@Callum ... because nobody does ONLY farm those crystals. The L$ Linden spends here go back into the economy, thus sustain for example development of others, or finance the development of new things directly (z.B. as uploads). And when the economy grows, people need more places, rent spaces on sims for example, make the next layer of the economy more profitable. It ends up with LL basically selling more sims, bringing more players to a point, where they have to go premium and so on. What the old LR did was to give new players a chance to build up very modest businesses. If the product or service is good, the rent bigger and bigger spaces, which adds up to sims, or if it is not good, all Linden lost were a few L$ which are already back in the system and thus show elsewhere up in the investment chain.
However, this is all at the moment moot, the quests in LR are totally bugged and can not be finished anyway. So right now, people are miffed. A mathematical indicator was already 46k people online over the last three hours. The European evening under the week normally is over 50 usually. Roughly 8% less than usual, lets see where this goes?