Sim tier and price raise in 2008?

Last year LL agreeded to give us a 30 day notice. Guaranteed us no raises in tier til 2008. Now we wait and see and pray~

The smart thing to do would be for LL to schedual price increases yearly, something close to or at the level of inflation, say a 5% increase every year, and stick with that. Unless we have another 70's-like crisis, or 80's like boom, LL will make more money (inflation is rarely 5%, so it comes out better for LL) and the consumer will feel safe. To many landowners, this is still just entertainment. Yes, they want to sell stuff and make Lindens, but very few actually believe SL will be their long term, sole source of income, so the 'game' is the making and selling of their objects or scripts or land, etc. If you make people worried about how big a bill their gonna get cause you'll suddenly jump their tier with little warning, and devalue their land when everyone panics and dumps it, the only people who will hold any land will be speculators and the die hard fans of the game. That will totally toilet the land market, which is a significant part of the economy as well as a significant part of LL's bread and butter, in selling sims, both private and mainland.

What LL REALLY needs is for their customers to feel a sense of security. It's human nature to stop playing a game or stop investing in a pursuit, where the risk is so high.

why? hardware only gets cheaper and bandwidth gets cheaper. my wages don't rise to meet inflation as it is. what costs do LL incur that justify a rise of 5% a year?

I for one embrace our tier raising overlords

Yes, it is common knowledge that there will be a tier increase for old islands (if you know how to read LL's PR, or blog).
Here: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/08/02/the-second-life-voice-viewer-is-live/

The main guts of it is in the linked FAQ, at the bottom, down the bottom of the non-existing stairs, in the locked filing cabinet in the room without a light....

Here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Voice_FAQ#Does_it_cost_anything_to_use_voice.3F

The only thing it does not say is how much it will increase by, but my guess would be to the same level as new islands (Note: This says that island owners *will* be charged for voice, unless they have a new island, whether they want voice or not).

Also the next line about groups, although some people seem to have some, well, interesting ideas what LL means by Formal Groups; I think it simply means all groups created in SL (and have paid the L$100 setup fee), rather than just "groups" of friends, or "groups" milling around in person.

This is not clear if it is a fee that is charged yearly (waiving it for 60 days then makes little sense, if it was to only be charged for the first time after 60 days, why not say that?), or is it charged more often, weekly like the list land in search, or monthly (or something completely different...).

This extra charge (whether we use voice or not, I don't, do you *really* want to hear cars, cars and more cars, not to mention the young **** zooming up and down the footpath on motorbikes just outside my window ) will be hitting us in the pockets in just over one month's time, probably still with no indication how often it is going to be, until the second charge hits us.

Er... it's annual. Once a year.

its a load of crap....

Server prices (hardware wise) and decreased while performance has increased. Lots of sims on SL are on outdated hardware. If you think that if 4 sims run on a 4 core server, you can pretty much say that each core is avg 1.6/2.0 ghz, so essentially you are running on a 2ghz cpu AT BEST with shared FSB and Memory core never mind file read and rights so you would be better off running a sim on an old desktop than a server at this rate, broadband has dropped through the floor and as wel know LL doesnt rent them there servers so theres no additional cost apart from maybe a 36 month lifecycle on hardware.

So at e.g $200 a month for a sim currently, this SHOULD cover running costs baring in mind you dont have a linden per sim and they have no customer service teams.

I appreciate the fact that everyone want to make a buck BUT....... LL should be looking how to turn those empty sims into a rich welcoming enviroment in order to bring more people in and increase land sales, tier payments, membership payments etc.
The ONLY way they are going to do this is reduce tier, I cant imgine ANY game that costs over $200 a month to play. There has always been two types of business model
1. Charge a lot so that only a few can own
2. Charge a little so that a lot can own.

Now as LL are dumping lots of sims on the mainland they are saying that they are preparing for the winter rush, is this true i dont know but I would like to think that LL would have more respect for thier client base. If they squawk about running costs then this is something they have created themselves. I wont get into a debate here BUT
If we have half the user base of free accounts then we would establish higher bandwidth availability, less sim lag and less social problems with griefers etc. Instead LL want those high numbers even though they can not afford to run thier systems with its current Ponzi business model so what do they do,......
They throw the bills to those that ARE paying while allowing those that dont pay to get away with it.
To me it sounds a little too much like RL ....... you pay your tax in order to provide facilities to those that dont or cant... the more people cant or wont pay, the more tax the few have to pay to sustain that economy.
I certainly dont like to sound like a bringer of doom, but WTF do LL think they are doing.... "uncle phil" should be ashamed of his business sense because the Tao of Linden mentality for his staff is ABSOLUTE SHIT, there are problems in SL that just wont go away and many people are sypathetic as they love SL so much BUT we arnt stupid Phil, people just wont pay for poor service, poor reliabiliy, poor customer sevice, lack of communication.
I would certainly suggest the following......
1. Reduce Free account functionality to attract more paying members
2. Increase base land holdings from 512 to 1024 before tier
3. Make that tier available to more people, example if Tier is more valuble to you than membership then why charge for membership at all.... why not allow EVERYONE the option of owning land and just reap the tier money.
4. BE REALISTIC!!!!!! we are all parents, students, mums, dads maybe the odd guy living with his parents with low cost of living. Most of us and i MEAN MOST just dont have the sort of money you would LIKE to charge us.
5. Stop paying your customers money to poor programmers and MANAGE your staff, thier are lots of problems that NEED to be done and you shouldnt rely on 3rd party open source folks like Nicholaz to fix your poorly written code.
4. With better managed programming team, you will need less of them therefor allowing the scopt for a proper customer service team.
5. The return of in world help.

Also the guys that rent from Island owners will also be hit hard as a raise in Island tier will reduce the availability of Islands as owners dump thier islands and the ones that DO stay will be high cost to cover expenses. The attraction to many within SL is either the ability to make a few bucks out of it (to be fair you wouldnt work the same rate per hour in RL), or the ability to play SL for free. So you have made it MORE attractive to be a freebie than a land holder.... you are ENCOURAGING the distruction of your OWN business by attempting to rape and pillage those that are your bread and butter to provide an open door policy.

I know I for one will be looking to wether i WANT to stay in SL if I cant afford to run my store, I make very little out of it and certainly doesnt really cover costs BUT as the lindes have said when they last increased tier.... "The Business can handle the increase" what that means is "As you are hooked on the game you WILL pay anything we charge you" As a brit we are used to having US prices with a UK pound sign wutout the US salary but I for one can not see good things happeneing If LL choose to selfdistruct.

*Gets off his soap box and makes himself his first coffee of the day*

Marty
(RL - IT Manager, handling 26 servers, 5000 users, 2000 nodes over 5 sites on a $60 million contract)

Land values & prices will go up but tier will have to go down when the opposition offer more prims at much lower prices and actually offer customer service as well.

We have No customer service as it stands now.....Now low can get go from here.

Definitely got some views on all this. But I'm going to do the tough thing, and wait and see what the deal is.

I've already thought through quietly and rationally what I should do based upon various contingencies, so it's simply a matter of seeing if it's A, B, or C right now.

Bad idea pal, bad idea...

Yesterday .... I spoke to my RL wife and co-owner of our little corner of the Pisherchia sim about raising land holdings and tier, at the moment I have $100 a month that I have to spend on entertainment and that pretty much goes to SL for membership and tier fees. Now if those tier fees increase, looking at thier pricing model I can see this

Additional Land (over 512 sq meters) (In square meters) Monthly land use fee

1/128 Region 512 m2 US$8

1/64 Region 1,024 m2 US$14

1/32 Region 2,048 m2 US$20

1/16 Region 4,096 m2 US$35

1/8 Region 8,192 m2 US$60

1/4 Region 16,384 m2 US$100

1/2 Region 32,768 m2 US$125

Entire Region 65,536 m2 US$250

Private Island 65,536 m2 US$350

I think thats is poberly the best you can hope for should the tier increases happen, there isnt really a formula for this working out.... it just seems to suit thier existing system well. Of course there is also the possibility that those prices are rather conservative.
We must also speculate that all of this may be just fear mongering and that additional costs would be for voice for private land owners as they are essentially renting bandwidth and rack space off LL I would certainly hope that it would be optional.

Anyway we all watch in anticipation.

Marty

So ..... you suggest that Second Life should be free for everyone, with the land owners paying through the nose while many free accounts wander through SL with 20 alts camping and griefing sucking the sims dry of bandwidth then.

Hmmm.... I might just go to McDonalds for lunch and order my food and say the guy in the next line can pay double as I want food for free......

You're making the same mistake many do. While it's known that there are griefers and camping alts amongst the "free" accounts, you can't just group all of them in a single bunch and get away with it.

I joined SL in November 2006. I am a free account, oh yes. So, according to you I'm having a "free lunch" at your restaurant?

Let's see... Less than a month after I joined I started renting an apartment in Rosemary, mainland. I'm still there, this means I am paying money to one of your "precious" land holders.

After a while I started renting a second place, so more money to another precious premium user.

Now since I am a power shopper we can speak about all the money spent in clothing, accessories and stuff. Some of the merchants may have been free accounts like me, but for sure they were renting their shop from someone. So money goes from hand to hand.

I buy L$ on the LindeX, money that goes to someone and commissions paid to Linden Lab. I trade with virtual stocks, again money that changes from hand to hand.

Now, if you call this "free lunch" or food, I wonder why my credit card company keeps writing me that I paid variable amounts of Euro currency to "Second Life". For a free lunch this thing looks quite expensive to me

Not to mention that I work as a DJ in SL, I play for a SL football (soccer, for the US) team, I go to clubs and I tip people, I visit places, I interact with every kind of people all the time.

I'll tell you what. I add more variety to SL than your average landlord will ever do.

And you come to me and you pretend to say that I should have limited access to SL 'cause I'm a free account and I deserve to be placed in the same bunch of camping alts and griefers?

Come on

Edit: grammar

This will lok great if the opposition offers a $100pm for a sim

Samantha .....

I have many friends on SL who ARE free accounts for what ever reason, and I dont make ANY mistakes as far as MANY of the "no payment info on file" or "no payment info used" are zombie alt campers.
But yes i AM a premium member AND a land owner and there will always be a certain disagreement between those that pay for membership and those that dont.
In most situations membership is there for people to have special treatment or recieve additional bonuses ... e.g. loyalty cards in supermarkets. I really dont care what you spend or HOW you spend your money either in RL or SL .... but i have said in a different thread that maybe its the poor souls like me that are the loosers that recieve very little for thier membership since Stipend is rubbish....firstland has gone etc.
SL is satuarated currently and those that DO pay are at risk of getting higher costs which of course was the subject of the earlier post, my point was that before they start to charge those with land etc higher ...they should at worst stop unlimited time free accounts, as with MOST MMORPG there is a free trial and a sign up... SL currently offer a unlimited free trial yet the take up has been so great that some join ... many do not.

As for paying rent etc ....again thats between which ever "precious" land owner andf the renter but the fact remains ...... if theres more taking then contributing ... then SL dies.
You have every right to your opinion as do I , I certainly would never insult you to assume that you should agree with me and certainly I did my 1 month of free trial then I joined up as I wanted to own my OWN land(relitivly speaking).
I guess this is no different to being a council house renter or owning your own home IRL.

But essentially you need to remember SL was a PAY TO PLAY experience when days were better and lindens were available (before my time) now its full of free accounts and the sims crash....... perfomance is crap..... costs are getting higher....land is flipped like a maniac and there are VAST VAST MASSIVE areas of SL that just say "FOR SALE".
I do not judge YOU personally for your investment into YOUR secondLife experience.

Where do go from here ...... if you read my WHOLE post earlier ... i stated should we abolish membership alltogether and just make i that so everyone can buy land....

But you just jumped on something that YOU found insulting.... which was the belief that free accounts are freeloading squaters who were a burden on the SL community and didnt contribute, you couldnt be further from the truth, but your belief or rather apparent belief that Free accounts SHOULD recieve every bennefit, luxury, ability and right to somebody who pays £10 a month are somewhat biased and unrealistic..... SL is not some nervana its is a business enterprise hosting a virtual world which allows its residents the ability to create. The point being what will YOU Do if LL does decide to shut its doors on the free accounts, would you go elsewhere .... would there be elsewhere....would it cost you to join...???

Again... all these things I dont know, im just a user...a resident of this place who pays his subscription and tier to enrich HIS experience.... if MY experience is stabilised and bettered for the dismissial of the free system ... then for ME ... theres the door off ya go. If LL dont try and rob the members to fund the free accounts (by way of hardware and BB costs etc) then personally... you should have the right to do what ever you please in what ever way you please.

Marty

Just a note .. i dont cash out ... so for me I HAVE to find tier from my RL.... unlike rental landlords and private estate owners

Because with every year that passes US$1 becomes worth less than it was. Don't you get a payrise each year? That's how money works.

Year on year the cost of ICT goes down. Broadband costs get lower and lower and speeds get higher. I just bought a new PC with dual core, 2GB RAM, incredibly fast graphics card, 320 gig HD that cost me less than half of what my first ever PC cost. Don't you find your ICT costs are decreasing? That's how ICT works.

Of course, in the real world it gets better and cheaper. Only in SL should it get worse and more expensive. Curiouser and curiouser.

Yes, but the decreased cost of hardware and bandwidth more than offset the decreased value of the U.S. dollar. My computer is cheaper in U.S. dollars now than it was 5 years ago--much cheaper. Yet in that time the dollar has plunged.

As far as I'm concerned, any account that has purchased Lindens on the Lindex is no longer a "free account".

No Payment Info On File folks (NPOFs) are the genuinely 'free accounts' because they don't put a RL dime of their own into anybody else's pockets (neither LLs nor any SL business owner). Sure, it's possible to contribute to society in other ways, but as in RL, taxes in SL should be inevitable. Whether it's a tiny fee on your Lindex purchases or a premium account, at least LL is collecting _something_ from you. It costs RL money to keep the platform operational, after all.

My big beef with NPOFs is uncertainty about age.
Sure, Payment Info on File/Used is hardly proof that one is an adult, but the possibility is hardly remote.
It offers _some_ reassurance that you're dealing with an adult.
When an NPOF account of a certain in-world age approaches me, I'm like.. "why haven't they even got it on file yet" if they're i) over 18 and ii) a long term resident of SL; so they get treated with kid gloves until that status changes.

Returning to topic, I always expected private island tier to levelled across the board (to $295 USD pm) this November 1st. Last years PI tier increase (for new sims) saw me dump almost a sim's worth of PI land due to uncertainty about its future value. The funny thing was that land prices actually went through the roof back then, although I suspect it became a little more difficult to 'sell' on private estates.

i agree with marty.
i also agree with walker that 'payment info on file' ppl arent really 'free accounts'.
maybe if we made an effort to recognise the distinction, less people would take offence to the whole stripped-down-newbie-account argument.

Reading this thread, I finally understand the "buy with tier" game.

The point of making us "buy" the right to rent land is to force renters to sink costs and make it harder to jump out of the land when Linden Labs does whatever it does to make land less valuable.

It's a way around making a lease with the following terms: "Landlord may modify and terminate the lease at will. Tenant has no right to terminate the lease if the tenant does not like the landlord's arbitrary changes."

Instead, either accept the arbitrary changes, or suffer a huge monetary penalty trying to dump it.

The trap of buying land has finally dawned on me. Wow, now I see that I really overspent on land. I didn't really appreciate all the risks that came with sinking a few hundred dollars to "purchase" land.

Jesus, you're getting a bad deal from your employer then!

If the rate of inflation were 5% (hypothetically) then a rise in price of 5% actually means prices have stayed the same - that's the point we're getting at.

How many people upgrade to premium the day they start? "Not many" is the answer. I've been here a year and am about to upgrade now. If I had had reduced functionality, I would have given up SL as a bad job within half an hour of creating an account - and many would do the same. Ending free accounts would lose them money in the long run.

Add to that the fact that you get little or no customer support and performance has been poor since they added voice. Plus anyone who bought their land a month ago has had its value drop by 40% should they want to resell because LL devalued the mainland with all the sim dumps. I would love to sit in on a meeting and see how they make decisions in this company...