Buying Linden Dollars

Well, it's good to know that the Lindens continue to follow these discussions. It must be frustrating to have so many good ideas presented and know that you can only implement (usually) one path at a time. So many roads not travelled. If in the future, things don't seem to be going quite right, you have a treasure trove of potential mid-course corrections to try.

I never used UO, so that is an interesting statistic about the extent of the external economy. If it is possible to track, with some accuracy, the extent to which people are exchanging real dollars for virtual (excluding normal membership fees) then I guess that would be a good way of measuring the success of the current economic system. If the total income from users to LL is X and you can detect that 1/2 X is also being spent on Ebay, or by other means for L$s, then the goal would be to capture that 1/2 X as direct fees somehow so that they could be applied to resources (servers etc).

In my one previous online community the vender clearly had in mind the notion of moving toward a franchise base, where they provided licenses to use the service and other people provided the actual service. It was actually not a bad idea, as such, but they moved the process along before they had the user base to make it viable. Nothing worse than a franchise operation where you don't have a single profitable franchisee to help you advertise the concept. The problem that plagues them to this day is that they build an infrastructure of "worlds", "galaxies", and "universes" to support this franchise concept, and in the process fragmented their user community out of existence.

Something tells me that the Linden folks are way too clued-in to let that happen.

The idea of user owned SIMs appeals to me (not that I can necessarily afford one). That might be a way to capture real dollars that would otherwise throw the existing economy off kilter. The notion that these privately owned SIMs would stay on the existing grid is critical. While there may be technical or sociological reasons to add separate grids at some point, it should remain a solution of last resort. (That won't keep me from suggesting it as a possible way to address adult content though, hehe).

It is amazing to me how much people can be in agreement and think that they are in complete disagreement...

I'd like to clarify my thoughts on money muling, as I think I was at least partially misunderstood by some:

As a service operator, I don't like money muling. Even though it generates revenue, it messes up my metrics and causes division in my community.

As a service operator I can:

1. Ignore it
   
2. Discourage/Oulaw it
   
3. Design the need for it out of existence
   [/list=a]
   
   My arguments on this thread were to encourage consideration of option C. Not to encourage A. My experience is that, in the long run B doesn't work, and A & C end up being the only real options when eBay trading starts, and option A sucks.
   
   I was NOT intending to encourage muling. I'm sorry if anyone thought I was.
   
   Previously, I wrote that the in-world social-behavior awards were important to the system, and need the highest attention which seems to agree with the posters here that say SL needs to reward more types in-game behaviors, more effectively.
   
   From my time talking to the development team during the SL UI design meetings, I can tell you personally that these reward systems are one of the main things they are thinking about. They have been listening to you about things like clothing/object/texture permissions, etc. Philip himself said that in-game rewards are more important than considering implementing any $US <-> $L feature, and I think we all agree.

Oracle Omega

Lets see some numbers.


Xavier

I'm rather interested in the numbers for this too ;p

a whole sim......ooo lala..

I agree with that totally. If I HAD to come up with something good to say about trading L$s on Ebay it would be the slight publicity value. Better for the company to capture that revenue directly and use it in traditional advertising though.

First off, no misunderstanding here Oracle.

Second, about the private sims,

One way to encourage private sim owners to keep up their current level of social interaction is to provide discounts on the price they pay for the sim based on their behavior.

For example,

I currently am rewarded with L$ for building interesting things, being friendly and so on, thus giving me more "game" money to do things with.

If I were to buy a private sim, where I could build to my heart's content without worrying about taxes, it seems logical to keep the same reward system as above, but have it act in reverse. That is, have each voting booth, or rating work towards lower the real life "$" cost of my monthly payment.

Of course problems come up. "Muleing" (now for the sake of ballot stuffing) becomes a problem again. Rate mining becomes more attractive (as real money discounts have a much stronger power than L$) and so on.


On the topic of private sims, would objects built there have to remain inside the sim boundaries? Say I build a giant floating disk to black out the sun. It taxes my private server heavily, but I have bigger plans - it has one of the new non-physics mobility scripts - and I'm moving out. We now have an object that was created for lowered or no money, with no tax burden that can move into and terrorize other sims, (not just by blackening out the sun ) but by temporally sucking up available sim resources as it moves through and perhaps even crashing the sim.

as such it would best to limit private sim objects to their sim, if they are going to be allowed to be built under different rules from the rest of the sims.

anyhow, just a thought.

L$ for US$ BAD!
Tree Pretty!