I've not read all of the posts on this and I doubt if everyone has, you'd be spending all your time on the forums and no time in SL at all!!
From what I can make out from all of this proposed price increase, it seems to me that the proverbial has well and truly hit the fan.. and is being spread far and wide and no doubt it has touched a large proportion of the SL community.
I dropped into Ahern yesterday briefly... I had troubles rezzing so I left as there were lots of people there protesting about this proposed price increase and I was getting lag too.
A 66% increase is huge and is not the kind of price increase you'd expect to see!
It seems to me, and no doubt it has already been said too, that Linden Labs know that they have a commodity here and are more than happy to 'exploit' it and under the guise of server issues etc they say costs are forcing their hand(?) possibly.. but there are people who work in the industry that state clearly that LL are incorrect on this and also that they have underestimated, greatly, what people are doing with OS regions. All beyond me really. i love it in here.. far and away a better place than where I used to be many months ago.
By increasing the amount of prims on an Open Space they virtually (excuse the bad pun) invited people to use them for homes etc instead of open space regions.
Why did they not insist on, or even enforce, their idea of the correct usage for the open Spaces when they first put them out there in SL! They could easily have enforced this at the outset.
Now that they have decided to increase the payments... lots of people will leave or just dump open space regions, and in doing so will lose a lot of RL cash to boot! Linden Labs will not lose out either way. People will stillcome in to SL and they will end up making money from them one way or another.
I have an Open Space sim which I pay a tier to an Estate owner, and I've just paid the tier too so I have a month to consider my options and she is now considering her options too with regards to her sims.
On mine I have 4 homes and a woodland and waterfall/riverl for a chillout area.
I have had this sim for a few months now and I stared off by just renting a house and then slowly moved up in rental size and saved up and bought my region. I've never ever had any problems and I was planning to buy this OS, and had spoken to the estate owner about it too, but if they are going to increase prices by that amount then I do really doubt that I will end up buying it as I don't think I'd be able to afford the increase that LL propose to impliment.
So it seems that, to all intents and purposes, that I will have to move to my newly aquired region and see if my friends will move there too. The intention was to have them next to each other and to have the OS as the fun place... sailing/swimming/surfing/waterski-ing etc. as well as a chillout spot. these things are all available there at present and would be available for the new rentals on the full prim sim to use as part of the rental.
LL have kicked that into touch at present...!! To use my comments from a reply to a friends post on this current topic...
She has a poll on the topic too.. so please do take a look and vote
link here....
/354/9a/290149/1.html
I am awaiting the outcome with bated breath.. I can't honestly see LL backing down and saying ok the current prices/rentals wont change. It would be nice but somehow I can't see it happening.
I do agree though with what Maddy is saying and it's one way of putting it, others may resort to stronger words and usage though.