To Phillip Linden and the rest of the LL Execs.

Here is a question that I believe needs to be answered and its more of a series of questions rather than one. Phillip, in the Concierge Town Hall meeting, you said that having 2 different prices would be bad? Explain how charging a premium price to customers that not only can flood the market with lindens, land, and products, but also have a significant advantage in getting traffic, do not have to worry about copyright laws, and already have a sizeable customer base is not a good thing for the game in general? Phil, you have been quoted as saying you are not creating a game, you are creating a country, and there have been numerous business accolades that have been given to LL for economic accomplishments within Second Life. These companies know economics probably better than you and your staff do, according to your own words, so why not use their funding to keep the average user's cost low?

My next question is this: How come Second Life has no records on how many free accounts have been made and how much of a percentage they make up in the game? Your own paying customers notice that they are not just a sizeable statistic, but probably may be in the majority as far as numbers of players to the world. These numbers represent 2 things, 1 is that they offer no money to linden labs to help make you profitable, in essence a welfare state for the game world, and 2 they also represent the vast majority of griefers as they don't have to worry about losing their account without a refund. I ask you and Zee Linden to look at those numbers, and if I am correct on the statistics, even when I don't hold the accounting books, that may be where you need to target price increases in the game. Lets say for instance they represent 50% of the community, say you charge them $5 USD a month, less features or soemthing like that instead of what premium or basic gives you, now we have 1 million citizens, whats 500,000 multiplied by 5? That seems like an easy way to get 2.5 million in my estimation.

These are 2 steps that Linden Labs could do to make it that the highest income and the largest population brackets in Second Life also put in their share of the price increase. Now Phil, you said that the amount of people does not affect the load on the game. We are talking about the load financially on the main income bracket to your company. It is the island owners and developers that pay the majority of the funds, we also make the majority of suggestions, are most of the time the reason bugs and exploits are discovered, control most of the order in second life by policing themselves for the most part. Why don't you treat us as what we are to your company? Shouldn't we be the VIPs of the game? We are the same as people for other games like America's Army or Battlefield 2 that get official servers. Please try to start helping us, give us more features or give us better land tools, maybe better management features. We are the ones you need to keep happy, if we leave, your big corporate sims will follow where we go, along with the freeloaders. Support us to your success, or abuse us to your downfall. It is your choice. I think I gave you questions that you can answer this time, hopefully this is the kind of post that you need to start thinking.

Raven, you're welcome to join us for the next Town Hall too, where there'll be followup to some of these hot topics! More info for anyone who wants to know:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/11/08/town-hall-with-philip-linden-nov-16/



This isn't accurate. We do, although it's internal statistics, currently considered proprietary info we don't share openly. However, what we *are* doing is, over time, adding more stats info to this page:

https://secondlife.com/currency/economy.php



To correct any misinformation, this isn't true either. Remember: Basic accounts can still buy from LindeX, and there are reasonable transaction fees which go to us:

https://secondlife.com/currency/describe-transaction-fees.php

Consider other benefits, like how Resis on Basic accounts help bring in friends, who go Premium because they want to own land and a house or something!

Remember: not all value is expressed in US$/L$. We're humans here.

As for your other suggestions, it's not clear to me what the specifics are. If you have a Feature Voting Tool proposal or something actionable as opposed to abstracts which sound passionate but are difficult to address, it'd help us a lot to zoom in on it.

Thanks!