Linden Labs Says (Raise Prices)

Some people buy land with $USD (such as a sim for $1,250US plus let's say $200 a month fee), develop it a bit, and allow people to rent out parcels of land on that sim for a small $L fee (you pay the land owner a certain $L a month, and they allow you to put your house, or your shop, and whatever other stuff you want, on a parel of land that they own.) They in turn collect those $L rental fees and sell them off on the market, often selling them for more than the $200US a month that they owe the company. Part of the rest of the profit goes to pay back that large $1,2500 load, but once that's paid off, your rental profits from the land becomes your own profit. That's pretty much the theory anyway (works for some, kills some others).


In regards to Lindex, PLEASE make sure to go here:
https://secondlife.com/account/currency_settings.php
and select Advanced view. Otherwise you won't be able to see most of the market data on there.

In regards to money leaving the system, every time you upload something, you get charged $10l. That money is effectively burned. This is what people here reffer to as a sink. Other sinks are the $25l fee to rate someone, and I think there are also some land ownership related sinks as well. Not too sure. I don't tend to keep track of the sinks much

Yes, there are actually banks in SL. One of the ones I know (because I used it for over a year) is Ginko Financial (do a search on the map for Ginko sim). They pay an EXTREMELY high interest rate of %0.11 a day, which makes a lot of people very suspicious of them. They're the only one I'm aware of that has actually survived for so long. However, they take the $L you deposit, transfer it into US$ on the Lindex, and use that money to invest in other places, like real banks do (supposedly in online casinos and such). They don't actually invest money in game to my knowledge. They had plans to do something land related and mortgage loans for sim purchases, but I don't know if that ever panned out.
There is also a stock market in SL. For some reason I forgot the website for it, but the person operating it is Shaul Althan. You can IM him for the info.

And yes, this definitely IS a business student's dream come true. I'm in business finance myself, and I have learned more from SL than I have in a ot of my classes I also read in an article a long time ago that some business classes in some colleges actually require you to open a SL account and start your own business in the game as a class project

From the Land: Islands page:
I'm not sure where any other figure would come from. The only thing not listed are "Openspace" sims, but that information has been posted in the forums. You get 4 sims that handle 1875 prims each, for a total of 7500 prims, all on a single CPU (not server), for the same cost as a regular sim. (That's 4x the land, 1/2 the prims on a system that normally runs one sim.)

Ah, thank you. I remember it being $150, and heard it was around $190 now, and heard from some people that their in-land sims, or the land ownership equivalent to about a sim, costs them around $300 (maybe they miscalculated with their land being all jaggy and such). But now I know for sure. Thanks.

To fill in the entire picture, mainland rates are for the peak amount of land owned during the past month. The highest rates are:

32,768 sq.m. US$125 (1/2 sim worth of land)
65,536 sq.m. US$195 (1 full sim worth of land)

there are no discounted rates after that. Increments after this are by the 1/2 sim, so 65,537-98,303 sq.m would cost $195+$125 = $320, 98,304-131,072 sq.m, $195x2 = $390, etc. (This does not include the 512 sq.m. that you get with a premium account

1) Ending the Stipend:

Should be done to lesson the money supply. It acts like an open-market operation from the
federal reserve and is the main reason for the devaluing of the L$.

Online game economies have always had a problem with inflation/devaluing of currency.

Goods to sell do not cost anything in terms of raw materials so there is now cost effect to balance the earnings made in-game

Yes, you do pay for it through monthly account fee's but the monthy account fee in $ goes to Linden Labs and leaves the system. The stipend thus is just a + in money supply.


2) SL is only a game, why should we care that L$ is going down in value?

It is an online game that is sold on a platform of crossover. Many players have real-life investments in terms of $ and time. That is the appeal for a high % of players playing SL. Real life businesses have made training investments in SL. To many players it is a major concern.


An online game acting as a real life economy must have the same sinks to allow true economics to work.


3) What is the answer to this Money supply problem?

Stipends must be lowered significantly...maybe end them completely after an account is 1 month old.

Raw materials must have an expense added to them. If I can make 1 million widgets for nothing and sell them for 1mill L$...the value of L$1 will go down everytime this happens.


I have to say that Linden Labs always takes a beating in these threads and I think its crazy that people are so animated about a game they love yet flame the creators.


My experience in online games have been alot worse than here at SL...Ultima Online, Everquest, Everquest II and WOW. Every one of those games had an inflation/devaluing of the currency problem and they didn't care as long as you paid the manditory $15 a month to them.



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1) Ending the Stipend:

Should be done to lesson the money supply. It acts like an open-market operation from the
federal reserve and is the main reason for the devaluing of the L$.

Online game economies have always had a problem with inflation/devaluing of currency.

Goods to sell do not cost anything in terms of raw materials so there is no cost effect to balance the earnings made in-game

Yes, you do pay for it through monthly account fee's but the monthy account fee in $ goes to Linden Labs and leaves the system. The stipend thus is just a + in money supply.


2) SL is only a game, why should we care that L$ is going down in value?

It is an online game that is sold on a platform of crossover. Many players have real-life investments in terms of $ and time. That is the appeal for a high % of players playing SL. Real life businesses have made training investments in SL. To many players it is a major concern.


An online game acting as a real life economy must have the same sinks to allow true economics to work.


3) What is the answer to this Money supply problem?

Stipends must be lowered significantly...maybe end them completely after an account is 1 month old.

Raw materials must have an expense added to them. If I can make 1 million widgets for nothing and sell them for 1mill L$...the value of L$1 will go down everytime this happens.


I have to say that Linden Labs always takes a beating in these threads and I think its crazy that people are so animated about a game they love yet flame the creators.


My experience in online games have been alot worse than here at SL...Ultima Online, Everquest, Everquest II and WOW. Every one of those games had an inflation/devaluing of the currency problem and they didn't care as long as you paid the manditory $15 a month to them.



P

They made these investments knowing that starting money and stipends existed.

If the decline of the L$ was so predictable given the existance of stipends, why did they do this?

The $L decline was constant, but fairly slow for a while. I think a lot of people just got REALLY spooked by the rather sudden %10 DROP in $L value in a span of just two weeks (300 to 330)

Around the same time a certain few people started spamming the forums with threads like this one. Intentional devaluation through market manipulation.

I mean, it does seem generally unreasonable that many of the biggest cashers-out, and those who are complaining about stipends and bonus money increasing the supply, are the same ones who got their own businesses started with a) their own stipends and b) the ability to sell goods to people who bought them with stipends. Some of them are even far back enough to have gotten the L$1000 stipends from rating parties - or, again, to sell to people who got them.

Maybe LL should retroactively remove some of the money earned that way from the economy?

Wasn't the big L$ crash caused by the announcement that LL would sell L$, not by increasing money supply?

Done! And adopted by one of the most popular fashion designers in SL.

Is this legal? I thought llHTTPrequest was blocked from retrieving data from LL pages, and presumably there's a reason for that which is still in force if you use a proxy.

And.. I really, really, really hope that proxy is on a very secure site...

Why? I don't get the concern.

Apparently the meaning of the word custom is completely lost on you.

Someone hacks the proxy server to make it return L$1 to US$1,000. All the VendeX sites automatically drop their item prices to L$1.

Plus the issue of having two tiers of scripters.

Yes, they got flippin rich with ratings bonuses, higher stipends, event support, etc. That's one reason I'm not crazy about their desire to take away stipends.

coco

Oh. Phfft. I was thinking you meant in the other direction. Soy muy goofy.

That's a grand point.. and the proxy wouldn't be the site to go after, now would it?

It depends where the proxy is. It seems that VendeX is using XML-RPC, not HTTP request, so it might be less hackable. However, attacking LL would be very dangerous for anyone involved in SL. Nonetheless, there'll be big bucks to be made on the day LL decide to change the layout of the LindeX sign-on page

As I say, it also bothers me that the public are blocked from using HTTPrequest to get this information, but people with external web scripting hosts are permitted to - it doesn't make much sense, and I've just asked on Answers about it...

What bothers me is there isn't a built-in way of fetching this information in LSL. Seems an idea use of the dataserver.

Exactly - either everyone should be able to access it, or no-one should; not this strange anomaly where only people with external webhosts can access it. (!?)

As I mentioned during the picket meet, this idea just doesn't hold up. As yourself, how many people do you personally know who hoard their $L just for the sake of keeping their $L? I don't know anyone (except myself). Everyone I know at most saves up stippends to buy something expensive, but pretty much almost everyone tends to buy buy buy junk in SL. People hwo have been here much longer than you have at most just have more textures uploaded, and a lot more really old and by now useless junk in their inventories. That doesn't make them "rich." Just more experienced.

But that's part of the point.. if everyone is going to "buy buy buy junk", then it becomes a lot easier for other people to "sell sell sell junk", and then those sellers have the L$ - those L$ don't disappear.

How many of the L$ now being cashed out were earned by the sellers on the basis that people would "buy buy buy junk because L$ were easy to get"? (This is an honest question, the answer may be none.)

My guess is that the % of $L that was around back then is small compared to the amount we have now. We didn't have nearly as many people back then getting stippends as we have had in the last year or so. (my guess the graph of amount of money is exponential, much like the graph of earth's population which increased 6fold in last 100 years). Also the people who sold items for $L didn't hoard the money either. When the money had no $USD value, they used it to upload textures and other things to improve their own businesses, and probably for the most part spent it on buying OTHER people's junk. I.E. it just got spread around more and more as more people joined. Once the money COULD be sold for $US (GOM), a lot of it got taken out as cash for RL purchases, and in turn transfered to those who wanted to buy it for junk in SL. Unless SL was a good investment vehicle (ginko is MAYBE, but I'm not sure how trustworthy it is), there is absolutely no reason to hold onto large quantities of $L.
That said, I do agree that some business owners definitely had a large head start on some of the other people here. Lusk is a great example. They started off by selling comissioned AVs back in late 2003/early 2004, then created an AV vendor system. They were here first, no doubt made the more money than any other fur av creator off of that (money which, again, ended up getting filtered through the sytem either through personal purchases, or, now, through $US exchange), and nowadays you still see the majority of furry AVs walking around to be luskwood creations. However new AV creators still keep popping up, and no doubt some of them are becoming just as successfull. It's all about being able to bring new ideas, a different style, or even just a different way of looking at things from a marketing and use perspective. Yes, some people are vastly more knowledgeable about the ins and outs of SecondLife and are much more connected to other people, but things here change so fast that unless you keep it up on a constant basis, you can very quickly find yourelf get surpassed by some newbs with a solid goal.

Sure - obviously older business olders always have some advantages in a capitalist system, which can be overcome. But there's a difference between those and advantages that are created artificially, and changes to the stipend system are pretty much artificial.

I agree that content creators should be rewarded for their work, but going into the US$ market isn't going to guarantee that. I saw a set of skins on sale for L$10000 yesterday. That's US$30. Now, it was a very good set of skins, and I presume it took a lot of work to produce - but are they really claiming that it took more work to make them, than to make Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (US$20)?

Now yes, I know that on places like Content Paradise, clothing and skins for avatars/models are routinely sold at high prices, but the buyers pay those prices on the basis that they (the buyers) are artists who are going to be able to use the content to construct other art. In SL, the extent to which you can reuse bought content in your own art is very limited, and it's no longer the case that the majority of users are artists anyway (ref. Philip at the last town hall).

It seems to me that people want it both ways. They want to charge the same L$ prices they did during the higher stipend periods, or even more, but they want each of the L$ to be worth US$. They want to cash out the L$ they earned while L$ were "cheap", and yet have them be expensive to the buyers.

You can't really compare a computer game with a skin. When you are selling a computer game, you have several million potential buyers. In SL, it is a few thousands.