Metal88 Carter's Free Sex rooms have been unplugged, and no surprises, he is not moving to Zindra.
For those who do not follow such things, let me explain that we are watching the death of an SL business model: the orgy mall. Now in the real world, I very much doubt people would go to a mall with naked guys with hard cocks running around propositioning anyone who might possibly be XX endowed, but in SL for a long time things worked this way: traffic pushed one up in the rankings, traffic is basically how long an agent is in an area, 1000 traffic points is roughly one avatar day. To generate traffic, parcel owners had to attract people, but generally the number of people with money to spend is lower than those who are just hanging out on SL. So to attract the hangers out, owners had to create reasons to be there. Now actual content is hard, but getting people to hang out is easy: give out something for free. This was called "camping."
One form of camping is giving out Linden Dollars: for sitting, by money trees or other games, and so on. Another form of camping is content camping: midnight mania, lucky chairs, and so on. The point of this is to give out something and make people wait for the chance to get it. However, even better is to give out something that costs you nothing. Hence "free sex." The point of free sex is to attract the chat room crowd. The people who log in, grease up, and ask every female handle their age, location, and measurements.
In a phrase, attract cunt campers.
As far as I know, I'm the only person who has admitted to doing any kind of survey or research on these in sl, and have blogged about them often. I still need to publish my survey of pick up lines, but that's for later I think. Anyway, to get to the heart of it. Mostly these places had newbie guys, many still shouting for how to find a free cock, and sex equipment lying around. There were a few female avatars who would play in such places, but mainly women who were there were there for another reason entirely. One was, of course, to laugh at the guys, another to fish out the very occasional guy worth having. But mainly, it was to spam something: vampire bites, advertisements for escort services, other sex clubs and so on. My count was that there were between 8 and 20 males looking for instant, no strings attached, sl sex for every female.
And in the main, women looking for no strings attached sex were seeking to try it out with someone who was not relationship material, and then move on. This led to the approach of men learning to ask women if they wanted to "try" the sex poseballs, because they assumed that their best chance was with a first time girl. Given how badly most of these men did SL sex there wasn't a second time.
Cunt camping had, at it's peak, a dozen major orgy sims. That's full sims. But for much of the last two years there were five main places: Neva Naughty, Free Sex Empire, Free Sex Land, Bukkake Bliss, Sexyland by Mixter Merlin. There were also a few other smaller ones, such as Sex4All. I'm half writing this list so that it is somewhere in the memory of the internet. There were also mainland orgy rooms, Bordeaux for example. I am leaving separate both freelance escort houses, and specialized places, such as BDSM rooms, even though there was some overlap. The reason is that specialized places sold specialized content, where as the orgy rooms had general purpose malls.
Now that is the key: the people who shop are the ones paying for the orgy room. Even if they buy at another location, because the rent at the orgy room is part of the overhead of the retailer or designer. There is no such thing, as free sex, but there was a system by which sex pollution could happen. I call it that because the costs were born by others, both in terms of providing the place, and in terms of other effects. There was almost no scam on sl that did not route people from the orgy rooms to the scam. Whether it was spamgames like SLBloodlines, or fishing expeditions.
It also has a long term social effect: men who pass through orgy rooms continue to ask women they saw there for sex. Harass in some cases. This is true whether or not the woman displayed the slightest interest.
An important reason for adult content rules is this: LL can only run at a certain level of concurrency on the main grid without major problems from various systems that are basically near their capacity. This means that LL's business goal is not more people, but to have more profitable people. Cunt campers, almost by definition, are among the least useful people on Second Life, in that they are relentlessly dedicated to neither paying for anything, nor contributing anything. They do not generally build, script or much of anything else. It is a big deal in an orgy room, and used as a pick up line, to have a place to go. Often this place is an LM to someone else's skybox. Adult content rules, by providing a very low filter, get rid of the people who make a free email, make a free sl account, search for "free sex" and then begin running around.
The cost in traffic of going adult is hard to measure, since many simply pulled the plug. Sex4All, Sexyland, and Free Sex Empire folded. Sexland dropped from around 60K to 21K, and most of those were looking for slesbian sex. I say this being fully aware that many are men irl, but be that as it may, that makes it a specialized, rather than general, desire.
However, for special purpose orgy rooms, there was no final drop off in traffic. The BDSM rooms, such as Bondage Ranch, saw no final drop off in traffic. Basically, people who want something specific, will register as adults to find it. People who want hit and run pixel pumping, have moved elsewhere for their fix. At this writing there is one old style orgy mall left with high traffic: Bukkake Bliss.
One can see why this model cannot survive the adult content rules. It was always basically a scam: selling access to other people's free sex, and charging content buyers for the privilege of funding a cock dump.
I am writing this summary because since the introduction of adult content rules, it was clear that this particular business model was going to go away, it relied precisely on the kind of people that LL wants to get rid of: the people who have no intention of ever spending any money. LL does not care about sexual harassment, not by their employees, not by residents, not by anyone. They even encourage it. However, they do care about money, and this was a group of users who were creating more cost than benefit. They aren't doing it because they are nice people.
After adult content rules went into effect, several parcels and sims decided to ignore them. This had been true of the old PG/Mature ratings, but adult content ratings have an even stronger incentive to break them. As I noted at the top, today one of the most flagrant of the adult content avoiders, pulled his parcel. He had 35000 traffic, on a 2048m parcel of mainland. That's 1/32 of a sim, using almost all of the sim's resources. Metal88 Carter, the person who ran it, ran two other parcels of the same kind. They are gone as well.
[Picture is the nearly empty Free Sex Land orgy room.]
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