Strictly Hypothetical

I must reiterate, this is just a thought experiment. There are no rumors about this to my knowledge, no Linden plans, I am not a secret Linden, yadda yadda.

Given the volume of complaints about SL (many perfectly valid), I started to wonder if there was any change that could pass universal muster. So, if LL (overnight or maybe with warning) doubled prim allotment on all parcels (including the city sims, so they would still be double normal, assuming this is still the case) with no change in fees, tier levels, no other changes, what would be the complaints? Who would be the aggrieved party?

Just curious.

That would be great, as long as they sort out the performance first, and when they did do it, it didn't cause major problems to the performance they have fixed

People would complain that their neighbors were cutting down their framerates even more with their 400-prim salad forks.

LF

D'oh, I forgot to add the part of equivalent sim performance (this is a magical hypothesis after all).

But yep, that would be a line of attack, whether there was a performance hit or not.

Hmmm... I'm guessing that people would complain that they just spent OMGWTF??! amount of $$$L on a parcel so that they could have X amount of prims, and they could have saved half that money and bought a smaller plot to cram every item in their inventory into if they'd had the double prim allotment before.

What's the percentage of people who own land (including renters)? If it's still in the 15% range, I'd say about 85% of the people would quibble over the universal part of your statement.

Not to quibble, but you can't include renters as they don't OWN, they RENT.

Working the math back from the September Developer Incentive Award 5,050-residents owned more than 512-sq.m of land (as the award is paid to two-percent of tier-paying residents with the highest Dwell/Traffic scores). Without a figure for the total population at the end of September there's no way to accurately calculate what the percentage was. However, at the time there were well more than 60,000 residents. Plus, we have no idea of the total number of premium residents that either own no more than their allotted 512-sq.m or no land at all but still maintain premium account status. I looked at this figure a few months back and the total percentage of the population that owned more than 512-sq.m of land was around 12-percent. So, the total percentage of the population that owns more than 512-sq.m of land, and thus pays tier fees, has been dropping. The last time I did a rough calculation in my head it had fallen to around 9-percent (That's a steep 25-percent drop).

A quick look at the main page of the Second Life site shows that there are presently over 77,000 residents. When the October Developer Incentive Award is announced, typically by the 7th of the following month at the earliest and the 13th of the following month at the latest, you'll be able to check and see if tier-paying land ownership is continuing to drop. A quick guestimate is that 6,160 tier-paying residents, or 8-percent, will make up the pool qualified to compete for the October Developer Incentive Award.

What's it all mean? Well, higher prim totals on existing land are unlikely as it would accelerate the present drop in parcel ownership. This doesn't mean that the buying and selling of land is over, just that the portion of the population that doesn't own land is increasing. Another way to describe it is that account conversion from Basic to Premium isn't happening at the same rate it did prior to the adoption of free Basic accounts.

With the elimination of Stipend Bonuses upon the release of version 1.7 expect increasing vacancy rates for rental parcels. A player can't rent land they can't afford to rent as most rents are paid in advance. This puts a squeeze on small and medium-sized "land barons" as at a certain point their margin gets too thin and they hit a break even point even with 100-percent occupancy. Large "land barons" can eat a thinner rental-price margin, but for only so long. Plus, the largest chunk of revenue for LL is in tier fees. It's unlikely they'd want to cut these revenues in half by doubling the total number of prims on all parcels.

Bingo.

Ooooo great idea, that'd speed it up!

what is the old addage? You can please all the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time but you can never please all of the people all of the time. Unfortunately, even LL looses out on the first one...unsure that they have ever pleased all the people even some of the time!!!!

I try not to whine....i just wade through the lag....enjoy the vibrant new color and crispness to my second life...and wait for stuff to rez. I am a happy girl. (You can always talk on yahoo or aim or msn or somewhere while you are waiting to rez) giggles

That was a whole lot of words! My bad. I did not want to misrepresent the percentage which I used. I should have said reside rather than own. My comment was mainly to the "universal" portion of the original post and that a vast majority of people neither own nor rent.