Real reason for the price increase: LL needs more bandwidth?
So says The SL Herald:
“Wednesday’s metaverse upgrade caused widespread mirth as residents across the grid chuckled and reported high packet loss. Liana Linden thanked everyone for their support and said, “We are working on this issue”. Usually reliable sources informed the Herald today that the packet loss problems were caused by an attempt by LL to reduce it’s streaming 3D metaverse bandwidth bills - bills which have soared out of control with the increase in online residents seen in the last few months. It would appear that this has been achieved by throttling bandwidth server side, presumably hoping residents will assume the poor performance was simply ‘another effect of an update’. If this is true, a fix may to the problem may be possible without another client software update - that is, if someone, for whatever reason, overdid the throttling.”
To me, higher fees to cover soaring bandwidth costs makes more sense than believing the line that the fees are to cover new hardware costs. The hardware story is obvious nonsense. Why wouldn’t you just admit that you need to cover increasing bandwidth usage? Is it because that admission would open you up to the obvious charge that thousands of free accounts are crushing you and WE are being made to pay for it?