Two questions on stipends

I know owning more land is great, but it is possible to build on a smaller plot and for $5 a month you can have 1024 sqm to build on and your things won't get deleted. It won't be as much fun for you but you won't have to leave if you have to downgrade your land holdings. I hope it doesn't come to that though.

As for whoever was asking why so many people make so much RL $$ on the internet, most of them are selling actual, physical products while in SL you are selling virtual products that aren't even stored on your hard drive, though a lot of good they would be if SL folded and everything was erased.

I say don't spend any more on SL than you would feel comfortable loosing should the plug be pulled tomorrow!

Is that different from movie, music, and video game industry, all of which provide you with entertainment, using their venues as business venues? I don't think hollywood or the music lables are in ot for the fun of it, I think they're in it to make money by providing that fun to other people. (yes, there are a lot of people in SL who are in it for both, business and fun)



This hasn't happened for the other 11 months out of the last year though. Everything in world suddenly costing you %10 more is not "normal." And, again, if there were enough sellers, the HUGE drop of $300 to $330 would've all been bought up and the price would've went back to $300. Hasn't happened.




I already covered that. That's not how a lot of things iRL work (see corporations, stocks, loans). That would also severely stifle inflation, and would create a very solid difference between the haves (people who own islands who are stinking rich iRL) and the have nots (everyone else including you).

Yes, cutting stippends will n doubt slow down sales, but it's not as simple as that. KIeeping stippends will keep sales, but the sales will also keep making you less and less money. People will have to raise their prices to continue to play within their means, which means stippends will pay for less and less. Eventually people will be forced to buy off of Lindex to buy stuff in game, as well. The outcome is the same in regards to the buyers, really.

Er.. movies you buy from movielink. Music you get from Napster and iTunes. Web hosting space you buy to advertise your product online. Database access you buy from someone to store your account information online. Antivirus software you buy that relies on daily/weekly updates from another location to continue working. E-Mail accounts you buy to keep in touch with people (personal and business). Online space you buy to host your online comics on which gets paid for by advertisers. 411 style services you pay to that give you info on a business or location. Blogs you post stuff to let others know about your life and general stuff. I could go on and on and on. There are PLENTY of service/information based things on the internet that people pay huge amounts of money for, which are completely intangeable, which will be lost if someone pulled the plug.

That doesn't matter, though. If you're only burning your stipends as a protest (which I presume is the case) then you should do something that represents the things you are protesting for.



They could continue selling their content on SLEx at no cost to themselves (100% profit!) or they could go down to a 512 (unless you're really saying they couldn't even afford US$6.00 a month) and fill it with small vendors.



There's nothing wrong with supporting someone who worked to create something, but people can still be forced to do things even if those things aren't wrong (whether forcing them is wrong or not is up to you to decide, is it wrong for the Government to force you to pay your taxes?) No one needs to buy anything but no-one needs to play SL either. If someone is going to play SL they're going to want a certain quality of experience from doing so, and the choice of either paying for it or going without is forced upon them.



But that's only because demand for them is high. That shows that if demand was high enough, the extra L$ being printed wouldn't necessarily cause value to drop.

That solid difference is already there - between the haves (people who get all the experience they want from SL without putting in US$) and the have-nots (who don't).

Oh yeah,d efinitely things available to the common person. I'm sure it's great to be born a superior human being and not have to learn a skill and have gold lying around, but the rest of us poor fools have to actualy do a job and get money to pay for our needs. That has got to be the most ridiculous statement.....






Wrong. If I order a book on the 'net, I get a real book in my hand to provide countless hours of enjoyment. AND I keep it even if the bookseller goes out of business. A car, a book, a cookie, all real things with real impacts on my life. SL and the internet are NOT the same.

SL is not google or Ebay. SL is a game where you actually risk the owner waking up tomorrow and pulilng the plug and you losing everything. You think he won't, but he might. He might just get tired of the crap and do it. I mean, it's his. It has nothing to do with being plugged in. My computer is plugged in and it's real. But SL is a "SIMULATED" environment a VIRTUAL world. Not a real world, a representation of a real world and/or environment. SL is also not Napster. Please quit trying to come up with analogies that can't fit the same mold. A cooke is not broccoli, it's nothing like broccoli. SL is not Napster, and it is different from Napster. See, if Napster closes down, I still have that song. I bought it, it's mine forever. And even if I don't buy it, as long as I remember it it's mine. Forever. SL goes down, you guys are so screwed. Common sense risks in a computer game: The owner might go suddenly out of business, the servers might get zapped by a current. EVERYTHING gone. You took that risk. I don't have time to be responsible for your risks and investments. Not my problem. If you are crazy enough to base your entire income on a game that is at the whim of another person, hey, knock yourself out but don't cry to me when it goes belly up, I'm a jerk, I'll just laugh. I however will see my experience as it is: a good time, with some nice people that I'm willing to lose certain amounts of money on. I see it my cash as a complete and utter loss financially speaking. If I make it up, even a penny of it, GRAVY, but hey, to me it's worth the risk of losing it all for the experience. Have any of you played the stock market? Because you guys don't seem to know the rules. You invest in something and if it goes down, you complain, maybe remove your money, but live with the consequences. You don't go out and cry to the public that they shouldn't be buying Walmart because you invested in Kmart and you don't tell the NYSE to change the rules. You deal, follow the market, take a risk.


And yes people, I really am a jerk. I really don't care. Flame and complain all you want, but look, if you wanted a safe investment anyone would agree there are better ways than an online game. And one more thing, SL ISN"T REAL LIFE...SL isn't even LIKE real life. I wish I could take my hair off and rop on another one...or my skin, change my bone structure with a click....wish I could spend all day goofing off shopping for a little bit of nothing, dressed in a ball gown if I want, spend all day at casinos, live in a home all by myself that i never have to clean, hell I don't even have to cook. Most of the times these houses DON'T HAVE KITCHENS! Second life was supposed to be a fantasy world to havea btter life than your real one....you guys are out to make it miserable.....

Movies you download and can burn onto a DVD, music you download onto your hard drive and can burn onto a CD. Most of the others you listed have some kind of ability to back up the material on your own hard drive, Many blog sites are free and run by advertising. You have a point about the web hosting companies though, I would still think you'd back-up your page on your hard drive so you could at least post it elsewhere.

SL does not give you the ability to back-up your inventory, your $L balance, your already uploaded textures...so if those things are not backed up by LL and are lost you have to re-upload them all. Nothing created in SL can be backed up by the user. That to me is a huge risk.

All real life beneficial services, see these affect real life. These have an impact on real life. You are paying for a product that actually exists outside of everythign except the internet. SL is not doing that. You are paying for something that isn't real. It has no effect on real things. The shirt I buy in SL I cannot wear at home. The land I buy on SL, if SL crashes I have no land. I can get a blog anywhere. I can make my own and host it myself even. And these are real life activities. A blog has real stuff in it, and if you don't believe talk to the people that get fired for bad mouthing their company on one. Again, SL is not real life.

Guild Wars costs real money, would you say it's real life? I can pay more money for the product of 2 extra accounts...is that real life? How about the wand I buy in Everquest...is that real?

Proved the point of playing beyond their means. They wont be able to provide content because they cant afford to pay their tier, but the same situation will arise if the stipends are gotten rid of in the long term scheme of things. By stating removal of their content it just proves it. Its not a negative consequence if they can actaully afford it. The point of the whole thing is to be able to pay for the means of it to start with.

As i stated a few times now they are at fault more then the stipends are. If they dont play beyond their means things wouldnt go down as fast as they do and it wouldnt be neccessary to lower the value of L to simply make payments. Sadly they wont stop doing this. Lets look how many sims anshe owns ok? Consider her profession as reported by the magazine to be that of a teacher or whatever she was. Now consider Sim #'s x 205 usd a month. Then consider her actual real world income.

Without the L > USD most likely she couldnt afford the tier and live. She has to make sure she has enough to cover that without cutting into her living expenses and if she has to lower the L value she sells at to do so well guess what thats business for her. The thing is she takes the risk and she knows she's going to need to pay that. She shouldnt scream then that the economy is falling as she herself is part of the contributing factor of it. Now when numerous people other then her do the same thing it creates a bigger and bigger problem.

Playing within your means is quite important for a virtual world. For instance and ill refer to project entropia/entropia universe again. That game is totally free and the money comes from no where other then playing the game itself and yet the value of their money is beyond SL's. Now that is because people are free to sell the money and wait for it to sell as opposed to waiting for it to pay some fee that they got themselves into but cant afford. When you look at it the business practices of alot of people in SL and in the Real world are quite flawed looking at it from a logical stand point.

But business people in real life would never attempt the BS some people are pulling now. Like owning a business earning less then you expect even though you knew the risk and then whining to the government to change it. The U.S gov wouldnt do it why should LL? You can view the stipends as bad all you want but unless business practices are changed trends are going to continue and it'll get worse.

Like what??




Still need to spend RL time and money to create stuff. Especially good stuff. And if $L declines, but people aren't willing to spend their $L on increased (inflation) in-world prices, then it's still a loss. Also things in world probably sell better than on SLExchange, since often times you can actually see what you're buying instead of just seeing a pic. It would also be kinda sucky and boring if almost everyone had to tier down to 512sqm, wouldn't it?




How is that different from the choice of either paying to go see a movie, or going without, being forced on you? I still don't get it.




Uh, yeah, it would. More demand for inworld items = more sales of items = more cashing out of $L while still less demand for $L = same decline in $L as before. There will be more $L bought to buy inworld items, but there would be more $L sold from the sale of those items. The amount of money exchanged will be the same, but the ratio between demand and supply of the money will be the same.

That would make me a have for the last three years, even though I don't use in game money for buying things, don't own land, and don't use $L for gaming purposes whatsoever. All the experience I want out of SL, that being building my own toys, learning t script, going to parties to hear my favorite DJs, chatting with friends, and having intimate close talk with people I care about don't require me to put in US$.

I know, as if this is how economy works? I wish everyone would change the rules so my business could be as successful as I just hoped it would be instead of as successful as I make it be. We'd all be millionaires if the NYSE would change the rules so our stocks paid off better than we thought they would and the stupid things would quit lowering and rising according to people's demand....*sighs* stupid free market economy....

Um, you can work hard at a job to get gold and diamonds, too. And both are fairly easy to get if you have the money. I'm sure you wouldn't mind it if the job you worked at decided to pay you in gold and diamonds instad of $USD or whatever currency, either, would you? My point is that money is a tool. It is not required to buy stuff, and can be substituted with something else. It's just that, same as while substituting a brick for a hammer may make things less convenient, substituting diamonds for cash would make things less convenient, too (hard to buy milk with diamonds, since you'd either have to cut it or buy A LOT of mlk).






It is if you buy an e-book. Or music. Especially if you buy a monthly subscription to napster, since without that subscription the music on your hard drive wn't play.



fyi, if the owner of iTunes woke up one morning and decided to pull the plug on that service, the songs you bought from iTunes probably won't work, either. At least the Napster, Rhapsody, and all the other music services won't. If you buy a book from audigy.com, and the owners pull the plug, those books will be useless too.



No, you won't. That song has to go out onto Napster's servers to make sure you're the owner of that song. No Napster server, no song. Same for audigy, and same for, say, a web page you bought from someone.




Ditto with real world banks, and every other business (almost all of them) that stores it's data on computers. Computer zapped, data gone, business SCREWED. You buy stock in that business, or deposit money into that bank, you're screwed too.




Entire income? I thought we were talking about current players being able to cover their tier to be able to provide you with the land and content that makes your SL more enjoyable? Who was talking about making RL income?




Um, you DO go out and cry, and even pass laws, if the stock market as a whole has problems that need fixing. What, you think Enron got away scot free, and all the people who whined about the exploit the used to steal money were ignored?




To you it isn't (although I doubt it, since I'm sure your in-game social interractions are same as your real life ones, and things you like to do in SL are things you'd enjoy doing iRL if you could)
To me it's closer to real life. It's a personal opinion and choice in how one chooses to play.



... by trying to make sure that your fantasy can continue to be supported with people willing to add more stuff to it... right.

Yeah, if that's all the experience you WANTED to have, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You'd be more concerned with your experiences and the others also having a good experience instead of your wallet. And that's basically what it comes down to, how much money YOUR making. I creat content because it's fun and I enjoy it...In fact, until you guys got your way and decided to take a newbie stipend I was on my way to making content for newbies to spend their money on. Now I don't mind readjusting my business decision, tho I'm really considering making it and giving it away. Heck, if enough of us did that, talk about killing the economy and still making the experience fun for others. And at the same time, we'd be forcing you to live by our standards. I mean, not holding a gun to your head, but if noone's buying anything you aren't making money and then you have to live as the rest of us. And since it's all not real and I can make infinite amounts of it, if noone gives me anything, I'm not losing anything at all.

You know, I'm done with this conversation I don't have to spend my money, I'll pay the Lindens, get my premium stipend and that's it. Let them have their precious Linden dollar....that'll get you what....a smidge of a piece of gum..knock yourself out LOL

SL is missing this feature, I agree.



Similarly to SL being free and paid for by people who wish to sell on it in hopes of making money... er.. advertising.



I agree. But that doesn't mean it's not a real economy. Just that it can't be backed up locally.

Well, why are you living beyond your means in real life by buying food and paying for a home? I mean, by your logic, you don't actually HAVE the money to buy that food or home, you just spend time and work getting it from somewhere else, don't you? And if you loose your job, you won't be able to afford to keep paying for food and home. Or, ok, let's make this things not nessesary for life. You go to the movies? You buy music? You watch TV? Then by your logic you are living beyond your means, since I'm sure you don't pay for all of those with money you have stashed away in some huge bank account.

No because i can afford said food. And actually if i lose my job i collect unemployment so i can still live. I know what income i have coming in and have a very stable income regardless. As i rent out part of my house to someone else and he also has a job. I also collect a profit from projects I've been involved with in the past and that is steady as long as that service is around. I dont rely on Money I DONT HAVE. And I have invested and saved wisely that if i run into a financial situation it wouldnt really matter because i have the funds in real life due to these actions

By my logic no im saying I dont pay for what i know i wont be able to afford. I know what i earn per month and by expectation some notice of you being fired has to be given by alot of employment places. I know if i got fired tommorow that i could still afford the 60 usd i pay a month on top of food and otherwise. Im not relying on SL as an income source but i do pay quite a bit. All together Club Republik is run at a cost of close to a full sim because of the manner its split up in. Pay almost full sim tier for about 2/3 of a sim.

Now me and my partner know we can afford it. And I could of lost my job earlier in the year and knew full well i could of. My company cut half its work force world wide. Now i could of been in there. But decisions i've made have left me wtih enough savings to live for about 2 years and have a few extra's without working. I didnt make the mistake of buying everything on credit, i didnt get in debt, i pay my taxes electricity etc, I rent out part of my house which is extra income, I own my house as well, I didnt refinance.

This is what i mean you can twist it all you want but i play totallty within my means and live totally within my means, In fact i can get by on my yearly salary for 2 years if i wanted to and i Opt not to do alot of things other people do. I dont drive (but thats because physically i cant), Actually i take the bus to work myself, also if i could drive i wouldnt to many bad drivers out there in the states =/. I can ride said bus for about 3 dollars a day. Which is like 1000 dollars a year. No idea how much money that saves really =/.

The thing is I know my means and i make sure im kept up to date on my financial situation and my companies status and keep my work up to above standard. I pay off SL monthly with money i know i have regardless. I dont go to movies rather pointless to go to them they cost to much to see it once when i can rent it for 1/2 the price and watch it at my leisure. Sure they arnt new then but who cares ?

Playing within your means means exactly what i described. Knowing you can afford the payment you need to make regardless if that income from SL comes in or not. Alot of people are relying on SL to pay that and that creates a problem when to many do it. If this practice continues it wont matter if the stipend is gotten rid of because if they need to unload their L in a restricted time limit that they themselves cause they will continue to undercut one another.

Cutting the stipends does nothing other then hurting a vast majority of the people in SL. Forcing them to buy L even for the simplest thing such as making an object. When people are going to have to spend USD to simply make an object the price is going to go up because their real life costs increase. Many people fail to take into account in this argument the simplistic matter of Human Nature. That in itself will cause anything to be flawed because human's naturally are flawed but those flaws make each person unique.

I honestly wonder if actually doing it is the only way to show you folks that are thinking its going to help the economy just how wrong you truly are. And another bit here Rasah difference between what you said and what i said. What you said would be me living beyond my need not living beyond my means.

And people who play on SL can afford their tier with their SL job.

However, if you lived in 1920s Germany, where the money you got paid on one day was worth less the next day, you wouldn't be arguing this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic#Economic_problems

Same s different post it seems. Again, where is the lack of buyers in your equasion? If there were enough buyers, why would sellers need to undercut each other?




So does letting the economy decline. Whether the stipends are lowered to $400L a week, and you can't afford to buy something that costs $500
OR
Whether the stippends are left at $500, but due to inflation, the price of that $500L item has to be raised to $600
You're SCREWED, and are forced to buy from Lindex. There's NO getting around this for the buyers. No matter what happens, Lindex will have to be a part of the equation.

and, again, just so hopefully you'll remember this:
CUTTING STIPPEND = BAAAAAAD This leads to deflation, which is also a bad thing


REDUCING STIPPEND = What I'm hoping for. Reducing it to reflect the ACTUAL growth of SL economy, not the influx of new alts.

Get it? Even ReserveBank said he didn't want stippends cut, but adjusted based on how much of an inflow is needed, and next to Jamie he's the most crazy "cut stippends" type in here.

Cut bas, reduce good. Got it?

I just want to have the stippends reduced if the inflation continues.

Im saying they shouldnt rely on that SL Job to pay their tier. They should rely on money that they earn in r/l from a job first. If they can help tier with that great if they cant it shouldnt kill them. Which is often the case here and is what is actually causing the economic situation to be the way it is in SL. If they cant afford it with their real life income and still be able to meet the needs of living then they shouldnt have gotten that much tier in the first place.

This situation is what is actually driving down the economy except you are one of these people that wants to push the blame on everything else but the fact. They should NOT be relying on their SL income to fully pay tier they otherwise cant afford in real life because this creates the situation i said where they place a time restrain on the L sale and have to then sell at a lower and lower value. They can get rid of the volume coming into SL but that wont matter with this trend of business practice. They can make it more scarce it wont change the fact that people are going to want to sell faster to cover their tier.

If they can afford the tier in real life they can then sell the L as they need to at a higher value and dont need to rely sheerly on that which is very unstable to begin with. If i went out and bought 2 sims tommorow it'd be because i know i can afford 410 USD a month or whatever the cost is. Not because I think i can cover it with SL money. Simply put I'd be within my means. Is it within my need to live no but it is within the means.

While you may disagree Rasah the fact is there and it is a fact that someone tried to bring up as far as time restrictions for your side. This is a situation that a person themselves causes by getting in over their head. They should not come whine about it when their plans backfire on them. Such is the world of business. You take a risk it doesnt pan out you lose out. You dont go tell people they can no longer get money because its bad for your business or someone that they cant sell something because its cutting down on your profit margin.

The world doesnt work the way you want it to you adjust to the world. The world doesnt adjust to you.

But this situation im stating is part of the problem. Not just a lack of buyers. Time restrictions created by the sellers cause value to go down just as much if not more. I'll agree to the point mabye give us 5 usd worth of L at the beginning of each pay cycle based on what the current market is but thats the only way to fairly go about it. However the stipends are neccessary to profit of people in SL and LL themselves so that moneyt has to be brought in regardless.

We can reduce the rate LindEx is falling by fixing what i said but it wont happen because these people dont know better or something. The problem is alot of people are screaming to actually end the stipends. The stipends are a small part of the Puzzle the situation i stated makes up a larger part of it.

The sellers are actually forcing themselves to sell lower on LindEx to cover their tier payments is what its coming down to. If they cant afford it with real life funds first that creates and issue where the money's value decreases faster then it would if it wasnt happening.

Why can't they rely on their SL job to help pay for tier? Is there a rule against that or something? And what's wrong with people who spend a lot of work for cool stuff in the game expecting to get paid with money they can use iRL to pay for stuff, be that tier or something else? Also, again, the only people who can afford to just throw away money on SL for the large scale land projects we have now are very rich folks. You want al of SL to be owned by RL haves? Cause I think the little guy with a lot of innovation who can come into SL and build a large successfull business, which is successfull cause it makes SL for for the rest of us, and then being able to use the $L they earn to pay their tier, is a very cool thing.



Fact is the value of $L is going down. Fact is there are two possible outcomes to that, those being either something being done to fix the declining $L, or your stippends not being worth the pixels they're printed on due to the resulting inflation. Only thing that's not a fact is your and my opinion on what is causing that decline. You think it's too many sellers, I think it's too much $L in the system.




But you can't afford to do that, can you. Most people can't either. So what you are essentially suggesting is for most people not to be able to own land.



I said that, but you completely missed the part about the time restriction being due to lack of BUYERS. And there's a lack of buyers because the $L isn't valued much. Why buy $L if you get $500 of it every week? If there were enough buyers, time restrictions would not be a problem.



And again, you are missing the point. You think this is about private business matters. Or individual business economy. It isn't. This is the whole of economy, as a whole, in the whole of SecondLife. If it was one business that got undercut by another business and lost money, that would be one thing. If this is ALL businesses suddenly loosing money becaue of something the government did (in this case LL) you complain to the government. When the stock market crashed in the USA during the 1930's in the USA, it wasn't because of what the business did. It was because of what the economy was like. Then the money of 1920's germany lost its value, and what you got paid in the morning could buy you only half of what it was worth in the evening, it wasn't the fault of the business that paid you, it was the fault of the government printing too much money. And what do you think the people who lived and worked under that government did? They complained until the government fixed things.



It does if it's a) democracy where you can vote on adjustments, or b) corporatocracy when you can buy politicians to pass the laws for you. I don't think that anything I say on here will be considered by any Lindens, or even read, however.

Burning only some of your stipend.



Sure - but all the stuff that's already been created could stay. And the brutal truth is, SL already has more content than a person who is buying L$ for US$ could ever buy.



Not everyone would tier down to 512sqm. Plenty of people who don't create content have bigger parcels that 512sqm, they're just prepared to pay the US$ fee for it.



Even if you couldn't go to see your movie, there would still be a reason to stay alive. If you can't have the experience you want in SL, there's no point playing at all. Also the average person isn't expected to be able to make movies.



I mean, if there is more demand for L$ in US$.

That's true. You can become a "have" in several different ways, and one of them is just happening to enjoy things that don't cost money to do in SL. There are other people who want things that don't cost money but for which the supply is limited by social factors. It varies.

I never said it was bad that they helped to pay for their tier. I said it was bad that they rely sheerly on their L > USD sells to pay that. They cant afford it in real life. And actually i dont think its to many sellers i never said it was to many sellers. I said it was the method in which they operate by not being able to actually afford their tier in real life without the use of an SL income.

And no i dont think its about individual stuff and you failed to grasp my point yet again. But actions in SL made by the sellers can impact everyone. Wether you wanna believe it or not. If all the sellers decided tommorow to sell their L at 500L > 1 USD they Impacted SL on their own. Not by an influx of new L and no by there not being enough buyers but by them Setting that price. There is more factors in the equation then stipends or simply sellers.

In fact its a mix of the two but the sellers make it worse by practicing in such a manner. Look at it this way if you want. Say I got a week to sell 1 million L just an example here so numbers may be large or small or whatever. Now the current exchange rate is 330 or whatever value you wanna say here. Now i need this 1 million L to sell so i can pay my precious little tier. Now am i going to put my L in at 330 > 1 usd and wait and hope it sells or am i going to put it in at a lower value so it sells off quicker so i can cover my tier?

This is where the sellers blame comes into the equation. They make a choice to sell that L 5 points under and they made a choice to get into a situation where they cant cover their tier by real life means without that SL income. What im saying is that these people shouldnt be relying strictly on SL so they dont have to be putting in the L at a lower rate just to cover it.
If they wait and sell some L and can help put it towards their tier great.

You fail to see even if there were more buyers this would continue. You would need a perfect balance of people willing to spend money and people selling L for your theory to work out properly and we all know the odd of that happening are pretty slim. Im just saying they should make sure that they can afford it in real life before doing it and shouldnt be strictly relying on SL to cover it creating a situation where they Have to have that income in hand every month no matter what the cost to the economy of all of SL is.

And 1 person on LindEx can make a huge difference if they keep selling at a low rate by the way.