They say, “If you are among the lucky 5 percent who either figures out how to game the auctions and be a land baron or who climbs the horribly steep curve of the tool set learning and the fierce prim-diva guild/appentice system of the creator economy AND you are our friend AND we and a select clique value the type of content you make THEN you can have free rein to your imagination AND make a living.”

- is an exquisite and accurate summation. It is awfully hard.

And don’t forget – there’s no way to make any money, either, when you first join! Entering the economy is an elite activity. For me, I just considered all THAT the game, cause I like a ridiculous challenge, and I especially love beating a game at its own game. In TSO, that was getting a size 8 lot WITHOUT any roomies, mainly because they were trying to social engineer me to be social that way, lol.

But many people do not like that sort of impossible challenge, especially in something they do in their recreational time.

And don’t forget you have the forums, where a bunch of crows sit on a telephone wire cawing and clawing at anyone who criticizes the system! It’s incredible the lengths they will go to! They actually sit there and claim that people criticize it because they can’t DO anything; because they are incompetant. Even if you’ve proved yourself a hundred times over, they still sit there and claim you just can’t or won’t DO anything. Boggles my mind. I guess they are just, basically, stupid.

That stuff about the teen grid is depressing.

It is death for the elite, and for SL, and that’s why I’m just enjoying the ride while it lasts.

Uri, I dreamed about you last night. I’m very worried about myself.

coco

First, they tell you it’s “your world and your imagination”. Second, they tout their game/platform/thingie in the media saying “Making a Living in Second Life.”

Then they stand back as hordes of people come in, and they slam 95 percent of them over the head and tell them they can’t have their world and their imagination and make a living in second life if it involves making t-shirts or poses and selling them in a yard sale.

They say, “If you are among the lucky 5 percent who either figures out how to game the auctions and be a land baron or who climbs the horribly steep curve of the tool set learning and the fierce prim-diva guild/appentice system of the creator economy AND you are our friend AND we and a select clique value the type of content you make THEN you can have free rein to your imagination AND make a living.”

See how it works? If you don’t know, you will.

To fight that kind of elitism, which is death even for the elite, by the way, the Lindens should just have “bulletin boards” that don’t require everyone to contort themselves into an event — especially the cliquish elite feted kind of event they love. There are classifieds that cost as much as $25,000 to really be seen on page one; there are FIND ads for $30 a piece that rely on the creaky and cranky FIND search engine of SL to find something under a search word IF it can fall into that “top 100″ arbitrarily displayed. But that’s just not good enough when you have so many new people without knowledge of these arcane ad systems, and who also don’t want to spend money at least initially just to enter the economy.

Entering the economy should not be made an elite activity. Currently it is, and many people enter, learn a tiny bit, make a little, get frustrated, buy a lot and spend more than they’re comfortable doing in what is at least “entertainment” and “play” even if they are bludgeoned into admitting “is not a game” and…they leave!

Over and over, I see this happen with tenants — sometimes I’m able to prevent this by sitting with them hours helping them through game difficulties but who has the time? In many cases, RL is just more compelling (as it should be!) than the RL-life struggle of trying to survive in a brutally stratified economy.

Or tiny example: My son was fiercely dedicated to SL, creating teams of people for doing interesting content creation and events-organizing as well as rentals with an ever growing dedicated group of friends. But griefing of increasingly sophisticated kinds, camp chairs, and other ills on the grid made them pause and reassess. They also saw how the Lindens kept undermining them — Blue STILL sets aside land for the Teen FIC; and the Lindens keep creating events and activities and feted non-profits to drive traffic not only their select feted friends, but themselves (something they do with far more abandon in TSL than on the adult grid –at least one Linden keeps IMing everyone online to tell them to come to her cool party in their cool Government Linden land built by an adult from the adult grid).

So what do they do? I know they won’t give up on their TSL activities but more and more, they either go outside (good thing!) or…play WOW. WOW seems like a stupid game to them by contrast with SL now — stupidly slaying monsters, skilling up, getting loot. At least the simpler game rules don’t have the built-in unfairness and elitism of SL, however.

I know you subscribe to the “game” theory of SL, that it is “just a game” and people should “have fun”. Well, I don’t think they “should” do anything. that’s why your repeated, taunting comment to Anshe, “When was the last time you logged in to have fun?” is hectoring and inappropriate. Real fun she has with her RL daughter in RL, as I do. On SL, it’s an elaborate job you’ve selected because of its fun aspects but you don’t expect it to be “fun” on some kind of consistent, entertainment basis.

If some people want to have fun within SL, they can create that world-within-a-world where they subsidize their lots with their own money, or they create break-even casual types of operations — no one is required to be in the rat race. Indeed, I lean toward that kind of involvement in SL myself, and want space for that kind of play/break-in/loss formula always to succeed in SL or it will die.

The problem is that even those with the concept to subsidize their fun, or break-even their fun, still need to be part of the economy — and they are blocked, and regardless of whether your goal is to just goof around and sell a little content to partly pay for tier, or just make a $40 subscription pay for itself, you need not to have the obstacles and friction that exist to doing that.

The rules state clearly that you need a host, that you need hours for events. I feel that’s wrong. Why? Who the hell cares? The forums are accessed by only 5 percent of the people; the infohub ad spaces are a joke and impossible to use; where’s the normal bulletin board for this community???

That’s exactly why we were advocating a category within the events calendar for notices of things that would be 24/7 duration. Those trying to control the events process so that they’d face no competition in their business, like Flipper, wrestled everyone else and the Lindens to keep that out. Some wanted to make sure that the 24/7 category only contained Hamlet Linden’s 7 day contests, let’s say, or some other high-end activity. Of course, they’d have “Arts and Culture” for that, and they could also get off their ass, come inworld, and host an event, eh? In the end, fearing 24/7 Ingos, they chopped out this category. They should have left it in, as one more filter.

What’s annoying me most, however, and others following this topic, is that EVEN if someone follows the rules and puts in a host, a duration, and objects (not vendors also in a store), they are still vilified on the forums and removed by the Lindens. But that’s breaking their own rules. The rules say you can have events, have hosts, have duration, and sell stuff — there is a category of COMMERCIAL in the filters and that is allowed.

Indeed, I was among a group that fought vigorously to get rid of their previous net-nanny stuff which basically prohibited you from having a building contest or home display because it barred “here’s my cool build” events. It also prevented real estate tours or announcements and showings of new communities by saying “no sell my land stuff”. Why? Who cares? Sell your damn land and have your damn contests, geez, WTF??? Who is this FOR anyway? You have to realize that many people have “buy my rentals” or “come to my contest” not to gouge the population out of the dollars but merely to make their sim break even or not cost a huge amount. Let them!!!

The dirty little secret of the events issue, [ELIDED BY REQUEST], is that as soon as you apply all the filters you want to apply in advance and hold people’s hands and make more rules you’ll find…there’s nothing on there. Much.

If you want better events, this is what I tell all the FIC on the forums who bitch: make them. If you build them, they will come. If they don’t come, build them better. Don’t shoot the messenger, which is the events board as it is now.

SL is a “platform” that has to serve many people, [ELIDED BY REQUEST]. If you want it to be an extention of TSO, I quite sympathize. I want it to be an extention of the better parts of TSO, too. But it can’t be ONLY TSO and be subsidized or break-even for everyone, with land purchasable like shelf paper at a standard-price and rigid rules that prevent a market economy from developing. If you want shelf-priced paper land, it’s there — go and study the auctions, study the list, and buy a $5/meter piece of land. There’s plenty of it. In fact, the Lindens artificially keep it at that price, as anyone studying it over time realizes.

If there’s no market economy in a game with user-made content and development teams working on improving the platform itself, the entire platform will never improve and become viable. I agree that the Lindens and the FIC/SIC put way, way too much emphasis on their own development and skew it their own way with their priorities. But that doesn’t mean the answer is to create a static, entirely rule-bound world like a game with Trumanville type walls around it everywhere. What it should do is be flexible enough to create a Trumanville within it and establish those rules, but not bind every server by them.

I don’t understand your aversion to some kind of ‘control’ over anything – the rules are pretty loose as it is, it would only be enforcing the rules in game that would clear things up, rather than ignoring them. There’s actually very little you can’t do even if the rules were enforced.

I think that Marsellus’ history as a mafia boss may be irrelevant – if he says it was only a roleplay, and he’s actually quite a pleasant guy in real life, then I’m prepared to give him that chance to prove exactly that. One thing I do know, though, is that the Stratics management will keep a close eye on him and if he does anything untoward, they will jump on him and if necessary replace him. You can never tell how anyone is going to work out once they get a position of power, regardless of their actual history. If SL:Stratics turns out to be just as bad as the ‘official’ forums, then people will probably migrate back to the ‘official’ forums – but if, as I suspect, the Stratics portal turns out to be a richer, more productive, more informative experience… then it may well be that LL decide to adopt Stratics as the official forums and dump their own. Because it’s quite clear to me and many others that the way the ‘official’ forums are run does not work.

Bob

The encouragement of free and untrammelled raw feed for events should be the goal of every bulletin board. Indeed, it’s the concept behind huge events listings on the Internet in general like the events listing service that recently grabbed the SL events into a feed and decided not to filter them, and God bless them! the Lindens and their squeamish Jeska and Jesse and their blistering eyes should take a lesson from that RL example.

Raw feed, yes, indeed. Then, there should be FILTERS for those who suffer from chronic eyebleeds and those with delicate constitutions.

Indeed, we have filters. These are called “Discussion” or “Commercial” etc. Of course, we rely on events posters to click off their categories to get filtered, and they don’t, but those that do are rewarded.

I personally only look at the entire raw feed of the events list a few times a week if I have spare time. Normally, when I log on, I merely filter first for “Discussion” and “Art and Culture” and look under those. I’d advise you to do that too, and save on blood pressure medication.

That’s what I recommend all the forums net nannies to do if you find these listings too hard to handle.

The scrubbing of yard sales that the hate-any-business-but-my-business state communists and creator-fascists on the forums encourage and even put Lindens up to is an abomination.

Yes, this is a game that criminalizes yard sales, but makes porn movies and pose ball “events” ok to keep on as long as they are related to a Linden alt or something. Geez.

I created Ravenglass Rentals Events today for anyone to join and put freely any and all events they wish. Events are the lifeblood of the society and the economy. The Linden- and FIC-and SIC-induced grab of the events stream is a naked bid to grab the economy and stratify the society. It’s wrong.

On my local bulletin board in the hallway of my RL apartment complex, or at my RL supermarket, there is no bossy church lady telling me I can’t post my tag sale or my trumpet lessons or my babysitting or xeroxing offers or my new Amway products. Sheesh. Why the hell should I tolerate such church ladies in what is supposed to be the non-church of Second Life. In fact, I don’t even get church ladies like Second Life has church ladies in my RL church, where I can put stuff up on the bulletin board like a kitten to give away or a Girl Scout cookie sales drive without fear or favour. To be sure, I don’t advertise sex orgies at these RL venues, but the point is, I can advertise any or all product, sale, service, tag or garagage sale I wish. Nobody is tapping their foot and checking their watch to see if my garage sale had a host, and went on from the hours of 1-3 on Sunday or not.

The grabbing of the events list, like the grabbing of the newbies’ stream, is just a naked bid for power by people who take it illegitimately. Try to suspend your own sense of nausea at naked av and Ingos and yardies for a bit to see that’s what’s underlying it.

Once we let mods go after resident content, we’re doomed. The user-created world will die. And we are teetering on the edge of it now.

As for Stratics, if they want a sanitized events list, like the one Flipper provides, well, who could stop them? It might work for some. I know we’re all looking for a cure to the toxicity of the SL forums. I take a very weather eye to Stratics being that cure. I don’t drink the Kool-Aid, Bob. And I don’t know what kind of message they’re sending here with a mafia kingpin being the portal dude — perhaps they are saying that nothing short of a mafia don is required to get the Poison Posse up against the wall.

I actually wasn’t involved with Stratics when I made that post. The position of Portal Manager was granted to me later in the day. I was just giving my 2 cents then. =)

Prok,

I wasn’t trying to insult you or anything. Was just saying I can help ya out. The counter is not invasive. It helps me monitor traffic to the casino and is a greeter for when you enter the casino. Nothing more. It’s memory is cleared out overtime and nothing is logged or kept. It can be very helpful though for auditting purposes, give-aways, etc. As for the games being confusing. They require a dealer to be present in order to gamble. Unfortunantly, when you visited we pretty much just opened the doors and only had 1 dealer which wasn’t online.

If you played TSO, these games should look very familiar and would be real easy to understand, however the fact they require a dealer is what can be confusing. You’re then trying to figure out how to pay the dice, etc which you cannot do. So I understand what your saying, but the house rules and dealer board clearly explain that. Perhaps you overlooked it or I need to reword some things. As for the casino manager, he does that with all people. Obviously they came to the casino and were interested and no dealer was online, so the manager takes the time to see if they are still interested in playing. We have some improvements we are making to help eliminate the need to do that.

Seriously though, the games are fun as hell and unique. Prok, come by and we’ll hook you up with the VIP treatment and the $1000 comp like I said. =)

Marsellus Wallace
SL Stratics Portal Manager & Boss, The Sim Mafia
http://www.stratics.com / http://www.thesimmafia.com

P.S. For those curious, casino’s name is Oasis Casino. We still have 1 dealer listed, but will have more up by end of today.

All calendar events have to be approved by a moderator after submission before they get put on the calendar.

So you won’t see repeat calendar spamming, if the rules are set and enforced properly. It might actually mean that real events and not fake sales-that-arent and *ingo every 30 minutes will clog it up.

Bob

I’ve never found the Stratics mods to be “over moderating” – but remember that they actually volunteered for the position and are trained, unlike on the SL forums where they are commandeered. The ‘staff badges’ also help clarify who actually has authority, and who’s just being a ‘tard’, as I believe the expression goes.

Bob

The PG format would frankly be welcome because there are so many foul mouths like Siggy Romulus who keep getting away with being foul in the worst way and the mods give them a pass. A more firm PG rating would help to organize collective shame for something like that.

The alt thing also sounds promising, since one of the chief annoyances of the SL forums is people coming back as alts with impunity and behaving hugely badly. Those who come back with barely-disguised alts like mine in order to fight the evil of othoers given a pass are then are pounded to make it look like they care about their policy — they don’t.

I don’t like the idea of banning links to sites though. That is overreach. And if they have an AR button system, they will have that same poison flaw that SL has with the pudgy fingers of the fanboyz weighted permanently on the AR button in chronic indignation and hatred.

What did you mean by “moderated calendar”?