A response from Caledon.

Mainland tier is an odd area, a mainland sim can generate more tier than an estate sim. The pricing structure is probably about right. However yes, allow non premiums to purchase mainland but keep the perk of 512M tier free only for premium members.

That doesn't even make any sense. "Premium" is only another word for paying $10 a month in order to get the 512sqm of tier. How much would it cost to get 512sqm if you're not premium? The same price presumably.

Anyway, I'd rather this thread didn't start moving into being about mainland. All I'm trying to represent here is the average small time estate owner, which is in fact what I am.

It can still remain the same at the lower levels while increasing more at the higher levels. So people at the lower level don't have to be paying more.

Well it can be as low as USD$6 and the stipend has to be added to so it will still have value.



You're not the small time Elan, come on. Grandfathered status should definitely end on transfer, that's one way of starting to deal with the issue.

There should have been a timetable in place regarding grandfathering, which with staggered increases could have worked out, especially with class 5 grandfathered sims, they've saved what, around USD$2,400 so far? A sudden price rise now would be unsettling so I can't see Linden Lab doing that after the Openspace issue.

Well that's what pisses me off the most. Maybe I misread because I can't find evidence of it now but I definitely got the impression that this was going to be a short term, maybe 6 month thing. They kept alluding to an announcement they would make in February of 07 which apparently never came.

I know you've mentioned a few times that grandfathering should expire on transfer but that doesn't help at all because all land owners will simply keep their grandfathered sims forever and we'll be no better off than we are today.

As for whether they're going to change it soon, there's one very obvious person gambling on it happening in the next six months but we shall see.

As for my small timeyness. I have a one half share in 3 full sims and 15 openspaces. At best that's midsize. Unfortunately at this point I can't afford to buy (or take the risk of) an extra full sim so I'm probably never going to be able to get ahold of one of these grandfathered sims. Besides it's probably, hopefully, too late.

and with an account like mine, 1024 free and 500 a week stipend, sometimes it's actually paid me to keep it

But actually, the reason it needs to be waived is that it is an additional step that confuses people. Premium membership should be elevated to giving someone a "concierge-like" status. In fact that's really why I keep my premium account - for the support portal. And since I get that tier benefit, ugh, why not, I have a little mainland under my freebie too.

Land barons already get a break with the group benefits anyway.



On this I agree, it should, with Class Five sims anyway - end. With Class fours, I am mixed. Either keep it at 195, or upgrade the sim with the price increase. But it should not get a tier increase while remaining a Class four sim.

They certainly hinted it wouldn't be a permanent issue but the oft repeated issue relating to February 07 was that grandfathered status on transfer would be stopped, that never happened. They gave a commitment that prices wouldn't change during 2007.

As much as I'd like to see an end to grandfathering, I don't think it would be at all fair on Desmond or Anshe for this to be a sixty day announcement. There is also the issue of class 4's. If you ask for an upgrade you are put on the higher tier level, if you're going to force an upgrade upon someone it needs to be done with diplomacy and although it has been around two years now any such change needs to be phased in.

Of course my personal preference would be to lower estate tier and not lower grandfathered tier!

However you're right, a certain person with a history of being ahead of the game has been selling a lot of and that's bound to start the rumour mill.

Yep.

According to Zee, there are no currently existing plans for any more price changes. That was his answer to a question about whether or not the currently grandfathered sims will end.

Just caught up reading the last dozen posts or so, and will make one small comment.

I think tier will be a dynamic thing, mostly trending up or down based upon economics, competitive pressure, and so forth - no matter how civil and cerebral the conversation might be.

In which case, long term, I see tier trending way down. How many years can 295/month in today's dollars be sustained, is the big question. Three? Five?

Eventually there comes a day when tier will be low enough such that literally anyone can have a mini-continent. Or not so mini. Which will end land barony forever.

He also said that if that changed, they would announce it with plenty of time ahead of the increase. Considering that they thought 2 months was plenty of time for the openspace fiasco, I can't put a lot of trust into a statement that price increases aren't planned right now. The only way we'll get a little bit of trust back into the market is if they announce that any price increases for the next year will include grandfathering for the current sim owners.

That would have been a lot more believable before they raised openspace tier to $500/CPU.

Ah, most interesting, thank you Des.

I've never been active in SL's land market, so I have a very ill-educated opinion. But such as it is, I've always felt that eventually tiers would come way down. I had seen two years as the horizon on high tier, but I'm interested to see your (more informed) time frame.

However, do you really think land barony will disappear completely? Or will barony morph more into land/community "developers", such as yourself? Even though we each will be able to have our own mini-continent, we don't have the time, resources or talent to make it as pleasant as Caledon, or as splendidly nasty as Suffugium, for example. I think many people would pay more than the lower tier of 3-5 years in the future to live someplace that is "nice", however they define it. In fact, I think most SL residents will be like that -- as does LL, witness Nautilus -- I bet there will be less interest in bare real estate, proportionately, than there is now.
.

How you control that dynamic is important. Not you personally, Linden Lab. When I was a lad we had the oil crisis in the seventies and then mass unemployment in the UK, interest rates and inflation were rising or dropping too much. Business needs stability.

I don't think that a sixty day notice that grandfathered levels would double is long enough, you're in a far better position to judge that than me but I feel it would be grossly unfair to expect you to adjust in that timeframe.

Long term prices must come down, historically if we look at internet access I was paying more on dialup ten years ago than I pay now for broadband. Dialup in the UK didn't include free calls so we were billed by the minute. I had some horrendous bills. Now I've got a fast connection at a capped rate, I see tier going that way too.

Ah, most interesting, thank you Des.

I've never been active in SL's land market, so I have a very ill-educated opinion. But such as it is, I've always felt that eventually tiers would come way down. I had seen two years as the horizon on high tier, but I'm interested to see your (more informed) time frame.

However, do you really think land barony will disappear completely? Or will barony morph more into land/community "developers", such as yourself? Even though we each will be able to have our own mini-continent, we don't have the time, resources or talent to make it as pleasant as Caledon, or as splendidly nasty as Suffugium, for example. I think many people would pay more than the lower tier of 3-5 years in the future to live someplace that is "nice", however they define it. In fact, I think most SL residents will be like that -- as does LL, witness Nautilus -- I bet there will be less interest in bare real estate, proportionately, than there is now.
.

I don't think it would be too appropriate for me to speculate about tier in detail, what would happen and when. First I could be very wrong; second, I keep some thoughts to myself (competitive advantage, sadly a factor in land barony).

More to point, the big recent discussion about openspaces, tier and so forth in this venue here is over - this was made clear. As such this will be my last post to this thread.

Of course, the land market situation will play itself out, and the overall opinion of Caledon residents will be made known via their spending. Ultimately, they speak louder than I do.



When I was in high school I learned engineering drafting with pencil and paper, there was no such thing as a website designer and you could buy a Fleetwood Mac album on vinyl or cassette tape at Tower Records. MTV and IBM PC's didn't exist, but Polaroids and 8 inch floppy disks did. That was a mere 20-odd years ago.

Huge changes none of us could possibly predict are coming, but there is no reason to fear them. We are all far more adaptable than business models.

~ fin ~

Snipped your excellent post, Desmond.

I have to say that personally it didn't feel good making any posts over that time period. Knowing that on the personal level something you have invested time, money and love into is now effectively a corpse (SL may go on, *MY* version of it is dead dead dead and staying that way) was sad actually.

I doubt many people have had your foresight and I also assume a lot were greedy and overextending - and taking out that anger on people who had made a contract with THEM in their own right not with Linden Lab. For those people, they could take a lesson from you here.

why people prefer to rent a place to a land baron at a higher price than in mainland? Because it is not the same thing. This is because land barons generaly provide a covenant and rules for building, so that we have reasonable waranty that our neighbourhood will remain compatible with our own project, in the style. Where in mainland, we can one day suddenly get a motocross track just besides our flowery den.

Linden labs efforts to better the mainland (cracking on addfarms, zoning project...) are perhaps an attempt to make land barons useless. Good, but it is still not enough, and anyway much too late: with the high prices, people will rather leave SL than move to mainland.

And people like Desmond Shang are different of land barons (Few have the size of Caledon, but they are many, to build a club, a group...). Technically they do the same thing than land barons, buying sims and renting plot, but their motivation is not earning money (some even lose money). What people like Desmond Shang really are is community leaders, providing a THEME, and offering it to interested residents. They make available a group, friends, organisation, activities, social life. In this way they are the best proponents of Second Life, the reason why people go into SL. And upsetting them is really a serious blunder.

at last I recall that there is nothing such as a land market in SL. Real land is in limited quantity, when virtual land can be added at will, with just adding new computer racks. So there is no need to "regulate" land market, just to serve the desires of people, whatever they do with it.

This is a very good point, Yichard. There should really be long-term leases for the sims, with fixed prices and transition terms. Apparently, some other hosts and service providers do this?

It's totally unacceptable for LL to say, two months from now the money you have already paid and would pay (if you can still afford it!) will only be 20% as valuable for this whole line of thousands of islands.