Is it even worth us bothering?

I know this is angry rant territory, but the economics changes announcement seems to basically spit in the face of every person who has ever discussed the SL economy.

I mean, there is an absolute wealth of excellent suggestions that have been made, I even posted a sort of summary of them in here, that would not only balance the economy, but provide effective enough L$ sinks that we'd actually have the money to bring back basic stipends and dwell and sustain it.

But out of nowhere comes a load of changes, most important of which is making premium accounts less attractive, to somehow improve the economy? This is backwards!
Then this throttling nonsense, it doesn't address the actual problem, namely that the sinks are not doing enough to offset the L$ being magiked out of nowhere. Randomly throttling won't help.

It really makes me wonder if there's any point to thinking about the economics and the game, and coming up with suggestions, good suggestions to fix it, bring the economy back under control and stop this destructive spiral of removing the FUN from the game.
If the only solutions we get are to remove stipends and dwell then SL stops being fun. I sound like a broken record but if SL stops being fun to point of pure economics then only sellers will remain, and then who is going to buy things? I only see SL declining and dying off if such a course remains LL's plan of action.

I dunno, I'm just really disheartened that here is a chance for an announcement to say "Hey, we saw your guys awesome suggestions and decided to implement them because they'll fix the problem" rather than "Oh we don't care about you, we'll just axe more stuff and add in some things that won't actually solve anything". It seems almost ignorant to the point of purposefully NOT implementing suggestions because to do so would be to admit that a random forum poster was right and the Lindens weren't.

It seems Torley is the Linden that listens (has a ring to it actually), while the others just ignore the player-base and do what they want, where is the link between the two? I'm sure Torley puts loads of effort into reading ideas and answering, and trying to get them put forward along with people's thoughts, and we really appreciate it, but it seems to just stop there which is really rather depressing, especially since it seems that Torley is relegated to just making people feel better until an announcement makes them unhappy again

While I thank you for your kind words, Haravikk, I'm certainly not the only Linden who listens. I'm very visible--in part because of what I do inworld, on the forums, and on my own blog, which points to the fact I know there are more Lindens who want to voice, listen, and respond, but we need better communication channels. There are steps towards this, such as Robin and Philip blogging. Perhaps it's not an unforeseeable future that there'll be more conversations with Lindens that don't get lost in the forums (as I often have to quote and requote).

Also, it's a different topic--but also a hot one--all the many recent anti-griefing features were implemented in large part due to Resident demand and asking for LL to hear them out. It worked, and continues. Similar sort of thing with the "user experience"; 1.11 today is directly meant to address this.

I suppose a difficult thing is when you have so many hopes and great ideas focused on a given area, and good stuff happens in other areas, but not where you care most about, and how you want to see it occur. While we can't please everyone, I'm personally tasked with making sure essential community feedback doesn't fall through the cracks. And as you know, you can always drop me a direct line at [email]torley@lindenlab.com[/email]. I'll be sure it gets to the right Lindens if I don't know.

I'll ask about more info re: the economy from Lawrence; he took and answered a lot of questions as you probably already know in the recent economic Town Halls: /3/93/121623/1.html