Forbes WoW Player Talkin’ Smack On Second Life
by Alphaville Herald on 19/08/07 at 2:06 pm
Will SL be the first virtual world to fail?
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
WoW player Dave Ewalt says SL players are losers
The iMojo wire’s inter-world taunting alarm went off this morning – and with good reason. After sitting through a couple ads in the Forbes video clip here, and some blather about the Linden space buck economy, World of Warcraft player and Forbes reporter Dave Ewalt got my attention when he said it is “hard to find someone who isn’t a loser in Second Life”. Hmmmm – that certainly puts an interesting spin on things – and this is Forbes’ second swipe at SL – is there a pattern here?
Mr. Ewalt somehow restrained himself from saying SL is like totally teh suxxor, but did mention concerns about sex, an SL bank run, sex, the gambling ban, sex, bad corporate builds, sex, and nothing to drive the Second Life virtual economy except cyber sex — oh, and did I mention sex?
The video contains other important insights such as “corporations were sold a bill of goods”, and the revelation that looking at virtual washers and dishwashers is not very interesting in Second Life – or real life. I’d been planning to send a memo to the Herald staff on that very topic – this saves me the trouble.
corporations were not the only ones sold a bill of goods
Mr. Ewalt – apparently an avid World of Warcraft player – skips lightly over the fact that WoW lacks world and content building tools, but chirps happily about how WoW is a wholesome platforms for socializing and forming guilds. Perhaps Mr. Ewalt is just jealous that WoW doesn’t have /b/tards crashing his game every weekend while the game gods chill out at home? This also suggests that the Herald ought to do an expose of sex in WoW – we worry Mr. Ewalt hasn’t been in the right sorts of guilds.
which guilds are those? why don’t I get invited?
Brail
Aug 22nd, 2007
Obscure Doodad, correction: there is no correlating of hourly usage with anything. The number you should be looking at on the Gender With Hours page is M/F Counts and associated percents, which is literally the total number/percents for each gender logging in.
And now there you go again making things up…first this:
“what are the probabilities that a game devoted to killing things is a formula more likely to discourage female inclinations than a game that offers the opportunity to develop fashions? One would rationally think . . .not very”
Made up probability based on your own version of “rationality”/experience:
“One would rationally think . . .not very”
And there you go again:
“It would seem pretty reasonable to presume that RL females would on average, evaluated over the entirety of likely female inclinations, have more interest in the fashion game than the killing game. ”
We’ve already established what you regard as rational. We’ve already established what you regard as reasonable to assume. We’ve already established the Dr Doodad diagnosis of the female psyche. We get it. Now don’t let facts smack you on the way out.
Reality
Aug 22nd, 2007
“We’ve already established”
Brail? We’ve already established that neither of you have any idea what you are talking about and neither of you have a grasp on reality.
No one knows who is really behind the keyboard.
Brail
Aug 22nd, 2007
Reality, put down the pie and get back to reading WoW players’ minds and stealing lines from Techcrunch comments cause you ain’t helping Obscure over there one bit with his (or 25.45% her) denial problem.
Reality
Aug 22nd, 2007
Brail, put down the memes and ego – as well as the pie bullshit.
You’re not helping your own feeble grasp on the real world.
Here’s a fact for you: Until you actually meet them, you’ll never know the gender of the person behind the avatar (using legal methods anyway).
Now then – if all you can do is make assumptions (stealing comments from where?) and tell people to ‘put down the pie’ because your fantasy world is not what a person believes …
Don’t bother responding to me. I don’t have the time to deal with little kids.
Brail
Aug 22nd, 2007
Reality, tsk tsk such misplaced anger. I had no idea that direct comments by a fellow gamer -Forbes.com, Deputy Editor- bashing your favorite game could have such a deep effect. You now already know the gender numbers and probabilities that you can’t wish away no matter how hard you try. But as a mindreading noncombat junkie, I’m sure you’re too busy out saving babies from danger do some other simple math, so I’ve done it for you:
45,367 / 494,981 = ~9.2%
24,292 / 494,981 = ~4.9%
8,535 / 494,981 = ~1.7%
The first calculation is the portion of active second lifers actually making any money whatsoever per month in your favorite 3D internet browser. The second calculation is the portion making $10 or more. The third, $50 or more (each rounded and each conservative since total active count is from June while profit counts are from mid-August when total active count then will actually be greater).
So if he’s talking about second lifers, wouldn’t you think he’d be talking -at the very least- about the vast majority of them, not the minuscule minority that you’re wet dreaming about (and most of whom would see more income with paper routes)?
Oooops, what was the sound of that.. a bubble bursting? ..Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe you need more pie, not less.
Reality
Aug 22nd, 2007
Sorry kiddo – statistics are a load of bunk.
Kindly go back to the basement you crawled out of, m’kay kiddo?
as for the rest of your response? Sorry, more bunk from you concerning my attitude, preference, personality and just about everything else.
Please, step outside your door and resume whatever it is you do in real life. Your ability to read others on the internet does not exist.
Obscure Doodad
Aug 22nd, 2007
>>
The first calculation is the portion of active second lifers actually making any money whatsoever per month in your favorite 3D internet browser. The second calculation is the portion making $10 or more. The third, $50 or more (each rounded and each conservative since total active count is from June while profit counts are from mid-August when total active count then will actually be greater).
>>
This person has not been attending Meta Linden’s office hours. She explicitly addressed this as far back as 5 weeks ago when she announced that evidence was mounting that more and more of the SL economy was moving to Paypal. Her statistics are not able to track Paypal transactions that take place off world. Apparently the most frequent of these events are SL land rental paid to SL land owners, in the form of USD external to SL via Paypal.
There is a lot of merit in this. This avoids the LL 3% commission on cash extraction and any monthly extraction limits. It does not affect LL’s tier income because that is paid directly to LL.
The PMLF numbers are what they are, and they are astonishing in that they improved in July — reversing a June dip — and of course July was when the casinos closed. Yet the numbers improved.
Maybe it was RL females buying more SL fashion . . . .
Brail
Aug 23rd, 2007
Obscure Doodad, first I need to get this out of the way: hahahahahaha.
Ok. So first second life was essentially a huge fashion industry and now it’s a huge paypal based land rental industry (otherwise you wouldn’t be making a point about a statistical insignificance would you?). How quickly things change in Doodad land. Wow.
1. 5 weeks ago, eh? Tell ya what, champ, if you can show any economic data over the past 2 years showing unique PMLF has EVER been over the tiny fraction of total active uniques like it is now, you get a cookie. I mean before any “signs” of “movement”, after “signs”, in between “signs”, above “signs”, below “signs”, anything. Ever.
2. If there were “signs” of a relatively recent “move”, then the percentages would have themselves decreased over time at some point to account for it. Otherwise, you’re working on the Wishful Thinking Theory [tm] where not only is in-world business increasing as a percentage as evidenced by visible, trackable numbers, but also increasing by invisible, immeasurable numbers.
3. “Signs” such as…reading individual covenants/notecard-contracts of thousand of unique land renters to make any assessment that any such statistically appreciable “move” is occurring? Is reading the top 5 land renters’ websites enough to make a blanket statement? Is searching covenants for keywords like “paypal” and picking up false positives like “we don’t take paypal” standard practice for evaluating such things? If a land renter will accept BOTH $L and paypal, do you get to count him in both the PMLF pile AND the invisible immeasurable income pile?
4. PMLF didn’t dip for June; you probably meant active user counts dipped, and yeah I guess that it is unbelievably “astonishing” that as active users decrease, some non-PMLF $L based businesses fail, leaving less competition for others struggling to be a PMLF number and they finally get the business they need to become one — if you’re easily astonished, that is.
5. Equally unimpressive (read: not “astonishing”) is that PMLF numbers improved from one month to another, in this case June to July. Wow. They’ve only been doing that every single month since at least October 06 (increasing alongside total unique resident count). Except for March 2007, each and every single month since Oct 06, the growth rate for PMLF has been exceeded, sometimes by double digits, by the growth rate for unique registrations (active uniques isn’t presented that far back). Shows how many are in reality just consumers, doesn’t it.
6. Before your “It’s Really Significantly Higher But We Can’t Track It; It’s Foreign So It Can Be Any Number We Want!” bubble inflates too much, don’t forget that PMLF figure already excludes “Linden Lab Charges” which probably slashes much of the under-$10US numbers further as it is, when applied, if not also some over-$10US.
7. “Maybe it was RL females buying more SL fashion”, and you can bet they’re paying in trackable $L, not paypal.
So it must be tough being an Obscure Doodad. You have to live in a world where an appreciable percentage of people for some reason have a different gender marked on their credit cards/paypal. Where for some other inexplicable reason, a vast majority of unverified players are RL females to account for the “it doesn’t make sense to me–I thought I had women all figured out” paradigm. Where second life is either just a huge fashion industry or a huge land rental industry, depending on the day of the week. Where a goofy sexually repressed Forbes.com nerd comes off as the lesser defensive ideological clown. Sigh, tough days.
Reality, “statistics are a load of bunk” <- Speaks for itself.
“Sorry, more bunk from you concerning my attitude, preference, personality and just about everything else.”
Awwwww, poor (74.55%) guy, you can mind read others like
“He’s a combat junkie and there isn’t nearly enough combat in SL for his tastes. Not to mention that he obviously has not actually explored the SL Grid and is only spouting off about what he reads on third party websites”
but little Reality dun like it when others read little Reality’s mind…
<@:’( clown hat, teardrop, sad face, sniff
Reality
Aug 23rd, 2007
Brail kiddo ….
He’s got a World of Warcraft account – nothing to do there except fight. No ‘mind reading’ there – just a simple fact.
Sort of like the simple fact that you really have no clue.
come back and respond when you’ve grown a bit and abandoned your little memes.
Obscure Doodad
Aug 23rd, 2007
I guess I don’t understand what all this is intended to say. You either did attend Meta Linden’s office hours, or you failed to. Such a failure would prevent you from asking her there how she determined that Paypal was attracting more of the SL economy. Such a failure would prevent asking her there . . . anything at all.
But I guess discussion here has moved from the valid question of the likelihood of RL female inclinations across a broad population as it exists today might show interest in a killing game vs one with a fashion industry — to the inworld economy.
Somewhat a different topic. The PMLF numbers, I think they are probably worth looking at, but not at the low end. There is no data of value there. It’s the top end that defines success, almost by definition. March to June showed fewer big hitters in world making $5K/mo (before tier, always remember these numbers are before tier) existing, but then . . . astonishingly . . . they increased in July. July was when the casinos closed. How there was an increase of truly successful accounts that month is puzzling, unless casinos were a drain on the economy as a whole. This is another good question for Meta Linden, though if one fails to attend one can’t ask it during her office hours.
The lower levels of PMLF are such insignificant amounts of money that they likely don’t mean much, but their relentless growth in the face of persistent SL upheavals suggests that those upheavals are not disrupting the interest of money making activities at the low end. Meta Linden, in her office hours, did once state that all the numbers are collapsed to one account. Meaning multiple avatars of the same RL person were added together for the PMLF numbers.
Anonymous
Aug 23rd, 2007
“He’s got a World of Warcraft account – nothing to do there except fight. No ‘mind reading’ there – just a simple fact.”
Reality, you are way off. You don’t just have to fight there’s plenty of other things to do in WoW. *Gasp* WoW has it’s own economy you know, it may not make the average player RL money, but there’s an economy. There are people who go there for the social aspect as well believe it or not. It’s ironic too that there are plenty of RPG games inside of SL that mimic WoW. SL is what you can make of it. Next time don’t lump WoW with the average perception that it’s mainly all about swinging a sword. There’s a whole cohesive world you can explore in WoW and many travel around to see the sights. You can do the same in SL, but sometimes it’s just one big messy jumble, save for the few sims that are just built for sightseeing. Like someone said, apples and oranges. They both do different things really. I’ve played WoW and left it because I no longer have time to put into it. I’ve been on SL for over a year, and left it. Not for the same reasons as WoW, but because I didn’t like the direction that LL was steering SL too…and I became greatly tired this wait and see game everytime I would log on, what problems would plague the grid today and what annoying bugs in the client that are never fixed (one example my HUDs never fully rez no matter how many times I shampoo rinse repeat them, this was not a problem a few updates ago)
By the way Reality, stop belittling people, your mindset is not law. Your becoming like a certain someone you’re always trashing for doing the same thing.
Reality
Aug 23rd, 2007
anonymous ….
1. I frankly don’t give a damn what your opinion is on the matter or what your personal experience is. WoW is primarily a combat game. You level up by killing, in fact aside from selling off items you’ve gotten or actually paying for it you get gold by killing as well. Social aspects are in :gasp!: Guilds! I’ve RPed enough elsewhere to know most – if not all – Guilds are combat based. Kindly don’t ever attempt that bullshit with me again. M’kay?
2. Arrogant? No. stating a fact. Look at all the ads that ran for WoW – they’re all about the fighting and that is the original target audience.
In the future do not attempt to bullshit me. How people use and and the original purpose are two different things: As far as I am concerned WoW’s original purpose is the salient factor here, not how people use it.
May you have an interesting life.
DaveOner
Aug 23rd, 2007
Huh huhuh huh huh you guys are fighting about WoW on the internet.
I guess the forbes-tard was right about people in SL!
Anonymous
Dec 2nd, 2007
I cannot /b/elieve this fgtry.