Sick of this....

And trouble is beside the free account holders who do spend via credit card, but state they can't afford $9 a month, there are the long term free account holders who seem so proud that they have never contributed a single RL cent to Linden Labs and those that refuse to, but expect A1 service.
And of course somehow amounst all this, other people are bragging that they suck enough RL money out of SL each week to earn a living.

Maybe they can use SL money to pay LL staff, pay operating costs & buy new hardware?

I'm a free account holder.

1. I own a business
   
2. I am a partner in two other businesses
   
3. I make approximately 300USD a month from sales in world.
   
4. I dump about L$300 a week into sinks (uploads)
   
5. I spend about L$2000-L$3000 a week on nonessentials

I see no need or value in upgrading to premium. I have no interest in owning land. Were I to desire land, better land, on better servers, can be had by renting from island owners, or in malls. I originally was purchasing lindens, using real life money. I spent about $60 in my first 2 months in SL.

At any moment, my income might dry up. I can't "trust" that this peak will last forever. a premium membership is a recurring expense, that I can't guarantee the ability to meet. If I should miss a payment, I risk having my account locked, and my assets and any land deleted. This is not a risk as a Basic member.

If I were to *NEED* a lot of land, I could purchase a private sim. There's no tier associated with that. There's no need to "go premium" either.

LL seems to be shifting it's business model. Eventually the "mainland" may well vanish into history. Private sims are the wave of the future. They can charge DOUBLE and people will still line up to pay the fees. the "premium" accounts don't bring enough money to pay the light bills. And even Linden Labs has pointed out that all the benefits of premium can be had without signing up for a monthly bill.

The premium accounts are the ones who own all the land and pay the monthly tier on it. So I don't think it is quite accurate to say they don't even pay the light bill.

coco

''you’ll know that only those Second Life Residents who have transacted with Linden Lab either by being a premium account holder, owning land, or purchasing currency on the LindeX''

I'm a free account holder, a businessperson, and a land renter. I have owned land in the past, and because of the awful condition of the mainland, moved to an island and tiered down to basic.

I'll make the assumption that all the things they say up there include "in the past". As in "If you're basic, but you've got Payment Info On File, you're good".

Am I understanding correctly that you believe there is no tier associated with owning a private sim?

There is tier associated with it. $295 US a month tier to own a private sim. In addition to however much you pay upfront. ($1675 or so US $)

Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you are trying to say here.

my understanding was (and perhaps it was erroneous) that one could own an island sim, without being a premium member. Of course it's conceivable also, that one could rent an entire island sim from a private owner.

The main thrust of my post still applies. There's very little *need* to become a premium member.

Both of those statements are true. You can own private islands without a premium membership and yes, some will rent you the entire sim. Your monthly cost would be higher but you more than likely wouldnt have that initial chunk up front.

After seeing whats happening to the mainland with prices, chopped up resold spam plotted landscaping, I'll take my islands any day of the week . The only reason Im even still a premium after getting my sims is that I made the mistake of making a year subscription. That wont happen again at renewal time...

Speak for yourself.

There was no hope for me to make my tier payments with in-world revenue before open registration.

I've done far better since.

There's still the random month where I have to pay tier out of pocket now... before it'd take 6 to 8 months to save up enough L$ to cover one month of expenses.

The scale of the business taking place has spiked in the last quarter of the year. Hell, I joined Dec 1 and am premium. I rent housing to people, some with free accounts, and **all** of them have been good people who just want to have fun and maybe earn some money in this game. They feed me, and I in turn get money to invest in my business, in addition to the infusion of cash I already gave it. So I am demand - someone out there is meeting supply. I paid supply 9k yesterday for some new land. Supply has to get its backing from LL. My payments help enable my supply to keep coming.

My good friend has continually reinvested and expanded her business. She now owns a shop with 5 different locations. She is demand. Someone out there is supply. The cash does funnel back to LL. It's not direct but that is just how it goes.

So yes, the money from free accounts does get back to LL, because people reinvest and expand their businesses. Not to mention the amount they BUY on the LindeX.

That's right, I forgot about that.

coco

Emily, your anger and name-calling isn't very constructive. People are just taking what is being given them. All the blame should go to LL.

I have never seen a company fail to provide a consistent product, change the rules and ignore their customers anywhere close to the extent LL is doing. The only reason they are surviving is someone is doing a great job in the PR department and they are the only game in town (which is why they are doing so well in the PR department. Everything that happens here is new to most so it feels like news). I do try to cut them some slack because so much of this is unchartered territory, but with every mistake, crash, upgrade or change in policy, my patience lessens.

Thankfully, we live in a country that fosters competition. I can't wait until I have the choice of another virtual world that can compete with this one. Until then I will stand motionless so I don't crash.

The best thing you did was tier down. I tiered down two levels this month and won't go any higher until they fix the performance issues to make the SL usable again and create a real customer service department, because the current one is a joke.

I am one of those annoying freebie accounts that has been on the grid only a month that the op thinks shouldn't be here.

I have paid rent to a landlord from the third day which gave me a base and neighbours to get to know as well as room to try and learn building etc. I have now paid out for 3584sq m of land on an island with a monthly tier of 6000L, in my first month have changed around $200 US to lindens.

I would have become premium if I had been able to purchase first land, older accounts had that benefit to help them on their way. The stipend for newer accounts is also nearly half that for longer serving members so have decided to go the 'freebie' way, sorry if that makes me some sort of leech on the system.

Thanks for the welcome to SL.

From the December Second Opinion newsletter:


Diversity and an Open Community

With the recent surge in population growth in Second Life paralleling issues of database load, there have been some crying for an end to open registration. The theory is that free accounts are using resources without contributing to Second Life. It's an interesting theory, but not one that holds up under scrutiny.

Not everyone is a landowner or a creator, and not every basic account holder is a griefer or a freeloader. Many people with unverified basic accounts are international Residents without access to the payment systems we currently offer. Beyond that we see exciting contributions to the economy coming from basic accounts who are themselves customers inside of Second Life. The growth in both the housing and shop rental markets coincides with growth in Resident-to-Resident transactions.

At the same time the number of people upgrading to premium accounts outstrips those who are downgrading, suggesting that many basic account holders are finding their place within Second Life and settling in.

When we opened registration it was because we believed that the ultimate contribution of many people to Second Life would be diversity and economic strength. What we've seen over the past few months is a surge of new and exciting people and projects coming to Second Life from all over the real world. Many of these new Residents simply could not have accessed our world before we changed the registration and billing structure.


Based on that, I don't see free accounts going anywhere. I do wish, though, that LL would find a non-financial method of verification and require everyone to verify in some manner.

Whenever people mention free accounts, what they really mean is the unverified basics (no payment info) so all what was said doesn't necessarily apply to you.

Ok this is a question for the technical minded among us. Could LL make the free account
data run through separate pipes or routers than the premium member accounts?

So that then there would be two concurrency numbers one for free accounts and one for
premium accounts.

So that those willing to pay for this premium qualification would not be bogged down by a large number of free accounts logged in at the same time.

I have nothing against free accounts. And as Jopsy mentioned above sales are much better
due to the rise in population.

And there are mass amounts of people who contribute greatly to SL and are on basic accounts.

Unfortunately the people who do care little or are only here to cause trouble or grief are
almost entirely all free account holders.

In the past the idea of a free account was as a trial period to check out SL.

It appears to me that the member classifications are again in need of an overhaul or clarification.

Perhaps if the separation of data pipes for free and premium members could be achieved
then those who have expended great effort and expense into their SL experience would
not be penalized by the presence of tens of thousands of "trial members".

Again if that were achievable, then members could have a choice of a premium class for that reason alone. So if they had no interest in owning land then it would be "premium"
without the land option but on data pipes that did not include trial members.
As having the free account open registration is a great thing for the growth of SL
as well as business owners for expanding markets.

There are definitely various perspectives here and most are at least in part valid.

What I am really asking here tho is the feasibility of less populated 'pipes' or routers
for premium members.

Would that work?

The original poster in this thread is stating non premium account holders being the problem, not unverified:

I am a basic account.

Basic accounts are REQUIRED for Second Life to continue existing. They are a major part of the economy because of the amounts of cash they spend on buying stuff and renting. "Free" accounts need to stay.

Something that would help with the load is getting rid of camping pads or traffic numbers.

Players that plop their avatar down and leave it there with an anti-idler are NOT contributing to this game. They don't get much money from this process (hence, not much goes back into the system) and they don't enhance the social aspects, as they are usually not chatting to anybody and not even at their computers.

Now, who is using these camping pads? New basic accounts trying to earn money the easy way. So, if you take away the pads or the incentive for them (traffic numbers), newbs won't bother using anti-idlers to stay in game while they are physically not even at their computer.

This would fix a lot of the load issues. Am I wrong?

You are not wrong, but that is really only a short term solution. Although I disliked the rest of Zaphod's post, the first line is right on:


The ultimate goal is to scale things up in order to sustain an enormous population, many times greater than it is now. Culling the online population just takes time away from working toward the larger goal; things need to develop to a place where it doesn't matter if people are wasting resources, because there will be an overabudance of bandwidth to waste.

Whenever I have tried to log in in the past few hours - even with the actual website - I have recievd the following message "zero sized reply" - has this got anything to do with a crash?

I agree - Find some way to remove the camping incentive, while retaining some meaningful benefit to dwell/traffic, and it is bound to have some impact on performance.. How significant an impact depends on how significant the camping impact is today - and as far as I know, that has yet to be quantified.

Hmm... i wonder if it would be possible to make up a way to monitor other peoples camping pads and keep records of them? If someone made a script that could distinguish campers from non-campers (and log the info to an outside database via llhttprequest), people with land beside major camping areas could put up monitoring devices. If you could get enough people to monitor areas, eventually you could get enough data to see if there is a major coloration between camping and lag. This data (evidence) could then be presented to LL.

The economic statistics say otherwise. Check them out sometime and pay close attention to the total number of residents spending money in world.

Isn't it the land trade that is basically driving the economy in SL?

I don't like the fact that because the system cannot handle all of the concurrent users SL is turning into a class war. Maybe it's a temporary server/networking problem, but it has been really bad this past week. It's true that free, unverified accounts are in great numbers; and they can play along with everyone else as long as they like. Linden Labs has no restrictions for these types of accounts, so it is not fair to the people using them to be shown hostility. Sure, credit card information is not mandatory to play; but how many people would just put their payment information into something they don't really know anything about? Given time, a lot of those unverified accounts may become verified or even premium members.

Something else I don't understand is why some premium members feel like their $10 a month is the foundation of all of Second Life. I thought the Lindens stated on the blog that having a premium account is practically free with the stipend and all, even though it has been reduced. Then there is land. I guess LL makes all or most of its profits this way. I know it's pretty pricey right now. Then again, I'm sure it's also pretty pricey to have all that hardware and bandwidth ready, available, and maintained 24/7.

Anyways, the point I'm trying to make here is to please be kind to newbies and free members. I feel it's Linden Labs' responsibility to provide adequate service if they are going to leave the flood gates open for all to come and play. 35,000-40,000 people online at once is not much to look at as far as online games, even if Second Life is somewhat unique. Let's scale and move it up a notch without having a civil war please.


P.S. Please remove the camping and false traffic counts associated with camping. Also, where is my avatar typing sound volume slider bar I asked for? lol

The rest of my post was not intended to offend anyone, not even the OP. Sorry if it did. I tend to speak bluntly, particularly in response to arguments that are irrational at best, and especially when the arguer resorts to suggesting that dissenters might be "selfish, greedy assholes".