The tier system blows, Vote in Prop 443

We don't know. However, it's unlikely that the costs for LL to develop, code, implement, and test a "progressive" tier fee schedule based on 256-sq.m intervals would be offset by the revenues generated. It would most likely result in a loss of revenue.



You also have the option of selling or abandoning existing land to make room within your current tier so that you may purchase that parcel. You could also ask a friend with unused tier to purchase the parcel and rent it to you. You could ask the seller to wait until it is more opportune for you to be able to make the purchase.



It's your decision whether or not you can bear the added expense of an increase in tier. If you don't already own the land you're not losing it, you're simply not taking advantage of the opportunity to buy it. And, as you stated, it's land you could use, however, it hasn't passed your own value threshold or you would've purchased it.

A nice compromise would be a tier schedule that included half steps...


512sqm (premium) plus one of the below:
000sqm ($0.00)
256sqm ($2.50) 1/256th
512sqm ($5.00) 1/128th
768sqm ($6.50) 1.5/128ths
1024sqm ($8.00) 1/64th
1536sqm ($11.50) 1.5/64th
2048sqm ($15.00) 1/32th
3072sqm ($20.00) 1.5/32th
4096sqm ($25.00) 1/16th
6144sqm ($32.50) 1.5/16th
8192sqm ($40.00) 1/8th
12288sqm ($57.75) 1.5/8th
16384sqm ($75.00) 1/4th
24576sqm ($99.99) (cause $100 is anti-American! ) 1.5/4th
32768sqm ($125.00) 1/2
49152sqm ($160.00) 1.5/2
65536sqm ($195.00) 1
98304sqm ($292.50) 1 & 1/2
and if someone has multiple sims, just $97.50 for another half sim.

It would preserve the 'bulk discount' aspect and keep the fee plan from becoming tooo confusing.

Yes, even out the steps. Make them all 1024 or something.

This is not hypothetical; I delayed tiering up for more than a year because of the huge jump in tier once you get beyone the $25 level. This cost LL about a year of tier that I would have been paying, but didn't.

If you couldn't buy the land you wanted, the tier problem would be irrelevant.

There's a piece of land you want that's on sale, but you can't buy it because it would put you in the next tier and you don't want that much land. You can't solve this problem by renting land, because that piece of land isn't on rental, it's on sale.



But are they doing so successfully, and making enough to pay back the extra tier for the land they didn't want? If you rent, you're going into competition with: a) people whose primary interest in SL is running their rental businesses, and b) people who are renting out their "extra" tier, but who pay their entire tier from their SL business income anyway, so they don't need to worry about making it back and can charge rock bottom rent since for them it's free money. If you're just renting because you had some extra land you didn't want, you may not even be able to compete with them, and certainly it will take a lot of work, which will take you away from what you wanted to do with your land in the first place.

I know this, Elex, because I tried it. When I had an extra 4096 I wasn't using, because of the difference between 8192 and 16384, I tried to rent out parts of it. The problem is that market rent is L$600/512/month or less, and it's a buyer's market. At that rate, if you are in any tier lower than 32768, you're making a loss on your rented land; and that's if you don't offer a prim bonus. If you want to offer a prim bonus, and you'll be ignored if you don't, then you have to mark off some infrastructure land to generate the spare prims with; so you can't rent out that land and have to make its tier back from the sections you do rent, which makes things look even worse. In my case I was willing to take the loss because I liked having people around and helping run a community, but someone whose only interest was in avoiding paying surplus tier probably wouldn't think of it that way.



A large number of SL users, indeed the majority, want SL to be fun and not work. These are the people who are spending sometimes hundreds of dollars buying L$ to get houses and similar - in other words, they're very strong supporters of the economy, and we want to keep them around, and avoid making it harder for them to spend money. It seems silly to suggest that, because they might want to own land and have a house that's around 6000sqm, they should be forced to start a business (rental or, um, whatever they "cultivate" on their parcel) in order to avoid wasting tier on the surplus 2048. This solution is also not scaleable, because it is not possible for 100% of users on Second Life to have successful businesses (someone must be paying money in somewhere). A continuous tier scale lets them keep using the land for whatever they want and is completely scaleable.

At last, someone understands what I've been saying for almost a year.

Just because you need a large plot of land does not mean you intend to use it for commercial purposes to produce an income. Sometimes, you just want to spread out, or have something small but with a lot of details - hence needing the land.

I believe that, out of all the decisions Linden Lab will ever make, ultimately their policy which emphasises the money making aspect of Second Life will be its downfall, because as you rightly say, if everyone is selling, very few are buying. End result, places that are made just to bring in real money fold and disappear, and all that's left are the copycat mall-in-a-box or club-in-a-box or *.ingo places with absolutely nothing of pure enjoyment value and no other reason for existance than "I built it".

Lewis

In all this discussion on virtual land I see a common assumption...
That the concept of a SQm in SL actually exisits, and that it has a fixed unit cost for LL to maintain.

I doubt it is easier for LL to maintain large lists of small plots than short lists of large plots.

Also, activity on small mainland plots costs more per prim, and per sqm to support because these objects get viewed, and interacted with much more often than large private islands do.

It seems likely that current landowners, and Premium account residents are paying for the privelege of being beta testers in a very blatent way... LL gets to earn some money, and has to suffer some big headaches because y'all are some very fussy, demanding custies...

And the residents are even more difficult... BUT they do find a lot of bugs, and flaws in the system, and their behavioral patterns... That's got to be a facinating collection of data...

In the end what is this good for? It's too unstructured for real commercial use as it is now. (The comment about the 10', bomb-throwing, dick at the board, meeting was a great example...)


The current "economy" is not going to sustain growth. LL has not commited to it! I do not see LL making any attempt at taxing transactions, which might indicate interest in a sustainable economy.

If this technology can survive the "wilderness" of public access then it may have some commercial use... packaged for sale to other corporations. I'm sure such a package will not include a collection of teir-paying "landowners" that keep trying to assert "rights" they do not have. The only rights any of us really have are to subscribe, or unsubscribe. Obviously LL would like to keep the higher tiers subscribed until they find a more profitable market to sell their system, but I just do not see SL as the next "MySpace"

The profit centers are very unstable, and unpleasant to manage...

=B-)

SL still needs a bonifide escrow feature.

Two people submit what they're offering in specific land, L$, objects whatever, causing those parcels/funds/items to be frozen/unmoddable while the escrow exists (unfrozen if either party bails out). When both people agree to the exchange it's completed.

Nearly every other MMO I've been on (and it's quite a few) has some form of escrow tool for trading, granted most are geared towards online person to person transactions, not unattended sales.

It would certainly help neighbors exchange land with each other to even up boundaries or consolidate parcels without having to worry about getting ripped off.

I don't think I care much about this (although I do currently hold 6456 sq. meters, which is hardly optimal in the current system). However, it should be pretty obvious that there's a right way and a wrong way to change it.

To change it, Linden Labs needs to make more money. It's just not realistic to think that they'll do something that results in them making less money.

Something like this would be a "fair" way to do it (ignoring the "free" 512m, as the current tier system does):

If land ownership is over 0sqm but not over 512sqm, the tier fee is $5.
If land ownership is over 512sqm but not over 1024sqm, the tier fee is $5 + $3/512sqm over 512sqm.
If land ownership is over 1024sqm but not over 2048sqm, the tier fee is $8 + $3.50/512sqm over 1024sqm.
If land ownership is over 2048sqm but not over 4096sqm, the tier fee is $15 + $2.50/512sqm over 2048sqm.
If land ownership is over 4096sqm but not over 8192sqm, the tier fee is $25 + $1.88/512sqm over 4096sqm.
If land ownership is over 8192sqm but not over 16384sqm, the tier fee is $40 + $2.19/512sqm over 8192sqm.
If land ownership is over 16384sqm but not over 32768sqm, the tier fee is $75 + $1.56/512sqm.
If land ownership is over 32768sqm but not over 65536sqm, the tier fee is $125 + $1.09/512sqm.
If land ownership is 65536sqm, the tier fee is $175.

Notes:
1) The current land pricing page is not specific about what happens if you own more than 65536sqm, and I don't personally know.
2) The /512sqm figures are shown to two decimal places, but there may be more.

Examples:

Under this scheme, my land usage of 6456sqm would break down like so:
6456sqm - 512sqm ("base" bonus) = 5944sqm tiered land.
5944sqm - 4096sqm (base tier) = 1848sqm "extra" land
1848sqm / 512sqm = 3.6 units ~= 4 blocks (always round up)
Fee = $25 + ($1.88 * 4) = $32.50

But, you say, Linden will not make a change that costs them $7.50/mo on everybody like me. To which one I respond that one of two things will happen:
1) I will buy up the rest of the land that my current $40/mo entitles me and scale up my resource usage accordingly, or, much more likely,
2) My wife and I, who own the land in a group, will adjust our group contributions so that she donates 1689sqm ((1024sqm @ $8 + 512sqm @ free) x 10% group bonus) and I donate 5068sqm ((4096sqm @ $25 + 512sqm @ free) x 10% group bonus), for a total of $33/mo.

Thus, in case 2, Linden would not be losing $7.50/mo, they would be losing $0.50/mo. Except that this change will have made it much easier for me to add a small chunk for an extra $1.88/mo. And if you don't understand that people are more inclined to buy something when they can do it a little bit at a time than in big chunks, you should probably not be participating in this discussion.

Case 2 closely resembles the "mix and match" approach proposed elsewhere, and I'm sure it sees common usage, except among people who want to be a single-user land baron in a world that's allegedly about communities. That'd be the small subset of a small subset that Elex is referring to and I agree that any scheme that panders specifically to them isn't worth the effort to implement. (Sorry.)

Therefore, the case where Linden loses a lot of money is based on the idea that I am clever enough to acquire land in an irregular size (when most parcels are right on the block boundaries) but that I am somehow stupid enough not to groom my land tier to my best advantage. That population, too, is probably too small to matter financially.

This means that the number of cases where Linden comes out ahead because people can incrementally increase their tier (and thus the amount they pay) outnumber the cases where they give up a bit of cash because people who otherwise would make a big tier jump for a small piece of land no longer have to.

Now, if Linden wanted to stack the deck in there favor (and I get the impression that they often do), then they could just tweak this to charge slightly more for the extra 512sqm blocks, by say 10% per.

Under that scheme, I'd pay $33.25/mo, a bit more than the $33.00/mo I would under the current system, and if I were within one 512sqm block of the next tier (or two or three in the larger tiers), it's actually to my advantage to buy my land and tier up, but it's slightly tricky for me to maximize my value proposition unless I can hit the tier exactly, which seems to be how Linden likes to do things. Suddenly, not only is there a more fluid market for small parcels in general, but those 16sqm parcels in the middle of nowhere have value other than for huge billboards. Also not a bad thing.

Plus, you have to keep in mind that anything that decreases the friction in a market increases the strength and long-term growth of that market. Strength and growth are good for almost everybody. The jump from $40 to $75 or $75 to $125 is a lot of friction.

The exception is people who deal in substitute goods, in this case rental property. Landlords who've already made that jump to the large low-$-per-sqm tiers will loudly decry any proposal that makes land discounts easier to obtain, because the current scheme raises an artifically high barrier against their would-be competition. It's perfectly natural for them to do so.

Anyway, I don't think it's a big deal either way, but I did want to point out that it is possible for Linden to make more money using a more flexible scheme without pandering to a vanishingly small portion of the userbase.

I doubt such a scheme would take more than a couple of days to develop and a week or so to test thoroughly.