Let me tell you what the economy of Second Life needs to salvage it, since I live it -- I work in it. It needs you to get your bosses to STOP THE LAND GLUT. As in TURN OFF THE LAND SPIGOT, NOW. You don't need to be tinkering with stipends, sinks like upload fees, stopping dwell payments in Lindens, ending incentives like tier bonus -- none of that will help, and only punishes people who actually actively contribute to the economy and collectively are its engine. STOP THE LAND GLUT.
Working the SL economy extensively may not be enough credentials for the forums crowd, but like many premium holders, I own a substantial number of sims and manage a medium-sized rentals and land sales business and other activities on them, and like the other premium-holders you need to heed, I do acquire a good feel for the economy. Please listen to people like me who can tell you what's obviously wrong with the LL economy, and the very simple things needed to fix it.
1. Do not remove the $2000 a month stipend. Like any entertainment enterprise, say, the travel company or deli store providing the tickets to the bus to Atlantic City, you need to offer a bag of poker chips, a coupon to the steak dinner, and a lucky hat or token. So everyone who ponies up the premium especially -- of which there are far, far too few accounts in SL! -- needs to get the little entry package. And they need to keep getting it, because each time they log on to SL, they go on a trip, where they use those little packages to buy more and more and more stuff. While a robust economy might consider getting rid of these after 90 days, say, we've got a sick economy kept afloat MAINLY by those who get these $500 stipends -- they're the doers! We've got an economy where content-creators, flush with cash p2p sales, cash it out in a hurry for USD and go play WoW. Their constant inflated cash-outs merely flood the land with money for basics to buy more of their content -- and it stays in that chain, never going outside. Basics -- churn -- come and buy it for a one-time looksee, but then can't get jobs or survive. The content-creators don't invest in any other sectors of the economy, making it a bit of a tulip or oil-dependent situation where the poor get poorer and then emigrate or commit terrorist acts, and the rich get richer and keep their wealth in off-shore accounts. Please, stop capital flight, emigration, a remittance economy, and even terrorism -- by rewarding those who diversify and stabilize the economy and create the middle class -- and enabling them to stay in this country.
2. Do not further punish the most entrepreneurial edge of the economy. Fanboyz, socialists, tekkie-wikis and other assorted naysayers constantly squawk that you should fix the economy by punishing the most entrepreneurial part of it -- those who pay premium and buy large amounts of land. Not so, G.I. Please, first get from your Linden contractors the real numbers for how many premium accounts there are. Back when there were only 40,000 "subscriptions" (let's be charitable and call them that, though "one-time trials on basics that never came back but are kept in the system" might be a more accurate description), there were ONLY 9,000 premiums. Worse, of these, only 6,000 used their 512 stakes and an unknown eveven smaller numbers of these tiered up beyond 512. So this precious, precious part of SL, which forums FIC on basics themselves love to hysterically imagine are some overfed, inflation-causing mass of SL -- which is very tiny in number in contrast to the masses, must become the feted and cossetted part of SL -- or at least not the punished part!
3. Get the real numbers of premium subscribers and tier-payers and work them, and only them until a solid picture emerges -- don't calculate mythological numbers based on hypotheticals. You're in a position to see the true numbers -- get them. You'll readily be able to see that there are very few annualized subscriptions -- nowhere near enough to have any inflationary impact with their alleged $361-valued Linden. And as I've noted in 2), the small number (it was 22 percent; is it now perhaps 30 percent tops?) of people who buy the premiums AND get the 512 AND sell it and tier up higher, is not enough of an explanation for "valueless currency". They got the bag of chips and played the tables night and day, filling up LL's coffers. Heck, they BUY the land and ORGANIZE the events for people to pay the tables night and day. Please do not punish them.
4. Incentive those who do most with a little. Really, this tiny, tiny number of people who a) got the premium b) got the $500 a week c) got the 512 and handily resold it for $3500; d) went into business from there and made a store, a large home, or even large land businesses (a very tiny minority) are the healthy, productive, driving edge of this game. Incentivize and fete them, please. You don't have to fete them by giving them free sims, letting them win contests, letting them rule the forums, or any of the classic feting forms for the previously feted content-producing class that drives the flow of basics in the door. But at the very least don't punish them! And a modicum of feting with this hardy and industrious bunch could go a long way!
Example: instead of offering free land and a house to a basic, who didn't value the already heavily subsidized 512 for $512 and already FREE tier enough to pay a lousy $9.95 or $7.00 or even $6.00 a month for it, AND get the $2000 valued at some $7.00 US today (essentially still returning the cost of the subscription if cashed out then), Linden Lab should be offering the free land and house to premiums who have 512 tier, but didn't use it !). The real incentives should go to those who bought the premium, but hesitated and didn't buy their 512, confused about tier or fearing bilking. The figures show us that 6000 out of the 9000 only used and bought even their 512, let alone anything else. Find a way to get those 3000 (these are the figures back from 40,000 -- they are greater now) to use their 512 allotment, as that often creates then further tier-ups of at least $5. They will buy and spend more -- and in larger amounts than basics when given a chance.
5. Do not compete with, mimic, "help," GOM, or destroy the rentals businesses. Rentals companies are what enables basics to survive without buying land. The deep glint in Linden's eye is the thought of how to destroy the rentals businesses, so that they can force more people to buy land -- or at least destroy mainland rentals so that they can force people on to (for them) more manageable private islands. They figure if they break the back of the land barons and rental czars, and also glut the land market to way beyond their capacity to absorb, they'll eventually eliminate them and create a hypothetical nation of shop-keepers on 512s, and a nation of residences on 1024s or a few 4096s -- an ideological vision that will translate to an archipelago of elitist project sims that they will both find easier to manage and calve off eventually when they move to "host-your-own sim". They want the strongest builders, the strongest land dealers, the strongest maintainers of kewl, Internet buzz, to take over the privatized, access-only Archipelago of Assholes and keep out the rest of us. That's clearly their aim, and while it may seem technologically their idea, they should be stopped in their tracks -- at least long enough to give a more democratic and liberal free-market Metaverse a chance to grow.
They need to leave rental companies alone, let them thrive, because they are an important cushion and conveyor belt in this game, with its steep learning curve and expenses. Most rentals are less than 30 days, and are used to acclimatize people to save money, learn how land works, then buy their own land. And often people buy land and tier it to pay for a home or shop, but then rent a home or shop in addition. So leave it alone. It only helps the retention rate, the content-buying rate (people can immediately start buying furniture and prefabs even if they don't go into the risk of land ownership) and it helps stabilize civilization away from sandboxing and even griefing.
6. Stop the land glut, before the land barons get angry enough to stop it for you by boycotting the auction. Yes, stop printing up those sims like some countries print up currency, that's the primary -- and IMHO SOLE cause of rampant inflation and devaluation in SL. Turn off the land spigot. Turn the damn thing off.
a) Stop believing in the inside mantra that the auction works on a "demand" system. It doesn't! It works on a "psy-war system" (see above, re: breaking the land barons' backs). The Lindens play chicken. They were compelled to make a huge inflationary payout of fake dollars with no labour or value behind them in the telehub buy back. They then let the barons cash those out -- but at severely devalued (by that time) rates. They then forced them to chug-a-lug bulkauction sims.
7. Make Lindens aware of their conscious policy of breaking the land barons, and get them to realize it is destructive of the whole economy. Oh, you don't believe Lindens have a conscious policy to break the back of land barons? Well, of course they do! Let's go over it again. Not only are their philosophical underpinnings, like Philip's famous "land and money are not stake in LL", and the conscious play of David Linden's plans for the year to increase content creation, there are the inworld policies and actions:
a) Refusal to keep deeded island parcels in land-for-sale list. When a change was made to the "deeding system," LL refused (after enormous amounts of forums clamouring, most achieved by dubious alts) to allow private island owners to put the deeded land opportunities into the "for sale list" -- and that capped the internal market of deeded owners selling to each other and insiders, too. Still, they flourish now on the Dreamland list of more than 500 people. When the capacity to sell parts of islands opens up, it brings in the problems of the mainland in term of ugliness and griefing. Covenants can't do enough to close this gap, so it shouldn't be done hastily (it is now being currently planned as if covenants will solve this problem -- a glorified notecard-giver can do a lot, but is not sufficient insurance.)
b) Simultaneous release of Dreamland private islands and New Continent. At the same time as Anshe Chung was able to buy up dozens of islands to start Dreamland, the Lindens competed with their own customer and glutted the market ridiculously by releasing the New Continent up north with a huge amount of hype in the Magellan legend to boot. Furthemore, with their devious plan to spring p2p on us, they put no telehubs in the New Continent, thinking they'd get people to fly more, explore wilderness more, and p2p faster than in fact they did (six months later). Failure to put in the telehubs after a huge amount of hype created a real-estate bubble and collapse that put many medium-sized barons and developers out of business in one day, killing the granulation and diversity desperately needed to stabilize this sector. LL doesn't realize that their plans to break the backs of land barons usually break the backs of the one force really capable of competing with -- and curbing but not killing -- the land barons -- other land barons who are new and will have a smaller business.
c) The move to whole-auction sim system. In June 2005, the Lindens decided to move to a whole-sim auction, setting the opening price of $1000 per sim. This cut out many smaller dealers who were thriving and competing successfully with Anshe Chung, Blue Burke and other big dealers. They also cut out the ability of individuals and groups who were end-users from buying land for homes and projects -- forcing them to buy from major barons. They put out dozens and dozens of these sims endlessly. Instead of focusing on development of her now vast empire of private islands, Anshe Chung chose to keep insanely bidding, making the price go up for baby barons and project leaders. First LL plays chicken by putting out too many sims; then Anshe and the baby barons play chicken. None of this chicken-playing has the slightest thing to do with the actual "demand" for land. Look at the map. Huge amounts of land are for sale. It sits there. It's not uncommon for a baby baron to put $47,000 on a 4096 and let it sit there for months and months and months now, devoid of buyers, just because $195 a month is just not a very large entertainment expense for some people, and like many people, he's going to refuse to take a penny less than what he had to pay on the auction, and really want more, despite the obvious factor of his margins destroyed by the $195 cost.
Land tied up for months and months at too-high prices might feed Linden Lab's immediate need for stable tier payments, but it is not good for long-term health of the economy or democratization of the land business.
d) The sudden removal of telehubs and move to p2p. While after a great deal of lobbying, the Lindens conceded that a "bait-and-switch" charge might stick, and offered a buyback, this only affected (in theory) the parcels purchased after August 1 and before December 31. There's no objective technical reason why p2p and telehubs could have been allowed to exist, so that windfalls and huge inconveniences both would go to the 128/128 owners where the sim landing defaults. A 90-day phase-out could have been implemented allowing people to see the market, build new malls where it made sense, i.e. private islands, and retire the old ones. Worse, this sudden change, which had been rumoured for months, didn't affect the big class of barons the Lindens wished to crush -- they figured out to sell their malls to wannabees, and the wannabees them floundered and were the losers in August. Furthermore, mom-and-pop medium or small sized malls in nearby telehub sims got destroyed too -- a pity. Some got compensated and moved to private islands to restart; not all survived. Pity. Remember, these are the most industrious and big-spending people -- and they create wealth and get others to buy it and stay in the game. Stop killing them, please, in the name of some fake distributive egalitarian "justice" or "democracy" which is in fact merely a form of creator-fascism, allowing a handful of creators and a handle of muscular oligarchs rules the economy and keep in inflexible, inpenetrable, and ultimately non-productive.
e. The acceptance of cheats on the telehub buyback. I can't help thinking Lindens know full well that Anshe purchased telehubs like Ross or Janus or Club long, long before August 1, 2005 -- try back in 2004!. Give me a break. Surely they have a history of the auction buys even if we, the public, are kept in the dark by the memory-hole auction that allows us only to see 5 days at a time (Tiger Crossing might still have this feed, we could check). So that means that we, the public, have to take hundreds of thousands of inflationary telehub buybacks dollars into the system, and the cashing out of dollars by SL's largest baron, and then the buying from SL of the bulk auctions -- all because of a cheat.
f. Placement of bulk-auction sims on the market. Knowing the barons would now be flush with cash, and wouldn't do the smart thing like buy themselves a BMW in RL and get out of this game, like Blue Burke lol, they put out something tempting to get them re-addicted, even at a higher level. Bulkauction sims aren't a "market test" for a proverbial, oh, UCLA somewhere that could buy 40 sims to do some big government-funded test of some tekkie thingie, they are a conscious policy to play chicken, once again. And Anshe and Guni rose to the bait, and bought, as did Cyberland and MarmelaGramela. How could they not? Mainland sims coming up on the auction have to be bought, if a company wants to preserve their market share. What's driving the auctions, then, is the desire to keep up reputations for business and keep up a putative market-share, but not an actual grassroots demand. Nevermind, with the right advertising, and some like Dana Bergson's Otherland have gotten really good at advertising tasty new chunks of new land, you can create demand where it didn't exist...but only to a point! We're reaching it!
g. Destruction of medium barons by poor custom service and lack of timely interventions. When significant medium-level barons come along to challenge and diversify this market, and bring more sense to it, the Lindens destroy them -- consciously and willfully. Oh, I'm paranoid you say? Well, no. Collectives often consciously and willfully destroy things that the individuals in the collective might have real plausible deniability about. Take Buster Peel, for example. Buster had an elaborate build on an entire sim. A patch and some glitches coming in completely destroyed this. If you think he didn't put his prims into the group on the group land, guess again. I have now had this experience myself, with my own builds, and with tenants, who have lost incredibly complex builds over night. The pattern seems to be as follows: when a sim/server ages beyond a certain point (90 days) something about it becomes unstable. Then, when someone buys land on that sim, or terraforms, or does something to break the film that has settled over it (LOL) something makes it crack, and the builds are destroyed or delinked and all returned to lost and found. Cache-clearing doesn't help. This is a really ominous little bug/complex phenomenon/thingie but the Lindens refuse to study it or do anything about it. That, and getting clipped in the New Continent bubble by the Lindens CONTINUED pouring of new land glut in the south EVEN after that awful glut of Ansheland's islands plus the new continent itself put people like Buster Peel out. LL really needs to take a look at how to compensate, or provide reparations for, loss of things by the game mechanism itself, through no fault of the resident -- a half sim of a build disappearing over night, never to return is a loss that needs to be compensated adequately, if not financially, through tier relief.
Or take Dark Korvin. A decent, medium-sized, land baron who is available, small enough still to do rapid customer service, good prices, etc. He is utterly demolished by continued land-glutting, even though he and others are manfullly trying to suck up the slack in the mass liquidation market that always results from the land glut. New tools on the client come in without warning, even very experienced land dealers get confused by them or they have bugs in them forcing workarounds, and whoops, he's tiered up a half a sim he didn't want and can't move out the door. I know what that's like, too. At least 3 times, I've been double tiered, once out of stupidity, once out of having no choice when I was trying to close an account, and once despite repeated pleas to the Lindens to do something in advance to fix a billing problem with accounts with same dates preventing a consolidation of tier. The Lindens blandly refuse to fix either accidental tier-ups or to help consolidate tier -- it's just not their job. They refuse to look at it. Next. There's always another guy to buy the island -- and another medium-sized land dealer has bought out Dark. The dog barks, the caravan moves on.
8. Do not remove the 10 percent tier bonus for groups. Given that land groups actually using this function can probably be counted on about 2 sets of hands (please get and look at the real numbers and don't cave to socialist thinking here), there's no reason not to keep it at least for now. Given the vast tumultuous adjustments that are likely to occur with "fixing" and "improving" the land tools (as we can already see from 3 days of lost business with the borking of the land menu and "buy for group" tools in this latest patch) people need incentive to stay in, and serve groups, and keep their businesses open. Stop punishing people who take risks and spend time creating businesses, wealth, and opportunity in this game, in the name of some fake, utopian egalitarianism that isn't going to improve the bottom line.
9. Stop harassing the events list. As Cocoanut put it so inimitably, geez, this is a game where having a yard sale is a crime, but being a Suicide Girl with the last name Suicide is celebrated. Go know! Get out of the Net Nanny business. Take a clue from that website that runs the events tickers (eventster? what's it called? That began running the events list on the Internet from SL?). Don't judge content. Let it go. Good cancels out bad. If bad gets hits, that must be what customers need and want. Events are entry-level jobs. Limits on times per day or size of parcel are reasonable; limits on content are not. Events that are glorified bling-sales or yardsales should be allowed. Use the filters. Move on.
10. Stop popping in the lowest rate for Lindens for buyers, and start putting in limited sell orders ASAP. This has got to be one of the dumbest things we ever saw, costing many people, even experienced like myself, lots of cash as they make mistakes when the system pops in whatever idiot sudden crashed-market figure is happening. That is, if someone decides to sell their Lindens for 500 instead of 250, and that number pops in as I'm looking at the menu and refreshing the page, I will accidently click on it and sell for half of what I wanted to sell at. The automatic pop-in MUST STOP on sells. Put the market indicators and the buy/sell template all on one screen. Let people eyeball it and pick. If you MUST hold newbies' hands, put your own generated number automatically into BUYS ONLY. But there is no reason on earth you should pop in the best BUY number into the template where the best SELL number is needed!!!!
Unless...of course...you're Linden Lab, driven to ideological fervour and excess, and you want one thing, to force the value of the Linden down, to make it "cheaper" so that masses of basics can be persuaded to stop camping and to spend $2.00 to buy some Lindens. Then you don't care if you a) force the worst sell number on an experienced seller or b) force the worst sell number on masses of ordinary people, not barons, try to cash out their Lindens -- pop in the worst rate you can muster and let them ignorantly sell from it -- when waiting even an hour for a better rate could occur if there was rational glancing at the list.
11. Stop competing with resident businesses. Efforts by LL to get into the currency exchange (GOM) and the land and rentals business (all this newbie housing sims, even if a short-term "test" is actually months and months of competition, and a bad precedent for letting selected groups of residents get an insiders' deal) -- all of these provide unnecessary attacks on entrepreneurs, harm the most productive edge of the economy, instill investors' with lack of confidence, and make people leave.
12. Increase texture upload fees. The content-creators' class has enjoyed an absolutely boundless free ride for like forever. They experience absolutely no costs for their business, other than their own time and perhaps a $99 for a PSP program. They can work on sandboxes or even outside the game, pop something in the game, and leave a vendor out to keep collecting cash. They're to be encouraged, sure -- what's a game without content? But the uber-feting of them needs to stop. They've just had a huge windfall of DOUBLE or even QUADRUPLE their sales income with p2p making it possible to kill off their major, legitimate, democratic competition in the form of the telehub malls, and making it possible for people to look at an ad or a profile and immediately teleport there to buy, buy, buy. So make these texture hogs clogging up the asset server pay $15 instead of $10. Some of them routinely bring textures bigger than 512 into the game. Gradation of texture size and cost might be a good idea.
13. Don't just do something, stand there. It might be a good idea to stop all this game-patching for 30-60 days with new features -- no patches unless it fixes existing bugs. The lastest list of bugs a mile long, with everything with disabling of "buy for group" to not being able to see the water in some sims to being unable to edit objects, open notecards, or even see the world as anything but gray squares, is just untenable. Go back and fix all that stuff before you start adding all these new features that mainly feed only the content-creation and tekkie class with toys that they don't even always translate into value for the public or the whole economy anyway.
14. Don't remove dwell payouts inworld in Lindens. These incentives for traffic can't possibly cost the system THAT much -- go see the number of people who own land and do significant stuff on it!!! -- and they are all that is left of a business development incentive that has been taken off now with the closure of the USD Developers' Incentive. Leave it alone, until the world prospers more. It's an important payout incentive to people who work very hard to do clubs, entertainment, non-profits, rentals, all kinds of businesses. It's wrong to keep punishing the doers of this world. It might be a reasonable move when the land glut is ceased, the land value stabilizes after allowing what is most valued to rise to its true cost, and what is valued on my sim to be sold to others on my sim or neighbouring sims more efficiently. If what these doers on land do is put out camp chairs and pay newbies, that should be a clue that free Lindens are in demand -- free Lindens that the premium account for $9.95, the free 512 tier and the $512 subsidy just isn't meeting. Let it go, or adjust the bag-o'-chips offer for another gradation of membership, perhaps, but don't punish those who do stuff in the game, and help others to do stuff.
15. Put in a users' land auction. Did I say STOP THE LAND GLUT? Let me say it again, LOUDER. STOP IT. That means a moratorium for 30 or 60 or even longer on anything but Governor land that is abandoned and recycled. Replace it with a feature on the website that helps individuals sell the land on their sims. Currently, they have no choice but to put out uninformed, incorrect choices. Too high, and they can't even sell to their willing neighbours who would take it off their hands and instill a better sense of good neighbourliness and move away from the kill-the-other-person attitude in this game. Too low, and land barons with scanners swoop down and then lock up that parcel for months as they can afford to ignore pleas to come down in price as they are working out of an entire, funded system of bulk. A website function of players' auctions, outside the LL system, or even integrated with it somehow, might provide more conscious feedback of pricing and valuing to get people to adjust more rationally and also get more of their land out the door to other end users, and would also rewared rather than punish small- and medium-sized liquidation businesses that aren't just low-life scum (there are some) bottom-feeding by bilking newbs out of their 512s for only $1024, but keep the land market liquid.
Lindens cringe when you suggest stopping the land glut or shutting off the spigot even 30 days to sop up the access. But by God in Heaven, look at the damn map. It's awash in dollar signs. Everyone is trying to sell and get out of the game, or at least to a larger parcel on a mainland sim, or at least to an island. Help them! Then new people could be buying their cheaper land released to a more informed and robust market. This notion that any sort of "overcrowding" could occur in a country with some 2000 sims out there is a vestige of beta and the early days that must be firmly discarded. There's no overcrowding in SL, there's only demand for prime real estate at prime, waterfront, open-Linden-protected sea, mature. That's not crowding, that's valuation. If the pricing of that particular type of land goes up, don't take that as a signal, as LL did in August 2004, that this is a seller's market gone haywire. People value land and get around your every attempt to devalue it.
16. Enforce the TOS against the Bush Guy and other sign extortionists. See my back pages here for the reams I've written on this subject and why it is necessary for the economy not only in its own terms, but for investor stability.
17. Develop a rational and business-friendly sign-posting and advertising policy to encourage rather than discourage advertising in world. This could range from (gasp) auctioning some roadside Governor Linden land in small parcels (to help compete against existing sign extortionists) or auction/sell space on tasteful and not outsized billboards at Infohubs, or other sites. The existing advertising mechanism at Infohubs is too clunky.
I predicted a land crash in February -- I could be off a month or two. What's going to happen is all these baby barons and individuals who bought lots of land up north can't hang on to it with that expense recurring. They will start to dump it all over for prices far less than the $10/meter or higher than Anshe maintains. A rash of liquidators appearing might bring it up -- like Rathe Underthorn buying up all the PG this last summer and fall helped hold its price above $2/meter when it crashed. But the amounts of land, and any continuing land glut,
Vasudha, did I say STOP THE LAND GLUT? I'm really, really serious. STOP THE LAND GLUT.
The land glut might as well be printed currency -- like Yeltsin first letting prices rise, then printing rubles in in 1992, leading to the great ruble crash of 1994. Stop the printing presses. Land is non-inventoried and fairly (artificially-kept) stable commodity that is not only marketed as a chief feature of the game, it really is the chief feature of the world leading to stability, as householders and store-owners and island world creators are motivated to stay, keep paying tier, and keep laying out content. Don't devalue it by creating more of it than can be reasonably purchased and developed. Let the existing market of unsold land siphon off.
All other tinkering -- getting rid of internal Linden dwell payments, raising classifieds prices, getting rid of the stipend, thinking up some other fee a la the texture fee -- these are not only not crowd-pleasers and help people leave the game, they are not the solution to the land glut problem.
STOP THE LAND GLUT.
Amen.
Are they really considering getting rid of stipends?? That is absolutely foolish.
So I pay $75.00 USD/year and what do I get for it?
I lived off my stipend when my business took a fatal hit due to P2P. Like many others I host events and pay the prize money out my own pocket. There are many others like myself who use stipends and/or our businesses to fund the things we want to do.
I'm not getting the reason for chopping out stipends. I agree with you comepletely: we DO need our free chips, or goodie bag or whatever as a thank you for stepping up to the plate and actually going premium.
I LOVE the idea of making file size a determiner for how much you pay for upload. We'd see a stop to all those humongous textures lagging everything right quick, thats for sure! Excellent idea!
*sighs* I hope you DO listen Vasudha, and GET your hands on the REAL info and stats.
Prokovy lives this stuff day in and day out, and so do many others. This posting right here is a gold mine of important info for you - use it.
Posted by: Brace | 02/13/2006 at 02:46 AM
Thanks for those comments, Brace, I hadn't thought of using the stipend for prizes, but yes, I remember actually when I use to do this when I had a club. It's very important for events-organizers trying to do activities to which those on basics come.
As I read the forums, I see the usual suspects, like Weedy Herbst, are taking an aggressively anti-stipends position, possibly in the genuine belief that it "harms the economy and causes inflation" but also quite likely in a desire to slam anybody who isn't a creator-fascist. Creator-fascists who have no expenses and who merely wish to compel everybody to make as they do, or buy, or die, don't mind losing the stipend, though Coco rather pointedly -- and aptly! -- asked what Weedy does now with her stipend -- gives it to charity lol?
So I can only pointedly keep asking the question: *just how many premium accounts are there?* Just what is the payout the Lindens make in $2000/month stipends each week? I'll bet it is a fraction of the payout to basics, no? And a fraction of other budgetary items? The Lindens guard this information carefully -- if they routinely gave it out, the contrast between that figure (it was 20 percent back in May-June) and the figure of basics among the 130,000 will be a very stark contrast.
It's a figure that reveals that in this game touted as a land game, not that many people come in and buy land. Most of the land is held in the hands of a few, like a Latin American dictatorship.
Most importantly, we need to see how many of the premiums buy land; of these, how many own more than 512. When we see the premiums who tier large amounts of land, we are looking at the people who pay the Lindens' their salaries. So they really need to view this "kickback" of $7.00 US per month (if on a quarterly subscription) as a tiny incentive.
The Lindens should not be looking to remove tiny incentives from the doers of this game. They should be looking to stop the land glut that devalues a chief commodity in the game and undoes the hard work of people trying to make the money in it -- which ultimately is money for them as it means tier and more hours in the game.
The basics need their $50 -- there can't be any cutting of slack there, I guess -- but with this plan to feed the masses subsidized stuff like that, the Lindens are essentially franchising off the job of taking care of all these people and orienting and entertaining them -- and paying the incentive of just $500/week to a small number of people for doing that.
I guess my son playing on the Teen Grid summed it up for me. I guess for a long time, I have perceived the $2000 a month as something I always tried to cash out into USD as quickly as possible, so that I could then essentialy pay for the subscription itself, so that I would feel that at leat that monthly cost was out of the way.
When I told my son they'd probably end up taking away the weekly stipend, he looked at me startled. "But isn't that what I get paid for my job?" he said innocently. Of course, he perceives coming on SL for hours a day after school and on weekends as a kind of job, a fun job, but still a job -- his job of running clubs, events, malls, whatever, with his friends. They work their asses off, trying to make and sell content, manage properties, hold events, and help newbies -- for hours. To be sure, they are paid for their content if they can create it, but the job of organizing the events, managing mall space, etc. is supposed to be compensated out of the property's income -- and that's not always enough, given the high cost of tier!
If the creator-fascists' answer to this is: but pay your income out of your work in SL and the selling of your content/services, etc. I can only reply that the cost of tier is so high, the other expenses (including having to pay high costs for others' content like houses!) are so high, that the $500 we get is something like a waitress' base pay. If you take a waitress job, the bulk of your salary will come from tips you have to earn yourself. But still, the management pays you a very minimal wage out of which payroll tax is taken. So you might get, say, $4.00/hour, but then you'd still hope to make $150 a shift in tips on top of that, depending on how well you can serve your customers. You wouldn't come to work if you didn't have at least that small basic pay every hour for when no customers come in or the restaurant is on fire.
Is it really too much to expect that someone who takes on the job of tiering land and putting clubs, events, homes, etc. on it as well as content creation and helping newbies gets "paid for a job" this very small amount? Basically, it merely ensures that the hard workers get the same kind of free subscription that the loafers get on their basics, by giving them $7.00 US in free chips they can cash out to pay the quarterly subsription *shrugs*.
Nobody is suggesting that free basics and their $50 stipend should be cut; why have the incentive of the essentially "free" (i.e. paid for by cashing out) premium subscription taken away from the doers of Second Life?
The only reason I can think of the vicious responses that someone like Weedy can muster to Cocoanut's grim -- and accurate -- depiction of herself as the "working middle class" and the stipend as a "salary for her job" is class warfare.
Indeed, I believe this class warfare underlies the forums, is what makes them so resistant to reform, and which explains what on the surface seems like personal animosity, but in reality is driven by actual clashes of class interests.
Content-creators, with absolutely no production costs or very little costs (prims are free, texture uploads are just $10 and mainly come free off the rest of the Internet) and little need for land (they can build in sandboxes, or even sit in PSP outside the game or go on other public/friends' lands or rent for a price less than tier) see those who are not dependent on them as their enemies.
It's hard to conceive of why this is, unless you peer closer at SL.
Why should content creators hate those not dependent on them in another sector? They enjoy an overwhelming lead in the economic race of SL, and their income pours in, because they can spend their time and minimal costs for textures, let's say, then reap endless rewards by selling copies of what they make which cost them nothing other than the time and minimal commissions it takes to upload and sell on SLexchange.com
You would think such marginal costs and such a windfall of profit -- especially since psp! -- would make the creator-fascist class happy, and content, and even expansive in mood. Anyone else having to compete with them in another sector will have huge start-up costs and ongoing costs.
Yet their pride of place does not make them generous in spirit because they fear competition like wildfire. Every new resident, especially a doer on a premium with land to make presence visible with a store or activity, is a threat to the market share they've managed to wrest out of the game. Every person who gets into a sector free of the cycle of create-buy-create-buy is a threat.
Again, they are called creator-fascists for these reasons:
o Insistence that everyone make stuff or die -- get out if you can't or won't make stuff, so as to avoid the blight of Tringo/camp chairs/money balls.
o Dividing everyone into creators and consumers
o Making freebies that can't be resold and whipping up public hysteria about those freebies on the forums
o Creating a climate of hatred against those who even sell used items
o Whipping up sentiment against yardsales
o Putting even freebies meant to "benefit the public" on non-modify so that the public can't even modify their creations
o Charging very high costs relative to their production costs, especially given the endless sale of copies issue
o Closing off information channels, alternative information, dissent, criticism
o Stifling any consumer advocacy movement that tries to get going
o Arranging society into guilds with rigorous corporativist notions of organization, and a rigid, hierarchical apprentice system
o Rigidly insisting on "quality" in creations based on their own aesthetic, with no tolerance for the amateur or the C+ student
o Loyality to the authoritarian state of LL as the creators of the platform which enables them to thrive, and criticism only when the federal state curbs some of their own excesses on branding domination
o Destruction of the reputation of others through libel, forums slams, etc.
o Control of a star system that eradicates competition outside the group on the forums
o Together with LL, control of RL media coverage of content creation in SL and branding
o Probably much, much more if I could think of it and had time!
You get the idea. So those who buy land, and perform the creation of content either outside their star and guild system, or create non-inventoriable content like services, club event organizers, rentals, land sales, property management etc. -- these as a class are the class enemies of the content creators because they represent a sector of the economy utterly outside their control, and a sector of the economy that has the potential to seriously undermine their hammerlock on things like media, star system, Lindens and MOST importantly, the new creators coming in who refuse to suck up to the divas!
Fascinating, eh?
So the premium account holders who are in the creator-fascism class of course want to remove the stipend because with their windfall content sales, they don't need it, as they also have no ingame expenses. They don't want club event organizers, or land dealers who cash out the premium to cover the subscription and remove at least one cost from their heavy mountain of costs in the land business, or anybody else to use the stipend to gain freedom from them -- and to get free of the cycle of being forced to buy at a high cost, or being forced to create all the time just to get dressed. Even those very hard at work all the time creating clothing might like a little break now and then to go out and stroll around and shop with their $500 and buy themselves something they themselves didn't make.
I could add that the reason you see a lot of the old content-creator class lining up to be Mentors/Greeters etc is because they want the lock on the newbie stream, not only to get them to buy in their stores, but to weed through them to find the right apprentices to put under their wing.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 02/13/2006 at 09:15 AM
Prok, I didn't get to read every sentence of your post, but I agree very much with the bullet points and the 50% or so that I did read.
I have the same concerns, and it should be obvious to any SLr who turns on land sales on the map and sees a wall-to-wall sell-off.
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=83978
Posted by: HiroPendragon | 02/13/2006 at 10:51 AM
Wow, that's an interesting post, Hiro! I missed that! It's especially interesting to see how you, as certified FIC and certified SIC, got an answer -- and even a kind of pledge -- that dozens of land barons, huffing and puffing to get Linden attention to this question in personal emails, in inworld communications, in public meetings -- could not get! EVERY time we raise this with Lindens, in public and private, they recite, like robots, that the auction is run on the demand system. But it isn't, as anyone can see. Or it's run on an elusive, virtual kind of demand in keeping with our virtual world, which overlooks the reality of how 5 seconds after this commodity is bought, others can't sell it...and are driven to buy new, fresh, fast MORE land.
I marvel at this, as I always marvel at the features of the class war in our game lol.
You pointed out that hey, with 61 sims (the bulkauction sims) clogging up the market, they could let up the gas pedal, eh? And Robin said, hmm, ok, we'll do that if we see they aren't getting bids, presumably on the next patch.
So, she/they might take a look at this..but guess what, the bulkauction sims are selling like hot cakes! They even had pre-orders in Cyberland and are selling well; Anshe's wierd green-grass islands with the grass even under the water is selling briskly; Marmela's funny-looking but cheaper beach is probably selling out best. And best of all, by having these barons do the parceling and supposedly offering them a buyback of "Governor Linden" land, the Lindens have outsourced one of their programming headaches anc reduced a cost. It's a little wierd seeing continents made up entirely of 4096 islands with few roads or other geographical features, but hey, that's what sells. I only see one asshat who has made a big mountain mall in the middle of it and scared some people off or forced them to build walls.
So the moral of the story is...the bulkauction sold, and the Lindens can only print more.
They don't have to think of the land they sold yesterday way up north in the new new continent...that is SO yesterday's newspaper! It sold once to those people who bid and bought it...so what if it doesn't sell for them now??? The Lindens have absolutely no incentive to stop printing money -- I mean "land" that is like printing money.
They sure as heck have no incentive to stop printing bulkauctions, look how well they sold!
I, too, hope that even without a land barons' boycott of the auctions, they could just stop putting out those $1000 "add-to-my-shopping-cart" sims up north for even 3 days -- 7 or 21 would be even better!. They isn't a demand for them. People bid only because of the game of chicken and "market share". So stop it, already, with the game of chicken, and just slow up.
It's an adjustment that cries out to be done, it costs the Lindens nothing, and the concommitant sale of all that unsold land now in the hands of land barons will help land barons, and help Lindens because all those new customers will pay top-dollar tier instead of discounted tier.
It will also help ordinary people trying to unload their land and move to better quarters, and give cheaper land to newer people with less money.
What's not to like?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 02/13/2006 at 11:07 AM
Well, I've followed up with an email to Robin.
As for when / how Lindens respond to Hotline posts, I think it's more or less when they have free time. *shrug*
Posted by: HiroPendragon | 02/13/2006 at 11:39 AM
Sometimes they have free time for some things and not others. I know Aimee tantrumed on the forums for days when no Lindens responded to her provocative "hotlined" post. And good for them! They don't answer every FIC, but I think statistically, it's easy to show they answer FIC more.
Please use your FIC powers for more public good, now, Hiro and stop Lordfly from harassing yardsalers on the events calender!
Yes, I sent emails to Robin, Daniel, Reuben, hmm...other Lindens, can't remember, over and over, on the land glut thing.
Also asked them repeatedly about the cheat on the telehub buyback.
FINALLY I did get back a kind of partial reply from one of them who said something like no special deal was made, i.e. we'll overlook your real date of purchase to enable you to buy bulkauction sims -- but this Linden also merely acknowledged that cheating could have occurred without their knowledge -- when in fact the cheat is visible to the naked eye for all to see, on a dozen sims.
Oh, well. It's a game. Play it! Or log off!
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 02/13/2006 at 11:52 AM
I posted something in the Events discussion area to Jesse Linden about the events list. I'll check back in a couple of days to see the response to that.
Course I'm merely NCI not FIC so we'll see....
I'm trying to imagine what life would be like for newcomers without stipends. I suppose I'll blog about it when the pieces in my head finally fall in place, but so far what I see ain't pretty.
There was an accurate depiction of the "build for die" vibe on a recent thread where a new person asked for help on "what to do" in SL.
I thought it didn't take a rocket science degree to help noobies, but apparently it does. "rez a cube or a torus and play around with it" or "go to the library of primitives" seemed to be the bulk of the "help".
Keep in mind, someone that new has no idea what "rez a cube" means and there is no guarantee that they know HOW to get themselves over to the LOP or anywhere else for that matter, or they most likely wouldnt have been posting for help in the first place.
What I've noticed so far is that folks that WANT to build already show up with that desire in mind, and ask you the building questions, NOT the general ok help mee what do I do now stuff.
Many people who come in here want to live a second life - maybe a life they aren't able to have in RL. Get a fancy house, a couple of cars, buncha cute clothes, have a whirlwind social life etc.
I'm not getting how chopping out the premium stipend is going to be helpful to the economy in any way shape or form. 500L/wk is small enough as it is, but its also big enough to subsidize getting started on that second life of your dreams.
How the heck do I know this? Well its exactly what I did two years ago. I wasn't interesting in building, save to get the skills I needed to make boxes to sell my clothes in. My partner Grey Mars who came into SL ahead of me was all about building and got the info he needed to do that.
Stipends make the world go around, as far as I can see. I'm not an economist, but I can see how they circulate and keep things robust and vital.
Either by paying rent, cashing out to for your account, as a more emotional but necessary boost in the form of perk or paycheck, It can be used like I use it to pay out on event prizes, those winners then turn it around by going shopping, pay their tier, rent etc.
Seems like a no brainer to me to keep it going, circulating and revitalizing - but then the track record for LL and no brainers hasnt been all that good.
Posted by: Brace | 02/13/2006 at 07:22 PM
You wrote, "Nobody is suggesting that free basics and their $50 stipend should be cut." Actually, there have been several long threads in the forums suggesting just that. The suggestion was to cut out the Basic stipend while leaving the Premium stipend. Or to have the Basic stipend only last for eight weeks or so.
The rationale was that this would reduce the fall of the L$ vs the US$, while providing an incentive for Basic members to move to Premium memberships.
I'm not sure if it would be a net positive or negative. LL does need to increase their turnover of Basics to Premiums--that's true. I'm not sure how much it would impact the money supply. Any estimates of how many Basic accounts are real versus dormant is an exercise in pure imagination. There's just no real data outside of the walls of Linden Labs.
Posted by: Carl Metropolitan | 02/16/2006 at 01:34 AM
basic users who can't afford to buy L$ are just not worth the investment. if they can't commit themselves to a second lifestyle after half a year, just cut them off the welfare.
Posted by: jauani | 02/16/2006 at 03:36 AM
Carl, perhaps there are a few links to people suggesting ALL stipends be cut, but whenever I see this discussion coming from people like Weedy Herbst, I see them viciously hissing at the premium $500 free 512 category, not the basics -- they probably assume basics buy a lot on the Lindex and then are their customers do they don't begrudge them the $50, whereas those with land and $500 are their competitors. I think that's what it amounts to.
If there is a suggestion to keep the premium, kill the basic, or phase out either in 8 weeks, well, maybe that would work in a more robust economy -- we don't have that. And I don't see that as the center of gravity. What I see, over and over again, is people like Lordfly screaming about a $361 Linden -- which you get by buying a year's premium subscription, not by being a basic. You DO NOT hear him say oh, kill off the hundred thousand basics. You just hear him rant about the "blame" to be assumed by those who allegedly bought the $361 Linden. (In fact, premiums do the Lindens and the economy a favour by buying Lindens that cost $2.89 -- exactly what the market is a lot of the time these days.
I agree there is no real data outside the walls of LL, and with good reason, it would kill their current media campaign to prove that concommitant log-ins are up from 4000 to 5000 -- they have Hamlet blogging about this, for example.
I think right now, the Lindens are heavily ideologically wed to the basics. For one, it feeds their capitalist side that needs a huge volume of sales of subscriptions that they can tout as numbers of residents to the media. For two, it feeds their socialist side by making them feel they are "helping the masses" and for three, it feeds their...hmm...exploitative side (is it Medici? Or is it Mussolini?) that takes control over huge swathes of mainly male, 20-something college or college-educated tekkies for enthusiastic, unpaid work which sometimes yields a nugget they can suck up into the client.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 02/16/2006 at 09:48 AM