Point to Point Teleporting

Whee! I can now do what I used to do in worlds.com chat 5 years ago! Technology marchs on!

I invested 30000 US$. Together with other telehub land owners, Linden Lab took more than 100000 US$ for land.

The difference to people who invest in the money ball, event, Tringo etc. is that they pay little by little, while we paid everything upfront. If you pay upfront, then you can be scammed. Exactly this happened. Linden Lab take our money that we invested in telehub land in good faith, then abuse our trust by remove the main feature of the land after we paid, but long before we managed recoup our investments.

If Linden Lab pull through with this and not compensate land owners, this might very well force business owners to fundamentally reevaluate Second Life in general. Beside the telehub land scandal, there are several other very worrying, or should I say disastreous, things go on. At some stage "adapt business model" might simply mean to take time, talent and money elsewhere.

Which would be a shame, but equally, I tend to think the void would be filled with people who are simply here to enjoy the "gaming" side, rather than the moneymaking.

Although I like the new P2P teleport (and there are ways to use that to financial advantage), I understand your outrage Anshe. I recently felt the same way when I (and several other merchants) discovered that SL had randomly reset merchandise permissions. As with so many such issues, Linden Lab basically approached it from the standpoint it was client error, despite the fact that numerous people have been reporting the same issue for months. It nearly destroyed my merchant line. I am not happy at all.

However, that's the Linden Lab attitude. They protect themselves with a TOS and absolve themselves of all accountability. Good for them, bad for clients. And as you've pointed out... one solution is to take the money somewhere else. I would imagine that if Anshechung.com suddenly decided to close up business and go elsewhere... Linden Lab might be shocked enough to snort a couple of times and almost wake up. I would guess that with your business acumen, you've managed to store away a pretty good nest-egg and could very well use that to make a good living anywhere.

I recently made just that decision. The permissions problem was the last straw in a long line of continual Linden Lab difficulties. Four times I've tackled them on these forums over major issues. Each time they followed the same pattern: Adamantly deny reality of the problem. When proof presented, smokescreen the results and blame the end-user. When proof becomes undeniable, admit the issue, but it's not really a problem, it's a "feature". Deny all accountability and responsibility. Fail to correct said problem.

This time I closed shop. I removed all my vendors grid-wide, shut it down. Put out a few, very limited vendors essential in helping Forcythia to keep her sims/group operational. I no longer manage any groups, I no longer hold events, and I log on as seldom as possible. I come to the forums on the rare occasion I get bored and feel like venting a bit.

But as for my support of Linden Lab and Second Life: end game. No more. I've wasted more than a year on this system. The last thing I want is to come to a year from now and realize I've spent most of it on Second Life. I tried hard to help Linden Lab recognize and correct major problems. Accomplished nothing. Waste of time.

Like you've pointed out, there are other options. I would foresee that eventually Linden Lab will stand nose to nose with a new competitor... and the mass exodus will finally bring home what people have been telling them for ages: Unhappy clients become ex-clients.

Despite the fact that I've operated as a merchant for some time now, I fully agree. I didn't come to SL to turn a profit. When I first got here... I knew that the "economy based system" would only serve to make an otherwise fun game more like real life. I didn't come to Second Life to duplicate Real Life and its problems. Add to that the extreme instability of the L$ due to lack of any semblance of a FED on SL, and you're asking for an economic nightmare.

I would like SL much more if there were no L$, if people made items and gave them away for the fun and reputation of it (as they did when I played WORLDS.COM), and if folks just plain enjoyed the game for the sheer fun of it.

But, SL is what it is and I tackled it as such. There are no guarantees. Land bought today is worthless tomorrow and worth a fortune next month. Merchandise that is a hot item today is on the low-seller list tomorrow (yup, mimics RL pretty well). Linden Lab can make or break fortunes by implementing a questionable decision. They are a monopoly and everyone in this world is totally under their control. That leaves us with three options: accept it as it is, work around their controls, or leave.

In RL, if I worked for a company that I found to cause me constant stress and problems, if managers constantly decieved me caused me to be unable to do my job properly and there was nothing I could do about that... I'd abandon that job as a lost cause and find more honorable clients. If I had a supplier that changed policies every month and provided me with damaged goods, they'd either clean up their act or lose a client.

I personally like the new P2P decision. It's been a long-time coming. The decision was made with a lot of consideration and feedback. It's now reality. There are ways to actually use that to financial advantage. So one can either accept that decision (since it is reality) and find a way to make it work, or one can decide "I'm mad as **** and I'm not going to take this anymore." Both are valid decisions.

Myself, I found that the major stress in my life was SL... mainly due to continual significant system problems that LL simply refused to fix. Solution: as much as possible, stop messing with SL and have as little to do as possible with LL.

Result: Stress greatly decreased. Me better now.

Yes, the void will be filled with people (most likely untalented and just here "for fun" wearing mediocre skins and sporting mediocre fashion saying their mediocre pickup lines and pumping away on their mediocre sex balls (all this while struggling to hide the monitor from their spouses while playing SL hahahaha). Meanwhile, the cream of the crop migrate to some other exotic realm where they can actually get paid good for their efforts.

-RODION

What business model is this? Where is the vision ? All I've seen in the short time that I've been here is an organization without vision .. who simply waits for the best content and most innovative ideas and simply usurps them. How can an organization survive who continuously erects barriers to discourage it's most succesful entrepreneurs, and put them out of business. A firm who stirs up the mob, then relies on its reaction to make decisions that are selfserving and shortsighted. Does anyone up there have a "big picture"?

Take your most successful innovators and remove every imaginable barrier. Facilitate even more success. They will soon make you rich. But, keep taunting them and making it so difficult for them, that they finally give up and you'll retain even less population then you're retaining now. How about showing some "leadership"? Ethical, Moral, confident, self-assured leadership that can move an entire organization forward with its customers, suppliers and staff. Stop killing your best thinkers .. innovators and entrepreneurs.

I agree that every venture on this medium is a risk, as it is in the real world. When the outcome is not influenced by the powers that be, one can calculate that risk.

Anshe-

You've got me playing devil's advocate here, I apologize. I've been wary with my investments of time, effort and $ in SL due to errors and changes in the past. More so because if anything happens to Linden Labs I'd lose everything I'd invested in. So, I contribute only what I feel comfortable walking away from. (and then I did walk away for the better part of a year actually to deal with RL and other online communities for around a year, despite my on-going land allocation fee.)

My losses were utterly and completely insignificant compared to your $30k-US. You are much braver than I to put that kind of money into an economy and system as young and dynamic as SL's. Especially (I assume) without any contractual guarantees that the telehubs would stay in place. I'm sorry it didn't work out better for you.

While I'm certain LL won't compensate you for any lost future revenue. Maybe they can be pursuaded to credit you some percentage of the money you paid them and suddenly lost due to land devaulation because of this change. ($20k = 2 sims of your own for almost 4 years?)

Good luck to you!

Wow lots of big college words, but your post is so speculative and theoretical I cant tell if your "fer it" or "aggin it".

Let me give you an example "Take your most successful innovators and remove every imaginable barrier. Facilitate even more success."

Well I have one store on my own land. All my traffic and sales is generted py people searching for stuff like I make and teleporting to my lot. Well the telehub is a server and a half away from my land, so finding my lot is an inconvenience for my customers.

From my perspective, the telehubs were a MAJOR BARRIER that the Lindens REMOVED, so I'm confident of even more success now.

I play many many online games, and lots of people I have talked to in other games who tried SL left precisely over the inconvenient travel system.

Believe me when I say, the people that dislike the P2P system are a very very small minority of the community, so don't hold your breath waiting for an outcry of people wanting to go back to telehubs. It ain't gonna happen.

The people that leave over this issue, will be replaced by people coming back over this issue. Its a win win for the community as far as I am concerned.

Poor comparison, go look into how Microsoft got started and how they grew. Also an OS is something an end user "needs" to use a computer, SL is a luxury.

Sounds like you're just bitter because you see your investments in SL at risk. Don't risk what you can't afford to lose.

Dunno if anyone's thought of this so I'll just let er rip.

How about making the telehub structures and land places of historical significance? Keep the structures there, but have them decay over time. Maybe let a few folks who've proven to be artistically minded have access to the models. Add some moss and cracks. Possibly even graffiti. I think it would help lessen the depreciation of telehub-centric land, if there was still a reason to *go* to that land. Just because a resident isn't forced to be in the middle of your people traps and strip malls, doesn't mean they can't be coaxed there.

Let me know what you think.

Dave Talamasca

Am I the only one to notice the irony in Anshe's comments about Microsoft being an almost monopoly in the OS market when she herself has a virtual monopoly on land in SL?

Precisele Lasivian... anything like this is a gamble, and the first rule in gambling is don't bet wheat you can't afford to lose. The slot machine isn't always going to put down three bars in a row, occasionally you get a lemon in the middle position and you lose out.

I am enjoying SL for fun. I've got a small store and themed nightclub, might sell a couple of hundred L$ a week in the store and have traffic of about 500 on the club which throws a few L$ extra in the pot too. If SL closed tomorrow, yes I'd miss it, but I wouldn't be risking losing my real home and everything else through it. Unfortunately, any good businessperson will tell you that whilst specialist markets are good, you can't base all your profitability on too few product lines - which is exactly what land barons have done. Maybe this will be a 'wake up' call that will force some of them to rethink their strategy and try something different. Why can't one build a huge mall on one sim, and offer special rates for commercial only use - and offering as part of the package advertising and other benefits to congregate the shops together? I know that when I visit a mall, I might go looking for one specific product (having found it through search) but will often look at what else is available nearby, and have often spent more money there than in the place I originally went to.

SL is an endless opportunity for the creative player. I have a lot of imagination and ideas but are limited by the amount of land I can afford to own. I'm still quite new here, so I'm sure some of the more experienced players can do much more than I can think of.

Lewis

Land is fungible, operating systems aren't.

That is, if I have a house, I can put that house in Dreamland, on the mainland, in the dAlliez islands, no matter who I buy or rent the land from.

If I have Second Life, I can play it in Windows or Mac OS X, not Linux or FreeBSD or BeOS or AmigaOS or Solaris or VMS or QNX or...

Anshe can NEVER have that kind of land monopoly.

if this was true, we would all be using Microsoft products, we would pay for the easiest to code programs and game mods would never exist. I'm glad not everybody thinks like you do, so we get a huge community with open source products, as well as game mods that by far outrank the games they were made for, as well in quality as in complexity. (exemple: for those who know Battlefield 1942: http://www.fhmod.org )

while you pay for your so called quality, other people get better things for free and contribute to it with their ideas to make it even better.


As to the opportunists I call land sharks, too bad for you, but for someone investing so much in something so unstable as a game, I can only say that this was predictable. Might as well try to gamble at the casino, Stock Exchange or somewhere else, because what you did was pure gambling :3

Now I'm going to have fun porting where ever I want with my free account, have some fun and watch the prices near hubs go down by the day, yay!

Maybe I've not looked so hard... but I've never, ever seen anyone else selling plots of land in quite the number that Anshe has, those little white advert boxes are everywhere.

Lewis

Monopoly means that buyers have no comparable alternatives and that newcomers can not compete. My market share is less than 40% and there is more than 30 land barons I compete with, not to mention all the private land owners who sell themselves. I also employ several people full time now to cope with the *imense* work. I myself have by now terraformed more than 120 previously empty and non existing sims, landscaped more than 250 sims worth of land with trees and rivers, and parceled off more land than many people can bare before they would get some tunnel crazy syndrome. The terms "land baron" is totally misleading. Most my time I spend on land development and customer support.

It is now official. After first day of "Infohub" traffic on all my telehub land dropped more than 75%. It seem the buyers are gone now, maybe just some retailers left looking after their own shops.

Well, it would be nice to see how much object sales have dropped on InfoHub land.

Obviously you're going to lose a lot of traffic, but probably most of that traffic was non buying traffic anyways.

The question is - are InfoHubs still attracting the newbies?

of course, goodbye dwelloper incentive!

...... which goes to prove that 75% of the 'traffic' that your telehub land recieved was merely 'passing by', rather than actual genuine visitors.

Or, to put it another way, you are only 25% as successful as you thought.

Or, putting it another way again, 75% of your traffic payment was incorrectly paid to you.

Lewis

Yes, sales in my hub stores dropped to zero. I will most likely not renew any of these stores that are rented. I did go to my stores yesterday, as I do everyday, and seen that so many vendors/renters have already left.

As I mentioned in my last post, I visit all my stores/shops everyday. It is still a little soon to say with any certainty but the new info hubs were deserted when I came by. Grizedale, Sammamish, and Mahalu, amongst others had one or two avies in the general vacintity. Braunworth was a ghost town.

I can assure you that telehubs generated sales, and sales kept sellers coming back. This meant rent income and land value for Anshe and many other hub land owners. This was where the value was in hub land, not dwell payments, but traffic and what that meant in sales/rent/land value. (please note the past tense)

I'm sure Anshe has no miscomceptions of how she is loosing on this move by LL.

Sure... but most business people in this situation would be looking at the market to evaluate gaps that could be filled, and looking at alternative avenues of income - branching out into other lines of business in the same field.

All I've seen from Anshe so far is a bit of foot stomping and a tantrum, with a threat to take her ball home if LL won't play the game her way (ie not have implemented p2p).

If I was Anshe, I'd be planning a 'mega mall', where people who want the mall/shopping experience can go, knowing that out of all the shops there, someone will sell what they want. Add in a modified 'infohub' kind of system shop directory so you can find where things are, and you've immediately got a replacement for the failed malls that polluted telehub land previously. Add in a cinema, a couple of cafe/restaurants, and a bit of landscaping outside, and you have something that will draw people - especially if it's actually well designed, unlike many of the malls that we have seen previously.

This is a great opportunity for someone to grab the initiative and make another 'themed sim' - instead of the small town america, you have modern mall style. If I had the money to get a whole sim I'd take the risk -but I can't. So it has to be up to one of the rich people like Anshe to take the lead here where I can't.

That's just one idea - there are many more. Instead of bemoaning loss of income, why can't people look at it as a new challenge?

Lewis

Good idea, but that would actually require work, time, ideas and imagination.
After thinking just a few seconds I already found how she could balance her "precious loss" out, but that would piss off most people in SL and again give the economic advantage to just one greedy opportunist.

You peeps continue to have fun, that's what you're supposed to have in a game isn't it? :3

So, you're losing the traffic of people going over your land to some other location from a telehub.

A true entrepreneur would find a way to make money off of P2P, not complain about their losses due to having what used to be high-traffic land.

Frankly you had prior knowledge of what 90% of SL would consider an obvious market shift in land, yet you chose to keep that land knowing full well that Telehubs were going away. I can't imagine how much you would be complaining if we didn't know P2P was coming at all.