New Homestead legality question

Based on what's been said, the original intention of the OS was to enhance estates etc with open water, park or forest areas, so the intention was they were recreational, not a commercial option. So based on this restricting to full sim owners seemed reasonable since it was an enhancement to existing property.

The new Homestead are being defined as available for rental, so they will now have the potential to be a small scale money making venture.

"If you want more than an Openspace, we will offer you the choice of moving to a new product called Homesteads that is intended for light use such as low density rentals. For existing Openspace owners we will phase in the price increase for this new product over the next 6 months. Homesteads will also have technical limits for avatars and prims, and eventually script limits as well."

I'm not a lawer, and don't have any idea about US laws on this, but given a few on here, including myself, have suggested that the Homesteads at the new price should be available to everyone, not just full sim owners, I'm wondering if now that they will be a profit making design, whether this change is almost a guarantee due to fair competition laws?

How do fair competition laws (whatever that is) come into play ....... The price of admission is a full sim. Just as the only way to get the colonel's secret recipe is through a franchise.

IF LL sold them direct you could expect the price to increase further as they would have to staff up customer service to take care of everyone direct.

Here there are fair trade laws that don't allow discounts and the like being offered to some customer and not others. For example, a bulk discount might be offered on a total spend of an order, but it can't be a limited offer to those who spend x million a year.

The franchise restriction would equate to must be a premium member. The full sim restriction says some customers/users are more entitled than others to certain products and earning capacity.

In the for what it's worth category, there are practicing RL attorneys in SL, some of whom are very much aware of the OS changes.

It is a shame that the situation would need to involve attorneys, but what is sad is that with the lack of communication from LL, it appears that the only thing they will respond to is a formal complaint filed through the courts. Then they will be forced to talk and explain the changes.

Do a search for: Second Life Bar Association

I'm not going to take legal action over this. I'd like to keep my sim, I'm willing to pay the $125 a month to do so, but no more. I doubt there's an estate owner out there who would provide an OS sim at cost so the only way I'm likely to keep it is if LL make them available equally to everyone.

I'd just like some actual factual information, from LL, from my estate owner. We don't know what the restrictions will be, we don't know who will be able to buy these new homesteads, I don't know what percentage of the increase will be passed on to me. Really we being asked to make a decision on guesswork and good faith....neither of which is a good strategy for making budget decisions.

Edit:
"IF LL sold them direct you could expect the price to increase further as they would have to staff up customer service to take care of everyone direct."

Why? I think we've called our estate manager 3 or 4 times since we got our sims and the only reason we couldn't deal with the problem ourselves was because we don't have full admin rights. SL isn't rocket science. With full admin rights most people could sort things themselves.

I think the need of having to own at least one full sim before being able to have addon products like homestead is like having to have a reseller account with a webhoster before being able to sell their webhosting as your own, agreeable a steep price to get access to the estate market but without it there would be even more fly by night estate owners giving the more reputable estate owners a bad name.
Offcourse that is probably not the reasoning of LL behind it, they just want to make more money.

There are also associated billing costs. If they sold direct and the product grew then that extra revenue should cover the extra costs. If they sell direct and it just means replacing existing owners with new owners and lots of them, that's going to be a cost burden to Linden Lab. Maybe they're ahead of the game here and that's why the price increase is so steep and they plan to sell direct at some stage.

Linden Lab are in this to make profit, they will have worked out the costs of doing business, if they thought they could increase their bottom line by selling direct they would do it.

I doubt selling to individuals would alter the support or the billing costs at all. Especially not the billing costs. And if they are using spreadsheets with macros and vb script or an access database or some such hacky quacky junk for billing then they need to eat the extra costs via deduction from executive pay as a penalty for not licensing proper software to take care of this sort of thing. Then they will have incentive to get the job done right.

Support? Same number of sims requires the same support regardless of the number of owners. Part of the terms of use for buying any sim should be a statement to the effect the customer is expected to familiarize themselves with the estate tools and region management. Then if an account constantly has issues that could have been resolved themselves they are offered an expensive additional support plan. As soon as most people are confronted with increasing costs for their unwillingness to learn they stop and learn.

Again, don't punish the grid. Don't cripple the sims. Discourage the problem people from being a problem.

The whole problem I have with this, is this...

"Homesteads will also have technical limits for avatars and prims, and eventually script limits as well."

So what exactly am or will I be paying for?

Well if need still to own a full sim to buy an Homestead ?

Actually, in order for LL to be able to sell OS regions to individuals who are not already estate owners, they would have to revamp the support options and greatly increase their current concierge support staff as all individual owners of OS regions would fall under concierge support. This is one reason for the current requirements of owning a full prim region before being able to purchase an OS region. There would be a significant increase in support needs as most Estate owners (at least those who own multiple regions) are fairly well versed in estate tools and the knowledge needed to manage full regions. Although there are certainly quite a few individuals who posses the same knowledge who are not estate owners, all the ones that don't would dramatically increase the support calls and support tickets. While not all multi-sim estate owners are responsible, many do offer a pretty good level of support to their renters/residents and many times can solve the problem that otherwise would go to Linden support staff.

Payment processing Ann. Accepting Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, costs money. As it stands now the big estate owners, Anshe, Desmond, Otherland, even Prok although he's mostly mainland so it's a slightly different situation, will be likely to be paying their tier fees from their Linden dollar balance. Consumers however aren't likely to be paying this way, they'll be making direct card payments, that will increase costs.




People won't do this, you've got a bit too much faith in people reading the manual there. As it stands a lot of support is done from inworld folks rather than Linden Lab, the more people who have access to Linden support the more people will use it and why shouldn't they if they're paying for it.