It's time we stand up against LL and tell them they need to make SL far for everyone

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Czari Zenovka wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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X3aV wrote:

Funny, lots of people like to claim they are part Native American, usually Cherokee. I doubt the spirit fathers would approve of a virtual trollop.

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/me glares at the person who clearly has a death wish, "What did you just call her?"

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*Continues standing behind my Captain of the Guards, making mental note to increase his salary*

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Hey, if you're not gonna be a virtual trollop, I'm happy to volunteer!

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

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Czari Zenovka wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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X3aV wrote:

Funny, lots of people like to claim they are part Native American, usually Cherokee. I doubt the spirit fathers would approve of a virtual trollop.

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/me glares at the person who clearly has a death wish, "What did you just call her?"

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*Continues standing behind my Captain of the Guards, making mental note to increase his salary*

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Hey, if you're not gonna be a virtual trollop, I'm happy to volunteer!

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Sooo, what are you doing later, Maddy?

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

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Czari Zenovka wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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X3aV wrote:

Funny, lots of people like to claim they are part Native American, usually Cherokee. I doubt the spirit fathers would approve of a virtual trollop.

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/me glares at the person who clearly has a death wish, "What did you just call her?"

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*Continues standing behind my Captain of the Guards, making mental note to increase his salary*

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Hey, if you're not gonna be a virtual trollop, I'm happy to volunteer!

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Sooo, what are you doing later, Maddy?

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I've entered an Irwin Corey lookalike contest. Come and cheer for me?

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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Madelaine McMasters wrote:

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Czari Zenovka wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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X3aV wrote:

Funny, lots of people like to claim they are part Native American, usually Cherokee. I doubt the spirit fathers would approve of a virtual trollop.

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/me glares at the person who clearly has a death wish, "What did you just call her?"

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*Continues standing behind my Captain of the Guards, making mental note to increase his salary*

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Hey, if you're not gonna be a virtual trollop, I'm happy to volunteer!

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Sooo, what are you doing later, Maddy?

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I've entered an Irwin Corey lookalike contest. Come and cheer for me?

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can do, send me a LM..

[Phil Deakins]

It doesn't matter where the Indians were at the time of the war of independence, Czari. There were just a handful of 'european' colonies (maybe states by then) in the east and it is those who fought for independence. Both sides enlisted some of the local Indians to fight with them.

I'm sorry if you're getting bored with this discussion. It would have been over and done with quickly if you'd accepted that most of today's U.S. people did not have any ancestral presence over there at the time of the war of independence and, therefore, cannot truthfully say that "we beat you"

[Charly Muggins]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

It doesn't matter where the Indians were at the time of the war of independence

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We know where they are at this very moment.

Spamming the forums.

Again.

[Phil Deakins]

Wrong Indians but that aside...

There's no reason at all to think that the spammer is in India. It's easy enough to write a programme that spams a great many forums, and people all over the world are in the business of posting links in forums; i.e. the chances are that s/he's an affiliate and not an actual seller of sex in India.

Also, I have a number of websites and I get lot of spam emails trying to sell various types of seo services to me. One of the types is posting links to my site on thousands of forums (it's for benefits in the search engines). Our spammer may be just doing that.

[Deltango Vale]

Many people believe the euro is artificially high for two reasons: 1) high government bond yields (because of high risk of default) in some of the dysfunctional economies of several member states. Such bonds have to be paid for in euros, which pushes up the price of the euro. 2) Questions about Germany's willingness (and ability) to pay for it all. Yes, the German economy is doing well (exporting high-quality manufactured goods to China and the rest of the world), which boosts the euro, but the whole euro project looks increasingly unsustainable. Presuming the euro survives at all, the idea of the euro reaching parity (and falling further) against the dollar is quite reasonable.

But I digress. Note that the UK price (including VAT) is the same as the US price (without tax). If CCP were simply pricing in tax, then the UK price would be in line with the euro price.

But all this is a digression as well. The bottom line is that until September 2007, LL was treating VAT as a cost of doing global business. Second Life was growing rapidly, revenues were increasing, profits were increasing and, throughout that whole time, LL was treating VAT as a cost of doing global business. LL changed its policy in September 2007 - right in the middle of the growth phase - knocking out most of the European investors (landowners, Premium Memberships) and doing so in a way that badly damaged LL's reputation internationally.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

the average number of people online, going by memory here, in 2007 at 8 am EST was about 10,000. Currently there are 31,599 online users... How is that tapering off or losing users?

[Madelaine McMasters]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

the average number of people online, going by memory here, in 2007 at 8 am EST was about 10,000. Currently there are 31,599 online users... How is that tapering off or losing users?

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Here's a plot of concurrency from Dec 2006 to Dec 2011. Concurrency was about 10K in 2007, as you recall. It peaked at about 66K in early 2009 and has been falling ever since.

Here's concurrency for the last 12 months, still falling...

I may not agree with Del over the reason for SL's declining concurrency, but I do agree that it's declining.

 

[steph Arnott]

Well nice try at imaginative number twisting. SL was vastly smaller. If you can say how many online per servers from then and now may mean something.

Added: As a carry on to the thread.

There a lot of things going on, as in going from private to share holder, incomes falling, LL changing things for what seems to be on a whim, teens seeing SL as just plain boring compared to other games, the list is endless.

[Phil Deakins]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

the average number of people online, going by memory here, in 2007 at 8 am EST was about 10,000. Currently there are 31,599 online users... How is that tapering off or losing users?

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Your post has been answered well enough, but I'll add to the replies.

I signed on in December 2006. In early 2007 I used to log in in my mornings (UK) which was when the U.S. was asleep. I remember very well that the number logged when I logged in was always around 12k.. Then it increased during my day, as the U.S. woke up, to approaching 30k. Some months later, LL was known to have been concerned that they'll never reach 30k concurrency. In other words, you are mistaken about your 10k figure.

[steph Arnott]

It was very noticable that as Europe went online, SL was like a gost town. So a lot jut said whats the point.

Added: Truthfull i only heard of SL on some tv crime programe, so SL di not exactly make much effort to make it self known outside USA.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

Well, Phil, if you look at that chart maddy posted you will see they didn't reach 30K concurrency until 2008. I did say average. I clearly remember logging on to 10-12K max, everyday. never seeing much higher.

It wasn't until CSI used SL that it exploded. and now we are seeing it drop back down to where it would be with a gradual increase. Like it would have had. A "busy" Saturday night was 30K back in early days. It was also mostly people in their late 30s early 40s online. Now there are a  lot of younger users. I'm not 100% sure how much of a good thing that is.

just my opinion, no need for anyone to get all butthurt over it.

ETA spelling

[Phil Deakins]

I didn't say when concurrency broke to 30k barrier. I only said that some months after I started using SL, LL is known have expressed concern that it wouldn't reach 30k.

However, in the early part of 2007, I logged in to a concurrency of around 12k each day, and that would through my do something approaching 30k - e.g. 24k, 26k and numbers like that. That was early in 2007, so your statement that SL only had 10k in 2007 was wrong. That's the point I was making.

[Vania Chaplin]

I remember those days. I came to Sl in jan/2007. After a week, i I stay about a month off and returned in february. Was when LL announced that if concurency was above 24k, would block basic logins. It never occured, the block, because many times I saw that there were more than 24k inworld, but was ever capable to login. (I only turned to premium in May that year, when it was clear to all that basic accounts was not being unable to login)

[Phil Deakins]

That idea of blocking Basic accounts from logging in rings a very small bell in my memory so yes, that also happened - not blocking but the idea of blocking. Concurrency was much higher at that time than the 10k that was mentioned.

[Innula Zenovka]

I've several times seen references to blocking log-ins by basic accounts, but only when TPV developers spotted this among the error messages that someone might receive when a log in fails.

I am pretty sure LL confirmed that was something that was there in the code, as an option, back in the early days but it was never actually used.    I certainly don't remember it ever happening since I joined in mid-2007.

[Deltango Vale]

I'm talking about European customers paying fees directly to Linden Lab. These included Premium Members and landowners. More free accounts doesn't make up for the loss of paying accounts.

That's just the money angle. Reputation is equally important. "We collected European VAT charges in a clumsy way." (Philip Linden) and "Linden Lab has made more mistakes about Second Life than anyone else ever has." (Ginsu Linden). Well, the mistakes kept on coming for another five years.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Deltango Vale wrote:

I'm talking about European customers paying fees directly to Linden Lab. These included Premium Members and landowners. More free accounts doesn't make up for the loss of paying accounts.

That's just the money angle. Reputation is equally important.

"We collected European VAT charges in a clumsy way."

(Philip Linden) and

"Linden Lab has made more mistakes about Second Life than anyone else ever has."

(Ginsu Linden). Well, the mistakes kept on coming for another five years.

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I have given LL more with my basic account then they would have received with 30 premium accounts fees yearly. This whole "Premium users are more important to LL" idea is pure BS and reeks of a superior thought pattern that causes a divide in SL. If they opened up land ownership to basic accounts they would see a rapid rise in land purchases. That is the only real benefit to being premium that i can see.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

I didn't say when concurrency broke to 30k barrier. I only said that some months after I started using SL, LL is known have expressed concern that it wouldn't reach 30k.

However, in the early part of 2007, I logged in to a concurrency of around 12k each day, and that would through my do something approaching 30k - e.g. 24k, 26k and numbers like that. That was early in 2007, so your statement that SL only had 10k in 2007 was wrong. That's the point I was making.

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I said at 8 am EST there were only about 10K online.. Last night at 8pm EST there were about 65K people online.. Those numbers are still higher than they were in 2007. SL did not have a natural growth period like other online MMORPGs. When the WoW movies comes out i bet there will be an explosion of users for them as well.. and then they will slowly drop back down to more "normal" numbers.

This happens every time a movie or TV show highlights a game or program, people flock to it.. play for a while and then if they like it, they stay. SL is not for every person in the world. Those people are leaving, and i say good riddance.

 

ETA typos

[Phil Deakins]

I didn't suggest that concurrency in 2007 was higher than it is now. I know it's not. I only corrected your 10k figure. At 8 a.m. EST, in 2007, there were always many more than 10K logged in. That's the correction I made. You said that it was 10k at the time when LL started to add VAT to European users, which came much later in 2007, when the daily low point of concurrency was much higher than 10k.. Low concurrency was much higher at the start of 2007.

[Deltango Vale]

Premium Membership fees are only one aspect of the loss. More important was the loss of European landowners (some of whom owned hundreds of estates, not to mention all the mom & pop landowners). Many European landowners were also business owners who shut down their businesses when they dumped their land. They had not only invested money, but a great deal of time in SL. Also, let's not forget the non-European business owners who were renting from European landowners. They too were adversely affected when their European landlords sold out. Linden Lab's change of policy had a negative domino effect across all of SL.

There is simply no way to see the "clumsy" and unnecessary loss of European investors, landowners and Premium members during the critical growth phase of a new product as a good thing.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

I never mentioned VAT.. not once. I stated that at 8 am EST in the beginning of 2007 there were usually about 10k users online.

Thinking about further... my first av was back in jan 06... that may be what i was thinking of.

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Deltango Vale wrote:

Premium Membership fees are only one aspect of the loss. More important was the loss of European landowners (some of whom owned hundreds of estates, not to mention all the mom & pop landowners). Many European landowners were also business owners who shut down their businesses when they dumped their land. They had not only invested money, but a great deal of time in SL. Also, let's not forget the non-European business owners who were renting from European landowners. They too were adversely affected when their European landlords sold out. Linden Lab's change of policy had a negative domino effect across all of SL.

There is simply no way to see the "clumsy" and unnecessary loss of European investors, landowners and Premium members during the critical growth phase of a new product as a good thing.

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You keep saying that but looking at the charts of the actual number of sims online on gridsurvey.com, there's no indication of a major change in growth rate, much less shrinkage, in late 2007 and growth got faster in 2008.

You keep arguing that Second LIfe could be much bigger if the costs were lower but you haven't shown any proof. You've publicly argued that Linden Lab would be more profitable if they cut tier prices in half but you haven't shown evidence of a group of people more than twice the current population paying $200 to $300 a month for a sim who'd be willing to pay $100 to $150 a month for a sim. Inworlds and Avination charge half that for a sim and they're not exactly exploding with business.

You're going to need to come up with better evidence if you want your arguments to be seen as more than a routine BAWWW about wanting to pay less for your stuff, because - hey, who DOESN'T want to pay less for their stuff?