The Tier Is Too Damn High – Page 5

March 14, 2013

LL Offer Tier Discounts To The Select Few Educators And Non Profits

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has broken a very interesting story regarding Linden Lab offering discounts to selected educational and non profit customers: Linden Lab Quietly Offering 50% Discounts to Select Non-Profit & Educational Groups Who’ve Given Up Their SL Sims.

Inara Pey has excellent additional coverage: LL offer discounted regions to educational and non-profit organisations on the QT.

I have a deep and passionate interest in education, both professionally and recreationally. This is not a good way to go about encouraging educational institutions to come back to Second Life, but I suspect Linden Lab know how badly they dropped the ball when they removed those discounts and that many wouldn’t come back even if hell froze over. The reason it’s not a good way of enticing educational institutions back is due to how vague the qualifying criteria for educational discounts is, indeed the criteria is almost non-existent, this isn’t how business planning works and at this stage of the year, many educational institutions are deep into business planning for the next academic year.

I suspect this is why Linden Lab are apparently targetting the recently departed, rather than the long departed, the recently departed are more likely to be able to make a business planning argument for keeping a Second Life sim if the costs are reduced by 50% or not being increased by 50%. However for the longer departed, they will look at such news with scorn and it’s hardly likely to improve their mood over the tier change Linden Lab made.

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February 12, 2013

The Protest Gnomes Multiply During No Credit Protest

So I arrive at my sim and pop in to The Dwarf Inn to check on my Dwarfins, but down a side alley to the tavern I find more protest Gnomes have appeared and it appears they aren’t happy …. with me!

“Oi, you’ve been using our brothers in your blog posts, with no credit to JubJub” said one.

“You can’t just use us like that” said another.

“JubJub brings us to life and you don’t mention that some of us come with lanterns”

“Or scripted versions that people can edit the signs of”

“That too, so it’s about time you mentioned JubJub Forder’s house of fun in the sim of VoronezhIrkutsk”

“Reasonable prices, some of us are even free!”

“And don’t think those Dwarfins in the tavern will protect you from us”

“No, they’re too busy drinking mead and breeding”

They seemed to find this most amusing and shook placards at me!

“Oh and don’t forget to go and check out Hex’s post at SLUniverse”

“Oh yes” laughed a Gnome “Governor Linden Agrees: The Tier is too damn high“.

At this they cackled manically and then seemed to lose interest in me!

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February 8, 2013

Second Life Has Always Been Disrupted By New Developments

Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town? No, neither do I! Second Life has always had a reputation for being a ghost town, which is just as well as even if they employed Scotty from Star Trek, the servers wouldn’t be able to cope with the load if the sims were even a quarter full right across the board.

When we had more inworld shops and more clubs, people complained about there being too many inworld malls and too many inworld clubs! However there was a common theme of there not being enough to do and even in the good old days of yonder, people complained that the tier was too damn high!

Avatar Central, the first store inworld created by the Lindens opened in November 2003, more stores would follow, lots more and the reason stores appeared was because stores could fund their tier via sales. Not in all cases of course, some people just did it for the love of it.

As Second Life grew, more places opened, clubs, casinos, banks and more malls. Clubs have always been considered a money pit, banks and casinos have left this virtual world due to policy changes and more likely, real world laws.

Now clubs and other ventures used to rent mall space, we’re back to stores. These rentals helped to pay for tier for places like clubs, roleplaying yadda yadda yadda, we’ve heard it all before. The Marketplace came along and blew the house down, is the view of some. Personally I don’t think it has blown the house down, I mean we’re not in a Hissing Sid has swallowed Toad scenario, not yet at least. However it has damaged the social cohesion somewhat, but that was always likely to happen at some point in Second Life.

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January 31, 2013

New Land Products Would Halt The Land Losses, But What Would They Do For LL’s Revenue?

Tyche Shepherd this week reported that the grid is ligher to the tune of another 61 private regions, this brings the losses for this year to roughly around 235, I say roughly because I’m basing this on Tyche’s last four reports and there’s a little bit of carry over from the last day or two of last year and the last report was on January 27th, so it is almost certainly slighly higher.

Now a lot of people want Linden Lab to slash tier and in many ways, that would halt the decline, for example they could slash the tier on homesteads back down to USD$75.00, or slash the tier on Openspaces to USD$25.00 a month and insist they’re only used for scenery with a stingy prim count. Openspaces at USD$75.00 a month seems extremely high to me. They could even slash tier on full regions to say USD$195.00 a month. All of these moves would halt the decline of sim losses, temporarily at least. However another route would be to introduce new products.

Now there’s no doubt that one way Linden Lab could halt the losses is to introduce new land products, such as a region that supports 7,500 prims for around USD$150.00 per month, or a region that supports 11,250 prims for USD$225.00 a month, or mega regions that were double, treble or quadruple the size of current regions in terms of prim count and land mass but had a pro-rata rata tier rate that was a fair bit cheaper than four individual regions, that might appeal to the large Land Barons.

There is a precedent for new products increasing the land mass, it came with the Openspace fiasco. When Linden Lab removed the requirement to buy Openspaces in packs of four and then allowed them to be placed anywhere on the grid, the land mass exploded, so much so that on July 8th 2008 Zee Linden opened his blog post with:

“Linden Lab is pleased to announce results for Second Life the second Quarter.

Land mass grew over 44%. The total number of regions owned by residents increased 44.2% over Q1 to just over 1.5 billion square meters. Our growth was due to the popularity of our newly launched “Openspace” land product along with a change in pricing to make the purchase of land more accessible to first time buyers.”

Now as those of us who were around at the time know, this didn’t end well, but in terms of bringing new land to the grid, the Openspace initiative produced staggering results.

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January 25, 2013January 25, 2013

The Tier Discussions Need To Cut Out The Blame Game

Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au has made a series of posts about lost revenue regarding sim losses and a couple of posts on how to introduce revenue streams to try and help the situation. The discussions have been somewhat heated, but I welcome Hamlet’s ongoing discussions on the tier issue. I can recall (although unfortunately can’t find any old posts) Hamlet quite some time ago posting that the tier model was too large a plank of Linden Lab’s revenue and that long term it’s unsustainable, so Hamlet is not a Johnny come lately to these discussions. He also posts the awful sim deathwatch series, of which I’m not a fan, but hey, these sims are disappearing.

Now two recent posts were on ideas for new revenue streams:

How to Stop SL Land Loss: Require Land Ownership to Sell Lots of Items in the SL Marketplace (Comment of the Week)

Should Linden Lab Charge SL Users to Keep Excess Inventory? It’s a Hidden Subsidy Hurting SL’s Economy

Now I personally disagree with both premises, in the first case with The Marketplace, the horse has bolted. This is the sort of thing that needed to be there from the start, introducing it now would be chaotic and bad PR. However I’m still not convinced that people should be able to list items via Direct Delivery to infinity and beyond, people should need to relist, but you don’t need to charge fees for that, although maybe a fee could be introduced if people want to list to infinity and beyond, but that wouldn’t be a long lasting fee.

The latter post I disagree with because the horse has bolted on inventory limits, they needed to be introduced from the start and how on earth would this be introduced. People would not want landmarks or group notice notecards, they wouldn’t want textures advertising new content, they wouldn’t want free gifts in case they went over limit and most of all, people would be miffed that their purchases were in peril, this would hit the economy.

However, although I don’t agree with the ideas, I do welcome the widening of the discussion. Unfortunately the comments tell a pretty sorry tale of blame games.

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