Tier – Page 3 – Ciaran Laval

November 14, 2012

New Premium Offer

The expected premium offer has arrived, A discount on a quarterly membership of 50%, meaning it will only cost USD$11.25 … I think! Now, if you’re cute with the Lindex, you can get someone else to pay for this in three months time, if the L$1000 bonus is included, you can get someone else to pay for this and have enough left over for a coffee from a company who may well divert the profits to avoid paying tax, but that’s a whole different ball game.

There’s also a new premium gift, as announced on the blog. A new airplane, with which you can fly in a premium only airfield. Personally I’m not that keen on the concept of premium only areas beyond sandboxes. I think it’s a good idea to give premium members exclusive early access to places, I’m not so keen on exclusive perks like airfields or even the wilderness. However if it works in keeping people premium, then fair play to Linden Lab.

Premium membership isn’t that bad a deal, you get 512m tier or a Linden Home, with mainland parcels so cheap these days a parcel may be a better option, Linden homes have restrictions on events and those parcels can’t be group owned, which means you may miss out on some features. On top of that you get a stipend of three hundred Linden Dollars, unless you’re a returning oldbie whereby it may be four hundred Linden Dollars, although if you’re a really old returning oldbe, it may be five hundred Linden Dollars. I don’t know if they still put you back at your original stipend level, they certainly used to.

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November 4, 2012November 5, 2012

Private Estate Losses Slow To Lowest Decrease Since June

Tyche Shepherd’s weekly report of the size of the grid has revealed this week that we lost just ten private regions this week. One Linden region was added, making a net loss of just nine regions, the smallest fall in regions since the week ending June 24th, which was actually the last time we had growth in the number of regions on a weekly basis.

Now considering that this is a much smaller loss than recently, it could very well be an outlier, rather than an indication of a change in trend. Time will tell. The same can be said of the net loss of over one hundred regions reported on October 21st, that was much higher than usual trends and thankfully looks like an outlier, that was linked in with the Royal Properties estate going belly up.

Tyche has also reported the results of her October 2012 private estate survey, which is based on a random survey of 5,000 private regions to determine the results.

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April 5, 2012April 12, 2012

It’s Still All About Tier

Ah Thursday, not just any Thursday, but the Thursday before the Easter Holiday weekend, where I can now put on my slippers, sit back, and not worry about my day job until Tuesday. This also means I’ll be blogging … unless Football Manager 2012 hooks me too much again. Hopefully I’ll talk about Kitely later but for now it’s the Second Life shoppers paradise that I’ll write about.

The rumour mill suggests that Linden Lab are looking for ways to get people shopping inworld again, not that people have stopped shopping inworld, but the rise of The Marketplace has caused concern for inworld ventures. I’ve spoken about this before, I am not a huge fan of The Marketplace but it’s here, it’s convenient, it works (usually, there have been glitches lately) but it undermines some key aspects of Second Life, such as store rentals and sales which help fund roleplaying sims, Arts sims, Club sims, social ventures, hangouts yadda yadda yadda. Personally I think the horse has bolted now, the time for some joined up thinking was months ago.

The Marketplace isn’t the only reason for concerns on the viability of social and arts ventures, Styles Of Edo have announced they are closing after five years of trading in Second Life. This is a Mens fashion store for those who aren’t familiar with the fashion scene. When I originally published this post, this paragraph suggested Styles Of Edo was closing due to not making enough sales to make tier, this is not the case and I apologise for any confusion, I have not spoken to anyone from Styles Of Edo and do not know why they have chosen to close, however there is a comment from Chrissy Ambrose in the comments of this post. Stores and Sims in Second Life close for a variety of reasons, new ones arise from the ashes and we carry on, times change, tastes change and culture changes.

Deja Letov posted in the official forums on their views on why getting shopping back inworld is a great idea, however again we’re back to inworld shopping not exactly being dead and my view that the horse has really bottled, we are too far into the bricks and mortar challenge here, the online shopping experience in an online world is now very appealing and yes there is something wrong with that picture because Second Life is a 3D virtual world and The Marketplace is a 2D Shopping site.

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March 7, 2012March 7, 2012

Land – The Financial Frontier

Linden Lab are no longer reporting economic stats,as reported by Tateru Nino here, but personally I’d long gone off Linden Lab’s stats and found myself far more interested in Tyche “Statto” Shepherd’s stats. Tyche regularly reports stats over at SL Universe, as well as running her own site from where you too can access the data, at GridSurvey.com. There are loads of stats to be found over there, including details of Tyche’s awesome census data:

43.0% of Mainland owned directly by Linden Accounts (Contiguous Mainland is 6723 regions including Linden Home regions).
6.7% to 7.8% of Mainland by area is abandoned parcels (details – 2nd Jan 2012).
56.5% of Private Estate regions are Full Regions, 42.9% Homesteads & 0.6% Openspaces (details including top 20 Estates – 29th January 2012).
Monthly Tier Estimates – Private Estates c.US$4.842 Million, Mainland c.US$1.008 Million.
As of December 2011 38829 Linden Homes are occupied (details – 2nd Jan 2012).

Stats galore and more fun to be had on that site but the survey that gets most attention from Tyche is her weekly grid size survey and this week’s doesn’t make happy reading:

“48 hours late in reporting but still based on Sundays figures – Anyway this week the grid shrunk by 196 regions, Private estates had a net decline of 183 whilst Linden Owned fell by 13

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 30188 ( 23058 private estates & 7130 Linden owned) 126 new regions were added and 40 returned to the grid, with 366 regions removed (30 were renamed and 6 came and went since last report)”

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February 18, 2012February 18, 2012

Love Will Tier Us Apart Again

Crap Mariner has a good blog post about Circle Brooms Laurel Arts Isle succumbing to the tier conundrum and having to close down. What’s good about Crap’s post is that it delves into why places are special for people.

Daniel Voyager on the other hand has a post about The Cartoonimals sim not closing down after it was purchased by Ima Flanagan.

Hamlet Au, in his disappointingly named Sim Deathwatch series has recently been talking about the International Space Flight Museum Sim closing down, but now being saved, for a while at least, which you can read about here. Betterverse Non profits has more information on this, in this blog post, which links to the International Space Flight Museum’s official blog, where there’s a post on the subject, and where they point to how you can help to fund them via donations.

Prior to this we had news that Bryn Oh’s Immersiva was closing, but a crowdfunder on indiegogo appears to have saved that for now. All of these issues highlight the problems of keeping experiences alive in Second Life, but the big issue, the issue that needs to be addressed by Linden Lab, is that of Tier.

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