camping, pathetic or productive?

what are your thoughts on camping? feel free to let it fly!

"Make it look like your overrated crap is ridiculously popular by PAYING people to come hang out at your store/club!"

...grrr

It's a lazy, deceptive and slightly desperate marketing tactic that's been abused by too many business owners.

As for the campers themselves - just go and get a job, you squatting bums.

The second option is easily shown (cue threads about not being able to get to land due to campers), disproving the first. The third is patently untrue (noone on SL is going to be without disposable income, however little it may be and even humouring that winning an event doesn't require skill of any kind, nor is having L$ even a requirement for being on SL).

(In before the lock as well )

My money came from camping during the first couple months I was on SL.

It wasn't until I found big, expensive vehicles to buy that I started putting money into things. It was all downhill from there...

I have met people who's main source of income is/was camping, though.

I wonder what will happen to SL's economy when traffic goes away...

None of the choices seem to quite fit.

For campers, it is useful. A newbie can finance a lot of L$ freebie boxes from an hour or two of camping and be an at least halfway presentable citizen in a couple of days at zero cost - and remember, zero cost is a powerful incentive for getting people to try something new to them like SL. And even afterward, it can serve as a small but helpful incremental source of income when things are slow - like when you are reorganizing inventory, carrying on IM conversations/discussions/debates/dramas, or doing anything else that requires nothing more from your av than to stand or sit around in-world. And the campers are not worthless bums: They are hiring out their services as contributors to traffic count for those who want it.

For those who want traffic count enough to pay for it, I suppose it is worth their while. I have seen at least one post claiming to see a measurable correlation between shop sales and camping-generated traffic count. I'll leave it to them to justify themselves, if they care to.

The real problem is with what economists call third-party effects. Other residents of the sim being camped are the "third party." They neither participate in nor benefit from the camper-payor transaction, but they can be and at least sometimes are afflicted with lag and, in extreme cases, are even unable to access their land because the sim is "full." Sometimes it can be extortionate: Sell to me or I'll camp-freezae you out of your land anyway. The lag-and-exclusion problem is a genuine drawback to the practice. As I understand it, such extreme cases are ARable and are acted upon as "abuse of sim resources." To me, this is a significant part of the island vs. mainland debate.

I, too, had no voting option that was appropriate for my situation.

When I first joined, I used the camping pads to earn money. I had no idea there was any other way for me to make money at the time. It was painfully slow, and a huge waste of "playing time" but it gave me a few Lindens to make my first purchases.

It's unfortunate that they are still used to pad traffic numbers, but until LL gets its head out of its ass, the traffic scamming will never get fixed.

I do appreciate the newer, more clever camping animations, especially the window washers, street musicians, etc. They're almost like movie extras, adding color to a scene.

How about the option " A means to an end." I did run one club where I offered camping, but I required the campers to be active. Inactive AVs were ejected after two warnings and banned if they made it a repeat offense. We would usually run 20-30 AVs at a time in our place during non event times, of those only 10 were campers.

At last, a thoughtful and sober posting in the subject. I was planning to make the usual angry, anti-camping posting, but I've changed my mind. Thanks Har.

Well, the campers shift some money around. It doesn't have much of an influence on the SL economy as a whole, but there's a tiny dribble of money flowing from the club and casino owners to shop owners that sell skins, talking genitals and other must-have items. Not a noteworthy amount though (5% of my total revenue comes from unverified customers).

Of course, club and casino owners expect the shop owners to rent vendor space in their malls in return. A silly concept; the amount of walk-by customers in a laggy mall is negligible, and in a world where distance doesn't matter it makes more sense to advertise one central shop than to waste money on classifieds for 20 different locations.

But let's not forget the costs. More unverified residents = higher costs for LL. Who gets to pay that? The verified minority. Higher island and tier prices, LindeX fees might also increase soon. Is that worth 5% more revenue? Not to speak of increasing lag and decreasing stability.

I thought everyone camped at some point? It's the only unskilled job that's in plentiful supply, and a lot of the negatives are only noticeable or annoying once you're a bit higher up the SL economic ladder.

I wonder what the loss of traffic will do to the economy. Somehow or other there'll still be ways to buy up one's place in the listings and/or game the system, though maybe that's just pessimistic. Anyone know what proportion of the population makes its virtual living from camp chairs.

My own investigation into camping (although it was brief) indicates that all are not unverified. You can't even get into some of the casinos unless you have payment info on file. As most seemed attarctive and well dressed I would agree that shape, skin, hair , clothing and most especially jewelry (lots of bling around camp grounds) benefit quite a bit from campers.

Probably not real estate though, since they don't really have time to go home.

Well, SL isn't about jobs. It's about entertainment. Usually one has to pay for entertainment. The intended use of the system is to reach for the credit card and buy L$.

If they are adults who would be able to pay: Why are they unable to calculate the electricity costs of their PC? Someone who camps for hours on end, possibly over night, pays more for the needed electricity than they'd have to pay if they bought the earned amount of L$ on the LindeX.

Finally someone with my SL philosophy. I am here to be entertained and glad to pay my own way.

During your travels down the hill I don't suppose you noticed an Aston Martin DB9 by any chance...

Who knows? A lot of people leave their PC's running all of the time anyway. At least they do here in the good old USA.

Here are two things I have to say to that, though.

1) where would that camping money be going if there was no camping? I think the people paying the camping money would either keep it or put it towards other advertising means, whatever they may be in a camp-less society.

It's true that the camping makes their traffic bigger, but it's also true that this is already known throughout as a useless figure in most cases. Most sales are done based on seeing other people with products and asking where they got it from.

2) what kind of shop do you have? Certain kinds of products attract certain kinds of people.

From what I've seen jewelery, houses, skins, and hair tend to attract people that actually put real US$ into SL whereas weapons and various gags and tricks tend to attract lower budget people. They're more into treating SL as a game than as a place to hang out and sometimes even a (excuse the obviousness) second life.

Once traffic goes away I think you'll see a major shift in the distribution of currency in SL. It may not seem big on an individual basis but overall I think it will be apparent.

I also think it will affect the amount of non-verified accounts actually online. They may turn premium or they may turn elsewhere.

Either way I'm all for traffic going away if replaced by a more reliable, less easily gamed system to promote our lands.

Not that their are any roads to drive it on..but hey we live in hope...

I started with L$250 and when that was gone I simply bought more without much of a second thought.

Eliminating camping will do nothing to the economy, the total amount of L$ involved is simply a drop in the ocean. It might have in an impact on those who specifically target the low-end market with cheap goods though, but that still won't affect the economy.

It will have some other side-effects though: if camping virtually dissapears then the statistics take a plunge. The number of logins will drop, the number of avies logged on over a certain number of days will drop and the total amount of hours will take a hit as well, leading to possible "Second Life's popularity declining" headlines.

...and how will all that NOT affect the SL economy?? The "cheap-ass crap/resold freebie" market is much bigger than you think.

In video games that are actually games (which SL isn't, really. It's more... a VR platform in which some hosts contain games, but other hosts contain other sorts of media) you can generally earn 'game money' within the game by doing activities that are fun.

Within SL, it quickly becomes apparent that the only way to earn money easily is to camp. Everything job requires doing some real work for a fraction of real wages, or else starting your own business.

Err. Survey ATMs excepted, those are also 'easy', sort of.

If I didn't already know someone in SL, my first day would've been my last. As it is, the whole place still seems to me overall to be quite seedy and full of scams, and generally pointless. But I'm somewhat entertained by coding up a few things and I enjoy playing poker, so. Eh. But, my point here is, that camping contributes to the air of scamming and seediness, especially the 'bonus camping' that needs to be 'activated' by playing a slot machine. Now there's a scam.

There's a fair few people who feel a bit odd buying game currency. I suppose it's making a commitment to the virtual world. I didn't buy Lindens for probably about month, and in that time I camped, worked as a pole-dancer, told fortunes, etc. You can do an awful lot in SL without ever buying money, so I can see why people might not want to. I only bought Ls that first time because I was upgrading to buy land to add to a mini-commune.




I suppose we won't know the true extent of the importance or otherwise of camping until it goes. You can make enough to get by from it, and forums and the like are mostly populated by people who've a made a certain commitment to the game, often buying or renting land.

Yep. Sitting in an infohub the main thing newbies asked was how to earn money, and in-world jobs mostly pay a pittance for the hours put in. Even content creation, because you can buy three hours work for mere pennies and the work won't reach minimum-wage payment until dozens of copies have been sold.

Which is another reason it's probably most efficient to just buy Lindens!

Are some of you assuming that alot of people will leave SL if there is no way for them to passively make L$?

Just how big a percentage of avatars out there have no cc, no paypal and yet will quit SL if they can't make money without having to do anything?

If you can't have fun by exploring and chatting then why are you in SL to begin with? it's not designed to be a solo activity, it's not a Barbie RPG where you just dress up for your own vicarious satisfaction is it?

It might have a big impact on certain types of markets, but they all barely have any turn-over so it won't really affect the whole all that much.

Look at the monthly spread by total spending amount (http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php):
134570 spend L$1-500 and 40887 spend L$10,001-50,000

If the lowest spenders spend the maximum and the high spenders the minimum you get 134570 residents spending 67 million vs 40887 spending 409 million. Despite there being 6 times fewer of them they still manage to spend at the very least 6 times more.

You can take and toss the 134570's spending and it will just make a little dent.