Evolving the Second Life Economy

Evolving the Second Life Economy

As discussed in the most recent Developer’s Journal and here on the SL Forums, the economy continues to be a hot topic for residents. The economy will continue to evolve based upon the size of the world, our observed statistics about its performance, and your suggestions. Based upon the most recent threads I wanted to share some upcoming designs we’re considering as incremental steps to address your requests.

Resident Comment: “As part of a group which has early access to new simulators why are we being charged land tax before the land is accessible by all residents?”
You’re absolutely correct – these groups should have land tax amnesty prior to the land becoming broadly accessible. We’ve refunded the recent land tax charges.

Resident Comment: “It’s too easy to get hit with a big tax bill at the end of the week because the ‘anticipated taxes’ rarely match my actual taxes.”
Currently we measure your tax bill daily but the taxes charged are equal to the specific bill assessed at the weekly taxation/stipend date. We will be moving to daily tax billing to give you an accurate picture of your financial well-being. Also, we’ll be running this transaction for all residents at the same time. Here’s a question for you – should stipends and bonuses also be given out daily or should payday come once a week?

Resident Comment: “Scripters get no love”
Adding a scripting rating to the reputation system.

Resident Comment: “I want to buy a 1/16th of simulator but can’t afford the taxes.”
Choices, choices, choices. The average resident should be able to easily maintain a plot of land big enough to contain a sizeable structure – for example, a House-in-a-Box will fit comfortably on a 24 x 24 meter parcel. Now, if you’ve got bigger things in mind you’ll need more money. A functioning SL economy doesn’t mean that every resident will get to own a virtual acre (the equivalent of a 1/16th of a simulator). Instead, a functioning economy equates to a system where residents can pursue their diverse goals with a probability of success linked to both the difficulty of their objective and their personal ability to achieve.

Larger revisions and tweaks to the economy and reputation system will be forthcoming as SL evolves. Be assured that as always we’ll discuss anticipated design changes via the forums and town halls. My suspicion is that in some cases rather than “fix” the economy, we need to improve (or add) enabling features. For example, the premise of peer-to-peer exchange being very important to the economy isn’t wrong, we could just make it easier to buy and sell goods (for example a “search objects” functionality or catalogue tool). Similarly, land taxes might be correct, it’s just very tough to be a landlord and “rent” property to other residents.

So continue to let us know what works and what doesn’t work for you re: the SL economy. Just remember, it is a constraint system so there will always be some pain with your pleasure.

Hunter,

Thanks for the continued updates.

RE: stypend and taxed daily.... Nooooo. Once a week is fine, thank you. Getting 'tiny' daily allotments and or tax bills, is like the song "Killing me softly...", billed and credited once a week is the right approach in my opinion. knowing daily our tax burden for the week is a good thing, and speaking of that...

RE: current taxes mesured daily but actual taxes charged on the 'tax day' values. This does allow for some 'tax dodging', ie. release land night before taxes accessed, buy back land after taxes assessed. But, if you got to taxing weekly but based upon taxes of daily use, how are you aggregating or averaging the taxable land/objects across the week? If I buy land one day, then release it an hour later, how is that taxed? conversly if I buy a big chuck of land just before your nightly (assumed) tax measure, and release it just after the assesment, are we taxed for a 'whole day' of that land ownership?

RE: scripters. Just give 'em Jolt cola they'll be fine. Hehe, just kidding. Adding scripting rating is long overdue, thanks.

RE: Rent and Loan payments. The 'system' needs to add the ability to let residents agree to be 'billed' weekly by the system for rents and loan payments they sign up for with a landlord or 'bank'. This will stimulate the economy, by freeing up unused capital because the lender or landlord can be assured of being repaid. Individual investors or landlord should not be put into the situation of 'collector' or 'repo man'.

- Mickey

I take mine in the form of Code Red, not jolt, thanks.

Seriously though, good changes but I'm not sure about daily taxation.

I say if we get taxed everyday we should get our stipends/bonuses everyday too.

MMM Code Red sounds good, think we can get that tied into the script rating? Where LL starts sending out bottles of Code Red based on how high your script rating is. Kind of a compensation for not sleeping Course I guess Linden Labs is trying to make money and they may not if they have to truck crates and crates of liquid caffine to Ama's doorstep

ok, ok. Code Red then.

Please back to the 'real' topic. Let Hunter and the Lindens know what you think about their ideas (and mine, and yours)!

I don't like daily pay/tax idea. Weekly 'works' in that the frequency of weekly pay/tax is right. Daily is too small/fast, 2 week/monthly is too far apart. The original 'design' of a weekly system is the right one.

I am interested in hearing their reply to my questions on tax measurements, accruals, rents, etc.

The concept of location longevity/structure/development/ rewards (instead of vote stations) for those who 'add value' to the SL landscape and population is of interest to me. I'd like to hear more on that.

- Mickey

Definatly NO on the daily tax...also I hope Linden Labs only counts the yes and no's from people who are actually going be here past the 23rd.

I do know of a coulpe of people that have no intent in staying voicing their opinion on the matter at the meeting.

No daily tax. Keep weekly tax!

As far as the other stuff, very nice. I can't wait to get a high script rating

Concerning longevity of keeping something and whether it should be taxed or not, here's an idea (although somehow I doubt it's possible to keep track of this sort of thing).
If a person owns land for over 24 hours, it will be taxed, even if you get rid of it before tax day hits. If a person owns an object for over 48 hours, it will be taxed, even if it's deleted before tax day hits. This is placed on top of the current system, whereas all currently owned land and objects are taxed at tax time (1am whenever). Yes, this means that if you buy land, own it for 24 hours, release it, buy it all up again, all before tax day, you will basically be double-taxed for that land. Same with objects.

This allows experimentation with land and objects without allowing allowing quick release quick claim of regularly owned land and objects. As far as I'm concerned, we have all decided that this sort of behavior is "tax dodging", thus illegal.

*Just made 500 new enemies*



Btw I made up that idea like on the fly, without considering all good and bad views of it, soooo if it's simply "a stroke of genius" lemme know, until then, it's just a crazy idea I had!

Here is something. The goal of daily tax is more accuracy, correct? But the draw is once a week is you worry about it less often.

Right now it is calculated once a week and given/taken once a week.

It seems you are proposing calculated once a day given/taken once a day.

How about this? Calculate the daily tax but only give/take once a week (the summation of 7 daily tax calculations). This would improve the accuracy while keeping the once a week hit. It also has the benefit that any 'prediction' for the week will get more accurate the closer you get to tax day (because more of the days are known instead of predictions).

Nope. No. I release and reclaim my land LOTS and never once for tax dodgeing. Do not double tax me for it, my taxes are killing me already. Here are reasons why I do this:

- Taxes are too high. I own most of my land in huge chunks, to cut corners I have to release and reclaim a smaller chunk of what I can afford. Under your plan this would hurt me seriously instead of help - no way out of tax hell.

- I run DarkWood Village and DarkWood. I sell plots of land and have to reclaim them when people move on for whatever reason. Aside from just those issues with your idea, here also I keep some of my land in large pieces and must divide it.

Daily Tax: Noooooo please! Mickey said it best, that would be killing us softly. I keep things up for two days, then discover I don't want them, or I finish the project and it's back in my inventory. This would be EBIL to the nth degree.

Scripting rating: YES! Now I finally get to give all those rockin' scripters out there their due.

And that's pretty much it. Thank you for keeping us abreast of things, Hunter.. Second Life continues to have the best 'guides' in the industry. <wipes her nose>

Thanks for listening to our concerns and continually evolving the economy. Adding a rating for scripters is a great start, but what about clothing makers? And this doesn't address the REAL problem with the ratings system...

The person who'll get the high script rating will be the most social person who owns the coolest scripted object, not the person who actually wrote the script. It's the same for people who build on commission or make clothing. The whole rating system badly needs an overhaul.

woohoo! go Chip! You saved my fingers.

Ah Oh, Chip is right! Rating systems are for social butterfly's, the people with skills that are makin sweet goods to circulate around this Second Life and are a tad on the shy side, (as metioned earlier in this thread) "Get no love."

should stipends and bonuses also be given out daily or should payday come once a week?

Once a week please. It would be more of a nuiscance to get it on a daily basis. IMO

While I agree with most of chips post ....
Its there. Its called Apparence. And it works just like you describe the scripting will work - the most social person who owns the best clothes gets the highest rating independant of who made em.

Just one comment. Can we get rid of charging for teleports? I don't understand why you would want to charge for that? And with the world getting so big, it's far too expensive. I never use teleport because of the cost. Why have it then? I tend to be late for events due to not wanting to spend the money.

Just my 2LD

Ingie

At least reduce the cost of teleportation, so that, say, teleporting from Gibson to Slate costs as much as going from Bonifacio to Federal used to (the longest distances I can think of, before and after the new landmass).

So all along we have been hearing that our stipends are tied to number of people and land. Yesterday there were 15 NEW sims added to the world, and my stipend did NOT go up a penny !!


What's up with that ???

Maybe it needs a week to cycle?

Why teleportation costs money

If you don't want to teleport (and the tp costs discourage you wanting to teleport) then you must fly through sims to get where you want to go. By doing this, you may encounter new users, other events, or builds you've never seen before. These things may (they have done this a lot for me) grab your attention and cause you to forget where you were going before, and decide to stop where you are and make these new friends. Thus, a larger and closer SL community is created.

This is what Linden Labs wants, so I can fully understand costs for teleportation, and I do not believe it has to be any higher or lower than it is.

I agree in general about the fees for teleporting.

But.... As the SL world grows (as it has just now doubled and will grow more in the very near future), the teleport costs to go from one end of the world to the other have gone up too. This becomes 'too much' for many folks to visit their old friends who may now have moved to the new sims.

As the world grows it will take much longer to fly from one end of the world to the other also (eating into limited online time that people can give to SL).

I think the teleport costs should be 'fixed' in that the cost to fly from the two furthest points remains constant, even as the world expands. If it costs 25L$ to go from one end to the other now, then when the world expands again it still is 25L$ for the new teleport trip between the two new end points.

This may sound like it complicates the Lindens life to continure to calculate this as land expands, but that is what computers are for, hehe. It should not be that difficult for them to devise a way to automate this.

If the cost to teleport from the far reaches of a future expanded world get 'exhorbitant' then SL is destined to create 'subworlds' where folks don't travel too far from home because of the costs ($ or Time, or both). This effectively 'shrinks' the available world to individuals, not grow it.

There are things about SL that mimic RL for usefull reasons, and there are things about SL that should (because it can) break free from RL limitations. The ability to travel somewhere instantly (and affordably) is one thing that should be encouraged.

When the SL community was small (in land and residents) it made sense to 'tax' teleporting, to encourage just what Dave describes. but once the world has reached a certain size in land and population, the reverse is the effect that results.

Teleport costs should now (or soon after the flood of newbies after launch) be reconsidered as to the impact they have upon SL life. I suggest that the originally intended 'social effect' will soon wear off as transport costs increase due to land mass additions.


- Mickey

I think there should be "check points" in each sim or a few sims, that can be teleport free.

In other words something like Diablo or EQ. Where you have to go to a place in a sim to be able to go to other sim check points. Do this at no charge. Then to go anywhere else it costs to teleport.

I'm with Charlie on this. We can always use objects like jetpacks and stuff to fly over stuff very fast if we need to. I understand the reasons for flying, but some teleport booths or points to go about the world would, if anything, encourage more exploration since it'd be less of a hassle to get there.

Hi Gang,

Lots to discuss on this thread, but I wanted to in this post give the design idea behind charging for teleportation.

In two words, community and affinity. In SL, where you live isn't driven by locally available resources (water, iron, domestic animals), racial subtypes or families (you just grew up there), political affiliation, etc. So what then should the concept of 'local community' MEAN in SL? Inotherwards, what will the neighbors that live on Welsh have in common (and yes I give Welsh as something of an example to examine)?

There are two possible designs one can strive for:

1. Absolutely nothing (neighbors will have nothing in common).

2. Affinity (neighbors will 'resemble each other' in some way).

Now the one we are striving for is #2 - neighborhoods in SL are REALLY COOL because their residents share something in common, and what is lots better than RL is that what they share may be very different and more interesting than what we find in real world geography.

So the problem is this... if you want to do #2, you must somehow make one neighborhood more distant than another. The way you measure distance in the real world is you pay out a piece of string between the two neighborhoods and measure its length. But you see in SL that piece of string doesn't quite work, because of teleporting. Teleporting effectively destroys the measurable distances between two points. For the mathematically inclined, this is because telporting creates a graph rather than a lattice, and increases the dimensionality of the space to a value greater than 3 (in proportion to the number of teleports).

So basically the cost for teleporting is designed to make neighborhoods coherent - 'far away' means 'not very like me' and becomes an exciting thing to do.

If teleporting is free, then why bother laying SL out on ground - just make it a bunch of stuff floating in space, with a hyperlinking connecting everything and rendering distance (and therefore spatial community) meaningless. I don't think that sounds fun.

Thoughts welcome!

Regarding Tracey's question about stipends varying with land/users:

The stipend pool (amount available to everyone) is a function of the size of the community. So no, it won't go up in a week. It will vary as the actual number of permanent residents increases.

Since there will be some ups and downs in the coming weeks (some folks leaving and new ones coming) we won't make any changes for a while.

Letting the taxes change perfectly algorithmically/every day, BTW, seems to be causing more confusion and trouble than it is worth. Our thinking at this point (in reading posts and seeing confusion over taxes) is to simplify / regularize the system to have less variance rather than more.