An open letter to Linden Labs.

Let me first introduce myself. I go by the name Nexxus Ambassador on SL. I have run a web hosting system for artists known as FurNation. Next year will be the 10th anniversary of our web system. We bring in 30,000 unique visitors a month and have been rated on Alexa’s page ranking engine at 52,000 of all the millions of sites on the Internet.

I bought two island sims on Second Life about 3 months ago, FurNation Prime and FurNation Alpha. Within a short period of time the sims have gone to the top of the popular charts, as well as being a major factor in bringing new members into Second Life.

The recent policy changes regarding the Developer's Incentive payouts, the Referral Bonus changes, and the new Linden Exchange has me greatly concerned for our future role in Second Life.

I choose SL over another long running 3D world system due to several advantages I saw. First, the Linden dollar exchange using GOM seemed to be a very good setup for us to use to continue expanding the sim land area. Second, the Developer's Incentive also seemed to be a good way to reduce the monthly sim fees as we built up a large community. Recently my reactions to both of these systems have been dismal at best.

First, the Developer’s Incentive seemed like a good system. Pay the island sim owner’s incentive bonuses that contribute to developing in SL and drawing visitors. This could be used to pay the sim fees or to collect as real US cash. Linden Labs recently changed this policy to “no cash payouts”. The Developer’s Incentive simply goes towards the account holder and is used for fees on the sims. Any extra accrued simply sits in the account unused.

Second, the new Linden Exchange showed promise at first. The amount in the account reflected both Linden Dollar sales AND Developer’s Incentive, so I assumed that I could now draw out any extra on the Developer’s Incentive and use it toward things to help our sim grow. This weekend we planned on doing some advertising for FurNation Worlds in SL, so I decided to draw out the extra that had accumulated in the Developer’s Incentive award. After a 2-day wait I received the following letter:

> There is a problem with this transfer. The current balance on your
> account is a credit balance in the amount of $XXX.XX. This credit
> balance was generated due to the posting of your September Developer
> Incentive Award of $XXX.XX and not through the sale of Linden Dollars.
> We do not pay out Developer Incentive Awards. If a Linden Dollar
> Exchange has not posted to your account correctly please let us know.

Well, as you may guess this completely destroyed our advertisement plans, as I do not have the available cash right now to begin. I was expecting the Developer’s Incentive to cover the costs.

Third, the Referral Bonus that we have been receiving for new visitors who sign up to SL due to our advertising of the sim has helped pay lots of fees on our end. We had been using GOM to convert Linden dollars to US funds. This worked very well until GOM decided to close its business early this month. I am still unsure of the reason for this decision, but from reading other forums it looks likely that it is due to Linden Labs opening up their own exchange system. Recently Linden Labs has also made a small change to the way the referral bonus will be paid out. I am still unsure how this will affect us, as this change only took effect last week.

I am beginning to see a trend going on, and I am not getting a nice warm fuzzy feeling over it. It would seem that every change made has been to the negative effect of smaller sim owners. While I run FurNation Worlds in SL for no-profit, the incentives that I was receiving to cover the costs and future growth of the sims was the major plus to hosting on Second Life. I feel that those reasons are slowly being eroded by the changes in policy.

As of this time our plans on adding a third sim to the island group has been put on hold. I am not feeling comfortable that future changes will allow us to continue without adding gambling areas or selling property to keep the sims (both of which we are against). I wanted to build FurNation Worlds on Second Life as a way for our present website visitors to have an interactive community. I am beginning to think that may be impossible.

Sincerely,

Nexxus Ambassador

Second Life is a game! ...maybe...

oh dear, repeat please, 1000 times
SECONDLIFE IS A PLATFORM..NOT A GAME
SECONDLIFE IS A PLATFORM..NOT A GAME
SECONDLIFE IS A PLATFORM..NOT A GAME
.................
LOL

Well, it's easy (I think)... you're now about to _wash_ your money.

First, calculate the size of your DevBonus. How big is the total amount?

Second, buy Linden dollars with all of it.

Third, now sell all the Linden dollars.

Fourth, cash out.

Hooray, you just laundered your money.

Will this actually work? I don't know (this is code for: You give it a whack, let us know how it all works out, and we'll wait over here). I'm not sure if there's a caveat that prevents us from spending our DevBonuses to buy L$. And if there's no caveat about this then it's just a matter of getting the transactional history of your account in proper order.

Sadly, the Canadians did away with the pink C$1000 bank notes which were always handy for border crossings.

Good luck and happy motoring.
--
The above post is strictly for entertainment purposes only.

Nexxus - In the interest of your concerns being most likely heard by Linden, may I make the following suggestion:

-Wait until a day or two after 1.7 is released (should be sometime next week)

-Post an entry to the Linden Hotline forum, and link this thread in General.


While Linden does occasionally read & respond to the posts here, there's absolutely no guarantee that they're actually reading your plea. Posting it to the hotline now may be non-productive, as many posts to the hotline have gone unanswered as we're nearing the 1.7 launch.

Hope this helps, and I wish you all the best with your project!

Well, if they said no cash payout, but rather a credit on your bill, then it makes sense that you cannot withdraw that money from the Lindex. It is a credit, not a cash gift. But at least it will go towards future tier payments, no? As a startup, LL has to manage cash flow carefully, and that's what this decision is probably about -- giving a return to high-draw customers yet managing the near-term cash going out the door.

i haven't seen an announcement limiting what you can do with referral L$ given, so you should be able to sell that L$ on Lindex just like you did on GOM.


My general reaction is that LL continues to tweak their pricing and economic model, and are trying to pull back from "subsidies" of all kinds. I would not be surprised if developer incentives eventually disappear once they LL feels confident that many larger projects can stand on their own two feet more easily. From my perspective, the main reason those incentives exist in the first place is to kickstart content/entertainment development, but as SL grows and matures this will become less necessary. I don't really think that we're there yet, however.

One of these days people will find www.lindenlab.com and find out that specific user problems can be addressed directly by phone or mail.

I strongly support Nexxus in this concern. I feel that if they are offering bonuses for people who bring new members to SL then those bonuses should be able to be converted to USD. As Nexxus stated he intended to used the funds for advertising SL and Furnation Worlds. I feel that Nexxus and Furnation seems to have brought alot to this online system and they are not being given the proper respect for their efforts.

You are mixing the referal bonus and the developer incentives, which are not the same thing. There is nothing preventing them from selling the L$ earned from referals. They did change the payout on them to make more of an incentive to get people who not only sign up, but stay as part of the community. The L$ earned can be sold like any other L$.

The developer incentives have been paid out for awhile now as account credit. This is nothing new. It is not a cash award, it is used to offset tier fees. The ability to withdraw cash from SL has only been added for the purposes of the exchange (though you can also leave it in your account to offset tier). The difference is that unlike the developer incentive, which is paid out by LL as a credit, the currency exchange gives proceeds from the sale of currency to a third party, thus you are able to cash it out. They are getting the same respect that everyone else does - they are deserving of no more or no less.