The value of the linden

You would think that with the recent press awareness of SL and that there are so many residents the linden would actually increase in value but it has not. Some landlords have raised my rent by as much as 50%, and in one location increased 100%.

Are new residents simply not buying lindens? Are third-party companies like IGE generally devaluing the linden? Is the occasional player-caused grid crash throwing the economy out of whack?

Does anyone know why this is occurring? If someone at Linden could give us a concrete answer it would help. Thanks!

The linden has no value as far as Linden Lab is concerned. The TOS clearly states this.

The One Currency All Hail The Central Currency

Thank you Khamon but that doesn't answer any of my questions. The currency doesn't arbitrarily change exchange value on a whim; some underlining thing causes the change to occur. My question is "what" is it? In other words can the cause be identified?

Greed?

The sudden realisation that they want to make more money?

You name it...

Here's what one of my landlords said...

"instead of peole buying lindens when they are new they jsut sit in
chairs, and dev incetive annd land bonuses are being remove cause of
camping chairs"

Sounds reasonable.

This is going to get moved to the Land and Economy forum, but..

I think it comes down to people carrying more tier than they can afford. This makes them need to cash-out in a hurry, meaning they have to post large sums on the market well below the going rate. This pushes the value down. With the new lower value, people will post their L$ at even lower values.

The system is stable enough that a couple large dumps at low values won't make huge changes. However, there's enough movement that a lot of small steps have pushed the L$ steadily lower and lower.

Nah. Straw man, at best, totaly off base at worst.

Camping chairs ARE a problem, but not THAT problem.

The amount you can get via camping vs buying them means that anyone content with camping-for-profit isn't going to be buying much to begin with.

So basicly because he gets a little less from dwell (yes dwell is not that big a moneymaker) he doubles your rent?

Or did I misunderstand something?

With regards to the camp chairs , I'm no fan of them , but sitting in the chair for hours to get like L$20 is not going to get your landlord that many sales from those mentioned moneychair camping people.

Seems to be to be a bit of a void excuse really.

As far as I know, dwell and camping chairs have very little to do with each other. Camping chairs are all about traffic, which provides a higher listing order in Find Places, and possibly an entry in Popular Places. Camping chairs are a relatively inexpensive form of advertising for big-money places, and I seriously doubt that removal of dwell will have much effect on them.

- Jon

TeaZers Island increased my rent 50% on the "shop" and 100% on a "cubby" vendor. Their reasoning was the declining linden value. All other landlords haven't raised rent. In fact many landlords said they will probably cap rental prices if they do need to increase rent.

Not sure of the impact, but I did pass a camping chair (well, cdance pad. Same-same) the other day with an undresponsive Avie on it. The floating text stated taht the dancer recieved 3L$ per minute. Not bad until I saw that that Avie ahd been in place for long enough to make 600L$+. I was a bit taken aback at this and did the math. That's over 30hours as an idle resident on one of these things. Not sure if 600L$ in 30hours has an inpact on the economy, but I bet it's gonna be a surprise to te landowner.

~Jessy

I think you need to redo your math - L$3 per minute is L$180 per hour, which would hit L$600 in about 3 hours and 20 minutes...

- Jon

No, he has to double the rent because the value of the L$ has fallen 25% in the past few months.

Additionally, the price of gasoline has skyrocketed.

The shortfall has to be made up somewhere.

Oh well then the answer is no. the underlying cause changes as whimsically as it does often. Some weeks the linden will be worth more, on average, because it jsut so happened that a couple of large groups of employeed people found the world and needed lindens to buy clothing. Another week will be due to some av marketing a fab new toy that everyone must have and will buy lindens to secure. Then LL will release some new kind of land and prompt the ready purchase of millions of lindens.

Then some weeks it'll be down because it's tax season and people are waiting for refunds before they buy anything else. Others because lots of new movies are out and people aren't playing SL much or because the linden is too high and people are just waiting for some to post at a lower rate.

The short answer is no. There is no identifiable underlying cause and certainly nothing that the Lindens could get a handle on to control the market.

Moved to the Land and Economy forum for further discussion.

We have discussed this enough.

Moved to LL Office for further discussion.

Ummmmmm...Oops! *snickerS* Darn decimal places.

But in that case.....holy!!! Ummm....*goes looking for a dance pad*

~Jessy

Im not in favor of a free market. I am infurieated that the L$ has lost so much value in such a short time due to greedy impatient people that use the system. I am all for a hardend exchange rate of 250 for every dollar spent and 275 for every dollar gained. That way SL is still making proffit on the exchange of currency and users are still able to make a substantial ammount. When I sell money even a small fluctuation in the exchange rate by say 3L$ hurts pretty bad and I want to see the nonsense stop. IF there arent going to be hardened rates then there needs to be a way to have a greater penilty for dammageing the market the way users are now.

/very angry user

Thats life, deal with it. Markets determine the "Value" of the
Linden Dollar. Not some arbitrary fixed price.

And if the price is fixed and people can buy/sell for what they
want, then new 3rd party markets will bypass LindenX and
trade there.. (ie: IGE, SLEX, GOM v2, eBay, etc)...

Socialists visions of control and fixed pricing don't work.
You need to fuss about the "Cause" that created the devaluation
of the Linden Dollar. Not attempt to control its price.

If LL didn't flood the market with New Linden Dollars every
Tuesday, we wouldn't have this issue.

The linden value is getting better every day. Eventually, I hope, we will reach that 1000L/1 usd level.

Alright I've been a resident of SL only about a week, and since day one I was interested in the L$ value discussions. And yesterday I thought of a possible soultion that I'm fairly sure most won't like.

How about making qualifying limits (espeically for free acounts, which I'll use an example) on the stipend. So if you have over $L200 in your account then you only then you only get $L25 that week, and have a cap before you are disqualified for the Stipend. Also to ensure that people wouldn't simply spend their L$ on Monday to qualify, use somesort weekly average. Premium accounts should have it reduced by half and also have qualifying limits, isn't the point of it that you can own land.

This might help some, although for SL to be really a platform for Developers and Businesses (as advertised on the site) LL really needs to stop printing over $50,000 USD a week. (very rough estimate with following assumptions 190,000 free users and 10,000 premium users at 300L$/1USD). Do the L$ sinks destory anywhere near that amount?

Hmmm.. Writing this I just cameup with another solution, how about funding stipends only from the sinks? It might require a slight increase in the costs of them, but at least new money wouldn't be created. Also if you use the qualifying limits with it, some system might be workable.


For full disclosure I playing with a free account and the $10USD i'd spend on a premium I spent at the exchange to buy L$, since I don't want to buy land quite yet. I also won't even consider developing content at this point, since 1) I dont have the skills yet and 2) 1000 / 1USD is possible down the road.

No, the point of my buying premium was for the stipend. Touch it and at this point I will gladly drop to basic and rent instead at the end of my contract. Cut my stipend before that contract is up and you BETTER have a decent recompensation. I paid for my stipend in advance when I purchased my premium plan. I paid for 500 l a week. Not an amount dependent on how much I have.

By the way, who said I wanted it to be a platform? Its a game.

Your right you didn't say you wanted it as a platform, but it is advertised as one if you click on the "Business Partners" and "Developers" links.

They also advertised it would have havok2 in 1.7


Your point?