Raw Materials

I'm still nearly brand new here on SL, but I've been reading a lot to bring myself up to speed ASAP. I've got the basics down, but I've still got a lot to learn. That being said, after reading these forums, one idea came to me pretty fast.

I don't know if this has been suggested or thought of before, but has any consideration been made to requiring the use of some sort of raw materials for the creation of objects? A cheap and plentiful supply would create few barriers to making them, but a small cost could give new players something productive to do in SL. Raw materials could perhaps be gathered by players, maybe some areas would have these materials available to find, or perhaps in addition, the could be grown on some SL farm, giving a new use for land.

Raw materials could then be used by players themselves, sold to some general market for a set price, or puchased from the same market for a slightly higher price.

The effect would be a nice workaround from the need for stipends, give new players something more to do, and take money out of the game from the richer players who presumably build lots of elaborate stuff.

I don't know enough about objects yet to know if this is viable, but this could be a simple or as complex as appropriate. Perhaps there could be some object properties that would require rare raw materials, giving players that much more to do - i.e. search for these materials.

If the more experienced here seem to think this might work, I'll certainly give it some more thought to actual numbers. And if not, then chalk this up to newbie enthusiasm.

It amounts to a tax on rezzing objects

Since time (to gather materials) is money , after all.

And it was tried before.

Some of the FIC can chime in now with your ancient horror stories ...

There once was a tax on prims. It cost L$10 to res a prim, which you got back when you deleted it. So to rez a 10-prim object would cost L$100, but you'd get that back eventually.

This was detested.

There were riots and protests and eventually the better system of tying prims to land was implemented.

So there is a raw material you need to have if you want to, say, build a house... Land. You need 4.37 square meters of land for each prim you want to keep rezed there. If you need more prims, you need more land.

This system also keeps the number of permanent prims in a sim from going over the limit of 15,000. That limit is there to keep render speeds from tanking due to too many things on screen at once.

So, while your idea crops up with new players from time to time, it's not something that can ever be implemented.

Well at least the idea is not totally off the wall, its was just tried and determined that it sucked. haha.

The goal here though, was not to tax objects to give more to spend on, but instead allow new players to turn time into money by playing the game somehow, while at the same time giving rich players something more to spend money on. A tax would not do that, and even without experiencing it, I doubt if I would like it as a feature.

Oh well, back to learning the game and the old drawing board. Oh wait, I have to make one of those first. ...

Quick 3 Prim Drawing board:

Cube, squash to 1m by 1m by 0.1m
Shift-Drag a copy straight up for later
Cut first prim 12.5% from beginning and end.
Hollow to 90
Shift-Drag a copy upwards,
Rotate vertically 90 degrees so open end is down
Lower to intersect base
Grab hovering prim
Flatten, widen to taste
Rotate to desireable angle
Lower to touch vertical stand.

Tadaa

One thing I love about SL is the ability to actually 'Sketch' in 3D

Hello Cannae and welcome to the forums. No, there is no raw material or production system in SL, no matter how obvious it sounds for a game that brags about its "economy". Many have come up with the same or similar ideas to yours (including myself). It always runs into dogged opposition by the FIC.



Yes, but that system was entirely beside the point. It cycled money back to the Lindens, it did not provide buying power for noobs or gave non-content creators anything useful to do. Nor did it diversify the economy or put a production value/cost on commodities. A pretty important dimension of an economic simulation wouldn't you say?

Of course, if SL is not a game, just a "business platform" to squeeze participants of real life cash, then it doesn't matter. It only gets in the way of potential profits, naturally. However, I think SL should be a virtual world simulation and a game.

one result of your hairbrained idea would be that anything would be made of the lowest possible number of prims. While that would be nice for bringing down lag, it would make it impossible for people like me to build such things as this,which was done for fun and is now accessible for free. At L10/prims, this would have cost me over L26,000 just to build it..
Sure, It could be done using fewer prims and more textures, but the poit of a replica is faithful reproduction in all details.

So please don't try to put limits to everyone's imagination. If noobs come here looking for work, they miss the point of SL entirely. Jobs are for RL.

(Jump to the last paragraph for a resource-gethering job opportunity you can use right now.)

One of the tax's main purposes was to provide money for noobs and non-content producers, actually. Linden Dollars are worthless in Linden Lab's hands - They can't spend them. All they can do is give them to players for them to spend. Taking in taxes allowed them to give out a lot of bonuses, incentives, awards, and payments (like for hosting ANY event) to the residents. Most of those kick-backs went to social organizers, through one metric or another.

But Linden Lab can't manage such a kick-back loop well or fairly for all sizes of Second Life. So they've been backing out of such artificial systems and watching the market balance itself. They seem to have been doing this quite slowly, to avoid upsetting things perhaps. They may have, arguably, been going TOO slow, leading to the slow drop in the L$'s value over the last two years or so. Current adjustments (removal of dwell bonuses) should help that greatly.

Most MMO games use a resource-gathering model as a major part of their artifical economies. That works, since the resource-gathering is artifical too. But Second Life is using a real (albeit unique) free market system, so artifical systems like resource-gathering don't fit it very well.

Resource-gathering isn't a great way for a "noob" to make money in the real world either. Ask any bag lady with a shopping cart full of aluminum cans. The gold rush was the last time any Joe Shmoe could pick up a shovel and make his fortune.

A kid doesn't make his new bike money from growing lemons or printing his own newspaper. He earns it by buying lemons, sugar, and paper cups or by delivering someone else's paper.

The bad news is that many of those simple pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps money making plans just won't work well in Second Life. The big deal about a lemonade stand isn't that you are making lemonade and no one else is... It's that you are making it HERE and NOW where people are, and you're the only one THERE and THEN doing it. They buy from you. But in Second Life, place is a much more mutable concept. On top of that, lemonade is a consumable, and nothing really ever gets consumed in Second Life.

And when position is just a number - a number that is easily changed - there's no call for bodies to transport objects from place to place. Paper routes and Second Life are incompatable.

This world of ours is an established pattern looked at from a new and unique way. It's the web, with people paying monthly fees to run their own sites. Other people are exploring the sites and interacting with them. But as far as I can tell, the only ways to make money running a web site is to sell things or to leverage advertising. While Second Life is 3D and you can see the other people "surfing the grid", it's almost the same economic model. We just use L$ instead of Paypal...

Now, if I were going to try to create a resource-gathering system whereby casual and new players could make some spending money... I'd use PEOPLE as the resource to be gathered:

As a "shopping assistant", you could direct players to certain stores in exchange for kick-backs from the proprietors. You'd pick which stores to take people to, depending on what they want and what you know and how good the merchandise is. You can inform the owners that you directed so-n-so to their shop to buy such-n-such, and that a tip or cut of the profit will put that establishment higher on your go-to list in the future. If they see you are making a significant improvement to their profits, they might work out a more automatic relationship with you.

Hmmm... I've written too much.

Alright, I wasn't around when this tax existed. Nevertheless, there is a great difference between a tax, even if it goes back into the system in the form of "rewards", and working for your income. In the latter case, you have the opportunity to work yourself up by your own effort and diligence (or decline to do so), by providing necessary goods and services for the game environment. What you do contributes directly to the resident created culture. In the first case you have a more or less arbitrary bonus system in the hands of the Lindens, with, as you put it, implicit issues of fairness. And of course, it would never build you a vineyard or a railroad, a petro-chemical industry or the Golden Gate, things that by themselves link in with the economy and generate wealth.



Maybe not. Maybe not at this stage anyway. Economy to me however, is above all defined as the material side of production (not just monetary speculation or even artistic expression). If I designed a Virtual World, this is where I would have started to lay down the basic framework.



That's right, but there is no reason to think of "resource gathering" in this limited and narrowly defined way. Lets not get blinded by the primitive standard of "economic activity" once set in EQ and mindlessly repeated by each and every MMO out there, just because such games are not about social interaction, but hitting each other on the head and "levelling".



You are correct. And of course, no economy would ever exist or get started in the first place if needs to consume did not exist.



Probably sums it up pretty well. I just think another sort of game needs to be done. The one that I guess many people expect the first time they sign in to Second Life.



Yes, this is the only sort of employment a system like SL actually can engender: service sector with a strong element of marketing. Sometimes, I think of SL as a satire of the contemporary western world. Massive unemployment, a workforce no one needs but perhaps for entertainment, enjoyed by people who grow rich from speculation or selling "empty dreams" while all the forces of production and manufacture, and in the long run, the very means of economical and political power, have long since departed for China.

I haven't tried it since it's very early days of beta a few years ago, but you might want to check out Wurm Online ( http://www.wurmonline.com/ ). It's the most resource-oriented system I've yet seen. To make anything, there are requirements for other things you need and the time in which to make it. Just about everything is player-made. They make this work by giving each player artificial "needs" like thirst and hunger.

When I tried it ages ago, the thing I found most frustrating was... While the effort I put into just making a small building had value in and of itself - I could sell my wood and nails to someone else - it took forever and was rather boring. (It may be better now.)

Once I amassed a small fortune, I wouldn't have to make such low-level elements myself, I could buy them from someone else. But to get that fortune, I'd have to do a lot of the boring stuff first. And then I'd need to maintain that fortune by creating something more complex that has a higher profit margin. But as more and more people played their way up to that level, the demand for such things would drop, and I'd have to move farther up the chain of complexity. At some point, I'd reach the limits of the game, and at some point, enough other people would too and hurt profits.

True, profits are not really needed since you can always buy your food and drink by going out and cutting down trees to make lumber and digging ore to make nails... But where's the fun in that?

I like the option Second Life provides. It's resources are real-world skills like texture creation, animation, 3D modeling, programming, social organizing, real estate management... And any others that people can come up with. There aren't any needs that must be filled. You can do nothing and be just fine. I like that.

Any vitriol this resource idea gets here is usually due to the "don't take away the uniqueness that we love" mentality. Which, I must say, I also think to myself when it comes to certain radical ideas. Not that the ideas aren't valid, but one MMO can't be everything to everyone, which is why there are so many. Such a change to Second Life would <b>completely</b> change it. Better to start fresh, or find something that more closely matches the vision and make suggestions there.

But give SL a chance for it's own sake, I say. I found Wurm Online (of two years ago) a bore and can't recommend it.

Fine. Go make your game. But keep your game out of my online world.

One option would be to allow the current prim allotment per square meter to remain the same but offer sim owners the option to increase their prim allotment for additional fees. That way, a sim owner would have additional resources (i.e., higher prim allotment) to entice others to build shops in their sims.

It would be a true market-based solution where resources could be acquired and resold. The sim/land owner could offer additional prim allotment to attract customers, or sell additional prim allotment to their customers. It would be up to the sim owner to decide the best model.

Another raw resource is server resources. Yes, they are outside of SL, but have impacts within SL. A sim owner could purchase more bandwidth, more memory, or perhaps a faster processor. This in turn could translate into market opportunities in SL for the sim owner and even the land owners of tiny parcels.

NOTE: Currently, sims are colocated within a server with up to three additional sims. Each sim gets its own, dedicated processor.




Tiger and Monique have both hit on a fundamental issue. Economies are based on needs and wants. These in turn are met through businesses that have acquired raw materials and turned them into finished product--be that food, shelter, iTunes music, cable TV, Internet service, etcetera. All of these are based on raw materials.

However, in SL, there is some consumption with RW consequences--bandwidth, server resources, prims, and avatar density per sim. The more bandwidth and server resources that are consumed, the higher the lag time of a sim. This can result in residents leaving a sim and, in time, that can translate into fewer visitors and therefore less revenue.

Prims of course are a resource that has some cost basis. You are only allocated so many prims per square meter of land. Once a sim's prim allocation is expended, the room for additional creativity is limited. You must remove some prims to create something new.

Also, currently most sims have a maximum avatar density of 100. Therefore, land owners that have plenty of "room" for avatars to shop in their stores may be short changed by a very popular location tying up avatar allocation. Even if the store was popular, if another landowner within that sim already had 60 avatars visiting, that would limit the remaining visitors to 40.

So, in SL, there may be plenty of "land" within a sim to hold several thousand avatars concurrently, but because of limited server resources, the number allowed in is a very small fraction of the maximum possible.

Having said that, the real issue with consumption in SL is land. In the RW, raw resources are the foundation of modern economies. And land, or more precisely land mass, is the limiting factor. In RL, the Earth has a finite volume of land mass above and below water.

In SL, land mass is virtual and therefore could theoretically be infinite in supply. This, however, does not seem to enter into peoples' minds when their rushing to grab a "choice" piece of land. That is why real estate prices keep on rising. It is truly a fascinating thing to watch.

Market prices for the raw resource of real estate in the RW are based on supply, demand AND location. In SL, location is not crucial since residents are not limited to ground travel and since travel costs nothing. Any location is great. What matters in SL is how well a given land owner attracts residents and holds their attention.

Having a shop next to a very popular club does not necessarily translate into increased traffic. Why? Because most visitors to the club transport in and out, bypassing all the surrounding real estate. So location in SL is not currently a real factor in price--although the land speculators would like you to think so!

What happens when a major player enters SL and builds an instant 50+ sim continent. All of a sudden, the land supply increases. The land barons in SL today need to do more than just hold property for sale. Unlike the RW, in SL more land can be made at any time.




Is SL a game or not? I venture to guess that LL did not set out to build just a game. Yes, there are areas were some players/residents gather to battle it out. Others make a "game" out of griefing, power pushing, or "killing" unsuspecting residents. Some design games within SL that have nothing to do with guns and battle.

But, many other residents come to SL to socialize in non-bellicose ways or participate in the creation of a virtual business that has real, potential implications for the RW economy. To those, SL is an online world that is here to stay and will be joined with the RW in the future. It transcends the mere game mentality.

Although the vast majority of goods and services that are currently produced and consumed in SL are purely virtual and therefore worthless in the real world economy, in the not too distant future, economic relationships in SL may very well have direct ties with RW businesses. Of course, there is no questioning the RW leverage of Linden$ when they are successfully converted to US dollars!

Others have said on this forum, "come one, it's just a game. Nothing is real here. Get over it." Whereas most of SL is virtual, there are real world impacts of playing/living in SL. Guns, battles, and video game-like realms are not the only options in SL.

There is the game called Business that can be "played" in SL. Only with this game, some SL residents have actually learned how to win a RW living. And a deftly run business can be a more powerful weapon (in SL and RL) than any rocket powered, high-altitude push gun.

Textures lag me a hell of alot more than any number of boxes or cylindars.. only torii and spheres are bad on my end.