Linden Labs seems to want to remove all of the means for players to earn money and fairly soon only people with extreme skill at building or scripting will be the only ones capable of earning anything. Then again even THEY WONT be able to earn anything because consumers wont have money any longer. If you remove all the money that content CONSUMERS recieve then they WONT BE ABLE TO CONSUME the producers products. They will BE BROKE.
With dwell bonus going away there will be little reason for people to run dance clubs, strip clubs, arena contests and many events (tringo / slingo) that dont result in objects being sold. With stipends being killed the TINY TINY ammount gained from 50$L payments wont even exist. Heck this payment isnt even gaurenteed!!! There has been several weeks that my RL partners account did not recieve a stipend even though the account was used the previous week.
What this means for SL is that people without content creation skills will lose most their jobs in Second Life. People like dancers, bouncers, DJs, and standup comedians will no longer be able to find work, since the crowds they draw to the land (creating income for landowner who pays their jobs) will no longer generate money to the given landowner. Our favorite games like Tringo, Slingo and Primtionary will get the axe next. These events will no longer generate dwell, so the land owner will no longer have a reason to pay a host(ess) to run such events. A MASSIVE market is gonna colapse slowly if not instantly.
BEFORE Linden Labs impliments this stipend Axe I would like the the economics statistics page to have an update so that we see how much $L is entering the economy each week by Basic accounts SEPERATE from the ammount of $L entering circulation from Premium accounts. Has LL themselves even looked at that number? Are they killing a source of income from new people without even considering how LITTLE of a circulation increase it is?
Since LL wants to reduce the total game currency in circulation a MUCH MORE LOGICAL solution would be to just increase the money SINKS instead of killing the money fountains.
One way to do this is to make the upload fees for various things based on the content being uploaded.
With sound files its fairly trivial for the client to calculate the playtime of a clip to be uploaded. There should be a base fee of 5$L, and a surcharge of 1$L per second in duration of the sound file to be uploaded. At the same time since the fee paid is based on length we should be allowed to upload sound clips up to 30 seconds in length. What this would do is for a standard 10 second sound the cost would be higher, but with more lengthy segmented uploads the cost would even o ut. Either way the fee would be exactly based on sound length and fair with only a minor increase in average cost.
With textures we all (should) know that textres are converted to sizes that are convienent for the system to handle. That means that the height / width is scaled so each dimension is a power of 2. Taking that into consideration the fee you pay for uploading a texture should be directly proportional to the size of the texture to upload. My proposed rate would be the uploader would pay 1$L for each 32x32 pixel section. The average texture size is roughly 128x128 and at the rate Im suggesting the fee would climb only slightly to 16$L. Textures at this size are not too horrible of either a bandwidth or vram resource hit on the players PC so the price is fair. A texture at 256x256 on the other hand takes up 4x more bandwidth to transfer, and 4times more VRAM to cache in the users video card. Since the fee is based on size this would translate in the uploader paying for what they use or a 4x increase in price. 64$L upload fee for a texture of such size. This also means that people using smaller textures would benifit. So the overall money paid increases reducing the circulation and helping the Linden vs USD ratio, and uploaders now pay based on the resources that both the Linden Labs servers and each player will have to suffer from their choice in oversized textures. We end up with benifits in ALL categories again.
The exception to this suggestion is screenshots. Since people rarely spam massive screenies all over the place and they are a social bonus more than a resource hit screenies should remain at a flat 10$L fee. If the screen shot is in Hi-Res mode the cost should be 100$L if saving as a texture.
Clothing designers who complain that their alleged 'need' to upload the same texture repeatedly to help align seams just means they need to learn to use the preview grid more when its available. Increased manufacturing costs MIGHT force some content providers to increase prices but these new costs will be equal across the board, thus final prices will be still equivilant between creators of equal skill and there is nothing wrong with them raising prices to recoup costs. That would either make people need to p urchase more $L off the LindeX or it would force buyers to only purchase items they truely think appropriate. And the product will either be worth it or not.
I dont consider animation files a massive resource hit and dont think paying a fee based on frames of use is fair (mostly since each frame only has data on what joints moved rather than a solid state of all current values). I do however believe a flat 25$L is still a fair-use charge. Leaving at 10$L also good.
Another money sink would be BRING BACK NEGATIVE RATINGS. They should still cost 25$L. The limitations would be that the only way to give a neg rating would be a checkbox you could select when filing an abuse report. The money would IMMEDIATELY be deducted. If the abuse team decides that action needs to be taken regardless if its a verbal warning or a punishment, they will increment the offenders neg rating in the appropriate category based on what violation was done. If no action is taken the person filing the AR would get the 25$L automatically recredited (or not).
Another REASONABLE cost would be having site to site teleportations cost 1$. There should be a few logical exceptions. Teleporting home should not cost someone. Teleporting to or from an Island sim should be free because the island owner is already paying enough REAL money out of pocket to LL. And accepting a teleport request id have free as a matter of tact. USING a landmark could be free but CREATING the landmark itself could cost 25$L and landmarks given away could automatically be no-trans that way people could still be capable of including LMs in notecards. The act of adding a LM to a notecard could be a fee action.
I'm not saying that these proposals would be recieved with loving arms. Or that they would even be accepted quitely by the tiniest portion of the community. What i am saying is that these changes would increase a few needed money sinks, and for the reasons listed above stimulate the economy and possibly reduce some of the asset costs that LL has to incur with textures and lighten the load on outdated video cards.
The methods I list above would be a MAJOR help to stabalize the $L circulation and the costs listed would make it so that players coming into SL can still ENJOY PLAYING HERE without feeling completely financially oppressed.
I see LL killing all these money fountains as killing methods that people can choose to have fun while in SL, and the FUN is the point of having an online world regardless if you consider it a game or not. SL needs content consumers EVEN MORE than it needs content creators. LL should stop idiotically caring about the LindeX exchange rates because even if the rate was 1-1 their precious premium account owning barons who generate LL's income will still pull out of the world when they run out of buyers.
At the very least LL should consider going back to CHARGING a small fee for new accounts. The basic account prior to 6 months ago always incurred a one time $10 signup fee. Maybe going back to that model would take a bit of financial stress off of LL even if they only set the signup fee to $5.
Regardless i would like MORE THAN ONE Linden to read this over, think about it and then to explain to me WHY the current plan of action is being taken hastily without thought instead of making choices that will actually provide the result that everyone wants. I think the whole community deserves a better explination of why the stipends are being killed with a bit more information than a 1 paragraph announcement that only says its gonna happen without a reason why.