Camping

think its a small amount of #1 and a WHOLE lot of #2

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PS I know what that sounds like - And yeah sounds appropriate

That won't help newbies unless they're graphics professionals. There will be older SL users able to do a much better job, and LL won't want to take any risks with their land values.

I still dont believe it, that peoples are still camping the whole day just for L$1-L$3 each 10 min.

Havent that they considered about their RL time cost and electrical bills? It's really not worth it... damn... hahahaaa

When I met Jeffronius Batra and learned that Amazon was in SL that's EXACTLY what I thought would happen - the Mechanical Turk would find a whole population of people willing to work tiny tasks for small amounts. Alas I have never seen it, though.

The Mechanical Turk project is not a scam - it seeks to use the human brain for tiny tasks that can't be performed well by computers. Some things are easy for us but nigh impossible for a computer.

it's worth it if you steadfastly refuse to put RL money into "a game". it's worth it if you don't have a credit card or a paypal account.

it's worth it to scratch up a few lindens to get a foothold... to see if this "game" is worth spending real money on. It's worth it if you computer is always online running seti@home, a web server, or something else.

And.. if you have to leave your avatar online because you run a business, and can't take the chance on your offline IM's getting capped.. and don't trust that often buggy "IM to Email" system.. then why not earn a hundred lindens while you sleep.. if you're gonna be online anyways?

Perhaps if ther were more jobes around like police, tour drivers, shop assistants, farmers, etc for those that are not programmers or graphic designers or selling their bodies . There would be less need for campers

Yes is bad when you come back to PC and find your shoulder sopping wet from the campzombie next to you's head resting on it, IT's LIKE FALLING ASLEEP ON A TRAIN !

Jobs are what SL lacks most. Actually, goals are what SL lacks most. It's its greatest feature and at the same time its worst weakness. I know people have to set their own goals and most of the time they find one and stick to it, but frankly SL is so empty. Shops are empty, roads are empty, vehicles are pointless, no boats on the seas, no divers underwater, it's all so depressing. And areas that are full, are really full... of camping zombies. I like to see a musician or a cleaner from time to time but what's the point ? We can't engage conversation with afk people, and nothing gets cleaned in the end.

Some areas have greeters, they are doing a great job and always try to help, and do they even get paid ? By LL or other organizations ? They don't even have any backup.

However, I'm not saying that having a job should be necessary, even owning L$ should not be necessary. One can have a nice life with exactly 0 L$ in the pocket. I understand campers of course, I camped for some time too at first (not much because of a crappy connection), it's just that $L shouldn't be all about L$. Be nice to people and you'll be the richest avatar.

... the escorts seem to have fun.

True but got to spend heaps on wardrobe continually too
And you get jobs you don't like but have to do at times with a smile.
And you could spend hours dancing on a pole for $40 too when the bar is full of jobless "no payment info on file"s, if 50 people going through put a $1 in cool got something but when they watch and banter for 20 min and tip you nothing, wonder why you bother if not for the company of the other escorts who are fun to be with, but then they often fade away after a few weeks. I have built a nice Condo for myself, but aren't interested enough in building for a living. Scripting, I can make a cube change color, again not interesting.

It's like life - one creates one's own goals.

People seem to have been trained lately to always expect artificial, canned "goals" that take the form of exp points, levels, university degrees, salary increases. Knock it off, people.

The problem is that the kind of goal SL has - where basically, you eventually get your goal because someone, or some group of other people, gives it to you out of their free will - is very scary and uncertain to attempt. And people who play SL for entertainment might not be happy at depending on such a thing in order to be entertained.

Sorry but I don't think you got my point Osprey. I've said that the lack of given goals is the greatest feature of SL, and its worst weakness. I should have added "depending on the user's point of view, abilities and prior expectations". Of course it's not a game, we're not here to earn xps and all, but frankly LL advertises on earning/spending L$ a little too much compared to the rest (in my point of view). There are so many other things to do here.

And of course (almost) everyone sets his/her own objectives according to experiences and abilities, no need to have a mission enforced since the beginning, unlike most games. I just regret this urge to earn L$ leading to pointless camping "jobs" only helping the traffic numbers. Actually the few jobs mentioned by Tegg are good ideas, and one can think of more... Time to give it a shot

Jobs are definetly what SL is missing.

People can complain about campers all they want, but until there are more jobs for those who are not highly skilled they will always be there.
Not everyone can open a shop or build something marvellous.

If you want to buy something in Sl and have no skills the only way to earn money is to camp.
Now i know that you could just buy lndens from the lindex, but some people have come here to lead a virtual life which involves getting virtual dollars to buy virtual items. Therefore buying lindens from the lindex is like putting in a cheat or passwrod to get access to higher levels etc. I myself, prefer not to do this and prefer to play a game without passwords etc. So when you r new to the game there is not much choice but to camp due to lack of jobs especially for those under 90 days old.

Remember that for some SL is jsut a game and not a place for them to make or lose a RL fortune. Why not let them camp.

I do agree it would be a better world without campers due to those who do nothing but camp(we can all laugh at them for their foolish get rich quick scheme) but i dont think it is possible until someone creates better jobs for the unskilled who just want to have fun and earn a little money now and then.

will only be camping for as long as it makes financial sense to pay campers

I'd prefer something like what AOL pointe does. They have a skate park with coins you can collect by skating over them. Some require you make impossible looking jumps. The coins take a while to regenerate so I guess the pay rate would be comparable to a camping chair. There's also the quiz show that pays 20L per win. I played against six people there once and it was quite stressful yet fun when I won. It's basically something that gets you multiple people visiting but instead of paying several people one paltry amount, you pay one person well, and everyone is trying to win. I would love to see more of these kinds of paying time sinks.

One problem is everything is made from nothing near instantly, no raw materials needed, you can transport an apartment block in your inventory too. If prims grew and had to be collected, old prims recycled perhaps then we would have jobs and blocks of open land in sims.

Perhaps a requirement to eat could bring up a whole new industry of chef's & waitresses.
The trick is balancing it so people only have to work a few hours a week to earn something, in a job where you can talk to customers too, not slave at keyboard in solitude for daily shifts, like RL

However, regular jobs are a no-no, mainly because of the unpredictability of online times (either of the worker, employer, customer or even the grid itself). I still believe jobs should be personal and provide public service.

Greeters, Helpers, I could think of Ancestors (people with strong knowledge in the grid's geography, politics, good and bad places, etiquette...),
Advisors (people with strong knowledge in a particular skill : building, scripting...),
Regulators (people who can serve as griefing witnesses),
Lag-killers (people who track slowdowns on a sim physics-wise, scripts-wise, agents-wise, client-wise... and report to the sim owner),
Testers (people who help scripters/builders/designers in testing their products, that one is a strong request from many people I meet),
Builders (people who build for you on your parcel, set it to no-scripts first, then have them Sell you the finished structure),
Texture designers (people who take a shot of your products, photoshop them nicely and sell you a final picture for your vendors),
Litter-killers (people who wander a sim looking for odd objects to report to the sim owner, that too is strongly needed).

I can think of plenty others.

As you can see, some of these jobs require some knowledge, others can be done by newbies. The only one question is, what is the value added of a particular "job" ? How much would people pay for an advice or a service ? SL may be an "entreprenarial" world (yeesh), it stays virtual and as such, keeps the strong freedom people on the net expect from any other virtual platform.

But the irony is - it's exactly this reason why the LindeX is needed. People want to come to lead a virtual life getting virtual dollars to buy virtual items, but unfortunately they also need virtual land to put the virtual items on - and the virtual land tier fees have to be paid for with real dollars. So if you want to keep your life virtual, you have to be able to convert the virtual money into real money - and that means someone else has to provide the real money.

This is why there can't easily be unskilled labour in SL. If it was actually possible for everyone to earn all the L$ they needed just within the world, so that no-one needed to buy them - then nobody would buy them, and thus no-one would be able to sell them either, so no-one could pay for their land via earning L$, and the grid would shrink substantially and many content businesses would either be forced to, or choose to, close.



Actually it isn't at all There are no "levels" in SL and in most cases, "success" in SL is far more to do with social factors than it is to do with having a lot of L$ to spend. I know that when you're new and struggling for L$, it doesn't seem that way, but it's true.



Because, well - if you're doing just about anything in SL that's helpful to other people or enables them to have fun too, then you should be able to earn some L$ doing that. What do you want to do for fun in SL? If it's just about anything more ambitious than chatting to friends, dancing (or other things) on poseballs or shooting people, then work out how you want to do it and start socialising the idea. I can't promise it'll work, but I can tell you that a lot of successful people I know, when they got started, bypassed the money system entirely by having a good idea and introducing it to people socially.

I have earned quite some money with camping.
And now I have put up two dance pads in my club to attract some visitors.

I don't see what is wrong with that.

If it's just two dance pads, there probably isn't much wrong with it.

The problem is if you had ten or twenty dance pads, so that when filled they consume 10 or 20 of the avatar slots in the sim as well as causing a great deal of lag - while not actually generating any social value, because there's no real person at the keys of those avatars.

it seems to me that the traffic stats in the search menu are false due to the campers discussed here.

maybe i should re-phrase...

the traffic stats are true.. they reflect the time avies spend in a location. tho what i think they SHOULD reflect is the number of times an avie SPENDS lindens in a location.

it would make more sense (from an advertising viewpoint) to have those "traffic" numbers reflect the number of purchases made at a location. or even the AMOUNT of lindens spent in a location.

That's still open to gaming. After all, lsl doesn't know the difference between a genuine purchase and money transferred through a camping chair. But at least if a chair owner wants their position to rise, they'll really have to deide how much money it is worth.