One Measure of the Economy, Anyway

[Lindal Kidd]

4 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The whole point of a virtual world, however, was to restore some of the personal contact lost by the impersonal internet. To be able to try on the dress or look at the house with the $0. To TP in friends and shop and to strut your stuff. I think these human needs for trying and showing and socializing are still inherent.

It's not often I agree with Prok, but I absolutely agree with this.  The Marketplace is handy, but it's slowly killing the grid.  I've believed this for years.  The MP is the Amazon of SL...and LL did it to themselves.

[Nuno McCullough]

16 hours ago, chibiusa Ling said:

As much as I love mesh, wear mesh and think that mesh was good in helping push SL forward.....you pretty much just hit on one of the reasons I hate mesh. The entry requirement now to start creating items is too much for most residents I meet to be bothered dealing with. Which is a shame in itself as SL used to be filled with creators big, small, crappy and awesome. Anyone could literally Rez a prim, start playing, add some textures and call it a day. Now however you have to download blender, follow tutorials, learn how to model, learn how to unwrap and UV, learn how to use cycles and thats just covering the basics of what you need to make a decent a looking basic model. Then after that you have to learn how to do advanced modelling, organic shapes, clothing...then leading on from that you have avastar and rigging and if you so do choose yet another program aka Marvellous Designer or Z Brush. It's an insane amount of effort and work and we now sit in a situation where the elite few rule the playing field with the semi elite few beneath them pumping out the same tired old copycat crap but done "differently" and most normal residents saying **** this too much effort I cant be bothered with all that. Go back 10 years and 75% of those normal residents would be creating, modding and probably have their own small store or offering to contribute to SL in some way...now....nada. Mesh made SL better but it also ruined it massively IMO

That and the heavy focus on marketplace stores. I do miss the malls of yesterday if I am honest. Given the option between a laggy Gacha rip off event or buying actual decent products in an SL mall...I would pick the latter any day.  Some of the best items I ever found came from the gigantic sprawling malls of 200X - 2010. Sadly I don't think there is anything you could do to actually rescue malls. Given (as stated below) you can rent a 512 plot of land for less than 500 linden a week now you would have to be offering out mall stores of a decent size and cheaper than what you can rent for privately to at least have a chance of getting people in and thats AFTER trying to justify to them why they should even pay in the first place when they can have a marketplace store for free. The only time I ever see successful "Malls" now (note quotation marks) is when they are included in some other pre existing sim as part of a shopping district or cater to a specific community, one example of this would be Annie May Heaven which caters to the Anime community and Anime developers.

The thing is....

1. Most malls I see want between 2-500 lindens a week for a tiny space with a limit of say 50 prims or something like that. You can go to someone like the Chungs and rent a 512m plot of land for around the same price with a higher prim limit and design your own custom space to suit your store, list it in search etc etc and even use the classifieds and whatever else yourself to advertise it

2. And completely dead. SL has become too accustomed to events, marketplace and having your own in world store, with marketplace being what most creators tend to go for now. That and the majority of the malls that are left are now selling products most people would consider as naffy tat that no one is interested in buying. We had a hop round some in world malls not all that long ago and, besides the occasional nifty throwback prim made item, it didn't feel like we were walking around the bastion of creativity that malls once were. 

3. See point 1

I do agree with you on a lot of the points you have made though and as stated further up I really do miss the malls of yesterday that we once had in SL that sold a wide selection of awesome nifty products. But those days are gone and unless your prepared to develop a voodoo fetish I doubt there is any way you could bring them back to the point they once were. Maybe if they were themed to cater to a specific community, as I also stated above Annie May Heaven is doing very well for itself as a mall combined hangout zone, then maybe a mall would thrive

Themed, exclusives, caters to a specific crowd. Though...most (read : nearly all) of them are now Gacha and my stance on Gacha (con products), those who create Gacha sets (con merchants) and Gacha events (con zones)  in general are pretty well known.

 

BUT....maybe you could be the one to change all of this. Perhaps a gigantic multi mall with different sectors catering to a specific crowd with fun games, hangout zones, a sandbox and whatever else you can think to throw in there to keep people entertained

Totally agree with your points. SL used to be a second life for everyone, I remember to see lots of inworld shops not only with top end creators but also with less "talented" creators, everyone arrived to SL and even with some simple linked prims could acomplish a sense of achievement, nowadays SL is sold almost as a RL mirror, everything must be super duper designed and detailed - even yesterday my boyfriend was laughing because my avatar was looking almost the same as my RL me - back in 2011 when I first left SL I was complaining that most people didn't interact, even for shopping they went only for MP and I simply thought "ok, maybe is just my problem", but no, after these years I returned, went premium and land is still being abandoned, nice built malls are gone, to be creator with need to hold more and more technical knowledge, MP is taking more and more from the inworld commerce (I wonder if LL will have any drop on tiers due to the lack of need to have have a inworld shop) and I guess that tomorrow we'll have new avatars that simply don't know what is to reez a prim