Question: using $L for tier payments?

I know I saw this on a webpage here, not even a month ago. Now that everything's been moved to the wiki, I can't find it. The page I saw said you could use $L to offset monthly tier fees. It was clear that you weren't going to get a free lunch out of it, but in my case, it could be the difference between being able to uptier or not. Did the policy change, or is it just "undocumented"?

While I'm asking about paying for land, does anyone know if there are discounts on land tier fees if you're willing to pay up front, as there are for the premium membership if you pay quarterly or annually?

I'm writing a proposal for a large project, and I need to estimate costs. Both of these could be major factors.

Thanks,

Neko

You're much better off selling L$ on GOM or IGE and using the result to pay your tier. LL does give the ability to pay for tier with L$ but it's not at all a good deal. As far as I know you can't pay with a combination of L$ and USD. It has to be one or the other but you can switch form month to month. I don't think you can prepay tier fees the same way you can subscription fees.

Hi Neko,

If you sell your extra L$ on GOM, you'll get far more for it. Use what you need for tier, and keep the rest for yourself!

The rate the Lindens originally set for L$<->Tier fees exchange is far out of line with the market (although I haven't checked for some time, so they may have updated it). If it's still less than ~US$4/L$1,000 you're far better off dealing with us. Plus, some lucky resident will get to use your recycled L$!

GOM is the way to go besides I belive LL discontinued that program....they want the cash.

The L$ for land tier was probobly to ease the adjustment from 1.1 economy to 1.2... "Look, see? You can still support land on L$..."

there are quarterly and annual membership fees. i pay $72 a year ($6 a month) for my premium account.

there is no option to prepay land tiers. i believe ll don't want to deal with prorated refund amounts when people tier down considerably with several months prepaid.

the advice to sell lindens at gom to pay tier fees is sound. the original lindens for land figures are prohibitively expensive.

Thanks, everyone. I'll go with an estimate of the GOM value, then. (!)

Here's the general idea, in case anyone else wants to offer advice (or discouragement, whatever):

Some friends and I have been playing a game called "Journey to Wild Divine." It's a bio-feedback controlled game with a feel similar to Myst, but with challenges based on self-mastery, rather than intellectual puzzles. Not everyone's cup of chai, perhaps, but some of us like it a lot.

It is, however, a single-player game. This gets kind of lonely and boring after a while -- the game itself can be completed in 10-15 hours, after which the replay value is pretty good, but still, it would be better if we could play online, try some collaborative multiplayer activities, have a kit to let people develop their own activities, etc. I think we've got the data import problem worked out in theory, using a port transmitter, reflector server with a db tying players' BF input to SL accounts, and XML-RPC (and I'd love advice on that, but I guess not in this forum).

Question is, how can we share the cost of setting the thing up? It's going to take a pile of land to get enough prims to make this worthwhile. And the ambiance is an important part of the experience, according to current players of WD. It would kind of spoil the look to have a supertower go in next door. An island would be nice, but that puts one person on the hook for $1k up front and $200/month afterward, as I gather groups can't share the cost of islands or use tier for them.

I checked out Dark Life last night, and I see they've gone with a purchased item (the backpack) for the required code to interface with their game. We could do something similar, as we'll need code to pull in the biofeedback data. I'm guessing they're also hoping for a dwell bonus, because otherwise you'd need to sell an awful lot of backpacks to cover the land tier cost, even at GOM rates. Never mind the initial startup.

The Wild Divine company is supportive of our doing this, but doesn't have the cash (or want to take the risk) of fronting us to get us started. They don't have any experience with an online game, and they're up to their eyeballs in trying to get the sequel (also a single-player game) out this spring. So we're on our own to manage funding.

I was sort of thinking something like this:

- Have a free setup area apart from the main area, where people can test the connection to the biofeedback device
- Give anyone who gets that far a free one-day pass to the main area
- Require monthly passes afterward, as cheap as we could make them and still cover server costs, plus spreading out the initial investment

If we could get about 30 players to pay $10/month each, we could break even on the SL server costs, anyway. There are about 12,000 of these games sold, and several thousand of the customers have accounts on the manufacturer's website, so that shouldn't be impossible. Anything over that and we could actually pay people who are contributing labor to the effort, which would be nice.

But does anyone in SL actually pay for passes? Or are they just considered obnoxious?

Should we try to find reasonable neighbors and go for part of a sim instead? It's not like we probably really *need* 15,000 prims, and then we could use tier to help pay for it. But neighbors can change so fast....

This is where being a solo builder/scripter type really puts me at a disadvantage. Changes to the economy don't upset me much, but I'm pretty lost when it comes to trying to figure out how to reasonably finance a project.

Ok, I've got my brolly up, let the shower of rotten fruit commence....

Neko

Yeah,.. LL accepting L$ as payment doesn't pay the bills. Unless they are selling L$ on GOM, which would be a very big no-no...

You should first identify how much land you need. Don't buy a private island. Bid on the auction. You will get a land that is on the grid and has better services. That's my assessment but ask others, I'm new, and on the private islands, I'm going by reading the negative experience of some people on here, and seeing only one really positive experience of a full-service island with no bugs and great FPS.

If you spread out the tier cost among a group, each putting in their 512 free with a $9.99 account, you will get essentially a tier-free game experience for all those pepole, and a 10 percent extra land added on as part of the group bonus. The sims aren't going to be bigger than 65,000 sq meters, so you would have to have your game on neighboring sims and that might be hard to get 2 sims at auction to be next to each other.

Building with group privileges is a buggy, frustrating experience, and our hope is that the Concierge system might end this aggravation for many.

Make sure the code is only open source and you're prepared to keep repearing it each time the Lindens put in a game patch or update -- this has been the experience of big projects like Simcast.

I personally don't think the game has the physics and the FPS to support really challenging adventure games but that's just me. It's my personal opinion based on my game experience. Like the package says, game play experience may vary.

Prokofy, that was the first idea I had, but I've still been wondering about access. I guess we would have to make contributing tier as a condition of membership to the group, whether it was the default 512 msq you get with the premium account, or another tier worth the member pays for. We could let people wander around and look at stuff without being in the group, I suppose, but only allow people who belong to the group to execute the scripts that use the biofeedback data. Either that or only allow group members in the place at all, which I think wouldn't be a good way to encourage potential customers (though it would help avoid griefers).

It would probably still be a good idea to provide or sell expiring passes which would act like group membership for a short time for those with trial accounts or basic accounts or who have bought land already, who have the equipment and want to try it out. I'd need to think about how to balance this so it would either encourage people to uptier and support the group quickly, or would make up for the lack of tier support sufficiently that it wouldn't matter if people kept doing it.

I just looked up the new Concierge service. It seems to apply only to individuals who own half a sim or more, not groups that do, so I'm not sure that will help.

You may be right about the physics and other limitations for adventure games, but this isn't really an adventure game, and doesn't have the same requirements. It's hard to describe.

Thanks for the advice, anyway. I'll need to think this through some more, obviously.

Neko

Neko,
Look me up IW. I would love to discuss this with you.