Kill Stipends = Kill Second Life

But . . . that is the plan. LL has announced that they will sell Lindens themselves if they need to if the money gets tight.

Since they will make a profit off selling their own Lindens, I imagine they won't be too upset if they kill stipends and the money gets tight.

coco

Not necessarily - they may have had an idea, found it wasn't popular, and then.. well, how do you "try hard" to have another idea?



Well yes, but that's part of the problem - in most cases someone who invented something new or became known for providing a service would probably be making money too because the skills are pretty much the same. You also have to bear in mind that things can be defined subjectively, some people might not need to look good to enjoy themselves but would not enjoy looking worse than everyone else.

Some ideas just haven't been marketed enough. I have a build I spent a lot of time on that most people simply don't even know about. I made very little money off of it, but that was because I did very little work in actually spreading the word about it. If I tried harder, I will no doubt find a lot more people interested in it. Another way I could "try harder" is by coming up with other different ideas. Ask people what they want or need. Heck, even take up some comissions. Show off your old idea, and even if people don't want it, use it as an example of what you can do. And if all else fails, then stop playing this game to make $L, and tart playing it to socialize and build for your own enjoyment.



Well, if you don't enjoy looking worse than everyone else, you can either put in some $US on Lindex, practice to make your own builds look better, ask friends for favors, moap around in game being completely miserable about how bad you look, or leave. I guess it's pretty much like RL......

What are you talking about, Hiro?

It's not guaranteed that you'll find more people interested in any given idea. And most of the time, if you ask what people want, they'll say a) something that already exists, b) something that isn't possible, or c) "I'm not telling you my ideas because I might want to make them someday". (Yes, I've heard c) from at least a quarter of the people I've asked similar questions! )



But without either skills or L$, you wind up socializing only with people better off than you, and feeling like the poor relation. And I don't know if others can, but I certainly wouldn't enjoy building something that other people were only going to laugh at behind my back or cringe at the eyesore on their neighbouring plot. If no others are going to see it, there's no point using SL when I could use another 3D modeller where cubes don't turn into pyramids when you hollow them



Practice isn't a magic bullet, and again the US$ may well be bad value.

Get over it. Agree with her or not, Brace Coral has been an active and generous participant in SL. She has organized, taught, and provided land for classes geared toward newbs. The HELPING HAND guide for newbs is available courtesy of BC. She came in, said her piece, and stepped aside. You don't see her aguing with everyone who disagrees with her or calling them whiny babies or the like. I don't know her well, but our paths have occasionally crossed beginning with my first day in SL. I have always found her to be a class act; intelligent, gracious, giving, and funny as hell. Her tone? Oh man, that's what I'm going to miss most!

So if you've got anymore to say about stipends, keep on keeping on. But as far as your opinions on the OP (and that's Ms. OP to you), I have many words for you but I will limit myself to one:

HUSH!

TY Margaret, saved me the effort of writing that out myself.

*gasp* Jopsy! I'm ashamed of you! Brace Coral is pretty cool beans, good sir. If her OP seems a little "harsh", well, that's because of her tone on the removal of stipends. Besides, if it was really offensive, I don't think so many people would touch it with a ten foot pole. (I was about to say "no one", but that wouldn't be accurate.)

Now, back on topic. This is the reason why I tell newcomers after the removal of the basic stipend to keep their starting money and (if they need more) to buy it, or get an SL job to earn some. It's sad, but it's SLife.


Oy, this post came out longer than it was supposed to. :\ (Yay, passive sentence. vv)

Edit: Hmm, okay, now I think my real post seems to be off topic a bit. So sorry!

From what I understand, newbies no longer get any "starting money". They get $0 and stay that way... I think I was among the last to get the $250 they were giving out.

Sadly I very much agree with this. As good as some of the things are here, it's still on a hobby level. I honestly have yet to see anything inside SL that would be considered "good work" in any other game. The features just aren't there. Until Sl evolves to the point where the content made can stand on equal footing with the content provided by most other games out there, you're not going to find the people willing to pay for it.

Sorry, but it's very true.




This is correct. I recently had a friend try out SL but she left as quickly as she came, saying "If the only thing I can do as a new account is pay for money, what's the point of this place anyway?"

Are you advocating suicide as a valid solution to solving ones real life problems?

Fair enough question.

There will come a day when Linden Lab must either open source SL or release the software for servers as proprietary licensing. Linden Lab has acknowledged this, and basically everyone agrees this is a matter of time.

So then what about the economy? Let's look at some options:

1. Everyone uses the L$.

Eventually it so widely used it becomes a de facto currency. More and more scamming and exploiting will demand it be regulated. An independent party - more than likely the US Federal Government - will come in and ask to take control of the L$.

Now, I don't think this is so likely because getting everyone in the world to agree on using the L$ as a currency isn't likely. Other people may run servers and want a totally different economy, some may want totally different ways of controlling money. For example, an MMORPG could start up and demand that its money be different.

Given the complications with this option, I see it not going to happen, and people would rather default to real money backed by banks.

2. Linden Lab runs its own economy, other SL hosts run their own as they like.

The L$ will become more and more like game money, because it will be needed to translate to all other SL currencies. People won't want to use the L$ because it doesn't translate easy enough, or because it's simply not viable for big business.

3. The L$ collapses at some point and we go to credits that are a fixed-rate from the US$. More than likely eBay will step in and Paypal will run the L$. Stipends will be based simply on a fraction of your payment to Linden Lab / Paypal and will be the equivalent of buying L$ with US$ anyway.

...

Those are basically the scenarios can play out, barring LL being purchased, and then it's still another company figuring out which option to go with. In any event, in the long run stipends are pretty much looking trivial with the ability to buy L$.

(Hiya Squeedoo! )

To be fair, I have re-read the original post... and it still think both the tone and the message are insulting. To paraphrase what I heard in her message:
Brace may be a decent person in other aspects of her life her post here certainly did a poor job of reflecting it.

An interesting point... but I think that if LL ever does license/release the code and a server grids not managed by LL start cropping up that there are much larger issues than currency transfer to deal with between these 'nation states'. With independently managed asset servers you're going to have an exceptionally difficult time transfering objects and people from grid to grid, or trusting completely outside scripts etc.

I don't see why they couldn't run completely independently though. Likely as not the fragmentation would cause grids with specific themes to crop up, they'd have their own population base that would very likely NOT jump from grid to grid much if at all.

Exchanges may or may not crop up for smaller grids, but they'd tie to usd (or euro) instead of to the LL managed L$.

What part of this is confusing?

I understood you completely the first time, honest I did. No need to explain your perspective with an even more nasty interpretation, as if your original comments weren't bad enough. Could have said "Oops, my bad" and left it at that but you just had to come on back and justify yourself to make sure everyone knows how very "right" you are.

Whatever.

Squeedoo, you seem to be a most pleasant person and you obviously know Jopsy and have experienced his good side. Would you have time to work on the hush with him?

Margaret- Sorry ... I missed your post before replying to Squeedoo. Let me just say something that's slightly more sympathetic towards the OP, and then I'll hush. Seems sad, but true, that offensive posts get more follow-up than polite ones. Perhaps Brace was taking advantage of that to start something that would live on without her. I'm sorry I never got to see her better side.

Aww, Jopsy's a good egg as well. *hugs* USDA Grade A, I say!

I am a huge fan of Brace Coral, god bless her potty mouth. However, I do have to say, why do you get to dictate what Jopsy is allowed to say? Brace's initial post does come across pretty negatively. It actually made me laugh because it is vintage Brace, but to the uninitiated, it probably does come across as "I'm not going to read this shit anyway, but go ahead and disagree with me so I can see how stupid y'all are". It basically boils down to "Anyone who thinks stipends need to go away is a lame moron. Discuss!".

Beyond all of that, Brace wouldn't tell someone expressing their opinion of her to hush. On the contrary, she would tell them to bring it, but not to chip their nails as it's just SL and not worth any of this nonsense.

PS - I don't want stipends to go away completely. However, even someone with limited understanding of economics has to recognize that 50,000,000L$ coming into the economy every month, with only a small portion of that going back out, is unsustainable. The larger SL grows, the worse the problem gets. Something has to be done to bring the balance to healthier levels for the economy. What that thing is, I do not know, but then I am not an economist.

is it dead yet?

hush.

Yes, we have all moved to IMVU. SL est mort. Vive le SL!

http://avatars.imvu.com/Niccolino

(Niccolino is my middle name in case you wondered).

Now be nice and send me gifts for my avatar. Kthnxbye.

Hmm... I just got an idea for another approach to this whole topic... tell me what you think of it, I'm still thinking this through and am not really sure about how this would affect SL. It's just an idea and it might be utterly stupid (especially the numbers are just guesses).

Instead of giving people Lindens each week, LL could replace the stipends with the ability to own (more) land without having to pay for it... like 52sqm for basic account users and additional 512 sqm for premium account holders. Combine that with the introduction of a "land renting system" that can be used by the people to rent out their free unused land holdings to other users for a fixed amount of cash (like 1L$ per 1sqm each week). This procedure should be automated: one player puts his 52sqm into a "pot" and gets 52L$ for each week he/she keeps them there. Another player enables a checkbox, types the amount of land he or she would like to rent (provided there is enough land in the "pot" and as long as the player pays the fee, the requested land is provided. I'm not sure about the consequences this would have but I'm pretty sure this would stir things up a little bit, especially the land market and LL's income through Land Use Fees.

I don't. His first comments stood without rebuke. It was the return (?) to the thread to express amazement that people were still posting in this thread and thus not sharing his opinion of Brace to which I responded. I answered his query by explaining that, whether they were in agreement or not, some reasons why the OP was not found to be so offensive to others that her thread should not be posted in. Which is what Jopsy was indicating; in other words, he was attempting to tell others where they should or should not post. I summed up by asking him to post on topic, as you have pointed out that Brace would certainly want him to do, and asked him to cease attacking the person, which the TOS spells out for him to do. A direct appeal to hush seemed gentler to me than pushing the red triangle. Although it would have afforded me anonymity and avoided the appearance in your eyes that I, instead of the TOS, was dictating what he could or could not post.

heh


I like that word. It's much softer than stfu, don't you think?

Right, exactly why currency will likely not get the attention it may deserve.


True, and though this is a side-topic, I think we'll see:
1. Companies establishing trust relationships - so LL and say, Yahoo grids perhaps would trust each others' stuff.
2. Linden Lab will try and put in place sufficient safeguards against hostile objects before allowing other people to run the software.
3. Other companies may pay Linden Lab to maintain entire grids with the same rules.
4. Even if items are restricted to a non-scripted transfer, people would still be able to explore, do building, and copy-and-paste scripts from one Metaverse Service Provider MSP to another.



Is every MSP going to have their own economists? I think this unlikely.


Disagree STRONGLY.

People will hear about cool things and want to see and experience them. New MSPs besides LL would have to provide connectivity to (some/most) other MSPs, especially as they are starting up and building a user-base. Why go to a grid where you can't transfer over to another grid's content?


That's a decent point, but if the rest of the world is running on some hard-tied currency, and that became a default, why would people on LL's servers accept the L$? LL server residents would not be able to take their wealth into other realms.