. It is inherantly evolutionary. And either one company (like LL) tries to be evolutionary, or it happens through multiple companies (startup 1 rises, goes bust. startup 2 learns, rise, goes bust. startup 3)... It may STILL be multiple companies... depends on LL's design decisions and technical prowess.

I don't think, though, that the technical infrastructure is there yet to meet any of our visions, and that's one reason why so many people are frustrated.

But you DID slam me, Ingrid. Anybody can see it. It is the usual subtle and perfect put-down, delivered in hands-free fashion with dev-speak like "the tools didn't lend themselves well to your projects" as a barely-veiled comment of the order of "you don't make houses and handbags so I guess you don't fit in here."

I'm glad you changed your houses. It wasn't personal. It was just market feedback. It made it a bit better. As I some, some of your houses rent. Others don't. A whole bunch of them in a row didn't rent. One of the big reasons they didn't is that people want to put down their own houses. They don't like seeing all one architect or all one home in a row because it makes them feel claustrophobic.

Meanwhile architects and urban planners love seeing one style in a row because it looks proper and stylics and balanced. Real people playing house don't want that though, or at least, not as often as we hoped.

I'm not exacting revenge, Ingrid. I'm making the kind of ultra-sophisticated pointed comment that you always feel called upon to make to me, in your veiled slams. I gave you a point of hard factual information. That your houses don't rent. Even though I keep buying them and will go on buying them and I love them. But people don't go for them always.

Now, you could come back and say "Prokofy, that's because your parceling sucks" or "That's because your chose locations badly" or whatever. But don't accuse me of revenge, when all I have gotten from you for months and months on the forums is nasty sideswipes.

Well your barely veiled comment about how my prefabs are ruining your business ventures are loud and clear. I suggest you don't buy from me anymore. I don't want to be the cause of anyone's SL dreams falling apart.

1. They aren't ruining my business.
2. I'm citing how in one, place, in one community, for a time, they did not rent. So I ditched them. A few rent elsewhere. I'm not as liberal about sprinkling them everywhere now.
3. This is a comment on market tastes and market forces, not on your skills.
4. I dunno, unless you ban my avatar from your stores, I will likely go on buying them, but even if you do that, I'll still be able to buy them from SLExchange.com LOL.
5. My dreams aren't falling apart, no need to exaggerate.
6. Honestly, Ingrid you've been slamming me for months and months and months on the forums. I fight back, but not very hard because I still consider you a friend and colleague.

But when you have absolutely nothing constructive to day and not a whit of insight about whether there is or isn't anti-business forces in SL, then I can see is that instead of engaging in intelligent debate, all you can do is use it as a venue for a personal attack. You have to make it sound like I fail, my dreams fall apart, I'm a loser, my business crumbles, etc.

But it doesn't LOL. So please, stop. It's not becoming of you.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Gawd I wish you'd follow your own advice.

you read what you want to read, Prok.

Ingrid said that some people work within the tools of SL. You seem frustrated with those tools, or lack thereof. You are welcome to post for better tools, but there is no need to post with such hatred for those who work within the tools.

That is a 3rd party view of ingrid's post.

It gets even better! Now I'm a complete, babbling idiot according to Prok! Serves me right for disagreeing with his opinions. So much for open discussion.

Prok! I spend quality time responding to your original post with non-emotional, thoughtful responses.... and you ignore me. Pffft.

I agree with you partially on the freebie things. I've always thought free items should be fully open with regard to the permissions, which is how mine are setup. This encourages new and older players to experiment with building and texturing without a) ruining a build that cost them a sum of $L's and b) worrying about being able to fix it. Just rez another copy and start over!

The only issue I've run into is when people re-sell them.


Oh, and Ingrid - there is a script out there whereby you can not allow a particular AV to purchase from you, let me know if you're interested.

Um...Schwanson and Chip...you're a good example of some of those categories LOL whether you realize it or not.

Have you adapted? Or were you feted lol? Are you really out there facing business difficulties and decisions on your own on a tabula resa, or did you have a lot of extra support? These are honest questions.

Schwanson, if you buy up everybody's old island when they want to cash out quick, and then resell it, sure, I'll bet you do well in SL. But aren't you the least bit troubled by the hatred of land barons? Don't you find it a hindrance? Or are you saying, shut up, suck up to Lindens, lay low, and just keep buying islands, never question anything, and you, too, will become a Secondlifeonnaire?

Because you're not really addressing the questions I raised -- people who consider *their own commerce is doing just fine, thank you* but give no thought to the hindrances in the rest of the game (like the events crap) and can only enter this debate by slamming me?