New price encrease in SL and how do you like it ?

I've always been saying Lindens are gonna ruin this game and this is their first step downward. This step shows how money hungry the Lindens really are
Anyone that likes the new prices are brain washed SL addicts and yes I do not come into SL unless my RL GF asks me to.
New pricing is a huge encrease and you the paying player will not get better service.
If there was to be better graphics or at least a show of some improvement it'd be different but SL as a whole really is lousy lag graphics get worse with each patch. I logged in and was shocked as to how bad it really has gotten.
Give a person their monies worth and some continuity in SL and I'd be all for paying morebut as long as things are as lousy in SL as they are its not for me let alone paying higher teir fees.
Lindens are as I always said money hungry and their entire being isn't to create some fun (game) its plain and simply to make money and thats thats. Lousy service and terrible game play all for a MUCH higher price ? ..... not me not now not ever.
Money is the rule here and money it always will be
Like i've always said gimme good smooth graphics and at least low lag and I'd be happy.
But not with the lousy way it runs let alone higher prices.
Lindens have the biggest balls of all .... lousy and getting worse virtual world and higher prices =takes a dumbass not to see YOU'RE getting taken for a sucker.
Namely those who support Lindens no matter what crap they throw at you.

This is their FIRST step downward?

Here's the problem. Clearly the last month or so there has been a HUGE media blitz about SL. You see reports on it in one form or fashion on TV, magazines, radio, etc, and naturally it's all positive. Never will you hear the flipside on all the problems we have in SL thanks to LL's decisions. The fact they increased the prices recently doesn't surprise me simply because there has been such a huge influx of new people coming, these people wouldn't know any better and would still think the new prices are acceptable despite the fact all of us veteran players are complaining and saying "this is yet another nail in the coffin to SL."

I have always felt that LL operates under the practice that as long as they keep the number of people coming into SL is greater than that of those leaving, then they could care less about if they tick off the older players and will continue to do what they want without caring what the player base thinks. As much as I would like to think the price increase will cause the game to come to a screeching halt, unfortunately there will always be people out there who will pay for it simply because of what the possibilities are with this game.

LL has us by the privates, and they are smiling all the way to the bank as they ignore our complaints.

E

I have always felt that LL operates under the practice that as long as they keep the number of people coming into SL is greater than that of those leaving, then they could care less about if they tick off the older players and will continue to do what they want without caring what the player base thinks.

I would hope that at the least they would want to keep the number of paying people coming into SL greater than those leaving.

They most likely have stats on the percentage of new accounts that become paying every month, and then weigh that against the number of paying members who are leaving, and as long as the incoming percentage is higher, they probably could care less. Same principle really.

E

You don't have a choice, LL wasn't doing well with the money at all. If they didn't pump up the price and charges, they WOULD have go downward. I failed to see your point.

As for older players, they are winner when they stay remain in SL. They are the hard cookies, who can deal with ever-changing history of SL.

It's like... You have real life aging through the whole history, where history grow and faster in SL. Some of your old friends is gonna say, "Hey, what happened to that one guy who was here with us?"
and other person had to say "Dude, He's dead!"
"How?"
"He left SL 3 months ago during the update."
"...oh what a suicidal wussy."



Grow up, get over it and deal with it.

Fine. So pump up the charges for ALL players. In fact, just charging them ALL would be enough. Even if it was a one-time amount, given the present sign-up rate. Or is it OK for those who already provide the most outstanding places to visit in Second Life to subsidize the cost of hundreds of thousands of (if we are to believe sign-up statistics) freebie accounts? I don't see his point either. But only because the 'average' player isn't really affected financially, because the 'average' player doesn't pay a penny towards the upkeep of Second Life at all.

The thing I don't get is that now that they've hit the 1 million users milestone, why continue with this open-registration nonsense? I'm all for letting as many genuine players in as possible, but a huge chunk of those new accounts are griefer alts or people who've just decided they want ANOTHER new name.

I'd very much rather they went back to charging $10 for a basic account to sign up and focus on cutting costs/selling more L$ than having them kill islands for everyone but big business. How many fun places that have managed to carefully budget their way through SL are going to be forced to close? What about NEW fun places? What chance to they have now!

LL don't seem to realise that to make money they have to keep the game fun, because if it stops being fun, it stops being interesting to people, and it stops making money =/

That's the Universal Forum Mating Call of something, I'm just not sure what yet. Not this forum, practically any forum.

Well this is of course a profit-making venture, and in order for LL to continue to support SL they have to turn a profit. Linden Labs is privately held, so their financial data is unknown, but it is safe to assume they won't be entering the Fortune 500 any time soon. Regardless, it is their product and it is perfectly legitimate for them to charge whatever they think they can get for it - that's how businesses produce great products like SL.

That being said there are a lot of companies who become their own worst enemy, defeating themselves even when they have a lock on the market. One of the reasons for this is what Philip Linden calls the phenomenon of the 'short horizon' investor. These are VCs or sometimes angel investors that don't care what the company produces or what it's future is. They want the stock to go as high as possible and sell their shares before the company tanks. This is a trend that is widely recognized as being detrimental to our economy - there are articles about it in Fortune and the WSJ often.

However, the problem is not the investor, or even the fact that the owners of the company - the investors - have interests and intentions not compatible with long term success for the company, it is the result of that disconnect: cutting expenditure in inappropriate places to make quarterly numbers; buying/selling parts of the organizations and mergers that roll stock into a greater 'total vs. sum of the parts' equation for the shareholders, without thinking of the differences in corporate culture or revenue streams; not making investments in new technology or product development; and most of all not protecting their knowledge capital.

In this instance I think a case could be made that they are risking alienating their core market, which is not desirable unless there is an extremely compelling reason, and there is no other acceptable alternative. If the 'old hats' in SL become disenfranchised they will take with them something that is indispensable to Linden Labs: competent and motivated knowledge workers paying to build SL. Imagine if Disney Land was built and maintained by paying customers, they'd be the most successful company the world has ever known.

I am new to SL (less than 3 weeks old), so I do not know all the various issues the SL core constituency is concerned about. One thing I hope LL realizes is that the current level of performance of the system will not sustain a large customer base. IMHO they absolutely must implement Havok 2 and increase their server availability. I have a 5Mb/s connection that is being saturated maybe 15% at most.

Sooner or later open source developers will begin to compete with LL. AOL has survived by keeping their core market, and not banking on taking over the Internet (although they did once have that ambition). Personally, I would be very cautious to listen to their core audience if I were LL.