Mr Altberg is apparently late getting to the office today, so I’ll wish him luck with his delayed flight and hope that he doesn’t have to work too late to make up for it. There has been a lot of commentary, advice, queries and so forth for the new Linden Lab CEO. Amidst all the talk, hope and good will a comment about Linden Homes and premium membership struck me:
Maybe I missed something when I signed up for Premium in May 2013, but I don’t recall ever being offered the option of 512 OR a Linden Home. It was more like “welcome to Premium membership, here is your Linden home, pick the one you want.”
Linden homes work well, they have really good occupancy rates and people are obviously ok with the process of finding and selecting one. Indeed I can recall posts about there not being enough availability of Linden Homes.
One bonus of a Linden Home is the extra space and prim allowance you get because of the way they don’t actually sit on the parcel your prims do. Another bonus is that there is no cost for a Linden Home parcel inworld.
However where matters get a little foggy is that people don’t seem to understand there is another option, that of acquiring a blank mainland 512 and using that instead of a Linden Home.
Now it may well be that this confuses people, I can imagine some folk would think they can have a Linden Home and a 512 and get themselves in a tizzy over tier when they realised they’ve tiered up. However surely there must be a way to guide people through the process of acquiring a 512M parcel instead of taking a Linden Home option. This is an important step for a couple of reasons.
The first reason is that Linden Homes are restricted use, they can’t be used for commercial ventures. The second reason is that if someone gets their head around the land buying process, they may then decide to expand their land holdings, you can’t do this with Linden Homes, there’s no reason to do it really.
There’s a lot of abandoned mainland, surely some new residents would use a blank parcel instead of a Linden Home, if the guidance existed. Getting people into the land market really is an important step for a virtual world such as Second Life.
I have to agree fully! I was the 3th user to get a Linden Home circa Feb 2010 and only in 2012 i did realize that i could abandon it and use the 512 m2 to buy mainland land!
The Linden Home process works wonderfully well, as you demonstrate, maybe a little bit too wondefully well.