Linden Lab Kills Dwell Payments
by Alphaville Herald on 18/04/06 at 8:45 am
It wasn’t much of a surprise, since the idea has been bandied about by the Lindens quite a bit in recent weeks, but Philip Linden, benevolent despot of Second Life, announced yesterday on the SL forums that LL will discontinue traffic payments to SL residents. Down wiht camping chairs! Full text of King Philip’s announcement after the jump:
he past several months have seen a gradual decline in the value of the Linden dollar on the LindeX currency exchange. Most recently, the Linden Dollar has dropped in value by approximately 11% since mid-February. In response to this decline, and in keeping with our desire to maintain a stable currency exchange rate, Linden Lab has decided to discontinue the payment of traffic incentives to parcel owners. For the most recent month of March 2006, these traffic incentives totalled $4.7M Linden Dollars. Removing these incentives will reduce the amount of new money being created and should be expected to have a stabilizing effect on the value of the Linden Dollar. Following this change, we will continue to watch the economy and make further changes as needed.We will also be posting a number of different economic statistics in the forums, for those who wish to follow the Second Life economy in more detail. Additionally, Robin Linden will be following up with detailed information and schedule about the traffic incentives.
The overall growth of the Second Life economy continues to be very strong: For the first quarter of 2006, user-to-user transactions in Second Life totalled $4.17B Linden Dollars, an increase of 68% over Q4 2005. Currency purchases on the Lindex for Q1 2006 totalled $743M Linden Dollars, meaning approximately US $2.6 million dollars traded at average exchange rates.
More information from Robin in this forum post.
The Herald will have more details on the economic changes later today.
Elde Eponym
Apr 18th, 2006
$L4.7M into a total money pool of $L600M… That’s a growth rate of 1%/mo. (Or to but it much more simply; the amount added by dwell to the money pool is essentialy insignificant.)
As usual the Lindens make a ‘fix’ that has little to do with the problem – and punishes the innocent rather than guilty. (Camping chairs have never been about dwell or DI. They are all about Find.)
Elde Eponym
Apr 18th, 2006
Based on Vashua’s post here stipends introduced $L35M into the economy, almost ten times the amount as dwell payments… One suspects the drop in dwell will do zip point nada to stem the drop in the value of the $Linden. (The drop has almost everything to do with the design of the market I suspect.)
Prokofy Neva
Apr 18th, 2006
I agree. I suspect the Lindens needed to find some sacrificial lambs to feed to the content barons and land barons bitching about the really sucky cashout rate now for Lindens ($300/$1.00 US today).
Plus, removal of ALL incentives and world-crutches (like telehubs) is a to-do list they’ve pursued with grim determination for the last 18 months I can see. It’s really just a matter of whether you can persuade them about how to sequence it differently or not.
Marsellus Wallace
May 8th, 2006
That’s not the only thing Linden Lab is killing. Anyone noticed the police blotter the past few days? A good chunk of it is for people misposting items as events and spamming people to visit their place of business. Granted, I do not support spam and hate to see events filled with ads, but dayem there are a ton of warnings being issued!!! Is this a result of the dwell going away? People gotta get ghetto to get business???
Marsellus Wallace
Boss, The Sim Mafia
http://www.thesimmafia.com