Back of the envelope calculations for our economy...

How many of these are just alts? And how many of these

1. Perhaps LL could create new features that would allow additional sinks. Once recommendation I would have is to set up a server that is just a DB. Create a set of LSL functions that tie into this db allowing storage of data on a more perminent basis. Should be relatively easy enough to implement (heck, myself and a hoard of others do similar on external accounts) but charge $L based on storage space on this server. Bandwidth would be free (would be internal network). The software would be free. The only price to LL would be the price of the hardware, which is relatively cheap. Charge <x>L$ per week/month to the script creator for storage on the DB. Since writing to notecard is among the most requested feature among developers, there would be a huge market. Even those of us whom currently do it via an external server could be interested due to easy of use and for the hella quick transfer of data it would allow (internal networked).
   
2. Or perhaps another one would be the whole outbound RPC issue. Again, set up basic accounts where people could upload their perl/python/ruby etc. accounts for off world processing, but again since it is on the internal network, bandwidth is free and there would not be the fear of rpc'ing the heck out of a major ISP and having them block SL.
   
3. People claim they want to teleport to a direct location. Cool, give it to them, but charge a fee.
   
4. Another sink which is not really too large of one right now but could be is to add a fee to join a group.
   
5. More dramatic ideas include removing the stipend from users past a certain age (give newbs money for a while to help establish themselves). Take some of the excess saved and use it to pay for "Linden Jobs". Linden Jobs could be things like running their video stream for an hours. Write a review of an object. Report on an event. Take newbs around on tours. Building/scripting contracts. End result: don't pay people for existing... make them do something productive.
   
6. Ad banner on forum. I personally don't necessarily like this, but I dislike low $L value more. Sell spots on a rotating ad banner for the forums. Perhaps then also charge a fee to have them removed if your too opposed to ads.
   
7. Probably too dramatic, but perhaps charge for forum postings (except some forums like technical help, etc). It would remove a _HOARD_ of money as well as perhaps can a little of the bickering.(Perhaps 1 $L per post).
   

[edited to add other ideas]

Those numbers are way off. There are 40,000 registered users, true, but that includes a bunch of free accounts that never log in any more. Just for an idea of how many people play, when they ran the Log-A-Thon a couple weeks ago and were trying to get 5000 simultaneous users, they peaked around 3800. So on a day they were giving a way a bunch of free stuff for just logging in for 30 minutes, they couldn't get more than 3800 people on in that time span.

Even among the active players, assuming anyone uploads 30 a week is a stretch. I constantly build things and use textures, but I've uploaded exactly 13 things in the last 10 weeks. Why? Because there's so much already there to use for free. I have several thousand free textures sitting in my inventory just waiting for an object to be put on.

Now if I were doing clothing design, that would be a different thing. But I'm not. And most people don't. Most players of this game are consumers. They don't make stuff, they buy it. They're here for the social aspect of the game. You also have a lot of people like me who think SL is a great building tool all its own. We sit in the sandbox for hours working on new scripts, new objects, but very rarely if ever upload any custom textures at all.

Two points: 1) Assuming 40,000 different users a week is way off. 2) Assuming everyone uploads 30 things a week is also probably way off.

Bring back Tax's! Oh wait a minute.. nevermind

Well wait a sec, you're looking for ways to get rid of the Linden money so maybe tax's in some form are not a bad idea. People who use excessive lighting, lag causing scripts, and other such resource draining content maybe should be taxed. Even a moderate tax on excessive resource usage would probably cause tons of Linden dollars to turn into vapor allowing for stipends to remain and possibly someday see the return of event compensation. For LL to not levy a fee of some sort against those who drain more resources than their neighbors is an insult to those who build and script responsibly.

Just my 2 cents.

The empire long united, must divide!

The empire long divided, must unite!

So it has ever been.

But there already is such a tax. It is called land tier, and it leases you a share of the server that a sim sits on... I wouldn't mind paying some of it in L$ though.

Income Tax Now!

Sorry, not exactly.

You pay for land and the prim allotment associated with that land. There is curently no fee levied against those who use more server resources via scripting or other server draining content than those who use less.

Actually you pay for a share of the server in general. The problem is that there is (seemingly?) no system to allow your scripts X execution priority for X land, NOT that there is a lack of charge for your share of the server.

What can you show to document that people pay for a share of the server? As I understand it, people are paying for land and the prim allotment that comes with it. There is no fee associated with server drain.

In theory there is a baseline of resource that a user is expected to use.

In reality some (some, meaning less than than the average resident) people are using far more than their allocation of server resources. IMO those people should pay a tax above and beyond their normal land tier.

A slightly niggling bit that threatens to drive this thread further offtopic... but the 40,000 number is the amount of avs that have logged in at least once in the last 30 days. If you want a total registered count, check out the total number of forum users.

Furthermore, their Log-a-thon was flawed in that it failed to take into account 1) european and other sizable populations within SL, and 2) it was over a 2 hour period, rather than a half hour. If you're going to stress test, take a hammer to the server, not a chisel.

But yeah, the 30/uploads a week has got to be way over the mark. I upload maybe 3 things a MONTH. I would reckon only clothing designers/other 2d artists are going to be uploading that much.

LF

While in theory I can see this as beneficial and huge sink (and I am sure my tax bill would be huge), I wonder if the strain on the server to implement this system would end up being too large, and thus increase the problem of over taxed servers. Light probably would be easier to tabulate (it is either on, or not) opposed to scripted items which non-stop fluxtuate. It would also cause issues if J-random newb ends up sending themselves into the red due to overuse of a buggy animation overrider, gets fed up, and quits. But your indeed correct that land tier has nothing to do with overall server share.

The $L economy has been on my mind lately, and I'll share a few thoughs as a noob. (actually after reading what I wrote, I guess it's a LOT of thoughts) -

Noob's don't have much money to start. If it wasn't for the premium account stipend I might not have lasted too long. Not cause I was out spending all over the place, I actually was a penny pincher. But I had the feeling that when you're broke the 'game's' not much fun. And the stipen is an extra reason to log in this week.

So I don't think that the answer is to remove the stipen, at any level, but to create other sinks. Quite frankly, SL is a major time suck and I threaten to quit all the time. So in all your economy thinking, don't forget that people don't have to log in, they don't have to sign up. Ideas that will would perceived as 'punishment' are not really good ideas because they'll factor towars pushing people away, which ultimately is bad for the economy.

To be specific, to not give stipend to people just because they worked hard and made some money that week, isn't a fair system, seems arbirtary, and removes an incentive to play and create. (You might think that it creates an incintive to create, but I disagree. It depends on the personality of the player.) And honestly, I think the percentage of people who actually do earn a decent wage in SL is very small and so it wouldn't really effect your equasion very much.

And FYI.. Directly taxing the rich to give to the poor (pay for stipend) takes SL to an unnecessary political place that I think would push me out. If it becomes over the top serious, political and unfun, why log in. Whether you call it a game or not.. if it's not entertaining, I'll lose interest and I'll no longer be able to justify the hours I spend there.


Here's a thought: A $4000L skin?.. I still can't afford it. Yet I think that good skins should be 4000L, and should not be afforded by all noobees. So maybe inflation isn't such a bad thing, if it's in-world inflation. If the value of the $L goes down, maybe we should just raise the price of merchandise. Maybe Chip Midnight should say, "My skins are $20US, and the in-world price is now based on that". Maybe there needs to be a way of linking the GOM exchange rate to the price of an item in-world so that it goes up and down as the rate changes. Just a thought.


I saw a thread about land which had some terrible suggestions about First Land, like having to give it back after a while. It's a bad idea. First Land gives a community (sim) a jumpstart and populates it. And as a noob, there's no way to afford $4000 land for months. So again, bored --> stop logging in --> no new users to buy Chips skin --> bad for economy.


Oh.. Lordfly, on your calculation.. you didn't factor in referral bonuses. I also did a lot of referrals when I started, which allowed me to buy better land, so that's another new money inflow that you've not considered. But I think a worthy one, because new residents means new consumers.


Which brings me to my final point for this post: SL is a community and the interaction is where it's at. An empty sim is a rather boring one, and without log-ins, SL is kind of meaninless. That's why dwell is important. Dwell is an incentive to create content that will lure people into the world. So that when people like me (a noob) log in, there's some avenue for interaction. Which hopefully will make me tell my buddy at work "Oh man, you gotta check out SL!!!", which hopefully means new subscribers, which is how LL makes money.

So keeping people in-world is a major goal of the Lindens, as it should be. And to make a statement like "Some people will whine, but oh well..", isn't thinking realistically. SL is a business for Linden Labs, and their financial success doesn't really depend on the $US value of the $L. It depends on the monthy fees they collect from you and me and *hopefully* new subscribers.

It's like you could just say, "Ok from now on.. Linden Labs has to purchase $L off the GOM at market value and then redistribute it as stipend." That would lock in the economy and boost the exchange rate. But it would also put them out of business in a matter of weeks, because at 16.2 million $L/month, that translates into at least $56,000 US a month. So that idea doesn't serve the interests of Linden Labs, and therefore of us, who exist in-world only by LL staying sucessful.

So my conclusion is that in your philosophical discussion of the economy, don't forget the fact that there has to be a balance between your interests as a "resident" and content creator, and LL's interests as a business.



---lightbulb goes off---

Actually wait a minute.. The total number of all $L's in the system is growing. If I understand right, that's your complaint. Because you feel that as it grows, the value of the $L lowers. Like the US dollar did once it was no longer backed up by gold. If the Linden's can just "print" money at will (which they can and always will be able to) then there's no stability in the value of the $L. But in reality what's happening is that I'm paying a $10US/monthly fee, some of which is being converted to $L and given to me as a stipend. I get $L500 plus some bonus which still totals less than $L1000, which is about $3.50 US lets say.

So your arguement about the $L being put into the economy doesn't really fly because I'm paying real $US for that $L. Even though in reality Linden Labs puts that $US in their pocket. (well, it pays for the thing which allows this fake economy to exist)

They're only giving $50L to the non-premium users, which only amount to about .15 cents US. You can't say that the $50 stipend is really hurting the economy.

A bigger factor into the value of $L is the Leaders, who hold mass amounts of it. If they try to offload large amounts of $L, the price goes down because of supply and demand. Someone like Anchee might hold 100,000US worth of $L, but that doesn't mean she could actually sell it for cash and make that much. Offloading it would reduce the value and she'd probably only get half that amount. The only way to raise the US value of L is to hold onto $L and NOT sell it. Which is only a fake value, because as soon as you go to sell it, the price would lower.

I'm going to stop now.. -milkbone

More possible sinks:

1. Name that sim auctions - Place the right to name the new continental sims that are put up (with LL approval... we don't need anything too out there, even for mature sims). I think some people would pay to be able to name one but don't want to fork out US$ for a private sim.
   
2. Added features bounties - Similar to the voting concept, except it is a "put your money where your mouth is". Players could submit desired features (or LL could just put them out on the floor). LL indicates a total sum of $L needed to contributed to a pool for them to implement the idea. I don't know about other fields, but I am sure some scriptors would pay good $L for desired features to be implemented.
   
3. Charge for creation of notecards - Why not, they take resources the same as textures and sound files.
   
4. Titles - Kind of like the whole group title bit, but allow people to create customized personal titles, for a fee.
   

So people like yourself who admit to using far more server resources than the average user should not be taxed on that usage? This is due to the difficulty and server drain that would be associated with calculating that tax? I wonder if your concern for your own pocketbook might be swaying your opinion here.

IMO people who use excessive scripts, lights, and other things that obviously cause resource drain and in turn rob other paying customers of their alloted resources should and can be (I think) taxed. It's really no different than in beta when one person could corner all the prims in a sim. That was not fair, and the current server resource allocation is also not fair.

I'm not an expert on resource management, but it seems to me that LL could implement a system that could easily on-the-fly calculate the average usage of all scripts owned by a resident on say a daily basis. Then add those days up and at the end of the week, or month, you pay your fees. In order to prevent the noob with a broken AO or whatever from accruing a large tax we could just simply make it so noobs don't pay resource tax's for their first few months. After fair warning though, they could be taxed. Maybe tax's would not apply to attachments, sandbox builds, and other public places.

If people like yourself were taxed it may cause you a higher cost of development, but as a developer you are here to make money, but make money on who's back? LL? The residents? Who? IMO the cost of resource drain should fall squarely on those who are doing it and not the average SL user living on a 512 in the middle of nowhere with next to no scripts running. If you want to play big then you have to pay the man. (or woman )

If you want to save the falling L dollar by creating equitable money sinks then you have to look at what it costs to run SL. I have no idea what it costs but I know where the cost lies and that is with those who use more than their fair allotment of server resources. Tax those "power users", which is fair, and watch the L climb again.

You don't want to pay for excessive script usage but you want to charge people for notecard creation?!?!

I don't think so.

A couple of comments concerning this, Angel. First, it is possible to implement this, by all means. However it will cause strain on the server and the slower the server is running due to high usage, the more it will strain the server. Even idle scripts that would not cause any server strain now will, due to the need to constantly monitor them.

Now lets examine what causes server strain. Scripts definately can and do, especially scripts that deal with physics. But scripts are not what usually brings a sim to it's knees. It is AV's. In all honesty, the current system pays the landowners that end up utilizing the most sim resources and that is called dwell. Your popular club sitting on 4096 m2 of land will end up taxing a sim far more than your j-random script happy person down the street. Of course your proposing taxing this scriptor for the resources his trade utilizes (i.e. cycles of cpu time for running their script) but overlooking the resources that the club owner is utilizing to run his trade (i.e. a hoard of highly physical, animation driven AV's). It would require a hell of a script to create the load of a single AV. IF your want to talk about sim usage vs. $US put into the system, the basic account holders are by having a lower ratio than hard core scriptors.

Server load is also probably not the main cost expenditure for LL. A server these days a relative cheap one time purchase (plus some data center hosting fees and maintenance). The largest expenditure to LL most likely is bandwidth. Scripts don't consume bandwidth (or very little if they utilize email or rpc). Things that do consume bandwidth is sending textures and sounds to an AV. By your logic, then those whom utilize more textures on their build should also be taxed, because it is more costly to the system. I am fairly certain the ongoing costs to LL is less with a mad scriptor's joint than your average clothing store with a 1000 textures compacted into a little plot. I also suspect that an AV walking by this highly textured clothing store will incur more lag than walking by a ton of scripts.

The end result is that yes, this would be an effective sink. Is it worth the sim load to monitor? I say no. Is it effectively and fairly charging for LL's costs and general resource usage? Definately not.

Sure. It is an asset the same as sound and textures. Why not? At least it would not burden the sims with constant monitoring tasks.

A good idea to drain L$ from the economy would be if GOM instituted an additional L$ fee, and kindly donated it to Governor Linden

I love these ideas, especially number 2, since I had already thought of it - though it would work better for USD
As far as money drain goes, charging L$10 for asset creation sounds great, but every time you save a script or notecard, it's saved as a new asset... I imagine charging only for the initial creation wouldn't take lot of load off the asset server but it would at least serve as a money sink.

This thread sounds very anti "average user" IMO.

You scripteratti don't want to pay for your resource use but you're very creative at sticking it to everyone else...

*shrug

Angel, tying script resources to land is planned for either 1.7 or 1.8 so there's no point in getting heated up over it. The Lindens are working on it. Thank God.

I'm finding this rather hard to follow....

We keep talking about needing money sinks, and a need to take $L out of
circulation. I'm going to assume most people in this thread know more
about it than I do, and so conclude they are correct about needing sinks.

But, that brings a few other questions:
1) How are ratings and uploads considered sinks at the same time GOM
and Ginko are not? In all cases a person reduces $L from their SL account.
In the case of GOM, other residents can bring the $L back in they trade
$USD. With Ginko those $L come back with a bank withdraw, with ratings
and uploads those $L come back in as stipends. I don't see how ratings
and uploads are viewed any differently than "buying" a service from an
inworld merchant (in this case LL), and those $L are recirculated when the
merchant pays for something (in this case hands out stipends).

Am I missing something?


2) How are Euro, yen, USD handled when other country currency is traded?
Let's say I work for an American company, but am stationed in China.
My company pays me $4000 US a month... but I'm in China, and most
places don't take $US, so I go to a bank and give them my $4000 US.
For the sake of easy conversion, let's say that US$1 = 1 yen, and so
my $4000 US would convert to 4000 yen.... but when I give my $US to
to the bank, they only give me 1000 yen per week (saying 4 weeks per
month).

Is the Chineese government REALLY creating all those new yen for
me every week out of thin air? ... cetainly if I keep giving them $US
and they keep giving me yen, they would have to, right?

I don't see $L any different than any other countries currency... we can
exchange back and forth with ease! So, do these other countries have
money sinks?



I have other questions, but will keep this post relatively short

Gabrielle

The difference is that when you pay an upload fee, the money is burned, its gone for good. Paying into GOM or Ginko is no different to passing your money to another resident, in fact that IS all you're doing. The money is still there, just under different ownership.

Well, except for the fact that most people owning land are doing something
that makes them $L (selling content, renting land, etc), and then they move
that $L out of SL via GOM or IGE to pay their tier... in effect reducing the
amount of $L in-world.

Gabrielle