New Stipend Policy

How? If I don't use the Lindex, I have nothing to spend in that scenario. The only thing affordable to me are freebies. How much money do vendors make out of freebies?

Of course we would need to adjust and potentially spend some money on Lindens. But my spending would decrease sensibly. In fact, I might also go down a tier to compensate. Rather than a beneficial move, I think you would see the economy activity reduce sensibly and actually vendors going under not because their production costs are too high but because the money they make is now insufficient to cover the time and money investment.

You say that's what would happen as if it were a certainty. You don't know that. Neither do I. Just don't restrict your view to a trite: stipends are bad for the economy.

Wendel

Ok i guess I let my energy drink get the best of me & got a little overheated on THAT one... So I retract that about it being so easy. I DO understand how hard it is & how much time it requires. I respect & admire all who create such beautiful things. Perhaps I'm just envious?

As a non-paying player (this was different until earlier this year when my 2 year old suddenly doubled his estimated budget for this fiscal year...i checked and rechecked his figures, but he assured me they were correct and I couldn't find any flaw in them) I support this wholeheartedly. Most of the cash I have in my account is from selling the few meager items I make, not from the stipend. And most of what I enjoy doing here is scripting my own gadgets anyway. I can't really justify LL continuing to give me money that I don't actually use (I rarely spend anything). The only money I am spending these days in SL is for projects I'm hoping will benefit the community as a whole (the ALIFE sim), and I'd buy Lindens for that if I had to.

i've seen the views and arguments go both ways on this subject. as a resident/land owner i feel this will hurt more than help the economy in the long run, but i would agree with the limited stripends of only for the first few weeks.

personally, when i first signed up, thats one of the things that made we think wow, this game is cool. yes i realized later that L$50 isn't very much and i became a premium account holder.

anywho, its not like they will change anything, its there game, its there rules, but just like in real life, the rich get richer, the poor stay poor. but then again, this wont effect me, as i am not here to make a profit like alot of you obviously are...

Perhaps others are, also.

I always thought it was a little odd that basic accounts got a stipend.

LL can always bump up the initial $ paid to new accounts if L$250 proves to be inadequate to get folks started.

If you pay Linden Lab ANY money, you're helping pay the bills, period. See Surreal's comment.

Its absolutely a sense of entitlement. New residents are given L$250 to begin. That's plenty to figure it out, in fact, that should probably be removed as well. If you can't be bothered to spend as much to give SL a try as you'd spend on a cup of coffee, or to see a movie which you might not enjoy... well, then I'm sorry, but its too bad.

Entertainment costs money. People whining about having to fork over a few dollars for great entertainment when they own a good computer, a fast Internet connection and so forth just reeks of a sense of entitlement.

Regards,

-Flip

Any more and its to tempting to just make alt after alt after alt - the teeny stipend was an incentive to stay in the game, in reality it helps to tech new players about money. The basic 250 is usually fluffed away on a mistake / scam.

At US$10 a pop that wouldn't be very cost effective.

Taking the stipend away from new basic accounts sounds good to me. We need to create more incentives for free player account (aka basic accounts) to upgrade and get engaged in the game financially and intellectually. Maybe they will feel less inclines to fly over 4-5 sims every once in a while and shoot random unsuspecting strangers with water melon guns....Yes yes, I know, not all new basic accounts do that, in fact several of my new acquintances who have basic accounts are a few of the most accomplished builders in SL right now.

I love basic account holders, I really do, they keep us excited about SL and are essential for this place. So don't take my position as anti-basic account.

Troy

Please don't confuse newbies with alts.

Are we seriously sitting here arguing about $50L a week?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not even close to the average Slingo, Tringo, Pizza or GG pots in game. Normaly the hosts drop in $100 a game to get the pot going. And normally at all the places I play the noobs yell out that they have no money to add to the pot, and nobody seems to have any problem with them playing for free while getting started.
So, any non paying basic member has the potential to make quite a bit more then $50 a week.. even more then $50 a day.

Think about it... what can you really buy for $50? Most things you want in SL are more then that.. so you'd have to save up for weeks to buy 1 average priced outfit.

I was a basic account holder for quite a while and that $50 didn't do anything to help me out. I had to work for more.

Ok. But how about another statistic that LL did give out - one from the town hall. That only 25% of SL users are content creators. Now, after that message I sent a message to Philip Linden asking how that was determined, and he was kind enough to reply, that it was based on the amount of time spent people using the editing tools.

Read that again. Only 25% of SL users are spending substantial time using the editing tools. That's not number of successful creators, or businesses, or anything like that. It's the number of people who actually use Build mode.

Now, from that we can conclude that less than 25% of SL is even in a position to consider cashing out money to begin with. (Where would the ones who aren't making anything be getting the L$ to cash out? Any decent land developer is going to spent time in the land editor.) If the market isn't stable when less than a quarter of the population are selling money, how is making it even harder for the other 75% going to achieve anything?



No, because your rent and house in real life are necessities. An island on SL is a luxury. You are depending on those other people paying you enough to get a luxury.

Exactly, its not enough to even help. The free handout should be discontinued. In addition... we're not arguing about L$50.

During the past 60 days, 113,606 residents have logged in. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that 80,000 logged in in the past week, and of those, 60,000 are basic accounts.

That would mean L$1,200,000 would be removed from the economy each week, had this always been the case. As SL moves forward, this is going to be important to keeping the economy balanced. My guess is it will remove a source of about L$25,000,000 per month within a year unless this change had been made, which brings the balance of sources and sinks much closer.

Regards,

-Flip

Its not that its 50L$ a week, its who its being taken from, and how it does nothing to address any of the L$'s woes.

Surreal deserves to be a successful content creator. But as we know from the real world, creative people often don't get the money they deserve, and it's because of the VFM issue. A good picture can take weeks or months or years to paint, but once it's painted, all anyone can do with it is look at it. And for the majority of people, looking at a picture isn't really such a big deal. They can see it once in a gallery, then they're done.

In Second Life, it's actually worse: creating things can displace people. If someone makes a really good cyborg avatar, then anyone else who perhaps doesn't have the same level of talent gets a horrible choice: either wear the cyborg avatar the first person sells (throwing away any imagination they had for how they wanted their av to look), or design their own cyborg avatar (which will match their imagination but, because of their lower talent, will look inferior no matter the design). Again, I can't really give statistics to back up the fact that this emotion exists, but it does, and I've seen it around, even amongst other content creators (in a thread here about designers who feel their product is inferior to a competitor's, but don't wear the competitor's because they feel they need to represent their own business, and therefore feel their non-business SL is worsened).

Now obviously, it would be insane and unreasonable to blame the original avatar designer for creating that choice, just as it would be ridiculous to try and limit what they could do to stop that choice being created. But what you can't stop people doing is assigning that content a lesser monetary value as a result, even doing so subconsciously.

Just means less money will be spent on clothes, hair, etc. That should make those anti-handout content creators very happy.

see the real problem are prem accounts they fork out 500l a week
say you pick a year for billing thats $6/m
you also get 2,000L a month which is as of 30 sec ago US$5.49
6.00-5.49= $0.51/monthly fee (obviously it will change with currency value)

so you think cool im paying .50 a month for 512m of land and yes if you sold the 500/m you got in return

but here is the problem LL just makes that 2kL a month

if you go and buy it, 2kL comes out of the economy and your puting in however much its worth is USD in the pocket of whoever you bought it from and so the economy works

you get 2kl from LL your adding the value of 2kL into the economy and taking nothing out
and so the value of 1L drops

you are paying for the land use but in return you are geting something of almost equal, that is worthless to LL

so LL is flooding the economy with Ls from /all/ types of accouts and the littel 10L per upload they take out of the economy cant compensate for it

but they wont take that 500L/week away from the prem account users because 80% of perm accounts that dont have extra tier fees are not doing it only for the land but to get that /free/ 2,000L a month
and they will downgrade and LL will lose money

if they want to fix this problem they will need to stop puting money in and not taking the same value out



dont take it away from the new players SL already has a steep learning curve, someone new to SL needs that draw to stay long enough for LL to make money off of them

now having a cut off would work lets say 2 months of geting 50L a week and then the flow stops, if they have been here for 2 months that loss of 50L/w wont make them leave and they no longer need the draw to stay in SL
and thats only 400L added to the economy per month

LL needs to make the draw on a prem account about the land and/or other options that dont effect the economy like this
i would like to see them cut land tier prices and drop all weekly L payments and make uploads free
right now LL just cant compete in land sales when theres others out there who can give you much more for less $

Gah arent you lucky! Last time I played the host refused to start until everyone put SOMETHING in. Since i had nothing I said... welll... have fun. I left and went and did something else and havent gone back since.

So I'm curious.

Did all you oldtimers who are screaming for stipends to be taken away also scream for Dwell to be taken away? Cause I didn't see it if you did.

How about when you got bonus money? That was just made up money. Did you ask for that to be taken away?

How about when the value was 200/1 and you were making oogobs of cash? The economy wasn't stable then -- it was just not-stable in your favor. Did any of you complain then?

Seems to me they keep taking away lindens from folks and the value of the $L keeps dropping. Who will you blame when the stipends are gone? Will it be that we are all loosers for not buying your lindens from you?

Oh yeah - to try and leech of a pot game is very bad form, will get you banned!!

This has absolutely nothing to do with the balance between new money being created and money being destroyed. According to LL's figures, they put more money into circulation every week than they take out. This devalues the $L for everyone. It doesn't matter how many people are doing what, where, with who.



So it would make it valid for you if I spent whatever money I made in SL on my RL rent? You keep talking at 90 degrees to the issue I'm discussing. This also has nothing to do with how money supply imbalances devalue the currency.

This is a completely unrelated issue, and my opinion false at it's core.

99% of all creation is hard work. Everyone starts somewhere. If your yardstick for measuring your success is other people than you are certain to fail because there is always someone, somewhere more talented than you. On the other hand, if you are proud of your accomplishments, regardless of if they are fledgling or polished... and continue to work at your craft, then you are almost certain to achieve success as other people measure it too.

Along these same lines, there is no guarantee that quality and hard work will be externally rewarded, so you better get at least the majority of your self-validation and reward from doing a difficult task well, otherwise you're likely to be miserable.

I appreciate you saying that I am a successful creator. I started knowing almost nothing and my first efforts would make a cat laugh. Ferran is the devient genius in our partnership. If I compared myself to her I would spend all my time sulking in the sewers of Chaos. Instead I have worked hard to learn the tools and to create things that I think are good. If other people think so too, then I am pleased and flattered, but in the end, only my opinion matters.

Besides, as everyone knows, there is a great pleasure in wearing or using something you created yourself which is completely unique in the universe.