Midge: A Chance for Projects

You're proving my point, as you're so skilled at doing on a continual basis. Every person here has their own unique personality, on the forum or in the world. Some are kind, some are cranky, some have large egos and some have small ones. That has NOTHING TO DO with your imagined class system. It has everything to do with individuals being who they are. Your continual mischaracterization of it is damaging, not just to your own tarnished reputation, but to those who are incited to make the same mistakes in perception. You point out nothing but your own bias, insecurity, and lack of common sense.

Anshe, actually there is another way to accomplish the same thing, but it also involves quite a bit of trust:

Create a group, and put an entire sim's land into the group. Divide the group-land into parcels.

Have prospective members "pay" for parcels of land in the sim, then donate tier into the group.

Once everyone is moved in (presumably only people who agree to or want the same kind of sim; loosely defined as low-lag or club free, or more specifically defined as "an elfin villiage" or whatnot"

The original founder of the group promotes 1-3 others from the group to "officer" status, then leaves the group; if they are themselves still living on land in the sim, they rejoin the group as "member".

1-3 officers in the group are held responsible for things like trash cleanup and enforcement of whatever zoning ordinances the group decided on. Although they are empowered to eject members from the group or delete builds, they agree not to go on a deletion rampage without the mandate of the group.

The officers can be voted on say quarterly or every six months, and put some sort of term limit in place that the same officer may not preside for more than two terms consecutively. Alternately, if the group is happy and content with the same people, they could leave the same officer(s) in place indefinitely.

The group agrees to assist any landowner who wants to leave with "selling" the land. The land wouldn't actually be sold, because it would always remain in-group, but whatever money is acquired from the new resident for the privilege of living/building on that parcel is paid-out to the member who leaves. This encourages members to leave in an organized fashion, instead of simply yanking their tier from the group and leaving. A sim resident could always do that, but all they'd get back would be their tier; no recompense, no land.


There are several worst case scenarios that I can think of:

-A member aggrivates the building restrictions so eggregiously that the other group members decide to eject them. The group has to scramble to cover tier.

-A member simply up and quits SL, or yanks their tier from the group without warning. Again, the group has to scramble to cover.

-One of the officers sells all of the group land to themself for $0, then sells the sim bit by bit to whoever will buy it. This is perhaps the only case I can think of for linden intervention. Perhaps it would be worthwhile talking to them ahead of time. If a group agrees ahead of time that the land is not to be sold, then the lindens might be willing to intervene and reverse land-sales if an officer decided to abuse their abilities in order to profit.

I have to leave for work in 10 min. Just found the thread. What's the status and do you need anything for it?

prokofy - too bad you didn't join earlier... too bad so sad! now get over it. charter and lifetime accounts were a way for LL to insure a user base that would legitimize more venture investment and further development of the product, and to establish some sense of community around which new players could arrange themselves, or i guess in our case, to which we can react to. these accounts do not confer any kind of special privilege beyond free 4096 tier. it does not cause any ingame class division. you are barking up the wrong tree.

Yes.
150 For sale signs please.
With a large Coke.

I have read many of prokofy's posts and certainly wouldn't have been put off by them. Just didn't see this is all. *is interested*

I hope you don't think that way about me too just coz I mouthed off about event funding cuts. hehe. I like people who make things. Politics and interpersonal relations don't always equate the way one would think, too. I am a feminist, yet I have several Gorean friends. Tolerance makes the world go round.

I smell an alt.

Hehe wouldn't that be ironic ?

With tax that comes out to L$4,500k

Would you like fries with that?

what kind of awesome street cred would someone have to have to be able to say there isn't class warfare in sl and you believe them Prokofy? obviously if they say that and they're over a few months old they're just protecting their elite upper class oligarchy and shouldn't be believed.

well i'm only about 5 months old now and i've never seen any indication of this other than you saying it. i suppose you're going to say i just haven't been around long enough to see it or i'm just a newbie so what do i know. course that'd be exactly the kind of elitist upper class self protecting bourgeousie domination of younger players you accuse the imaginary feted inner core of so i guess instead i'm just plain wrong.

or maybe despite my young age i'm part of that feted inner core of content barons even though......fuck if i know. i don't sell anything or own much land. what exactly is it that totally discredits the fact that i've never seen the slightest shred of evidence for anything you talk about? oh wait i'm a forum harpy. never mind.

bleh the old i'm-just-one-person-what-could-i-possibly-hurt argument. so if one person can't damage the game how could one person do anything good for the game? you can't have it both ways. either individuals matter and can make a difference or they can't.

fact is yeah, you do make a difference and do damage. new people come on here and (say it isn't so) come to the forums and see your muck raking and suddenly they think "yeah now that you mention it i did blow all my money on lap dances and prim dicks and cyber whores and now i'm broke and you know what? some people have money. class warfare! the Man is putting me down!" and they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and pretty soon we got a whole lot of jealous morons seeing themselves as oppressed.

and i'm sorry if you see buying some land and renting it out as "giving back to the community". it's not giving if you're getting paid hehe. and all your forum evangelism doesn't count either cause you're wrong.

Hmm....hmmm....well, even if Phil Linden himself came down from the clouds and told me there is no class warfare in SL, I wouldn't believe him. I have it on good authority from a labeled Feted Inner Core group member that Phil was heard to Laugh Out Loud at a party about the term "feted inner core"...but TMOT, Phil is lying awake at night, in the Dark Night of His Geeky Entrepreneurial Soul, and saying: "Do I have class warfare in my game? Have I created a monster? Did I fete and cosset a group of pioneers who now constitute a serious attitude adjustment problem for my ambitions to take this game into the million league?" Phil, I could heat up some warm milk if you can't sleep...but keep asking these questions, they are legit.



Hmm...well it's worth going back and reading ALL the posts that hit before and after the economic changes. Boy, was there some howling about content barons and mentors and whatnot. I didn't even think up the term content barons, remember? That was somebody else's bon mot, and God bless 'em. If you don't see it, fine, I will go back to listening to my tincan receivers on teh Intarnet meh....



You know, self-reflection is a wonderful analytical tool, and I'm so glad you're now engaging in it. Breathe deeply, say Ohmmm....yes....get in touch with your upper class self-protecting bourgeous domination inner ur you, Zuzi...feel the inner core...BE the inner core...touch the inner core...SMELL the inner core...yes...breathe deeply...


Bingo! You have reached the Zen of Inner Core. You don't have to be old to be feted. You can become feted within five minutes with the right connections. I'm looking at the stories of some of the particularly egregious fuck-you hedonists on my docket, and I see some no older than me, i.e. September 2004. But...maybe they are alts? Only their hairdressers know for sure...




Bingo! Ding ding ding ding ding. You guessed it! You win the prize! Please collect um....wait, the game is down, nm.



One person can damage the game by oh, say, opening a club on a dinky 2160 lot, building a big-ass laggy ugly structure with 1024 textures, lights and scripts galore, putting 30 patrons on that dinky square, attracting mafias and griefers galore with attachments like hoochie hair and guns, and putting the sim down to 27 FPS. Yes, this is a true story. That seems to me to be "damaging the game" although there isn't a single thing in it that violates the TOS, really. So I can't see that I did a single thing like that, hon. Get a grip.
Only five percent of the people read the forum, if some crank rages on the forum, his post is pushed down five days later, and forgotten. Could we walk around the robots now please?




Good for them. They are right to be mad at paying $750 for a prim dick that they can't even jerk off with, but have to wait for somebody else to click on : ) If enough of these people get mad, the price of prim dicks might go down to $550? I dunno...it's the market. These jealous morons ARE oppressed by land and content barons and frankly, they are your customers, and you should treat them better than calling them jealous morons, and pretty soon, there will be so many of them that your prim dicks will simply have to cost less, and work better : )



Um...when did I say that playing store was "giving back to the community"? Sheesh. I do think it's a bit of a public service not to be raking in a profit -- could I even break even is the question. There's a residential sim that stayed pretty much residential, maybe a small business by an existing owner. There's another half a sim that stayed residential rental. Well, I dunno *shrugs*. It's just my little bit for simkind, take it or leave it.

When I first decided to push the envelope of the group land thing, and asked Live Help about it, Lee Linden got on and explained to me the greatest pitfall, which is any officer of the group may sell the entire parcel or set of parcels out from under the group. So his advice was to make sure that partners were selected carefully, and warned that even the most trusted friend might end up doing this on me. Well, worse can happen than this, but that's another story...

Basically, any officer can take the entire parcel, or quickly link up all the separate parcels, and sell it to himself for $0 or to others at any price because eacn officer has the privilege to go into the land edit and sale menus.

Of course, he might have trouble selling off a big chunk of land, but don't think you could run to the Lindens on this one. It's something that you can do in the game -- be an officer and take away a whole parcel or even whole sim, linked up, so the Lindens will do NOTHING for you.

If this happens, you will be stuck, because you cannot expel that officer -- officers can onl voluntarily leave. I've been told that there is a system whereby rank-and-file members can take a vote, and if 2/3 of the members vote against an officer and want him expelled, he can be removed. But I don't see how this actually works by an automatic clickable game mechanism. Anyone? Maybe you go to the Lindens when you have that 2/3 vote registered on the game mechanism? I dunno. But it could get awfully hard to do, rounding up all the many owners on a sim in a land group and trying to get them to focus. Still, it might be one back-up.

Other things might be done -- building signs, negrating, posting on forums, naming and shaming is often a good way to accomplishing things when the Lindens are stymied and people behave badly. But you'd have to be prepared for nothing to work.

This is why I wish the Lindens had group land like they did in TSO, after several versions of the game where roomies became griefers and ruined properties. They made a "property owner" who was the sole runner of the main menu for things like sale, wallpaper choice, etc. By the same fashion, there could be a title called Founding Officer who is the only one who has the right to sell the plot or collection in the group. The other officers could edit land, join land, etc. but could not set it to sale. I just don't know if this is feasible programmatically. I'll post it in feature requests.

You call the vote in the group interface. Everyone votes. If 2/3rds agree, the officer is moved back down to member status. It's simple. It works. However, in order to get enough votes you usually have to either get everyone together at once, explain what's going on, and start the vote, or send out a very VERY detailed notecard to everyone and hope they log in during the week the vote is active.

That said, it's not a solution to the "officer sells land" problem, since they can do that in an instant.

Yes, I realize it's not a solution, it's just an after-the-barn-door kind of response.

Interesting. So the moving down happens automatically as a game mechanism?

I realize trying to get everyone online etc is the chore.

Now...let's say the officer set it to sale, and it didn't sell yet. Now...the only way he could reasonably do this is to first sell it to himself for $0, pay the tier for that entire group -- that's a bit of a check on his behaviour, no? -- and wait for a sale. So if the vote can happen, he is moved down to member status, then expelled. Then you could go to the Lindens and say you took a vote and expelled a member/former officer who sold land o ut from under you. I don't know if they would intervene...it's always like asking for a miracle to get them to go back on some game action, but...maybe?

Obviously if he kept it in the group, some other officer would just come along and put it back.

so i guess in the end no matter who says it and no matter what they say, you're right and everyone else is wrong. that kinda sums things up i guess. after the TMOT the rest of that is your imagination. do you understand that? i'm not sure.

so if even newbies can be part of the FIC it's not an oldbie conspiracy it's an everybie conspiracy! who's in the feted inner core? apparently everyone but Prokofy.

but they aren't my customers since i don't sell anything. see above. i get to call them anything i want. even if i did sell things and i probably will someday, i'll still call a duck a duck. that's alot more important to me than whether someone buys my hypothetical video game products. somehow i'm sure that attitude will only make me more feted somehow......

i still think you are one delusional dude Prokofy but it's hella fun to see what bizarre leap of logic you'll go for next. keep going on this long enough and maybe you can make it a self fulfilling prophecy. i know i sure want to get priveleged and elite and oppress you now just so you won't be disapointed hehe.

Are you talking about the issue in Stanford? If so, it wasn't Oner who "threatened" you. It was me, and it wasnt a threat. If you remember correctly, after purchasing most of the sim cheaply after it went public (note: Anse did not buy the public land, so lets not put blame where it doesnt belong - she bought it from someone else) you elevated the land around him and obscured his build. He felt powerless, so I told him that if he wanted, I'd give him some other land to build on, I'd buy his and put the most hideous casino SL has ever seen on it. I told you the same thing. It wasnt a threat - thats exactly what I was going to do. I own that land to this day, and the core of it is still raised all the way up.. However, someone else bought the surrounding land, and reversed your "urban planning" for that area.

And no, it wasnt a matter of Oner thinking that new players should kiss old players asses. It was a matter of me not liking the way a rich player could bully a poor one. Since I, too, have lots of resources at my disposal (and prolly also feted olbie inner core LOL) I took it upon myself to take the heat he was feeling.

However, I have no idea who neg rated you for it. Not my style.

So, if you are going to point fingers of blame, make sure you have the right target. Also make sure you have the right reason. it wasnt oldbie vs. newbie - it was rich vs. poor. I merely changed it to rich vs. rich & leveled the playing field. Fortunately for both of us, that particular issue never reached fruition, and my interest in the matter waned.

Just setting the record straight.

With Regards,
Antagonistic Protagonist

ARTHUR: I am your king!

WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.

ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings.

WOMAN: Well, how did you become King, then?

ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake,... [angels sing] ...her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!

DENNIS: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

ARTHUR: Be quiet!

DENNIS: Well, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

ARTHUR: Shut up, will you? Shut up!

DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!

Oh, were you going to make a kind of Sir Lancelot/Camelot kinda theme on Midge, Chip? That sounds great. Hope you work something out.

nah, just offering farce in exchange for farce

On a similar note, if anyone needs to fart, there's a porta potty on Schwanson's land in Boardman. It's slightly soiled but free to use.

I have been primarily refering to the issue in Crescent. Oneiro tried coerce me into not use the +/- 4m terraform option on my land there and after I did not give in, his neg rate mafia sent me more than 10 tripple neg rates nicely spaced in regular intervalls over next 10 days.

Remember that Italian mafia boss also consider themselves "fetted elite". They will show nice face in public, will go to church service and hug little children, but at same time send their toons to threaten and murder for power.

Ah ok. I have no knowledge of that issue at all & therefore have no opinion on the matter.

-AP

*beams*



Even Anshe is saying "feted elite" now. Yes, Mafias are definitely among the feted, as not enough is done using existing tools and leverage to curb their harassment. The Lindens just wring their hands....

lol.

Um ok.

*snicker*

I suppose this thread will be moved over to Polysci Ghetto now, though it is a story of our Land and Economy.

After all this discussion, remember, Midge came into being as a zoned, residential area run by Anshe Chung. I and others bought land there -- I bought 2048 for $12000 or so which was a good deal. I was able to pay just $15/month to Anshe for it and she made differentiated levels of tier available. Midge wasn't a happy experience for me for various reasons having to do with people who didn't like my Lordfly house and my houses in a neighbouring sim (where's Weedy when we need her to tell people to "stop sticking their noses' in people's businesses! geh!). And as you can see from the attached photo, at my end of Midge, where my neighbour was blaze Spinnaker, we got some junk up in the sky that kinda spoiled the experience. Some suboptimal intelligences put a huge platform off the mountain and stuck junk on it...others built sky boxes that weren't really quite up in the sky high enough LOL...the usual SL menu...because you can't buy or rent the view, even when you buy a whole sim, even when you control it as a residential sim. And...there was the fellow on the other end of Midge who had a big blighty griefer tower he held out with for months, with an extortionist price tag on his land, who resisted negrates and reprimands, who finally somehow sold out to Anshe, who remained absolutely steadfast in the face of any attempts at griefer extortion.

Along the way, some big beautiful builds happened, some people found solace from the vagaries of SL life, there was a nice big residential sim...but only about half rented or sold, seems to me. Or let's say 60 percent at the most to be charitable. A lot of it just didn't fill up, especially in the mountains. I guess a misty moutain turned out not to be the idea place for nice suburban or Victorian residential builds, which is what many people want.

blaze's castle still dominates the horizon, but I think he moved...and Anshe announced the other day to all the residences of Midge that they could all move, and get equivalent land in her new Ansheland sims with the foreign languages and dunes. So Midge...at least that chapter of Midge...is over, and we await to see if Anshe sells it as a whole or just parcels it off and leaves it on the open market for the usual SL menu.

Looking out over the vast misty expaness of Midge sweeping up to the mountain this morning, I pondered the follies of simkind...it lasted not even 90 days. That stable residential community that was supposed to preserve us all from blight couldn't completely work. Not only because of the blight right within us, but the blight that appeared on the edges. And, because it didn't sell completely being sort of...bronchial...for people who want sunny, lakefront, etc. vistas.

Nothing is permanent in SL. We learned from Xenon yesterday that LL doesn't save copies of everything that's on the server periodically as I thought they might. I thought they'd want to save an archive (at least snapshots) now and then, the way sometimes the Internet is saved. But apparently it can't all be seen as to be saved...it's too hard? Or something.

So...just a note of passing on Midge: A Chance for Projects...which represents I guess another failed SL project, "despite our best efforts"....