Free Basic Membership

Second Life Basic Accounts are Free!

What are your thoughts on free basic membership?

I'm anxious to see the diversity this will add to our community.

It's a good deal.

I'll take more residents any day of the week. Growth is cool.

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

THAT's what we should have on tutorial island! A big mockup green avatar that has that sign... That would be so cool.

Personally, I'm worried, because there will be an influx of money generated by nothing. We might have quite a bit of inflation...

Also, I'm worried about added server load. These freeloaders will drag down sims, but won't pay for their upkeep. On the other hand, it's all set up anyways, so they can't drain too much from it. They might even buy land.

But it's nice, because now I can pull in my friends, for FREE.

Yeah, we got Soylent Green quotas to meet!

But seriously folks... I see this as KEWLEES! SL's just become the holy-cow-whatta-value game/platform/thingie of the century! (So far... only 95 years to go to know if it holds the title.)

How about we start small, and go for game of the year first? XD

Seriously though, in another, say, 50 years, we'll have twenty-seventh life, in which you wear a headset that directly sends signals into your visual cortex and is controleld by your mind.

Ohh no! More tourists, users, consumers, non-stakeholders etc! Future is bleak!

More seriously, this is a great move by Lindens, which should add significantly to economic growth, sort of like tax cuts.

I'm not sure whether this will add to or take away from inflation.

#1 The stipends of the many basic accounts will add to the currency pool, and thus inflation.

#2 The low stipends of the many basic accounts will cause them to buy currency, thus increasing demand, and thus exchange rate (indicating inflation).

I only joined a few days ago and paid my $10, now it's free? waaaaaaaaa!!!

Ah, but you see, not as much inflation as if the stipend bonuses were left unchecked. The economic reforms recently announced make a whole lot more sense now.

I don't think either of these would likely to cause inflation, if anything they may be slightly deflationary.

#1 - the stipends are so low (50 L/week) that they would be negligeble addition to economy Even if you consider 10,000 people signed up within a month and actually stayed, this would only add about 5 million lindens to economy overall.

#2 - Actually this is more likely to happen, anyone who stays for the long run will likely purchase more lindens or create items to sell. Either conditions would be deflationary, because more demand for Linden dollar would increase its value and more new items created would also reduce prices as it would increase the supply side and create higher competitive environment.

So, I predict this will at the very least stabilize the economy.

Indeed together with the L$ exchange integration, they make more sense. They are moving into expansion phase and providing all means for fast economic growth without inflationary pressures.

Hehe, I can see how much that probably sucks. But regret won't get anything done in life, so you need to get past it. I recommend that all of us who PAID for our accounts create a special "we paid" elitist club. Then the freeloaders will be left out, and they'll donate $10 to LL too.

To Snowcrash: yes, I can see how that will work.

This really confuses me....first of all I can't see the page in the link so I'm assuming this is actually true.

LL is cutting bonus stipends because there are too many $L in the economy so they are going to put more out there in the form of basic accounts with starting ammounts of $L and weekly stipens (low though they may be) for FREE?? How does this stabilize the economy?


*edit* guess I should have read the whole thread...oops! interesting theories...guess we'll see. At the very least it'll help the land renters though I can't imagine how many more people a savings of $10 will bring in.

Hooray! This is cool.

The post didn't mention stipends though, so we're guessing that they stay the same, correct?

Sue's link has an extra http in it, so here's a working one
/3/18/60620/1.html

Also its in the Announcements forum.

I'm scared.

Considering the Lindens have a hard time figuring out account differences between different people /same people /wives/husbands/kids, I don't see how they're going to stop, say, a griefer from signing up with 40 different credit cards, for free.

No monetary investment = no risk = no rules = anarchy.

I'll just be hiding on my land, thanks.

LF

Hey Oz, hope you are having a nice time. Thanks for the correction on the url, I wish that dialog box for entering a link would come up blank, or do some validity checking.

Yeah Sue, I agree, I always have to check for that when using vBulletin. Dunno why they put that in there by default either since most urls work fine with just www. :/

Lordfly, I dunno, the last time there was free accounts it didn't turn out too bad. I doubt this will have any big negative impact... but we'll see.

I think this is great for SL. If SL is the Internet 2.0 then access to SL needs to be as easy as access to the internet.

With paypal this brings us closer to the mass market. With internationalisation work too these are exciting times.

These new account holders will get $50/week stipends and will spend their time buying currency *from us* via LL. This is the future..

It's positively brilliant. People can now browse The Grid All Hail The Central Grid just like they do the 2D web. In fact they can link directly from a website onto a parcel and back again! Well they almost can. We're finally getting there! Thank You LL THANK U thankye oh thanks and thx...to be continued

I guess I am considered a free loader. I came here in April of 2004 after receiving a free account from Second Life in the mail. I have bought land and sold land and currently co- owner of 8 sims and an active member of the community. Did you ever think that these so called freeloaders come into world and fully participate becoming someone who has much to also give to SL?

I think we should all be careful of what we labels we give to people because you might end up losing the very people who would be an asset to SL.

Haha, me too. $10 really isn't anything I'm going to lose sleep over, though. It was worth the money JUST for Burning Life, which is why I signed up.

I'm very, very ambivalent about this.

I know from first hand experience, as soon as you remove any barriers to entry (even a modest $10) that all kinds of people who have ZERO interest in SL as a community are going to show up and cause problems.

The $10 basic membership price helps weed out some of the yahoos. One reason is that people won't pony up even $10 to _find out_ if they like someone. The other reason is that without some sort of credit card verification, there will be no way to keep under-18s out of SL. I don't know if a CC is still required, so that could be a false concern.

OTOH, I recognize that free basic accounts will probably lead to more premiums, but that's certainly not guaranteed.

And I personally don't want some under-18 wandering into a mature area. For several reasons. One it exposes LL and SL residents to potential legal risk and two because SL residents shoudn't have to worry about what they're doing in mature areas.

Nobody is saying that people who come in on a free account won't be productive residents. But as soon as even a small barrier to entry is removed, it opens the door for people who have no interest in being productive and may behave poorly in-world.



Quite succinct and complete on target.