Chic at Ebbe's Place

Metro Chic at Canada Chic's sim in front of a LEA20 photo taken from a video - oh my!

A funny thing happened to me today when I logged into my Metropolis account. There was a note waiting for me from someone who apparently "knew me" but who I didn't recall. They wanted to say that they noted I had made an account in Metropolis (????) and wanted to let me know this was a non-commercial grid. Yep, there is a *wink* coming as expected.

Now I assumed their heart was in the right place, letting me know and all that. I was a little put off with the idea that I wouldn't have done my homework (which of COURSE I had done, knowing the "no money, never" or similar slogan that I found on the Metro website).  I wrote a note back  saying I had come over to help a friend, ended up in cloud status for almost two months and just now am "real" thanks to a rez kit I picked up in Canada.

That got me thinking about money.

Much of Open Sim is money free. Some worlds have money, but aside from some rental property I haven't found anything to actually BUY in said worlds -- and I really was looking. Canada now has money but it is opt in money and I have chosen not to join the system. So I will likely be rethinking my "commercial" sim (really, now how much did I think I was going to make? VERY little is the correct answer). Citizens were pleading for things to purchase; whether or not they actually want that? Well time will sort it out.

So in some worlds we have rates of exchange and in others we have a "free" economy. Now most of the free stuff is marginal at best but given freely at one time in history with good intentions so that counts.

MONEY was a big deal when I was newly out of the SL pod. You needed it to buy stuff as group gifts and freebies of worth were definitely NOT the norm then. Instead you bought lindens or you camped for them (money trees were also fun and indeed I started a business with money tree proceeds). One of my favorite camping spots was in the center of a mall. It had flowers and waterfalls and tons of campers (maybe 20 at a time). You made $18 an hour and could earn $100 a day. My friends and I (yes, real life friends folks) took turns making money.

That leads us to the "how do you measure your worth" question, which is an interesting one. In real life and SL and a few other worlds, success in some terms is measured in monetary rewards. Sure, there are fame and glory points to be added in or perhaps even replacing the $$$, but just like in many video games, there is that  -- "can I make enough to support myself and live as I would like" idea even before you move into the making a real life living area.

I looked up a few statistics that fit into this theme.  From Daniel Voyager's metrics:


According to this there are many more residents on per day (constantly) than there are sims.

This is the login screen from Metropolis, currently the busiest (?) Open Sim grid since OS Grid is down.


Look at the regions compared with the users (this was taken at 5 pm SLT). I can't explain the huge difference; no doubt there are plenty of reasons including home and school servers etc. Still, the statistic show a very different view of virtual life.

Folks complain that SL is empty - :D, well.

The one SL statistic that is puzzling to me is that 10,000 plus new sign ups a day. Really?  Where are they coming from? They can't all be alts or agents or whatever. If even the smallest percentage of those folks stuck around the concurrency would be going up instead of down.

Anyone with insights -- chime on in here. I am puzzled.