Should LL reduce tier to keep the failing economy in SL alive?

I have a feeling LL can't reduce tier enough to offset the other issues that affect retention and the inclination to buy land. Combine the generally awful new user experience with the self-created atmosphere of fear uncertainty and doubt related to the vague and contradictory policy on Adult behaviors and content, and you're left with a very small number of people who will a) stick around and b) feel confident that they'll be able to do what they want to do with any land they'd consider buying. It's not just Adult stuff either; there's a sense that anything not completely mainstream that one might want to do in SL is likely to either be broken with the next "upgrade", have the price jacked up, disabled outright in the name of platform stability or become a bannable offense overnight.

My thoughts too. With 1024 (have 512 now) and the extra 117 prims I'd then be spending in SL - better house etc.

I am not holding out for any reduction in tier. I am awaiting the changes that were suppose to take place to make the mainland experience worth the aggravation. The Brooklyn consulting firm was suppose to present these changes in November of this year (info from so old blog post I can't get because I am typing this on a phone).

I would just like to see a mainland perk package that shows that LL appreciates our business. Now it is just a overpriced slum abandoned by the landlords (and no, the Community Partner Program - where the Lindens give Private Estate Barons incentives to supervise the mainland -is not a mainland improvement).

I have a sinking feeling that Big Spaceship's touted 'advancements' may be the blorum and the green and black xstreet revamp.

You'd be more like a content creator. Some people think this is a good idea. Given what LL is willing to pay through their new third-party contracting site, it looks like LL thinks this is a good idea.

Welcome to the club, you poor sod

THe numbers were taken off the top of my head. But I think the stability of the grid is less dependant on tier than you're suggesting: after what it went through with the OpenSpace/Homestead fiasco, if it was at all fragile we'd be seeing armagriddon now.

Every day is a victory, Anya That said, if the boat isn't rocked too hard things should be okay; basic conservative principles of 'income is X, tier is Y, reserves are Z for when something stupid happens' have held out pretty well now for nearly 4 years.

Argent, the grid has been quite resilient... yet I'm worried more about an IBM style or AOL style sense of invincibility. IBM and AOL pwned all... until they didn't. Or even Kodak, who should have been poised to take digital photography by storm... except... they were too successful with chemical films that they blinded themselves with their own success well past the final 'sell by' date.

I'm not one much for chaos theory or other catastrophic failure schemas, but sometimes a "snapping point" analogy is valid. It might be a perfect storm of competitors, an advance in graphics cards or even a cultural shift... but I could see the whole SL paradigm falling rapidly in a very short timeframe unless certain correct moves were made at critical junctures.

Of course, I don't know what those moves are, any more than the rest of us... but there's a lot of dominating tech companies that zigged when they should have zagged, and fell *fast* and unrecoverably. Consider where Kodak, IBM, AOL, Wang, Smith Corona, and Sears would be if they only covered their bets a little. Even inflexible industries that have been propped up with billions can't hold on forever... Motor City redux. Anyway, I'm rambling.



Interestingly enough... after years of agreeing with this, I'm beginning to wonder if the hosting is actually the least valuable component of what the grid represents these days.

It's more the brand now I think, and the exposure. For instance, an ad in the New York Times might be worth more than an ad in the Mayberry Town Newsletter... even if the 'hosting' is the same. The same ink, the same grade of paper and so forth.

This isn't an entirely finished thought either, I'm a bit loopy tonight and trying to keep a fever down... but just something to think about.

You know i was really taken back when the adult grid came out the same pricing as mature and PG sims for tier. Then again there would have been a huge ruckus, but i think there's many creators out there making alot of money, that aren't having the expenditures that land owners have. Then too that does at least encourage creativity. Perhaps there should be the 7 sins taxes implied...and bring gambling back, since then the sex business has certainly blossomed since gambling's demise. I do get irked when i see a club running 25 ad boards for escorts off of a 2048 lot at a substantial cost per week on the ad boards. Not to mention the off the top tip % they get from dancers. To think all that had to be moved to an adult area, for the sake of keeping SL more advantageous to the corporate owners, that cost too am sure will be passed on to the rest of us.

Perhaps its time SL had new tier based on the usage of the sim, with PG land being the lowest tier, but that would bring up who would be on morality patrol to be sure no one was sinning in the PG sims. Being as SL is poorly equipped to do much more customer service than they are stretched to do now, i can't see them successfully keeping a PG sim pure. As far as not charging tier on up to 1024, shesh i have (6) 512's in front of our mall now that are full of crap, and the owners no longer exist in SL, but i can't get SL to assume ownership and clear them, to me that is not a win win proposition. All that own land should be paying tier, but the amounts are getting to be cost prohibitive for most to own that are in it for entertainment/social/hobbyist situations.

So SL pretty much has to is own detriment created a Sodom and Gomorrah, and that certainly in the future won't get better unless they seek in players that want to maintain and support PG and mature sims, but in this economy, it gets more cost prohibitive by the day.

Cannot, shall not, and will not happen without some major changes in US law. Gambling online, hosted on US-based servers, is illegal, regardless of who is running the games and who is paying to play them. Bring back gambling and kiss Linden Lab and Second Life goodbye forever for running illegal gambling operations.

That's why the gambling ban exists.

I first read this idea nearly 3 years ago when I joined SL, and they're still the only game in town. Open Life and the others based on LL's code are still struggling to achieve the level of performance and stability that SL had when I joined. Blue Mars may be great, but it doesn't give the freedom and ease of creation SL does. For me, competition to SL would have to do exactly the things SL does, but better and cheaper. No sign of that so far.

Then how do all the "party poker" and other gambling games online exist?

Nominally, they're "not gambling" because there's an element of "skill" involved in winning. In reality, of course, there's hardly any skill required in many of them, but evidently LL Legal decided they could get away with it and have, so far. And that scary big change in US law that would make the problem go away? Might well happen, before all that long.

But it's important not to overestimate the effect that would have on the grid economy--just as it's important not to overestimate the effect of the initial ban. What happened at that point was just that the "gambling economy" got more centralized. Caused a huge disruption, with a lot of once-large gambling businesses leaving, replaced by about the same amount of gambling, all controlled by a very few Linden-blessed scripters, who have been rolling in money because of that "ban."

Anyway, this part I find baffling: Could you possibly be suggesting that Adult region tier might have been *higher* than PG and Mature? If so, you might want to skim through some of the more recent transcripts of Blondin's Zindra meetings to see just how grim are prospects of survival for Adult businesses that played by the rules, and the huge incentives LL accidentally created to cheat on those rules. Higher tier would have been just another way to encourage the cheaters to bury their rule-abiding competition.

*crosses fingers and thinks good thoughts*

Hope you can beat it before it breaks through and tuck in all warm .

Kodak actually weathered the transition pretty well. The camera company that really took it on the chin was Polaroid, because their business was all about exactly the kinds of thing that even early digital cameras did better: instant photography.

Not sure what is baffling about it, the sexually oriented stores, clubs, creators etc are making most of the larger profits in SL, and being as they had to have an entire continent created, the moving, the paperwork of such, etc the expense should be shared by others who for whatever reason are not involved in sexual content? Hence the tier will more than likely go up for all at the first sign of the RW economy perking up, but doubtful LL would even consider mainland PG or Mature discounting. That would be my point.

With Kodak there biggest crisis was when camcorders came out in the early 80's. There 8mm home movie (film) bussiness disapeared in about 2 or 3 years. With digital cameras they didn't make the same mistake.

The baffling part is the fact that there is such a large number of businesses still allowed to be on the non-Zindrafied mainland, and also on private estates that are not flagged adult, because they don't advertise with forbidden keywords, and are still selling adult content which the responsible adult stores have moved to adult regions where their customer base is required to be adult verified.

To insist that not only do they have to put up with their competition not doing the right thing and moving to adult regions, but also have to pay higher tier on top of it because they actually did do the right thing, is a major slap in the face, and totally impossible to grasp your logic here.

Don't know if you seen this but an interesting statistic from Pandorah Ashdene

*Governor Linden directly owns 30% of Mainland land by area*

That's not good is it!


The rest of the numbers:

This week's numbers
Since LL is still 'repairing' their statistics page, again quoted from Tyche Shepherd's blog ( http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/business-land-economy/8523-new-second-life-sims-past-19.html ) this week's island numbers:

*
Yet again a slow week on the Grid, which showed a small net growth of 30 regions (29 Private Estates).

Total number of Main Grid regions is now 29403 ( 23798 private estates & 5605 Linden owned).
168 new regions were added and 30 returned to the grid, with 177 regions removed (71 were renamed and 3 came and went since last report).
There were no major coming or goings on the Grid though the new 33 Ursula Regions were renamed to their final names.

Whilst my daily grid surveys have showed a quiet grid, I've been busy this week running two special surveys. The first completed on Monday shows that Governor Linden directly owns 30% of Mainland land by area, and that 84% of Resident Owned Mainland is group owned.
The second completed on Friday estimates that 60% of Private Estates are Full Regions, 39% Homesteads and 1% Openspaces.

Adult regions grew by 27 to 1651 (5.6%), PG Regions grew by 5 to 4644 (15.8%).
Breakdown of current regions by Ownership and Classification:

* Estate - Adult: 1303
* Estate - Mature: 19264
* Estate - Offline: 9
* Estate - PG: 3222
* Linden - Adult: 348
* Linden - Mature: 3835
* Linden - PG: 1422

I think the problem with lowering tier is that it would instantly hurt many of LL's best customers - the land resellers. Changing the proportionality rules for tier would unquestionably do this, since that's what land sellers depend on for their profit margins.

That said I also think that the tier fees serve some useful function for social engineering - and that they might well have been intended that way. If you could have a complete sim for US$5 a month, then we would now have a grid of several million sims - and if you think SL feels like a ghost town now..

And regarding the competitors - I again think we need to be careful. Argent's definition of a VW may well mandate that "it will only mainly appeal to a small number of people", but I fear that it's more than that - that it depends on an experience which CANNOT be delivered to any but a small percentage of the virtual society at one time, and so if only the "small number of people" who currently enjoy it were left, it would be gone because there would be nobody to be their audience/foil.

/me doesn't see LL playing with tier. Not at the lower levels, anyway.

Having a graph of the various tier levels and how many people are in them would show you the lines that they're willing to poke at. At some tier level, probably 8k or 16k, the number of people at that tier drops way off - those places (or just beyond them) are where LL should add a few more steps in tier..

Ah, one of those enjoyable calculus problems. Hopefully someone at LL knows their calculus.

People in SPR who never built so much as a room or scripted their descriptions still enjoyed playing with my Otterizer (a gadget that temporarily turns your character into an otter, complete with speech emotes and description). But if that kind of thing wasn't possible in world I wouldn't have been there to make it for them. Same thing in Second Life with my "don't touch this" button. All the crazy cool stuff that makes SL cool depends on the "virtual world"ness of the platform.

Today,I tried Blue Mars for the very 1st time...i've been putting it off, even though i was one of the 1st to be accepted for a Developer's license. For me to play Blue Mars successfully i would need to buy another computer (higher end).....I think that's the big fail part of Blue Mars. It will take a few years before the average household PC is equipped to handle Blue Mars.
For the 1/2 hour or hour that I did spend on the Beta platform, I wasn't overly impressed....i'm talking about it's basic functionality here! Nope...this won't be the SL killer people were waiting for. Initially i was one of those that thought Blue Mars could.....but they've scored some own goals imo (they took a few leaves out of LL's book)


.

Yes and no.

The people who enjoyed playing with it could have played with it on any platform that contained it (regardless of how it got there, by user creation or otherwise).

You enjoyed creating it, but in order to make it worthwhile, there would have to be people who would want to use it (ok, possibly including yourself).

I know there's the argument that an isolated "content creation team" could never produce the huge variety of content found in SL, which is fair enough, but there's the counter-argument that the majority of content in SL isn't actually valuable (one blog I read claimed that roughly 8 out of 10 items in any given store probably wouldn't sell and were only there to stop competitors from knowing what idea to copy)

Agreed to these points!

Yes, because Anshe pays for all of her sims out of her very own pocket .

If LL would be able to lure renters away from cookie-cutter landlords its profit would only increase because they could offer a lower tier than the renters were paying, but still higher than those landlords were paying them.

Landlords (the cookie-cutter kind) are not a necessity and shouldn't be catered to.