Svarga sim closing?

If I find a cool place I try to leave a tip. If there is no tip jar available I try to toss a few bucks in the owners pocket. You cant get in Disneyworld without paying 67 bucks for a ticket, how do we expect the common person with bountiful creativity but limited financial means to construct such wonderous places and maintain them? Dwell has been snuffed, and rental space just doesnt seem right on such builds. When all your offering is an impressive place to visit, if you dont charge admission to recoup expenses, its strictly gotta be a labor of love. Thats fine if its worth 1200 down and 195 a month to you. But for most folk thats a car payment. Support the properties you enjoy visiting with your cash. Your admiration alone wont keep them open.

While the Disneyland analogy is a bit out there, tipping is not enough most times.

Let's just say for basic fees, you need to pay 205 a month for a sim (USD).

That works out to about 56375L a month just for upkeep alone. Which is 1880 a DAY, or an average tip of 78 an hour. That's a lot of tips that just don't come in, unless you are an exlusively unique sim, such as HatC or FN and have been around awhile to be known as unique and popular.

I wish people were that great of tippers for build only places, we might have more places to 'hang out' as opposed to party or have sex.

Dwell/DI made it harder for new folks to be seen compared to the "biggest of the big creators" - because those "biggest of the big" were also getting large amounts of dwell and were winning the DI prizes regularly. (To say nothing of the camping chair farms..)

If a club is able to charge L$500 for a rental spot, it will do so, and dwell/DI won't matter. Like, if I have something I want to sell that's worth $30, and you come up to me in the street and give me $2 for free, I'm not going to drop my price to $28 - the item is still worth $30.

And what's so horribly terrible about buying L$? You can start a business without putting in any starting capital in SL, but if you do you are making things harder for yourself. If you can make back that L$500 from vendors on the spot, then great, if you can't, then it doesn't make sense to continue having vendors there.



Well yes, but hopefully making and selling useful things will enable you to pay the rent. If it doesn't, at least you have some extra L$ to spend on newer things. SL isn't "supposed" to be free - if you can cover your tier from sales, that's great and well done, but I don't think it's designed anymore on the basis that everyone should "earn" their land and not have any more than they "earn". It's far more common, from what I've seen, for businesses to reach the equilibrium point where their tier fee reduced by the amount they cash out, and the amount of extra entertainment they get from the L$ they retain to spend in world, leaves them getting good value entertainment from SL. Yes, some people just want to make money and will cash out down to their last L$ but I've found they're less common than many people think.



At the time of the big fall in the L$, there was no "quick page" - the "advanced mode" was the default and the only option. In fact, the "quick page" was introduced to help stop the fall, by allowing people who wanted their L$ sold right now to get it, albeit at a lower rate, rather than creating an undercutting war on the advanced page.

Also, the sinks are at the moment balanced by Supply Linden sales - in other words, they make money for LL. Now that might sound "evil" to you but it's an important cause - if LL go broke, we all lose everything, and they weren't doing very well at the time. It's not clear that LL are in a position, with regard to their business, to start giving that L$ away instead.

Thanks for stepping up to the plate, Des. To answer your answers I would propose that pid-up accounts would have a fixed amount of votes to allocate each month and only 1 vote per sim / project allowed. Any votes not used in a calendar month would not be carried over to subsequent months. This would encourage people to get off their butts and spend a bit more time exploring and getting to know the length and breadth of the grid.

Yes, it's quite possible that some 'celeb' builders would find a few of their projects saved for posterity, but there's plenty of new builders coming in all the time who create works of merit. Any system could be gamed, so it would have to be thoroughly thought through so as to minimise the possibilities of 'gaming'.

jrrdraco, I think you and Des are closer to the mark as far as LL's policies go but it can't hurt to float the idea and see what sort of reaction it gets.

But how about a system where each resident has 5 votes to allocate per month. Any sim that gets 5000 or more votes in a month gets free tier for that month.

Well, that already exists! To cast your vote just pay L$15 to the sim owner. If you're a paid-up user, your stipend will cover this and more.

Point taken, Yumi, but how many sims get 5000 visits a month? I suspect that the sims that see that kind of traffic are already self-sustaining commercial ventures. However a well-publicised donation-box voting scheme could work. I have seen donation boxes in many sims / projects but they tend to be very low-profile.

Camping chair farms are still out there, when everyone thought they'd go away, they didn't. They just started paying less. The top pop. places yesterday, I think 3, maybe 4 had no camping chairs at all. But in any event I'm talking mostly on dwell, which if someone is gonna give out money to other resi's to give them the means to buy things from others, then sure.

You are assuming everyone is money hungry out there. Not everyone who can charge that much, did or would have had it not been for trying to make up the money elsewhere. I know PLENTY of people who base thier rent on making ends meet rather than profits. I was one of them. My mall was for me to have a project, I only charged what was necessary. My rent for my house was L based as well, when the L dropped so badly the rent had to go up for the landowner.

As for what's horrible about buying L, some people A, don't want LL to have their credit card or any other info, some people can't afford plopping down tons of money on start up fees, but have a unique and incredible idea that will not get seen. I'm not talking about businesses that start up JUST from malls and clubs. There are TONS of creators out there, I'm talking upload fees, rent fees to start out. You are arguing the side of the big guys who are already rich and want to get richer. I'm talking about the little guys who just want the pride of seeing something they made on someone. People rarely are in some of these malls with high prices. I've advertised in all kinds of places, and turns out my best seller was from a free space from a friend of mine. My prices are pretty cheap (I'm not a master designer yet, my clothes are low rez as opposed to high detail), but then you've got a quandry.

If I was to pay 500 for just ONE spot, I've got to sell that a week from that 1 spot for it to work. My prices go up, to make up the difference and without earning good money from a camp chair anymore, someone's gotta take the hit for my upload fees. It's not like in RL when you can go to 'new' shows to show your wares for free in mass in different sims almost daily. You can't put up a free shop in front of your home (minus a $15 one time fee for a permit usually) and put out as many things as you wish.



You again, are arguing from a viewpoint of someone big, who's already making tons of money and wouldn't care. I'm not saying everything else in SL should be free. Don't make it an all or nothing like you are turning my view to be. I'm saying there is a middle ground in all this. Most jobs in SL will rarely pay enough in a shift to cover 1 outfits upload fees by the time you might need to make a tweak or two. You can't work enough to keep creating and all that without having no RL or spending RL money. Some people can't afford to invest hundreds of dollars. It's rather harsh to say that, if you aren't rich enough to do it in RL, then tough for you.




But now that it's there, it's hard to think L won't fall again, once the 'money launderers' start using it like they used to.



You are again, going to extremes. LL didn't fall with dwell being paid out, nor would it have if it continued to do so. Don't tell me you are naive enough to think even a few thousand dollars a day would crash out LL. They make all they need to and PLENTY more. Now if they'd use that on bug testing...

They get so much money drained from the economy and from RL pockets, it's insane. This isn't a mom and pop company that depends on every dollar. $1000 for sims. How many own sims now cause the mainland is so nasty laggy and subject to wider griefing? 4 sims to a $500 server... That's a profit straight out of $3500. 200 a month in tier for them and it trickles down. Premium accounts. Hell so much money is traded on the LindeX... with a 30 fee on ANY amount you buy, and a 3% drain on ANY amount you sell.... when they reclaim land from any accounts and put them up for sale, they don't pay that person in L what it's worth.. they just take it.

So don't act like LL would fall if they put some sort of incentive back in for people who have great spots.

I think the real issue with LL incentives for great builds/attractions/sims is actually how to determine what is great in an ungamable way.

Everything that has been tried was gamed and the money never went to the places that really deserved it.

The SL world really has gotten too big for a linden to fly around to every build and make the determination themselves. And any automated system I can think up someone else can think of a way to game.

That I believe is the real reason for the death of incentives.

When dwell was active, there were far more camping chairs around. And the top popular locations did all have camping chairs at the time when dwell was active. Dwell didn't help small people all that much. And remember that to get dwell, you had to own the land, which involved spending real money.



I'm fairly confident that the kind of place that's charging L$500 for a low prim cubicle now, is almost certainly a place that's interested in making a profit. If they can attract interest at L$500 they would not drop that price just because they got some dwell.



Well, I can understand worries after the hack. But equally I hope you'll understand that LL will want to regain people's trust, and the only way to do that is to encourage people to do the things that require trust, ie, buy L$ or subscribe. Saying, "Ok, we understand that you might not trust us, so we'll give you some free stuff" would be tantamount to them agreeing that they couldn't be trusted.



There are plenty of people who'll help out with upload fees and even free rental if you're a promising creator and you network a bit, so this isn't so much of a problem. And even if there weren't, an upload is L$10 and you can find rental in some locations for L$50/week - so spend as little as US$4 for L$1000 and you're fine for both for plenty of time. That's hardly "tons of money".



I'm not, really. I know it sounds like I am, but you are arguing like I often would when I was new and I've found it's just based on misperceptions. For one thing, there aren't really that many "big guys who are already rich and want to get richer", and certainly most of them aren't content creators. In the original version of SL, v1.0, it really was the case that the amount of land you could effectively use was based entirely on how much people liked your creations and liked you and similar, and you couldn't buy L$. And from what I'm given to understand it was much, much harder at that time for new people to be noticed, or to even get a space to build on at all (because, since land wasn't bought for US$, LL had to wait until their profit from subscriptions allowed them to buy new hardware, which happened a lot slower than people accumulated votes and L$). Buying L$ is very valuable as a way of getting a starting leg-up. If you want to play the game of "how far can I get without spending anything" then that's fine and it's perfectly possible to succeed but don't be surprised when people who do buy L$ take the lead - real life businesses are run that way for a reason, after all.



So you can see that the L$500 rental spots are probably a bad deal. So, go ahead and don't rent there and if no-one else does the owner will be forced to bring down the price.



If you've paid for a home in RL, you can do that, and you can do the same if you've paid for a home in SL too. And in RL, you can't have your shop active 24 hours a day, with no cost for materials, and no cost.



I'm not making tons of money, and I do very much care about new folks. And as I say, there's places to find help with upload fees and even free rental or spaces for new folks to sell. Why would you ever need to invest hundreds of dollars? Even L$10000 only costs US$36 and is far more than you need to get started. Originally you had to pay US$9.99 to even create an SL account. If you do that now you'll get L$2750.



They don't. It's been reported that they were only just starting to turn around a loss. Their investors are very unlikely to let them do anything that loses them money.



No, it isn't that simple. 4 sims might run on a $500 server, but then you need the internet connection, you need to rent the colocation facility to put them in. You might need new servers for things like the asset cluster and similar, which no-one can "own" so the cost has to be split. You need to hire people to keep the servers running...

Got some extra tier? I'm trying to get a group together to donate bits of tier to save Svarga, which will allow Laukosargas to maintain ownership. If you're interested in donating, IM me in world - Indigo Crew is in for 4000 square meters!

Regards,

-Flip