IMPORTANT: We need your input - the way going forward

Ideas & Suggestions
1

Hello All,

This post is going to be a little bit long-winded, but it is a very important one and requires your input as a member of the community. There is a vote within it and it requires as many of you as possible to click on that vote button and as many of you to add your input by replying, as what I am about to discuss could potentially change our system dramatically for the better or the worse. And I am all about listening to our community.

So let’s start by going back and reading the initial introduction to SLColonies I had written back in early 2019 when I first ventured into making SLColonies with my friend and developer and now fellow creator & partner, Drakkhis before our community was growing:
https://slcolonies.com/docs/home/

Now, let’s break down this post into sections where I feel we may need to begin re-looking into what was said and possibly making some changes, based on your input.

One of our methods of really fixing the problem of supply & demand and focusing on player driven economy is putting measures in place to prevent the selling of items crafted and gathered within the system to be sold for L$ on the SL marketplace or through the use of vendors. Instead, we added features such as marketplace HUBS and vendors which use in-game currency including buy and sell orders – much like an exchange. This encourages trade to be done within lands at marketplace hubs and vendors using the internal game currency. Players in the system will visit other regions and known artisans in order to obtain the resources they need to craft and progress.

In this paragraph of the introduction, I go into detail about why products crafted by SLColonies players should not be able to be sold for L$. And we built the game very much with that in mind. You do not get prim ingredients that are transferrable to other players which you rez onto the ground to load into your crafting station or farm fields and the like. And there is nothing currently in the system, besides reselling your crafting stations, that you can earn L$ from unless you were to come to the main store and sell your coins for L$ at the ATM we have made available - the only link to players ability to make real money.

But today, we are in different times, and if you have any knowledge about new NFT based games and crypto-currency, you know players in those games can play to earn and some even allow them to make a living. If you don’t know much about NFT’s, check out this video for a bit of an explanation:

Obviously, I doubt a game within Second Life can provide that type of income, but Drakkhis and I did have a thought about how we could allow players to earn an income, without ruining the goal of roleplay. Let me get into some of the detail.

We are thinking of a type of crate which players can make that functions kind of the same way as the Storage Crate already does, but with limited functionality as well as some added functionality.

crate-pbr-low-poly-model-04
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Source: Wood Crate - 3D Model by KellyJohnson3DArt

Something like this can be crafted within the Carpentry station. So it costs nothing for you to own. When rezzed into its prim form, you will see branded SLColonies on one face, and when clicked, you as its owner can add your brand image on a face and a product image on another face.

When clicked, you can also load 1 stack of items from your inventory into it. When another player clicks on the crate, they will have the option to view its inventory by going to a website link, to confirm what is inside.

You as the owner could sell this item for L$ in multiple ways:

  • You could just set a buy price on the prim, so a player just right clicks and selects buy to make the object theirs.
  • You could load multiple of the same type of crate into a vendor which accepts L$. So a player pays your vendor and a crate is sent to them until the vendor is empty.
  • You could take a screenshot of the crate and list it on the SL Marketplace for L$.

You can make crates selling 1000 x Water or 100 x Wheat or whatever you like. The limit in the database is actually a stack of over 2billion items, so we doubt we would ever reach that limitation.

The new owner of the crate can click it and withdraw all items from its inventory at once and it will transfer to their personal inventory on the database to be used in crafting or whatever its use is.

So what are your thoughts?
Are you for it, or against it?

  • Yes, I like it
  • No, I don’t like it
0 voters

Can you take the time below by replying as to why you voted yes or no? Why do you think it will or won’t work and what are some solutions?

Thanks All!
Tem

2

I think the ability to earn L$ while participating in SLC is quite important for a lot of people. Many rent properties in SL or pay tier and need the L$ for this reason. I really like the idea that if I sell 1000 water as an example, it will go back into the purchasers SLC online inventory which prevents copy bot on rezzable items. I produce a lot of items and need somewhere to use them or sell them. Having coins is great but I cannot see anyone say renting a large portion of land with coins. Has any thought been put into allowing people to use either coins or L$ at markets? The danger of this idea though is everyone will probably choose this way to sell items, thereby making community markets obsolete. Is there a way to limit the items you may put into them, such as only water, reeds, ores, ingots etc, but not allowing say tools. Make your own or buy your tools for coins from markets.

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This is a whole new line of thought for our System, Sean… We need and love the feedback on the community for this, so If we do it we do it in the Right way

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With regard to what Sean said about only selling items for lindens, the way around that is to give the option to buy an item either with coins OR lindens and thus prohibiting people from only selling items for lindens.

I am personally not a fan of earning lindens due to negative experiences with other systems and video games where the focus on making money ruined the economy and rp but fully support support allowing people to earn lindens is if it enables this system to grow and flourish and thus benefit the developers. That is the only reason I am voting “Yes”.

I do think more people would join if they thought they could make lindens from using the system, and I imagine it would be easier to establish and maintain more sims, etc.

An issue I have run into in other games/systems is that often a few people tend to dominate the economy. In the last system I used there were a few people with multiple sims with thousands of fields and animals and automated production chains which made it hard for people with small farms to compete. But I suppose that’s the reality of capitalism (which I have never been a fan of in RL).

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I like the crate idea for selling bulk items but i think there should be an option to buy those in coins or L$.

I also like the fact that you can play the game without using L$ all the time and that you have the ability in SLC to get coins by selling at markets and especially doing fill requests and trading. You also have the option to convert coins back to L$. There are not many systems in SL with a coin system so encompassing as SLC.

The systems in SL that are dominated by a few huge players with very deep pockets / vast resources also spoil the game for many others as they flood the system with items and super low prices. This also will crash that economy.
RP/Farming Systems based only on L$ can also get toxic very fast - greed has no limits.

This needs to be done the right way.

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I am not in SL or SLC to make money, but for the fun, community, interaction, break from RL they afford. That said, I am not against anyone making a profit from the “work” they put in. Nor am I apposed to reducing my costs from being in SL :):):). But I don’t want to see the profit motive overwhelm to the point of domination on markets by a few who have the time and financial resources to take over. In G&S, wine-making is time-consuming, as it should be, contrary to DFS. But, at the end of wine-making the only off-ramps for the product are some recipes that use wine, collectors (have a great barrel logo), and position on the roster of who made the most barrels of Grand Reserve wine, something you don’t control but is inherent in the random ratio rules of G&S. The end result of that is domination of that accolade by a few with hundreds of vineyards, cared for by slaves or hired workers. The satisfaction of producing a quality product subordinated to the race to the top of the leader board. I would not be best pleased to see the beauty of the interaction inherent in SLC overwhelmed by the rush to dominate for profit. All that said, I vote yes to the proposal and that, as in RL, one can denominate the currency they want a transaction to occur in: zlotes, Euros, $US, iksos, Lindens, SLC coins, Bluebells :).

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8

I want to thank everyone for taking the time so far to post their responses and offering their advice on how we might be able to approach it.

I will respond to everything below and add more ideas that I think might solve most of your concerns.

I agree. Even the smallest amount earned will help somewhat with rental tier.

I like that about our system also. The virtual inventory is a very unique feature of ours, with the ability for a limited set of our items being rezzable after crafting, such as our farm animals, barrels, some foods and soon also some furniture.

Yes, thought has been put into that and that’s a definite no no for us for exactly those reasons. There’s be no incentive to roleplay at all and the focus would switch from roleplay to earning L$.

We could limit what goes in them, but because of the way I plan to design these crates and how selling works, I don’t feel there would be any issues with allowing tools to be sold for L$ through these crates specifically.

Correct, and we have those options by allowing players to sell for coins using the marketplaces and the vendors. And we’ll be able to give the option to sell for L$ using the sales crates.

Me too. As you can see from the introduction post to the system and why I created it in the first place. Opening the system up to the potential of earning L$ has to be done carefully and I will need to decide if I feel it is a step forward and I am willing to go with it or not.

But as you said, it may enable the system to grow and flourish at a faster pace, therefore opening more communities to the players and so forth. But, again, if the focus switches on farms to make L$ over roleplay, you won’t see marketplaces or coin vendors in those sims and they’d only be interested in producing crates to fill with items to sell for L$?

True, that is a potential risk. But, at the same time, because the crates would only work with L$, then RP sims would mostly use only coins and the region servers allow a sim owner to list their sim as an RP community or a Farm and so forth.

Also, I have a few things in mind which enable us to control market domination, by way of how we build the system and I will go into it below.

Since the sales crates would not be something you purchase in the main store and are instead something you have to craft, we can do the following:

  • Adjust raw material cost to craft a crate to increase, decrease the cost to produce and sell.
  • Make sales crates usable only once. The crafter can set their brand and logos, but once passed to a buyer, they can no longer change the design of the crate, and once emptied of its items, can no longer be used (single-use crates, no copy).
  • Temporarily halt ability to produce more crates while the market is saturated.

There are potentially more things we can do to help control market saturation and we will always listen to our player community.

As mentioned above earlier in the post - we have the option to sell things using coins through marketplaces and item vendors. The sales crates would be for L$ only, specific to those players. The sales crate would not be purchasable for L$ and must be crafted in the carpentry as single-use items which are no-copy and will delete themselves after use.

Yes. Although I do need to reset the main market and look at the pricing I had originally set. As currently there is not enough room for competition by owners of other markets. It is on my list of things to do.

The ability to convert coins back to L$ through the main store is the main thing stopping me from going down the path of a sales crate idea. The risk of the sales crate is everything everyone else has already noted. But to be able to convert your coin to L$ means that all the roleplay still happens, all the markets for coins still get used. Perhaps the best idea is to market the ATM some more and ensure all our players know that there are ways to earn L$ in this game by participating, and ensuring that the ATM is always funded with L$ to exchange coins for. It works on supply and demand, meaning that, if no one buys coins, then there are no funds on it to give L$ and vice-versa; if no one sells coins, there are no coins to buy on it for L$.

Correct and it’s my fear which is stopping me from wanting to go down the sales crate path idea and sticking to what we have - the ATM.

Sorry, what did you mean here? Do you mean we should do the sales crate idea right away, although this opens the door to that greed mentioned just above prior?

Agreed from my end. I think the more I got into answering our players’ concerns above, I have slowly convinced myself that the sales crate idea, although potentially good, will open pandoras box to those profiteering style players only hellbent on earning L$ and not about the community and the roleplay aspect as what we have come to love about SLColonies.

I think, for now, this one will stay on the drawing board, and we will keep the ATM method of transferring coins for L$ and L$ for coins as the way we operate. Until I am satisfied that any other method will negate those risks.

Tem

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I would vote no.

Those who would want to monetize the system are not likely to consider those who don’t want it monetized, and it feels like it could affect the in-game economy (that may or may not be true, just a gut feeling). It has the gut-feel of an entryway for bad actors. Do I have anything to back that up? No, not a thing. Would I be a bit more hesitant to invest in SLC (buying stations, etc) in the future if it became monetized? Yeah, I’m afraid so.

And yes, I should have read the other comments first. Oops.

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Yeah I have already swayed myself into not doing it. And your further input has sealed me back into my original position.

Having the ATM is plenty enough opportunity for lindens and can be controlled by lack of people purchasing into coins.

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