No dwell - no point in free content

People keep saying that, but it's not those places that the dwell is enabling... the most dwell bonus you can get from an avatar on your land is less than they're paying to keep their dummies dancing. When the DI was a going concern, yes, it was big enough to pay for them... but dwell isn't.

What getting rid of dwell is going to get rid of are the places people built for fun but keep around and keep letting people visit because they get a gold star and a cookie for it.

I actually dont think the incentive to have very high traffic will disapear completely with the elimination of dwell payments.

One of the reasons being Land owners who rent vendor areas generally charge and keep their stalls rented based on Traffic.

Of course many of us who rent vendor booths will skip the camp chair places since they tend to be so laggy we dont figure anyone would ever actually shop there.

It could very well be the elimination od dwell will require places such as I have described to charge more for rent / Add more stalls (and accompanying lag)

I just want to add in my 2 cents here. Personally, dwell doesn't matter to me. When I decided to become a premium member after a couple of weeks of playing the game, it wasn't because of dwell. I liked the game and I wanted to buy some land and own my own home, which I do, all 8000m of it. After I got my home set up I decided to start a cafe, which I have done. I now own almost 14000m of land.
I didn't buy the land to make money. To me the money I put into SL was my entertainment budget. I can spend $100 a month going out to dinner and movies or I can spend it playing SL. I've chosen SL.
Dwell had no effect on my decision. I personally think getting dwell for holding a party at my house was kind of dumb. I would have preferred that 40 or 50L go to somebody that deserves it. If I were to structure dwell it would be for businesses only, not for home owners who can throw a party.
The cafe I started for fun. I hold live events and pay for them out of my own pocket. True, I make some money in tips, but it certainly is no where near enough to pay for the cost of the entertainment, let alone the tier. To me, if I can make a couple hundred L a day on various things I'm doing good. That's my daily spending money. Any other major projects I decide to do I simply buy the L and move on. I don't ever worry about recouping my costs.
I have even taken to renting out some of my land with little homes for people with free accounts. I don't make enough on those to pay the cost of the land, but I wasn't trying to. I would own the land anyway. I'm just simply doing something useful with it.
Deciding to be a premium account holder and buying land shouldn't be based on how much of that money you can get back it should be based on the enjoyment of the game and the willingness to share that enjoyment with others. If you make somethign in the process more power to you, if you don't, oh well. Who cares? That's not what SL is about.
There will always be some that will do extremely well and be able to make a living off of this game, but for the majority of us this game is simply about having a good time, meeting new people and making new friends.
Stop complaining and enjoy the Second Life that you have. We all have terrific friends here, some of us have found love here, that's what this game is about. Money is just a distraction from what's really important, friends and fun.

Although I tend to agree with you, I have to remind you that the whole reason dwell is being removed is to stabilize the value of the linden, so that object makers can take more USD out of the economy. So playing, "What are you? Greedy?" doesn't really fly. According to recent articles, it's not just a small handful of people making significant money off of SL - it's a fairly large group. But at the rate we're going, educators, public servants, and events hosts will not soon be a part of that growing group. Why shouldn't they (we) be?

NO! It is a bad decision to bring something into the world of SL, have people adjust their lives to it, and then LL decides to remove it!

Don't tell us what is a good and bad business decision. I'm sure your business would dwindle if LL decides "Land owners get max 1024 land" or "You may no longer sell copies of an object, only originals" or any other zany rule LL comes up with to screw up the current society

If that were to happen I would adjust my business model and go on. Business is a crapshoot. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. Won't see me whining in the forum because of the removal of something that in Linden advertising says you MAY get. Not you WILL get.

I just think relying on SL to make money is like quitting your job and buying a lottery ticket figuring you're going to win. Its just not a stable environment. Why take that kind of a risk?
It is a GAME. It always will be a game. A game is not a stable environment for taking major business risks IMHO.
Linden Labs is god here. They can do whatever the heck they want. If they want to change the currency tomorrow, rename it and make it worth absolutely nothing they can do that and nobody can say a word about it. They can close up shop and go home too. Then we couldn't complain about dwell or no dwell. Doesn't make it right, just means they can do it. Relying on it is like relying on that lottery ticket as far as I'm concerned.
There are only 2 things in life that are certain folks, death and taxes. SL doesn't fall into either one of those! Sorry!

Whoa. Point by point.
1. I'm not relying on SL to make money, personally. The issue is how much I'm being bilked for in order to provide a public service that draws people to their world, so they bring in more USD.
2. It's just a game, eh? That's not how it's being marketed, not how it's being treated by users, not how the media is dealing with it. But that's a separate thread, I guess.
3. Relying on a lottery ticket - here's where that analogy fails: When you create events in SL, you don't just make a land purchase and then sit back to hope profits roll in. You work. You buy or make stuff to make your land and event attractive. You network with people to get them to come. You make an investment, not a lottery ticket purchase.
4. The 2 things in life quote seems oddly out of place, considering you're telling people not to trust in SL like they trust in their day jobs. It's kind of like if someone lost their job from a large corporation, or was told they would be making less money, and someone says, "Quit whining: you're only assured of death and taxes." Doesn't mean that the voice of opposition should be silenced just because bad things happen all too often.

Because of the complaints that opposition to this plan is whining about entitlements, I am going to begin to refer to the removal of dwell as a price increase, since that's what it amounts to for me and many others. I already pay a lot; if paying more can be avoided I want to do so. If your price isn't going up as a result of losing dwell, then what right do you have to complain that those who will be paying more are upset?

Its how I market it.

It show I and many users are treating it.

And its how msnbc were treating it . I assume msnbc isn't real media?

edits:

Wikipedia: Second Life is a privately-owned, subscription-based massively-multiplayer online real-life game (MMORLG) created in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab.

msnbc:
Game-within-a-game busts out

'Tringo' jumps from 'Second Life' birthplace to Game Boy Advance


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12502613/

cnbc: (from forums)

/108/ff/94274/1.html

My hat is off to Flip and Jen. This was just an excellent, low- or no-hype presentation on how Second Life can be USEFUL. Imagine that, a "game" (CNBC's word) that is useful for something besides mindless entertainment!

On the downside, CNBC labeled SL a game. gah.


(Personally I considered it an upside)

You were well aware of the financial costs when you chose to provide a public service. That is not being "bilked". "Bilked" implies that you were not told exactly what you would be expected to pay. The removal of traffic bonus (which was never in a concrete manner promised to you) does not in any way change the terms you agreed to when you signed up for premium and purchased land. One has nothing to do with the other. You are not being "bilked".

Oh good grief. I said JUST A GAME. It's obviously at least partially a game. But let's take a look at how it's being seen and marketed, if you need specific counterexamples:
From the Business Week article featured on the main page of secondlife.com:
"Second Life hurls all this to the extreme end of the playing field. In fact, it's a stretch to call it a game because the residents, as players prefer to be called, create everything."

Here's a bit from another media link on the secondlife.com page: http://www.contractoruk.com/news/002544.html :
“We don't consider Second Life a game,” Contractor UK was told [by Linden Lab].
“In fact, we're the opposite of a videogame - there's no goal, there's complete freedom to do what you want, the residents create and own the content they make, not Linden Lab.
“When we gave Second Life residents the intellectual property rights to all the content they created in Second Life, it was because we believed that their ownership would make Second Life a better place - and it has.”

Not to mention the famous quote by Philip Rosedale to Wired Magazine way back in 2004: "I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."

By the way, the story that appeared on MSNBC was from an Associated Press article. A lot of places (including CNN) ran the exact same article. As I'm sure you noted, the emphasis was on Tringo, not on Second Life.

This is obviously a tangent, but I felt like I needed to respond to your criticism of my statement that Second Life is being treated as a business opportunity, not just a game. That makes decisions like removal of dwell all the more important.

You said the media weren't calling it a game..you were wrong.

Heres another good quote form Philip I base all the truth of his others on:

'Havok2 will be here soon'

Pardon me if I put no weight in his announcements or declarations.

Tringo one: GAME WITHIN A GAME

Not game on a platform.

Oh, and I prefer 'player.' Always have.

Okay, its not like the prices of things are hidden. You knew quite clearly what you were going to be paying in tier. You also knew what the price of premium membership was and how much the land was going to cost when you bought it. So why are you complaining about paying for things you made the choice to buy or pay for in the first place?

It seems like this whole argument just goes around in a circle. Some of us that have bought land seem to have bought with the idea that at some point they would have some of or all of their costs offset by dwell and sales, neither of which are guaranteed. And I suppose, like real life, a person starts a business with the idea that at some point they will be making money. But, nobody takes into account an increase in taxes or a loss of profit in some way. The taking away of dwell, to me, would be like an increase in taxes. Do I expect to see dwell in prices? Sure. Why not? I expect to see most things go up by 5 or 10L to offset dwell. Just like I would expect to pay more if there was a tax increase.

Like I said before, it is a game. You control an avatar, that avatar is made of pixels. So is the fake land we live on, the fake houses that we live in and the fake businesses that we own. BTW...Lindens aren't real either. It's fake money. Its made real by the fact that its traded fictitiously against the USD. Whether I get 5L for my buck or 500L for my buck doesn't really matter. I buy as much or as little as I can and that's it. Whether my av has everything or nothing is simply a matter of how much money I'm willing to put into the game. Where I draw the limit is my own personal decision. You make that decision for yourself. All I'm saying is, don't base that decision on how much dwell you're getting or how big your stippend is. Base it on what you want to put into the game and what the game is worth to you.

Raise your prices if you feel the need to, that would most closely resemble real life. But unlike real life, SL costs are pretty finite. Tier doesn't change and premiums don't change. Your costs are the same all the time and you made the choice to pay those when you bought the land and started your business. Even texture uploads can be budgeted. You know exactly how much it costs per texture, so even that is relatively finite. If you only have $100L then you can only upload 10 textures, simple as that.

Why am I not complaining? Because unlike real life, Second Life is a choice, play or don't play, spend money or don't spend money. That's what it all comes down to. Is dwell really so important that you'd leave SL and the real people here (the ones controlling those avs) because of it?

Actually, Lindens are just as much real money as any other currency, since they can be traded. The USD is not backed up by anything except for faith in the US government (since we went off the gold standard a long time ago). Lindens are backed up by faith in Linden Lab. Is Amazon.com a fake business, since it sells online and uses money not backed up by anything? Is Anshe Chung a fake business?! If you think so, why are you even reading the Land and the Economy forum?



Now I see where we're failing to communicate. I don't charge for people to take my classes, or visit my museum, or use my cafe to practice their conversation skills. I will be doing some market research to find out how much (if anything) consumers are willing to pay for these services.




First of all, no I don't plan to leave SL. And premium membership was a financial decision based on how many Lindens I would be getting back in stipends. Since that hasn't changed, I have no intention of changing my membership in SL. Even if stipends were removed, I would still be a basic member and enjoy the things that SL has to offer. The issue is whether I can support the land tier I am paying, and along with that what kind of content we as a community want to have in our world and what we're willing to do about helping it exist.
Second, things in life (real life and Second Life) are almost all choices. Gas prices go up, and people complain. But they could stop driving so much, or buy more efficient cars. Housing prices go up, people complain. But they could choose to rent or live with their relatives. It's not different. I'm just unhappy about this price increase for me, a free content provider (note the name of the thread). In order not to pay more, I will have to either move down in land tier, or make what is currently free cost money. Or the third option is that I simply pay more. None of those options are particularly appealing. That's all I'm saying.

For pity's sake...

"just a game" and "not a game" are trolling points.

The phone company makes a distinction between 'Residential' and 'Commercial' customers, provides service to both, charges a bit differently but then the services used are differently.

In our case, we have people that view SL as a game 'residents' and people that view it as a business 'commercial'.

The vernacular and priorities don't seem to be compatible between the two groups and only causes bickering.

Game/Not-game does not matter if you're talking land prices. Land is land, prices are prices, the mechanics of SecondLife are what they are no matter what anyone calls them. Usage varies, so what. Talk about usage and quit with the incendiary label flamage.

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Where's my @#(%&#*$ espresso.