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

Cheyenne raises an excellent point. I don't know if LL realizes how much resident goodwill they have burned through with the Openspace debacle. Its hard to recommend a Premium account to a friend or a newbie, when you are pissed and/or disgusted with Linden Lab.

A key component of any campaign to up Premium accounts should be to restore some of that lost resident goodwill and faith in Linden Lab.

I think this is called "creative accounting". Only CFOs know how to do this. It is what they are paid for. They have no need for restrictive dogma like "2+2=4".

Well, there is no charge for a basic account, how's that?

Vittorio - Good question. The stipends theoretically consume demand for L$ that we would have to fill by selling L$ openly on the exchange. That theoretical value is approximately the same as how much people pay us for premium subscriptions.

Might want to check with Robin Linden on that first before agreeing since it was pretty obvious at the traffic future meetings that traffic would never be removed and that talking about traffic falsification being unethical was poorly received.

The fact that there are now 6.5 percent (10.1 Million) of Americans unemployed may play a HUGE factor on the number of hours spent in SL in September. That isn't even taking into account other Countries. Looking for work right now might be pretty fruitless, but it won't always be that way, and these 10.1 Million will be returning to their 40 plus hour work weeks eventually which equals less time to spend in SL.

Give Premium Members a sort of fake celebrity status. We should at least count as double the traffic of non-premium. While you are at it, give us some traffic credit for having been in SL several years. =P Call it SL loyalty bonus? I'm curious to hear some of the possible down sides of this type of thing from other residents. I haven't really thought it through fully yet, but it could encourage Premium Accounts?

So if you have a premium membership (for as little as $6 a month) and own no land you can submit support tickets and or open Live chat.....but if you are basic and own a Island (paying $295 a month) your not allowed to access support or live chat?

anyone else find this wierd?

Not really--you have access to Concierge service instead.

If LL want to become a reliable company that delivers QUALITY & RESULT to its customer base is to stop the FREE ACCOUNT APPROACH!

Nothing is for free in life nor in RL nor in SL..... or LL has to become a CHARITY ORGANIZATION, but the investors want to see CASH in there pockets, isnt it ! THATS WHY IT IS CALLED A BUSINESS.

Where the whole approach goes wrong is that paying LL customers are carrying the costs for these free accounts. Who pays for the hardware, server traffic, operational costs at LL, overhead ? Yes the premium account members !

A company is as strong as there customer base, if the last one lacks the first one dies !

So it is time LL to Get all your popcorn and drinks out in the meeting room for a BRAINSTORM session (oh yeah I am not gonna pay for the pop and soda ...sorry... first result .... )

You could treat stipends (and raising them) as an "economic stimulus", with the intent of using them to grow the entire SL economy--of which LL gets its cut in so many ways.

Or is this a case of "vote Keynesian; act Austrian"?

I can sit and watch the stock market crash for free too but it also means everyones 401k including mine.. Doesn't mean I need to be happy about it LOL

I was just goin to say just that! Very good. Also Linden should not ban avatars when a DMCA is filed but they should ban IP. That would really help some of us.

Ami

You get concierge live chat support if you own an island, it's bloody awesome in my experience.

I'm having serious sense of humour failure young lady.

Cause and effect Katt. Basic accounts stimulate the economy either by spending inworld or renting privately which brings money back to you guys.

Some people can of course spend nothing but they don't do so out of the kindness of your hearts, they do so out of the kindness of our tier!

Waitaminute...
300 x 52 = 15600 L$
Annual subscription, the best deal, is 90$, which at the "normal" exchange rate of 267 is 24030.

So a payment of 15600 L$ consumes a "theoretical value" of 24030? While I don't subscribe to the "it's free for LL to give out L$" version, that statement doesn't make any sense, unless LL is giving out a massive amount of L$ to lifetime members or something like that. -Which, in any case, wouldn't really make sense to include in the calculation.
Or am I missing something here?

ETA: As pointed out, I miscalculated due to VAT. Annual subscription is 72 US$. But that still leaves Zee's theoretical value well above the Lindex value.

Unless you want to torpedo private islands and drive away what are probably your most lucrative customers, don't even *consider* doing this until you either raise the mainland tier rate to $295/mo per 65536 sq.m, or reduce private island costs to $195/mo.

I think Ciaren was talking about M when she said someone. Particulary in relation to the thread "Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden" where the promised "talk" with Jack and M didn't happen as neither has showed up or sent an appology for missing their "talk" for over a week..



"so for now" and "those are final" are conflicting.

Can you please clarify if you mean "so for now those are what LL plan on" or "This is the last word"

Well, investing US$250 as setup fee to create something certainly turned out to be a bad idea...

Shared IP addresses. Like from Universities. Banning by IP is not going to be effective. The griefers already have automated ways around that and therefore so do the rippers and so will the traffic falsifiers.

There is no code way to deal with this. Only by no warning permanent deletion of every account with a traffic falsification operation on any parcel it owns will people learn it is unacceptable.

As for DMCA? Good luck with that. The only way to deal with the problem effectively is to drop support for non Windows operating systems and work with Microsoft to set up operating system disabling on detection of non LL program memory access attempts. Otherwise it is a waste of time.

Not happening.

However a good idea is to allow region estate managers the ability to select an option that bans a resident's IP address when the resident is banned from the region. We don't need to see the IP address. Then it is a region owner's choice to ban a potentially shared IP address.

Don't people using DHCP from home end up in a shared IP address with others from that ISP?

I suspect that many region owner's wouldn't understand that the IP is not specific to an individual.

I can't decide if it would be amusing or not to see a region owner ban an IP and then discover that it's also the IP that the region owner is sharing. (Sometimes the world is smaller than expected.)

Firelight Simca

No way. That number is pretty good for lightly-populated sims, but for sims with more than five residents the percentage of bots is a lot higher. I estimate the number of bots is in the 40% range during peak concurrency and 50% during low concurrency. I detailed my reasoning in another thread.

i've looked extensively...

http://greendots.typepad.com/

I *strongly* disagree with 2 and 3.
Premium should gain perks, it shouldn't cripple others. Trying to restrict things which are otherwise freely flowing only causes people to jump through hoops and create bad blood. At *best* something like two forums would only force people to cut'n'paste between them to get the information they need.
We need people to work together, not create an artificial "us vs them".

(And I am premium, by the way).

1,947,000,000 M2 of land is 29,710 regions or so

So

11,587 Full Regions
13,073 OpenSpace Regions
4,160 Mainland.

Those OpenSpace regions bring in US$980,475 a month in tier now
Those Full Regions bring in US$3,418,165

Is your financial plan to drive a large number of people to convert their openspaces into full regions so that the low profit earner is moved into a higher profit level?

Have you accounted for the drop in lindex and user to user spend and user hours online as a portion of the (let's say) 20,000 or so people who own land on OpenSpace islands get fed up with the game and leave or otherwise curtail their spending and time online?

Butterflies in the Amazon.

It will be very interesting to see the january figures, but even more interesting to see the figures a year from now after the "Final" price rise in July '09.

I agree Ban the bots. They just suck resourses from the servers, Maybe if all the bots were gone, the OS would perform better. However in saying that, I am not teckie so maybe I am wrong. But I like the idea of 4 logins from one IP. Works for me.

Why have a premium account and spend $79 a year. I only own islands.. However, you do get better service at times from the chat line if you have a premium account