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Raising Price and lowering usage ability

Raven Welesa
Registered User
Join date: 17 Jul 2005
Posts: 32
10-30-2008 04:18
To Jack Linden and the rest of the Linden Team;

So your plan is to raise prices on these Openspace sims and the reason you state you are originally doing this is because they are being overused. Then you say after you raise prices, you are going to tell people to limit what they are doing on that openspace? Are you all completely insane? In the time around the World where a recession is starting to take its toll on the economic and financial wellbeing of many of your own residents, you all take the extraordinary step of not only raising prices, but telling us we cannot use these to their full potential?!

Jack you and the rest of the lindens that came up with this idea have got to be completely insane to think this was a good idea. There is a parallel to what you are doing. When oil prices started going up, OPEC watched as speculators drove prices up, watching from the sidelines for about 3 months and doing nothing until they hit 130 dollars per barrel. They finally raised production levels and prices started going down. During that time however, the OPEC president made a statement saying that the high prices had PERMANENTLY damaged their reputation and were to be the cause of them losing far more money than they could control even with a production cut. You at Linden Labs are about to permanently and detrimentally affect your own bottom line by this measure. First you will cause a shift of the economics from the private islands, of which has made linden labs a vast majority of its money from residents, to instead focus it back onto the mainland continents and start another real estate buyout similar to what happened about 1 year ago. This will cause prices to skyrocket on those pieces of land, large tracts of land to be empty and abandoned to the lindens or sold at way lower than expected prices, and the linden dollar being devalued as hundreds of people start selling off millions of lindens to make profit off the new land available. When that bubble bursts, within 3 months time, Linden Labs will have alienated the private island owners to such an extent that it will cause many of them, with hundreds of thousands of dollars to leave the game permanently to never return again. I say this to you Linden Labs. Follow through with this plan and you will cause your own destruction.

I also see very underhanded alterior motives to this. I see a bait and switch, which if I research this I bet I can find that even if this is legal, it is unethical to do to your customer base. I see this as a way to cut down on the creativity of your primary land owners that have developed this world into what it is today. You all are taxing the ones that have brought massive amounts of people to see this world and now are telling them that you don't give a damn about them and you never have. You all care more about your free accounts and a mainland continent that no one asked for than you do about the people that have brought you all of your successes in the first place.

Heed our warning linden labs. You follow through with this, you will cause Linden Labs to be no more.
Cal Alexander
Registered User
Join date: 18 Feb 2005
Posts: 37
Poor Business Ethics
10-30-2008 04:26
I am not surprised at this 66% increase in tier. It is typical of LL business practice. Linden slased prices 40% on the cost of islands, driving many people out of business, and other SL home owners to lose all their investment.

The answer is simple, don't invest in Linden Lab. DO NOT BUY. Enjoy SL in other ways but don't let them into your wallet anymore. Second Life will not be here at this rate anyway. Your dollars are too precious. Be smart and don't waste them on Linden.
JCS Hawker
Registered User
Join date: 14 Nov 2007
Posts: 2
10-30-2008 04:52
Openspace sims are so popular because much of the mainland stinks and is overpriced.

I do not come to SL to look at blight. And openspace sims allow for more creativity and 'privacy' [although that really is just an illusion when online].

LL would have to start enforcing zoning AND control the land bot / land speculators for at least a year and do a good job of it before I'd even consider having a plot on mainland. I consider the condition of the mainland sims as failed quality control.

I took a look at Nautilus and the land speculators jumped right in there - bought plots and put assinine prices on them. I really don't think that there is any reason to believe that Nautilus will ever be as nice as the private estates.

By increasing prices in this fashion, without having put reasonable attempts to deal with sim overload first, you have
1) damaged LL's credibility
2) given your customers more reason to look for other options

BTW how feasible would it be to have people host their own sims on their own machines and still be able to connect to SL? I suspect that you'll say something about compatability, security, etc. but if given reasonable costs and options what people really want is freedom and control to do what they want. And if they misuse their own sim and start to 'feel' it on their own machine, possibly they'd be more responsible - or at least easier to isolate from the rest of the grid.