Linden Loans: what effect would they have?

"Linden Loans: what effect would they have?"

It would make LL a bank. I'm sure they're chomping at the bit for that.

That's quite true, but the missing information here isn't just to do with the quality of individual merchants, but the setting of the entire SL world. The issue I'm raising isn't people spending money on poor quality products (although that is a problem, sure) but the issue of people spending money on products which have no experience linked to them.

There are many examples of that to be found around, posting them feels a lot like "SL groaning" really, although the surveys involved did take a while:

Returning to an old example that was told to me a few months back - Places search for "cheerleader": 32 results. 29 are malls, 2 are almost certainly TOS violations (would anyone like to show the "School Girl Sex Campus" to the press?). Only one is a stadium (that might logically be a place where cheerleaders would perform), which in fact turns out ot be.. another mall. Although it does have a central build for playing performances, it's sealed off by ban lines! Ok, this is a borderline activity, but that's a pretty clear imbalance (imagine if WoW charged you US$10 for a sword and then told you you'd never get to fight monsters unless you made friends with the right person)

Or how about a bigger one: "fantasy"! Of the first page of search results, 24 are shops. 25 are sex related (and that includes some of the RP areas like Toxian City, which advertise "bondage" as a feature of RP). Only 10 actual areas for RP existed. 1 was in pure Italian, so not interesting for English speakers. 6 actually dropped the visitor into a mall, and on 4 out of those six there was nothing else happening in the sim. (The remaining 2 seemed active, though.) The 2 that were accessible but didn't drop the user into a mall, had only 1 or 2 people on them, who were either talking privately or in the mall areas. And at least 4 of them, including the 1 that has not been mentioned yet, were filled with rules notecards which were obviously penned by very bitter admins. Yes, I know that you are tired of goreans in your sim, but don't lay into ever single new person who visits just because of that. (At least one also thought it was cute to play pranks on innocent visitors, such as rezzing gates in front of them.)

Now imagine that I am a newbie who just spend US$20 on fantasy avatars - as I am encouraged to - and found that was what was offered for the next step.

I hope you see the problem. Yes, the whole "it's my land so I can do what I want with it" applies, but the original point of the global rules of SL - the dwell, the ratings, etc - was to manipulate the definition of "what people want" so that they wind up producing, not only good land of their own, but an overall SL that is a desirable product. And it seems they've broken down in that regard.