Well, now that the self-congratulatory orgy of smugness that is ‘April Fool’s Day’ is over, one can start looking at MMO news and believing it again, which is always nice. Plus by now, anyone not trying the Planetside: Reserves thing is probably a bit bored of my witterings by now, so I went and had a trawl in the Second Life ‘Land and Economy’ forum, which is always a good source of MMO ‘Whaaaa?’.
It’s a forum full of equal parts of People Who Take RMT VERY seriously, and People Who Like To Take The Piss, and is ever a fractious place. The much vaunted Metaverse of The Future looks like it will be just as ugly and class-riddled as our gritty and grubby Real Life existence, which is a disappointment. No utopian triumph of mankind for us! By class, I don’t mean Wizards, Hunters and Image Designers, I mean Working Class, Middle Class and Upper Class – painfully familiar pigeon-holes that I thought, perhaps naively, the virtual world would free us of.
In Second Life, these tend to manifest in the Basic Account people – degenerate proletariat freeloaders who are given 50$L a week, and can’t own land, but play for free, (of which I am one), and the Premium Account people, petty bourgeoisie, who are given 500$L a week, can own land and actually pay a $9.95/month subscription. Some of these Premium people pay vast sums of RL money to buy complete Sims and then sub-let them out – Land Barons. Predictably enough, huge bitter forum arguments spring up between the two, with calls for the Basic people to have their stipend, (the 50$L weekly wage) taken away because they do nothing to earn it, and keep cashing it out for a whopping 16 cents, US, a week, devaluing the monopoly money for those who are trying to run SL as a primary income. (And not paying tax on it, I bet.)
It’s a crazy mixed up forum, but entertaining in its way, as much of the flaming is surprisingly well constructed and articulate. They may have a point though, because since I started pottering about in there, in Autumn 2005, I’ve seen the average USD to L$ exchange rate go from 250L$ = 1USD, to about 300L$ = 1USD. Clearly something is amiss, but I suppose it’s only a problem if you particularly care. I don’t, being perfectly able to construct much of what I want in there myself, and basically seeing the whole thing as the best Lego set I’ve ever owned, but it must be a pain for people trying to use SL to pay their internet bills, or even mortgages, out here ‘IRL’.
Attempts to slow the currency fall consist mostly of manipulative ‘Economic Analysis’ threads on the board, but due to the automatic ‘best buy’ system for selling the money, the upshot is that unless your money is priced cheapest, you have to wait until the cheaper stuff sells. This means that the value of the L$ will only rise if everyone agrees to work together to fix an agreed price, and then wait for their turn to sell. Yah, right – what actually happens is that the seller looks at the lowest price, and then thinks, ‘screw you guys’, and sells at one point lower. This perpetuates, and leads to the long-term slide we see. The situation isn't helped by the conitnual printing of new money by LL, in the form of these stipends. Trouble is, without some kind of income that doesn't need Photoshop, Poser or Java Scripting skills, there's no way they'd have got anywhere near as many people for try it out, let alone stay and pay them anything.
One notable resident, the much reported on virtual mogul ‘Anshe Chung’, an enterprising young lady who earns something like $100,000 a year from the game and owns her own continent and many in-game businesses, had even stepped in with a proposal to create her own competing in-game currency, apparently pegged to the Euro, in an attempt to create some sort of stability she feels the Linden Dollar no longer has.
Walkerings: A Second Currency for Second Life?
All very interesting and precedental in itself, but it was the discovery, almost passed over in the glut of April Idiot Day junk, that her account has now been banned by Linden Labs, due to late payment by one day of various land fees, that adds that juicy element of gossip to the whole affair. A fifteen page flurry of people trying to work out if it was a gag or not followed the initial post, by Anshe, publicly letting everyone know what had happened, only to be locked by a ‘Yes this is real, and no, we don’t talk about it’ post form one of the Lindens – the character surname all GM staff adopt on taking the job.
It’s quite likely it’s all coincidental, and indeed, the billing rules should apply to everyone equally, no matter how wealthy or big a customer one is, but I can’t help but wonder how long LL had been looking for a reason to be able to slap one of their greatest resident headaches back into place. Still, Anshe didn’t get where she is today by being stupid and most likely has any number alts, associates, child companies and legal experts to fall back on.
The whole episode, which is probably far from over, just goes to show that unlike RL, forming a virtual secessionist government, or staging an online coup, is not terribly practical when the incumbent administration literally has the power of a god, and can make your lands, holdings and very existence vanish with the flick of a switch. Info-topia is still a long way off, and will most likely never come as long as any one man has access to the Power Switch…