Limited resources makes the real world 'real'

[Prokofy Neva]

14 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

 

from an operational pov. I think that Copy in this simulation is the manufacturing process, once a product has been designed and built. In SL the cost of manufacturing is directly paid by Marketplace sale price commissions. Inworld indirectly thru tier

with a sale pricing cost model then the resource cost of a sold product can sometimes have no relationship to the sale price. Which can in some cases lead to selling freely gained high cost/impact resources for minimal financial cost to the seller

on the wider point, for buyers in such a simulation then the impact of NRC is a whole lot less than it would be for the sellers. The buyer gains NRC from the seller. NRC that the buyer paid for with money thru the purchase of the product

 

OK, but these fractions of things and this disconnection from the sale price (a gatcha rare can sell for US $100 for no real reason like a tulip) -- they are roughly comparable to RL but then there's the attention economy issue.

In RL, if I want to sell my used espresso machine on Craigslist, it's pretty efficient and I can pretty much sell it if I go below market. Or on the bulletin board of my housing complex. And the supermarket that has us as hostages because the next one is more than a mile away only has maybe 10 brands of bread competing and they can be taken in at a glance and so on.

In SL, a willing seller cannot meet a willing buyer. Cannot. They might as well be in the Taklamakan desert. In fact, at least in the Taklamakan  desert there was an oasis here and there and helpful villagers. In SL, no one may ever learn of your thing to buy. With search broken, and especially on the Mainland, you're in the desert. I can't tell you how many zillions of times over the years a new customer will come to my door and literally collapse with exhaustion. They will say they have looked literally all day and couldn't find this type of rental. Very, very often I see someone pay and immediately log off, they are so exhausted. That's because things cannot be found because there is no advertising capacity. There isn't any free media so that consumer criticism can enter into play and outside blogs only partially fulfill that need. You might think it odd that in a world of idiots spinning a 10 x 10 plywood block in the air with FOR SALE on it to sell some scrappy bit of land for a dime, that there is "advertising," but that's just it. He has to rely on a passer by on a lonely stretch of a "working class neighbourhood" as the Herald used to calls sims like Athabasca. 

The events sprang up and the gatchas sprang up due to the lack of advertising capacity in the normal sense. So with broken search, you literally are trudging through stalls as if really you are coming through the Taklamakan and finally resting your camel while you put out your dusty rolls of fabric and other parched people collapse nearby and gaze at your silks brought from China.

Yes, we can fly. There's that. But the merchants' events often involve sims where fly is turned off.

 

[Mollymews]

3 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

OK, but these fractions of things and this disconnection from the sale price (a gatcha rare can sell for US $100 for no real reason like a tulip) -- they are roughly comparable to RL but then there's the attention economy issue.

In RL, if I want to sell my used espresso machine on Craigslist, it's pretty efficient and I can pretty much sell it if I go below market. Or on the bulletin board of my housing complex. And the supermarket that has us as hostages because the next one is more than a mile away only has maybe 10 brands of bread competing and they can be taken in at a glance and so on.

in RL the price at which producers sell their products is related to the cost of resources needed to make the product. Sometimes a producer can sell a product for less than cost (loss leader) to grow market share. This is not sustainable over the long run rtho for producers to do, when market share growth doesn't eventuate

with selling our stuff secondhand to other people in RL then the resource cost to the producer was already built in to the price we paid for it. That we might then choose to on-sell the product for less (or more) than what we paid for it, doesn't in practice change the resource cost incurred by the producer of the item

and the person who in turn gets the RL product from us, gains the resources necessarily embedded in the item. Which they can either on-sell themselves, or in some cases can deconstruct the item and sell off the parts, or sell the item to the scrapyard when the embedded materials are worth something to the scrapyard operator

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Mollymews said:

in RL the price at which producers sell their products is related to the cost of resources needed to make the product. Sometimes a producer can sell a product for less than cost (loss leader) to grow market share. This is not sustainable over the long run rtho for producers to do, when market share growth doesn't eventuate

with selling our stuff secondhand to other people in RL then the resource cost to the producer was already built in to the price we paid for it. That we might then choose to on-sell the product for less (or more) than what we paid for it, doesn't in practice change the resource cost incurred by the producer of the item

and the person who in turn gets the RL product from us, gains the resources necessarily embedded in the item. Which they can either on-sell themselves, or in some cases can deconstruct the item and sell off the parts, or sell the item to the scrapyard when the embedded materials are worth something to the scrapyard operator

 

Except you do have to tier the view of that ware, Molly. I always remind people who gripe that I have put a free thing out for $1 and not $0 -- if not $5 -- that I am *tiering their view of that item*. They could not see it and buy it if I did not pay that tier. And it does indeed add up, US 0.00267 may seem like a Coke bottle top token but it's real money day in and day out across sims. It's reasonable to charge. And again, how will you be seen in the sea of gatchas at the giant gatcha mall? 

I think the deconstruction of the goods really doesn't have an analogy because it is very rare that you strip some elaborately made landscaping, for example, just to get that single copy of a Reid Perkins bush that isn't on transfer, so you can't re-sell it anyway. There are few things you *can* strip down reasonably. A gatcha Lootbox might have 3 things in it that you could re-sell one per $25 instead of the $75 it cost. I think the lion's share of things are not broken up. There's no recycling. There's no post-consumer paper.  In fact most gatchas are in inventory, unsold and unplaced inworld. It's like an Amazon warehouse that not only has a workers' shortage and no Internet to advertise; it also has no trucks.

 

[animats]

There's growing interest in creating artificially rare digital objects. Gacha do that, of course. But it's getting bigger. Look up "non-fungible tokens". These are tradeable digital things with traceable ownership. Uses a blockchain. Some are artworks, some are purely symbolic, like the "property deeds" to real places that Upland sells, using Tilia as a payment system. It's a way to monetize Fear Of Missing Out. Also, non-fungible tokens are really a way to avoid regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Decentraland and Sominum Space use those extensively. The effect is that all the action involves trading land, and few people do anything in those virtual worlds. As a result, they're boring to visit.

If anything, SL already has too much of that. All those big landlords sitting on huge amounts of vacant land, trying to keep the price up. Which reminds me, I need to AR some new floating, rotating, FOR SALE signs. Recently one of the smaller land barons bought some lots near me from a larger land baron, but their tenants all moved out.

Edited February 25, 2021 by animats

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

31 minutes ago, animats said:

but their tenants all moved out.

Ah, now there's a rare resource, tenants.

[Mollymews]

24 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I think the deconstruction of the goods really doesn't have an analogy because it is very rare that you strip some elaborately made landscaping, for example, just to get that single copy of a Reid Perkins bush that isn't on transfer, so you can't re-sell it anyway. There are few things you *can* strip down reasonably

 

on the recycling part

in SL yes that is mostly true overall for the most number of people

a SL exception to non-recycling is when we get a product that is modify. Sometimes I will deconstruct an object that I no longer want to mount as a whole. Taking from it the parts I do want like doors, windows, etc and repurpose them into another build I have made for myself

with some objects that I buy then later on I delete them. Trees for example. At the time I bought the tree it was pretty ok LI/cost wise compared to other trees availabe. Then somebody else comes along and makes better looking and less LI trees. In which case I get them and delete the older ones as I am never going to mount them again. Same with clothes and other wearables. I chuck them in the trash bin. In a simulation like SL then the trashed products virtually disappear. In the real world it ends up in a landfill

i think that this chucking away behaviour in RL is what Philip Rosedale was alluding too. Recognising that this chucking away of resources is not good in a limited resources environment

my interest in all of this is, if we wanted to simulate a limited resources environment with people in it,  then how might it done

[Evah Baxton]

We've got big evolved brains and an unevolved need for reproduction. It seems that nature wants us to figure out better power solutions and continue to grow.

What if one day Earth is just a massive city? We've harnessed the power of the sun since we chose not to regress into obscurity and along the road solved all the terrible things.

We would then focus on bigger things like dealing with the dimming finite universe instead.

[Prokofy Neva]

@Profaitchikenz Haiku  You would think. But you may remember Kenny Linden. We landlords used to rage and wail when he would laconically come and remove our barriers hiding ugly signs on 4 sides that were put there to sale at $10,000 to get us to "buy back the view". And perhaps 2 or 3 neighbours would gather together and block the ad farm on all sides. Lindens had no policy on spam or ad farms there and it was a long 4-year battle to get them to do this, so Kenny came and removed the fourth wall, because it was against the TOS to block somebody on all sides. And we'd gnash our teeth and threaten to dump our land and leave SL and again, laconically, he would say "There's always another guy to buy the island."

The gal who was VP of customer service or whatever it was called. Resident Experience? Community Life? Product? We're all those things. She was rather pointed. "Hmm, just what are those owners of those $10,000 16m squares doing on that land, anyway, their knitting?" She got it. But she could not overthrow Jack Linden on this; because he couldn't overthrow Phillip. Philip thought there should be absolute freedom and if my right to extend my arm involved punching your face, too bad. 

There's always another guy to buy the island.

Like Lee Linden's forthright and frank admission to me that sims worked their best without avatars and therefore, the less of them the better, Kenny knew that indeed for every land baron who flamed out of SL, another 10 would come in the door especially after they saw Anshe on the cover of Business Week. He had no shortage of island buyers, so to speak. Customers were not precious. There were too many to accommodate. 

I've never adopted that attitude with my customers and tried to have rules and be decent but there is, frankly, a breaking point for all of us. Because entitlement demands are insane and endless and have no upper limit given today's upbringing and lack of self-sacrifice. A young Lothario will come to me lamenting the crowded nature of the domes and the scenes for $15 a week with no  privacy or dedicated radio. He shows me one of his past rental cards where the landlady has rented out...a bench. A bench with "avatars can see me" turned off, animations, and a seaview. I mean, what else do you need? It's not like you really need a table and chairs, you know? So for a little more, gosh, why can't they make something decent, he says. He means *versimilitude* as I called it. Not something shamelessly catering to the "affordances" of SL but something nice.

So he comes to my $25 or $35 rentals but now has an appetite. Can I turn the box around? Can I replace it? Can I furnish it? No? Oh, you have furnished ones but for $100? OK, I could go the $100. Then he wants me to build a Zen garden and partition the loft.

A Zen garden. I'm supposed to build a Zen garden for someone paying me US 75 cents or US $1.50 a *month*? No, I say. The price point has vanished not only for tier but my time in any sense at all and only rudeness can cap it. Only saying, "These are on self-service, so if any time you are unhappy with your service of yourself, there's the refund button." Zen gardens???

Undeterred by any kind of brusque response, this fellow finds a $100 skybox in a scrappy area, my cheapest, where some other overprimmer prim-a-donna has left in a huff when her things were returned for overprimmage and being on the wrong lot. He grabs it and lives happily for perhaps 6 days -- then he refunds and who knows where he goes. Off to the bench again, perhaps. No amount of time, care, concern, build, decoration will ever keep such a tenant so why try? You can't. I see landlords at $3500 a week not doing what I will do for $350 or even $35 -- I mean, where is the price point? I'm not interested in role-playing landlord for you in a game. I'm willing to lay out *versimilitude* with the Lindens' broad sketch strokes in the back, a road, a tree, a bridge. But Zen Gardens???? Build your own darn Zen Garden my dude.

As for the outrageous value of Decentraland, where a Wall Street Replica went for some insane price, was it US $13,000, there's something contrived here. I don't know whether the developer has his hobbyist friends come in, I don't know whether he thinks that his replica of Wall Street will become the sole one in real life -- as if anyone couldn't make their own version or copy his even. Who knows. It's like EVE Online. Enormous sums change hands. Without any real simulated market as we have or versimilitude. You know, chunks in space or some kitted out ship, not even land.

@Mollymews I guess I am not as interested in you in creating a simulation when...we already have a simulation, and most people don't want to observe a simulated economy as a game for themselves, but want to live in that economy, buy stuff etc.

Philip used to encourage people to delete their trash and delete things they didn't wear and such and I used to ask him, but wait, if everybody does spring cleaning this week at your behest, isn't that going to have a terrible effect on the servers. He thought not. But I'm not sure he thought it through. Fact is, SL is never in danger of tens of thousands of people suddenly going all Marie Kondo on the Lindens' servers, you know?

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Evah Baxton said:

We've got big evolved brains and an unevolved need for reproduction. It seems that nature wants us to figure out better power solutions and continue to grow.

What if one day Earth is just a massive city? We've harnessed the power of the sun since we chose not to regress into obscurity and along the road solved all the terrible things.

We would then focus on bigger things like dealing with the dimming finite universe instead.

You can't dismiss the billions of years of evolution.

Not so fast.

How can I always tell the birth gender of any avatar coming to look over a rental?

The men walk around the perimeter of the lot establishing their territory.

The women go inside and sit down and nest.

Be as woke as you like, be as creative and diverse as you like, but those two behaviours can't be erased. They surface though they are not needed. There's not going to be any reproduction except of prim babies. The territory is a pixel.

 

[Bree Giffen]

4 hours ago, Mollymews said:

a way to address this is NRC quantitative easing by the simulation provider.  The mechanics is the same as Supply Linden who prints L$ to keep the quantity of L$ in circulation relative to resident transactional activity

the NRC sink would be resident inventory. People generally prefer to hold on to their stuff, for all the various reasons personal to them

Quantitative easing goes against the entire idea of limited resources.

FYI, not really for or against the idea. Just tossing out my thoughts. 

[Mollymews]

53 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

Quantitative easing goes against the entire idea of limited resources.

yes it can be seen that way

depends on what the total amount of resources is set at relative to the population behaviour.  Whichever number is chosen then at some point the total amount available will be exhausted and no further NRC can be eased into the simulation

combusting/recycling NRC delays the end point whichever the number is. Combusting NRC from no longer wanted stuff could in itself bring about an equilibrium in a static population

an issue in the real world is that the human population doesn't remain static, it grows. And there is no reason why this would not also be the case in a real world virtual simulation.  And to be realistic, we don't need to simulate this to know what will happen

in the population growth case then the only way other than war resulting in death, is exporting people to other planets, which can be simulated

just on simulating death virtually. Accounts are dead when they are canceled. In which case any surplus NRC above the minimum can be released back into the simulation pool. In this case it would be like the real world, we can't take our stuff with us when we die

edit add: If we were to delete our account in this scenario then I think most people would combust their whole inventory. Sell the NRC on the exchange and cash out before cancelling

Edited February 26, 2021 by Mollymews

[Gabriele Graves]

The idea of NRC is an interesting one and certainly a virtual world built on that basis might be an interesting experiment.  However I cannot agree with the premise that resource limits would make a virtual world seem more "real" or that it is what makes the real world seem "real".  The seemingly "realness" of our real world is a variable thing anyway.  For some it seems more real than for others and yet we all share the same resource limits of the entire world.  So it is an entirely relative thing even in our real world.

In my opinion, what makes the real world seem "real" is that it cannot be experienced except through the senses we have and that it is all encompassing.  Today virtual worlds seem less "real" because there is at best only sight/sound and the real world always intrudes to some degree .  If a virtual world could be made to be sensed by all of our senses and so that it is all encompassing (at least until you decide to exit anyway) in a similar fashion to the Matrix for example, then that would go a long way to seeming more "real" than they do today.

In the movie Ready Player One the idea that everything in the OASIS is no-copy is an ever present theme.  They have single use items like magic spells and effects, power-ups, rare one-off artefacts, guns that run out of ammo, armour that degrades with every impact and motorcycles that need repairing by someone with appropriate skills even though it was brought out of an inventory.  In fact I cannot recall a single item in the whole movie that wasn't no-copy.

Did it make the OASIS in Ready Player One seem more "real"?  Not really.  It made it seem more like a game world and less like a sandbox world to me.

I think the bodysuit with the advanced haptics would have done more to make the OASIS seem more "real" to any participant.

 

[animats]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There's always another guy to buy the island.

Not really. There's a huge amount of abandoned land in SL, and even more land owned by landlords but not rented out. Areas near roads and water can be rented, but interior land not connected to anything has near zero value. Look at what's not selling on the auctions.

[Gabriele Graves]

There is a difference between modelling reality and making something seem real.  The latter can be achieved without much modelling of reality than we think and is more to do with fooling our brain and senses to some degree in the suspension of disbelief.  The former may be interesting from a scientific point of view and for some types of people but I would wager as the accuracy of the modelled reality increases that it's ability to be a compelling experience for many people diminishes.  Perhaps it is like how some people love highly accurate simulation games where the degree of skill required is almost at the level of a highly-skilled professional doing the job in the real world but some people really dislike them and don't find the required level of skill or involvement to be at all compelling.

Edited February 26, 2021 by Gabriele Graves

[Madelaine McMasters]

I have no interest in manufactured scarcity. I have finite time and mental capacity. The difficulty of doing anything in SL already burns more of those two resources than I'd like. Adding further limitations seems counterproductive.

Rosedale might simply be experiencing the desire to shed things after a life of accumulation. That's not an argument for limiting resources, that's an argument for self control.

[Mollymews]

2 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

 I would wager as the accuracy of the modelled reality increases that it's ability to be a compelling experience for many people diminishes.  Perhaps it is like how some people love highly accurate simulation games where the degree of skill required is almost at the level of a highly-skilled professional doing the job in the real world but some people really dislike them and don't find the required level of skill or involvement to be at all compelling.

looking at a NRC real world simulation from the 1st-world consumer pov. In the main these consumers buy product when they want.  They may make, or attempt to make, some things themselves which are outside of their core skillset/tradecraft, typically as a hobby. Generally tho people stick to their skillset to earn money. Using the money earned from this, to buy the things they don't have the skills and/or time for

so in such a simulation where the large majority are these kinds of consumers then NRC has no impact on them in terms of how they 'live' in the world. Some/many end up with an inventory full of NRC. Every time they buy something then their personal NRC number goes up. NRC-rich. However it will have little meaning to them unless there was some reward in reducing this number. So the idea of combusting and selling the NRC released. There would not be any compulsion to do this, people can do it or not as they choose  

 

[sirhc DeSantis]

Some sort of imposed 'resource scarcity' (outside of those already present including time and skill set as McMasters mentions) would result in a - resource management game. Already a trillion of those out there and way back even wrote some myself.

Plus even this leftwise leaner smells the peril of a centrally planned economy =^^=

[Mollymews]

a thing

the resistance to resource costs mostly comes from producers. Not every producer for sure, but minimising the cost of production is a thing that most real world producers slave toward

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

5 hours ago, animats said:

There's a huge amount of abandoned land in SL,

I have been slightly worried by this but for ages, it's not actually a new thing. Prokofy's comment that a Linden said regions work best without avatars in them has got me thinking again. Does it cost more in both hardware and operating costs for populated regions? If so, then empty ones do actually make some commercial sense.

[Syo Emerald]

Ah yes, great. We need the poor people to make the virtual world feel more real. Increase the poorness!

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Certainly. Hand over your Lindens.

[Luna Bliss]

7 hours ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

Plus even this leftwise leaner smells the peril of a centrally planned economy =^^=

Mother Earth is a Socialist don't you know...   

[Mollymews]

18 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

In the movie Ready Player One the idea that everything in the OASIS is no-copy is an ever present theme.  They have single use items like magic spells and effects, power-ups, rare one-off artefacts, guns that run out of ammo, armour that degrades with every impact and motorcycles that need repairing by someone with appropriate skills even though it was brought out of an inventory.  In fact I cannot recall a single item in the whole movie that wasn't no-copy.

Did it make the OASIS in Ready Player One seem more "real"?  Not really.  It made it seem more like a game world and less like a sandbox world to me.

agree. My take after watching Ready Player One is that it is a movie about a goal-oriented game from the genre There-Can-Be-Only-One

not much  different from lots of other games in how resources (objects) are obtained and deployed

[Mollymews]

16 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Rosedale might simply be experiencing the desire to shed things after a life of accumulation. That's not an argument for limiting resources, that's an argument for self control.

14 hours ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

Some sort of imposed 'resource scarcity' (outside of those already present including time and skill set as McMasters mentions) would result in a - resource management game.

 

i quote these two thoughts together as I think there is a relationship between the two

there are elements of resource management now in worlds like SL

Parcel LI and a cap on avatar attachments being examples of this. These limits/caps are dictated by hardware. How many processes can execute reasonably well on the hardware and software implementation in the spacetime available. No matter that this is the reason, we do manage our own use of resources within these limits

the idea of NRC does raise a question tho (which has been expressed in some posts on here). Why would we impose an artificial cost on resources in a virtual world?

i think this a little bit of a misnomer. Resource costs are not artificial. The storage cost (and taking it a bit further, the delivery cost to the viewer) of an individual item is some fraction div fraction of a cent. Those fractions add up to a considerable total

is not so much that is artificial. Is more that the cost price is arbitrary. In the SL case, the cost price is arbitrarily set to zero for manufactured products. Manufactured meaning copies

which raises another question. Why zero?

in the SL case we can go back to the beginning. In the beginning Linden chose to rely on residents to populate the world with content. Zero manufacturing costs greatly assisted in achieving the flourishing of resident content creation
 
Cory Ondrejka commented recently that in hindsight they (Linden) got this a little bit wrong. That they as a company should have created more content themselves from the outset and not been as over-reliant on resident producer/creatives as they were. The underlying basis of this kind of thought is: Thru content is the world shaped

which in implementation can be thought about as contrary to Philip Rosedale's philosophical view of virtuality-based existence

initially the idea of SL was that it be a virtual world based on resource cost. Prim taxes, upload fees, etc. Which accorded with Philip Rosedale's view - a multi-user collaborative virtuality in which problems (both real and theoritical) could be parameterised and simulated, where the cost of the simulations could also be measured. Mr Rosedale has always been big into these kinds of things. Recently he has been posting on his website some simulations that show answers to the question: Why do the rich get richer, even when everyone starts from the same base? 

continuing on, a real world problem soon surfaced in SL. Prim banking/hoarding. Is one of those ah! jeez moments

given the system design at the time, Linden made a decision to go with land parcelling as a way to allocate inworld prims

i am not able to get inside Philip Rosedale's head, but I think that if he has a hindsight regret then it is this. Parcelling (everyone an island within their parcel boundaries, as it turns out in every land parcelled world including the real world) destroyed in its infancy, his vision of a collaborative virtuality on a global scale

of course he may not have this regret. I am just going off what I think the logical endpoint of this thought process would be. So take all what I have said here about these two people with this in mind

 

[Prokofy Neva]

19 hours ago, animats said:

Not really. There's a huge amount of abandoned land in SL, and even more land owned by landlords but not rented out. Areas near roads and water can be rented, but interior land not connected to anything has near zero value. Look at what's not selling on the auctions.

Yes, really. There are something like 28,000 or 30,000 simulators in total making up the world, see Tyche's latest survey. Of these ONLY 5,000 are the Mainland which is the ONLY type of sim where land can be abandoned. You can't abandon parts of islands, you can only abandon the entire island, so to speak. And Tyche and our own observations even if anecdotal show that yes, islands are let go every week, and the overall number has slowly declined, it isn't a drastic decline like parts of the mainland because people buy new ones at a good rate.

Interior land in fact is bought and valued, just not by you. I bought a pink mountain Nautilus sim that filled with tenants on the ground and sky, and I saw several artists have bought these dirt-cheap sims to build installations of art projects like Soho lofts. There are some stores and people who want to look out on Blake Sea but not pay the insane prices of it. So it has value, lower than that ridiculous Blake waterfront but appreciated. 

When Kenny Linden says "there's always another guy to buy the island," what he means and what isn't being grasped here is that the Lindens don't have to care about alienating customers because more are always coming. Customers take any amount of abuse and come back for more, even after a hiatus of huffing and puffing. And they are absolutely right about that then, and they are right about that now, just less blunt in expressing it. People who get fed up with SL and its travails and bail out don't matter in the larger sense, whatever the individual little or big tragedies like the departure of a Starax. Oculus Rift doesn't care if it rig doesn't sell and Best Buy turfs them out because they make the customers vomit. They will get another round of VC cash, they'll make another iteration of the thing, and new rubes will come in the door and buy it. This is not science. It's the circus.

If abandoned land bothered the Lindens, there wouldn't be any. But it doesn't because they have economies of scale, even if 2500 of them are abandoned resident land on the mainland, they have a system in place to "pay down that debt" which is to let residents request it as individual parcels or try to push it on the auction, so if a lot doesn't sell and entire sims are being maintained with nothing on them, so what? Sims perform at their best without avatars as we already know from Lee Linden. They're all about optimum performance.

When the Lindens can get user to user auctions working without pernicious land oligarchs driving up prices stealthily, it may move more, but ultimately, I think they will have to go back to making very pretty, well-landscaped, fast new entire sims, as they used to, and set the opening bid high as if they were the land barons who won the piece already, and literally cut out and rejoin parts of the mainland as Desmond Shang once urged them to do, which of course is unfair to the one guy living in a little cabin on an entirely empty sim, but he'll be compensated. The railroad is going through.

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Prokofy Neva