Tiered bonus stipends

I just put in a feature suggestion that I think might even out the "social butterflies" with the "building Hermits"

Please let me know what you all think????

/13/12/4245/1.html

Thanks for looking

Love Ingie

I think easier rating through objects in 1.1 will help with this a bit, but you're right... it still wouldn't have helped me in that situation. If you're going to build a building for someone you might want to charge a premium because once you've been paid for it and release it to the owner you'll never see another benefit from it. Skee paid me very generously for my services, but I admit I was a tad jealous when her votes shot up to 15-20 a day ;P

As far as being rated for your own house though, 1.1 will help a lot, as long as people take the time to rate. You can already rate people through their objects but most people don't know or can't be bothered to do it.

Another thing about ratings which I've never heard anyone mention is that it's a lot easier for noobs to get a high rating bonus than it is for a veteran... it's hard to get that "change this week" up there when everyone you know has already rated you. It would be nice if that didn't factor quite so heavily into the bonus. It's the biggest culprit for hugely fluctuating bonuses.

One of the problems with rating is yes the building.
I am NOT the builder in our SL family.Linkin Slate is. Linkin and I came to the game as a couple with the intent to share knoweldge and resouces.
Where I am the socialite, Linkin is more comfortable, exploring the many ways to build and figure out scripting.
My mentoring events and ratings help pay for his "building addiction". He is usually in the negative, come pay day. He has recently started to teach, which helps his income some. He actually broke even one week.
I brought it up at the town meeting, that when ppl come to our lot and vote, they think I built it becase it is my land with out actually holding the cursor over the house to see who owns it. So I get the build rating. Your answer to me was. "This problem would be cover in the group fix." I am sorry, but there now has to be 3 to make a group, if I read the information correctly. There is only 2 of us. The group build credit would not apply.
He can not even put the voting station out becasue it is my land and you cannot have two on one property.
Also there are more wealthy ppl out there that have PAID for the building they own and are getting credit for what they have not built.

As far as the tiered bonus system goes, it sounds like a simplification to me, and I like that. I meant to respond to this one when it first came out, but now I remember thinking I needed to ponder it a bit first and then it totally slipped my mind. Duh. Some other issues have come up here since then though, in particular...

Great post Nyna, I think it points out a number of issues that don't get enough coverage.

I'll self declare that I'm one of the extreme hermit types that don't get out much unless pushed. But still I have a group of people I've known a while (a long while in fact) that I work well with. We often work together without even communicating. Steller built a giant beanstalk, Paul added some huge flowers nearby, Tweke made the biggest tree I've ever seen in SL and when some land next door to that came available I decided to continue the theme (in a rather silly way). As far as I know there has been no discussion of this, it just happened. (Or maybe they just didn't consult with me! hehe).

I think the rating system as it stands that seems (to some of us) to favor social behavior was intended to encourage such group activities/projects to take place. One questions, to which I don't know the answer: Is enough of it taking place already such that it needs no further encouragement?

The other question is: Is there a limit to how much people should be encouraged by the economy to do things that they would not do naturally? My answer to that is a definite YES (there is a limit). Some people are sociable and will be so with or without a reward. Others are on the cusp and for these, the reward is enough of a push to get them involved in things. Still others will not respond to a reward in any event. If someone doesn't want to do group activities and the only way you can get them to do so is to make life miserable for them otherwise what has been achieved? The quality of those forced group activities will be low in my opinion, and this might actually discourage others from participating in the future

Nyna's post presents another example, where people entered as a team in the first place and began working together without being encouraged in any way. In their case, because of the restriction on group size, they are actually discouraged a bit from what would be a good pairing. There was some frivolous use of groups a while back that really came about as a way of altering the prefix to your name. I think another way is being added to do that, but maybe when the new accounting changes go in that allow for groups to share funds the limit on group size should be set back to 2.

I think everyone is cautious though, thinking that the next big change in the economy is going to essentially put them out of business. The fact is, I don't think anyone really KNOWS what will happen with each change. We need to all be more willing participants in the experiment though, because the only way to optimize this thing is to try variations, and in the process there may be a few steps back as well as a few forward.

Regardless of how near perfect the economy gets I have a concern that there will always be the possibility for large numbers of people to be frozen out at the bottom, and as a correlation to that there may be a few individuals who control huge amounts of system resources. Maybe the easiest way to avoid those extremes, rather than just trying to re-balance the economy to avoid them, is to simply make them impossible to achieve. In other words, put absolute caps on and individuals total net worth and also put an absolute floor.

The cap is easy enough to understand... the rules of the economy would allow peoples net worth to go up up up, but no matter how "broken" the system might be in some incarnation, the top net worths would only be able to go so high. Any excess over that would just spill back into the general pool. That alone wouldn't prevent people at the bottom from being frozen out however (since a large GROUP of people at the top could still end up owning everything) so there would also need to be a floor established that no one would be able to go below. I'm a bit less clear on how this would work, clearly not the way the -1k limit on taxes worked. My first stab at it would be, again, that total net worth could not fall below a certain point, and that point would be the cash equivalent of a small plot of land and a few dozen prims to populate it with. That might in fact correspond in fact to roughly the amount new users are given. You could actually assure them "it will never get worse than this".

That also means that we could all set up a "base", call it a house or whatever that we will never have to worry about having to delete or move. As we do better, we could expand, etc, but we would never have to worry about being wiped out. What the system would PREVENT you from doing is de-rezing all your objects, releasing your land and then blowing the cash on a gambling game or something. Similarly, you couldn't be taxed out of existence, but that also means there could be no way to hide assets from that tax system.

Oooh, thinking about this gives me a headache. Sorry for the ramble.

I agree entirely with what Grim said in the beginning and I'm throwing you mad cookie rewards for saying that.

Rich don't need to be richer by help of the Lindens! They own half the world already. I understand SL is a bit capitalist, but if it gets to an extreme where I'm feeling like the scum of the SL I'm not going to want to play at all.

Help the middle and lower class out. Allow people the chance to rise economically while tapering off the amount of wealth a person could have. Try to find ways to increase the power of buying and selling so that everyone has a chance on the market. I understand that the larger the build the larger the amount a person has to pay, however... money shouldn't be handed out so freely.