The real danger of the L$50 Stipend

Uh... LL?

And then comes week #2. Just because you buy a bunch of clothes, some hair styles, some new walks, and some pose balls doesn't mean that any newbie is out and about and winning contests, selling items, etc. for actual income.

We all know it takes something spectacular to win a contest if you're not already an established person at a club. And even then, there's not much money in most contests with low attendance that a newbie could win (I've been lucky, won two, and put it all in the bank) but then again my avatar is hardly presentable except for the fact that I make my own unique t-shirts.

If I had hundreds of stolen credit card numbers I could make a damn site more money with them than by using them to farm SL stipends.

Ordinal! Is it just me or does this feel like some sort of Republican "beat the poor" strategy?

Dammit, it's just making them lazy! Welfare dependency! They should go out and get jobs as dancers and escorts if they want to buy bling!

Out of curiosity, how long does a basic account need to be logged in to get the $50L? Is a login then immediate logout enough, or is there a longer duration required? (Forum search seems to be wonky for me at the moment)

Did some quick calculations, and at the $250L per $US ratio I use as a rule of thumb, I get:
1 minute login, 10,000 accounts, $2,000US per week per machine
15 minute login, 672 accounts, $134US per week per machine
60 minute login, 168 accounts, $34US per week per machine

The above numbers assume no down time during the week (yes automation doesn't have down time, but the LL servers do). No diea what gold farmers can make per machine in other games.

If this really is a problem, seems that boosting login time requirements would be an effective way to combat it with less problems than a complete removal of the stipend.

One 1/5 of the SL population are Premium. Do the math.

1/5 * 500 = 100
4/5 * 50 = 40

5/7 of new money goes to premium users
2/7 of new money goes to basic users

cut premium stypened first.

A basic player who buys no money is a drain on LL. A premium player supports LL by paying $10 a month. If 1/5th pay $10 a month, and 4/5ths pay $0, which group is supporting LL and SL?

Example: If there are 100,000 players, 20,000 pay $10 per month, they contribute $200,000 per month. 80,000 users paying $0 per month contribute $0 to the system. The only way basic users can support the system is to buy $L. If they don't buy $L they do nothing for the economy, and are a drag on the value of $L.

Just an opinion.

I knew that someone would bring that up eventually. I can see that point but the initial argument isn't about drain on the SL economy as it relates to the real world, it was on the devaluation of the Linden due to more money being put into the system. It's fair to say that free users are a drain to the real world bottom line of Linden Labs, but we're talking about the economy of SL and not the economy of the company as related to the United States economy.

That 'drag on the ecnomy' also aids inc reating content for which other buy Linden dollars.

That 'drag on the ecnomy' produce a statistic, a larger crowd, which in turn draws in more paying players.

That 'drag on the economy' often sample SL before buying a subscrition, thus adding to the economy.

That 'drag on the economy' can increas ethe experience for paying players, encouraging them to stay longer, thus adding to the economy.

Finally, that 'drag on the economy' often pays rent, and enables landlords to survive. this keeps the landlord here longer (see above point) and aids them in keeping paying for their teir. Another benefit.

I am a premium member...my fiance is not, as of yet but will be when we settle more bills. To any who think its wrong for me to pay and she can't yet, she has paid for many game services monthly in the past for years. I only now choose to invest. Why? Partly because of the content and experience that 'drag on the economy' produces.

Now this seems like analysis with some thought.



Yeah, the premium accounts are definitely a source of $L.

if it's 1/5 of SL, that's 25,000 premium accounts x 500 $L, or 12,500,000 $L a week.

At the current rate of 280, that adds 44,642 USD worth of $L a week to the system.

Or 2,321,428 USD worth of $L dumped into the system per year! Which is about 100 days of the Lindex' recent daily volume.

However, I'm not entirely convinced we have 25k premium accounts.



Farming:

>>1 minute login, 10,000 accounts, $2,000US per week per machine

Yeah, makes sense. Let's assume a bad scenario where 20,000 accounts are being farmed, what is the impact from such a 'worst case' scenario?

1) 4k USD per week at 250 $L/USD, or more realistically perhaps 3k per week given that the $L is sliding over time.

2) Say the farmer(s) get away with it for one year. The entire farming problem would be 3k * 52 weeks, or 156k USD, unless they got fancy with referrals or something.

So it would be a pretty good income for one farmer, but like Strife implies, farming has likely a 10 or 20 times smaller effect on the economy than the premium stipend.

I'm presuming farmers are not 'duping' $L or something like that, which is actually a fairly big presumption.

Well, the value of $L would surely increase if basic users, who bring nothing to LL or SL otherwise, would buy $L rather than be given free money. Premium users pay LL for the $L500 per week. If it turns out LL needs to remedy the market because LL uses $L to reward premium users, LL should buy some of the $L used to pay premium users. Perhaps LL could buy 30% and create 70%. That would instantly remove lots of $L from the market.

But it's clear which group brings little to SL, and it's not those who pay LL, own land, and create content for sale and aesthetics. It makes sense to offer those people a bonus for supporting LL and SL. I see no benefit to LL or SL giving any money to basic users, except that money ends up in a premium users account at some point. But if the value of all $L suffers because of it, I'd support killing the $L50 for basic users.

By the same token I could see suggesting killing your own stipend based on the fact that you have brought unneeded stress to the forums.

Which stresses the people.

Who stress the economy.

No, the basics are GOOD for the economy as it encourages growth.

It is true that some reporter said that Cory Linden said that. This means that the reporter misquoted (which happens far too often) or Cory was mistaken or just plain making a false, unverifiable statement.

To my recollection, Robin Linden said the "accounts" number was the number of accounts that could potentially login at this moment (i.e. paid-up which is not hard for a basic account, not suspended, etc.)

When you think about 90% in 90 days, the implications are beyond belief. First, every basic account that ever signed up is included in that pool. How many sign-ups were unable to get SL to even run? How many logged in once, found it not their cup of tea and never returned? Those two components could push the 90% active number into falsehood alone.

I know perhaps about 100 players well enough to know when they take extended leave or total leave of the game. And they do, for months, or forever.

LL has a very decided interest in making their numbers look good to their investors and potential customers. As a private firm, there is absolutely no one who is able to validate that claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; there is no evidence.

Oh, and I've made over 2 billion posts on these forums, see, it says so just to the left.

omg, making big deals about getting 50Lindens a week, this is the saddest post i have ever seen since the... um.. ok its the saddest post I ever seen.

The benefit you mention is the entire point of having free users - to build a large customer base and support those with land. The system already allows anyone, free or premium to create whatever they want to use as commodities to buy and sell. The only thing a premium user can do that a free user can't is purchase land to sell, correct?

So, basically your argument about free users somehow contributing less to the system is ludicrous. If anything, a free user who rents from a paid user and builds a club (or shop or whatever) on it or whatever is contributing to the system twice.

In theory we have a very odd economy where there can be as many producers as consumers. No real economy could possibly work that way.

I'm sure if EA made the figures of paid TSO accounts public many of us would be horrified. You're right, it's in the game company's interests not to be open and honest about the true amount of paid accounts and active players, because would anyone be impressed with "hey, we've got 7000 paid accounts" instead of "over 100,000 players have signed up to SL" when we all know that a large majority of that 100,000 either no longer play, or never got as far as activating the game.

I signed up for Sociolotron because a friend wanted me to; I went through signup, downloaded it, then realised that it wouldn't work on Windows 98, which I was still running at the time. As far as the game is concerned, I paid therefore I'm a member - and a statistic - even though I never actually got past the installer.

I think if LL were open and honest and actually told us the amount of logins during a week, many of us would be surprised how low that figure actually is compared to the 100,000+ claimed on the website.

Lewis

I like Lit's suggestion of requiring an hour login to make the $L 50.

Anyone who is on basic and plays, just by presence of being here enriches our world, and it would effectively kill off that particular form of account farming.


A 'real life' shopping mall is thought of in terms of dollar per hour, per customer.

For instance, people just hanging out at a mall spend upwards of 20 USD an hour, in some upscale places over 100 USD per hour. They hang out, and start to want things they see: some food, a soda pop, a movie, a sweater.


Furthermore, when I get my sim, any basic members that reside there will effectively be paying tier through me.

I'd say at least half of the members that buy my architecture are renting; I find I'm setting up houses for people all the time in themed island sims. A lot of those basic accounts are very market-savvy consumers, and spend their money very strategically.

And much to my surprise, members only a week or two old, new to SL, will spend 100 USD without even blinking - that surprised me greatly but it happens like clockwork. Talking to them, yes, they are quite new and not alts (or reeeally good actors).

Eltee done said:



True.

I think that statement SHOULD have ended this discussion. You get 5 accounts total per credit card (and you can't delete them to make new ones). Each account brings in 50L a week with a grand total of 250L a week! That amounts to about 1$ a week. It would take 40 WEEKS to get back what you put into those 5 accounts. If someone wants to game that then i say be charitable to the idiots because they aren't going to get far in life that way.

Could you use more than one credit card? yes. of course. but that's 5 stolen credit cards for , once again....1$ a week. Let's pretend you aren't just screwing around and wanted to make 100$ a week. Gee...500 credit cards no one would EVER notice. There are probably 500 year old men with erections that are much more stable than this plan. Stop being needlessly paranoid about this crap.

The point of forums is to allow opinions to be shared. If everyone agrees, the stress level goes to 0, but then the point of forums is killed. Therefore, stress is expected in forums. Those who cause no stress are not contributing much to the forums.

Every one seems to forget one key fact. You need a credit card. Only the first account is free. If you had 10,000 acounts, thats 100,000US$ at 2,000US$ a week it would take 50 weeks to break even. Are you willing to bet 100,000US$ dollars that in a year you can break even? That the economy will be the same? That there won't be some predatory rule that LL implements to counter your practices?

Question??? Maybe my figures are off but:

Free Accounts get 50L per week (providing they are on once a week)
50L times 52 weeks equals 2600 lindens a year per account (Approx: $10.00 USD)
If as assumed there are at least 50,000 free accounts that comes to: 130,000,000 Lindens, or (current average exchange rate of 275 lindens per USD = approx: $472,727 USD per year.

Now what do these new accounts do with that money.....They buy things, clothes, hair, shoes, play the slots, etc..... they spend it!!!!!

Take that away and there will be a lot of creator's, landlords, and other vendors who will be out an awful lot of money.

I was a basic account holder when I first came on and there was a lot of things I wanted but did not have the money to get and also wanted to own land...so what did I do...I paid for my preimum account. Now I get 500 lindens a week...and what do I do with the money.....I spend it...in sl. I buy things.....

Seems to me if we cut out the stipends for the basic account holders or as some want decrease or stop the weekly stipends for the preimum holders as well...where will all the wonderful things that the content creators make come from...

I understood the reason for the 50L stipend was to give a taste to the basic account holder to entice them to upgrade...to buy more things, to encourage the content creators to make more things for them and all of us to buy.

I have not been creating anything up until now so all my cost in SL has come from the weekly stipends and what I put on my rl credit card which is a lot believe me.

You think the SL ecomony is bad now, take away the money and see what happens...goodbye sl and that to me would be a great loss.

The point is that free users do add value to SL (well, as long as they're not just zombies). There's the fact that they're more likely to become paying users than if they weren't offered a free trial, for a start. There's the fact that even if they don't, their creations and just their presence as people in the environment is important in attracting others. Who wants to pay money to a company to go to an empty virtual world? The more users you have the greater social element is present.

And if they don't get at least a few L$, they're likely to think "well, this sucks, I can't buy any of this stuff" and not stay. I'd actually rather have a situation where people didn't *need* money in SL at all, but the capitalistic aspect seems to have been successful in attracting certain people as well. (Also a lot of crap in my judgement, but anyway).

The whole thing reminds me of Livejournal in the early days. There always used to be a problem with the servers and people would blame free users, who have always been the great majority, saying "they should make it pay only". But that was never the point. LJ isn't just a blogging system, it's a social networking system, better than Friendster or anything deliberately designed to do that, and the denser the network the more attractive and successful it is and the more paid users you end up with.

If you want SL to succeed, you need either free users. It's not WoW where you can create content yourself and people will come and get it - SL is more social than that. If you want free users, right now, you have to give them L$ to play with. If you don't like that then start giving your stuff away for free.

The presumption is that a farmer would use a list of credit card numbers and addresses to launch each account, thus none would get charged and the account holders would never even know it happened.

The people who sell such things are the same people who will sell you 100,000 email addresses for 100 USD per block, duped CD's of Microsoft Office and Win XP for 50 USD, nonprescription Viagra, and so forth.

In fact, most businesses that deal with consumers have thousands upon thousands of their customer's credit card numbers on file. This is not a difficult kind of thing to get, in the least.

I agree with your points. Basic users do bring content, even if it's only their av socializing. But, if we must remove $L to assist the economy, their pittance would be the logical choice, and here is my reasoning.

If I am a basic user, not a farmer, then the $L50 per week isn't going to entice me to stay in the game. Let's face it, $L50 won't buy much, not even a shirt or sunglasses in most cases. If they were forced to buy that $L50 each week it would cost them a total of 30 cents. If that is going to make them stop playing, I'd say "bummer, SL must not be a very big deal to you". The truth is, most of these are alt accounts.

Perhaps a compromise would be to give the $L50 to the first account, but any other accounts on the same credit card would not receive it.