Second life d day.

Thousands of us wait for this reaction from LL. the so called final decision regarding the future of OS. Many of us are very dead set on our feelings about this price increase and i feel this may be a defining moment in sl history.

It could very well be the kickoff to the end of SL as we know it. The loss of trust on LL's part is not one so easily overcome and if they do not do an almost complete 180 .. they very well may see the biggest and loudest and most damaging of protests they have ever witnessed. And that will be beginning of the end with the start of a major withdraw of the very people who pump the money into the game.

This is not the first time i seen corporate big shots stir the pot in online services only the distroy what it is they where messing with. Sony who has been in gaming a lot longer has done it on several occasions and has a poor reputation with the online community, and they provide a lot more services for a lot less money then LL does.


The online community is not a board room, it is a extremely intelligent and highly informed source of income. Depending on how you treat us, we can be extremely accommodating or brutally harse.

We as a hole represent all walks of life, from the very poor to the very rich, the most educated to the barely can type on a keyboard. the able bodied to the not so able bodied. By far the Internet community as a whole is the most diversified group of men and women you will ever come across.

It never takes much to anger on group or another when dealing with such a diverse and passionate group, but to anger enough to unify so many of them against the service providing company takes a great act of stupidity or greed. Good job on that part....


As people await to see what happens, if your final decision is as equally infuriating, expect to take heavy losses in the pocket book. Ohh sure some will stay for a while till the loss of the others start to effect the rest of the grid. the diminished land masses will make for laggy other places and loss of friends.. Seeing sims like some of rezables oldest ones going down is a sure sign of failure, how many other of the cool places to go will start to poof.

tick... tock... time goes on and so do we, we lick our wounds and carry on spilling out into the net in seek of new and interesting things to do. While we are passionate in the things we do. We are still free to do as we wish. And once we are gone its far to late to do something about it.

Time will tell what destruction LL decides to bring down onto its self. We can only hope they wise up before its too late.

People are making exceedingly good posts today! I like your eloquence, almost poetic in a way.

And I agree. This is the D-Day for SL. I've already made plans for my future; something I wouldn't have even considered before this openspace row kicked off. But the more I discuss it with friends, the more keen we are to move on and find a better place.

I can't be the only one.

You certainly are not the only one Stoo. This has certainly taken the wind from my sails and my desire to even be inworld since this OS issue began has been significantly diminished. Further, the recent statement that "Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business." for me added insult to injury.

I'm being extra cynical here, but why announce this today? The day after the presidential election? Is this their way of 'burying bad news'? If so, it worked 'cos today I don't care about OS anymore. It all kinds of fades away to nothing compared with the fact that Obama got elected.

Obama = YES WE CAN!

Linden Lab = NO YOU CAN'T! =P

In almost total agreement, though we will linger here using my free tier 512 allowance, being an olde worlde premium member maybe.

But as you say in my time here I have never known LL to be overly proactive with the residents. though now they just plough on arrogantly paying us no heed and making announcements and adding shineys to their lumbering behemoth of a grid we all love/hate so.

If this price hike goes through then we will be looking elsewhere to spend our time, not overly worried about whistles and bells, we will be happy to go without all the pretties that SL allows.........

Such a shame the assinine attitude that filters down from the top of Linden Labs seems to have permeated so far.

Lack of information...once they were overflowing with info on login and blog pages and now it's tiresome and dreadful trying to navigate from page to totally unrelated page chasing info......from the Co that wants to make the newb experience simple enjoyable and easy......get real....they can't even make their website user friendly.

sighs, this was gonna be a short note of agreeance but my ire rose as I typed, soz guys and girls but feelings are runnin high as I wait for the...D Day to arrive, it has already here in the old UK

Without a doubt the timeframe here is allmost sure to be something to do with the elections .

Could it allso be that Obama stated that he would be taxing companies that make more than 3/4 mill per year ....Are LL trying to get us to foot the bill for an expected price rise in TAX for them ?

Hmmmm

Not going to happen.

We have been screwed over by LL since forever.

The masses are not going anywhere. This is not the end of SL as we know it. That happened when 1.2 came out and LL heard that magical $CHA-CHING$ sound as the first tier payments ever rolled in.

ALL of you in this forum can quit now and in 1 month time you will be replaced by people who are absolutely oblivious to any land tier increase whatsoever.

No numbers enough to hurt LL are withdrawing. No one is going anywhere except to the mainland after they lose their OpenSpace.

I think the bad publicity that has been generated will really damage the new user database. For instance, the amount of anger In World is hard to gauge but it will have a detrimental effect on confidence of new users. I for one have always supported Linden Labs and have run a website inviting people to join http://spacexcape.com . But now, instead of inviting people, I will be warning people from use of it and I will be actively watching out for new programmes to complete my project. My announcement on my website will depend on the outcome of their announcement here today.

How will it have an effect on new users? A new user signs up, learns about OS sims, wants one, learns the price, and decides to pay it.

How many people have you invited to SL?

When the membership is MILLIONS your invitation to a few, or a dozen or 10 dozen, is nothing.

This issue is history. New users will join and just say "aww too bad they are not cheaper" and buy an OS sim anyways, or invest in the mainland.

It is win/win for LL, and lose/lose for the people who quit.

Thats exactly what SOE thought too with their inovative changes to SWG that in the end dropped the active subscriptions from 900,000 to around 35,000 in just a couple months. and most of the 35,000 where only active cause they have blanket accounts that cover all SOE games. All the new users they figured they would get with the new interface.. never showed..... nothing but crickets and pvp in that game now.


You know why WOW does so well? they tend to not screw with what works.


as far as members in the millions ... they don't have millions of paying customers, they never have. they have 15,732,926 accounts, out of 16 million accounts you have less then 1 million that log in in a months time, of them how many are bots alts and non paying accounts?


here is an interesting stat... grant it its just the start of the month....

Islands Added Month Islands Owned Islands Added
(During Month)
November 2008 26422 -117
October 2008 26539 1045

Apples and Oranges.

The user attraction between Star Wars / WoW / SL are totally different to the point of being alien.

Yes it is easy to drop a game that you pay a subscription fee to when your character has been changed and you can no longer function the same way you used to in your every day grind of rat slaying and adventuring. Most definitely, you "nerf" characters and you change a persons view of their virtual self in that world, possibly causing the players to feel their character is no longer them. After all, if you played a UmpleDump because UmpleDumps can slay MooBeats with 6 hits using the Object of Ooze, and they remove your ability to do that, then you feel personally slighted and something you did EVERYDAY is no longer achievable and may very well feel like you are no longer an UmpleDump, so why play the game any longer?

Owning an OpenSpace sim and losing it is not the same as losing an integral attribute to your player character that allowed you achieve a specific goal in the game world.

There is very little LL can do to people here that have the same personal effect as nerfing a MMORPG characters abilities short or deleting the shape and complete inventory of a user, by accident, and it being unrecoverable. And even then plenty of people will not leave but look at is an opportunity to start anew.

No. You cannot compare SWG or Everquest, or Dark age of Camelot or Aherons Call or any of those games and the changes their makers do, to SL.

If you say so.... only time will tell. Hope you don't loose your shorts in the process.

... given that SL has no goals, losing land that you own and have created into some particular dream of yours, be it that tropical paradise, store selling your own products, dark RP area, or whatever... I'd say that was pretty integral, in all honesty.

If you are a musician in SL, and you're about to lose your own 'venue' that you built.. I'd say that's part of your 'gameply' quite happily nerfed for no good reason.

67% price increases are not 'a good reason' by anyone's standards, neither is a blanket increase for everyone instead of against the few people that truly are abusing low prim sims.

No. We are selling our Full Sim and moving to the mainland.

Months of work down the toilet. And literally days and hours of labor ahead while i change the landmark inside hundreds of pieces of furniture.

I think ANYONE hanging on to a Full Island will not only lose their shorts, but will be given a sand enema by LL in the upcoming future.

The difference being "nerfed" affects your character and is internalized as people identify their character with their 'self', while an Openspace sim is external, and we all identify ourselves here by our avatar not our sim.

For many a sim is more then the place to sell their crap on.

I can see your point but I think my identity is largely tied to my land. I rarely teleport anywhere else, unless I want to go on a shopping spree. For me, my land is the reason I'm in SL.

Depending on the announcement (any time soon) I will know whether I'm losing my land or not. But even if some miracle backtrack happens and I'm saved for now, it won't be long before some other shit falls from the arse of the Lindens all over me.

For me, a sim was not for selling my crap on until a couple months ago.

We turned our sim, which was home to our 167m, 10,000 prim furnished super yacht, into a store.

I've always had a gross need for land that most of you will not understand unless you were here for the Prim Wars of 2003 which led to the creation of prim tiers. I cannot live on less than 3750, and even that is small.

Compleatly understandable. Building anything requires you to have the room and prim count to do so.

You're just one person thats been negitivly effected in one form or another and forced to move everything to mainland.

How many other people are in your situation, I imagine quite alot, how many are just going to suck it up and move to the lag infested nightmare of mainland where you can build heaven just to have the guy next door build a giant weener for you to admire and there is nothing you can do about it.

In the bigger picture, How many got sims as pure privacy, something they can not get on mainland. A place to craft an mold into their version of heaven.

How many of the as jack said "15,000 open space sims" that will be effected will remain standing , how many of those same owners will drop their full sim as well. how many of the 10's of thousands burned citizans will turn around and get mainland land or just forget about land all together.

You can think it will have no effect if you want but I think your being rather nieve to do so.

Not naive. I just have a long memory of slights against the community by LL.

How do you think i felt when LL told me in 2003 that I would have to pay $195 usd for every 65,000m2 i owned when i owned 200,000m2?

How about when they told us that we could pay tier with Linden, and then priced a 1024m2 monthly tier fee at $50,000L And a full sim tier fee of around a million linden - and this was when the linden became exchangeable for USD.

Before SL v1.2 land was free, we paid a low tax, but there was no tier. And lots of us, owned massive tracts of land only to be told we would have to drop it all, move our builds, shut down our businesses, etc. to make ready for 1.2. And you know what people did? They said they were leaving, they said they were losing everything, they said their community project could no longer be funded, people were sad, angry, and in general upset. And in the end, they rallied together and bought land as groups using our free 4096m2 tier (Lifetime account holder benefit) to eat up a full mainland sim for free whenever possible.

I can go on with more examples.

Nothing naive about referring to history for an idea of what will happen in the future.

What you do not understand is that the very day the first OS sims go on sale with the $125/mo tier, they will be bought by users who never knew that the OS sims once cost $75/mo., and they will be bought everyday.

Time will roll on and this will fade into the history annals of SL. And then 1-2 years later some other crisis will occur and someone just born a year ago before the new crisis will say how they know this is the end of SL without knowing the history or number of LL induced crisis's we have had and survived in the past.

dont underestimate the power of 'word of mouth' and community sentiment.
if a noob logs in, mentions land, and is immediately warned off 'll will rip you off' 'll are greedy theyll screw ya', he might not be so anxious to pick up that island.

Maybe not. In today's economy, someone may invest $75 into what is still in many ways a game, but may balk at $125. The $100 threshold is still an issue. You see it from your long time as an SL user, and as a "believer" but newer users won't have that perspective. LL could raise prices if they wish anytime, it's their service, but to make such a huge jump is just bad business.

First off, they didn't just wake up on a Monday and say "Holy Shit, look what happened!"
They saw it coming, but the Ka-Ching was too good to make them do anything about it until the absolutely had to, as usual. They should have announced that the concept was being abused and are looking into ways to fix it, including possible fee increases. Explain what people were doing, and give them a chance to change their behavior. Some would, some wouldn't. Explore any other options and then announce a raise in fee's. But not 67% with 2 months notice. 25 or even 33% would probably be doable. People would grumble, but most woudld accept $99 I think. Continue to work on fixing the problem internally, slow down sales, maybe institute a sliding fee scale, something.

Instead they chose their usual Hit the Panic Button and screw everyone because they were either too stupid/lazy/greedy to see it coming. They deserve every single user who decides to sell out, tier down and walk away. If you can get something back for your sims great. If not, I see nothing wrong with abandoning them and let LL clean up their own mess for once. It's high time they did.

What MAY happen in the future.

I have to say I concur with this. In my overly large friends list, of all those I have directly talked to in the last 2 weeks, *nobody* has said they are leaving SL. A few have said they will downsize their land holdings... but this balances with others I know upsizing by deciding to get full sims.

So, regardless of what I think of LL's decision, I think this "mass exodus/sky is falling/SL is doomed" is not gonna happen.