Sorry but I just don't see it. You can wander round for days without spending ANY money, enjoying the content that othe people have created and provide for you. My land, for example, costs me $40 a month, plus endless thousands of L$ that I've spent on the things I have there or made myself - which, like many other people, gives you an idea of what SL is capable of, and what people do with it. As a newbie, you do not need to spend thousands of L$ on a new skin, clothes, hair, AO's etc, to figure out whether perhaps you like the game or not.
That's true. But what needs to be understood, and what a lot of these arguments seem to miss, is that all of this stuff is socially dependant. It all depends on the groups people are interacting with, how they value things, etc.
At the moment, there's a visible tendancy for newbies to maximise the amount of value they get for free from SL. They way they do this is by getting together in all-newbies group which only use freebies, and which - more importantly - only consider those items for the purpose of their social judgments. If you meet up with them and you're wearing a good freebie skin that's good for a freebie, you'll get compliments, even if it's not that good given the whole scale of SL. If you meet up with them wearing a L$1000 professionally made skin that looks awesome, on the other hand.. you get ignored ("Eh, so what, all you had to do was spend cash."
or even insulted ("well, if it makes you happy, but we like our looks and didn't need to pay for them." Please don't deny this - I've seen it. I've even had a newbie ask me for help building something, and when they were done, comment that they would like to give it to others, but they might "be evil and charge". Those was their words. They actually saw charging L$ for something they made as evil.
The same thing happens on just about every single game or online world that has optional payments for upgrades. And SL needs to try to discourage it. Giving new folks a "taster" of the wider economy is a part of that.
I really have little to no sympathy for those who have a $2000 computer, pay perhaps $100 a month for high speed internet access, then claim they don't have $10 to buy some L$ on Lindex so they can buy something they want
See above. It's nothing to do with their RL money situation, it's to do with the fact that spending that US$10 won't get them any social return in SL.
