Entropia - A better Second Life ?

[Quint]

The same guarantue you have that MA will pay your withdraw, in case EU collapses and everyone withdraws.

Afaik, MA will pay out the tt value of our items in case they would decide to stop with EU. But since nothing in SL has a tt value or something similar, I'm not sure what Linden would pay to the users in such a case. They might pay out something, but no court in the world could force them to do so.

LL is more like a webhost, they get their money by selling lands, by upload & land tier charges, premium subscrion fees and renting whole sims.

Exactly, LL hosts a system of pixels (a very good system that is I must admit), but without any hard guarantee that you will get anything for your pixels (whatever they are now "worth" in SL) in case they would decide to stop with SL.

 

[Ozi]

As someone who knows very little about that other life, what this thread does show is that both EU and xxlife have something to offer and the public will decide what attracts and interests them.

I would personally love to see MA bring alot more customisation into EU. We need it to see the economy really develop. When I first discovered EU I was expecting there to be a lot more customisation than there is. It has gotten better with uploadable ad screens etc.

 

[Finch]

Afaik, MA will pay out the tt value of our items in case they would decide to stop with EU. But since nothing in SL has a tt value or something similar, I'm not sure what Linden would pay to the users in such a case. They might pay out something, but no court in the world could force them to do so.

This is a big difference between the 2 systems that throws people a lot. In the vast majority of circumstances, in SL you don't buy items with the intent to sell them on later. In fact, most items are set with permissions such that it would be impossible to do that anyway. This is the crux of my point I posted earlier about most of the value in EU being contained in items and their markup. Cashing out here would be a very different thing than there, as it would consist of selling items and skills before getting ped out of the system, whereas in SL pretty much the only thing you would cash out is the money in your account (which really is the only thing of "value" there other than land).

Objects that you own in SL don't have a value per se as they do here for the simple reason that objects are created in an unlimited supply for pretty close to free (some very tiny upload fees for things such as custom textures, animations and sounds) other than the real life skill of the creator. There are very, VERY few things there that appreciate in value. One example might be transfer enabled object of a creator who no longer distributes his goods but somewhere along the lines became famous (for example, works by Starax). Even then we're talking only tens of dollars, not hundreds or thousands, much less tens of thousands. So in essence, there would be no selling of inventory items to anyone as that stuff really holds very little, if any, value to anyone other than the owner. This is in blatant contrast to here, where it is common to have a great deal of value tied up within items (and their markup) that would certainly need to be sold to others in order to recover funds. Since we're talking about selling out, I certainly would hate to be holding a mod fap if everyone tried to sell out at once .

I guess that reveals in a way, a big difference in the platforms, in that to make money here, you really need to rely on a word I saw several times in this thread.. inflation, or increasing markup of items along with people willing to pay the prices. There you just need decent skills in content creation (with a dash of marketing) and you can make sales all day long . The two really couldn't be more different and thus a bit of a conundrum to compare.

 

[Tseng]

Yea, in SL you're either content creator/land baron/entrepreneur or consumer. As consumer you can have your fun/enjoyment for quite little money (i.e. have some very cool piece of cloth for 1500L$ or less (1500L$=5.66 USD)) while you have to pay a fortune in EU (as much as 1500 USD in case of some of the rare/good looking clothes).

So people are more likely to spend 5.66$ for a cool looking coat in SL than they'd like to pay 1500$ in EU to "define" their avatar. You can get most clothes for 150L$ (~0.55$), so people there have much more different clothes which they wear in different zones or for different events.

As said above, there are two groups the creators and the consumers. The creatores mainly "play" (if you can call it playing, as it's not really a game but more like a simulation or virtual world (which entropia never was)) it for money. So if they sell their products, they have the money. They don't need to have virtual items with a fixed/guaratueed prices as in EU and the L$ on your account are as safe as your PEDs on your PED card.

The other group, the consumers, usually don't expect to get the money out. They buy L$ in order to spend them for their personal enjoyment (making your char look better, get some funny gadgets or rent a land and make your virtual home). You could still sell it to another person (if the transfer permissions are enabled) if you're quiting, but as i said, majority doesn't bother.

Besides that, with the right managment, it's possible to controll the way your products are sold. i.e. you can have no monify, no transfer, copy permissions and charge a high price for it. With that, a person could buy one item (i.e. a chair) and copy it as much as he wants (like 4 times to have enough chairs) but that person couldn't resell (and make profit) with this.
Or you could make no modify, no copy, transfer permissions with mid price, allowing your customer to have one of this object and have the chance to sell it, if he doesn't need it anymore.
Or you could also make it no modify no copy no transfer and make it pretty cheap. Then everyone who'd like to buy it, would need to buy it from yourself and not from someone other who sold his. Bad thing there for the buyer is, that once he bought it the money for it is gone and cant be get back by selling to some else.
Modify, copy transfer permissions are of course stupid, as the buyer could reproduce the item as often as he wants it and to sell it to another persons and even change it
Or you could make modify, no copy, transferable. The buyer could buy that item, modify it (i.e. changing textures but keep the model) and resell that one item again.
Or you could make modify, copy, no transfer to allow people to customize the items as much as they want and make as many copies as they want but unable to transfer it (makes often sense on clothes, hairs, some furniture etc.)

But SL has no game play, you usually do things similar to things in real life. Hang up with friends, go to disco, do roleplay or some PvP action (paintball like), go shopping, just exploring the world or create something yourself.

EU is more like a game, which is the big plus point for EU. What's really bad is the system behind it, which makes it not that enjoyable (low returns, very high money sink, high inflation and prices). With that "fixed" EU could be a great game... could... But for that to happen, MindArk would need to get away from the idea of geting max profit with minimum effort/customer base.

They have to learn, that you can make as much profit with 800.000 active players as you can with milking out this 10.000 active EU has (well even more, as technically they are counting all deposits as profit, which isn't true actually). Look at the SL stats, 800k people who logged in in the last 30 days, thats more than EU has accounts.

In May, there were 194,536,894 L$ which went out of the economy (upload fees, land sales, ads, etc) which is ~734.000 USD in only 1 month. And this doesn't even include the premium accounts (10$/month iirc), land tier fees (depending on how big the land is you own. With premium account, you can have 512m² land without additional tiers). Not really up2date, but for every "private" owned sim, LL gets ~300$/month on land tier fees (one sim is 256x256m big)