Should Linden Labs Eliminate Weekly Stipends?

From the votes that are in, it is apparent that should LL need to constrict the money supply, they would be well advised to seek ways other than eliminating stipends.

New taxes, possibly? I wasn't around at the time, but I have heard murmorings of a supposed "Tax Revolt" that took place in beta. If this is true, perhaps the Lindens would be dissuaded from raising taxes.

Minus the ability to tax or cut stipends, I'm not sure how LL can have a dramatic impact on the L$ money supply.

It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Agreed. Its funny how the "Golden Rule" of RL business also applies here in a virtual world.

What is the Golden Rule of business you ask? "He who has the gold makes the rules".

May it ever be so.

No stipend means everyone MUST create it order to purchase things, the problem being when one can create they no longer need to buy things. May as well simply go to a barter system.

Yew dun traded mah praaz-winnin' milkin' cow Bessie in on dat dere mota-sackle? Paw, gemme mah gun, we's be havin' clown fer brek-fist agin'.

I voted No, for two reasons.

One being... Having to rely on your own creations and thus "Am I good enough?" mindsets.... incurs risks that were a hallmark of There, that I do not wish people to ever be forced to repeat in SL.

Two being... When you are new you are bound to buy SOMETHING before you go to start building, and I for one think that by going out into the SL community shopping for the first time gives people an idea of what people like and don't like in SL, and thus, they get an idea, for if they decide to build, what is acceptable and not acceptable.

Some of you may laugh and point at the second statement and cite how this is how griefers are born. Well... sadly yes it does work both ways... but I've never seen an entire sim full of nothing but griefers so it seems that more good *is* coming (or comming, to irritate those folks that hate when coming is spelled with more than 1 M) from it. :>

*twitches*

Jaq... I think my first question should have been: what's so wrong with the current system that you think we might need to rid ourselves of the stipends?

I don't feel we NEED to eliminate it. I guess what I'm saying is that at some point something will have to be done to control the supply of money.

Since the primary way money enters into SL is through stipends, it seems logical LL may want to scale them back to control the L$ supply.

Why would we want to control the supply of L$? I mean... if you feel you have too much L$, please, feel free to pay it to a non-existant key, or maybe upload about a billion useless textures and delete them again to gobble up the excess.

I'm not in SL to play economist, so I don't really care how many L$ are floating around in the economy. Provided that I have enough to do what I want to do, that's the end of my interest.

If they do, then I don't see much reason to pay for a premium account... the 512m2 allotment is not reason enough to pay the monthly fee for me.

MmmmMMMmmmmmm one prim box

Siggy.

There used to be a system in place where if you had over (I want to say 3,500) a certain amount, you didn't get a stipend..

.. now while that was enforced I never had more than that amount of money anyways -- I was forever building and paying rezzing costs and prim taxes -- BUT there were folks out there that would circumvent this by giving one player (alt?) their money...

So, it didn't work....

Siggy.

No.

Not everyone in SL wants to create for money or focus their online time into having to have an in-world job so they can buy a shirt.

Personally I think anyone who makes more than a certain amount of money from object sales the week before shouldn't get a stipend, and instead it should go into the pool to help increase everyone else's stipend, and give more starting cash to new players.

I think thats a great idea -- and I guess if they did it based on sales it would cut down on 'gaming the system' too.. Vendors give money - and don't go under object sales -- so would you also count 'moneys given'? I would.

Siggy.

L$500 is the base for a premium account.

Up to L$750 can be awarded based on your cumulative rating points

Up to L$750 can be awarded based on the change (number of new rating) points you receive in the current week.

Grand Total Potential Stipend per Week : $2,000

It's not too hard to do - I've had $2,000 per week since mid-August, and I don't get out that much!

Ahem.

Let's say stipends stopped coming in tomorrow.

Then, let's fast-forward a couple weeks.

Vendors, feeling the squeeze from not having paying customers, will either a) raise prices to get more money from less customers, and hence go out of business, or b) lower prices to the point of comfortable profit margins.

GOM prices will spike upwards, and upwards, and upwards.

Finally, the reason the GOM prices are going up is because...

you ready for it....?

it's because...

THERE IS NO MONEY COMING INTO THE ECONOMY WHILE A TON OF IT IS LEAVING IT FOREVER.

Every time you bid on an auction, upload a picture or a sound file, pay an inactive account, get your account suspended/banned/cancelled, or pay a linden for something, that money is gone. Forever. Simply deleted. Zip, gone, sayonara.

So, with zero money coming into the game (except for the pitiful dwell payments), and a ton of it leaving, you're left with, eventually, no money.

And if you simply shift the stipend payment to land holders, you create such a disparity of income brackets that the entire economy would grind to a halt. Seriously. Plus newbies would be overly frustrated with having no money (unless they pay exorbitant amounts on GOM, as indicated above), and would stop coming in, thus further undermining SL, and then we wouldn't be able to have such silly conversations.


Good idea! Wait, no.

LF

The ramp-up time for learning the skills required to generate quality content in this game space is so steep and long that I think at this point stipends are necessary -- especially without the makework individual job objects like preserving in TSO, or the jobs like the robot factory. It's simply too hard to earn money in this game, even if you spend 2 hours a night trying to win contests or generate dwell or ratings -- unless you have something scripty or eye-popping to sell.

Read my blog on this subject, the message I took home from Phil Linden's town hall is that the direction of SL is one where land barons will be allowed to drive the economy, and welfare for ordinary people will be cut back significantly. And some other, new system will be found to reward content kings of merit.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com

So what happens to those who like to just create? Since some skills are limited to certain things how are they going to get money to pay for services without a stipend? For me, I'm not here to do 'business' I'm here for other reasons. Forced to work? Mmm.. me thinks no.

No stipends? Yecchhh....

One of the cool things about SL, that makes it a pleasant contrast to RL, is that if you want to, you can just loaf and do nothing, and still get by. That's what makes it a game (or a creative and recreational activity that is not, repeat, NOT a game, if you must), as opposed to, y'know, *work*.

Plus, as LF said, there is money constantly leaving the system. (And the charges for uploading and so forth exist for a reason, because it's a drain on system resources.) Not that we'd ever get to the point of seeing the last linden spiral down the drain, but things would get a little *tight* after a while, nu? Deflation sucks just as bad as inflation; ask anyone who remembers the Great Depression.

The Lindens already have a mechanism for adjusting the money supply: land auctions. They control the rate at which new sims are brought on line, the rate at which they are placed on the auction block, and the proportion of auctions that are in L$ (shrinking the money supply) versus US$ (no effect on the money supply). And GOM provides a nice metric for whether the money supply is running high or low. Do they need anything more than that?

That's definitely the fly in the ointment. I'm not sure how you'd deal with that. Probably the simplest would be to make it so that money given through a script counts, but given directly av to av doesn't. That way if someone borrowed money from a friend or got a gift it wouldn't keep them from getting their stipend. They could also make it opt in.

So $750 for each of those is the limit?

Thanks, Lisse!

I think Daemioth said this to me once -- I should have listened more carefully.

For my first few weeks on SL (starting in August), I thought that this was still the case. If this isn't a testament to SL's lousy documentation, I don't know what is.