Forbid access to Currency Exchange to basic accounts.

Had an interesting thought about the highlighted statement. If a basic account generates enough Linden to "make a living" then that means that the account is either providing a service (escort, hosting, teaching, scripting, building, etc) or is selling stuff (creating or distributing content). Either way the account is contributing A LOT to SL. Money is not the only thing that keeps SL going, it's also the fact that content is created and distributed. Creation of content draws in US$ indirectly by enticing other people sign up for premium accounts.

So in a way, these basic accounts that are making a living ARE generating US$ for LL.

God forbid that there are any basic accounts out there who are creating content that people are willing to pay for... willing even to the point of buying L$ so that they can afford to buy that content.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but LL takes a cut of the monies and that helps pay for the running of SL...

Or the basic accounts who have done a good job of creating content that people want to buy, and cash out some L$ so they can enjoy some of the fruits of their labour... Again, LL takes a cut and that helps to pay for the running of SL.




What was that about not contributing again?

While we're here, I'd love to hear how basic account holders are able to make a living or sell large amounts of linden without performing a service or generating/distributing content. Must be some really juicy scam.

I was wondering if anyone had considered "money camping" in their analysis of the reasons that the L$ has lost value. It seems like everyone is certain that stipends are the problem - but honestly you can sink a stipend very quickly. Its USD value individually, especially for a basic account, is negligible. It is most people's natural inclination to 'save' too, and if some do, it shouldn't be considered a character flaw. Nor should it be if they wish to engage in the free market that is a part of their second life and sell their savings. It would not be a lucrative sideline though, to try to save stipends up over the months and months that it would take to gather enough to make these huge bulk sales at such low market prices. It just defies common sense. Not for an active and participating AV who is interested in the things that they can buy, and goods and services that are available to them as cash sinks, anyway. Inflation isn't being caused by stipend, certainly not by them alone.

Free money is exactly that - who cares if it sells for 290 or 310 if it was 'earned' as in many cases with 2, 3, or more alternate characters, by sitting nearly entirely AFK while their owner neither participated in, much less contributed to the economy or overall experience of Second Life, or sunk any currency into classifieds or land purchases? Free camping money can add up for the individual a LOT faster than stipends do, and can create enough income to make it worth the time and transaction fees of selling it regularly at any price they can get.

If you left 3 computers running non stop and just turned on the monitors every so often to make sure you hadn't crashed - and you accumulated say, 100K L$ per month this way - would you really mind selling it for 310 instead of 290? Or 350 instead of 310? Or 1000 instead of 800? Free money is free money. As long as it is free, there will always be someone willing to sell it for a little less than the other guy, until the value finally is the smallest increment higher than "free" that is possible. (10000/usd? 100000/usd? 100000000/usd?) Yes, stippends are free, but they accumulate too slowly for the individual to effect the economy.

There is nothing wrong or malicious about people camping. You almost have to question the judgement of anyone who doesn't accept free money being offered them while they invest little time or effort and break no rules. There is nothing inherently wrong with creating the camp areas either - Second Life means all kinds of things to us and who is to say that its wrong to pay L$ to draw a crowd and host a busy land, be a major player at their own cost - whatever the reasons? They don't do it for developer incentives, because they are no longer on the table, and many many have operated for months and years with no chance of ever winning one when they were available. They do not get back nearly in dwell bonus what they pay out, and they can only generate so many sales or other revenue streams capitalizing on their traffic, because 2/3 of the 'traffic' is off mowing their lawn or watching Oprah while sitting in their camp chairs, AFK.

But if you think about the effect this creates in the economy: campers get money for free and therefore are willing to sell it at great prices. Some of those buying large amounts of currency at these great prices in turn go off and pay campers again. The campers collect it again, and resell it again for yet lower prices to stay competetive with the falling market. The buyer continues to get better and better deals on their currency purchases month over month compared to the price that was already acceptable to them before. If it was worth 800 USD last month to host a busy land with a lot of campers, then next month why wouldn't it be worth 600.00 USD to get the same results? And the month after that...400 USD? From the camp owners perspective, the deal just keeps getting better month after month.

From the campers perspective, as long as the free money is rolling in with little investment of time or effort, why not keep selling it at the most competetive rate possible to ensure immediate sales? In this symbiotic relationship, the camp owner and camper can drive the value of the L$ down to next to nothing, and both still be perfectly happy with their results! Clearly that can't help the overall value of the L$.

Perhaps LL could create a variety of incentives to promote a more active participation from those here simply seeking fame or fortune for thier investment of time, as well as those talented builders and scripters. LL wanted to recognize creativity, great coding, art work, imaginations and other insprirational things with Developer Incentives - things that might make SL better and thus more potentially profitable for everyone - and that is a noble cause. But DI's were based on traffic alone, and so the camp center was born - it's as good of an invention as any other by that one yardstick.

Now even without DI's, they remain - as they have become a very popular thing to do and there is an obvious desire among many residents to do it, even when operating at a financial loss for the owner. Maybe there could be incentives to earn L$ based on, for example, time spent completing building / scripting tutorials, or scavenger hunts that are completed by visiting a series of great landmarks - Ways to make 'free money' that at least also incent residents to be active, learn, and explore. Maybe there could be a way to recognize via another ranking system really imaginitive and great works, even on lands that arent overflowing with traffic. At the same time perhaps they can increase the cost of some existing money sinks, and/or invent new ones if need be. Between those 2 changes it probably wouldn't be necessary to take away new residents' only 'walking around money'. I sincerely doubt the removal of stipends would counter the falling rate of L$ as long as there is any one person willing to pour their own money into the economy and pay people to sit on their land.

Incenting people to get up and go learn new ways that they can make their own livings or create popular attractions might be a better approach. They will value their currency more and be more reluctant to part with it at low prices.

............

Thankyou, that was almost precisely what I was about to say to Lewis and better said.

How? Have two linden values, "real lindens" and "basic stripend lindens"? I can' see any way this idea could be implemented, so I really can't offered an informed opinion as to why I think it's wrong.

Most of teh post in this thread seem to assume you mean "don't let basic account holders cash out at all"; is that what you meant?

@Willie

A L$3/10min camping chair will generate a gross of about US$43.50 a month (@ 300L$/US$). That isn't much if you factor in expenses.

But I do certainly agree that we have to find new and/or better ways Linden can be used in-game. Give people good reason to spend.

I've been around 1.5 months and I have not spent on anything except my few uploads. Anything I want or need I try to make myself. I'm no party person so most of the posted events don't grab me at all. I'm not earning anything yet beyond the stipend, not counting a L$10 bit I received for a tiny bit of scripting.

Probably people have to find a way to get my demographic to spend. Find something compelling enough that would actually make me think the purchase/fee will be worth the experience.

We have to be extra innovative because our avatars don't consume (eat, etc.) and objects we buy don't need to get replaced. Clothes don't wear out. Vehicles don't use fuel. We can't just put all those in because bringing RL stresses (read: expenses) into SL defeats the highest purpose of SL.

I still stand by the thought that the Linden's weakness is that there is insufficient demand for it. The only idea I've been able to come up with is to find a way to transform tier payments into some kind of equivalent Linden currency exchange transactions. This is because theoretically land payments are supposed to be paid in Linden (inside the SL world) but instead are only a US$ payment (outside SL). That is, tier payments are a completely external transaction while they actually should have some form of internal effect.

At 43.50 per month one camper could afford to own 8,704 SqM of land, without ever using any of their own currency to pay for the tier! But they don't often buy land at least by my estimation - and they could afford to obvioiusly just based on the above example - but they sell the L$ for USD instead, often at ridiculously low prices just because - well, its free anyway. Why try to compete with other sellers to get 300/USD if you can just instantly get 302/USD and its all free anyway?

While more compelling money sinks to help counter that and other inflation sources is probably a great idea it still won't divert the die hard camper who has learned that s/he can convert L$ to USD by simply turning on the computer and then leaving for work or school and checking over the next day or two every so often to see how much they've 'earned'. Especially anyone with 2 or more computers and SL accounts available. Then its 87 USD per month, 3 = 130.00 etc. With things like VMWare, Windows XP multiple occurences, etc. it is conceivable that someone could log in dozens of campers from one single machine, in fact. Thats good money by almost any standard, but it gets lower and lower month after month as they agree to sell it for less and less. As long as there is a source of money willing to pay them, there will be a ready audience of loyal visitors - so why not offer them a little money to go learn how to build or explore the wonders of SL instead? And offer the camp owners the information and guidance to build popular, crowded attractions that people pay THEM to see and enjoy, rather than the other way around?

Just a thought, I agree with your comments as well. I still believe if there were a way to quantify the amount of L$ sold that were obtained as a result of camping - we would find those most often willing to sell for below market value obtained the funds in that manner. And if there were a way to quantify the amount of purchased L$ that go right back into camping payrolls, we would see the effect that I mention - a downward spiral of L$ value, that still keeps both parties perfectly happy.

If you take out the people who rent the land, you take out number of land owners who make the living from these rentals, and who do pay LL directly for ownership of land they then rent.

"There's lot of people who never ever painted a picture in their life, they contribute nothing to existence of art. Because just buying these art pieces so artists can actually make living and continue their work on creating new things... that does not count" <-- same logic, or lack thereof.

Why not add a clause that Premium holders must always have at least their basic stippend ( i say 3 months worth should be enough ) in their account before allowing them anywhere near the lindex !!!

Or Premium holders are not allowed to spend Linden at any shop, plot or place of business that has a free account associated with it.

How about premium account holders must not socialize with free account holders in case they swap Linden.

Maybe we could get away with premium only sims and leave what's left of the unwanted land for the free accounts to pay rent on.

( oops that reminds me - Premium account holders must not be allowed to cash out any linden earnt by charging rent to a free account holder )

Or how about just - mandatory Coffee so that some people will wake up !!


Why shouldn't I cash out my Linden - I earnt them.

The only difference between me and you is that you pay $10 a month to be given 2000Linden - I dont.

llSetTimerEvent(EVERY_TUESDAY), llGiveMoney(MAIN_ACCOUNT, 50), plus it's terribly easy to make a quick shell script that logs on all your alts without even booting the SL client

just now one of these 3L$/10 min campers is selling L$687,122 at 315L$/US$ leapfrogging a sell order of L$30,000 at 314/1.

And the camper who uses $43.50 a month to own 8704 sq m of land is no longer a basic account holder but a premium account holder.

Then again with dwell going away, the issue of camping will be moot.

I've been doing some numbers and what I see so far is that there is potentially some arbitraging going on and that the Linden at 312 appears overvalued. As of today I'm not sure anymore who are screaming because they're losing sales worth and who are screaming because they'll lose the ability to arbitrage.

What I'd rather see is a different set of economics to cover how things work here. As is stands everyone is measuring the SL economy using RL economic rules and concepts while many aspects of reality are bent out of shape in SL, the most obvious to me being:

1. No real consumption

2. The land tier payments are completely external and do not participate at all in the SL economic system.

3. The Linden's current value still allows for a form of arbitrage.

I'm not saying we add consumption but we need to rework our economics to take all that into consideration. If the tier payments stay completely external then we have an open loop system where US$ would naturally only flow out of the SL system.

LL would then naturally be part of the cash flow loop since that's where the US$ enters the system. We are now talking merging an RL component with the virtual SL economy.

If you keep LL and tier payments out of the economic system then don't expect the Lindex to be anything but a selling market and do expect the Linden value to keep dropping to some stable level.

愚かな糸に疲れさせていて得ることは決して私の収入の取り消しの記述をあきらめない最初に内容提供者がどん欲、愚かの

主題についての最後のメッセージ

Ah but I disagree. The camper who makes 43.00 a month and owns 8704 SqM of land and pays no tier is getting quite a bargain even if paying for a premium account. But there's also the case of 'the camper, and his alt, and his alt, and his alt', each sending that much per month to their one premium account holding Uncle, who pays the tier, and sells the excess free money below market value. In fact another possible thing to consider might be a limit of no more than X accounts per 'household'. That would alleviate some of the stipend concerns I've heard as well.

The dwell bonus earned as a result of paying campers is tiny compared to the expense. Developer Incentives were revoked completely, and more brand new camp grounds opened. People pay campers because of a number of possible reasons, but making a profit from them due to dwell alone is not a likely one. So again, as long as they are happy to operate at a loss, and that is entirely their perrogative, free money is being delivered to people who need do nothing more than sit AFK in a chair. That being the case, they will likely always be willing to sell it for less than others are.

I don't discount the validity of no consumption, arbirage and your other points. I think vehicles could use fuel and fuel could be a resource that might be found on some lands, teleporting could cost 1L$ per trip - L$ purchased could have a 3 or 10 hour delivery time to help prevent arbitrage. Theres a lot of possibility, and the world is still pretty young. But aside from all factors that affect the value of the L$, if, on top of them, a stream of free L$'s flows into people's hands, they will always be willing to part with them for less than others would, and that will govern the price at which anyone can succesfully sell.

That's not correct - by renting the land, they're providing custom to the rental barons, who may buy more land to rent out (and thus pay more tier) as a result.

If it wasn't for those free basics, people wouldn't be renting that land and the rental barons would scale back.

But this creates two problems:

a) if you aren't paying those US$, LL aren't getting any money (remember LL get very little money from people buying L$ on Lindex to buy content with);

b) the more people do this, the more premium memberships are percieved as a cop-out for the untalented (as they already are by some new players) and the chance of other users paying goes down.

This is the dreadful problem with LL selling SL as a method of making money; making money requires paying out as little as possible, and that includes paying out as little as possible to LL.

But what a lot of people miss is that it acts in the opposite way, too. Some people are discouraged from signing up for premium by the fact that others can get as much, or more, income for free.

Again, I have to mention the CEM factor - the average enjoyability of being purely a consumer as opposed to creating content. The nature of SL is that most content creators draw more satisfiction from SL than most consumers - we might argue that that's how it should be, because the content creators should be rewarded from their effort. But then the consumers will tend to say, "Why should I pay, when others get more satisfaction that me for free?" and the bottom end of the market falls out.

The big problem is that at the moment, the ability to create content and sell it on is still the "killer feature" of SL. As long as that remains the case, contributing content walks a fine line because at the same time as adding extra options for players, it also damages that "killer feature" by removing opportunity. Obviously it would be ridiculous to have a situation where no-one could create anything for fear they'd take the opportunity away from someone else in the future, so the only alternative is that SL must develop a new killer feature, with creation just being a nice optional thing you can do if you want rather than the current "oh wow this is what makes SL stand out" perception.

If this thread's ideas were going to be implemented the only way of doing it that I could see is: basic accounts get their L$50 a week, plus whatever they buy on LindeX. Any other L$ they recieve - through sales, gifts in-world, etc. - is placed into a "holding account", the value of which is displayed to them, but the actual L$ is not accessible. As soon as they go Premium, all the L$ in the holding account is unlocked. But this is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and really messes up a lot of incentives that are important to new players, such as newbie contest prizes (such as at Show and Tells) and Money Trees.

@Yuri

What we have is a very complex interaction of business, creation, fantasy, economics, and social factors.

What I lament is that I have not seen anyone come up with any real workable solution that will strike a balance somewhere among those factors.

The business people don't want the linden to decrease in value but also its value can be arbitraged by those who seek to exploit it (I wouldn't because of the amount of effort required to pull it off).

Creators have a problem because lots of things are being sold for L$1. There are many residents who push the envelope of the freebie angle. Many creators won't be able to get enough compensation for their efforts so the only motivation left is creating for fun. Which it still is. But the business incentive certainly is pretty weak for many.

SL feeds fantasy and people can live out lives they can't in RL, but often once their purchases are done, they're done, and they don't need to purchase much more after.

On the economic angle people keep trying to equate SL economics with RL economics on a 1:1 basis while it's very clear that many well known economic phenomena collapse in the world of SL.

Over all of this LL has to be able to maintain their bottom line which based on impressions they seem to be doing. So this is one less problem.

What I think we need is a paradigm that works with what is present instead of one that seeks to change things. LL has their reasons for doing things so maybe we should try to find user-end solutions to the perceived problems.

But certainly the giga-sized clashes of ideals and philosophies is not helping.

(musing) maybe LL should come up with another set of servers and call it RL2 where vehicles use fuel, clothes get worn out and need repair and replacement, avatars need to eat and sleep, traveling costs money, we pay for utilities, and making anything costs money ... not as fun a world since it already mimics reality. Maybe some people will buy into that since real world eco concepts will work there.

OK

A - Indirectly I am paying those US$ - People want to buy my goods they pay US$
Some of that I cash out - some I use to pay rent ( more than 2000 a month )
Someone is taking my Linden and converting it to tier.

B - Give me one good reason why I should become a premium member..
For 10$ a month I get 2000 Linden which I already earn and therefore do not need.
I get a 512m plot of land that I cannot use because of the prim limit
I am allowed to vote in a voting system where the votes are ignored.


I see no point - I do not come in to SL to make money - the fact that I make money is a side effect of me enjoying making content.


I see no reason for bashing the free accounts just because some of them take advantage of camp chairs and their 50L a week - lots of premium accounts also park in camp chairs and do not contribute to SL.

The basic fact is that the system of buying and selling Linden is flawed - it will never work - there will always be someone with a few thousand dollars to spare who can ( and will ) drive the market exactly where they want it to be to suit there own pocket.

Shut down the lindex and sell (and buy) at a set price.

Bah.

I'm on a basic account and I pay $US 100/mo. to Linden Lab as my half of our island fee. It happens to come sideways through my partner's account because that's the way Linden bookkeeping is set up. And that doesn't count all the $L sinks I contribute to as a content provider - nor what I pay others for advertising, services, etc. which they use for their tier, etc, nor the transaction fees I pay in $US for my share of the business.

No gaming company to date has managed to shut down the black market in their currency. I don't believe Linden Labs would be able to either.

There is a high corelation between the success of content creators and the amount of land used (either through rentals or by directly owning land and paying tier). Either way, the more successful a content creator is, the more they contribute to LL by paying for land use. I'm sure there are exceptions, but if anyone thinks this would solve anything in the economy (or would even be helpful at all to LL's bottom line), they are dead wrong.

Who said anything about the black market ?

I am talking about the dirty great big white one that has "Please Abuse me - Unregulated - Free Money" posted in 500m high letters, that is the lindex.

If people want to sell their linden in back alleys and bars then fair enough - nobody has ever managed to stop the black market in anything - period.

At least with the lindex out of the way the majority of people will know what they are spending/receiving and will be able to budget for it - all of the forums fireworks will stop as there wil be no lindex panic to talk about and as I have said in many other posts - maybe we can get on with improving sl and leaving the finance jocks to play in their own playgrounds.