Help stop the L$ from dropping, stop premium account allowances!

So many people blame the falling Linden on giving the basic accounts a weekly allowance but what about the premium accounts? 500 a week is 10x what the basic accounts get and most likely the premium users don't need an extra 2000 lindens a month while the basic account holders actually can use an extra 200 a month! Why take money away from those who need it most?

Simple answer is dude, we're paying for those $L. If they discount the premium membership to just the value of the also included 512m worth of tier, then by all means, take my stipend away.
And why do you need it most? Like your WANT is somehow more important than our want? There are no NEEDS in SL. Spending is entirely discretionarey.

Questions we don't know the answers to:

How many people are on premium accounts?

How many people are on basic accounts?

How much money enters the economy because of these accounts?

How much money enters in other ways (dwell etc)?

How much money leaves the economy through payments to LL (uploads etc)?


Until we know the answers to most of these questions, we can't really come up with a strategy to raise the value of the $L. Remember, when some self-styled expert in the forums tells you he/she has a solution to the perceived decline in the $L, he/she doesn't have the facts either.

Because most of the premium members contribute to the system/world not only by paying their monthly membership fee, but aslo buy land and create/build CONTENT -- they are content producers, not just CONSUMERS and tourists.

And the value of the Linden drops due to too many Lindens being injected into the system, so all the supposedly economic "experts" who are screaming about the fall in the value of the Linden are the same idiots who dump their $500L weekly stipend into Lindex AND THEY ARE THEMSELVES DRIVING THE VALUE OF THE LINDEN DOWN.

While these numbers are not published officially, at least some of them can be easily deducted from publicly available data.SL currently has some 150,000 residents. No, I don't want to debate how many of them are alts. The developer incentive is paid out (by definition) to 2% of the land owners in SL. In January, when the number of residents was around 100,000, DI was paid out to 140 residents. This means that 7,000 = 7% of the residents are land owners. From previous information officially published by Linden Lab we know that the overwhelming majority of Premium Accounts own land. (There is not much reason to go premium of you don't.) That means that some 7% to 10% of the residents (alts or not), are on Premium accounts. Lets assume 10% just to make calculations easier.

With a population of 150,000 this means 15,000 Premium Accounts (max).
150,000 minus 15,000 = 135,000 (or a bit more, but less than 140,000).15,000 * 500 L$/week = 7,500,000 L$ per week in Premium Account stipends.
135,000 * 50 L$/week = 6,750,000 L$ per week in Basic Account stipends.A hard one. I have rarely met a resident who earns more than 20% of his stipend in dwell. But there are some big players in the dwell game. I would be very much surprised if dwell were much than 10% of stipends on average. But maybe another forum reader has better numbers for that.Even harder. Biggest drains seem to be upload fees, classifieds and account balances of orphaned avatars. Upload fees will rarely sum up to a huge amount except for some very prolific content creators. The drain size for classifieds could be easily measured - but thats a tedious job And the number of residents leaving SL for good with a positive balance is probably a trade secret.

All the numbers mentioned above have an error margin of at least 20%. But still you can safely assume that nearly the same amount of money enters the economy through Basic and Premium stipends and, taken together, this is a lot of money - some 13 - 14 Million L$ (50,000 US$) every week.
I am not sure if anyone who is making decisions about the basic parameters of the SL economy is expecting "we" to "come up with a strategy to raise the value of the $L".

Looking for sound economic advice in the forums seems a suicidal strategy for a business IMHO.

How about LOWER Tier prices so people buy L$ to buy more Land?

They keep taking this and taking that...how about giving something in return?

Why? Why shouldn't it fall? Why should it stay stable? Various people try to play armchair Greenspan whilst assuming that the value ought remain constant and yet offer no justification. I think the unstated reason is "because I want it to", but that's not very compelling to others.

Advocate a policy change if you wish, but you should probably give people a reason why they might care. Linden Lab will probably ignore you anyway, but if you are posting in a public forum to sell your case then sell it.

Bravo!!!! Another Voice in a Sea of Welfare Addicts.
The Addicts won't give up their drug without a fight..

The way you discuss welfare and project welfare onto our -paid for- stipends.. I can only imagine you must hate living off of welfare real world.

i see alot of people have no idea how supply and demand works.. if you think that the chump change of 50L the basic user get is going to make a big change if any at all your sadly mistaken. the lindenx rate is based apon supply and demand. if the volume of linden going in over weights the the need and volume going out it loses value that simple. If you think taking away someone 50L a week is all the sudden gonna cause masses to start buying linden in bulk then your in for a rude awaking.

people now a days dont cash out anything less then 50k.. some no less then 100k, and fact is there no demand for it. even if you take out the 50L a week given there still gonna be no demand for that high of volume.. people are just not buying linden in bulks of 50k in bulks of 100k+ at the rate that it is coming in.

say you have casher A ,B , and C

casher A cashes out 50k
casher B cashes out another 50k
casher C decided to cash out 100k

you now have a total of 200k floating around lindenx

now you got 3 buyers

buyer A decides to buy 20k
buyer B decides to buy 10K
buyer C gonna splurge a bit and buy 50k

only 80k out of 200k was actually taken out thats leaves a supply of 120k still lingering around.

now you get 3 more people who decide to cash out in bulk that supply of linden now grows where the demand really doesnt.. and so forth

the problem isnt within the game the problem is within the lindenx market. right now the volume going in and the volume going out is like try to seasaw with someone who 120lbs on one side and someone who is 500lbs on the other side. the only way to even it out is to either find somewhere to add weight to the lighter side or to drop some of the weight on the heavier side. thats what need to be focused on ways to even out the weight within lindenx itself not within the game, and intill that is done what i said earlier is just a fact..

if there is more supply then demand the value of that supply takes a loss

Have you looked at the volume figures? Today's is $788,587.

and seen the amount of linden still avalable

Open Sell Orders


Exchange Rate Sellers at this Rate Total Remaining Quantity


L$278 / US$1.00 13 L$258,553


L$277 / US$1.00 27 L$1,714,000


L$276 / US$1.00 12 L$746,682


L$275 / US$1.00 15 L$1,257,492


L$274 / US$1.00 15 L$2,095,015


L$273 / US$1.00 13 L$566,701


L$272 / US$1.00 12 L$653,233


L$271 / US$1.00 8 L$392,894


L$270 / US$1.00 23 L$1,264,151


L$269 / US$1.00 7 L$206,163


L$268 / US$1.00 10 L$2,610,280



that is a lot of linden left in the market to be sold. even if thats the volume shown is what being taken out to orders there probably twice that amount that goes in

I don't think anyone's expecting all of that to sell today. I imagine some people are placing sell orders at different prices, some close to the price it currently selling at, some higher in case it moves upwards. Its probably more meaningful to look at the volumes around the price it's currently selling at, and compare... that's where the Lindens people expect to sell quickly will be.
I dont think a fictitious scenario with imaginary numbers really proves much.

right now in the bank of lindenx there a supply of 27,381,148 linden waiting to be sold. so with that much linden in there there no need to pay someone top dollar to just add to the ever so growing surplus of linden already there. once that number begins to drop or people start to buying larger bulk of linden the market value isnt going to change much. that volume of 900,000L is would be great if no one were to add to the amount of linden already there to be sold

Tier is the main source of revenue for Linden Lab. Lowering tier would be a nice shot in their own foot.

I don't care of L$ value, i always dealed with the L$ instability.
I'm against basic stipend removal, i don't care of premium stipend.

At current volumes a very large proportion of those $L will turn over within the month. That seems about right, and I think in an exchange you would expect the daily volume to be a smaller number than the total supply. Do you imagine in RL markets that daily volume is anywhere near equal to total supply?

I've seen this claim before. I would like to see some evidence. I'm a contentent producer on Basic, and there's a hell of a lot of content consumers on Premium to judge by the number of "level the ground and drop a prefab house on it" builds out there.

This whole discussion about "Basic Account holders do this and don't do that, Premium Account holders do so and so" gets a bit boring after a while. It is running in circles, too.

Why is it so hard to see, that "it takes every kind of people ..." to make our Second Life?

There might be a bit of a difference between the behaviour and the typical occupations of Basic and Premium account holders. But don't forget, for example, that many Premium Account holders are here to have fun, too. And a lot of creators and business people in SL are on a Basic Account. It' s not that the type of account make a resident "good" or "bad" or "useful" or "business" or "creative" or ...

The only factual difference I can see, is that Premium Acccount holders are customers for SL. They supply the company with a constant stream of revenues. As harsh as it may sound, Basic Account holders are of interest to LL only in so far, as their inworld activities finally provide an incentive for a Premium Account holder to spend some more money for tier, renting of a private sim, etc. This incentive can come in many different forms. This is a complex society.

In the end all residents of Second Life are important for this virtual world, its growth, its beauty and its prosperity.

Gee, the same kind of whiny iodicy spouted by Rodney King, the crackhead who ran from police, then whined and fought with them until they lost it and whaled on his sorry ass.



You're ignoring the fact that SL as it largely stands was built/created by those Premium account members who were, in fact, the ONLY SL members at the time -- LL did not start up freebie accounts until there were, what, about 50-60k members?



And that "constant stream of revenue" is what keeps the servers running and pays for new servers for new sims.



Actually, LL began offering free accounts as a way of introducing more people to SL faster, in the hopes that they would soon upgrade to Premium (as I did, after being messed over by two landlords in a row, so I could own my _own_ damn land). Unfortunately, the DI given to high-traffic sites like clubs/casinos with camping and artificial "events" (basically dressup contests) injected by clubs/casinos has thrown that off: the freebies are now "working" at camping on autopilot (zombies) in order to make money, rather than upgrading and receiving their $500L/wk as paid members. And the Premiums who are basically tourists, in SL only for "fun and games" instead of contributing by being landholders and building/creating, are dumping their Lindens on Lindex, thereby creating an artificial glut in the Linden, and driving the exchange rate down (and then bitching because they're getting less for their Lindens).



And a fair number of them are dragging down the quality of life in SL, just as in RL, the productive members work and the nonproductive ones are on welfare, are addicts of one kind or another (camping and/or slots), and hassle everyone else who actually does anything useful, while whining about their rights and how beautiful diversity is.

My, did we have a bad week, did we? I hope you have lots of fun this weekend - inside and outside of SL. Get well soon!

I didn't realize that the point of SL was to work. I thought it was to do whatever I wanted.

My position is still very simple. We don't have the data. We don't know the most basic facts about the money supply. And it's obvious we don't. The self-styled experts are quickly reduced to name calling in any thread dealing with this stuff. They can't support their arguments with hard facts, because they don't have them. So what do they do? They start calling their skeptics things like "lazy" and "welfare addicts" and "communists" and go off on weird rants about Rodney King.

If you have facts, present them. Calling your skeptics "welfare addicts" is counterproductive. It shows you don't have the facts to back up your claims and it shows you don't really understand the meaning of the word "welfare". Which only serves to raise doubts about your understanding of basic economics.

yanno dude, you really need to look up exactly what welfare is, just because someone has a basic acct doesn't mean they are welfare people.. why pay for something we are not going to use.. difference.. land.. thats it! if you don't want to own land, than why pay for a premuim acct. Get OFF your high horse and quit your whining!

So you can be messed over by your neighbors instead?

I'm a Basic account user. I am not a "free" account user. And I pay more money to Linden Labs through Tony and Alliez than a Premium account user would... without adding to the inflation/exchange rate problem... in fact the Lindens I buy mean I, the Basic user, are part of the solution to your problem.
You know that, for a fact? You don't think ANY of them are spending ANY money on content? Oh, and how does flattening 512m and putting a prefab house on it "contribute"?

we pay more, thats why. We put more real money in the Linden pocket, so we get a bit more. What do you want? walfair for the poor?