The Other Side of Mainland Tier Reduction: Other New Fees

[Prokofy Neva]

No sooner did the blog about the new lower tier fees hit then some of my tenants were eagerly asking me -- "Are you going to pass on these savings to us?"

And I said, "Actually, no, first I want to recover a little bit from all the awful things we have suffered in the last year."

My reasoning was that the Lindens did this action in order to stop the downward spiral of more and more land being abandoned, and people saying they didn't feel they got much out of the Premium account -- and good! They needed to do this to help business and perk up the population.

In the last year, those of us in business have had to put up with loss of customers due to the Lindens' competition -- first Sansar, which believe it or not, did cause some disruption -- in my view, mainly in reducing the value of the Linden. The LindEx falling some points meant lower cashouts and that hurt. Then there was Horizons, a Linden community that took away customers the way Linden Homes does -- what can you do, that's how the Lindens have always been, they compete with their own customer base. It became fantastically expensive. 

Then there were things that affect everyone -- the return of grey squares, sim crashing, griefing, the refusal to solve the abandoned land problem at root.

So like Lucy and the football, here we are again, Charlie Brown. Just when it seems as if finally we will have a bit of a recovery, a bit of a break, a chance to maybe catch up and in fact indeed pass along savings to customers WHOOPS...and in a birthday announcement, yet!

New fees coming:

Last week, we announced that we have lowered the cost of Mainland by over 10 percent and doubled the Mainland tier allocation for Premium members. In the coming months some other fees may increase, including Marketplace commissions, Linden Dollar exchange fees, and cashout fees. In addition, we will soon announce new tiered Premium membership offerings that allow Residents to choose the membership level that provides the benefits most important to them.

Now, this is especially annoying because the Lindens JUST DID THIS -- they already raised the fees for Linden purchases and cashouts. So they better not do this again any time soon! Marketplace commissions -- already painful when there are a number of annoyances on the Marketplace, including arbitrary dump offs -- hundreds of your listings getting dumped (this has happened to me several times as it has to others) and then the deliberate removal of certain items in the "wrong" category which can be a terribly finicky (and often incomprehensible) thing.

It would be nice if when people created things they could already pre-set them in a category so you don't have to do that piece of it uploading a gatcha to sale, it's such a drag.

As for the tiered premium -- well, that will likely put our expenses up again as if you are in the land business or creation business you will need whatever advanced thing they are offering. How could this be less painful? Perhaps if there was a creator's premium that had a flat fee for X number of texture uploads, or a land dealer's premium that had a greater bulk discount or greater group bonus -- something!

It's discouraging.

I can only hope they hold it off awhile...

 

 

Edited March 21, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Callum Meriman]

As a landlord myself....

I imagine, when your customers are paying the Lab US$2.00 per purchase (and I am sure many will only be buying 6K or far less at a time) they will ask you to drop your rent even more vocally.

"Why should you get 100% more profit," they will say "when we have to pay extra tax to the Lab."

[iamyourneighbour]

Fair trade off imo. 
Kinda annoying as a merchant since you are not allowed to do P2P linden sales. It's really boosting mainland activity beyond imagination, already seen two whole sim auctioned off next to me with proper development by the owners in the past week. 
 

[Qie Niangao]

It does seem a tough call, not knowing how or when the other shoe drops, whether or not to reduce rents to correspond to reduced tier fees -- and how / if to factor-in fee hikes already imposed on currency exchange necessary for a landlord to pay that tier.

My situation as a trivially small-scale "landlord" is utterly unrepresentative of anything, but for whatever it's worth, I updated my rental boxes with a 10% decrease when the tier reduction was announced. It's not a business for me so the decision was easy, simply a way of spreading some good news about the platform's future.

[Love Zhaoying]

On 3/21/2018 at 10:39 PM, Callum Meriman said:

when your customers are paying the Lab US$2.00 per purchase

Is this specific fee announced yet?