What if... (L$ thread)

OK....so to make SL a better world.....(simply for the sake of creating)......if I'm understanding this correctly......the content creation should be left up to:

1) Stay at home housewives/househusbands who can afford to play in Photoshop for 8 hours a day.

2) Overpaid computer programmers whose job is not on the line due to the economy.....and can come in here and play around and write scripts while they are at RL work, with no ramifications.

3) RL artists making enough RL profits to afford them the luxury of sliding into SL for hours on end and toss out their talent for free, while getting paid heftily in RL to toss it out.....but simply as a service to humanity, here.

4) The independently wealthy who would rather spend time in a virtual world, creating and touching virtual objects.... than to place their hands on their tangible content that they can well afford in RL.

Did I miss anyone?

And no offense to any of the above....sweet set-ups you have.

Except for the independently wealthy who have tangible "stuff" to place your hands on.....seems a bit sad to go into SL and have to pretend.

My opinion the immediate impact would be the ones just making it by or breaking even paying tier with lindens generated from their sims or whatever their income was generated from to pay for their land..They'll be gone before it makes it to the blog.At least the land would be..it will impact them all but the little guys will head out at the first sign of trouble..

it would probably end up with logins like open life has..people just here to enjoy second life as a communication platform more than anything now..

i mean that is like going from income to be 100% taxed..it would have to be a pretty good program to get people dropping money into it knowing there is no return..then you are back to a game..

There's no amount of RL money that would give me the RL lifestyle that Argent enjoys in SL. Hell, even if the Star Trek Holodeck was real it wouldn't be up to the job.

That might help, but I think it would still screw over the internal economy pretty badly. And I seriously doubt LL would do that. Why? Because maintaining those servers costs THEM "Real Money", and they can't pay their power bill with L$. LL needs real cash payments to remain in business.

For a person like me, for example...

If I could still take the L$ that I earn in-world, and could send a large chunk of those L$ to my private island sim owner each month to pay for the slightly more than quarter of a sim that I have, and if he in turn could use those L$ to pay the monthly fees to LL to cover his sim maintenance, that might, at least initially, save my land and my social activities. My sim owner has his one sim so his household and mine and a few others can have a nice place to live. None of us have that land to turn a profit.

But my texture sales alone already bring in more than it takes to cover that land rental, plus provides for all my in-world expenses for new avatars, new clothes, and other spending for myself and several alts. If I had no "sink" for removing L$ from the SL economy and taking that as a profit, I would soon accumulate so many L$ that they would be utterly worthless to me. More than I could possibly spend. I would have very little incentive to make anything new, since my past efforts would be covering my expenses.

My RL spouse certainly wouldn't approve of my spending so much time in SL, when the family no longer could expect to ocasionally get a 'free' restaurant meal or a 'free' trip to the movies or some other "little luxuries" that my SL profits provide today.
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And what about the big landlords? Why should they even consider tying up massive amounts of real money in SL real estate, if there was NO profit to be made in that, AT ALL? Would Dreamland, FairChang Isles, Caledon, and many other large estates remain in existance? WHY should those people run their sims as a non-profit charity? And if they sell or abandon their sims and leave, who will replace them? Who in their right mind would pony up over a thousand bucks in real money to buy a sim, and rent it out to others, if they could NEVER earn that thousand bucks back? Would you?

This is pretty much my situation. I have never cashed out and don't intend to, all the money I earn sits there waiting for the USD 195 tier payments and membership payments to come out of it and then I add to it when I earn more. In the meantime I use a small amount of it to buy other items etc.
I would actually prefer it if you could not cash out as long as tier and membership could be paid using it - actually I would not even be so bothered about membership as long as the tier was payable that way.

The market for items would probably atrophy considerably over time. So would the commercial rental market. As moderate as the supplemental income might be, many of the content creators that are merchants simply wouldn't have enough motivation to continue their businesses without the ability to cash out and those that do would probably have diminished motivation to put out new content. It could have an even greater impact if exiting creators decided to release all their items as full perm before leaving SL.

I believe there was a large amount of content creation in evidence long before you could even cash out. Someone from way back then will correct me if I am wrong.

Yes there was lots of content. Content that people paid 10k plus for even back then - unscripted, i know because i bought a custom ordered and built hover bike from someone around October 2003, and an extremely wealthy resident came along, saw my hover bike and offered the creator 10k or 15k (i cannot remember which) more than what i paid and she gave him a copy.

So yea, there was a lot of content, considering the number of actual active people on the grid. People were constantly building - the number of us that were there for just consumerism and social diva'ing were very few, and so many who were there back then during the beta and first few months after it went live in June were extremely technically and artistically adept and very interested in SL for its creation tools. And most importantly, since there were so few people actually on the grid and active, if you wanted an item you often had to either make the item(s) yourself, or hire someone to make it.

There were a lot of people doing really cool and innovative things and building really cool things. After all, Lumiere built The Ivory Tower of Primitives not long after his arrival in 2004, Cuby did Abotts Aerodome, Maxx did the Skyscraper 04, Taessa built the 194 prim bookcase in mid 03 (/invalid_link.html & http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Prim_hog, Club Midnight was a place like a RL club that you actually looked forward to going to on Fridays and Saturdays for a raging party.

Ahh good times, lots of cool content being made all the time...

Considering how LL goes about doing things they will end up going bankrupt. My reaction would be anger that I can't log in. The in-world society would of course no longer exist.

It's a slightly awkward question, because if LL were to make this change now, probably the betrayal of trust involved would be more significant than any effect that the pure monetary change had on the economy.

If they were to change it now, then most likely - as others have said - third-party L$ sellers would quickly pull in to cover the gap.

But what if LL actually _forbade_ any RMT at all?

First of all, the really big one. Any resident landlord who dealt using L$ transactions would instantly and permanently either shut down or more to US$ transactions. That, in turn, would very much damage those businesses - because obviously, if you pay in US$ you have to give the landlord your real identity (which you might not want to), and also they gain a huge set of extra responsibilities to do with having a US$ business income. Small landlords would disappear.

Secondly, the slightly smaller but only slightly one. Any resident business that operates based on earning L$ to pay tier or earn real money would no longer have that motivation, and would close up. This means that the only businesses remaining active would be ones where either the owners or beneficiaries wanted to buy things in-world, or the business could obtain a US$ income from outside SL for the services provided within it.

It would mean, essentially, a much smaller world and much fewer products. On the other hand, residents who wanted to create would no longer be forced to specialize in creation or plan for death by competition from a specialist somewhere along the line; this would possibly lead to a more creative and driven world, but it'd be a WoW style "driving", where when you reach level 60 you just have more than you can ever spend.

You keep saying this, but that doesn't make it any truer.

Or else you're talking something less apocalyptic and more subtle... but the "circle of life" is just as real whether there's money involved or not. Who uses "rn" or "BNews" any more? They got outcompeted by better open source projects. Without an economy, you'd still get people's projects from falling out of fashion after they got bored and quit developing them. But that's not the same as your business getting inevitably ground under if you don't spend all your time making new stuff instead of enjoying SL, as you keep implying.

It's inevitable reality in economics. It's a natural consequence of the division of labor.

And the "circle of life" is fine - that's not the problem. The problem is that monetary profit attracts too many people and is entirely out-world as a reward. If it were removed, there would be less competition (reward is worth less), and less motivation to spend all of your time creating and marketing and competing (the more fun you have, the more the reward is worth).

Google this

"Linden Labs has the ability to..." doesn't mean "Linden Labs is stupid enough to commit corporate suicide by..."

In-world, out-world, the lindens themselves don't actually leave the game... when someone sells lindens that means someone else is BUYING them, to spend in the game.

Which means the economy is bigger, there more stuff for ME to buy with the Lindens I earn, and there's more people for me to sell my stuff to so I don't have to work as hard to sell enough to pay my tier.

This! I paid $15.00 USD/mo when I played EQ with no possibility of money taken out of the game. I realize SL is not a "game" per se, but the enjoyment it gives to me as a hobby, social venue, creative venue, etc. is worth paying that to continue if SL ever came to that.

Google this

Having been though one failed startup in RL, I can guarantee you that this problem is not limited to SL.

*nod* The issue isn't the L$ though, it's the reward.

When you can cash out L$, the reward is - or can be - out-world (money), so you can spend all your time in-world creating and enjoy the money while you're logged off.

If you couldn't cash out L$, you'd have to spend it on land or content instead, and the reward would be in-world. So there would be no point spending all your time creating (unless you enjoyed creating for the sake of doing so) because you would never be getting any ultimate value from your L$. You would have to go out, join in things, buy things, to bring that L$ to value. And by doing that, they're adding a service to the world for everyone - one that's perhaps more important than content, and that is way out of balance with content in SL today.

So what? That works the other way around. And what's keeping me from spending more time in SL just enjoying SL isn't that I'm spending all my time in SL building, it's that RL has a higher priority.

It doesn't matter one skerrick whether it's Mary Madbuilder that spends the time in-world with the L$ 20,000 she earned in-world, or Pat Powershopper who paid Mary Madbuilder the US$70 through Lindex so Mary Madbuilder could cash out. The L$ themselves are only spent in-world, whether they're spent by the person who earned them or the person who bought them from the person who earned them. They don't magically disappear into Lindex never to return.

Sure, but you could still divide the time that you _do_ spend in SL.



It _does_ matter, because Mary Madbuilder isn't out there creating social context for others, and Pat Powershopper isn't getting to create environments exactly the way she likes.

huh?

Because "Mary Madbuilder" is doing all the building, and because "Pat Powershopper" couldn't compete with her on building without spending all her time building too, Pat can't make exactly what she wants (her builds will be too low quality). Also, instead of gaining money by selling things she built on the side, Pat has to _pay_ money for Mary's builds.

But without Pat, Mary is just throwing content out into the ether, where it will mean pretty much nothing without someone like Pat to bring people together and attract interest and have people using it. Yet in spite of this, Mary gets to be the one who's self-supporting while Pat has to pay.

This creates the "SL groaning" situation we have at the moment: where there's far too little context as compared to content. (Try any search keyword, and count the number of a) shops, b) sex builds, and c) anything else that show up. a) and b) are always far ahead of c). )

Yumi, Yumi, Yumi...

But what is your actual explanation, response to the argument?

Without one of those, you could simply be an exception.