Tragedy of the commons

Raise your hand if you think the economy is screwed up here.
Money appears out of thin air in your pocket every week and people think its normal. Not only that, but without doing anything in particular other than flying around and chatting, your stipend will increase because of ratings.

So, basically, we have guaranteed, constantly increasing amounts of welfare? Groovy!
Tell me, how can we afford to pay so many people this huge amount of welfare? Where does the money come from?

In real life, the economy doesnt work like that, and for very good reasons:
An economic system is a means of distributing our limited resources among ourselves.
SL has very limited resources... but unlimited money!

Anyone know how many prims we can fit on a sim? My guess is about 10000. This is very very low!
The economy here is supposed to limit people's ability to fill up the sims, but its just not working because everyone gets free money all the time.

$100000 will fill up an entire sim with prims, denying everyone else the possibility of building.
$100k is by no means an astronomical, unattainable amount of money, and if you divide it by 5 peeps its only $20k.
If you look at the leader board some people have gained more than $20k in a single week!
I think that your prim quota for a sim should have a hard limit, depending on the amount of land you own there.
Also, Supply and Demand 101:
We have a fixed supply of 10000 prims and more people moving into a given server, or more people building, means that Demand is increasing. Therefore, as Demand increases, so should prices. But this isnt so, every prim costs the same in rez and taxes independently oh how many prims you own already.

What we have here is a classic "Tragedy of the commons": a situation where people are free to make use of a common resource.
If we are selfish and try to get as much as possible, the resources will be exhausted.
But, if each of us took into account the good of the whole and limited prim use to a fair amount, the resources would be enough for everyone.

So people, please, if you want to make an object with a complex decoration dont draw it with prims, use a texture!
And if you're in a crowded server please delete some of your objects and do your neighbors a favor.
Thank you.

If you just fly around and talk to people your stipend may go up. But your stipend is only applied to your taxes and to getting you back up to the base $3500.

Now, if you are just flying around talking to people, you are not consuming much in the way of server resources, which is really what money represents.

If you start putting objects in the world and buying land then you are taxed on them. Your stipend represents the amount of prims and land you are entitled to just for being a paying user of SL. If you increase your stipend via ratings, you are showing that you are an active participant in SL and deserve a greater alotment of resources.

So there is no free money. You stipend helps with tax. If you have no objects, you pay no tax and the stipend does nothing for you (except maybe getting you back up to $3500)

In addition to what WG said.....

Your premise is incorrect. There is not a limited supply of money. Rather we have what you are talking about.

You seemed to skip the entire side everyone complains about - the taxes!

There is a general pool of money that represents the resources available in the world. When you use those resources (upload stuff, rez objects, buy land) it takes your money!

The stipend is a way of saying 'You pay for this game, you deserve this many system resources each week."

The bonus system and vote booths represent a way to move the resources around a little. When you vote for someone or rate them you are saying 'Hey I like your stuff, I like what you add to the world, I like what you do with your resources. I think you should get more resources"

Theotrically this makes it so the people who influence the world in the ways liked by most get the money to influence the world more. You do stuff people like and you can do more of it.

WEDNESDAY:
"If you just fly around and talk to people your stipend may go up."
That's exactly what I said. So?

"But your stipend is only applied to your taxes and to getting you back up to the base $3500."
And why is this incompatible with what I said? This gives you unlimited funds.
If you can only go up to $3500 each week you can "only" support 3500 prims with it, which is 35% of a server.
Do you think we should have a sim for every 3 people here?

"Now, if you are just flying around talking to people, you are not consuming much in the way of server resources"
Unless, of course, you're wearing a spiked armor with so many prims that it takes up 4% of a server, like this guy i met yesterday. Plus I meant that as not doing anything useful, like a shop or something, but merely building things for yourself.

AMA:
"Your premise is incorrect."
Who is incorrect, and what was the premise?

"There is not a limited supply of money."
That's what I said, unlimited money.

"Rather we have what you are talking about"
Who?

"You seemed to skip the entire side everyone complains about - the taxes! "
Confucius says, He who complains about taxes, has far too much stuff already.

"When you vote for someone or rate them"
I dont know what game you have been playing but in my version of SL most people meet, exchange cards, rate each other positive, and THEN start talking. Especially the newer residents. Hmm actually skip the talking, I've been rated and carded by dozens of people I never even talked to, just because I happened to be in the same event as they were.

People also usually vote for everyone they know or even those they dont know. There is no such thing as "I like your stuff" for most peeps. It's just something they do.


Are any of you familiar with the term "Denial of Service"?
I think it should be against the rules to have a small number of people with a small amount of land have such an excessive number of prims that it clogs up an entire server, preventing those who move in and buy a decent plot of land from building anything.
Right now, there is absolutely nothing preventing people from clogging up a server by buying a single square of land and filling it with very small prims.

Look, I'm not complaining about some people having too much money and others not having enough.
I'm complaining because when I got to Da Boom it was at 100% prim usage and I couldnt even rez my hat, even though I had 1/12th of the land in it.
It got to 80% when they wiped old user's accounts, but now it's getting near 100% again.
When I see people having silly decorative objects that serve no useful purpose and are composed of well over 100 prims, I can't help but think that 100 prims would be enough for me to build an entire house.
I believe there should be something to prevent this kind of thing from happening, namely, a guarantee that if I buy a huge plot of land I will have the prim quota to populate it.

Well shoot. Typo on my part should read:

"There is not an unlimitted supply of money."

Sorry I wrote that when I was supposed to be working (sshhhh don't tell anyone).

There is a limited supply of money.

It is tied to the available resources.

Stipends and bonuses are a way of dividing up the available resources.

The money does not get made out of thin air.

And I don't care what confucious said, at least in this case, you can't discuss the economy and ignore half of it. Specifically when it is that half you are ignoring that does what you are asking for.

The taxes are what limit what people can build and how much.

The stipend and bonuses are supposed to be a way to give more resources to the people that make the world a better place according to other users. I said thoretically in the first post, I am not ignorant of what people really do and never claimed I thought the system worked. In fact if you looked up economy on these boards you would probably find over 100 of my posts. It is supposed to be a democratic system. Rather than lindens going around and just awarding $$, and thus resources, to what they like, they are trying to give us a way to decide what we like.

And the truth is that the system people use of just voting and rating for more or less random people hurts everyone. Your bonus comes out of a pool of money. The portion of that pool is decided by how many votes you have in comparison to everyone else, or the total of all votes. If you own 1% of all ratings then you get 1% of that pool. You go and vote for random people then you are giving them a larger piece of that pool of money. Now it works if they give you a rating in return because then you both have relatively more votes compared to other people.

Confucious also said one mans trash is another mans treasure. Or something. But just because you don't think that object is worth 100prims doesn't mean the owner agrees with you. The owner is paying $$, which does represent server resources, and is not unlimited. They are paying $1,000 to put it in world and at least $100 a week to keep it there.

"If you just fly around and talk to people your stipend may go up."
That's exactly what I said. So?

You said your cash will go up, I said stipend, they're different.

"But your stipend is only applied to your taxes and to getting you back up to the base $3500."
And why is this incompatible with what I said? This gives you unlimited funds.

No, it gives you $3500 a week and some tax coverage. If you are paying no taxes, and building nothing, you could give the money away, that's your choice, that's the money you get for being a paying customer. But...

If you can only go up to $3500 each week you can "only" support 3500 prims with it, which is 35% of a server.
Do you think we should have a sim for every 3 people here?

A prim costs $10 to rez, so you could have 350 objects, or one sim for every 30 people, which is not so unreasonable BUT, then next week you have to pay taxes on those 350 objects, and one assumes you have some land to keep those on, so you have to pay tax on that too. So you probably wouldn't be able to build another 350 prims, somewhat less. Eventually, depending on your rating, you will hit the balance point where you have just enough stipend to cover your taxes and no extra. Then if you keep building you will become insolvent and won't be able to build anymore.


"Now, if you are just flying around talking to people, you are not consuming much in the way of server resources"
Unless, of course, you're wearing a spiked armor with so many prims that it takes up 4% of a server, like this guy i met yesterday. Plus I meant that as not doing anything useful, like a shop or something, but merely building things for yourself.


Attachments cost the same to rez any other prim, and I believe you still have to pay taxes on them. Plus, attachments are automatically phantom, so they are not so hard on the sim.

I'm not saying the economy's perfect, I'm just trying to point out that it's not careening madly out of control as you suggest.

The problem is that you can't stockpile money by just holding onto your stipends for a couple of months. The stipend pays for your taxes, and you'll either pay the rest of the taxes out of pocket or get the rest of the stipend -- IF you have less than $3500, and even then you only get enough to take you up to $3.5K. So, if you decide to abstain from spending money for 3 months in order to save up for your fantastic floating castle in the sky, you'll have ... $3500.

The only way for your net worth to increase is to slowly invest money in prims, so that you don't go outside your means, and at that rate, no one has to worry about suddenly overloading one of the servers with thousands of primitives.

Entirely untrue. You can make and sell clothes, furniture, weapons, art, or gizmos. You can make a gambling game and put it in either of my Arcades or the Atlas Casino. You can offer services. You can host events (you get $500 for hosting the event and $500 to cover any prizes you give away last I checked). You can work on Resident Work Projects which pay very well. There are LOTS of ways to earn money besides sitting on your arse waiting for your stippend, more than I have mentioned. Go out and contribute to the world in a way people are willing to pay for.

I think one of the main things people are missing here is the fact that NO ONE WOULD GO OUT AND BUILD 3500 DOLLARS WORTH OF PRIMITIVES. That would be considered cluttering the area, unless they are building some massive castle or mansion. While in theory your right Eggy, in practice, it doesn't happen like that. Just like the economy IRL, things just happen to work out. Since we get the base stipend until we have 3500-4500 dollars (i've heard 4500 dollars somewhere), that allows us to continue getting money to contribute more to the world. Most people don't want to sit there and build clothes and textures and such just to make money. With the stipend, people can continue playing after their inital money is gone.

The stipend also keep prices down on services and goods. Can you imagine how much money a t-shirt would be if the person who made it wasn't getting a stipend. Most of the outfits and shirts in the world don't really make much money, because everyone is building their own stuff. I payed aphrodite 20 bucks for a t-shirt, imagine how much she could have charged me if she hadn't gotten a stipend. A simple t-shit could cost us upwards of 100 dollars, because people need to make their money back after their taxes are taken.

I guess the main point i'm saying is that the stipend system is a good idea, because it allows us to have money. The more money we spend, we can be assured that more will come back within the week. And the fact that there is a roof on the stipend system also helps keep people from hoarding money.

Untrue. If you are caught banking objects, the lindens politely ask you to delete said objects, and then if you don't delete them for you. However this is only applies to obvious banks, i.e. rooms full of really tiny primitives.

I dont know what you peeps majored in but basic calculus will show you that if you get 3500 a week you will build up to 3500 objects. Taxes just make you build at a slower rate every week.
1st week you build 350 prims, then you build 315(because of the $35 tax), then you build 285, (...) but if your money keeps regenerating you will always be able to build, until all your money goes to taxes.And if you are NOT dependent on stipend it's even worse and you can fill up a server relatively fast. You can make a huge tower of a house and fill it with pretty 100 prim furniture and clog up the entire server's object quota on a relatively small piece of land.
Look, I dont care about any of your arguments, fact of the matter is that Da boom has around 40% Land Occupation and over 90% Object Usage, which means that people there are using over twice as much as their fair share of prims and that people moving in will not be able to build. Against facts there are no possible arguments.

hmm if they have the stipend to cover their taxes(i.e. they have 'earned'(use the term loosely) that amount of resources) then why shouldn't they?

just for semantics(and you know this, given your previous post) it does not cost 3500 to 'build' 3500 objects. it cost that to maintain them from week to week(probably more depending on height from ground and size). It costs 35k to 'build' 3500 objects

This is not a good sign.



If you had simply posted that Da Boom was near its object usage limit, no one would have -- or could have -- argued. But you started by arguing a thesis, and people responded to your argument.

Yeah, that's true, but I'm talking about a simple case, the one Eggy is speaking about, where it's assumed that prims only have their intrinsic value, and nothing more -- not useful for being sold, attracting people, etc.

And why, may I ask? I havent heard a single well formed logical argument. You're all acting as if I was some sort of noob who misunderstood the economy, and are thus trying to explain to me how *well* it works when I have seen that it *doesnt*, and I *suffer* on a daily basis its effects. It is exactly *because* I understand the economy very well that I can see the problem with it.


My point here is that what is happening in Da Boom, can and will happen in any other sim, because the economy is flawed in such a way that its not only possible but LIKELY that a small portion of a sim's users and land will deprive everyone else of resources.
People in the real world do not pay a measly 10% taxes, and neither do they expect to be able to have a gigantic mansion, beautifully decorated with fireplaces and fountains and whatnot.
Why are people so vain and greedy here?
Does it really matter that your virtual house has objects X Y and Z taking up prim quota if you're hardly ever there?
Looking around my bedroom I am hard pressed to find a single decorative object. I have a bed and a bedside table with a lamp, a computer on a desk and an old rocking chair to sit at the computer. A bunch of scattered papers and CDs and also my cat
These are all things I need on a daily basis, except, perhaps, my annoying cat who is always on the wrong side of the door
If you're hardly ever around your house, or even online, why must you leave things around to lag the place for everyone else?
I dont know how many of you ever heard about Game Theory but object usage is a zero-sum game, while a real economy would not.
In a real economy, the population of a sim/country would be producing value with their builds which would GROW the economy and add more resources to the sim/country.
In the SL economy, maximum resources are fixed, and whenever you use them, whenever you rez an object you are depriving someone else of that same amount of rezing, and lagging the server. Whenever you build something, even though it might be pretty and useful, you are also dimishing the SL experience for the rest of us.
I think that if you want to have a party at your place you could very well rez the necessary chairs in 5 seconds.
The problem with this is that people get a free stipend that pays their taxes and so its the logical behaviour to milk that stipend for all its worth and keep a lot of stuff rezzed so you will get more money next week.
If we have a global object limit, shouldnt we also have an individual object limit?
Shouldnt someone that wants to take up the entire object quota in a sim, also be forced to pay for the entire land in the entire sim, given that he will render that land entirely *useless* by making it entirely *impossible* to build there? Entirely so.
It is only logical that you have an object quota tied to the amount of land you own. If you want 10% of the prim quota, pay for 10% of the land, if you want 90% of the prim quota, pay for 90% of the land. Other people have rights too, you know.
Now, I dont know who is doing it and what objects they have, but Da Boom is nearly empty, but misteriously full of objects.
This is a weird occurence that indicates something is wrong with the system and thus something should be done about it, either to the rules, or to those responsible.

1) The stipend comes out of a pool of sorts, why do you think everyones stipends plummeted for a while there? Money hoarding and whatnot will kill the economy.

2) I'm pretty sure DaBoom was one of the first Mature areas, plus it's really close to the welcome area.

3) Why build a house? You don't eat, you don't sleep. a shop, I understand building, but a home serves little purpose.

4) Have you ever asked these people to remove these items (It has to be done uber-politly, because everyone will already be high strung about the sim being laggy)?

5) This entire post was meant to be non-confrontational, I would prefer any and all responses to remain as such. You've met me... I'm calm and all that...

I don't understand why you're rebelling against the concept of people making objects and placing them in world for viewing. It sounds like if it were up to you, the landscape would be wiped of wasteful (decorative) objects and replaced with spartan cubes for people to live in.

Land is constantly being added to the grid as the user-base expands. If one sim gets too full for your liking, pack up and move to a new one, instead of griping about it and doing nothing to further your condition.

Also, as I remember a Linden saying, lag usually isn't created by objects; it's more subtle things like broken scripts or bogged-down physics simulations.

Dio,
I already know and understand what you have said.
With regards to your second point there, have you read what I wrote?
I know all about Da boom. I've owned land there since April.
Fact of the matter is, most people and HOUSES disappeared with the wipe, but the lag and insane levels of object usage did not.
I've only ever seen 4 or 5 of Da Boom's residents, hence my remark about people having a fancy house for vanity's sake, taking up prim quota and never being used.
Also, I don't actually KNOW who is taking up all the prim quota, or how. I usually don't go poking around other people's houses when they're away.
With regards to 3), I don't know if it was intentional, but that's remarkably similar to what I say all the time. I fully agree. People who want their silly mansions with 8754 prims should be forced to live in the default cabin for a month to get an idea of what a normal house should look like in SL.
4) The people there don't like me very much, it seems. They think my Disco will force them to shut down their stores, as if I was this gigantic corporate shark like Walmart or something. They also complain about the noise, since there is no way of sound proofing a building in SL as far as I know.
Finally, if any of you see my posts as confrontational, you dont know me very well. If I was annoyed at any of you I would probably have muttered something about the "utter cluelessness of the stupid twits surrounding me", as I often do IRL. Given that I'm an educated person living in a country with record-breaking illiteracy, this shouldn't come to you as a surprise
A lot of ppl here don't even know how to READ, and the vast majority didnt go beyond 4th grade, since that was the only mandatory schooling we had for a very long time.

Schwartz, et al,
I am not rebelling against any concept.
I am not rebelling period.
I have simply stated that:
A) It is possible(due to design flaws in the economy) and likely(due to human nature) that a single person or small group of people will (ab)use the resources of a server, filling up the object usage without buying much land, and therefore rendering the rest of the land useless, since no one would be able to build there..
B)I define this (ab)use as raising, unnecessarily, the object usage by building too many and/or too complex objects, possibly to go beneath the 3500 limit and get some extra cash, or merely for vanity's sake.
C)I dont know where you've been for the past month or so, but I was picked by the Lindens to be the disco manager in Da Boom's "Alt-Zoom Disco". I cant move, as much as I would want to, but that is BESIDE the point.
D)The point is that Da Boom is usually pretty empty(40% land usage) but still has, mysteriously, between 90% and 100% object usage. See A)
E)I also believe that you SHOULD NOT, in any way, diminish other people's SL experience, namely, by filling the world with objects so that other people will not be able to build.
F)Therefore, I propose, that in order to prevent people from overusing resources, we should tie a person's prim quota to their land ownership, so that no bit of land shall be rendered useless for building purposes. People with big plots of land would get to build a lot of stuff, while people with small plots of land would build less. It's only fair, right?

I don't understand why people have such a hard time understanding me here. It seems that they can't be bothered to read everything I wrote, and enjoy nitpicking about stuff that I havent even mentioned, instead of arguing for or against my main points.

I was merely responding to one statement in your premise which were incorrect: I mistyped and caused confusion. This is why people may think you don't understand the economy as well as you claim. Because the fact that there is not unlimited money is a core component of the economy.

As for your other ideas they may have some merit. However there are some cases that I don't think they account for.

- Joint projects where only one person owns the land
- Building in a sim where you own no land
- Buying lots of land, building lots of objects and then selling the extra land.

I can see a way where taxes scale up the closer you get to your limit, up to double when past it .... that way you could build on land you don't own, it just costs more. But not all objects have $1 tax so the order you build could effect your fin

There are two problems I see with all this though:

Predictability. One already existing problem with the economy is predictability - being able to forecast how you can and can't spend your money. This would make it worse I think.

Complexity. The more complex a situation or system the more likely failure and bugs become, as well as general confusion. The economy is already too complicated. I have yet to meet someone in game for less than a month who really understands what is happening with their money.

Another reason you are getting such opposition is you are basically asking for tighter controls and a tighter economy while there is more than one thread about how people don't have the money to do what they want and theink they should have more money and the ability to create more things.

Hope that clears up my position.

I don't think anyone has really missed your point here Eggy. But I also don't believe that there should be a prim limit set either. If someone wants to make something that would involve a lot of prims, more power to them. But hoarding should not take place. Why don't you snoop around Da Boom and see if you can find anyone hoarding prims, huh? Or call a linden in to snoop around. That's what they're there for, to help make your experience better. Setting a prim limit will just make people crazier, and we'll end up with a flame war on the forum and in-game, because someone can't finish their building. Rather than making a rule that will affect how the game is played, call a linden in to do the snooping for you, and they will more than likely be able to handle the situation.

Ama, thank you for clearing that up.
My idea of "unlimited money" stems primarily from the "regeneration factor" introduced by the stipend.
Imagine that you start out with 3500 "life points" and that while battling a beast you lose some every round.
If you have regenerating armor, depending on how much you lose per round, you can prolong the battle endlessly.
If you gain more or the same amount points that you lose per round, the battle will go on endlessly.
Same goes for cash. If you follow a spending pattern such that your money will always be replenished, or even increased, by your stipend, you effectively have unlimited money.
This does not mean that you will eventually reach a million dollars in cash or net worth, it just means that over time you have the ability to spend a million dollars, or more, because it's always being replenished.


This can easily be dealt with by subtracting from the prim quota of the place you're building on, rather than your own.

This is also far from insurmountable.
You can deal with this in many ways, by imposing either a hard limit or a soft limit.
Either you will simply not be allowed to sell land below your prim usage, or you may go into the negative for a while, after which your newer objects will start to decay. In case you dont notice the decay happening to your objects, you could also get a periodic message, say, once a day, warning you about your prim quota so that you could correct the situation.


This is also a good idea IMHO.


Oh, no, please dont ask for predictability. I once played a game, about a year ago, called archspace, where the rules were fully and mathematically predictable.
I mastered it in a month simply by remembering my statistics classes and calculating the best possible way to play the game.
Then I got sick of it and never went back.


A good game takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master.
Don't worry so much about the noobs. They have their whole life ahead of them to understand, or not, the inner workings of SL. This is definitely not a game that you "play through" and discard, since there is no ending.


Well yes, and all children want is to play computer games, eat their lollypops and never worry about their homework.
We all want a lot but never pause to think if our demands are realistic.
Of course there should be one heck of a lot tighter controls on what people can or cant do. Talk to the Liaisons one of these days and ask them how painful it is to deal with all the people and their conflicting expectations of the game.
Of course there will always be people wanting to build an empire. I myself have often felt frustrated at the technical limits imposed on us.
As I have said before, my first object was a chair that took up 50 prims, and when I made 8 of them I raised the object usage by 4%. I was shocked that the limit was so low.
But we have to be pragmatic and acknowledge that what the average user here pays monthly is a pittance, especially in the USA, and servers cost a LOT of money.
My website is hosted on a Cobalt RaQ 3 and we do have disk space and bandwidth utilization limits, so that all the other people on the server can get their fair share as well.
The lowest base price for such a server is $1,500.00... and don't get me started on bandwidth. The prices for business quality lines are insane even toward the lower end solutions.
For $14.95 a month you simply shouldn't feel entitled to a whole lot of stuff, and you certainly shouldnt expect to be able to build unrestrictedly whatever comes to your mind. We pay more than that for cable, water, power, phone, anything.
I've had dinners more expensive than that

The trouble is that I don't think your demands are realistic, especially not retroactively.

I don't think there is any such thing as a perfect economy. After all the word "economize" means that there is something that I want, but that I can't have *shudder*, at least not when I want it (NOW!).

There have been several attempts to "do the math" in this thread, but the problem is that parts of the economy are intentionally undocumented. So we can't be sure if the economy is inflationary (more money floating around than things to buy) or deflationary (things going unused because nobody can afford them).

In SL, as in the real world, there is more to the economy than just counting the number of paper bills and coins floating around.

In the real world if someone invented a shoe box sized gadget that would generate as much power as you could use and all you had to put in each day was a small piece of cheese our economy would change overnight. Fortunes would be gained an lost, and while it is hard to imagine the end result as being bad, it would clearly be disruptive for a while.

I *think* that is what we are dealing with here. Every time a new user signs up or a SIM is added, every time a new object is rezed, every time a script runs, and every time an object decays and vanishes that delicate balance changes a bit. Marginal adjustments to the economy that may "fix" a shortage now may not have the same effect as the total size of the economy grows. An economy is like an ecosystem, the larger it gets, the less effective "tinkering" with it is.

On the other hand TOMORROW they might discover some residual piece of debugging code that is slowing the SIMS down by 50 percent. Removing that code would allow for twice as many objects and no adjustments to the economy would be needed. We also don't KNOW for a fact that the object limits are set at an optimum value. Maybe they could be doubled now without major impact.

As far as server costs: I think blade style servers are down around $500. Servers these days don't need sound, video, or even their own disk components (although you would obviously have to have a disk drive somewhere). As the speed of processors continues to increase and the price continues to go down, things in 2nd Life can't help but improve. One thing I'm curios about though: What happens if there are newer SIMS with processors that are (for example) twice as fast as the old ones? Will those SIMs be configured differently (larger prim limits etc) or will they just seem faster to those people using them?

I think your thoughts are still skewed about the unlimited money.

I started beta in December of 2002. I didn't do much for the first couple weeks except walk around and talk to people. After that I decided I needed to get more money. I worked the system exactly as you describe. First let me say the economy was slightly different - all prims (independant of size) were taxed $3 and there was no neighbor discounts on land. I worked the system and ended up at around (drum roll please) $12,000. Now with min tax on an object being 1/3 that old value and land being cheaper I wouldn't be suprised to see someone pass $20k doing this, maybe even 30k. Here is the issue: It would take many weeks to do this. If you make the full $3,500 a week it will take you 8.5 weeks to get $30k! Thats about 2 months! And if you build anything interesting, that uses bigger prims or lights, or buy more than the bare minimum of land, or teleport etc then it will take longer! And god forbid you should ever buy something.

Those people who make $20k a week aren't doing it with stipend manipulation. They are selling something people want or providing a service people want.

The money supply is no where near as loose as you claim. There are only a few people with over $100,000, and I'm not one of them. Not for lack of trying of course.

And believe it or not I have argued many times about how people think they are entitled to too much in this game. That they should start small, build up until they can afford the castle. Its almost a standard line of mine.

Now on to game design.

Predictability is needed. Not predictability in the way so people can work the system. That predictability is already there. What I want, and what others want, and what we deserve , is to be able to look at my Account Histor / Summary and see an accurate prediction of what is going to happen to me. If my Account Summary says I will gain $1,000 this next week then I should not lose $3,000. A lot of work has gone into this and it is much better now than it was before.

Complexity is an issue. Linden Lab hopes to make money off this game by convincing 5 day trial users that they should buy into it. If durring that 5 days the user is befuddled by the money system it could decrease their willingness to buy. Also I agree with "minute to learn, lifetime to master" theory and think *very* much that it doesn't conflict with what I said. The system should be simple at its core. Made of simple components that interact with each other. Chess is a simple game, its a fairly short list of rules and straight forward. And yet it takes many, many years to master it, if then. Its the exceptions, the bending, the curving of rules that make things unnecesarily complicated.

"The tax on a primitive is $1 if it is small and on the ground, it goes up the larger it is and the higher it is off the ground. And it goes up the closer you are to your to your prim limit for the sim you are on, and the prim limit for you varies by how much land you control in that sim as proportional to other players and may go up or down if you change land size or if others buy or sell land or objects. Also because the extra charge for nearing a prim cap is related to the initial tax of the object the order in which objects are created will effect how much money you have and deleting an old prim that was cheap tax and replacing with a new one will raise your overall taxes."

That is unnecisarily complex. By a lot. The system is complex enough already. The money is tight enough already. It takes too long to amass the money you are talking about by "working the system". The people with that kind of money are the ones who have earned it in some way shape or form. In fact I have found it is much easier to earn money in a 'conventional' fashion than rely on a stipend that fluctuates each week based on how many ratings you got that week.

And I think I wandered off topic.

I think someone is banking objects in Da Boom if the prim count is that scewed. Have a look around and see if you can find where it all is. Perhaps someone semi new , or even an old timer, is just making things more complex than they need to be, or has a motorcycle with hollow cut tubes with physics enabled for spokes (don't laugh, it was done and lagged out a sim BAD). Hollow cut tubes by the way have 4 rounded surfaces and 4 flat circular ones, cut ones also have 2 flat rectangles with square holes in em. That is an ugly thing of a prim, especially to do physics collision detection on. <cringe>.

Damn I wandered again.

I think your problem is not the economy but a localized situation. I hope you find a solution to it.