Q3 closed on a high note with an unusually strong September. Talk 11/12 w/Zee Linden

In real currency? That's the way to make money!

Thanks for the lession, I'm always willing to learn - english isn't my native language

But the point is, that the most bots aren't used in a good way.
I know some users who runs 10-12 camping bots over the night to earn money. Some of them are too stingy to buy lindens, but that isn't the point. This makes the user-to-user transactions senseless. Also the time users spends in-world is senseless with 20% bots.

On the other hand for marketing 70.000 online users looks nice and it's a good marketing argument. But this is a illusion only and i can't believe that Linden Lab want this.

I think Linden Lab has more then one option to eliminate the bots from traffic and online counting, maybe it's a good start to do so. This won't affect bots with good functions.

Actually I will not be "reconfiguring" in Q4 here. I already reconfigured that with the purchase of 5 regions in OpenLife grid. The only reconfigure I can offer Linden Lab is freeing up some server space as I give them 2 regions back and say bye bye. I would also expect to see Q1 & 2 , 2009 display dismal results because of your increase tier policy, non response to what your customers asked of you and your basic greed. I'm sure Q3 did close higher after all the sales of Open Space regions that you just robbed the owners of countless dreams. To be blatantly posting this to your blog is a slap in the face to all of the people who put food on your table and you just hit over the head with a hammer. Q3 & Q4 close on a "low" note for the people you robbed of their dreams and money.

Well, thank you, Zee for at least acknowledging this. I will move forward with my plans to sell at a loss or abandon my OS sim, and exploring the viability of other virtual worlds, since LL can no longer be trusted.

Have been wanting these for nearly as long as I've been in Second Life ... Does it help that I've been a premium member since I signed up over a year ago? Don't own mainland, so I'm not including those.



Once you start participating in SL for any extended period, those group slots fill up FAST. I find myself dumping really great groups because I'm maxed out. It's how we stay up-to-date about artist performances, new content releases, business-related support, and on and on. I've actually heard many people tell me they create Alts simply to juggle additional groups.



The Picks tab is how people are able to direct other residents to worthwhile areas; the possibility allows for more traffic, more transactions. It's also how a lot of residents highlight friends, more info about themselves as content creators, performers and as a person.



Never understood why this wasn't a real option from the beginning ... All other chat interfaces allow for it, and I think it would allow the opportunity to create content, work on customer service and more simply, roam around SL unimpeded by a flurry of IM's. It's a pain in the, well, you know, to click "Hide Status" for everyone in a Friend's list ... it also doesn't protect your status from any object that can call up your user key.

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For me personally, I would even go as far as to argue that the stipend could be eliminated, but I'm sure that would be one step too far for most. Make the user experience better, more efficient. That's worth the quarterly $22.50 I shell out.

and you added more to it by limiting avi's, lowering prim counts and script caps. So the only changes to the original announcement were ripping off your customer base more.

Sad sad sad sad.

Bots are fun and all, but a bot doesn't even know it should add somebody to a group unless some script tells it to. Sure, we can keep adding more moving parts for every simple thing we want to do, further complicating chimeric contraptions that would make Rube Goldberg jealous, but ultimately why should I want to even minimally belabor the login and presence services with a bot, when the script--which has to exist anyway--could perform the same function with a single call? And that's not to mention all the other vital things that scripts *need* to do with Group information, if only Group were a first-class object in LSL.

Just a short note about Linden Land for newcomers to the game, the introductory L$1 per meter land. I started in February 2007 and spent a bit of time exploring and getting to know the ins and outs of SL, I then started to look around for the Linden Land to buy a 512m plot for the L$512, it was impossible to find and after a month it became evident why, because the program was stopped and I understand completely why. But again that was mainly a product that suffered mismanaged control on your part.

My point, if I had bought Linden Land at this time, I would probably be a premium payer and have a much larger chunk of land now, actually I would probably have a openspace sim and feeling a bit distressed about it, so thanks for saving me from that, but as it is, I am still after nearly 2 years, not a premium member and I don't own land at all. As time as passed I have learnt to live in SL without owning or even renting land, due to many other generous residents.

Will I buy land? well yes probably one day, but that's still nearly two years and counting that you've not made much money from me at all, probably 10 to 20 US$ in the exchange rate charge.

A new type of product allowing new residents to purchase cheap Linden Land is a great way to increase your retention rate and way to increase the small change from premium membership and a good way forward to increase revenue from those residents that WILL eventually expand their land holdings.

You can pass that on to Jack too.

OK agreed. Of course it's silly to try to do everything a script can do using a bot but I hope we can both agree that some tasks will be near to impossible to do with scripts and must be left to bots and plenty of tasks are simply more efficient with bots.

The whole first land thing was only gamed because land prices were so high it made it financially viable to pay the $9.99 for a premium alt, get the cheap land and then resell it. With prices down where they are now there would be no gaming at all, apart from perhaps people running around trying to convince newbies to sell their first land for L$2/sqm instead of decent market rates.

If LL had just pumped more land into the market at the time and kept prices down they could have continued the first land offer quite easily. I suppose it had other downsides from their perspective, maybe it cost more to administer than it was worth but assuming that is not the case then they should look into starting it back up again because we need prices around 12/sqm or higher (if I remember correctly) before there's any way to game the offer. It really was a great way to spread goodwill and just about everyone who owns 512sqm eventually upgrades to something bigger. Plus it would really drive more people into mainland instead of wandering homelessness and improve retention in my opinion.

Then you do extremely well with english. So well that I didn't know it isn't your first language.

I wasn't being serious with my question about bots. I run 22 myself. But we can turn this into a bots thread - it would be far more enjoyable than discussing how well LL is doing at a time when they are reaping the rewards of conning their customers.

It's this kind of selfish, short-sighted thinking that gets us into problems like the one we seem to be in. This is really the only application you can think of, or is it the only one you want to put forth as an example that suits your agenda?

Good or bad, we've been posting them every month since I got here. This year I've been commenting on the quarterly.

I think the best way to do that with the data we already have would be to look at LindeX Volume. We've tried what you suggested a number of ways and its never something that is concrete enough to rely on.

I'm not sure if I completely understand your question - but we were selling about 20 to 30 open spaces per day before that time. Is that your question?

Yep, we agree. I'm "pro-script" but not at all "anti-bot." (I'm vehemently anti-Traffic, but that's a whole different issue.) I'd only favor banning bots (as if such a thing could be done) if it lead to better support for LSL (as if such a thing... ah, nevermind. ).

We did let the L$ appreciate against the USD by one Linden dollar. In general we will seed to let the L$ appreciate a little bit against the USD. We did it at this time to "tighten up" the supply. We recognize the pricing changes are a bit of a shock to the system as is the real world economy. So we're basically giving people a small incentive to hold L$ by letting it appreciate a little.

Sinks and sources are the levers that we have to stabilize the exchange rate. Currently all of the sources are just a bit smaller than all of the sinks. That causes the supply of L$ to contract if we did not sell L$ openly on the exchange. So while sinks do not have a direct financial impact on us, they do help us manage the exchange rate & if the demand for L$ is stronger than the supply (on the LindeX) then we can sell L$ and that does have a financial impact. Its a bit complicated so I hope my explanation is clear.

I'm sorry. You're right. It does appear that way. We certainly didn't do this on purpose. We should not have re-launched open spaces with the full prim count and without any restrictions. It created a situation - if we didn't change it - where we would not have been able to continue to invest aggressively in improving Second Life. So we had to make the change. And you can imagine this was not easy for us to do. Then when we made the change, we listened to the feedback and changed it again trying to address the various types of residents who were affected. We hope that we have found a way to address the issues of most people with the final changes that M announced.

A few forum posts back from this one, I explained how we use sinks and sources to manage the supply of Linden dollars and hence the exchange rate. If our sinks were larger and our sources were smaller (read stipends) then we would have to sell more L$ on the exchange to keep the exchange rate stable. In that way, if there were no stipends, and the demand for L$ remained unchanged, then we would have to sell all the L$ that we didn't stipend. In that way, we tend to think of the stipends as a real cost.

Of course, I'm *not* saying that we would take away stipends and leave premiums the way they are without stipends. We need to improve the premium subscription & make them less dependent on the value that the stipends provide to residents.

I hope that makes sense. I'm trying to answer the question as directly and as honestly as I can. Feel free to ask a clarifying question if you need to! Thanks!

I am for some reason alarmed by the latest entry here, in particular one element that alarms me is the following excerpt.



The reason I am alarmed is that it tells me that whom ever produced this report is not in touch with the reality of the way Second Life is running. I get the feeling it has been written by some one who has no active working interest in Second Life and from some one who rarely gets to interact with real people on the grid. Zee may have posted the report and I know that Zee has a reasonable working knowledge of second life.

The sales above, we are told is where land in Nautilus Region is changing hands at a whopping 60L$ per square meter, and the inference is that tenants really want to live there so they are snapping the land up at really high prices. That from what I have seen is wrong. I have seen land barons buying the land at auction and then selling the plots with crazy prices of upto120,000 L$ per plot. These are not residents moving in, but players trying to sell land at grossly inflated prices. (I am not calling them realtors as realtors that I have met are not as misguided).

These figures we are led to beleive are from a quarter when the Lindens announced a hold on new sims as there was a decrease in the demand for sims. So what is happening? I do not want to write something negative here as I know posts get pulled pretty quick these days if the Lindens disagree with the content. (Thus skewing opinion and creating an untrue bias in perception)

My questions are:
1) What percentage of land sold on Nautilus, has been resold or is up for sale? If residents were buying it to move in and stay, I would expect a low figure. If it being bought and sold, churned, I would expect a high figure.

2) What percentage of land has been reclaimed by Gov Linden in the same 1/4? How are land returns matching up to the new land being introduced, In other words, how much land made available is new, and how much has been owned before.

3) What are the current figures for:-

a) Number of avatars per region as I regularly see clutches of sims with not more than one or two avatars on?

b) Percentage of avatars who pay Tier to other players or Linden labs?

c) Number of daily logins divided between Premium members ( able to hold land) and non premium members (capable of being a bot)

The reason I ask these figures is that I get the distinct impression from your figures that the hundreds of bots we see are actually contributing to the land purchasing, user to user transactions and active daily registrations. Nothing could be further from the truth as at least one sim near my own has upwards of 40 users at a atime on it and they are all camping, many are still ruths. They are bots, not active players, and your figures dont seem to differentiate between them and regular users. That means your figures are being presented wrong, and that Zee, to be perfectly honest worried the heck out of me. If you are prepared as a Company to present figures that are not being shown correctly, what else is being hidden?

warmest but worried regards:

River Ely

I know M is reading this entire forum. I'm not sure what you're asking him to apologize for. We do listen as best we can and, as you can see in this forum, I'm answering as much as I know. I expect to spend most of the day keeping up on this forum. I will be shutting this forum down at the end of the day today so I can return to my normally scheduled programming.

I've thought about that. Its a bit of a chicken and egg problem. When we want the demand and supply to rebalance at a new price - we could announce it...but I think that would perhaps be a bit artificial and I'm not sure if it would have the desired impact of actually soaking up any excess supply. Instead, announcing it might cause the sellers to wait thereby changing the price because supply is artificially reduced while the sellers wait for the better price. See what I mean? So for now, we'll try to keep it stable. You can get an indication of what's happening in the market on your own though - simply by looking at the sell depth and the buy depth. When you see the sell depth thinning at once price, you can see ahead of time that it might shift.

Thanks Ciaran. The forums end up much more productive when we're engaged. I'm glad I have the time to do it today.

I think people who were renting parcels on open spaces are going to be hurt the most in the short term. Open spaces were not designed to be rented on. Too many renters could have a bad experience and that would harm their second life experience.

So, folks who were using the open spaces as intended (as open spaces) can stay at the $75 price point & accept the increased restrictions that we're putting on them.

For folks renting land on open spaces, they will have to raise their rental prices - but because there's no longer that cheapest option for buying land, I think all the landlords will have to raise their prices in unison. Its painful in the short term, but necessary for us to be able to invest all that we want to in Second Life to make it a great experience for all of our existing and future residents. I know that doesn't sound very personally helpful to you and your specific situation. But I hope you understand. Thanks for your question.

We're not seeing complete abandonment. If you have an open space region there are many folks who will buy it from you. They can consolidate 4 open space regions in to one full region without paying a fee - we're seeing that happen a lot.