Last straw.

Due to the obviously oblivious, I've cleared this post. Kudos to those who tried, a few words to those who didn't, and away I go.

then get the f** out and stop bitching. We all have our share of problems in sl and being agressive will not change a thing.

Oh, look, it's another one of those forum users that doesn't know what forums are for. By the way, look who's talking. Your next post will not be dignified with an answer. This place is looking for feedback, there's my feeback. I'd rather be saying everything's fine, everything's tolerable, but I can't anymore. Go find someone else to harrass.

Your post reminds me of the old adage about honey vs. vinegar.

YOU try growing a business from 40,000 customers to close to a million in 20 months and see if you don't have growing pains.

I know a number of the Lindens on a fairly personal level, and believe me, they are trying to make things better. Your threats to leave are not going to speed things up.

P2

This might really work believe it or not- Do a FULL reinstall of second life.

Here is a link explaining how its done.


http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=043


Sometimes when i install a new SL client its disastrous until I perform the full uninstall/reinstall procedure.

Well, la-di-da.

coco

we all should be ahamed of ourselfs, going on and on about how LL NEEDS more user accounts, we should have been hollering about even more bug fixes and system stability

kinda reminds me of this adage house on sand

ya know with all these people claimin a close and personal relationship with the lindens around, i now know why we get stuck with inane features that benefit only a few.

that said, the lindens have a job to do, and they knew that eventually, wether it was in 20 months or 20 minutes, they would hit the one million mark. and i can guarentee, they are no more ready, security,server, etc etc, to handle these numbers than they were before. hell they still haven't fixed the bugs from updates over 2 months old.

so yay, you've reached and surpassed you 1,000,000 "citizen"counting those griefer accounts,locked out accounts, dead accounts, and people with more than one account or alts, i think a more realistic count would be closer to 627k). can we now get back to addressing the issues concerning grid attacks, lag and bugs? or is it more important to keep the investors happy than the ones who invest thier time and money into this game( and i mean the people who pay tier fees but land vendors etc etc)?

speaking of which, in the buisness world, inflated numbers are a no- no, especially if you are using those same numbers to garner and ot attract potential investors. as to the influx of new players, lets see how well you handle, a new round of griefers, and hackers. the stuff happening now will seem like the good old days.

Wow gal well stated..seems that LL is so consumed with grid griefers at this point, its amazing that anything is getting done.

Inflating subscription numbers has gone on along time, in my days at an ad agency, was not uncommon to see newspapers and mags give away thousands of free subscriptions to bolster their figures. But never found that a good way to do business, seems a bit slimey to me, but thats why im not in that biz anymore either.

Yes have to agree the investor has become LL's customer...we the tier payers have been demoted to consumers, so im guessing bugs and greifers will be the norm from here on out. Not sure how the servers will handle the overflux of players that do come on now, rezzing is terrifically slow and the quality of the game has been seriously affected for me.

Can't anyone just have a nervous breakdown without blaming LL for everything anymore?

--
"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote."
-- Kosh

According to this poll

/108/42/113580/1.html

taken here on the forum in June of this year, about 75% of the accounts are admitted alts. I believe SL showed registration to be around 300k or so at the time.

You seem to have that backwards.

Nearly 60% of the respondants said they had NOT created alts since June.

Besides, what do alts matter anyway? When McD's says "15 Billion Served" you think they're saying they've served 15 billion DIFFERENT customers? Heck no. They're re-counting repeat customers.

I would put bet real money that the number of one-time players that register, try SL once and never return *FAR* outnumber the number of alts in SL. (And those ARE unique headcounts, despite their transient nature.)

Whether or not tourists really count as "residents" or not is a completely different debate.

Actually, I was counting was the number of alt accounts the respondents said they created vs the number of respondents. You will see that on the avarage there are about 3 alt accounts per respondent.

...and yes, I agree, the number of one or two day transient accounts are probably a large percentage of the "logged in the past 60 days" number as well.

Count up the number of admitted alts. ~350. 250 voters for 600 accounts. (using averages for the higher #s and 21 for the 21+ and 1 for "lost count". Which is below average (1.4 alts), as stated above as 4 accounts (3 alts) average.

All I have to say is.. I'm glad I didn't invest my funds too deeply into the game. I'm surprised those of you with land tiers and steady outbound cash flow haven't gotten tired of paying in and losing out.

Personally, had I owned land (and by the by, I DID pay to get into SL and I HAVE paid into SL - just 'cause I dun own land doesn't mean I don't spend cash), I would have immediately sold it and stopped putting money into the game until the Lindens started really working on it again.

With the way the inventory system works now, you can highlight everything in range, hit "Take" and it all goes into your inventory as one object instead of many, as though it were linked. Moving out and back into new land wouldn't be too hard, and it'd give alot of folks a chance to find cheaper land in locations more suited to them.

As far as I can see, aside from the possible hassle of the actual move and letting people know (which isn't hard, anyways - the Search feature works, and word of mouth goes very fast), there is not much to lose by pulling out and stopping the flow of cash until they're ready to start fixing things right.

If the Lindens want this to be a business, let's show them what being a business is about. Supply and demand. With SecondLife, we are the content. Therefor, we are in a place to demand. They'd have no choice BUT to supply if they want to keep it alive.

And the majority of your count is made up by the minority of people who have posted sarcastic exaggerations... and who knows how many more lied/exaggerated without clarify their vote.

That and the standard line about forums not being representative of the population within SL.

Sorry, but 70% is seriously bunk.

"I made 157 of 'em and in fact am every new person who has posted to the forums since." - Kris

"Ive made 500." - Einsman



"I have 5,649 alts." - Savonah


Oh and how many do you think actually took SuezannesC's advice just to try to further show out out of control easy registration is?

"I suggest that those with multiple accounts, especially those with multiple accounts created since 6-6-6, answer the poll with each of their accounts." -- SuezanneC

I've left and returned a few times... but I kept paying tier on my land... it's old extra-terraformable mainland land with really outstanding neighbors.

Who has time for more than two MMO's at a time? I've taken sabbaticals from SL more than once to play in other worlds, but I after a few months I keep re-engaging here.

I agree with your reasoning... if you're not getting what you think you're paying for, stop paying and offer to return when your issues are addressed, but I don't seem to be having any of the problems that you seem to think are show-stoppers. Maybe I'm just lucky?

As our business grows, so does our investment in SL. We pay for a little over a sim now, we have condos in three sims..we do not own the entire sim in any of them. We pay around $200 US a month. If we do not grow, we do not invest more in land or tier. We are good landlords, about 3 months ago we were packed to the hilt, 100% rented out, with a waiting list. Its dropped off to about 3/4 full now, weve changed nothing, we give good service, and get lots of refferals from current and past renters. The trend we notice now is no one stays in the game more than a couple weeks. Lots of move ins, but no longivity.

What i see happening, and i hear alot is, IM BORED! I think the entertainment content of SL has dropped so drastically that no one stays much past the "oh wow" first two weeks.

I think the worst mistake LL made was to drop content incentives, even i have to agree theres not alot of things to do now...nothing new is coming in. Most of the fun places that do still exist, have no incentive to add new things..and most are getting pretty stale.

So all we can do if we get much less business is to sell land and scale back..we sure arent in a position at this time to expand, and so it goes, and im sure were not the only one thats in this position. Hence less investment in SL, whats that old addage...money talks bullshit walks?

I agree with everything you've said, Cinda.

The indigenous entertainment - never very well supported in the first place - received its final death blow with the removal of dwell bonus.

People said, "Oh, well they should charge for their entertainment, and if they can't charge, it's because they simply aren't good enough."

I said, not very likely. Getting people to pay for entertainment piecemeal once already in an entertainment medium is nigh onto impossible. (I say "nigh onto" because certain events - cultural soirees with hefty entrance fees do work for those who want to be seen there, but that is very rarified.)

Anyway, what will replace home-grown entertainment are those who do not NEED to make it pay for itself - real world businesses. This I also foresaw long ago.

Bad enough that these real world entities give away the entertainment for free, but when they start giving away the physical content for free, I'm afraid we will be quite close to Advertising World.

Advertising World is where SL isn't a place for individuals to try to make a go of their own businesses (for a profit, not as a hobby), but where real life entities use SL as PR/advertising for their real product, which actually exists in the real world. Advertising World isn't a place where one comes and stays, but where one comes in to see what's happening, looks at all the ads, and goes out again.

That they give away entertainment and physical content for free doesn't matter to them at all, because that content is simply part of their advertising budget.

Smart individuals have already jumped on this bandwagon, in the form of businesses that create the content for those companies, and get paid big real-life bucks for it, as a part of that advertising budget.

For those of us who don't wish to take that route, or who want to keep our own indiginous businesses, there is still the possibility that we might be able to continue anyhow, and to even profit from the real-world companies' presence:

Let's say GM or whoever actually manages to give the average visitor to SL enough to do to keep them hanging around. The visitor might then start buying shoes from someone OTHER than Adidas, etc., and cars from someone other than the free ones they get from GM (if GM is giving them away). They might start looking at entertainment other than that provided by real-life companies and entertainers; might start buying clothes and houses and gadgets from others as well.

In other words - if these real-life businesses somehow manage to give people enough incentive to actually hang around, then we might all profit from it, even if they are giving away for free the content we charge for.

But - I think Advertising World is just as likely as the coexistance scenario.

coco

What i see happening, and i hear alot is, IM BORED! I think the entertainment content of SL has dropped so drastically that no one stays much past the "oh wow" first two weeks.

I agree. Not only aren't people building to get dwell, but a lot of great builds by people doing it purely for the love of the art (and it is art) have moved to private islands where they get hassled less, or have taken their islands private, because there's no incentive to keep them open. I predicted that this would be the inevitable result of killing the dwell bonus, and I'm sorry that I was so accurate in my assessment.

LL needs to come up with a traffic bonus mechanism that's harder to "game". There are economic models in the real world that would work wonderfully for SL, I've suggested a number of alternatives over the months... but I have no hope of them or anything like them happening any more.

Despite the anti-LL sentiments this question may evoke I'll ask anyway:

Dwell Income and Developer Incentives do have to come from some place. To keep the exchange rate balanced, LL would have sacrifice their own revenue from selling L$ on the LindeX, to be able to safely pay out either or both kinds of DI.

Which do we get more of a bang for? Incentives for excellent (but inevitably transient) content... or funds to support LL's development (and testing, of course!) of future versions of SecondLife. I, personally, would rather not sacrifice the long term potential of SecondLife for a more short-term win.

Keep in mind that there's a weird reverse psychology effect that comes with "quality content" in SL. Seeing something done poorly often encourages people to invest in doing it better. Seeing something done very well quite often discourages folks from trying to compete. (or, put in more succinctly: Virtual Crap can be an excellent fertilizer! )

(and no, I'm not saying "excellent content stifles creativity", just that those looking to make a name for themselves aren't likely to go around riding on someone else's coattails.)

Fwiw- Most of my builds are strictly for the joy of building... despite the lack of dwell income, grid attacks, strange newbies and such... I love having tourists. Being on a private isle would hamper that somewhat.

When they announced that Dwell and DI were to be eliminated, I suggested that instead additional sinks be created OR stipends be reduced. I even suggested a number of sinks that would be easily implemented by adding features that people had been clamoring for and charging for them.

Instead we get Dwell cut and stipends have been reduced... and Linden Labs has tied their Lindex sales to the sinks, instead of using those sinks to help manage the economy as they originally said they were going to.

Ditto, but I'm having to pare back. I've had to sell the land that was providing the spare prims for the Coonspiracy Sandbox, for example.

My output has gone down recently but that's not because of SL; it's because of outside factors.

However, I must say that when dwell and DI went, there was an explicit promise that they were going to be replaced with some new and groovy system to encourage creativity, that couldn't be gamed. A noble project, certainly, and one which I'm sure has not in any way been forgotten. Signed, Estragon Malaprop.