Homestead Pricing to be Grandfathered if purchased before July 1st, 2009

Good points, I guess and overall I am a 'winner' in this since I still have my Homestead. This is just a messy situation because of all the chopping and changing that's happened.

But I'm not sure it changes my longterm view. I would sooner buy a full Region than a new Homestead for instance.

Looks like you were right all along Ciaran,re.LL not going through with the increase

Remember that I take profits as anything above a 'tier reserve' ~ you better believe this whole thing hit me in the wallet.

In terms of cold hard cash, after consolidation of some regions at a loss, rearranging the estate and so forth it's in the neighbourhood of about 8000 USD even now, if not quite 10,000. YES, out of my pocket. Given another year, it is likely to be that full 10,000+ USD.

This doesn't count the solid weeks of full time work during last December holidays making sure the estate didn't fragment, dealing with furiously angry people and so forth.

I didn't have great margins before, but now I'm running about five bucks over tier on a whooole bunch of homesteads. If one goes vacant... think about it. I'm risking 95 to make five. Over and over and over... there is no victory here for me.

Just one less boot to the head... until July 2010 of course.

That 99% should be glad they didn't lose 8000 USD.

dont worry des, your time is coming. that $5 is $5 that ll can be making for themselves, and they have their eye on it.

The only thing this accomplishes is delaying the flood of Homestead abandonments for a year, so they don't have to face that pack of wolves at the same time as the Adult Content changes wolves.

The *right* move would have been to abandon the planned price hike to $125 entirely, while offering the restoration of abandoned Homesteads for those who dropped them, as in the current offer.

Pretty freaking pissed.

Dumped OS sim on 11/27/08.

This is where a wee bit of imagination comes into play, instead of "Grandfathering" they could have offered cut price sims through the month of May for large estate owners (which I'm not), they could have said "Buy two islands get a homestead free", they could have said "Pay three months tier and we will guarantee you a fixed rate of USD$95 through to July 2010".

They could have done umpteen things other than just say "Grandfathering" after all the excuses under the sun they gave for not grandfathering at the time.



No I'm happy I folded when I did, I only had one, never loved the product. I felt the product would crash eventually anyway, I didn't expect Linden Lab to cause that crash but my crystal ball gets foggy at times

Now if I'd paid one more month's worth of USD$75 tier I'd have the option of a free reactivation, which would gnaw away at me and possibly tempt me, especially whilst drunk.

Dumped mine 23/12/08. If either of us had paid tier in December we could have dumped them at the end of January, never paid the higher tier fee and still be entitled to a free reactivation. That's another thing that sort of annoys me about this, they can't even get their reasons for the date cutoff to make sense.

Glad someone noticed

I almost had to laugh, but not in a good way, when I saw the announcement. It figures that they would do something like this, because they've been hemorrhaging sims since the OS announcement. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole, not even for a year, because it won't take another year before they do something ridiculously stupid that will hurt all the folks buying one now, such as allowing anyone to buy one at $125 USD/mo tier.

Thanks but no thanks, Linden Lab.

Dear....when has anything they've ever done made sense? They flip flop more than...nm, won't go there

for myself it doesn't matter to much, I traded 2 homesteads in to get a new full sim in december (the people using that wanted to move to a full sim) and kept one that is rented out as full raising the price with the same amount LL did letting the renter know the increase at the same time LL let us know their increases so my profit never changed, now the tier will be grandfathered for a year so will the price I ask my tenant so it will be my tenant who will be effected the most by it.

"After listening to the feedback we have changed the eligibility for re-enabling abandoned Homesteads. The offer now extends back to October 28th 2008, the date of the first announcement"

Blog edited!

Damn temptation does come my way!

You still don't get it do you Ciaran... this whole scheme was only mean to persuade you back to your Homestead

Anyway I got the news yesterday from my landlord (landlady in fact) and was very happy. Saves me 2500 linden per week, which is 130K for the coming year, nice money. Would have stayed anyway, I knew the new prices when I started renting my Homestead sim.

Who knows what can happen in a year. Maybe I will grow into my own sim, maybe I will rent a second Homestead, maybe things will say as they are. For the moment, I am very very happy with this decision. Still think 125 dollar is way overpriced for what you get, but we will see. There are always people who want the space. For me the space was even required

Well,you saw many posts of mine re. homesteads,while half of what i was hoping for came to be,the other half did.nt,but i always remembered you saying that a while back and it stuck in my mind waiting to see if it would come to be.
For some reason i did have faith in what you said,more like hoping your were right i guess

I think the people saying that LL should have cancelled the price increase instead of putting it off for a year are missing a major point. As far as I know, this is the first time that LL has told anyone what the price of anything will be that far in advance. I suppose there's always a chance that they could change they're mind again, but there's no other piece of SL land out there with a 1 year guaranteed rate other than the homesteads now.

That whole thing is nothing but a desperate attempt of damage control. And some buy in. Well. I'm not surprised.

LL behaves plan- and clueless and unpredictable as always. Rather causing more damage than control in my opinion. But it's up to you to take the bait (which in fact is not even this as it cost LL nothing but saves them from the next looming disaster) and hold on a bit longer. LL will find more ways to screw you soon as they have done so many times in the past. Be ensured.

Just out of interest, what happens when you dump (i.e. abandon, not sell) a Homestead (or a Region for that matter)...do you get hit with a major penalty, and how is it done, do you submit a support ticket saying you want to cancel?

You submit a support ticket and if you do it say a week or so before tier is due there's no extra fees. If you do it well in advance they should be able to take it off the grid before your next tier due date.

You do, of course, lose the invested setup fee, which is arguably a fairly big implicit penalty.

Thanks for the replies. Yes losing the initial investment is a penalty, but it would be even worse if you got hit with penalties from LL. Also it may be difficult to sell the sim for profit in the current climate, especially an unpopular sim format, when you take into consideration transfer fees...and a delay in selling because it's unpopular will lead to more tier being paid. In short, depending on circumstances, it may actually be cheaper to lose your investment.

Just got another "Buy a Homestead Now and Save $360/ year" email from LL.

They are so full of crap.

Just got that email too. I'm reactivating my old one so i'm not looking for another.

I got one too. :/

Whaddaya mean ":/"??? All they want is to save you some money! Ooh hey if buy two you'll save twice as much! YaYyyyy!