A Letter To LL About Builders

[Suzanne Logan]

I have been in SL for 8 years and an owner of a private sim for 6 years that is made beautiful by the content from builders. I take a personal loss every year on it, but that is my choice in making a place for others to play and enoy. I support you all wholeheartedly. I am concerned when I hear about the content rule - what you build here belongs to LL not you. The cost of SL is exorbitant in comparison to up and coming worlds and I am hoping that competition will drive some prices down and create more reason among the decision makers of this world. But yes.. Bash, your point is well - taken. For the majority of people in SL this is a place to spend money - not make it. That money goes to you and LL. A simple economic idea.. or used to be. Promoting a way to make all of that easier is a good thing.

[Suzanne Logan]

However - that there be an elite group that gets special privileges does not make sense. It isn't just about tier that your discussion brings us to.. though that is what some are thinking.. You are asking LL to expand their thinking in ways that will support economic growth while removing the barriers that stifle it. The answer may lie in their own competition.

[Dayna Bedrosian]

Most people are not on one grid, but spread out. Not only that, but the Hypergrid a person is not limited to one grid. That's why when you look at a number on a grid it seems like a waste land.

 

It's apparently obvious that RP groups are the bread and butter of SL. Without us there would be hardly any sales for the magnificent items that are created.

[Cheshyr Pontchartrain]

---

Dayna Bedrosian wrote:

Most people are not on one grid, but spread out. Not only that, but the Hypergrid a person is not limited to one grid. That's why when you look at a number on a grid it seems like a waste land.

---

Amusing, but blatantly untrue.  If "most people" were on multiple grids, the population of Kitely, Inworldz, etc. would be more than ~1000 active users and 30 online at any given time. Third-party grids are irrelevant to this discussion.

[Dora Gustafson]

---

Dayna Bedrosian wrote:

Most people are not on one grid

, but spread out. Not only that, but the Hypergrid a person is not limited to one grid. That's why when you look at a

number

on a grid it seems like a waste land.

 

It's apparently obvious that RP groups are the bread and butter of SL

. Without us there would be hardly any sales for the magnificent items that are created.

---

References are badly needed for these claims

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Dresden Ceriano]

---

Dayna Bedrosian wrote:

It's apparently obvious that RP groups are the bread and butter of SL. Without us there would be hardly any sales for the magnificent items that are created.

---

In other words, you apparently/obviously (take your pick) have nothing to back up your assertions.  So be it.

...Dres

[Dresden Ceriano]

---

Dora Gustafson wrote:

---

Dayna Bedrosian wrote:

Most people are not on one grid

, but spread out. Not only that, but the Hypergrid a person is not limited to one grid. That's why when you look at a

number

on a grid it seems like a waste land.

 

It's apparently obvious that RP groups are the bread and butter of SL

. Without us there would be hardly any sales for the magnificent items that are created.

---

References are badly needed for these claims

:smileysurprised:

:smileyvery-happy:

---

Don't hold your breath.

...Dres

[IvanBenjammin]

---

Suzanne Logan wrote:

...what you build here belongs to LL not you.

---

Nope, what I build here belongs to me. LL grants themselves 'non-exclusive' rights to use it as they see fit, but ultimate ownership and copyright are mine.

Unless you refer to things built entirely out of prims and library textures, in which case ownership might well lie with LL.

 

 

 

[Scooter Hollow]

I don't know if I agree about creating multiple classes of users, especially by potentially subjective definitions, but I do feel that Second Life's pricing structure is one of its biggest problems. I work in OpenSim, and every time I feel tempted to take a look at moving into Second Life I take a look at the prices, and decide there's no way I'm getting that value out of that money.

 

Although even that's a moot point since I can't see myself switching over for as long as the current content TOS are in place.

[Energy Metaluna]

quotes "As I see it, the major issue with this model is that the success of the system is based on a $300 ... "

AND %90 at first glance run to the door, enter search, and keep looking, that (actually $295 U.S.D (private + $1,000 U.S.D opening fee))

or $195 U.S.D mainland (per month)

 

that would scare anyone without telling them the information they REALLY want to know, "why" it does not take someone "smart" to ask that question, funnier thing is i read another post about someone wanting to "expand the grid" and i am guessing they ment they have their own "build" they wanted to connect to SL, what would be great, but if they did not have those tools that can actually be somewhat mimiced off even something like "Blender" with enough tweaking, and most sertainly with Maya and 3Ds max hands down, only draws me to think in the end, your buying the connection right? logical deduction, so the question i have is.

is $195 U.S.D (mainland), $295 U.S.D (Private + $1,000 U.S.D opening fee) the "real" spirit of "you'r world, you'r imagination"? this question has been around since day one, and now? economicly, world wide, this is like a car, in some cases, even in the U.S. (and yes i can find one running great at this price) so, where is the money going?

[YT Upsilon]

I think a reduction for creators in SL would be a good idea.  

IMHO LL could also distinguish tier prices for A M G rated land, and public vs private group only land.

All in all though tier prices should be reduced across the board.  Let's face it - RL property has.    

[MIstahMoose]

RL property seems silly to bring up when your Sim rests within an expensive server box. Servers are extremely expensive and how SL works is very intensive to run and have up to 50 avatars in real time. You're paying for the cost of server, maintenance, bandwidth, support, etc. Not property value.

[Energy Metaluna]

it was april fools, i was pulling a funny ... lol but it probobly was not funny :smileyembarrassed:

i am sure there isn't a lot they can do about it

[Scooter Hollow]

---

MIstahMoose wrote:

RL property seems silly to bring up when your Sim rests within an expensive server box. Servers are extremely expensive and how SL works is very intensive to run and have up to 50 avatars in real time. You're paying for the cost of server, maintenance, bandwidth, support, etc. Not property value.

---

The problem seems to be the distribution of those server costs. In an MMO, you can have hundreds of people in a spot at one time, but those costs are spread out to $10-15 a month per person (on average, or maybe less depending on how much of a free-to-play MMO it is). The MMOs don't go, okay, we've got a couple hundred people in this city hub, and these five guys are making the most off of the auctionhouse, you five need to pay for the subs of at least thirty people each.

 

But aside from that I can't help but feel the costs are hugely inflated from what they should be. I might not go up to 50 people, but I can run an opensim server for a couple dozen on a local machine for essentially free, and if I wanted to go bigger with it I could rent out an amazon server for what I'm pretty sure is a fraction of the cost. There's no way it should be costing a thousand bucks to set up a sim.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Scooter Hollow wrote:

---

MIstahMoose wrote:

RL property seems silly to bring up when your Sim rests within an expensive server box. Servers are extremely expensive and how SL works is very intensive to run and have up to 50 avatars in real time. You're paying for the cost of server, maintenance, bandwidth, support, etc. Not property value.

---

The problem seems to be the distribution of those server costs. In an MMO, you can have hundreds of people in a spot at one time, but those costs are spread out to $10-15 a month per person (on average, or maybe less depending on how much of a free-to-play MMO it is). The MMOs don't go, okay, we've got a couple hundred people in this city hub, and these five guys are making the most off of the auctionhouse, you five need to pay for the subs of at least thirty people each.

 

But aside from that I can't help but feel the costs are hugely inflated from what they should be. I might not go up to 50 people, but I can run an opensim server for a couple dozen on a local machine for essentially free, and if I wanted to go bigger with it I could rent out an amazon server for what I'm pretty sure is a fraction of the cost. There's no way it should be costing a thousand bucks to set up a sim.

---

First of all, right out of the starting gate Open Sim really had no or very minimal start up costs.  Essentially the software was handed to them on a silver platter when LL made the Viewer open source.  How many millions of dollars in R&D are you benefiting from for free now?  How much does Open SIM still benefit for free from LL's R&D?

Secondly, what are your support costs?  If your local machine goes down, how much will it cost you to replace it?  How much are you paying for Bandwidth?  How much are you spending on Legal Counsel to ensure that your business is in compliance with Federal & State laws?  Tax Attorneys are certainly not cheap.

While my personal take on things is that SL does earn a healthy profit, I still don't think it's as huge a profit as some people like to make it out to be.  Most who claim it's a cash cow seem to ignore that there are more costs to running SL than just having a Server with some software on it.

 

[Sean Heying]

---

First of all, right out of the starting gate Open Sim really had no or very minimal start up costs.  Essentially the software was handed to them on a silver platter when LL made the Viewer open source.  How many millions of dollars in R&D are you benefiting from for free now?  How much does Open SIM still benefit for free from LL's R&D?

Secondly, what are your support costs?  If your local machine goes down, how much will it cost you to replace it?  How much are you paying for Bandwidth?  How much are you spending on Legal Counsel to ensure that your business is in compliance with Federal & State laws?  Tax Attorneys are certainly not cheap.

While my personal take on things is that SL does earn a healthy profit, I still don't think it's as huge a profit as some people like to make it out to be.  Most who claim it's a cash cow seem to ignore that there are more costs to running SL than just having a Server with some software on it.

 

---

Couple of points on this:

How many millions, tens of millions of dollars of free programming have LL recieved over the years since the viewer source was released?

There are a lot of very talented people in the TPV teams, a few of them I know could easily command salaries of 250K-350K per annum, a lot of patches, a LOT of patches have come from the TPV team into the Lab viewer and a lot of free debugging has been done too.

That the libomv team had a little help with server protocols - a lot, most even was reverse engineered - is a small price here compared to the amount of benefit, many many times more, that LL have taken back from the opensource community.

How much does opensim benefit from the libomv code? Not at all if you are talking monetarily as outside of Avination which only accounts for MelanieT, there is no money being made. How much does LL benefit from the opensource community? Immensly, to the tune of thousands upon thousands of free programming work.

 

On costing you are right though, I am not so sure that LL can move too far from where they have priced things. I know my own Amazon server hooked up to the private OpenSim grid I now live on costs me USD$80 a month. It has four regions, but after about 10 users it clogs up a little. LL's servers are easily able to handle more people, they perform better and based on my own server costing $80 for 10-ish people maximum, I don't think the $195/$295 is that bad.  After all, for a builder wanting a shop, a mainland sim can't be terraformed but skyplatforms are perfectly fine.

 

On Opensim, I have NPCs, I can upload mesh and textures for free, I can do a lot there and import 99.9% of it into SL without issue, so as a design space it might be ideal for the budding builder. HOWEVER, it's empty. Not just on the small grid I am on with 260ish people, but all the grids HG connected or not. 

 

A few people - like me and the other "koolaid drinking" opensim poster can move happily from SL and effectively give the middle finger to LL, but I honestly don't think most people could.

What people can do though, especially builders, is set up their workshop there and develop for free (especially mesh makers) then do a final import into SL and sell.

I have to say I don't support the OP letter. This would make 2 classes of people, 1 class who subsidises the other. But I do add to that, $195 a month for a mainland sim will be fine for a lot of people who want to sell huge items. The sky is the limit.

 

Oh and, yeah, do try OpenSim for your actual creation workflow, it's far cheaper to build stuff when you don't pay for every single mesh upload, good or bad. But unless you are a special brand of masochist, like I am, you likely will find the emptyness quite weird.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Sean Heying wrote:

---

First of all, right out of the starting gate Open Sim really had no or very minimal start up costs.  Essentially the software was handed to them on a silver platter when LL made the Viewer open source.  How many millions of dollars in R&D are you benefiting from for free now?  How much does Open SIM still benefit for free from LL's R&D?

Secondly, what are your support costs?  If your local machine goes down, how much will it cost you to replace it?  How much are you paying for Bandwidth?  How much are you spending on Legal Counsel to ensure that your business is in compliance with Federal & State laws?  Tax Attorneys are certainly not cheap.

While my personal take on things is that SL does earn a healthy profit, I still don't think it's as huge a profit as some people like to make it out to be.  Most who claim it's a cash cow seem to ignore that there are more costs to running SL than just having a Server with some software on it.

 

---

Couple of points on this:

How many millions, tens of millions of dollars of free programming have LL recieved over the years since the viewer source was released?

There are a lot of very talented people in the TPV teams, a few of them I know could easily command salaries of 250K-350K per annum, a lot of patches, a LOT of patches have come from the TPV team into the Lab viewer and a lot of free debugging has been done too.

That the libomv team had a little help with server protocols - a lot, most even was reverse engineered - is a small price here compared to the amount of benefit, many many times more, that LL have taken back from the opensource community.

How much does opensim benefit from the libomv code? Not at all if you are talking monetarily as outside of Avination which only accounts for MelanieT, there is no money being made. How much does LL benefit from the opensource community? Immensly, to the tune of thousands upon thousands of free programming work.

 

On costing you are right though

, I am not so sure that LL can move too far from where they have priced things. I know my own Amazon server hooked up to the private OpenSim grid I now live on costs me USD$80 a month. It has four regions, but after about 10 users it clogs up a little. LL's servers are easily able to handle more people, they perform better and based on my own server costing $80 for 10-ish people maximum, I don't think the $195/$295 is that bad.  A

fter all, for a builder wanting a shop, a mainland sim can't be terraformed but skyplatforms are perfectly fine.

 

On Opensim, I have NPCs, I can upload mesh and textures for free, I can do a lot there and import 99.9% of it into SL without issue, so as a design space it might be ideal for the budding builder. HOWEVER, it's empty. Not just on the small grid I am on with 260ish people, but all the grids HG connected or not. 

 

A few people - like me and the other "koolaid drinking" opensim poster can move happily from SL and effectively give the middle finger to LL, but I honestly don't think most people could.

What people can do though, especially builders, is set up their workshop there and develop for free (especially mesh makers) then do a final import into SL and sell.

I have to say I don't support the OP letter. This would make 2 classes of people, 1 class who subsidises the other. But I do add to that, $195 a month for a mainland sim will be fine for a lot of people who want to sell huge items. The sky is the limit.

 

Oh and, yeah, do try OpenSim for your actual creation workflow, it's far cheaper to build stuff when you don't pay for every single mesh upload, good or bad. But unless you are a special brand of masochist, like I am, you likely will find the emptyness quite weird.

---

I am very aware of how much LL benefits from the free contributions of it's users.  SL is not unique in this but just in User to User support the benefits are monstrous.  After all, who is it that really teaches people how to navigate through SL?  Who is it that helps the New User to get established and comfortable here.  It's certainly not LL.

Ebbe has said he wants to get the Linden staff back In World.  That's going to cost money (salary) to do.  There has to be a return on investment with this or it's not going to work.  But I've long maintained that too often design and other decisions are made by people who don't have Second Lives.  They do things that complicate life rather than making it simpler.  I can point to things that used to take one mouse click to do that now require three.

My main point was people like to claim how cheap it is to run an Open Sim but they forget just exactly why it can be so cheap.

Also, thank you for bringing some real numbers into the discussion.  People talk about running Open Sims on home computers.  And just from a bandwidth point of view I've wonderred could they handle twenty or thirty Ava's comfortably?

 

[Bash Quandry]

I'm seeing a lot of arguments against one class of users subsidising the other.

Firstly, one group of users ALREADY subsidises all other users.

Premium members and landowners already bear the cost burden of the system so that everyone else can play free. Not only do they pay tier, but they have to pay a monthly fee for a Premium membership to even gain the honor of paying that tier**. To be clear - since it seems a lot of people were reading way more into what I wrote than I explicitly stated - I'm not saying people playing free are moochers. I love Residents. I build for residents. I wish there were more of them.

Secondly, I'm also not suggesting creating two classes of users. Nor am I suggesting that one group of users are better - one cannot exist without the other. I'm merely suggesting an additional level of membership and giving substantial contributors to the system an earned bonus for doing so.

These are facts

• Content Creators build the stuff that makes SL a unique and interesting place.
• They build the stuff that people buy L$ to purchase, which runs the SL economy.
• They account for some portion of landowners that directly contributes to LL profits, which in turn makes it possible for SL to be Free To Play.

Given these facts, would it not benefit the system as a whole to make it possible for those that are contributing back into it to expand?

Would it not benefit the system as a whole to make it more lucrative for builders to dedicate more time to the system?

Would it not benefit the system as a whole to attract more high end content creation talent?

Lastly, I purposely didn't go into detail about how to determine a "Builder" or "substantial contributor". I left out a lot of details because my letter was already too long and I'm not qualified to make those distinctions. I was just making a broad proposal. But such a distinction is not some impossible arbitrary concept. Every action of every player is logged so it's not like there's no metric that can be extracted to determine how much a user contributes back into the system.

**Yes I know there are ways around being a Premium member, but some of us would rather not put our hard work at the mercy of a land broker that might fold without warning.

PS as a side note. OpenSIM supporters. Where you think the inspiration for your system came from? Before you go boasting how revolutionary you are, you better recognize who your Daddy is.

[IvanBenjammin]

I don't think premium membership costs are substituting much of anything. Some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations suggests to me that members get around 60% of their membership fee back as L$ in the form of stipends (based on quarterly payments of US$ 22.50, L$300/week stipend, and a rough exchange rate of L$250 per US$1).

And as Mr.Moose said, running servers is not cheap. I have no idea what percentage of tier money goes into ongoing costs, but I'd bet its a significant fraction.

Also, the cost of land isn't what keeps 'high-end' building talent away IMO - its the fact that SL's tools for creating and importing content are neolithic compared to what most artists are prepared to use. Visual quality and performance is also more important to these people than most, and stumbling through a laggy mess of a sim is enough to put many people off permanently.

[Scooter Hollow]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

---

Scooter Hollow wrote:

---

MIstahMoose wrote:

RL property seems silly to bring up when your Sim rests within an expensive server box. Servers are extremely expensive and how SL works is very intensive to run and have up to 50 avatars in real time. You're paying for the cost of server, maintenance, bandwidth, support, etc. Not property value.

---

The problem seems to be the distribution of those server costs. In an MMO, you can have hundreds of people in a spot at one time, but those costs are spread out to $10-15 a month per person (on average, or maybe less depending on how much of a free-to-play MMO it is). The MMOs don't go, okay, we've got a couple hundred people in this city hub, and these five guys are making the most off of the auctionhouse, you five need to pay for the subs of at least thirty people each.

 

But aside from that I can't help but feel the costs are hugely inflated from what they should be. I might not go up to 50 people, but I can run an opensim server for a couple dozen on a local machine for essentially free, and if I wanted to go bigger with it I could rent out an amazon server for what I'm pretty sure is a fraction of the cost. There's no way it should be costing a thousand bucks to set up a sim.

---

First of all, right out of the starting gate Open Sim really had no or very minimal start up costs.  Essentially the software was handed to them on a silver platter when LL made the Viewer open source.  How many millions of dollars in R&D are you benefiting from for free now?  How much does Open SIM still benefit for free from LL's R&D?

Secondly, what are your support costs?  If your local machine goes down, how much will it cost you to replace it?  How much are you paying for Bandwidth?  How much are you spending on Legal Counsel to ensure that your business is in compliance with Federal & State laws?  Tax Attorneys are certainly not cheap.

While my personal take on things is that SL does earn a healthy profit, I still don't think it's as huge a profit as some people like to make it out to be.  Most who claim it's a cash cow seem to ignore that there are more costs to running SL than just having a Server with some software on it.

 

---

1. I find it silly to claim that SL is still trying to recoup the costs of initial R&D after, what, more than ten years? The occasional patch (including work they get for free) is hardly worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.

 

2. The cost of replacing my machine is the same as it would be whether I was running a server on it or not. And...legal counsel? How much am I paying in legal counsel to run a minecraft server for some friends? How much am I paying in legal counsel to play Wildstar? Tax attorneys? I want a place where I can create with my friends, not open a competing business to LL.

 

I feel like you seem to be under the impression that I want to create a virtual world system as a company or something, but I'm just a user who wants to make stuff.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Scooter Hollow wrote:

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

---

Scooter Hollow wrote:

---

MIstahMoose wrote:

RL property seems silly to bring up when your Sim rests within an expensive server box. Servers are extremely expensive and how SL works is very intensive to run and have up to 50 avatars in real time. You're paying for the cost of server, maintenance, bandwidth, support, etc. Not property value.

---

The problem seems to be the distribution of those server costs. In an MMO, you can have hundreds of people in a spot at one time, but those costs are spread out to $10-15 a month per person (on average, or maybe less depending on how much of a free-to-play MMO it is). The MMOs don't go, okay, we've got a couple hundred people in this city hub, and these five guys are making the most off of the auctionhouse, you five need to pay for the subs of at least thirty people each.

 

But aside from that I can't help but feel the costs are hugely inflated from what they should be. I might not go up to 50 people, but I can run an opensim server for a couple dozen on a local machine for essentially free, and if I wanted to go bigger with it I could rent out an amazon server for what I'm pretty sure is a fraction of the cost. There's no way it should be costing a thousand bucks to set up a sim.

---

First of all, right out of the starting gate Open Sim really had no or very minimal start up costs.  Essentially the software was handed to them on a silver platter when LL made the Viewer open source.  How many millions of dollars in R&D are you benefiting from for free now?  How much does Open SIM still benefit for free from LL's R&D?

Secondly, what are your support costs?  If your local machine goes down, how much will it cost you to replace it?  How much are you paying for Bandwidth?  How much are you spending on Legal Counsel to ensure that your business is in compliance with Federal & State laws?  Tax Attorneys are certainly not cheap.

While my personal take on things is that SL does earn a healthy profit, I still don't think it's as huge a profit as some people like to make it out to be.  Most who claim it's a cash cow seem to ignore that there are more costs to running SL than just having a Server with some software on it.

 

---

1. I find it silly to claim that SL is still trying to recoup the costs of initial R&D after, what, more than ten years? The occasional patch (including work they get for free) is hardly worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.

 

---

I never claimed that LL was still trying to recoup those costs.  All I said was Open SIM didn't incur them.  But tell me, what's the going rate for a Senior Software Engineer or a Software Engineer in general.  Are you telling me that LL is waisting hundreds of thousands of dollars by employing these people for the "occasional patch" they do?

 

---

Scooter Hollow wrote:

---

 2. The cost of replacing my machine is the same as it would be whether I was running a server on it or not. And...legal counsel? How much am I paying in legal counsel to run a minecraft server for some friends? How much am I paying in legal counsel to play Wildstar? Tax attorneys?

---

I didn't say that you were running a business or trying to open a competing business.  And if you want to give away for free your time, energy, resources, etc, that is perfectly with in your rights.  But LL is a business and so they have business exspenses. 

 

---

Scooter Hollow wrote:

---

 I want a place where I can create with my friends, not open a competing business to LL.

 

---

Cool, nothing wrong with that nor would I ever say that there was.  But whether you just want a place to have fun with friends or even if you were trying to start a business, you still have exspenses.  I do believe the Minecraft Software cost you around $30.00US to start up.

 

Lastly, I am a little curious about this statement, "In an MMO, you can have hundreds of people in a spot at one time."  What MMO allows for hundreds of people in a spot at one time?  At best anything I've ever read about maxes out at around 100 if they even allow it and there is a lot of math on why that is so.  http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/dbms/Data/Courses/CS632/Papers/ScalabilityForVirtualWorlds-ICDE2009.pdf

 

[Dresden Ceriano]

---

Bash Quandry wrote:

I'm seeing a lot of arguments against one class of users subsidising the other.

Firstly

, one group of users ALREADY subsidises all other users.

Premium members and landowners already bear the cost burden of the system so that everyone else can play free. Not only do they pay tier, but they have to pay a monthly fee for a Premium membership to even gain the honor of paying that tier**.

To be clear - since it seems a lot of people were reading way more into what I wrote than I explicitly stated - I'm not saying people playing free are moochers. I love Residents. I build for residents. I wish there were more of them.

 

---

There's a vast difference between a person who chooses to become a premium member and/or landowner (for which, in the case of private region ownership, it's not necessary to be a premium member), and being a landowner who is forced to pay more tier in order to compensate for some other landowner's discount.  The former is choosing to pay for something from which they alone receive the benefit; the latter would be forced into paying for something from which someone else receives the benefit.

 

---

Bash Quandry also wrote:

Secondly

, I'm also not suggesting creating two classes of users. Nor am I suggesting that one group of users are better - one cannot exist without the other.

I'm merely suggesting an additional level of membership

and giving substantial contributors to the system an earned bonus for doing so.

These are facts

• Content Creators build the stuff that makes SL a unique and interesting place.
• They build the stuff that people buy L$ to purchase, which runs the SL economy.
• They account for some portion of landowners that directly contributes to LL profits, which in turn makes it possible for SL to be Free To Play.

Given these facts, would it not benefit the system as a whole to make it possible for those that are contributing back into it to expand?

Would it not benefit the system as a whole to make it more lucrative for builders to dedicate more time to the system?

Would it not benefit the system as a whole to attract more high end content creation talent?

---

And yet, creating two classes of users is exactly what would result should your suggestion ever come to fruition.  You can spin it however you wish, but what you're really suggesting is a way to have your tier lowered at the expense of your fellow users... something of which I could never be supportive.

 

---

Bash Quandry wrote:

Lastly

, I purposely didn't go into detail about how to determine a "Builder" or "substantial contributor". I left out a lot of details because my letter was already too long and I'm not qualified to make those distinctions. I was just making a broad proposal. But such a distinction is not some impossible arbitrary concept. Every action of every player is logged so it's not like there's no metric that can be extracted to determine how much a user contributes back into the system.

---

But, you're whole "broad proposal" is contingent upon just such a determination.  You say that you're not qualified to make that distinction and yet insist that it's not some impossible arbitrary concept... I defy you to back up that statement with any sort of logically credulous argument.

Actually, metrics would need to be determined prior to analyzing any sort of logs... otherwise, how would anyone know on what they should focus when they begin to look through what would end up being a ridiculously large amount of information?  The very idea that LL would expend so much manpower deciding how they should reduce their own income is simply ludicrous.

...Dres