I was going to post this in response to the Sunday 10/29 blog thread about increasing the cost of islands, but you seem to have locked comments on that thread after only 5 responses. Are you back to your old tricks of wholesale censorship and sticking your fingers in your ears again?
Well, here ya go anyway:
Just. Completely. Ridiculous. While I'm glad my community bought an island before this insane price increase, I feel sorry for anyone else who was planning too, and most of all I feel sorry for LL. Sorry because you're killing any chance at long-term viability for your product with really bad decisions lately.
Let's get one thing straight. You seem to think that the current round of interest by the media and by various corporations is somehow the new trend of things and will be your route to profit in the future. You are sorely mistaken. Where is the ROI for all these new corporations who've come into SL recently? Nissan. Reuters. Sun. Pontiac. Etc. How, exactly, do these corporations make any type of money from their presence in SL? Product sales? No, of course not. They're experimenting to see whether this is a viable advertising vehicle. In other words, they're paying for traffic. They've been wooed into experimentation by all your hype about "1,000,000 residents".
Residents? Please, we all know better. 1,000,000 AVs does not equal 1,000,000 residents. The ones that aren't simple alts often don't stay because SL isn't something most people can wrap their heads around. You *did* read the big article on Yahoo News a couple weeks ago, right? Most of the people who tried SL during the recent wave of publicity were essentially going "why would I want to play this game?"
And of the ones who do get past the concept and the learning curve, who are these people? Techie neophile geeks, for the most part. And a relatively small percentage of those are people who understand the techie neophile geeks and figure they can make a buck selling in-game products to the techie neophile geeks.
The corporations who are experimenting with SL will pull out as soon as they realize that they're not getting the traffic numbers to justify the cost of keeping a sim in the grid. Their money is much better spent paying for traffic in the more traditional media channels. They'll get far more eyeballs per dollar.
LL, you are completely losing your core audience. The audience who will stay loyal to you. You keep making it harder and harder to *earn* the in-game currency to cover tier or at least mitigate it. You've taken away dwell, you've cut stipends, you've cut developer incentives. The *only* people who can make money are the very successfull clothing or scripted object designers. Which is a tiny percentage of the population. You are slowly making it impossible for people to justify creating content for you. You are fools.