Virtual Worlds – Page 306

November 14, 2010January 12, 2014

Consumers Count

A copule of issues continue to raise their heads, viewer 2 and camping being the ones on my mind right now, well getting to the pub for a lunchtime pint and watching a bit of footie are at the forefront of my mind but that will happen shortly.

There’s a thread on the blogrums asking if the camping ban should be lifted and there’s a deliberately provocative open letter to viewer 2 haters, from Aeonix Aeon in the form of a blog post over at The Andromeda Group blog.

Let’s start with the camping ban, we’ll never know if the camping ban has had an impact on the economy, people don’t analyse the statistics enough to prove whether there has been an impact one way or another. Camping was however one way for people to earn Linden dollars and I would imagine most of those Linden dollars were used to either buy items or pay rent, I definitely know people who used camping money for rent. The issues of camping were of course related to traffic wars and morphed into bot wars where people would have bots on their land 24/7 to artificially inflate their traffic score and get a leg up in the search stakes. Continue reading “Consumers Count”

November 13, 2010January 12, 2014

The Digital Revolution

A post by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes, refers to an interesting, but off base in my opinion, article by Edward Castronova over at Terra Nova. Basically Edward Castronova ponders whether people spending more time online has the potential to be an important factor in a real world recession. The answer of course, is yes it does, but not for the reasons Edward Castronova seems to cite.

I’m not even going to attempt to get into a discussion about Keynsian economics, I’m not an economist. However, the Edward Castronova article does mention Keynsian economics, so if that’s your bag, I recommend you read the full article, I’m going to look at this from a different angle, where I feel Mr Castronova is somewhat missing the point is when he says things like:

“People who spend time online don’t have to worry about what they are wearing. Suppose that some percent of a given day can be spent in pajama’s, the rest must be spent in decent clothes. For decent clothes, you need a whole and varied wardrobe. For PJ’s, you need a few comfy ones. Now increase the amount of time that can be spent in PJ’s. The demand for decent clothes falls, if ever so slightly. The internet allows us to do all kinds of stuff in our PJ’s – so it must have an ever so slightly dampening effect on the market for fashion.” Continue reading “The Digital Revolution”

November 12, 2010January 12, 2014

Worlds Can Collide Sometimes

Battle.Net the Blizzard partner site that caused a kerfuffle over the way they wanted to engage with Facebook and display real names on the forums has evolved into quite a useful tool. I can now talk to friends who are playing on different realms or even in different games in the Blizzard family and now that they’ve removed the threat of Facebook, real names on the forum and displaying your friends of friends when they shouldn’t be being displayed, it’s now something worthwhile.

However, at some point this sort of tool will be more beneficial if it extends across other worlds, such as Second Life, and allows you to talk to non Blizzard game users. There’s also something else they’ve introduced that’s handy, an authenticator. Basically, with this little USB device, you can only login to your account or the game, whilst it’s plugged in, and whereas such a device is far from perfect, it’s an improvement in security. Continue reading “Worlds Can Collide Sometimes”

November 11, 2010January 12, 2014

Inworld Classifieds To Have 256 Character Limit?

I found an odd issue whilst using the beta version of Viewer 2 recently, one of my classifieds had been torn apart and there wasn’t much text left. I felt that this may have been an accident carried out by me, possibly whilst drunk, so I decided I better rectify it and found out I couldn’t. I was unable to add any more text to the classified description, I thought little of this, it was one advert and I’m using a beta viewer, no biggie.

However today I have discovered the cause of the problem, it’s a bug that limits classifieds to 64 measly characters, well there’s a Jira about it, so it must be good hey, but …and it’s a big but, the Jira itself, STORM-577 has some rather worrying revelations in it and some odd guys called “productEngine” posting there. Continue reading “Inworld Classifieds To Have 256 Character Limit?”

November 5, 2010January 12, 2014

The Free To Play Model Gathers Pace

Linden Lab have long been criticised since they opened Second Life up to potentially more customers in 2006 and allowed people free unsubscribed access, some of the criticism was justified as it did open the doors to some unsavoury types who only wanted to cause trouble, but it is also a model that gives people greater choice than a straight subscription model does.

Four years on and Lord of the Rings Online and Pirates of the Burning Sea have both moved away from the subscription model, to allow people free access to a point, while addons and premium options can be purchased. Champions Online will move to a similar model in Q1 2011, which must all in some ways please those at Linden Lab who took the decision to move to this model, the cold harsh reality being that payment and registration are barriers to entering a new world and limiting how much freedom one can potentially have, puts people off at the door. Continue reading “The Free To Play Model Gathers Pace”