The Groups *Are* The Government

Yeah, I saw that. I've also written lists of suggestions on notecards to Lindens, and posted there. As have others.

The point is, you need to also listen to your fellow players, not just talk to Lindens, and hear some of the problems contained in your suggestions -- it's not just a question of one older player writing some brief, succinct list of fixes as they see it, and just getting the Lindens to listen to them because they are older and all the rest of it.

A LOT of people have stake in this. And A LOT of people have put out all kinds of ideas. It has to be worked back and forth and submitted to a LOT of discussion and correctives.

Example: someone offers a simple idea like "Let's make it impossible to sell land more than your tier level".

Then you run smack up against the problem of what to do when you have to move land out of your own possession into the group's possession.

You have to think through how these things are used *in practice, in the world, by those who use them.*

I could outline them here, but I believe I've done that already.

You can't even accept support for your ideas without turning it into and old versus new issue.

You support the idea of changing the groups, in the abstract. You made a list of to-dos. It's different than mine. There are some significant differences.

And yes it is about new and old. Absolutely. Because the old version was about the collective, sharing everything equally, thinking of land as just a mere substrate for projects, just so much sheeting you keep unrolling endlessly, not as a resource that is valued, more scarce, and costs a lot of money.

That could be solved by adding in a 'Group Land Tier Transfer' feature where an officer would be allowed to move land tier from one group to another group of any size up to the maximum the group holds.

Of course, even that has drawbacks. If the intent was originally to find some means of protecting the officer from someone selling land out from under them, then this method would still allow for theft, but would add another step to the process. In order for them to 'steal' the land, they would simply transfer as much land as possible to a different group and sell all of it once deeded to that group.

Hmph.

Not sure on this one... could you explain more on the process of how those scenarios would act out?


Well, maybe tier donation in lieu of cash rent is not the best way. I don't fully understand the logic behind why someone would want to donate tier instead of cash payment. They'd have to pay a monthly fee anyway and while they would, depending on the arranged deal, get the additional 10% land bonus, I can't see what it would offer for you, unless there is an additional fee or they are only allocated a lower % of the tier they donate. For example, you would allocate to them a 2048 plot when they donated 4096 in tier.

Anyway, maybe sometime you can explain this in more detail.

Sometimes, being older, and having *too much knowledge and too many prejudices about the game* can hobble you. I know I find that.

1. Say you're new and you come to me and ask about renting or buying. I tell you to study, shop, and buy first land. I advise you where the best places are. You pick. I then, if I happen to have the cash for that type of loss-leader expense, offer to buy your land. I advise you to put it for sale and be patient, at least 7 days, in most cases you'll sell it for at least $2500 if not even $3500 if it is in M.

2. You now have 512 of free tier, paid up, in the premium account. You could go off and buy land with that tier, a 512, or tier up. But in most cases, being new, you don't want to rush into that and don't have the money and are reluctant to go buy money on the GOM which you don't fully understand. So you donate it to Ravenglass Rentals or one of our other rentals groups.

3. You are in complete control of that tier. You've paid for it, and can move it in and out of the group at any time. You just have to give me 24 hours notice. Unlike a land purchase in world or on the auction, you are not "stuck". You don't have to think how to resell. You have 512 of tier donated to a group to obtain *the equivalent* of land.

4. Now, instead of paying $250/512/117 prims rent, which is my going rate for M, you pay no cash. You put in the 512 by going to FIND GROUPS, joining the group on open enrollment, press "join," right-click on your own profile, select "groups" in the pie-chart, then press "activate" if that group is not already activated with the title "member". You then go to the "land" tab on the group menu, type in "512" and press "contribute". Voila. You have paid tier instead of cash rent.

5. Next, you select one of our 512s anywhere in the system. Or select a 1024, which is what a number have done, or even 1536. You then have 512 as part of the rent, and the rest you pay in cash. You'll pay $350/1024/234 prims normally, so now you'll pay just $100/week in rent for 1024, using your 512 donation.

6. Stay as long as you like. Save your stipend. Shop around. Join with friends. Look at the auction. Lather, rinse, repeat. Finally, you are ready to move on. At this point, you take out your 512 and apply it to your new land purchase, when you have tiered up.

7. Or, what some have done, you leave 512 in the mall rentals group for your shop. You get land that you can terraform, name, put in FIND PLACES, put music on, etc. This is a great deal for oldbies who have an extra 512, too.

So what is NOT to like about this, Juro? Absolutely nothing. Nothing!

Now, let's pick it apart from the vicious perspective that its critics always apply to it, based on their own prejudices:

8. Why are you giving people only 512 when they donate, instead of the theoretical 517 that they are "owed" because they should get 10 percent more in a tier donation group?

Answer: because they get many services and benefits for their rental in my group and I feel that offering them the exact equivalent of tier=land is an excellent way to track this donation and understand what it gets:

-- purchase price is waived, I've absorbed that
-- land around is secured as to views and prim availabilty in a group, something they couldn't do on a 512 by themselves
-- group dwell/traffic circulates equally to all members of the group, and puts a few extra dollars in your pocket each week.
--sometimes, to be sure, there is "group liability" due to the cost of $30/week/FIND PLACES listing which I have offered for free in the past. But then everyone in the group gets a -4 or a -6 to pay for that feature instead of paying $30. If this seems to offset too much, I restore it by selling something into the group to distribute.
-- events spaces for free as a group member, that enables you to put on events of various types even when you don't personally own land
-- free vending space on the boardwalks or towers in some communities
-- game help

I think all these and other benefits more than offsets whatever putative 10 percent you think these tenants should be getting.

Since I accept the risk of them pulling their tier donation without notice, and I give them all these benefits, I think it's more than fair that their donation's 10 percent goes to me as a group officer.

Now, if you're like Traxx Hathor and others who have constantly trashed, misrepresented, and slandered this program, due to their own personal baggage, you'll say the following nasty things:

-- You're just sucking up newbies' first land and scamming them
-- You're just sucking up tier for your own use to make purchases
-- You're just lording it over everyone on numerous sims by leveraging their tier for your own agenda
-- You should never prey on newbies as a category of people for a business, they are too vulnerable
-- If something happens to you or you don't pay your bills, people lose the land they were on

Answers:

-- Anyone who has actually studied first land and actually bought it from others, unlike 99 percent of the people spouting on this list, knows the truth about first land: it is Purina. Buying first land is usually a loss. You can't sell it right away, except possibly to another land dealer, taking a loss, or possibly to a newbie, who wants a 1024. It sits on your tier, and you aren't getting it for free like the newbie. If they've put 512 into your group, fine, but most don't opt to do that.

-- You have no motivation to scam someone for a five-minute transaction *when you are trying to keep them as a customer and have them enter your rentals system*. This is the obvious flaw in the "logic" of Traxx Hathor and others who slam this system. They aren't thinking through what customer service is like this because they don't attempt it.

Why on earth would I want to pay a newbie less than what his first land is worth when the whole point of buying his land is to have him join my system? I'm not in the market for firstland just for the sake of flipping it -- that's a time consuming risky business that requires a lot of upfront time and capital to keep the land on tier until it can sell at a profit. I sure don't want to be doing that.

So the newbie I've just bought land from comes and stays with me on the average of 4-8 weeks. He gathers more and more knowledge of the game. What, I'm going to rip some guy off and then move him into my system and talk to him every week and have him then "get wise" 4 weeks later I've ripped him off? No way. In fact, if anything, in 4 weeks time he will not only have saved a lot of money by not paying cash, he will realize that I helped him and gave him a good deal.

-- Let's say I get 10,000 worth of tier donations in this fashion. That's a grand total of 1000 in extra land I wouldn't have had without the donations. Whoop-de-doo. I can really go far buiding a huge empire with that! Most of the time, I have to make defensive land purchases. I"m buying water that has been chopped up and put for sale in our view. I'm buying land that suddenly appears for sale in the sim and could threaten our view. I'm buying up prim land to give people extra prims. So my purchases with "their" donation (which is a payment for rental and related services, after all) are for the good of the group. I'm not exactly building a villa on a private island skimming off the tier donations of my "rental empire", hmmm?

Such a program provides a service and an introduction to the game. It runs at a loss often. It is widely misunderstood -- precisely because of older players such as yourself and younger players with decided baggage and freight problems harassing me over it.

I care not. The people who donate tier to our group get a fantastic deal. We cooperate to make sims better We make residential communities open to all on the mainland grid. I think that's worth fighting for and I will go on doing it.

Newbies, far from being "preyed on" are eased through some tough passages in this game. Older players with their biased "land advice" cards and their pent-up hatred of land barons, sitting on their free 4096s, don't know what the hell they are talking about, so I ignore them.

What if something happens to me? Well, it's a game. What have you lost? Your tier is utterly transportable. That's why it's good to join this type of program rather than get tied down with a purchase you can't unload. You just pull it out, and leave. If for some reason Governor Linden seizes this land you were once renting, your belongings come back into inventory. You pull your tier out of the group, if it is still open. If it were disbanded due to something happening to the chief officer, well, too bad, you lose nothing, your tier comes back to you. Go find another rentals group or go buy land -- life is about change. Renting gives you enormous flexibility -- you *can* rent the view when you can't buy it, and it that view changes, or that payer-of-the-view dies, you leave and find something else. In exchange for flexibility, you don't get permanence. But then, most people understand that about this game.

Most people don't keep rentals for very long -- maybe 2-4-8 weeks. They often buy their own land. Or they just don't need land and hang out with friends, or whatever. There are some long-term tenants who find this benefits them. They control what they pay for their living by paying it to the Lindens each month, not to me. They know that despite GOM fluctuations, etc. their tier cost is the same each month.

OK... I get it now. So, the new member pays a 10% premium to you in the form of the Group land bonus for the privelage of joining one of your communities. Sounds like a good deal.

As I was pondering the idea of closing the loophole on officers who might try to steal land, it started to strike me that what we really need is something that allows for officers to shift land in/out of groups, making the land tier 'liquid', if you will. The problem this poses is how to keep an unsavory officer from selling the land out from under you.

One thought I had which I'll toss out for digestion is that maybe there needs to be an 'approved' list of groups that any officer can move land into/outof. This preserves the autonomous nature of officers, yet clamps down on where the land can be moved to or from. It might also be beneficial to have some sort of voting method if an officer wants to move land out of the group to a group that is not on the 'approved' list. This would help reduce theft by land shifting and selling from another, unassociated group.

OK.. ready for comments.

Um, Juro, nice try in tendentiously phrasing it so it seems like someone is paying me a 10 percent "premium".

If someone *else* -- like your best FIC friends -- charged more rent than they pay on tier, i.e. $30US instead of $25 US on a 4096, for example, would you call that "paying a premium" and 'paying 10 percent premium"? Of course not. Everyone understand that if you have to pay tier, your rent has to be *more than* the tier for you to justify the business and *the up front cost of land purchase and house purchase!* Geez, that's pretty evident.

In fact, when someone gives me *only* 512 tier for a 512 land, *I lose*. Because they haven't paid me any tiny percentage of my upfront costs, they haven't paid for the house they are living in, they haven't paid for other maintenance costs. So if they put into the group an extra 5 meters on top of their 512, it is *more than compensated by the weekly extra dollars in their stipend from group dwell for the entire group* and I still come out the loser and they come out the winner. Can you please RECOGNIZE THAT!!!!!




This remains the problem. If you stipulate that an officer cannot move more than he covers in tier, an officer cannot shift among groups to make purchases or sales, or even just adjust parcels because some customers want 1536 and you might only have 512 available, etc.

I can only see the solution as having the founding officer, or "investing officer" be the sole authority to sell land, and the sole authority to move all land and all tier. He can then opt to give these same functions to other officers if he trusts them. That's why on my proposal for group tool changes, I have a set of 24 functions -- not half a dozen roles -- and I toggle the functions to adjust the kind of group.



This sounds way, way too complicated. How can LL keep track of all the thousands of groups and approve or disapprove them? Or are you suggested that the group officers have a set of groups they toggle??? It all sounds too cumbersome. Leaving the authority to move land and tier to he who pays for the land and founds the group, and the others he designates with those same rights, is the solution.

OK.. ready for comments

Umm.. they *are* paying a 10% premium in the form of added land bonus, are they not?


I DID recognize it. I wasn't passing judgement on the deal at all, you are getting a little snarky thinking that I am somehow suggesting some malicious dealings on your part. You are running a business and you have to cover costs - it makes perfect sense to me that the 10% land bonus that would come with a tier donation is accepted as a fee. I got it and I got it the last time I posted.

Honestly, you need to quit thinking that everytime I post its to slam you Prokofy, becuase it's not, as evident by my last post. It makes you look paranoid.



I think it could be simplified so that only groups that current officers are members of would be on the list to tick as 'approved'.

As I explained, that extra 5 meters that they now put in from their 512's 10 percent is hardly any kind of big premium. They get more than they give.

So it's not to be paranoid, but to be very clear. I never post to try to persuade people like you who constantly argue and debate me just for the sake of argument, I argue in order to persuade those looking on.

As for the officers and the groups, it would be no trouble at all for an officer to make a brand-new group with himself and his 2 alts or two pals in it and transfer all the land. If you make it a criteria any group he's a member of, why, if he is treacherous, he'll make a new one.

It's a stumper, and I think the only way is to have that idea of the investment founder.

No shit. I got that after you explained to me how it worked. It is a premium and one that as a fellow busines person, I can understand the reasoning behind it - you offer services above/beyond what they could get from just buying land. Refer to my original comment post your explanation:



Gee, Prokofy... I was pretty clear after you explained it the first time around, yet you got snarky with me, which I will not stand for, especially from someone such as yourself.

Sucks when you get two stubborn individuals together, doesn't it?


I think that might be an answer. Something like what you mention, or what Cubey talked about whereas the founder would not be subject to a recall or other malicious actions. This one is for sure a nasty pickle.

I am bumping this thread for consideration in the Favorite Thread of 2005 Contest

You might also want to take a look at I Don't Get It, And They Certainly Don't, which can't be bumped because it is archived.

I'm pretty new to SL and only just starting to think about how I want to make my living, but looking at the group structure, clearly (to me) it is seriously flawed as a business vehicle. I these flaws have been well identified in this thread and some excellent solutions have been offered. I can't help but think that groups currently are primarily a social construct, and that there needs to be a seperate model for business. I also think that for much of which people use groups for, would be unnessarily complicated (especially for the new) by incorporating all the features required for business. So clearly, I think there needs to be (at least) two options. I think introducing many of the features proposed in this thread would have a profound positive impact on SL's economy. At the moment, even a cursory objective risk-assesment of any group based speculation throws up a whole lot of red flags to any half-astute potential investor/business person.

SL's implementation of groups has nothing to do with socialist economic systems. It's hard to believe I need to say this.

Early Internet pioneers didn't imagine the spam problem. The architecture to deal with spam has evolved in the last years.

While LL employs remarkable people, it's unlikely every issue will be addressed simultaneously. It's guaranteed some will disagree with whatever development priorities the Lindens select. The Lindens encourage us to vote on development priorities. No other commercial virtual environment I've tried does so.

Corporatism is merely privatized socialism; you have the same problems as with the USSR, only on a vastly smaller scale (a company, not a nation).

Let's drop the phony capitalist/socialist dichotomy. The only political scale that matters is democracy vs. dictatorship. CEOs and Party Chairmans are equally likely to become corrupt dictators, the only difference is the scale on which they operate.

My advise is ditch the SL group rules and make groups the old-fashioned way: make them out of thin air. If I want to start a corporation in SL, there is absolutely nothing stopping me. I do not need automated devices to run this corporation; I would, as CEO, simply lay down the law and if someone did not abide, they're out. Just as RL has no magic dialogue boxes to effect my will on the world, I have no need for any group functions to successfully run whatever group I want.

Of course, I have no desire to be in any group or corporation or commune (that's what I escaped RL for to begin with!), but there's my two cents anyway.

I'd really like to see more concern over democratic functions in SL, though; we are certainly living in a more capitalist (eg. anti-democratic) system, economically speaking, but on a political level SL is still stricly fascist (eg. corporate-statist), though in a good way of course. But naturally we can have no faith that the Lindens are good-willed, and should start working on some kind of SL Constitution (ratified by the citizenry, natch) rather than focusing on niggling details about group functions. But this is another topic entirely . . .

no thanks!

Just in case people are joing the thread at the wrong place, here's the important part of Prokofy's post excerpted below: