Don't cut our stippends!

If the stippend of the free accounts gets cut down from our current $500L a week to just $50L a week, I WILL LEAVE SL! You can't buy ANYTHING for a measly $50L, and I want to be able to enjoy the game. Don't cut our $500L stippend just to satisfy the "Land Barrons!" If you do that, the vast majority of people will allso LEAVE SL and SL will collapse and go broke!!!







Oh wait... they already did that about a year ago... OH WAIT, NO ONE LEFT!

Just because your gameplay style wouldn't be affected by the loss of a L$500 week contractual reward in return for your commitment to SL by having a premium account, it doesn't mean that the vast majority of us wouldn't suffer.

I don't know where you get your facts to show that 'nobody left' - but trust me, plenty probably did, it just wasn't obvious because of the constant influx of new players - most of whom don't stay either.

Currently there is no way to earn money in SL unless you sell stuff, or get lucky at a casino. Remove stipends, and you'll see "Cash barons" controlling the money market even more than the "Land barons" do now. That then makes SL even less fun for those who are here to enjoy themselves - and without them, the 'businesses' of SL suffer.

Remove stipends, you remove your customers, you lose too.

Lewis

Hmm, I never said that I would leave SL. I will continue to enjoy the pleasures of SL for a long time. I just won't buy any inflated L$. I will continue to sell content from SLexchange. I won't pay rent to 2 or 3 vendor stalls. I won't upload. I will buy content from websites. However, I doubt that I will splurge as often.

I urge everybody to stay in SL if stipends are eliminated. All I'm asking for is that we just don't buy L$. We either buy content for real currency on a website or we make it ourselves. We can script and twist prims for free.

I've noticed something on the "Currency: Market Data Page" if you look over a 90 period, the lower the L$ drops, the more volume sells. Peak selling seems to be Fri and Sat. Could be more people buy and then log in or could be people have run through their stipend but want to buy more content and decide to buy their L$. It would be interesting compared to a history of the number of people logged in over time. And how many buyers of currency have been in SL all week.

I wonder if my crackpot theory about stipends being the equivilent to casino poker chips and coin roll give-aways could be right. People start blowing their stipend, see more stuff they want and then purchase the L$ to get it.

this was aimed at the few people out there who have either threatened to leave, threatened to boycot, or claimed that SL would really suffer from the loss of leaving players, were stippends to be eliminated.

I think people would stay. They'd yell, scream, start a million threads, kick, but they'd stay. They love it, they know they do.

True, I am sure some people left, but they probably came back later, at least with free accounts. Almost everyone on every game I have ever played who had ever threatened to leave, straight down through text baed MUCKs and dial-up BBS games, has always tended to come back, because they were either a. too addicted, b. too currious, or c. realized it was kinda stupid of them to do that when the game gave them more value than what was taken away from them.

The loss of $500 shouldn't affect people much. Yeah, a lot of people don't like the idea of using Lindex, but they'll have to get used to it once things change. People here had to get used to a lot of changes, myself included.

Yes, you are correct, there is very little choice in how you can earn money in SL, especially for free accounts, with those choices mainly being sell stuff (prims/scripts/services), gamble at casinos, or invest money in banks and financial services, BUT if stippends were to go away, and the economy being forced to rely on more $L exchanging hands, it's very likely that people will end up having to find more ways of $L exchanging hands.

And as you said, people may have left, but the influx of new customers was so huge, that it didn't affect LL any, and probably didn't affect most players either.

3104 L's cost $10.00 us at a rate of 320 L's per $1.00

Premium Account cost $9.95 plus you get 500 L's per week x 4=2000 L's and 1 - 512 lot. with 117 prims per Month.


A condo rental cost 200 L's per week x 4 = 800 L's with 125 prims per Month .

You want to start worrying when content creators leave because they can no longer afford to pay tier with Linden Dollars. I for one will leave if it ever comes to the point my sales can't pay my tier. No way I'm going back to being landless, nothing for me there.

Won't sway me, sorry.I paid for it, I should get it.

I would also take into consideration the trend in which Lindens have been going. Used to cost $15 a month just to play. Then $10 a month just to open an account, and another $10 to own land. Now it's just $10 to own land, and completely free to play. The trend is relying more and more on economy, and charging people less and less to play. If they were to cut stippends, I am sure you would see a cut in your monthly payment, too.

I think legal action will be the rue of the day. I am also thinking that some residents (not saying who) might be subject to conspiracy to defraud charges. Did you know that is a crime in the United States? We can make internet history!

I would stay too buy will refuse to buy Lindens. If I really need content can buy from slexchange for dollars from my Paypal account. If I cant get that “kawaii” jweery, dress or whatever it will be too bad.

Interesting point, and it would make me a very happy bunny if it went that way, but I'm not so optimistic myself. LL's overheads must be enormous, I can't see them giving free tier in the near future.

Not gonna happen based on what happened in the past history, either. Back when the pay was $15 a month, some people decided instead to buy a "life time account" for something like $150 to $300 one time fee. Quite a bit more than what you pay for a year nowadays. Then lindens said it would be free to play, so those people who paid all that money were quite upset. Lindens compensated them by allowing them to own land. They'll compensate some how this time as well.

And what of charter or lifetime members who paid hundreds of dollars for their premium account? If the stipend were removed, then they'll have paid for nothing.

Yes, you the content providers will have to get use to selling your products through the internet for dollars. I think residents will think twice before paying for SL only content with dollars. Lindens are play money and residents treat it as such. If residents are forced to buy lindens or pay dollars they will buy less.

Free tier, doubt it, since tier pays for physical stuff like server space and bandwidth. Cheaper tier? Maybe. They figured they could make more money on small transactions of land owners and the economy by having much more people join that they could from $15 a month or a $10 subscription fee. Perhaps increasing their numbers again to yet another stable base will cause the economic income to cover even more of what they lose on running the servers.

Why would I have to get used to selling my stuff for US$? If someone wants my stuff, they pay in L$. If you don't want it, someone else will.

Well, what if they have no Lindens to buy things? Remember a lot of residents have no source of Linden income. That means without the stipend buying them. I don't like trading real money for fake money.

Oh I see the flaw in your logic. In rl we are limited to what we can sell by supply. In Sl supply is endless. You can sell 100 units for the same cost as one unit. Thus it is in your benifit to price your objects for max demand.

It is not uncommon at all for MMPORG's to raise their subscription prices from time to time. Everquest, the game I played prior to SL - raised them at least once if memory serves.

All the signals from Linden indicate to me that its not a matter of if they'll cut stipends, but when. Consider it a 'price increase', and I'd expect it to be introduced just like price increases in any other game.

I'd imagine it will go like this:

-Linden will announce that stipends are being cut for all new renewals or new accounts.
-Existing subscriptions will remain unchanged until they are renewed.
-Probably with a small amount of lead time as an incentive for folks to purchase a yearly subscription to lock themselves in.

Yes, many folks will complain about it when it happens. Indeed, some of those will actually leave SL. Most however, are SL junkies (just like me), and aren't going anywhere till they pull the plug on the grid. New residents that come in will never know the difference.

I've seen more changes that many have deemed 'traumatic' than I care to count since I've been here. Most folks will continue to play SL, and watch it grow: regardless of whether they cut stipend bonuses, cut ratings, cut event support, cripple the event calendar, give free basic accounts, kill GOM, remove telehubs, remove public land, kill developer incentive, kill dwell..... or cut stipends.

I like your ideal of how the stipends will be removed. I would of course not renew my premium membership and either buy or rent land from Anshe Chung. She takes payment from paypal. Linden Labs will lose my membership money. Mulitply that by a few thousand and we are talking BIG money.

And then who does Anshe pay?

Anshe Chung pays tier on whole sims but get tier payments like Linden Labs. Also you dont have to have a "premium membership" to own or rent from her. Linden Labs gets more money from the small landowners than the big land barrons. Do the math!

Just out of curiocity, I'm going to do some math here. Let's see. This data is for yesterday, May 22nd.
Total transaction fees: 9,300,512
Average rate: 320.83
Previous day's rate: 316.77
%1.23 difference. Let's take that to assume that almost all of the linden put up for sale yesterday went through and was bought, i.e. half of the 9mil above was buys, half were sells.

Average quantity traded: 4,532

Now, calculating the profits. Half of 9,300,512 is 4,650,256.
For sales, multiply that by the %3.5 selling fee, you get $162,758.96L, which at the 320.83 rate comes out to $507.31USD
For buys, divide the 4mil by 4,532k, and multiply that by $0.30 = $307.83USD

Total LindenLab profit from yesterday's transaction, about $815.14
Which is equal to a bit over 81 monthly subscriptions, or 11 annual subscriptions. That's for ONE DAY. And it's not fair comparing that to annual, unless you multiply this to a year, which would be, to be conservative on this, $750 * 365 = $270,000 / $74 = 3648 annual subscriptions.

That's equivalent of 3648 annual subscriptions, supported by Lindex alone, WITH the inflation. Those numbers WILL jump up if the stippend is cut and people are forced to buy even more through Lindex. I am VERY sure LindenLabs have done their numbers on this, too.