This morning while reading through the RSS feeds I learned that Linden Labs who make the 3D virtual world Second Life will be discontinuing dwell payments to parcel owners in an effort to stabilize the value of the eroding Linden dollar.

According to this official Second Life forum post (registration required) by Robin Linden this change was necessary because:

This incentive was originally created to support content creation in Second Life. The reality is that it has never done a particularly good job of recognizing the broad variety of content, and recently the advent of camping chairs has contributed negatively to the culture of Second Life.

Effective May 15, traffic bonuses will be reduced by 50%.
Effective June 13, traffic bonuses will be eliminated.

Interesting that camping chairs are specifically fingered as a negative factor.

Camping chairs pictured above are objects (sometimes chairs, dance pads, rugs, hot tubs, etc) where a SL resident can sit/stand/wear/dance and earn L$ just for hanging around on the parcel. Literally one needs to do nothing but occupy these chairs to earn Linden dollars. Some chairs have timers that kick out avatars or codes to test if they aren’t AFK at intervals. Others have chair limits they will pay and/or the owners can kick out manually. The more avatars on the parcel, the more dwell bonus earned, so this change to remove dwell bonus by Linden Labs conceivably could remove the incentive to have as many of these camping chairs around the virtual world.

There is a group of vocal and passionate SL residents who despise camping chairs because they believe it leads to people just parking their avs in chairs and doing other things out of world. They believe that all or most monies are then converted back into $USD and not pumped into the Second Life economy. These concerns aren’t entirely invalid, but the chairs also create a way for untrained and unskilled residents to generate L$ that they could spend for a wide variety of goods and services in world. I hesistate to use the word “lazy” as the anti-chair camper crowd would use because as long as the owners of these chairs are willing to pay residents to sit in them, how can this be blamed on the residents using them? Also, these chairs could be an intentional loss leader to get residents into a shop to possibly buy goods/services. Every resident who sits in camping chairs cashes out all camping money earned? I don’t think so.

So will this actually remove all camping chairs? Fellow VTOR group blogger and VGI MUD casino operator and camping chair owner, Lestat, describes how he believes this will impact his business in SL:

Though it was nice to see the nice traffic incentives each day I don’t think this will impact business at my casino in VGI MUD. I’ve had many blundering errors on the side of customer service as well as losses. Thanks to some good friends and customers (who are very patient) I believe I am ironing out many of the issues I’ve been having with both pleasing patrons, as well as creating a positive cashflow.

I can see casino owners especially not wanting to axe the chairs. Some ways they might get the residents to play the machines more would be to give a longer chair stay and higher pay rate based on gameplay. Some chairs already do this so it’s not just a camping chair by itself but a chair that encourages more gameplay.

As a relatively new business owner in Second Life myself, I own a scripting business, I believe this change directly will have a limited impact on me. I haven’t been making much in dwell on my parcels and what was made was split evenly with the rest of our VTOR group. We have been giving away L$ during our radio show each Friday streamed through SL and currently don’t have any plans of changing this promotional allocation. It’s money budgeted. Advertising.

Also, I’m not with the crowd that dislikes camping chairs.

I can see how certain businesses might use these to draw customers in for other moneymaking ventures like shopping, gambling and other adult activities. I was even thinking about creating one for an employee to sit in while watching my store. Camping chairs could provide a creative way to pay employees in Second Life. I was thinking how a series of scripts could monitor the employee and interaction with customers as they came into the store and when no customers were present the camping chair could provide additional income. Or even maybe a camping bracelet or watch that would only work inside the store.

Therefore, I don’t think the loss of dwell will be a camping chair killer, although it will get a few of them out of some places in Second Life. I can also see where not pumping in 9% of new money through these dwell payments to parcel owner might help keep the value of the L$ from eroding.

I’m glad to see Linden Labs didn’t remove the weekly stipends yet. Free accounts get L$50 per week and premium accounts receive L$500 per week. However, Phillip Linden reports that 72% of the new money being pumped into Second Life comes frmo those stipends and in a recent podcast interview at SecondCast indicated those are on the table to possibly be reduced or axed too if the value of the Linden dollar doesn’t stabilize.

Finally, and this is pure personal excitement, I was glad to read about this news on our VTOR group blog first this morning. Kudos to Lestat for writing about this story as soon as he discovered it in the forums and spreading the word on the VTOR blog. For Hmm readers with any interest in virtual online worlds (MMOs and MMORPGs) and specifically Second Life I would strongly encourage checking out and subscribing.

VTOR which stands for Virtual TO Reality now has over 125 posts and continues to grow daily. I’m contributing a minimum of three new posts a week there and all ad monies we earn are split among the participating group bloggers. Paid in Linden dollars, of course.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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