Long Term - is Land the best basis for a virtual economy?

Paraphrasing Philip, the economy of SL is based on what is actually scarce - server resources. For simplicity's sake, land was set up as a controlling measure of those resources.

Anyone who was here prior to the 1.2 change in the economy knows that the current model resulted in economic growth far in excess of anything that had been achieved under the old system. But is it the best model for us to use in the long term?

I have some ideas I'd like to bring up, but for the moment I'll leave the question open. Let's quibble!

I suspect that there is something burried deep in our pre-mammalian cortices that has a strong affinity for territory. This certainly manifests itself in the RL and very much so in SL what with landowner "rights" and such. I don't think you'd be able to extract land from the equation even if it were effectively boundless.

That doesn't mean there aren't other scarcities that affect any finite system. In SL, access to assets and computational (LSL) cycles are recent chokepoints. Even if the equitable distribution of those was assurable (which is way hard) there would likely be another scarcity hiding behind them.

To my eye, the basis of the SL economy has always been creativity and inventiveness. Were this not the case, people would be selling each other plywood cubes endlessly. There is also considerable traffiking in ego, but I think this applies anywhere humans gather.

Oh, and you wanted quibbling? Well I disagree with what you wrote (despite there being nothing to agree or disagree with )

Long term, I fully expect to host my own server(s) and not need their land at all.
I don't need a lot of horsepower to fiddle around with an object or two.
I also shouldn't need a very powerful server in order to host a little get together for 2 or 3 friends of mine.

I guess that first post was too short for any real complaint! Ok, here's my idea:

The Prim

Land, in and of itself, is not actually a major drain on server resources. A single server could easily contain all of the terrain in SL, if that was its only job. As such it's not a realistic measure of someone's impact, it simply serves as a symbol of it. As Malachi said, it appeals to our territoriality.

What if we switched to prim allotments instead?

Stay with me, part of this would require some rethinking of the grid plan, not just an economic adjustment.

Instead of paying monthly fees for a certain amount of land, we'd pay for a batch of prims. Going on the basis of the current system, $25 a month would get you 937 prims to play with. Your basic free account would get you 100 or so.

Land would drop to a secondary role. It could be bought and sold, but taxes on it would be small amounts of $Lindens solely to keep someone from buying up the entire terrain.

This would open up new possibilities in flexible resource allocation. For instance (and really a necessity for this economy to work) the servers could be devoted to areas where heavy levels of activity are occurring, and leave the rest of the terrain basically dormant. Many variations of this have been discussed. Instead of having 500 servers tied directly to land areas, the terrain could be modeled by just a handful, and the rest brought in to serve locations where the avatar and texture density require it.

I've been agitating for more flexible ways of arranging virtual space for a while now. My own personal SL style seems to require huge amounts of territory, but not a great number of prims. Other people may find they'd be perfectly happy to live in close proximity to their neighbors, but never have enough prims to furnish their living space.

One possibility I'm particularly fond of would be the opening up of a new continent that would be on the scale of millions of square miles. It would allow people to homestead pretty much wherever they like, whether that be right next to each other or hundreds of miles away in empty terrain. No more complaints about the ugly, lag-inducing build next door. No more fighting just to get a couple of adjacent parcels in a sim. If you don't like your neighborhood, just make a new one somewhere else! If your friends want to move in next door, they can! Just wipe out the old primstead and set it up on the new location.

Wide open spaces.

hi,


the current setup seems to be fine, the prims need to remain linked to something like land in order to create some form of order. Right now, you pay a certain amount of US$ for land tier, which allows you to have a bit of land if you so desire. Currently you don't have to pay a thing to rez prims, nor do you have to own land to do so. There are plenty of basic members who play all day in the sanbox, and fly around having plenty of fun all the time never needing or wanting to own land. These players enjoy building or tinkering with prims for no charge. Also if you didn't have a structured parcel, everything would be a sandbox and your build would not have any more reason to occupy an area then anyone elses. So who get to use what area and why? As long as land and prims are dependent apon each other the control of content is obvious and undisputable. This also gives the player a since of ownership even though its all essentually 10101010's.

land works as well as any other measuring tool. the amount of land we own in a sim determines the number of prims we are allocated and provides a perpetual source of income for ll. it also makes people comfortable by supporting territorial mentality.

what isn't, and should be, tied to the amount of land we own are the number of textures we can display in the sim, and amount of scripting memory we can commandeer (possibly just the number of running scripts), the number of cycles we can use per second (millisecond whatever), and the amount of traffic our xml/rpc & email processes require.

but that would be platformish and ruin people's immersion and sense of community. so it won't ever make much sense for ll to implement these limitations because it's more important for their customers to feel immersed in a world than it is for us to have an effective Internet tool. we're arguing against the corporate goal when we ask for varied methods of payment and resource distribution.

all of that said, i use a lot of land and few prims and scripts myself so wholly support the idea of larger tracks of land with fewer prims and lower fees other than the fact that ll would have no way of compensating themselves for the lost income. they can't cash the unused the prims.

Brutal, soulcrushing lag doesn't do wonders for immersion either.

If there were measurements and quotas attached to textures and particles and cycles devoted to scripts the same way there are for prims, I imagine people would adapt to the changes the same way they adapt to low-prim building techniques.

if there were reasonable measurements to the amount of inventory storage we required on the asset server(s), the world would function smoothly and people would adapt to that too.

but first people would complain like disenfranchised ferengi. oh and a good dozen would quit second life forever and never come back so there. those prospective scenarios qualify the whole idea as something that would "damage the community," "ruin people's immersion," or "cripple the economy." these are the patent reasons we're given for not considering, much less implementing, sensible suggestions. i suppose i'll get used to it one day.

Also, since average prim use is probably lower than the limit (i.e., most people with $25 tier probably don't use all 900-whatever prims), one of two things would happen:

1. LL would lose money as people realize they don't need such high tier.

2. LL would set prim rates higher than tier rates to make up for that income loss.

Which means the forums will go up in flames and they'd never manage to push it through.


Also also, from a purely business POV, LL needs to keep their pricing structure in some form that even the rankest noob who's never set virtual foot in an MMOG can understand. Telling someone, "You can come in and build all you want in the sandbox for free, but you need to own land to make your builds permanent" (as they do now) is easy for everyone to understand. Telling someone, "You can fly around and socialize if you want, but if you want to build things, you have to pay for the privilege" is marginally less easy to understand, and a whole lot less attractive to new users. Same goes for charging according to more granular measures like FPS or whatever. As soon as you do that, you close the grid to everyone but people who can understand that stuff well. It's just not inviting.

Also also also, in-world commercial value is tied much more closely to land than to prims. You can make a lot of money off a low-prim mall or rental apartment, if you have enough land. Well, maybe not a *lot* of money, but the correlation is with land more than with prims. Stated another way, it takes fewer prims to make money than it does land, in most cases. So it's probably a loser for LL. Which is not to say the goal of all SL residents is to make money, certainly. But if you're not after an income, it doesn't matter who you're charged since you're probably on a Basic account anyway.

As far as server resources go, it wouldn't take switching the basis of the economy fromland to prims to get a more efficient server allocation structure, which is apparently something LL is looking at, or so I think I've read. They could simply allocate servers based on activity within each sim, so that the sims that tend to be more active/more laggy tend to get faster servers, and the ones that are consistently less active/less laggy, get slower servers, with measurements and adjustments going on constantly so that the system tends toward an equilibirum. That's not an easy algorithm to write, but it's eminently do-able.

that is a builders nightmare

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but aren't you basically just saying you'd like a lot more land without having to pay for it because you don't use many prims? *snicker* I think the current system is fine.

No other ideas then? Well, I did ask for quibbling.

Once upon a time SL seemed like an escape from my suburban existence. As things have gone on though, it more and more resembles the view I get driving to work each day. I ascribe a lot of this to the forced medium density that comes from tying prim amounts fixedly to land amounts. If that's what we're stuck with from now on, I don't see how SL can avoid the fate of being just another suburb.

Maybe it's just time for me to move on.

Since arriving in SL I've become aware that the basis for the economy has already evolved through major paradigm shifts, so it's reasonable to expect further evolution. Land as a basis for the economy is too simple, but so is prim allocation. As Khamon notes, it fails to capture the resource costs of asset storage and sim FPS processing cycles. Those are scarce resources of value to residents. We need to include them in the basis for the economy. Let the inevitable handful of complainers screech -- that's the sound of personal self-interest, not the voice of the community.

Apparently there used to be a phenomenon called prim-hogging or prim-hoarding? Sounds like a recipe for bad neighbor relations. The same could be said of laggy scripts in a sim right now. It's a real triumph when the different folks who end up as neighbors in a sim also end up cooperating on lag reduction. Somehow that's more fun than solving the problem by purchasing a private island. More of an epic I guess. : )

Ananda, your idea of a wide-open continent has lots of appeal. I like living in a wilderness with towers rising from the forest and the uncluttered ocean, with a floating workshop occupying a relatively small part of the total area. (the attached image shows some of my area, and some of my neighbor's island.)


But here's where we disagree:



There's a difference between avatar density and the other computational loads. Those avatars represent residents who should indeed receive the computational resources they're paying for, no matter where their avatars spread out or congregate. But why should performance deteriorate in my partial-wilderness sim, just so performance can improve in those sims where many owners have been profligate with scripts and textures?

I'm confident that ll will make changes to the economic basis, and while we miay not like all of them, the changes are fun and interesting as experiments in a working economic simulation.

Well I tend to agree with you that it's rather unfortunate that the vast majority of sims have turned in to suburban neighborhoods. I'm not sure exactly what to attribute that to. I don't think the way land and resources are handled is really the cause. I think a lot of it has to do with a massive influx from TSO and people bringing their culture with them. I'm definitely nostalgic for the days when outrageous and inventive builds were celebrated. Now it's more likely that somoeone who builds something out of the suburban paradigm will be accused of grief building I don't know how we change that, but I don't think it's as simple as changing land and resources. It's more cultural than systemic.

Absolutely Chip.

I remember when I was a newbie I couldn't believe how many malls there were. I kept thinking, "Of all the wonderful things you could build in Second Life, you build a mall?"

Now I understand that it's all because of money that there are so many malls, but at the time I just shook my head and said "There's no accounting for taste."

I do find it interesting that even when given the canvas to draw out your fantasies, people usually opt for the most familiar and comfortable.

you're wrong here i mean just and well no, actually, you're right. i just want more land without having to pay for it because i use fewer prims. come to think of it, i probably wouldn't move anyway. i like taber and zoe because i'm a core baby.

what i'm talking about though are specialty sims like nova albion, but with lower priced land and fewer available resources. if we had small blocks of sims that allowed people to own land for less tier and fewer prims, or no ability to operate scripts, or such, there might be a market for it. for the same amount of money, i can own far more land in some areas of alabama than i can others. the state charges taxes on the land based on it's location, potential usefulness and known resources.

the difference of course is that alabama doesn't have to pay a massive colo bill to provide that land to me in the first place.

I know what you mean about the culture changing, but let's not discount the effects that economic forces can have on the situation. In flying around the world you'll still find lots and lots of very creative work. My complaint is with how everything has to be at a sort of medium scale, cramped and crabbed in next to each other.

This is dictated by the fixed grid pattern. Other than the city sims experiment, every part of the world is on the same fixed number of prims per meter. Every single sim is the same 256x256 meters. To use the servers in an efficient manner, the vast majority of the surface area must be devoted to development.

As for grief building: being tied into a particular parcel is the reason why this is such a problem. If you could just pick up and move to a better location, no one could engage in that form of extortion.

I guess what I'm getting at is just because this is a realistic world is no reason it has to follow the same economic patterns as Earth.

The interesting thing about low-prim sims is that it would give the Lindens something to do with their older servers. They could upgrade the older sims in game to new servers and move those servers to the low-prim discount sims.

This makes so much sense that there must be something really wrong with the idea.