The Duran Duran party with Nick Rhodes

So the Duran Duran party, I talked about in a previous post is still going on. Nowadays you can find a lot of avatars dancing and partying on the avalon sim still waiting for the concert and the Duran Duran island/world to come. Rivers Run Red, who are responsible for this event, now transformed their Duran Duran pavillon into some sort of club area with dance balls and Duran Duran music.

But that’s not all. Additionally there’s an answering machine standing nearby where you can listen to Nick Rhodes who is leaving message for the waiting crowd and additionally hints on the build to come. And it is a real ansaphone. Nick Rhodes leaves messages via the phone which get processed on a server and uploaded as AIFF to the parcel where you can listen to it then.

“we’re really trying to make the Duran Duran island a kinda new immersive environment, one that will tease and create game play”, Fizik Baskerville of Rivers Run Red tells me.

So check it out yourself. I met lot of nice people there and apparently they are all big Duran Duran fans. Here is the SLUrl to Avalon.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, media, riversrunred, duran duran, avalon, immersion, virtualworld, taotakashi

Philip Linden announces Economy policy changes

Philip Linden announced in his blog today (Philip’s Blog: Linden Dollar Economy Announcement) that there will be various things happening regarding the Second Life economy. It might be due to the recent changes (that’s just speculation) on the LindeX at which the value of 1US$ is now around L$ 300,- after quite some fall from L$330,- between Jun 27th and Jul 3rd.

Here’s the short version of the announcement:

• In the future the fixed-supply systems of Linden Dollars will be exchanged by a more dynamic system which also means to replace the fixed stipends by something he does not tell us yet (“… move toward
  selling Linden Dollars into the economy at prices or using mechanisms
  designed to keep the economy stable.”)
• New Premium accounts will from now on get only L$400,- (instead of L$500,-) stipend per week.
• Linden Lab will start selling Linden Dollars under a set of rules like that sells will not be secret, will be limit-sell orders, will fall under the limitations of Currency Trader Tier 2 (more information on tiers), will be not be more than 5% of LindeX volume in the past rolling 30 days, will be volume-restricted based on Linden Dollar Sinks.
• Linden Lab will introduce “Circuit Breaks”. This means that trading will be halted for a specific time based on (pos or neg) movement of the average exchange rate in any given days (e.g. 10 percent in any 12-hour period : projected 1 hour halt, etc. See post for more details).

So these changes are obviously not easy to understand for people without a decent knowledge of economics. And even then it’s probably hard to estimate effects as it’s a) hard in general and even in RL and b) the economy of a virtual world is not really comparable with a RL economy.

Thus one things is probably sure: Lot’s of drama.

But: Linden Lab seems to learn and there will be two Townhall meetings, one at 6:30pm PDT tonight and one 9AM PDT tomorrow morning, both at the Pooley Stage.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, lindex, linden lab, philip linden, economy, stipend, discussion, townhall, exchange rates

Check on the last drama: LindeX

So the drama before registration changes has been the LindeX and the change to the Terms of Service by Linden Lab to allow for them to sell Linden Dollars on the LindeX (blogged about it on May 9). And in fact, the value of the Linden Dollar was falling quite a bit after that announcement as everybody was selling as they were expecting a severe crash of Linden Dollar.
So now having the next discussion I was wondering what happened to the Linden Dollar in the meanwhile as you hardly hear anything about it and here’s the result:

In fact the last month looks like an trend upwards for the Linden Dollar’s value and thus fears of a breakdown seem not to have become true. We have yet to see at which value it will finally stabilize.

Technorati Tags: business, discussion, drama, economy, lindenlab, Second Life, secondlife, Tao Takashi, taotakashi, virtual world