Kategorie: Personal

I’m an ESAK

I’ve taken the good, old Bartle-test to see what kind of player in MMORPGs I am. Ok, some of the questions don’t apply to SL, of course – like killing dragons, gaining experience points – but when you carefully answer the questions, you got a real good picture about what kind of player you are.

So I am an ESAK. This means:

Based on your answers, you are ESAK.
Breakdown: Achiever 33.33%, Explorer 86.67%, Killer 13.33%, Socializer 66.67% ESAK players often see the game world as a great stage, full of things to see and people to meet. They love teaming up with people to get to the hard-to-see places, and they relish unique experiences.

Some further explanations show the four categories. The categories mean:

  • People with high Achiever scores tend to prefer collecting points, levels, treasure and accomplishments that set them apart from other players–or simply present challenges.
  • People with high Explorer scores tend to enjoy finding all of the unique areas of the world, often enjoying the immersion of the experience. Finding a place with unique monsters and seeing what those monsters do is usually more fun for an Explorer than defeating the monsters themselves.
  • People with high Killer scores prefer the player-versus-player aspect of any game more than anything offered by the environment. They often relish the adrenaline and challenge of pitting themselves against real players.
  • People with high Socializer scores enjoy interacting with other people, forming organizations, and finding cooperative solutions to the challenges within the virtual world.

Although the test is now somewhat old, the results are still a very good match. If you want to try it on your own go to this page and just answer the 30 questions. That’s all, done in under 5 minutes and it’s fun.

Just a little reminder

When you’re the owner of a good going business and are in the process of setting up your brand new arrived sim, better be sure that your access list is setup the way you think it should be. Why? Well, because when you’re talking about the sim’s name in public at your well frequented business, you never know who might overhear it and goes there to take a look around. Oh, and taking it in your pics is also not so good, then.

New pest coming around: banner ads

A new pest is forming up in Second Life: newbies going around with banner ads (and similar objects), getting paid for it the usual rates (2-4 L$ / 10 minutes). The benefit for them? Well, they can move in contrary to camping chairs or dancing pods, so I expect to see a drastical increase in such kind of advertisement.

The benefit for the people „employing“ them? Very cheap advertisements running around nearly everywhere.

The drawbacks? Well, for me:

  • Bad karma and bad image. I would never do business with such a store/shop/company who litters the landscape of SL with such kind of garbage.
  • It ruins many places, because the banners are something that catches your eye.
  • The people doing it do this normally without asking, just come in with it and walk around, so they are in many places in for an ejection or ban. Go figure.

And here is a nice screenshot of such a guy dancing around in the garden of Intimate Moment’s with such a banner ad:

Banner ad

I asked him two times to put this thing off, and he complied. Lucky him, otherwise I would have ejected him.

In the same league play for me guys going to an event with a vendor’s tray hooked up. I’ve seen it already twice on events of us, some weird looking guy came in with a drawn weapon and a vendor’s tray full of cigars and other stuff.  I just hate such behaviour and when I see such a guy I’m on a very short fuse.

New profile pics

I finally took the time to let take new pictures from me for my profile by a photographer. Without further adago here they are:

Profile Pic

Profile pic b&w

I’ve placed the colored picture in my profile. Those nice pictures were made at the Serenite Gardens, a very nice setting there. The photographer was Melodious Source, I can recommend her without doubt. A great artist and wonderful personna!

SL roundup

After not posting entries for some days, I’ve got to dequeue my queued posts now. So, with no further delay here they are:

  • SL had terrible problems yesterday. They bunch varied from not being able to login to problems with teleporting up to problems with the assets. So it was unsafe to use the inventory at all. This reminds us: when you really want to do business in SL, the platform tends to be fairly unstable. Count that always in. The whole drama lasted over 10 hours. Hopefully it is over now.
  • Zee Linden posted an Excel spreadsheet about the key measures of SL. Very interesting read, you should give it a read. There are some big differences from SL’s statistics to other games, and it shows. For example:
    • The time of hours spent online per month seems to grow exponential at the moment.
    • There is a big growth in land. But the area covered by private islands is 2.5 times bigger than by the mainland (102.72 square kms mainland compared to 258,08 square kms private islands).
    • Also again: big economy growth in world and big growth in the sales of the LindeX.
    • Also as it seems a big exponential groth in the number of residents at all, but the number of premiums more in some kind of linear growth, also taking off right now, too.
    • The top 100 countries of the residents: 31.19% from USA, 12.73% from France, 10.46 % from Germany, 8.09 % from the Netherlands. I would have thought that more people are coming from the USA, but it shows that the audience of SL is truly international and not dominated by US residents only. So this leads of course to separated communities and some gated communities, too.
    • Average age on the main grid: 33. Bummer. Now this is really worth mentioning it. The audience in SL seems to be much older than in other online games, which makes it of course more interesting for commercials, real life companies entering it and so on and on.
    • More males using it than females (58,89% male compared to 41.11% female), though the female population keeps growing and growing.
  • RL issues are coming strongly into SL, too, right now and this is going to be a big, big thing. Mainly: violation of copyrights. It is the title theme of The Avastar from last week. Only because there were not really actions taken against some people because SL was not on the radar of the companies and copyright holders at all does mean that it is safe to use copyrighted material. On the contrary, RL copyright of course applies also to the in world. This is a lesson people should have learned from the booming days of the Internet already, but history seems to repeat itself right now. For example they are interviewing King Pascale who sells his articles under real life brand names like Gucci, D&G, Chanel and so on. Now this guy seems to come from Denmark. The graphical ad for his shop looks like this:
    Luxury Fashion Ad
    To cite him:

    I don’t do anything illegal. Producing articles and use of real life brands is forbidden. However, I don’t only sell on what other people create for me. I got it in writing from the Lindens that it was not illegal to sell on RL brands.

    Dude, you are sooo wrong! When a brand is copyrighted, it can be applied to several fields. For example the name of a computer must not apply to gardening utilities and so on. But what you are doing is to use the already established brand names to sell your own goods and make your own profit out of them. Read my lips: when a brand owner/copyright owner is going to sue you, and this is bound to happen sooner or later, you will be sued. Period. Don’t take the naive stance, it is not going to help you. Only a letter from the Lindens is no absolution that never anything will happen to you or binding legal consultation at all. Go to a lawyer with experience in this field and ask him for a consultation in that matter – and be quick! Be so quick!

  • Of course violation of copyright does also include streaming music, videos and much more fields to cover. With the rush of RL companies into SL expect them to take some actions against it. Otherwise you’re naive.
  • Another matter if importance are the still way too much high prices for land on the mainland. The prices are still not falling down, despite some other opinions. It seems that there are still land buying bots in the grid, buying new land under your feet. The Lindens should really do something about it, like introducing Captchas and other countermeasures. This is getting frustrated.