$195 Grandfathered tier? Does it still exist?

Question. i'm not buying or selling land. just a friend and i are having a debate.

a long time ago island tier was $195 a month. Now islands are $295.

for awhile LL let the $195 people keep paying 195 because the price was grandfathered in..

but. there was talk (we thought) of LL wanting to raise the $195 people to $295 too. Did that ever happen?

Our Debate: Are there any people with private islands/estates still paying $195? who bought Islands long ago? or are all Island owners paying $295 now?

if this is in the wrong section sorry.

I'm still paying $195 for a class 4 island.

There are still lots of them out there. Even a few class 5s at $195.

They're mostly horded by influential oldbies who threaten dire consequences if grandfathering is ever ended.

Of course the rest of us who have to compete with people paying a full $100 less per sim struggle on with what we have and try not to get driven out of the market.

thanks!

we wanted to know if the price increase ever happened to the people paying $195. It seems it didn't (since you are someone still paying $195) .. ~

yay too, because it means i win the debate i didn't think they forced a price increase for the grandfathered in people...

Didn't all the Class 4's get upgraded to Class 5 during the OS thing? thought that was part of the announcment.

That particular grandfathering seems extraordinarily persistent. At one point, there was talk of requiring the higher price to enable voice on a sim. I'd guess that those old grandfathered sims will eventually convert to Class 5 (or whatever is then current) with no charge, too. One hopes that by that point the rest of the grid will have so expanded that the remaining grandfathered sims will just be a quaint feature of SL real estate, as with the tier-free 4096s of charter members.

ETA: the Openspace announcement indeed spoke of upgrading class 4s to class 5s, but only for Openspace sims. To wit:

I wouldn't be surprised if they have started upgrading most of them anyway just to get rid of legacy hardware. I do know the whole mainland has been upgraded to class 5. Also there are no class 4 openspaces anymore, those were changed to 5.

I thought "grandfather tiered" sims were on older servers and handled less than what the new class 5 could, correct? Are class 5 worth the extra $100/month?

Actualy I think the whole "class" thing is a more than likely long gone.

I bet you cant even buy the CPU that was used to make a Class 5 server anymore... where are they getting parts? Craigslist? and only 2 gigs of ram? and a single Sata (not even Sata II?) hard drive per server?

Most new home computers sold at retail stores far outclass a "class 5" server as it was discribed in 2006.

Not quite correct, there are class 5 sims that were grandfathered.

Why on earth grandfathered status continues on transfer is a mystery to me, especially when it's a class 5 being transferred.

My sim is a grandfathered class 5. I just got it a couple weeks ago. The class difference is pretty minor, though it depends on what you use the sim for. Mine is quiet, just me and a few friends hanging out on it, no super intense scripts. If it were a class 4 we probably wouldn't notice. But a sim with renters and all kinds of stuff on it is a bit noticeable, there's a sim nearby like that and it usually doesn't perform quite as well as the 5s.

EDIT: No, class 5 isn't worth an extra $100 a month, especially if you don't get a choice. And while I too don't know why the grandfathered pricing sticks through a transfer, I'm one of those dire consequences people as far as increasing the price on existing owners goes.

What essentially happened was that in November of 2006, LL announced the island tier increase, and there was an immediate furore amongst people who had been thinking of buying islands. Of course for a lot of people, being successful enough in business to tier an island was a major goal in SL and this had messed that up for them quite dramatically.

As a result of that LL offered a compromise - they sold out the remaining class 4 islands with the old $195 tier, and then a few class 5's slipped out at the lower tier in order that they could keep up with the barrage of orders.

AFAIK, the reason for the "tier doesn't increase on transfer" rule was that class 4 owners protested that, if it did, they would take a big loss if they sold their islands because they would be offering an inferior product to class 5 sellers for the same tier rate.

I believe that class 4 owners have had, for some time, the option to choose to increase their tier to $295 and be upgraded to class 5. Since there is no way to identify the class of a sim, I don't know if the class 4's are still class 4's, but it's still visible that they occupy a particular range of server addresses which other sims do not recieve.

Ive got something for you yumi and will send it when I get in world

That was probably true in 2006, but in 2009 a grandfathered class 4 still generally fetches a higher sale price than a non grandfathered class 5. Over 2 years of cheaper tier should have helped soften any blow on a future sale.

Ideally LL would phase it out sensibly, so that recent purchasers aren't given a nasty shock and find that they paid more for a sim on the premise of cheaper tier, but LL should be able to work towards at least phasing out grandfathered status on transfer.