Canceling Premium due to 300L stipend base

I am always saddened at how people sort of ignore the plight of the casual player. Clearly to someone who is so deeply involved in the game that the pixels resonate, cannot see how such a pittance as $500 linden can make a difference.

However, truth be told, after a pretty good initial investment (mostly to buy land, but also for top of the line skin, clothes and hair) 500$ linden a week pretty much covers most of the expenses in SL if you budget it.

Its not much, but maybe, just maybe people don't choose to exclusively use SL as their only monthly entertainment, and so litereally, every penny counts. Remember as well that SL requires significant supporting costs-a computer, highspeed internet, etc. Thus the amount of money availble for SL might be so limited that the cost of one value menu meal a month is a game breaker.

SL should be trying to keep these casual users, not sending them away with the message that "if you don't love SL enough to spend whatever it takes, you really shouldn't be playing."

Most other computer entertainmnet, even if it is not as diverse or powerful as SL, is basically free, one you pay your subscription cost. YOu can make money just by killing stuff in WoW or in my favorite non-SL diversion, NWN2.

So with a little effort you can go from being broke to a pimp daddy investing only your time. In SL you cannot to that. While I think most people who come to SL as basic members do not expect to get something for nothing, my $500 linden stipend is a nice way to say thank you for the monthly subscription, the additional tier I pay, and the time I spend on line making this community better by participation. If they take that away, I might feel like I am getting stiffed.

Increasingly LL has decided the way to go is to spin off the concept. There is nothing wrong with this. If you open source the the place, then you can rely on the individual licensees to deal with customer support on thier islands. Unfortunately, at this time LL is not able to ditch customer service entirely.

I have heard all the economic arguments about money supply and inflation, and I have never seen any analysis of the core dyanmics of SL. YOu can't do that sort of analysis with statistical research of the Lindex market. So I do not think $500 linden weekly is going to bring about the downfall of a vibrant economy.

What amazes me is not that people leave when they find out they aren't getting thier Stipend, but rather that they stay ans support the virtual community on a shoe string. We ought to thank these casual users for makig our community big, and incresing the size of its profile. Hell $500 lindens a week is cheap PR for people who pay to partcipate.

I agree with a lot of what you have to say Jake. And I am not entirely without understanding. The first couple of times I dropped ten or twenty dollars to buy lindens it felt a little weird to me too. But in my experience in talking to people who say "I will never buy linden dollars" their view really comes from a philospophical stand more than from a lack of means. It's that part that is interesting to me, since a lot of these people are not causual players, they spend a lot of time here. They just have a problem putting real money into what they perceive as a game that should be free in all, or at least most, of its aspects.

In some ways the other games Jake mentioned have fostered the very attitude he sites as the reason people dont want to buy Lindens with real money.

=)

Chicken or the egg deal

Jake, don't overlook the many managers, security staff, hosts and like. I deliberately leave out DJs from the list as they invest to use music streams but there are many casual account holders who do not own or run a business or land and make their spending money by spending a little time at their favourite places.

How many Prims are you allowed to have on a Premium land ?
(The number of Prims is also a value, isn't it? And I don't find the information)

Hello Hedda, are we talking a First Land plot of 512 sm? 117 prims is the standard. If you right click your land, and select about land, check the objects tab should give you total and available numbers.

I think you are right. In WoW, which is a game by everybody's definition, the clear goal is to level up, and this requires, among other things, game money. Therefore, to buy gold on eBay is essentially to cheat the system. A lot of MMORPG players view those who do this with great disdain (I can be counted among them). It is not surprising then that in Second Life, where so many people have come from more traditional MMOs, some of that negative attitude toward buying game dollars should also arise.

I think also the very idea of spending "real money" on virtual goods is a leap that some are not willing to make. However, going back to my movie rental example, there is nothing more ethereal and vaporous than a movie rental, where the "goods" so to speak disappear within a matter of a couple of hours.

I like this analogy and have to agree with it. I didn't have any issue with buying Lindens on the market with my real money. I use the computer, and gaming, as my primary source of entertainment. Buying lindens is nothing more than renting a movie. After it's all done, you have nothing left but your memories of the movie, and your memories of what the lindens bought you. You have nothing "tangible" RL wise. It's entertainment expense, nothing more.

You're previous comment about MMO gamers and purchasing money is spot on also. I would never buy plat on the outside market for my other game of choice, EQ2. Like you say, in that game, I consider it basically cheating. Not so for SL, that is part of the fun! My SO can't understand why I would spend rl money to buy "fake" shoes. Yet, she gladly pays SOE for 2 accounts so she can keep a banker/vendor bot online all the time. Her nearly 50 bucks a month far outspends what I spend on SL, yet I am the wierd one. LOL

It's funny too to see how the "casual vs hardcore" player arguments occur in SL too. Kinda refreshing to see that the "I'm better than you are newb" mantra carries across all "gaming" formats!

Also, despite the success of WOW, I still see MANY people who view fees of any kind for online games as illegitimate. They would never even look at WOW because it costs money to play. They come to SL because the basic is free, but have no expectation of ever spending anything because they philosophically disagree with the concept.

You really don't need to invest any amount to get enjoyment out of SL. You don't need shelter, or food. You can make clothing easily, albeit somewhat basic, but with a little effort even the in game editor can yield some pretty nice things. A lot of activities are free, with chances to win money, there are the dreaded camping chairs.For a new user I'd suggest going to the Master Money Tree during your first month ad hit all the MoneyTrees. You'll pick up a few Lindens, plus you'll visit a lot of differnt areas. I'm sure there are a lot of other ways to build up a little nest egg. I love Sploders. In the right club a $20 investment can yield a decent profit. A little creative effort can go a long way.

It's sad to see the sense of Entitlement that has permeated RL has made it to SL. Anyway for me at least, it costs $10 to see a 2 hour movie...for that same amount I get a month of S, even with outages (I don't have that much free time for it to be a major issue), it's still a good value entertainmet wise.

Heh heh, now I disagree albeit just slightly Kyricus. I understand your point but I would maintain that whilst the movie becomes a faint memory, what you can buy with your lindens is there the next login and the login after that (bugs permitting!)

If you've bought lindens to buy a plot of land, a house, a photorealistic skin or a flexi hairdo, it's there .. in-world .. for you to enjoy again and again.

This is my first online community with currency so I just accept the 'supply and demand' principle as regards resenting buying lindens above the stipend.

This sense of entitlement is pretty much pervasive also - which is ironic since those same people are often the biggest anti-advertizing bunch.

They somehow think all the computers, the bandwidth , the salaries , etc are all covered by magic.

An interesting question - if there were sims where teir fees were half price , but you had to allow web based advertizing (like how all these "Free" websites make money" i wonder how many people would go that route.

And I can visualize a good majority of these types as the ones we see parodied on TV, in front of the computer 29 hours a day 9 days a week.

An interesting thought occured to me reading this.

The ability to finance your secondlife by paying directly from your fitst , rather than on same game driven treadmill - Allows people with busy Rl's to log on and use SL for a much smaller time per day.

If you pay your tier and buy you lindens you only go on to SL to go on to SL. An hour might be fine.

If you try to get something accomplished in games liek Wow, etc - it takes you an hour to just get ready to get stuff accomplished. You spend a lot of time doing trivial things to earn money.

This conversation is very interesting to me.

I often find that people who are disinclined to spend real money on linden dollars are very willing to spend large quantities of their time in order to acquire very few game dollars. As a mentor, I often am asked "Where can I find a job?" When I explain that "jobs" in SL pay very little, most often less than fifty cents an hour (expressed in US dollars) this does not bother them in the least. When I ask if they would be willing to work for that kind of money in real life, they give the obvious answer.

Now some jobs can be fun, and that has a value beyond money, but I am always amazed that people are willing to invest so much of their real time for so little in return - yet are adamant that they not spend real money here. It is as though their time is of little value.

The view that Second Life is a game, it should be a closed system, nothing should be injected from without, and that time spent earning money in SL cannot be viewed in real life terms, seems pervasive.

This manifests itself in interesting ways.

Camping chairs are an example. By no reasonable calculation can camping be seen as a cost effective way to obtain linden dollars. Yet if you are dead set against spending real money on game money, or you believe it is somehow wrong to spend real money for virtual money, then camping makes a lot of sense (particularly if you care little about how camping hurts the SL community).

Another example is tipping live musicians. It is not uncommon for a live performer to receive 10 lindens as a tip. This is the equivalant of a couple of pennies for what may have been an hour or two of entertainment. Would these people ever consider dropping a couple of pennies into a performer's hat in real life? Of course not. Yet here it makes perfect sense. Time has no value.

I am often asked for custom builds of my products. I rarely entertain such request because my time is very valuable to me (read: expensive). I certainly would not consider charging what I make in real life, but I am also not going to bust my booty for a day to earn a few thousand linden dollars. The custom work I do is often for free and I am quite happy to contribute to projects of merit, or to somebody's happiness, simply because doing so brings me some joy.

But time is money, and time spent in SL is real time and has a real value.

So it is interesting to me, these beliefs people have, about their own time, about spending real money in Second Life, about their entitlement to unlimited capacity and services from Linden Lab - especially when the arguments are framed not on lack of means, but on some sort of philosophical grounds.

Sorry I should have stated it differently, if they take or lower my stipend I will leave my premium membership and become basic and when my saved $L are gone I will make no more purchases...I am not in often, I have only a few good friends in SL, and it is the principal of signing on expecting one thing and getting another. I know $500L is not a lot in US but I do not buy $L's. I won't do it. It's like a credit card, once I start I won't be able to stop, so I just don't even consider it an option. I pay plenty with my quarterly membership and my $15 a month tier.

I'm in for quality time about once a week and make purchases maybe once a month...saved up that is $2000L to go shopping with, I can usually buy something fun or a couple outfits with that. Anyway, hope that helps you understand better.

I've said it a million times. Premium membership is pointless. You can rent land from other people who have it, and the money just isn't worth it. It either needs to die or have more features.

I don't think it's as simple as "time spent earning money in SL cannot be viewed in real life terms". It's more that they want to evaluate the "game" of Second Life on its own merits, and to them, the "game" is about earning money and spending it. Bringing in money from outside isn't judging it on its own merits, because it brings in an outside factor. They want to see what entertainment SL can offer them within the game. They do still see the time spent in real life terms, though; if the game turns out not to be entertaining enough, they stop playing.

The objection to buying L$ is often voiced as an objecting to spending real money for virtual items, but I think a stronger objection is that they see the "game" of SL as being about continuous development, just as most online games are - camp for a few weeks, buy fancy things for your avatar, then become a model and earn more.. and so on. The idea of buying L$ for real money hurts that - you get a finite amount of L$, which runs out some day, and then you can't develop any further. You can buy more, but that's just the same as having spent more real money in the first place - there's no "domino effect" increase, which is what many players hope for - and, as customers for an entertainment product, demand.

Hi Yumi, I was just thinking on similar lines regarding the domino effect.

Being old enough to remember younger days before electronic wizardry, entertainment on a multiple user level meant things like Monopoly, Millionaire, Totopoly, Pirate and Traveller to name but a few.

In these, there was an in-game currency and we could gauge our success or failure in direct terms of who was in the lead.

The thought of just puting in some 'real money' would have destroyed the entire principle.

I sympathise with Musicteachers notion that dipping into a credit card is too easy, too tempting and indeed dangerous. We have an astronomical number of debtors precisely for this reason so I respect the courage to say 'no more' in this respect.

I can see the thinking that 'if I can't enjoy SL by being self-sufficient, then I fail' It's a goal, an ambition and it's still making SL what you want to be.

*nod* The interesting thing is that the most "successful" people I see in Second Life, other than business owners, are usually not people who have the most money but the people who have triggered a social domino effect. They meet people, get an opportunity that way, use that to meet and be known among more people, etc.

This is a wonderful thing, but the problem is that it doesn't scale - it can't work for everyone. And no, I don't mean by that that people who act like assholes should be treated the same as people who are upbeat, nice and friendly. What I mean is that it's great that an upbeat, nice, friendly person can benefit from such an upward spiral but what happens when there are 10 upbeat, nice, friendly people? 100? 1000? At that stage, they're essentially creating their own seperate social systems, but the realities of how L$ and existing business/locations work can make that a bit harder.

I keep promising myself that I'm going to stay out of these threads, but here I am again

I understand the inclination to not spend RL $$, I was like that as a newb myself. I swore I would never pay RL money beyond the $10 that it used to cost to get a basic account. I kept to that promise for months, until I wanted to buy the large piece of land that became the SL Botanical Gardens. The only time I've ever put money into SL has been for land. There is *NO* reason for anyone to need to spend money here, other than for land. There are so many freebies that a casual user can enjoy a very nice SL without ever spending a dime of RL money. Now, when people start whining here, it is because they want something that is not free, and there I don't have much sympathy. There are free houses, clothes, hair, skins, vehicles, jewelry, textures, animations, poses...you name it, there is a freebie for it. If those items aren't good enough for you, well then that is a completely different discussion now.

Yadni's. Thousands and thousands of freebies. For everything else, there is LindenX.....

And that is Priceless

But this sort of ties into what I mentioned above - they don't want explicitly the non-free items, in the sense of having a shopping list that has particular non-free items on it. What they want is the feeling that they can work their way up to earn the non-free items within the "game".

Lots of freebies = great. The feeling you'll only ever have freebies = bad.

I think this is part of the problem, its a problem in thinking. Though I haven't been here long I very quickly gave up the notion of second life being a game in the sense we all think of games. EQ2 is a game, WOW is a game, Vanguard is a game, SL..well, it's more than a game actually.

If you want to proceed as if it is only a game, and not bring in any outside resources (rl money) then you can expect to be dirt poor and pretty shabbily attired for a while I'd think. From what I can see, to make $L in SL requires actual work and thought. I dont' mean work in the sense of going out and whacking a few mobs hoping for a chest drop of "sword of uber killing" that you can sell to an in game vendor for mucho plat; I mean work in the sense that you need to set up a business plan of sorts and then follow it thru. If you're like me in RL, an accountant, you don't have a lot of portable skills you can bring to SL to earn a living. I.e Graphic design, programming, architecture, etc. For me, I look foward to learning these skills but to others, thats work, and not a game.

You need to decide what type of job you are going to have and how you are going to make that a reality in SL. Quite honestly, some of the work but into this "game" by people amazes me. I dont' think I put in that much effort at the office most days!

That I think is the crux of the "whining" problem. People look at this as a game instead of a "second life" and expect to receive the almost instant gratification a game provides. Instead they find that $L doesn't come very easy unless you buy it, and hence, the game must "suck".

Anyway...people can work thier way up to the non free items, but, it will feel like work, and many people don't want to come home from a day at the office only to have to work on another business plan so they can set up a retail store and staff it, and design the goods, and..etc..etc...etc..

This "game" isn't for everyone, especially if you are looking at it as only a game.

But, Yumi, they CAN work their way up. SL provides a toolset by which anyone can get into the "game." What it does take is the willingness to learn the toolset. I don't have any background at all in graphics, animation, architecture but learned to use the tools provided to make things that earned me $$. I totally agree with Kyricus that most of the problem comes from people thinking SL is a game and being pissed that they can't kill things or complete puzzles to earn $$. The same amount of time spent camping to earn Lindens could be spend at the Ivory Tower or an sandbox getting into the REAL game of SL, which is creating content for other players who would much rather just pay someone else for their time and skills rather than learn to make things themselves. The system works out for everybody - except those who don't want to pay for their toys via LindenX and don't want to learn the SL toolset.