Tier – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

January 15, 2013January 15, 2013

Ideas On Offsetting Tier Costs

“Although we currently do not accept L$ in lieu of land sale and maintenance fee payments, we could. Acceptance by Linden Lab of just one month of land sale and maintenance fees in L$ denominated payments could cut the in-world money supply by more than 50%.” – Zee Linden, 14th August 2007 – Second Life Economy Blog Post.

I’ve quoted Zee there, who was the chief financial officer of Linden Lab a while back, because The Marketplace arguments are tied tightly to the tier being too damn high arguments. I’ve argued in the past and continue to argue, that Linden Lab can’t cut tier until they find alternative revenue sources.

Inara Pey has an excellent blog post explaining why slashing tier would be problematic: Tier Cuts : Looking From The Lab’s Perspective. There are some eye watering figures on how much income Linden Lab would potentially lose from slashing tier by a third: “However, were the Lab to cut tier by one-third, they immediately slash monthly private region revenue by $1,400,520. That’s equivalent to 4,747 full private regions vanishing from the grid – 1.6 times more that the total number of private regions (full, Homestead and OpenSpace) lost in 2012.”

This is the stark issue facing Linden Lab and one which explains why tier is unlikely to be slashed anytime soon. However this doesn’t mean nothing can be done, Linden Lab need to get their thinking caps on but a couple of areas which could be investigated are with regards to timed usage and greater use of Linden Dollar sinks.

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December 31, 2012

2013 – Hopes, Wishes And Forthcoming Improvements

Usually at this time of year, someone will post some predictions for the forthcoming year, although that seems to be light on the ground this year, it’s always a bit of fun to see those predictions and see what transpires. However predictions aren’t for me, instead I’ll post some hopes and wishes and look at what may happen.

On The Horizon

On the horizon we have some useful looking improvements coming to us from Linden Lab. Project shining leads the way and is already well under production. This includes server side baking via project sunshine, which will be a pain point for some as older viewers such as Phoenix aren’t coming along for the ride but it should mean improvements to how textures load and improved performance. This is also alongside the new http-Library project which is already being used in the beta viewer.

This comes on the back of Linden Lab improving hardware during 2012, as stated on the blog post about 2012: “in 2012 we made the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of Linden Lab”

So we should see the results of these hardware and software improvements during the coming months. We should also see the emergence of the open source efforts to improve graphics rendering performance such as the use of normal and specular maps during 2013.

Then we should see more work done on the good building practices wiki pages, which is turning into a bloody good resource.

Second Life expanding to Steam is still on the horizon. Changes have been made to the beta viewer, including a create account option, so it seems to be getting closer.

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December 27, 2012December 28, 2012

Prim Perfect Poll Results Suggest The Tier Is Too Damn High

The results of Prim Perfect’s recent poll are in and unsurprisingly, there’s large feedback on the tier being too damn high in Second Life. The poll received 246 responses, which in some ways makes it a representative poll, on the other hand the poll was self selecting, which means it might not be representative. That’s the way polls work but they are usually weighted in some ways to select certain groups of people to try and balance results, 246 out of Second Life’s user base would satisfy most professional polling organisations in their results, the self selection wouldn’t.

I’m not trying to invalidate the results, largely because I agree with them mostly, but I think it’s only fair to put some perspective on the poll. Prim Perfect do the same, they’re not trying to hide anything, which is good to see.

I’m not going to cover all of the poll, you can go to the Prim Perfect blog for that, but I’ll look at a couple of results. I’ve covered the decline in private estate ownership on this blog, most recently with news that private estate ownership is down 12% this year, a result found because of the wonderful work of Tyche Shepherd. Prim Perfect’s poll also pays homage to Tyche, although at that time the losses were 11%.

What do you think are the major factors causing the decline of private landholding in Second Life?

The high cost of tier in Second Life – 84%
The economic situation in the real world – 66%
The dominance of the Marketplace making holding land less viable – 41%
A sense that Second Life is outdated – 27%
A move to other forms of social gaming – e.g. Facebook, phone apps – 16%
Other – 21%

Wait wait wait! That’s more than 100%! Yes that’s because it was a multiple answers question.

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December 24, 2012December 24, 2012

Private Estate Losses Reach 12% For The Year

Tyche “Statto” Shepherd reports a net loss of 106 sims this week in her awesome survey post over at SLUniverse. Linden owned regions increased by 16 this week, but private estates were down 122. This makes the year to date loss of private regions from the grid 2,863, which is 12% down for the year.

The increase in Linden Regions comes from the arrival of 18 Linden Realms staging regions, so it looks like we may get some new fun sims to explore. However amongst the losses are sims owned by Dell, IBM, The US Army and The British Council. However the vast majority of the 122 losses are not corporate sims.

The good news for Linden Lab is that the size of the main grid still stands at 28,097, of these regions 20,994 are private regions with the other 7,103 being Linden owned. This means there’s still a very healthy amount of usage, but the trend remains downwards.

By my estimates private region ownership is somehwere around the level it was at in June 2008, although in June 2008 we had seen some large growth during the year.

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November 29, 2012

Scaling Down To Save Tier Requires Major Collaboration

Another interesting coment came up from Inara Pey’s blog post (see previous post for link as I don’t want to spam pingbacks). Adomaw Lupindo raises a really interesting point about tier and scale:

Do you think that LL’s Mesh discounting was an indirect way to offer tier reductions without changing their product pricing scheme by passing on the work to the content creators? I’ve asked the opinion of an estate manager and what that might mean and it was pointed out that even though people could in theory cut their prim needs by a max of half—it doesn’t give them more or the same amount of landmass to play with that on.

Linden Lab have, over the last year or so given us opportunity to reduce our land impact (prim count in old money) numbers. We can now create 64 x 64 metre prims natively in the client, whereas the old maximum was 10 x 10, unless you were using workarounds, such as megaprims, which as far as I’m aware were never officially supported. We can use tricks and techniques using the convex hull shape to reduce the land impact score and we can buy or upload Mesh. This means that your 117 land impact allowance on a 512m parcel goes a lot further, so can everyone tier down? I mean tier is the bugbear (and is too damn high). The answer of course, is no, not everyone, not even the majority I’d guess and that’s an issue of scale.

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