Two questions on stipends

How about we change the name from "stipends" to "features LL promised to users in an open contract"?

Instead of "End stipends now!" we can have "end features LL promised to users in an open contract now!"

Ugh. Why do you people keep repeating this. Almost ALL businesses out there "play beyond their RL means." RL businesses. Almost every business out there requires a uge loan that the business can not afford to pay in full, and usually takes YEARS to pay off. LL is a perfect example of that. And that's a GOOD thing, because that means there are people who are smart enough to figure out how to provide YOU with a huge amount of land and content to play with, by putting in a lot of their own money and figuring out hot to get that money paid back. If we didn't have people putting a lot of their RL money into the game and playing beyond their RL means, we'd have all of SL either split up into tiny 512sqm chunks, or owned by RL millionares who don't mind wasting a grand or two every month on land and stuff others get to play with, which is essentially charity.




Situation changed. When it dropped from $300 to $330, no one knew that was going to happen. And if someone sits there and pokes you with the tip of a knife a little bit every few minutes, and you know it keeps happening, know it's not fatal, but know it's REALLY annoying and pottentially dangerous... do you "know the situation and don't whine about it," or "know the situation, and attempt to get it fixed?" Why should people sit on their hands and not do anything when they see a problem? What kind of logic is that?

Because RL business and a virtual world are very different. RL businesses take risks to get started and many times they fold...SL businesses can be started with absolutely no risk if one starts out playing within their means. If someone wants to take a very risky and flawed virtual economy and try to make a RL business out of it, they shouldn't whine when they start having troulbe making SL ends meet, and they definitely should not call for changes that affect the majority, non business types, to fix their SL risk. The only "people" who have provided me with my land is LL and my neighbors who sold it to me when they were finished with it. It is not a 512 sqm chunk and I don't have a SL business supporting my tier. It's just over 8000 sqm, and that is what I own because that is what I can afford in RL. Why do you think everything would be in 512 sqm chunks? I have what content I have because it is what I can afford with my stipend, If I have no stipend then I will buy no more content, I'll just make want I need/want.

Basically those who are willing to pay for $L's now will keep buying $L's for what they want, but I'm afraid getting rid of the stipend will not lead many more to pay for $L's. If they can't earn it, or get it through other means they will do without or leave SL.

I recently created an alt. just to see what life without $L's is like and holy cow!!! I have several houses, cars, planes, scripts, textures, and a butt load of clothing, some of it very nice quality, hair, and skins all for Free! Newbies certainly won't be lacking in content if they figure out how to search "find" for free content. Someone even GAVE me $50L's because their "free" content was $1L for tracking purposes, which I promptly gave back since I could easily get that $50 from my main account.

If someone is in SL for the fun, creative, and social aspect of SL, they will be able to have a fine time without stipends and without buying their $L's. I guarantee, if LL cuts premium stipends, initially there will be an immediate drop in sales as everyone hoards their remaining $L's for things they REALLY want. And eventually there will be an even greater drop in sales as people who are unwilling to put more $US into this game run out of their $L's. Cutting stipends is not the answer.

However, I'll echo the cry that if anyone really feels they don't need their stipend drop it in a sink every week to get it out of the system. Don't be a hypocrite and call for the end of stipends yet keep yours every week!

Not sure who said it, but someone recently said that content providers want us to buy their $L's so that they can pay their tier. So in a sense they don't want to pay their tier, they want us to. Now if every SL business would pay the tier that they can afford from RL, and happily take any profits out of SL that they can, continuing to to only pay the tier that they can afford without their SL profits, there would be a hell of a lot less crabbing about the value of the $L and the whole stipend or no stipend argument will finally go away...but of course this won't happen.

But they only provide it in exchange for money, and at the moment the "play" is very limited - often by SL itself through no fault of the creator - so it's bad value for money.

A single Poser model can easily sell for the equivalent of over L$10000, and a single piece of clothing for L$1200 - but you can "play" with those much more than you can with the equivalent in SL. Poser has morphs, free posing, and a renderer good enough to produce work that can be shown as art to the outside world; all of those add value to the content. SL doesn't have any of these - if you buy a model, you either can't modify it at all or have to have the same skill of model building in order to modify it; if you want to graphically interact with anything, you have to have an animation which you pay seperately for, and then you can interact in just that one way and have to pay again if you want another, etc.. and even the highest quality art work generated by SL - even in the infamous "lipsync SL" - has to rely on the novelty of having been made in a virtual world to survive in the RL market. If SL is supposed to be a platform rather than a game then the role of content creators in the "platform" angle seems not to have been thought through so well, because at the moment most created content can't be used as a platform to base anything from.

In order for that "land and content to play with" to be actually worth playing with, SL needs to be made less limited, not more.



So if in the past, knowing that stipends and starting money existed didn't enable you to logically deduce that the exchange rate would fall, then what's your (or other people's) justification for, when the exchange rate does fall, automatically deducing or assuming that it's because of stipends? If it wasn't predictable, why is the causality suddenly so obvious?

Actually, as someone who has owned a RL business, intelligent planning means no huge loan. And any decent business person does NOT "play beyond their means", not if they want to continue to show a decent profit. A decent business person expands ONLY as s/he is capable of to maintain their profit line, otherwise they set themselves up for a huge fall. Something that is proven regularly. We've all seen a big company suddenly shut down for "expanding too fast". Granted my business did not immediately make me rich, but I was making good money and keeping myself alive and in toys as well. Eventually, as I had more money coming in I would expand well within my means, thus ensuring if sales dropped off I didn't shut down. ONly a complete fool goes beyond their means, because eventually someone will want to be paid and your going to be standing there liquidating for less than it's worth to scramble it up. Even Bill Gates started in a garage.

I have seen a lot less of Alan Greenspan in these comments and a lot more of "I have just enough knowledge to screw someone". I'm not saying everyone hear has no idea what they are talking about, but some of you are just blowing smoke.

Quite frankly, your asking the wrong question. You want to know what's gonna get you a short term fix, I'm wanting to know what will help in the long run. Ok, so you can sell off your 1000L now for $5 (just throwing numbers out there), but if only a rich few can afford your product priced at 2000L, yeah, you are getting $10 TODAY...but in 3 days you may be making $100 (not a 100L, $100 USD) LESS what you normally made. I don't know what you people think a bunch of broke people are going to buy, especially for higher prices. And the prices will rise. Everyone is going to have to make up for the fact that less cash is out among the people, which means less people spending money, which means higher prices so you can make your tiers.

I cannot see the stipend causing a problem. If there were jobs in SL equal to what we provide in RL, I could see a problem. I mean, if you have salespeople and truck drivers and allthe myriand people that work in RL that don't actually have jobs in SL (ok, so who the heck needs the lawn mowed in SL hmmm? and with vendors, who has a salesperson standing around????) then the stipend would be stupid. Consider the "stipend" thier income. These are our unneeded salespeople and truck drivers and waitresses, etc. SL really only has a limited number of true jobs available, unless you want to to start paying players for useless activities, such as lawn mowing. If you are going to base your view of SL economy off of RL economy, then you better think of everything. And there's an entire workforce in RL that there isn't in SL, maybe you should consider that.

As far as SL being boring??? Oh please. I have met SO many people here that it is awesome to hang out here. The other night several of my buddies and I sat around watching a movie, an activity that we would have never gotten to enjoy together because we are scattered all over the nation. We go to parties together, another activity we can't do. We SPOKE to one another (not typed SPOKE) and cut up and had a good time. These are people I'd have never met without the internet and would never have gotten to interact with in this fashion without SL. SL DOES have a ton more going for it than coming home from work just to log in and work some more.

Now all of this is my opinion. IIIIII know I'M not an economist, and quite frankly I think if the Lindens were to listen to me for their business I'd think they were complete and utter friggin' idiots. Unlike certain people though, I know that and don't try to tell them how to run it. I think if I thought I could do a better job I'd go open my own SL rip off.

When I said "play beyond their means," I meant "play with money they already have." That's not what most businesses do. When you open a restaurant, or an office, or whatever, very often you end up having to borrow money to pay for the building you're running your business out of, in hopes that the business will make you enough money to pay off that initial loan. That's what people in SL do: borrow a few $100US to buy some land or an island in hopes that the business they set up on it pays that money back. The "whining" that you people claim isn't the "Oh noes, I have lost money I put into this, YOU should give me the money back." I don't remember anyone on any of the forums claiming this. The whining is mostly about the state of our economy. Specifically that the HUGE %10 drop in $L value in just TWO WEEKS was an EXTREMELY bad thing for people. The slow decline isn't all that great, either, since prices have to be raised for sales to cover tier, but stippends remain the same, i.e. the value of those tippends has been dropping. Yet the stippends are partially to blame for the drop in the first place. I don't see that "whining" about being able to pay tier to be any different from RL banks and financial institutions whining to the fed reserve about changes in interest rates, or drop in the value of USD. If you think no one out there is complaining about this past year's decline in USD value as compared to other curencies, then I don't know what world you're living on. Are those businesses that are loosing money iRL asking the government to force all US citizens to gve them money? Hell no. They just want more sound and sane financial structure/economy. Are any of the anti-stippend people here trying to get LL to force all of you to give your $L to their businesses to help them pay tier? That seems to be what you believe, yet I haven't seen anything even close to that anywhere. Most I've seen is "whinings" to LL to stop printing money out of thin air at a rate faster than SL is expanding. Whether that means lowering stippends to reflect the actual economic expansion (AFTER the contracts have expired), or getting LL to get some of that $L off the Lindex/market. Who the hell came up with the idea that anti-stippend people want to force you all to pay for their businesses? And more specifically, HOW did you guys come up with that idea?

I bought land to put a house, not to open a business and make it my RL income. I came in knowing it was a game and anything else is just gravy. If I wanted a huge RL income, I'd get a well paying RL job. Up until everyone started the stipend yell, I was buying my Lindens AS well as the weekly stipend and my premium account. I felt that even before I began to get skills, it was a form of entertainment worth what I'm putting into it. And the only reason to pay the premium was to get the stipend as well, as I got rid of the land since I had no room to do anything with it.

When I said "play beyond their means," I meant "play with money they already have."

I hate to say but "beyond their means" has always been considered spending more than you have coming in, not with what you already have. And no, not all businesses borrow money to set up or have to, nor do they do it "in the hopes" that it will turn a profit. Not if they have half a brain. A decent business person looks at what the market wants and gives it to them, thus ensuring a profit coming in. NOw, they CAN borrow money, but if they are halfway intelligent they make sure that they can make those payments with a good business, not a hope and a prayer. The bank wants paid whether you're a success or not.

You cannot compare SL economy to RL economy. SL economy doesn't have the same things going for it. It has a smaller employment opportunity to the average person, whereas real life employment is varied even if you have no skills. Hell, SL is missing a HUGE portion of the RL work force. Also, there are tons of things you don't need in SL that you do need in RL, such as a roof over your head, basic clothing, and food. I don't see world hunger being a problem in SL, and you don't NEEd a house, and you can get clothes for free. All things that would never happen in RL. In SL money is just another game tool. Sure you can cash it in for RL bucks, but if you're relying on it to pay land fees or as income, then you have problems. I KNOW this is a game.

If everyone who's worrying about the economy isn't using it as land fees or income, then why all the hooping and hollering?

See, the thing is, I like Second Life. I like owning a chunk of land where I can build things that don't get deleted every few hours. I can't do this unless I can pay my land tier. I can't pay my land tier unless I can sell Linden dollars. In other words, I'll be forced out of Second Life by expenses if the value of the Linden dollar keeps falling and the sources of income keep getting scarcer.

It really isn't that complicated.

Anyhow, the stipends have nothing to do with it. The Linden dollar is falling because the game is seriously out of balance. A few people have too many Linden dollars that they have to cash out, and hardly anyone needs to buy them.

You can't force people to buy them when they don't need them, and if you create artificial expenses then Second Life is no fun and people quit.

So what you have to do is provide some content that people are willing to pay for, and that is not such an easy thing to do.

So the problem is simple, but the solution is not all that easy.

We're not talking about a huge RL income, we're talking aout SL expenses being covered by SL profits... And why are you paying a premium fee if you don't want to own land, when the premium fee gets you less $L a week than simply buying off Lindex? (unless you have the annual premium)




Yes, I agree. But that's the definition THEY have decided to use, not me. I know what "beyond one's means" means. They seem to assume that "borrowing money to play this game" means "playing beyond their means." Not my definition, but for the sake of staying on their topic I had to adopt it. Sorry.



Preaching to the quire here. I owned/own businesses, and am quite well versed in how they work. Yes, some people are lucky enough to have the capital to fully fund the start of their own businesses. Most people do not. Heck, isn't that what the entire concept of "stock ownership" is about? Not having the capital, so offering others to pitch into the idea? Again, I'm just trying to dumb this down as much as I can. "In hopes of" obviously means that they hope that the well researched revenue/expense accounting statement that they present to the bank in order to get their business loan actually works out. Some times it doesn't. Even if the person is intelligent, and knows what they are doing, at times there are things outside of their control that go wrong, such as a fire, or another competitor, or the country they're doing business in going bankrupt or confiscating their prperty. It happens.



It does and reflects RL economy pretty much perfectly if you take just the entertainment service section of it. SL economy is pretty much RL economy in the online entertainment business. Think of Napster, but with the server being located in a third world country, and with every content creatr being allowed to sell their "music" through this service. A lot of the RL service type jobs are in SL as well.



Money is a tool, period. Game or otherwise. RL money is a tool that allows for easy exchange of goods. SL money is a tool that allows for easy exchange of goods. Both are exactly the same in that they are only worth what we all agree they are worth. You THINK its a game, because that's what you use it for and that's what your opinion of it is. For others it's a business. Yet for many others it's a game that allows them to run a cheap small business. Even "game" is a relative term. My investments in SL are "game investments," where the amount of money is relatively small, and is all done with "game money." I get entertainment out of playing with that "game" investment, just like I would with other games. But the money still has value, and the investments are only different from RL ones because there's less money being invested here than in RL stocks.




^^^ Huh? Who said that?

Couldn't someone then argue that it's harder to provide better content, when better content would not pay better $L? I mean, if same quality content used to make good $$$, but now makes less $$$, and better content will just make as much $$$ as old quality used to, that would mean people would have to keep making better content (i.e. spend more of their time, work, and money) just to make the same amount of $$$ as before? Seems like a catch 22 scenario here: To increase $L value, you have to make better content, but to make better content, you'd need $L value to support the work put into it.

I'd like to point something out to the people trying to compare R/L and SL economically. Real Life businesses have limited resources / SL has unlimited resources. That 1 item someone makes can be sold an unlimited number of times. Where as in Real Life if i have 50 CD's to put music on Im limited to 50 cd's. I cant put music on 1 CD and sell that 1 cd an unlimited number of times. Real Life businesses take out loans Which they have to pay back but are less at risk because most people make things people actually want in real life and are willing to spend their money on as the object is actually tangible.

And to the person saying LL cant set a value of L that is very very true and i know that even though i posted contrary to that in effect. But what my post was about was that is the only way the economy is going to truly balance at any given value. Otherwise it'll never happen. To the people saying the stipends dilute the value of L not 100% true while stipends equal into the equation they really dont contribute a huge factor of it. The people getting in over their heads with tier payments are the leading cause of the problem. And someone proved that trying to prove me wrong to. Time restrictions they need to unload to much L to fast and cant do it at a higher rate so they sell lower. Its nothing to do with the stipend because either way if they had to unload that same amount of L monthly enough to cover their tier well guess what?

Answer to that is that they are always going to take the fastest route while still being able to cover it even if they need to use a little real life funding as backup. Tier payments are not a problem its payment for matinance. And getting the L at below market value really isnt a big problem. So we get a little more as a bonus for being premium what is the big deal there. If your in SL for money you take the risk you know the economy is a floating free market and choose to get involved. Deal with it. Dont come here and whine about stipends just because it fits your agenda at the moment.

In the long run removal of the stipends would lead to problems. First off this action makes it so that every single person has to buy their L. Wether the content creators realize it or not forcing people to buy L is a bad move. Most of you hopefully know this as you yourselves would be unlikely to purchase L if it was forced on you. People become more fickle with their money as well. People spending less money in world = less profit which leads to deflation where things end up becoming cheaper in world and then we see the L rise due to that but it starts to become slightly expensive unless LL tries to counter act that with introducing their own L at a set value which just leads us back to the situation we are currently in except now people have no money.

What your looking to happen wont actually happen and i think alot of you fail to realize the mechanics of what your actually recommending LL does. LL could credit my account 1.25 usd a week or just like 5 usd a month and let me buy my L but if i dont spend that on L they lose that money. I garuntee you if i asked anyone of you anti-stipend people right now to give me your stipend you would be unwilling to give it up especially those that dont have a business which i doubt anyone calling for it doesnt have one.

The point of the matter here is that there isnt a proper way to fix this. Its not simple at all like most of you want it to be. I hope mabye one day you will enjoy SL as a whole as oppossed to a business model, but please dont try to ruin it for those that wish to play it differently then you do.

Do they really borrow the money, as in taking out RL bank loans? Really? I'm surprised if that's the case and understand the concern a lot more.



The argument is: if you aren't depending on your L$ income to pay your tier, then why do you care about how many US$ it's worth? As long as prices in-world don't go up, you get just as much for your L$; and if nobody cared about how many US$ the L$ was worth, they'd have no reason to put prices up.

The business point of view is alien to a lot of people's. I would expect to pay more for a world in which I got to be a star or a fashion designer than one in which I just got to be a consumer.



Umm... it's pretty plain. They've lobbied for the removal of stipend and extra money so that other people are "forced" to buy US$ for L$ in order to spend it at their businesses.

And are they trying to force people to spend the L$ at their businesses? Well, in some sense, yes. The "L$1 for 250" effective-freebies system has already been seriously damaged - it remains to see if people will go all the way down to L$0. I have always understood that people giving stuff out for L$1 were counting on volume to get at least enough L$ to buy some other content themselves with, if not to pay their tier.

And it's also going to hurt new businesses - people will spend their higher-valued money at places with established reputations because when the money has a higher value there's more risk. This won't be seen for a while, of course, because the majority of SL residents are still recieving stipends, but it may happen eventually. Now, of course, all those places were unknowns once.. but they were unknowns when everyone was getting free money, so there was much less risk in spending it at an unknown. Every new business in SL knows the trick of selling things for below L$500 or below L$50 so that there'll be some segment of the population for whom it'll be basically free to give you a try - the L$50 option is gone, now, and the L$500 one will probably be affected too.

It's already starting to affect newbies. When I first joined and for a long while up to the stipend and primer removal, newbies would sell stuff cheaply to each other, figuring that a) newbies have their starting money and stipend to buy things with and b) encouraging a culture where newbies can sell stuff to each other is a good thing for everyone, because you can get money from another newbie today, and then tomorrow they can sell to someone else, etc. I remember on several occasions showing newbies how to make simple vendors that they could leave in rental or public business areas (and having to tell off the one who thought that the corner of the stage at NCI constituted such an area )

But a lot of signs indiciate that they don't do that anymore. They give their stuff away because their reasoning is now that a) no other newbies have any money and b) encouraging a culture where newbies give stuff away is good for everyone because then others will give stuff to you too. The US$ angle has effectively created have and have-not classes.

So yes, in some very real sense, they are trying to force people to buy US$ and then to spend the resulting L$ at their businesses.

In SecondLife, land is a limited resource. Land also drains your money quite a bit. In real life, MP3s and downloadable movies are an unlimited resource. A lot of data in RL which generates a huge amount of income is an unlimited resource. You can draw a picture or a logo once, and sell it multiple times to people who want to use it in their businesses or personal uses. You can write a single copy of MS Windows, and sell it millions of times, too.





Again, see MP3s, downloadable movies, the ENTIRE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY.




They wouldn't have to unload as much $L if it was worth more. They wouldn't have to worry about unloading quickly if it was bought up faster, too. It's not the sellers, it's the $L value. And the value of everything in the entire world is decided based on how much of it is available. Heck, even sh*t would be worth something to someone if it was only encountered in tiny quantities.




Most anti-stippend people agree with you. Cutting stippend off altogether will cause deflation, which isn't good either. Some amount of money HAS to be constantly pumped into the system, Just not TOO much of it. So, if you've actually read the forums, you'll notice that most people just want stippends reduced or adjusted, not completely removed.





No one can force anyone to buy anything, unless they hold a gun to their head, and I don't think LL is planning on doing that. All I am saying is that if you actually WANT something in SL, it would be better if you put your $$$ into Lindex and bought some $L from people who actually need that money, instead of having LL print that money out of nowhere and just give it to you. If you don't want to buy stuff in SL, you don't have to. But if stippends are reduced, and more people want to buy stuff in SL, they will have to. They're not being forced, they'll just have to go through other venues, that's all.




There are many ways to fix this problem. Some will work a lot better than others. Fact is, there is, or was, a big problem, and it has/had to be fixed somehow. There is only one way to increase the value of something, and that is to make it more scarse (make less of it). All the options available have to do with just decreasing the source of it, or increasing the rate at which it gets pulled out (sinks). And of all the options listed, I personally am of the oppinion that decresing the source of it is the best option. Some think that increasing sinks will fix that problem, although I view it as akin to increased taxation for the sole purpose of making the economy better, and making the game less fun/more cumbersone. Many others either think there is no problem, or simply don't care.

EXACTLY, and the main point here, SL has to be fun, otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of the game. Its a game, some people forget that.

Why not? I support the company that makes my fun. I don't expect anything to be free. Nor do I expect it to pay monetarily for itself.





Actually my aunt just opened a business with nothing more than a leased building and furniture she bought over time. So far is quite the success and she didn't borrow a dime and had no start up capital. "In the hopes of" does NOT suggest a well thought out plan, it suggests I'm going to throw some crap out here and if I get lucky someone will pick it up. If you have a plan, you have little need of hope. As far as things outside their control, we're not talking about things outside their control. We are talking during normal operating procedures.





This is so wrong it's painful. Let me "dumb it down" for you. See, for people to afford those "entertainment service sections" we are still discussing a whole economy. You cannot have outside influences on one economy and not another and compare the two. In RL you HAVE to have food, clothing, and a home. HAVE to. Your ability to spend money on entertainment is severely limited based on that. That money comes from people who work for a living at jobs to come spend entertainment money. In SL all your money can be play money as you have NO necessities to meet. There is NOTHING necessary about 2L. As far as service jobs available in 2L that are in RL, maybe I'm in the wrong places, but haven't seen a whole lot of waitresses, truck drivers, stock boys, salespeople, etc widely employed. You have dancers, hosts, hookers, and business owners. Not exactly a wide work force and naturally limited by what's needed, there's no race to employ as much of 2L as possible.





Money is not a tool in RL, money is a necessity. You must have money to have food, clothing, and a home. It doesn't allow for an easy exchange of goods any more. It's the ONLY way to exchange goods for the common person. A tool can be done without, money in RL can't. You have it or you die. Not lose your little account, DIE. Because these days, where else are you going to get food, clothing, and a home without it?




I use it as a game because it is a game. It's not real. If someone wanted to, they could pull a plug and it would all disappear. If I kill people there, they don't die. If I build a house there it doesn't give me and my kids a place to live. It's like nintendo. Granted a nintendo you pay monthly for, but it's still a nintendo. I log off and even if I "ate" in second life I still have to actually eat at home. And even if I put clothes on my avatar, I still have to put clothes on at home. ONly the people are real. That's not real life. That's a game. Or at least it should be, someone who relies on it for food and a house has got issues I don't even want to approach, and probably won't be a problem much longer as they'll starve to death or be evicted when their landlord wants that green money thing instead of Lindens. It's a very nice pretend world, and I like it. But I'm not confused or anything. Nothing in there actually affects my real life. Just like reading a book or roleplaying D&D...I do believe it's a "virtual" world as opposed to a real world, simulated as opposed to a real environment.






You wanted to know how everyone got the idea that people were using this to pay for their land tiers. I believe it's been stated by several people, including yourself, that your using second life to pay for itself. I could be misunderstanding, and feel free to correct me, but I understood it to say that.

People keep repeating this because the people that are playing beyond their means rely directly on selling their L on a monthly basis. If they own several sims they need to cash out over 200 USD per sim worth of L a month . They need this L to sell within the time restriction they themselves created by playing beyond their means and thus sell it at a lower rate to meet this time restriction. If they didnt do so their account would be put on hold 7 days after until such time they can pay that tier. Now most are putting in to earn a slight profit monthly on top of covering their tier fee.

The point here is that they shouldnt be relying directly on their SL business to pay their tier.
If they can pay it in real life then the sale of the L at a restricted time frame doesnt matter. This prevents people from having to put in vast quanities of L at a lower rate. While it may not solve the L value going it it can and will likely slow it down dramatically if people actually practiced this. But they choose to restrict themselves to a set time frame and have to then sell enough L to cover their Real life expenses of SL instead of being able to pay it and having their L off to the side to mabye help pay the next month or spend on something else in real life.

Not restricting your L sales to a time frame prevents you from having to dump in enough to cover your tier on a monthly basis and doesnt force you to sell the L faster in order to have it at the right time. That is what people are getting at by stating that people shouldnt be playing beyond their means.

Last I talked to Luskies, they said they're about $10,000 in the hole >.< Yet they seem to be running a mostly non-profit thing, using theirextra SL income to pay off the debt. As to why they went so far into the hole? I was told it was because they didn't want the land popping up for sale around them to be bought up by laggy casinos and griefer types, so that the place they give to the people to hang out on would be more enjoyable. I suspect they knew what they were doing when they went that far into the hole though



Probably the biggest issue in regards to the disconnect between people who play the game SL, and people who provide them with the land and content to play on




I checked Yadni's yesterday. All the recent stoff is $0l now. Cant call him a "freebie reseller" any more



I agree. It seems that as time progresses, SL becomes more and more open to people, yet more and more complicated to actually play around in. Who knows, maybe with time things will adjust where the stippendless freebies will have a more establishes system for making extra $L. Maybe more charities will show up. Maybe SL residents will even end up creating their own government that holds LL accountable with the threat of pulling all their subscriptions, and will establish things like taxes to support the poorer SL residents. At this point I think anything's possible in SL.



My personal reasons for not selling stuff is that I just simply don't think the $50L value or whatever that I would sell it for is even worth it. I mean, it's like selling something I would've charged $10US for in RL for about $0.15. It might as well not be worth anything at all at that point. As for the have and have nots, those have always existed on SL, even before the US$ angle. There were people as far back at 2003 who had a lot of $L, could use that $L to res large complex builds (ack when every prim rezzed cost you $10l), and who were hated by the have-nots in the $L sence.

That's not what the most vocial people are saying. Just look at the thread titles: "End stipends now", "End welfare tuesday", etc.. Even you, as I understood it, were encouraging people to "burn" their entire stipend, not just some of it.



By this logic the RL Government does not "force" anyone to pay their taxes, because after all you still have the "choice" of not paying and going to jail. Most people consider "force" to be any situation where you try and make people do something by threatening them with negative consequences if they don't involve violence. Many of the people here are threatening SL with negative consequences (they'll remove their content).



They are effectively being forced because they may need to buy certain things in order to make their SL experience worthwhile to them. In that case they are offered the choice of buying the L$ or quitting SL and giving up their hope of having the experience they wanted.



That isn't quite true. The contents of my vacuum cleaner bag are unique in the world. The chances of anyone else having the same collection of dust are astronomical. No-one would pay for that. On the other hand, DisneyLand can print as many tickets as they want to. As they expand they increase capacity so can print more tickets. Is the value of DisneyLand tickets going down? To a consumer user, I think L$ are far more like DisneyLand tickets than money!

Jale i gotta agree with you heavily. But sadly these people wont practice the same thing as playing in their means. And cutting out the stipends would get rid of the small amount of actual jobs that currently exist in SL. You know it as well as i do and im glad someone can actually see that its a bad move and why in the same light i do. I agree to many are looking for a short term fix. They dont realize that what this is gunna do is mabye last a month and either L$ wil get overly priced as well as items in world or the linden will continue on the same trend and prices in world will go up.

Either case prices in world raise up. The economy is unstable because many people do play beyond their means which i stated above as to what specifically that means. I wont post it here as it'd make the post longer then it needs to be. Its not unbalanced because people have money to spend and this is why I quite frequently put the blame for the L devaluling on the Sellers as its actually a quite valid statement in the broader range of things. The stipend = money for people to spend.

Wether most of these people realize it or not they rely on the stipend as much as the rest of us and they wont put their stipend in a sink weekly. As someone said they are hypocrits when it comes to them themselves giving something up. I just gotta question how many of the people calling for stipends to go bye bye actually realize that the stipends are a major factor in their "profit".

A %10 drop in money value in the span of 2 weeks is hardly "normal operating procedures." A continual decline over the last two years, however, is "normal" in that is the standard for the last two years, but it's still not a very good thing.






SL is entertainment, much as art museum, music subscription services, cable TV, and professional sports are entertainment. You don't need any of those things. That doesn't mean they are not a part of the economy.
As for SL service jobs, I was thinking of hosts for parties and events, assistant managers/customer support for businesses, assistants for landlords, etc. A lot of service jobs needed in SL to help people out when the owner of the business/event/land/whatever is not available. They just aren't very often used yet.





I can get food, clothing, and a home by selling my services to someone, or paying in gold, or through any sort of barter system. If I write a web page for someone, and they let me live in their appartment for a month, money has never entered that exchange. It is a tool that makes bartering easier, that's all. Even if I had $0USD, I could get by just fine in the world if I had a bag of diamonds, or gold, or anything else valuable and easilly tradeable.




Can't all the things you listed above be applied to the Internet as a whole? If yes, why do people spend and make so much money through the internet, instead of just keeping in mind that it's not real? SL is entertainment, I'll give you that. But that doesn't mean that SL, or it's economic structure, is just a game where the value should have no more meaning than an at hope paper board game. It's an entertainment venue no different from Napster, and a markeing system similar to google or eBay. People put in a lot of their money to enjoy it, and other people take that money out to help pay for their RL things. No different than people paying napster to enjoy entertainment created by a musician, and a musician pulling out that money to pay for their food iRL.
btw, there are A LOT of things you can pull the plug on in real life that are not exactly games, and will sEVERELY hurt people financially. Just because it's plugged in doesn't make it any ess valuable or "make believe."

That doesn't mean they are playing beyond their means, that means they are playing well within their means. It's just that if the economy keeps declining, THEN they will be playing beyond their means, will have to cut back, get rid of their land, shut down their shops, and stop creating things.

And most businesses fail within the first five years in RL. You wanted reality, didn't you?






Frankly, situations change in RL too. Somebody comes up with a better product, better advertising, et You have a huge competitor that sets up in the area. In RL, you either adapt or die, you don't whine to the govt to change the laws because you have invested x amount in your business and you deserve to see the money returned.

Basically, this is what you are doing. You are losing money and instead of adapting your business model, you are trying to change the rules because you honestly believe that we owe you a living.

Jamie Bergman is one person. There are a lot more people than just Jamie Bergman here. And people who burn their entire stippend do so becaue others do not. If everyone burned a part of their stippend, then no one would have to burn all of it. Plus it's all voluntary.




The "remove their content" is not a threat, it's a negative consequence of not being able to continue to provide their content. They won't do it to spite the stippend earners, they will have to do it simply because they themselves can't afford to continue duing what until then they no doubt enjoyed doing.




But, as you say, SL is just a game. No one NEEDS to buy anything. And what's wrong with supporting omeone who worked to create something? I'd like to buy a S.M.A.R.T. car iRL, but I can't afford it at the time. Am I being forced to pay for it? Should I expect to get it for free or something?




The contents of an every day vacuum bad are very common. Just dust. The contents of a vacuum that was sent to suck up some dust off the moon or a passing comment, now THAT is unique, and that dust is VERY expensive.




Disney can't print as many tickets as they want. They have park capacity, and can't sell any more once it's reached. Disney tickets are also going up in price, because the land, the stuff Disney parks are on, which is represented by those tickets, is scarce. Too many people want those tickets, but there isn't enough of the park to go around. So Disney has to raise ticket prices to discourage people flooding in, and has to limit the number of tickets they sell. (p.s. I worked at Disney). $L on the other hand isn't really limited by anything right now. The Disney equivalent would be if Disney parks kept growing faster and faster until Disney parks were everywhere. At that point not a lot of people would be all that interested, and going to Disney would be akin to going to a McDonald's, with prices no doubt reflecting that.

Rasah the problem is most people calling for the end of stipends dont use it at all as an entertainment venue. They are strictly using it as a business venue which creates problems for them. And the 10% drop is normal operating procedure as I'll point out now....... First off these people "playing beyond their means" are practicing normal operating procedure for a business.

They have fee's to cover and have to pay said fee's on time. In real life however they have minimum payments required with interest compounded directly on that. The problem having to pay said fee's on time is that they have to sell at a rate that they will sell within a certain time limit. This is often halted to just the end of the month or so and is dumped in in one large amount. Their normal operating procedure is to cover their fee's and possibly make a profit. Thus lowering the value to sell faster makes sense as far as being normal practice.

However their normal practices impact the economy far more then the stipends ever will. Since they dont directly cover it with what they can afford with their real life income they rely directly on SL and as such need to practice in this manner. Sadly them doing so causes the value of L to go down faster then it normally would. There isnt many solutions to this problem. There is only 1 and it requires the actual people using SL as a strictly business model to change alot of their practices and not get into what they cant afford with a real life income as opposed to their SL income.

Sadly them changing their ways wont happen no matter what is done. You could get rid of the stipend and you could cut all the L in world in Half right now and it wouldnt make a world of difference. You can increase the value of something by making it more scarce but that doesnt mean more people are going to spend money. And as sales drop due to stipends being cut prices willl go up anyways so why threaten with inflation when its inevitable no matter what is done?

Sadly these people wont change and we cant force them to. They have to want to change and only THEY can actually fix the SL economy .

Many businesses in SL fail too no doubt. That's not the issue. The issue is whether ALL businesses in SL have a stable platform to work on, or whether ALL of them are at risk of a loss because of the effects of the economy as a whole.




Again, everything you listed there is components within the economy. This isn't an issue of competitors having problems with each other, or problems between in world businesses. There are plenty of those, but they are the standard in RL, as well as SL. This is the issue of the economy as a whole. And yes, you DO whine to the government when the economy as a whole is unfavorable. Look at the US government. Most politicians are owned by businesses who hope that the politicians will keep the economy in check. Many businesses and corporations also vote with their power to make sure that the federal reserve doesn't screw things up and kill things for everyone. When the economy in US tanked during the great depression, A LOT of businesses, as well as employees, complained to the government and forced it to create laws that would prevent what happened from happening again. This is about the SL economy as a whole, not individual businesses.