Expanding the SL Economy

I most enjoy going to places where there is some conversation with some folks ive met before and some i have not. I really think that many times all the bells and whistles are not needed. A welcoming location, with some folks committed to making it work, some shops, apts etc are much more inviting than a barren corporate sim.

In my view, LL is missing the boat and alienating alot of companies by presenting the "buy and island - make tons of money" method for entering SL. I frankly think that Ben & Jerry's was ripped off by their SL consultants by making a huge bizarre looking sim where you collect cow poop as a game. If they had been coached to open a Ben & Jerry's store on every corner, they would have gotten much more exposure. But, LL and their chosen developers push the "buy and island" thing to make money.

I believe that a much more integrated approach, whether it be for a club or a gadget shop, is the way to go. Make desirable locations, bring in good businesses with interesting items, displays, etc...and most of all make people want to come back because they connect with someone.

BTW - my business on all levels is growing consistently since i started in Sept. 07. So, it can be done.

For some people it can never be cheap enough. It doesn't matter that they will still probably spend more camping than it will to purchase L. I spoke with someone who complained about the dollar versus their own currency, which is weaker than the US dollar, and was just blown away. What difference does it make? The value of the L is pegged at a certain rate to the US dollar. It doesn't matter what the exchange rate is, whatever you would have to pay in your own currency per dollar is what you ultimately pay, plus whatever currency conversion fees. With the weak dollar, it should be easier to purchase more L. Unless their currency is falling even harder than ours, I wouldn't expect to hear the complaint.

I'm probably in a minority, but that's the last thing I want to see. I don't want to see Ben and Jerry's, or Coca Cola, or Starbuck's on every corner in SL. There is enough of that in RL. I much rather the Corporates are on their own sims, where I can avoid them.

Their stuff is even more tasteless in SL.

Oooh.. maybe that's the point!. We can't judge 'em!

I would tell a RL company to open a sandbox. Something residents actually need and will visit.

i would really like to see the development of true anime avatars... skins, shapes, clothes, products all exisiting in a cartoon town...

It doesn't matter what businesses are developed. IF the platform isn't stable, functionally consistent and accessible to as wide a range of potential users as possible, an econmy can't thrive.

1- I meant maybe residents from Central & South America, the poorer countries in Europe (former eastern block), parts of Asia.....it soon tallys up. Brasilians for instance are the 2nd or 3rd largest community in SL. (average monthly salaries around 500 USD or less)

2- Yesterday I saw a bunch of mainland plots being sold at 4.8 L

3- A lot of RP sims i've visited, look amazingly beautiful especially the archictecture. By contrast most Malls look messy and dull. Its just a preference i guess. A reduction of tiers or discount might be an incentive for some SIM developers to create beautiful looking Sims open to the public......without the need of having it subsidised by having a Mall or a series of Shops or sub-letting part of their lands. Just a thought. I love exploring when i have a bit of time and finding beautiful gems (SIMS)......i recently stumbled across a SIM called Timeless. (Worth having a look at)

Essentially..

It all depends on what you mean by "expanding" the SL economy.

Do you mean bringing in more US$?
Do you mean bringing in more creators?
Do you mean creating more innovative products?

On a few notes:

- SL has never, ever, had venture capital, even while the banks were in full force. They offered interest but they didn't make loans. There were _sponsorships_ for a while, though. (They might still exist, actually.)

- The "chainstore makeover" is arguably an inevitable part of the capitalist model - avoiding it would require quite a bit of re-engineering of the current way SL's economy works.

- Lowering tier prices is very controversial because it would mean that every land trader on SL would have to redo their entire cost structure!

How about increasing the number of online users...thus catching up to what we already have in-world. Land is a good example.....and we too much of everything else as well. (clubs, shops, malls etc etc)

The cow poop game was fun. It made the Ben & Jerry's sim one of the more interesting corporate ad sims.

That's almost down to what I bought a 3000m2 of waterside land in Kuula back in 2005. The 6-8L$ target (which may no longer be LL policy) is an average. Clearly some land will be more than the average, just as some will be less.



How about this? Let people buy single OpenSpace (void) sims without having to own a full priced sim first? That would allow much more creativity, at a lower cost (though with a more limited prim count).

I agree, and my friend Gypsy is doing just that.

Any sane economy needs an effective dispute resolution system. The dispute resolution system would address not just merchant vs. merchant disputes, but merchant vs. customer disputes.

Without a dispute resolution system, the risk of any transaction becomes so enormously high that a lot of transactions just don't take place. The only way to minimize risk is to make tiny purchases and avoid unfamiliar products (or just not participate).

The lack of a dispute resolution system, I think, is the main reason that the SL economy is the cesspool that it is. It's why SL markets function nothing like one would expect, when compared to modern US or European markets, for example. (For real world analogs, maybe the SL economy looks something much like Russian economy circa 1990.)

Edit: I'll add that the OP noted that things like gambling, unregulated banking, and escorting are all down or out. Funny thing about those three industries- they are all kinds of activities people do without any expectation that there is a dispute resolution system to help them out. If you get screwed when participating in gambling, loansharking, or prostitution, you don't expect the law to help you out when you get screwed on a transaction. Industries which thrive despite the high risk that come with the transactions. Maybe that's a clue.

Many of the points here are very good, but I'd add that the homogenisation of the grid may also be partly responsible.

The problem is that with the current land model, it's relatively rare to see areas of land developed that are designed to have things appealing to only a few people. Everyone wants to make back their tier, and the way to do that is to appeal to everyone (if you can) and then run a mall. Most of the things of limited appeal are designed around closed groups of friends, and while it's great that's possible, any number of people who otherwise could have been interested can wind up left out (not by any deliberate action, but simply because they haven't happened to bump into any of the people in the group)

The problem is that this percieved limited range of activities propagates all the way up. Anime avatars are a great example. Why are there avatars for Bleach, Naruto etc, but not other series? Because those series are focused on fighting and, by using scripted combat systems, you can fight.

It's not just that those systems do regular things and call it fighting - those systems do implement tactics and consequences and they have the correct "feel". A good example of where that doesn't work so well is magic - all the magic items that I've ever seen in-world have no magic "feel" at all, as they just do things that are standand on SL, they don't work for fighting (which is what most of them seem to be designed for) because - with one exception - they don't support any tactics, and you know that anyone else can buy one and do exactly the same as you. I wish I could think of a better way of doing this (in fact I was trying to make a better magic system myself at one point) but I can't.

So why is this happening - bluntly because it's a big risk... I'm sure many people are familiar with the chicken-and-egg problem of any new business, even a simple club, of "nobody is here, so when someone comes they are alone, so there is nothing to do, so they leave, so nobody is here". Trying to break through that problem with something more complex along these lines that make take months to develop only to find it isn't popular is going to be difficult, and it's even more so because most of the popular themes on SL don't have just one item. SL's content model really encourages people to "toe the line" of what's popular because if they break away, suddenly no content is available, and although they can make it themselves it'll be a lot of work to have less content of lower quality and that'll obviously make the person stand out as "weird".

There might be some money to be made making use of the embedded browser.

odesk.com does almost same thing for RL software development jobs.
(well, I don't sure how their 'guaranteed remote work' will work in case of SL,due to necessary of using SL client for many jobs)

A retail business in SL requires no startup capital. All the creation tools are free for all to use. There are even places that allow new retailers to post their items for sale for free. Store rental itself is nominal per week (for about US$10 you can rent a store space for about a month in many retail shopping areas. Additionally you can list on SLEXchange and Onrez.

That being said, it is a little late to get into the retail market because the demand has become static (or shrunk) as the population growth has slowed down. Without more residents as consumers there will be little growth in the retail market. Linden Lab needs to look at ways to increase this consumer base. More stability and better grid performance are key to this but it is really largely out of our hands as SL residents.

Grid Stabilization is paramount importance to keep older and new residents(hope the new CEO is reading this topic) coming back in. This also ties in with products working like their creators built them to. Borking up scripts is NOT helpful to the economy, nor does it encourage a creator/designer to keep their business going. How frustrating can it get to see your scripts keep malfunctioning and to have a long list of IM's and notecards from customers notifying you their item(s) won't work like it is supposed to? We all know of businesses who have given up just for this reason.

Orientation Island needs a large pool of volunteers, more Lindens and Mentors to be there around the clock. The application process seems to be snail paced and discourages others who might want to apply. Most of the newbies I've talked to didn't seem to know anything at all. C'mon, the basics should be given to everyone who lands there. A course on courtesy should be a mandatory requirement, since so many problems could be lessened if a newbie had some facts. If we were asked what we thought would be useful information to give all newbies, it would be practicable and enhance the newcomers experience.

Land tier lowered doesn't always mean more malls or clubs. I think many would buy more land to have more space around their home or keep open water unbuilt on. Most of my friends mainly want more land for the prims, not to build on.

There have been some excellent suggestions made here and I hope that they will be read and given some serious thought by those who affect our experience in-world.

FPS is a good idea

I would be inclined to play, as I do play ut n' I often thought ..man this sim would make a great map for UT... but that would require a lot of cpu power and fps.. you know the way SL runs now I doubt it could do it.

I am not a good role player in the fact I lack the skills to translate into text what I am doing feeling etc. so shoot em up is cool with me.. no descriptive skills needed.

9 months ago when I first signed on to SL there was NO ONE to help me at OI. It took me 2 hours to figure out things there..(no experience about any thing like SL before) I met a avatar and we went through it together but neither of us knew a thing! I kept walking around in circles...

And I gotta say these so called mentors you got floating around world are mostly a joke. I asked one once a question and got laughed at and ignored.. so.. how about some people there who actually CARE!

The problem with helping on OI is that the mentor still has to use the regular SL chat interface to help. If the new player doesn't understand it - and it's entirely possible (and understandable) that they wouldn't - there's pretty much nothing they can do. For example, most new people don't have the chat history window open, so they only see the mentor's speech as a message that appears fleetingly, so they miss it and wonder whot's going on. Then, most don't know how to reply. Or they immediately wonder who is talking to them, and want to find them, and don't know how to do that, and so on..

Apparantly the Lindens found out in a survey that most people preferred NOT having mentors on OI, so for a while they were advising them not to go there. The problem is that the HIs - which were meant for that purpose - are now barely used and are spread out far too much. There are 10+ help islands which means that if there are 3 or 4 mentors "on duty" they can't possibly cover them all, especially when there are maybe 1 or 2 users on each, so you either follow them around making them feel uncomfortable (a bad idea) or you teleport between help islands (which, thanks to an ongoing bug, ruins your Home setting)

I think the state of affairs within America has a lot to do with with problems of 2nd Life. Please don't hate me for saying this ppl, just one mans opinion is all.

But the internet is all about freedom. There are PG areas and Mature areas in 2nd life. Sex in all its forms is allowed in 2nd life. An underage minor could pretend to be an adult and goto a mature area where there are orgies and sex machines etc which can be very graphic and disturbing to a minor. Yet these are not banned! GAMBLING HOWEVER is banned! Does anyone else see this as supremely odd?!?

I think that there should be more protection against minors accessing Mature areas definetley but not at the expense of us ADULTS trying to make our first fortune with Gambling and or Non Gambling game machines. It is every adults FREEDOM whether they gamble or not. And it seems the only reason it isnt allowed is because the amazing creators of 2nd life find themselves in the unfortunate position of having their HQ in a US state that outlaws gambling. (the land of the free ahem)

Anyway, what i'm saying is that with the money that linden labs makes, is it not at all possible to counteract this problem for the good of the community and of course themselves. Maybe by moving the main base of operations abroad to say London or somewhere else in Europe or even a US state where gambling is ok. Or maybe even fighting the courts to say that the gambling rules should not apply to as the people using the service are from all the world etc. Sorry if I sound bitter. I am not bitter in the slightest. I love 2nd life and it has provided me with the opportunities in life to earn money that I never would of had otherwise. But it does anger me when things are over ruled to the extent that people in the world can't have their freedom due to just one state in the US and their rules. Does that make sense? Hope so.

Anyway, long llive 2nd life and the opportunities it gives to the new generation of computer users. please dont let the big multinational companies come and kick us outta the way and turn it into 3d facebook!!!!! Thats why we all come here. To escape the 1st life remember!!

I thought that the US as a whole outlawed internet-based gambling. Moreover, unregulated gambling as on SL (nobody checks that the slot machine script pays out, ever) has always been suspicious generally.

However, I believe that the gambling ban was more to do with the statement that _banks_ started refusing transactions to known Internet gambling companies. As an example, triplejack.com was denied the ability to take PayPal payments because they are an online poker game, even though they don't use a real money betting model.

This is really a tangent and I don't want it to threaten to derail this thread so let me make it clear and hopefully put this to rest. Like so many other residents of SL, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act works and how far reaching it is. The subject for enforcement is not internet gambling site operators but the financial institutions that allow themselves to act as conduits for the flow of money to such operators. A bank that is subject to United States jurisdiction (by having accounts and offices in the United States) is not going to allow money to fund from any of its account holders to a site operator that might be covered under the statute. You could move Linden Lab to the moon and it would not make a difference because the money has to come from a bank that is ultimately subject to sanctions by the US federal government.