I am finding myself enjoying SL as a world less and less lately as free places close up forever, places I loved and enjoyed all because they have no good way to support themselves anymore.
I'm talking about dwell, and how it's scaling back and ultimate removal is killing fun places and forcing them to try and rely on donations, which is even less of a support mechanism than dwell was. I see all the L$ pay-outs, dwell and stipends getting chucked, when the solution isn't to remove them, but to COUNTER THEM instead. They are good things, and make SL the fun place it is ceasing to be. I don't leave my house anymore except to go to someone else's in-world, because a lot of the free places I liked to visit are gone and if it continues then chances are I'm just going to get MSN addresses for all my friends and leave instead, as I don't want to pay when my enjoyment of SL is decreasing every time a place I enjoy goes under. I like SL because of all the fun places to visit, but the ones I loved are gone, and those that are left are struggling to hold on.
This has been further emphasised by the fact that I recently looked into buying a sim/private island to realise one of my dreams. I knew it wouldn't be cheap, but the current pricing for a sim is a joke, as is land come to think of it, when buying an extra 5 square metres can cost you almost USD$100 a month extra. Why not charge for the square metre? Tier is a horrible system and discourages land owners who may need just a single plot of extra land but have to pay for 1/2th a sim worth?!
It seems to me that the reason for the high prices is to somehow compensate for the gross over-extension of the L$ sources in world, but in truth they discourage people from becoming land/sim owners, which is surely what LL should be wanting MORE of? How is that going to happen when it's so expensive?
Instead, what LL needs to consider are BETTER methods of compensating for the L$ created, and try to lower costs (further optimisation of the game in terms of networking, caching and sim load will help this). There are several good ways to fix the L$ problem:
Taxes - a small tax on transactions (buy, pay, cash-out-to-USD but not direct transfer) would fetch considerable sums of L$ without hurting developers or anything else. Sure some people might complain, no-one likes the idea of taxes, but no-one likes a game that stops being fun to play! Charge it daily or something on profits and it's a great system.
Scaled-uploads - charge more for bigger file uploads! They cost more for bandwidth, so why charge a flat-rate?! L$10 is a steal for many things!
Pay for P2P - charge land-owners to enable the P2P option on their land, same as listing in find places, it makes sense (as home-owners can disable it) and FETCHES CONSTANT REVENUE.
The thing is, services are being provided that you are providing for free, when you CAN'T. And what's it costing? Everyone! Good sim ideas are ground to dust because of restrictive pricing, dwell goes to pot hurting free places and the economy becomes unstable, land prices are becoming absurd.
This is a huge problem, and I know I've written an essay/pseudo-rant but my last one mysteriously disappeared and yet this is an IMPORTANT issue and here are several excellent solutions that NEED to be considered, for this game as a game, not just as a virtual economy.
Please pay some real consideration to these things, because they are not only easy to do (tax doesn't even require a client update!), but are real, effective solutions to a problem that is having a larger effect than any Linden really seems to be acknowledging
If this thread gets deleted as well then I'm done here, this game is starting to look like it'll never be the game I bought a premium account for if it continues.
