Forbid access to Currency Exchange to basic accounts.

Simply not possible, LL doesnt buy L$.
At your option,
1-> It means LL will take the risk of extra L$ stock on the market. Or they will stop all free money sources.
2-> More than, 600 million L$ in SL ATM. Just imagine LL announced that they will buy and sell at a fixed rate of 300/usd. And residents tried to sell 200million L$ NOW. Why should they pay over 650000 USD? If they decide to do it now, it means, they owe to the SL 600million/300 USD = 2 million usd. (<- I dont expect most of you to understand this.)

LL simply wont buy-sell L$ at a fixed rate, they cant. Anyone who has a basic economy knowledge can understand this. No need to discuss on this option then.

Simple division is fairly easy to understand - why would you deem us too stupid to understand such a concept ?

That's true. But Premium memberships have greater value to LL than tier.



And that's exactly the problem. There needs to be a better reason. At the moment we have the problem that:

a) users who're successful via rental land, say "I don't need Premium since I have all I want anyway";
b) users who're trying to become successful, say "People in group a) don't need Premium so in order to become successful I don't either";
c) users who want or wanted to become successful but think rightly or wrongly that they can't, say "if I can't become successful I can't enjoy SL as much as groups a) and b) so why should I pay when they don't?"

This only leaves the users who come to SL with the intent of mainly being a consumer to be the ones who pay for Premium - and they're the ones missing out on the "killer feature".

I pretty much agree with you Yumi, the problem lies in LLs pricing structure. As for killer features, maybe you're trying too hard. Take fashion for example, I know of no where else online where CONSUMERS can indulge their love of style & clothing so fully as in SL, and whilst it's only one aspect of SL, a whole lot of people are doing just that and loving it. Have you read Second Style ?

You have this whole line of reasoning based on fallacy right there.

The enjoyment of content creator doesn't come "for free" -- it comes at price of time put in creation of content. Time which could be devoted instead to say, flippin' the 'burgers to earn more than $10 needed to get the Premium account and some extra on top of it.

If some people prefer to plain pay the $10 instead of spend time necessary to earn the equivalent through the in-game means, then this is their option. And they get the bonus of actual "real" land ownership. But i'm not sure if beyond this it should come with any sense of entitlement along lines of "i should be able to enjoy this place more even though the other guy is investing more of their time into it than i do. And if i don't, then it's not issue with me, but it's that other guy that should be punished so i at least get some schadenfreude in lack of better entertainment"


Oh, and incidentally? The one additional point where premium accounts 'contribute more' into economy is generation of superfluous L$ ... because $10 paid by the premium account holder makes LL generate 500 extra lindens a week and put in into the pile. While basic account users mean generation of L$ 50 a week, and beyond that operate strictly with the money already existing in the economy...

Looking at it this way, it almost makes more sense as far as economy stability goes, to have as little premium members as possible... because each of them hurts the economy 10x as much as a basic member. go figure ;s

I understand that. But the falling L$ shows that not enough people are doing that and enjoying it - or at least, not enough people are buying L$ to do it with.

Creating things is the "killer feature" of SL because it's guaranteed, and provided by the platform. Many things such as fashion suffer from the "Marrach problem": they're strongly community driven, not just in content provision but in how the content is then used - people want others who care about fashion to look at them, and they want to have opportunities, like Second Style.

But the problem is that communities can't guarantee that to everyone. At a party everyone can be friendly and nice and helpful to newcomers, and generally on SL they are - but you would not ask everyone at the party to sign a contract saying that they would all be fined if any individual newcomer, not counting jerks, had a bad time. Nobody would accept something like that, it would ruin the social nature of the situation.

And the result is that there's always a large number of people who slip through the cracks. I don't know how this can be rectified. I don't think it can be rectified without, as above, putting unpleasant "forced socialisation" duties on others. Newbie Volunteers undertake to ensure every newbie gets basic help if they're stuck, but ensuring that every new person who wants (for example) friends to help them styling, shopping, and getting a modelling shoot, gets that, is in a completely different league.

And that's why these things have trouble being the killer features of SL - if you sign up, you might get them, but you might not. But if you pay for Premium or buy L$, then your money is definately gone (although, you might be able to sell back your L$). Creating things, on the other hand, everyone at least has access to the technical tools necessary.

Which, in most cases I hope, the content creator enjoys doing!

Both people are just doing what they enjoy, but one person has to pay and the other gets paid.



Except they only invest their time because they are getting to do something they enjoy (creating content).



People deal with issues like this in real life because they have no choice but to live real life, and so they have to deal with them in order to be happy. But, by and large, people aren't going to deal with issues in order to enjoy Second Life. Why should they? There are any number of leisure activities they could do instead that don't require them to "deal with" stuff. If they've come into Second Life to live their dream, that surely should obviate any need to "deal with" anything, and thus needing to do so means SL hasn't delivered on what they wanted.

There is a world of difference between having a "sense of entitlement" to something, and thinking "it's not worth my time/money if I don't get" that thing.

Of course. One should generally try to get a work that allows them to do things they enjoy. This applies both to SL and RL.

Does it mean if say, a programmer actually enjoys writing code, the person who hires them doesn't have to pay them "because they enjoy their work"? Somehow, i doubt it... yet this is the very reasoning displayed in this thread. "They enjoy making the content, so somehow this makes the time they spent on it 'free'".


True, but i don't see the effect of the latter here, but rather of the former. People aren't asking to make things more worthwile for them by giving them more, they ask for things to be taken away from the others. And that, this belief one is in position to tell what someone else should be deprived of... well it certainly rings like sense of entitlement to me.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't get rewarded for their work because they enjoyed it.

What I am saying is that it's human nature that people are going to be less willing to pay money to enjoy themselves, when they know that others are enjoying themselves for free. The fact that the activity involved in "enjoying themselves" is different does not necessarily matter.

I have seen this. I see a lot of new folks asking me how to make money, and I'll tell them the standard list of suggestions, but with a note that they shouldn't get jobs they don't enjoy or make SL drudgery for themselves. And their basic attitude is very often the same: they aren't interested in buying L$, so if they can't find something they enjoy that makes money, they'll do without or not play at all.



Well, that's because everyone here by now knows that "giving people more" will not solve any problems. Suggesting giving people more stuff for free will just put the L$ down even further and get anyone who suggests it on this forum brutally flamed. In any case, as I mentioned above, it's not really about stuff, but about activity: content creation as an activity is built into the platform, whereas few other items (except possibly games) define an activity in the same way.

I think we still don't agree on that concept of free (my time is _not_ free, no matter if its devoted to activity i enjoy or not)

But that aside -- if i accept that it's indeed a way some people view things ... why exactly should LL set the system-wide policy based on such particular and narrow-minded view? I mean okay, so there might be someone who pays $10 for premium membership (and doesn't find enjoyment in content creation) ... who resents the idea that someone else can have fun in SL through substitution of that $10 with raw work and time involved in creation of content. But so what? Yes they might be offended by it even to the point where they'd no longer pay for premium account, but rather settle for basic account, and purchase L$ from market. One could argue it'd actually do the game economy a favour, rather than damage it (less printed L$ goes into economy, more L$ is bought off market)

Effectively, this is entitling such person with power to decide about entertainment of others, purely because they cannot live with the idea someone else does things differently than they themselves do. Why should SL follow this route..?


Well, for one thing this is supposedly not giving people 'stuff for free' but giving them 'stuff' for their premium account fee. Plus, it all depends on what exactly is being given. When you say SL is content creation platform for example -- suppose there's option for premium account holder, to 'trade' their weekly stipends into ability to upload content at reduced fee (perhaps capped at some point) ... suddenly you could make the ownership of premium account interesting option for these very people who supposedly make others question the point of having the premium account at all. Which, if psychological aspect is as important as you make it to be, would be a good thing, wouldn't it...

You're still missing the point, as you're still claiming that when person A has fun, it's just "having fun" and they ought to pay for it, but when person B has fun, it's "raw work and time" and they ought to be paid for it.

That means that person A is going to feel that their idea of fun is a lot worse supported by the world than person B's, and may decide to look somewhere else for it. Which sounds fine, but if all the person A's look elsewhere, there's no-one to pay the person B's.

My point is that you can't have a regulated market that will work if there is a thriving black market. East Germany tried it with their currency, and they had jack-booted thugs to enforce their rules.

IFF = TEH BASIC ACCOUNT STIPN STOPES I QUITEK TE GAem!!!!!!!!