New L$ trading level low - L$317 / $1 USD.

No, I'm paying for the stipend. Its listed on the membership plan page if you don't believe me.

http://secondlife.com/whatis/plans.php

I am paying for these things:

1. Stipend of 500L a week
2. 512 m2 included teir
3. ability to purchase more teir

Also the stipend is listed BEFORE land ownership.

Great post, Rasah. This all makes perfect sense. LL has clearly been moving towards a world which is free of entitlements for a long time. I don't know why some people just can't get that through their heads.

The TOS says that they're free to do anything they want with L$ (including remove it entirely) at any time they feel like it. By using Second Life, you agree to be bound by the TOS and CS.

It doesn't make sense is the zing of it all. The stipend is listed on the membership plan page, its part of what is paid for. So therefore, the stipend is what you pay for. Its not an entitlement, its what I paid for. The land is only a secondary bonus.

And they are bound to do the legal method in handling the agreement if its alterred. Be it paying premium fees back prorated, huge drop of lindens, or phasing it out at end of agreement 'renewals.'

I'm not saying they won't drop stipends..just saying it will most likely do more harm than good, and they will approach it the proper way, especially in regard to the 'lifetime' account holders.

I think you're wrong. I'm pretty sure they can change any aspect of the service at any time for any reason. LL's legal counsel will make sure of it before doing anything that you may not be happy with though.

Due to the explosiveness of the possible effects and volitility of the situation, I would approach a phase out in their position. In other words, remove stipends from any renewed or new premium accounts at that time, and let standing agreements run their course. In 12 months all but the lifetime accounts would be settled, with no legalities involved, and those lifetime accounts are a -whole- other cruise ship.

But the thing is, Jonas, what you would do is not relevant to anything at all. You seem to think that you are special, and that the world should revolve around you for some reason. I'm sorry to have to share this news with you, but the world does not revolve around Jonas Pierterson.

Linden Lab is the sovereign ruler of this world that we sometimes inhabit, and they will take your stipend away from you WHENEVER they feel that it is ok to proceed. The machine has clearly been in motion for some time now, and all of the whining in the world cannot bring it to a halt. Linden Lab must always move in the direction that is good for the community as a whole, not in the direction that is good for Jonas Pierterson personally.

If you plan to tier down to basic, you might as well save yourself some money and do so now. Again, in summary, the world does not revolve around Jonas Pierterson.

Thats alright, I can drop to basic and use their service for free anytime I like too. Oh, and the stipend -is- good for the community. The linden sellers aren't the whole of the community, after all.

Eventually, basic access will likely have to be removed. At that point, you'll have another decision to make.

We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Used to say that you pay $15 to play and not much else. That changed. Then it said you get land ownership, dwell, AND incentives for running a attractive parcel of land (community incentives or something). Stipends were almost the same for everyone. That changed. In fact, people bitched quite a bit when things changed. They bitched when they realized there were free accounts now ("I paid $100 for a year's access, and now I can get that for free? WTF! I'm leaving SL and NEVER coming back!" Needless to say that didn't happen). They bitched when stipends were changed so that the amount you pay monthly would reflect your stipend, premiums making $500 a week, while frees now made just $50 (instead of $500 for everyone), ("You have changed a socialist system where people made money based on creativity and everyone was equal into where the rich and the poor are two social classes! I feel left out, and this will make SL too much like iRL! I am quitting SL and NEVER coming back!" That didn't happen either.) they bitched when dwell was taken away, too, as I'm sure you've noticed. So this won't be the first, second, or even third, time they changed stuff. And people will keep bitching and threaten to leave SL and NEVER coming back, while the number of people here will continue to increase every month.

I hate the word "entitlements".

One of the reasons I have premium accounts is for the stipend. I pay for that "entitlement". When they stop giving me my entitlement, I will stop giving them their entitlement.

coco

And you will not have any land, either. Those that want land, knowing they can profit from it, or simply wanting to own land, will keep paying "their entitlement." Simple as that.

You should take that up with LL. Entitlements is their word, not mine. I perfer the term welfare, but nobody seems to like that much either.

Except there's a difference between signed up accounts, and active players.

In 6 months, accounts has doubled. Active players has hardly moved in the same time.

Getting people here is not a problem. Retaining them is - and by continually promoting "make money" as the reason to come here, people will in the main be disappointed and give up, having never experienced the vast majority of what SL has to offer them.

Unless we retain players, SL will stagnate and slowly die a painful death. The sad thing about it is Linden Labs don't seem to want to recognise or address the issue.

Lewis

I'm not disappointed AT ALL! I'm quite happy with my SL income level.

For every 'success story' like yours about an individual that LL promote as to how people can make a substantial income in SL... there are probably ten thousand or more players who can't or haven't - and have quit because it's too much like hard work.

Apart from being a Land Baron (of which the market is saturated already) there are very few other opportunities outside of casinos or sex-related stuff to even cover your tier, let alone make money.

Lewis

I think that in time the economy will mature to a point where it can handle a "working class" type as well. The biggest reason why there are so many failures is because right now almost everyone is an individual business. Well, to be honest, not everyone is cut out to be/run a business.

Some people don't have the talent. Some people don't have the time. Some people don't have the money. Some people don't have the desire. Some people don't have ANY of this.

Essentially, some folks just need "a job". The biggest problem with jobs in SL right now is that they're all stupid and none of them pay a meaningful amount of L$. This will change though. All things in time.

That's what they said about all the other times, too. It's too bad Lindens have asked a bunch of other people what they think SecondLife will be like in 5 years, and not me. My answer would be that, judging by their progress, and their direction of progress, especially with implementation of XMLRPC, more hardware support, support for HTML textures on prims, support for streaming audio, video, and flash, and soon to be implemented support for rendering and controlling web pages on prims as well as support for more machine level coding, my estimate is that in 5 years SecondLife will be the de-facto browser for the internet, if not an operating system in an of itself (that former one may take 10 years). Imagine booting up into your own private 3D space on a huge display (monitor), rendering multiple monitors around you, some with web site browsers, some with office documents, etc, and being able to just look left and right (and other directions) to switch between which application you want to use. Once the economy stabilizes a bit, and marketers realize SL's potential (which they already ARE. Read the Business Week article), SecondLife will also be a place where people will do their online shopping, being able to look at the items on here before they order them iRL. Essentially this will be an extention of people's first life. A sort of a voluntary "Matrix" if you will. And you will be whining, sitting on the sidelines, complaining about how you don't get your $500 stippend any more.

VERY good point, and if you look at SecondLife's progression to date, you'll notice it reflects the rest of computer software development history, just about 15 to 20 years behind. Used to be that everyone had their own business, everyone built their own stuff, and everyone scripted their own scripts, like in RL. Now we're JUST starting to see companies and organizations emerging that work together to build up sims, program scripts, and run service oriented businesses. People working for those organizations make a sallary, too. It's very limited right now and just emerging (best examples I can provide are people hiring permanent DJs and game/party hosts, and small organizations like builder clubs and GinkoTech that are hired for various projects), but once the L$ stabilizes, my guess they should take off. ESPECIALLY once people realize that you can easilly compete with someone making stuff on their own by having LOTS of people make something a hundred times better than what that person made on their own. ESPECIALL when high level coding language thingy gets implemented.

When people realise it's just a computer game, and treat SL as such, THEN and only then will SL grow.

I really don't get all this rubbish people keep going on about SL being the first part of the "3D web". First life (reality) and Second Life will only merge in the minds of a few sad individuals who live in their parent's basements. Blurring of the two in the way that you suggest is as much of a fantasy as real life teleportation and humans flying unaided. Or being able to change your shape into a different species.

Lewis

Most people don't want to be part of a group, and don't have the ability either - things like work and sleep get in the way.

Yes, reality sucks, but that isn't at risk of closing down at any time and you'll lose everything.

That's the difference between reality and a game, you know. Perhaps you should play reality occasionally, you might enjoy it.

Lewis

This kind of shortsightedness was expressed about the 2D web as well. Do you really want to miss yet ANOTHER boat?

Um.. where have you been these past ten years?
SecondLife is curently used by some major businesses as a meeting/collaboration system, saving on costs that would be spent on flying people over. According to BusinessWeek, one california fashion/clothing company now ports their RL creations to SL to display them in fashion shows to prospective buyers, as well as other people in the company (like factories and materials purchase managers and such) to give people an idea of what they have in mind, instead of paying to fly these people out to their actual location, and claim they've saved about $170,000US a year by doing that. From what I hear, real world advertisers have notices SL as a potential marketing platform, so it won't take long for textures billboards to turn into more sophisticated 3D displays. I am curently working on selling an online comic object that would allow people to sell their iRL comics within SecondLife, saving on printing costs, and using the online comic as advertizement for the real thing. This is just the beginning. Just as GOM was just the beginning of the Linden economy (before which L$ was worth exactly $0US.
And besides that, plastic surgery allows people to reshape their bodies already. Ears, whiskers, and all.
And IBM worked out teleportation back in the late 90's, using an object as a reference to scan and recomposite off of. They successfully teleported something like a small virus. Problem is the energy involved is WAAAAAAY too cost prohibitive. So, we ARE living in YOUR fantasy world. Feel free to join us