Is LL really planning on eventually removing stipends?

This quote by Robin infers that LL has plans to remove stipends as a source eventually. I'd really like to know if these are actual plans, when they are planned on being implemented, and why? I think as player in this game I deserve to know if the $L that I already buy each week as a premium member are going to be taken away, because if that is the case I guarantee me and many others will no longer find any incentive in staying paying, premium members and will immediately downgrade to basic status. I'll happily rent land from someone else rather than continuing to pay LL for a service that is less than I now recieve.

I am getting very frustrated with LL constantly catoring to those that use this "platform" to make money as they are very much the minority. Where the majority use SL as a "platform" to have fun and not worry about whether or not they can afford to buy enough $L's to do something. It's much more enjoyable to just save them. I currently love my little plot of land, I love building pretty things, but I won't be able to do that anymore if I don't have any $L to upload textures.

Maybe LL thinks they will make more $$ off $L sales then they currently do off of premium membership fees...who knows, but I think this is a VERY BAD DECISION and will cost LL a lot of members.

Please stop taking money from the starving artists to line the pockets of the people who have lost their origional purpose for joining.

I promise, the quality of the content in SL will not suffer. You'll initially loose those that are only here for making $$ and their content, but there are many more who have been struggling that will happily take their places.

I honestly don't know why LL believes that removing sources will help the value of the $L increase...all the changes they've made so far havn't caused any significant increase, and it has made SL a lot less fun place for many people.

But back to my origional question. I'd appreciate knowing when stipends will be going away so that I can decide how much longer I want to continue paying for SL.

And rather than just making this whole thread a giant vent here is a suggestion...Why not just set a given value for $L then the people can keep their fun and the business people can quit worrying about the $L demise. Also another suggestion...why not grandfather clause all current members so that when this change takes place they are still able to play in the way they origionally signed on to do.

I don't begrudge the content creators compensation for their time, but I personally will not pay any more $US for virtual content that isn't even stored on my own harddrive.

Hi!

The rate at which new money needs to be added to keep the currency exchange rate roughly stable depends on how quickly the economy continues to grow, which is a function of both the rate at which new users enter SL, and the average amount of money everyone is spending in-world. At present, both are growing quite rapidly, which means that substantial amounts of new money will continue to need to be added to the economy.

With respect to premium stipends (which are the largest source of new money), we don't have any immediate plans to change these rates of payment. What we are trying to do in talking about this stuff is to explain the mechanics of how the economy works - someday when the growth of SL levels off (which may not be fore a long time) there may be a need to add less new money. This, of course, doesn't mean that the idea of a 'premium' account which includes a fixed amount of currency delivered every month needs to change. We could alternatively charge SL users their premium fees and then buy the currency for them directly from the market, as opposed to making it. This would cause LL to make less money, though, because part of premium subscriptions would go to other users (currency sellers) and not LL.