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A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.


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Okay ~ so, over the years, I've slowly become familiar with the issues of running SecondLife ~ both the technical ones ( all those balls of group data getting dragged around with avatars, bogging down sims as they try and connect from one to another ) and the social ones ~ of managing a store, and friends and, trying to not let people fall through the cracks.  So I've been thinking rather long and hard about my reply here, and while there's many things I find frustrating about the news, there's really only one thing stands out as problematic and worth planting a pitchfork and lighting a torch of my own over.

Reducing basic account activity feels both punitive and disrespectful to your legacy users.  People who have been faithful members of the community for a decade or more shouldn't be treated on equal grounds as someone who has just signed up.

Grandfather in the 42 group cap and old IM limit for accounts that were created prior to June 4th.

OR

Alternatively, I'd suggest raising all caps by one each year the account remains active.  Kind of a 'thank you for being here' reward. ( so a basic account that's 13 years old gets 48 [35+13] groups and 28 [15+13] offline IM's )  People love inventory expansions in games, and they love birthday presents, and all the data that's needed is already tracked to implement this.  Happy Rez Day!  Here's a group slot !

I've been premium for almost the entire time I've been on SL ~ so while the changes to the basic account levels shouldn't affect me directly, I still find them insulting and problematic.  My management accounts aren't premium, so lower IM caps will cause them to be difficult to use.  There are thousands of people who are emotionally invested in SL and offer their time and energy into making it a better place that don't deserve to be punished for not handing over money.  Don't alienate your long-term user base please.

Thank you for listening @Grumpity Linden

-- Liz

Edited by polysail
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9 hours ago, Saturday Melody said:

Maybe people who haven't subscribed would be more enthusiastic if the result of a missed payment were not a frozen account. I simply cannot take the risk that something will go wrong with my payment and I will be locked out of the commitments I have inworld, that's an OP negative for me. Busted back to freebie account? Sure, I can work with that. Frozen out? Nope.

Why can't I earn and pay for my subscription with Linden dollars?

And if you were at the other end of the world from the Cool Kids, maybe you'd appreciate the importance of IMs more. Some of us need them to work. Same with groups, so the groups that will lose me are the ones I joined to support, so I can keep the ones I work for. No wonder they're annoyed.

Indirectly, I think  you can.  When you cash out the funds go to your USD balance. As far as I know, that can be used to pay your fees to LL

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10 minutes ago, Sasy Scarborough said:

If they put this into practice in the next three months from this date... even with the 3 month warning, I will personally sponsor your store with premium lite at 3.00 a month for your first 6 months, it would be worth it.

Someone else was kind enough to make a similar offer and I greatly appreciate both offers. I am sorry but I can not, in good conscience, accept your offer, for reason I will not disclose, publicly or privately. The reasons are very personal. Thank you very much for your kind offer.

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id like to suggest a small increase in premium stipend. with the rate hike it seems the only thing we are getting is more group slots. i wont benefit from the land price reduction. it would be nice to have a bit more allowance...and it would cost LL nothing...from 300L to 500L a week...please.

Edited by ShuggerBaybee Luv
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Grumpity, I'd like a clarification on the grandfathered/buydown regions...

I understand that if I buy a grandfathered or bought-down region, I can have that status transferred, for a fee, and pay the new, even lower, monthly price.  That's terrific.

Here's my question:  Are you going to re-open the buy-down option for people who buy a new private region from LL or purchase a standard, non-grandfathered region from another resident?

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1 minute ago, Selene Gregoire said:

Someone else was kind enough to make a similar offer and I greatly appreciate both offers. I am sorry but I can not, in good conscience, accept your offer, for reason I will not disclose, publicly or privately. The reasons are very personal. Thank you very much for your kind offer.

You are welcome. 

 

-----------------

I keep seeing stipend increase comments, stipends are money, they do cost, if Lindens give them they have to come from somewhere, fees etc otherwise its fake money and then the bottom falls off the economy. If you do not spend it you can sell it, so increasing prices to then give it back would make for a serious firing of some accountants 😁

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I agree about the loss of groups because creators/store owners/managers have to join groups for events/hunts/sales.  Not every creator is a Premium account.  I buy more L than I would get from a stipend so I never went Premium.  The land price drops don't help me at all since I have a homestead that I rent. 

The message cap is a big kick in the teeth.  Yes, messages go to your email so you can still read them offline.  That doesn't help with stuff dropped on you.  I own a weekend sales list.  I use a dedicated sale alt for the group.  I give merchants a dropbox that they rezz, grant debit, put their submission cards in and hit send.  Saves them fighting to make TPs or lag.  All convenient in one spot, their own land.  This does not count as a notecard being dropped on you so it isn't automatically saved if you cap.  Merchants message asking questions, shoppers message to let us know if something is wrong, subscribers send you new subscriber messages.  A cap of 15 means at most 7 cards and one message of some kind because the sender also sends us transaction information.  

I don't need a house on an alt that stays in the office.  I don't need a stipend on her.  She only needs 2 groups so no incentive there.  There is no reason I would make her a Premium account.  Notecards and messages will be lost.  Myself or my assistant will have to try to track down cards from merchants that are on the other side of the world and don't keep the same time as we do.  The cards might not get replaced before list deadline....especially if the merchants are constantly getting capped due to new limits.

I talked to someone that owns another sales list and she has the same worries.  We will need to keep those alts on constantly to make sure we get everything. 

You say that this move isn't to punish basic accounts or make them turn Premium but it is doing that anyway.  

 

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Well, one thing to keep in mind, Grumpity, is that the reduction of grandfathered and regular islands is cancelled out *if you have more than one premium account*.

Now, why would anyone have more than one premium account? 

And the answer is: because groups don't work. It's not about the limit on the *number* of groups. But the *functioning* of groups internally.

So you need multiple premium accounts to make land groups as an owner - hence 2 or 6 or more times $72 a year really adds up -- and now will be so much more expensive with multiples.

So I went from having one big land rentals group 14 years ago, to having 6 or more such groups now, each with a few hundred people but also each with their own separate premium account owner.

Why? Because once you get over about 400-500 people in a *land* group where varying permissions are handed out to tenants and managers; where land lists have to load; where notices have to go out, it starts to lag and become unreadable. Trying to go back and forth *on one account* between such groups gets really crazy. Logging into each one of them separately is much easier.

Also, note that in the old days it was NECESSARY to make multiple groups with multiple owners because of the nefarious "officer recall" that would remove the tier payer from his own land. Sure, these groups now could all be turned over to one account. But then they are no longer original owners and founders, but merely "made owner". I'd be reluctant to do this, to be honest because it's also useful to spread tier out over several dates to pay. Making the conversion inevitably means that you are stuck with much earlier tier dates -- you lose some money. Even so, due to your cost increase, I'll have to struggle to do this and get rid of premium accounts -- how many others will be doing this?

In the larger groups when I try to change a person's role, it's not uncommon to wait more than a minute for the menu to "turn over" or "save".  That's a long time. It's useful to put group ownership on different accounts so that the requests go to the owner and you burn through them in one quick session, successfully, instead of having ALL of them bombard you at once, with some messages inevitably lost in the system.

Typing a name into the search box simply *does not work*. You have to trick it into working by typing only the first letter or two.

There are a number of other annoyances with land groups as you may know -- even if you are the owner of a group and you put a prim on that land, unless you set your tag *to that group* it returns. There was a very brief period when LL played with getting rid of that -- but since it required looking up and reading all your groups each time, it abandoned it. Still, it's a huge pain when all day long, you have to keep switching your hats just to go from one sim to another -- because you need multiple groups because big ones don't work.

So many things in SL that aren't so great and are chronic annoyances occur because they are workarounds to some other thing that isn't so great...So groups never really got fixed up right, after LL made the very important reform of transferring them from hippie communes, where anybody could steal land by triggering this insane "officer recall" which was conceived as "democracy" (it was more like anarchy or terrorism). They converted them to *differentiated* role groups, where owner, officer, member etc could have different *powers*. Some of the socialist furries howled, because they wanted absolute equality everywhere, and even if one person had to make another an equal owner, that wasn't perfect equality. For most of us, however, it was a great benefit and made the economy more secure and helped it grow.

I like to think I helped bring about those necessary reforms (if you wanted a land-based economy, which really, you still need) with this blog post, which Cory Linden then read and showed to Philip. It's hard to imagine that yes, there was a time when all funds distributed equally ("group dwell" or any payments from sales) because there weren't differentiated roles or a checkoff box to enable or stop this:

https://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/01/imagine-if-the-pizza-guy-stole-ll.html

Another chronic annoyance -- which I was willing to suffer a permanent JIRA ban over -- is that "share" can override group "laws" -- like the ability to set whether any member can return group-set prims -- something you want to keep turned off or members return rental boxes and buildings, by accident or on purpose. The ability to "return shared items" is a pet Linden feature that I suspect most users don't even know about, much less use. Because if a group-set item is accidentally or on purpose put on "share," it can be returned -- and lost or broken -- or it can be griefed by members in fact not empowered to move or return group-set objects. Some Lindens favouring open-source culture love the idea of group builds and being able to return any other builder's prims in the collective. Others in SL don't favour collectivism but capitalism, where the person who paid for the sim and pays the tier controls the land, rather than Soviet communes.

And if you don't want to hear my thoughts about the historic ideologies of your old and new homelands, understood, but then there's this, that affects every member of a shopping or fan group -- group chat often lags, to the point where you really can't have group chat in a group also holding multiple roles and land.

The reality is, if you have multiple premium accounts, some of them will be almost free of inventory, and then never lag in any way. So that's useful also for trying to perform chores on really laggy days in SL.

 

 

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9 hours ago, Saturday Melody said:

Why can't I earn and pay for my subscription with Linden dollars?

Saturday, you can!  Sell the $L you've earned on the LindEx.  The proceeds go into your $USD Balance.  Whenever LL collects land fees or Premium dues, they go look there first.  Your registered payment method is only charged if there isn't enough money in your $USD Balance to cover the charges.

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7 minutes ago, ShuggerBaybee Luv said:

id like to suggest a small increase in premium stipend. with the rate hike it seems the only thing we are getting is more group slots. i wont benefit from the land price reduction. it would be nice to have a bit more allowance...and it would cost LL nothing...from 300L to 500L a week...please.

It's not true that it "costs LL nothing". Sure, the state can print money endlessly -- and does. LL is like Yeltsin's Russia in that respect.

But it comes at a cost -- inflation. If you have lots more "free money" injected into the system, then the rate of exchange worsens to that people who earn that money trying to cash it out -- who are already facing new, stiff fees -- will get less for their cashout. It's a basic economic rule that any increase of cash into a system DEVALUES that cash, so that the rate goes down, i.e. it may cost less to buy, but makes less to sell. The more Lindens there are to the US dollar, the worse its value.

The Lindens have this in fact carefully calibrated, by their lights. I'm not sure they still use "Supply Linden" to artificially suppress the value of the Linden, but likely they do. Otherwise, when you see 14 million Lindens for sale, yet the offer to purchase 2500 Lindens for $11.47 US *within 10 minutes* would not be possible. Huge pots of money disappear mysteriously often, and not because somebody bought those millions. It's not clear HOW it is run, but THAT it is run to "balance the economy" is a given -- to keep Lindens cheap enough to make players feel 1000L is a big wad, yet not so cheap as to go below $3.50 US for them when cashed out by merchants.

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12 hours ago, Cain Maven said:

A few of the other changes will also indirectly affect creators. Reducing the group count will make it harder to reach customers. Reducing the number of offline IMs will make it harder to communicate with customers. (As a side note, taking away benefits is a very unfortunate way of treating customers/users -- google "loss aversion" to see why this is a psychological blunder even if it saves a few pennies.)

 

Flash! Sighting Linden Lab’s new limits on offline messages and group memberships Microsoft and Google have just announced that Hotmail and Gmail will reduce the number of messages in any mailbox to 15 for non-premium users. They said it’s incredibly difficult to send text characters over the internet and storage costs are going up with the increased price of 5.25 inch floppy discs, and they wish they’d gotten into full motion 3 dimensional virtual worlds which are so much easier to operate. Wait... wait... correction. They didn’t 😀

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37 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yay! Sweatshop labour for the win!

So what if some currently being paid a living wage, with basic benefits such as health care, lose their jobs in the US, to be replaced by pieceworkers who require no benefits or labour rights!

I NEED MY 7 GROUP SLOTS!!!

Where was your computer made at? How about your cellphone? Most likely China. Now guess what? Computers, and cellphones are cheaper now days. In 1978, an Apple computer cost $3,000.00. That would be about $15,000.00 today. If not more. California has become too expensive to do business in. So move to Texas, Nevada, Delaware, or Florida. Off shore about 30%, to 40% to low wage countries.  This would be support, and something like the G team. SL needs a police force. And I don't mean people role playing police officers. There used to be the G team. Bring that back, and hire people in low wage countries to work in the new G team.

Then start replacing those that work in support, with workers from low wage countries. LL can do this by replacing a few workers at a time. If a worker quits, or retires, then replace the worker with another worker from a low wage country. But don't get all the workers from the same low wage country. LL needs to get them from about five, or six low wage countries. Because there could be wars, or revolutions. Then there's natural disasters.

For what it cost to hire five workers in California, LL can hire about 50 workers in low wage countries. This would be a win, win for LL, and for those that play SL.

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42 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

That's kind of what I'm remembering. The difference being that if the account was created before those changes then you get the 500L. Shoot, I'd be happy with the 300Ls if I could afford premium.

L$300 is peanuts for SL's economy.  That's the average price of hair these days.  Skins are usually 1200+.  Clothing and outfits are anywhere from 250-500.  Shoes are 500-800.  Makeup around 250+.  Now imagine if you want to buy furniture and accessories for your parcel of land.  You can forget about it.

The stipend has never adjusted to SL's ever changing economy, which isn't that desirable once you look at the prices of everything.  

Edited by Nextio
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Ok, so Lindens Labs is now spitting on their users/customers faces, just like that. Remember that the ones you're using now are people who had make you grow and earn so much money and could leave you easily with this ugly  Sansar that you're trying to push so hard.

Linden Labs was often criticized for taking advantage of their users/customers. Guess now it's just a proof that all those speculations were actually true

Edited by NicolaBCole
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10 hours ago, Kat Linden said:

Hi! So, I am very afraid of pitchforks - please be gentle.

I just wanted to briefly address groups maths. It's true that the groups of Basic accounts are being lowered by 7, and the groups of Premium accounts are being raised by 10 - and if you look at that math alone, it might not seem to add up. However, most residents have at least one alt. Technically, you can have up to 5 alts, and many residents are not entirely limited by that technicality. But let's you had one Premium Membership and 4 Basic alts - the number of groups you could have on your main account would go up by 10, but the total number of groups you could be a member of would go down by 18. This is important because all members of groups contribute to lag, even inactive group members. This is especially true for group chat. There are residents who have a lot of alts that they have not used in years that are still part of groups, and they are slowing those groups down. Lowering the number of groups for Basic accounts will not be a quick fix for this issue, but reducing the number of groups Basic members can join could help keep it from building further as we go forward.

Hi Kat - I am replying to this without reading anything that's come after, so if its already been said, I apologize.   Its true that people have alts.  However, not everyone does.  It seems to me that, it would be worth it to comb through groups that are "inactive" and delete them - say, a group that has not had any activity in the past 6 months.  Same for avatars, really.  If they have not been active in 6 months, send a warning to the email on file that clues them to log in or lose it.   There have been problems with groups going back at least as far as 2007 - probably longer, but that's when I joined.   Chat lag, notices not going thru - and the larger the groups get, the worse it gets.    I understand that Second Life wants to give us new, shiny stuff to play with, but honestly, please just go back and fix the bugs that have been in JIRA for years and years.  Fixing those things would have to be a help, server-side as well, I would think?  

Also, please consider, your basic members are IMPORTANT.   Even though we don't pay a membership to be on SL, we are still spending a lot of money in SL.  We buy lindens, we spend lindens on things like tier/rent, clothing, landscaping, events, etc etc etc.  All of which, when people go to cash out, Linden Lab gets to take another piece of.  This really feels like you are penalizing non-Premium members of SL.  I think its a bad road for Linden Lab to go down.   Sure, Premium members should get perks.  But don't take things away from the non-Premium members that we've only just gotten, and been begging for, for years. (Groups)

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5 minutes ago, Nextio said:

L$300 is peanuts for SL's economy.  That's the average price of hair these days.  Skins are usually 1200+.  Clothing and outfits are anywhere from 250-500.  Shoes are 500-800.  Makeup around 250+.  Now imagine if you want to buy furniture and accessories for your parcel of land.  You can forget about it.

The stipend has never adjusted to SL's ever changing economy, which isn't that desirable once you look at the prices of everything.  

Excuse me. I've been in SL for a very long time. I know where to find good/high quality products at low(er) prices. Thank you for trying to help.

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10 hours ago, FlightlessAngel said:

I agree that all of these concepts are hard for new users to grasp BUT I have to say I find that older members find them much harder to grasp because it is not just getting a handle on the game but it is basically relearning a game you feel you already put the work of learning into. New users are more willing to change because they are going in the with expectation of learning a game.

I can tell you that when I had found SL a few years back if I would have seen that I would have had to pay for it I would have kept scrolling and I think a lot of people would. You need a free membership but you also need real incentive for them to switch over. Under no circumstances should you further limit what basic users who have already been here all these years are getting (They are your faithful members and a large amount of them are pouring their RL money into Linden Lab's real wallet). Consider only knocking down what new registering members are getting. People do not take kindly to having things taken away. Be mindful that not all basic accounts are forever-noobs that do not contribute. I have met many residents that did have premium for a period of time and then decided it wasn't worth it to them and they dropped it for a while. Just because someone is not forking up a whole $10 a month (Which really isn't all that much at all.) does not mean they are not putting out much much more than that supporting their own shopping habits. I have watched non-premium members drop $100-$200 or more a month just for shopping and then more for their land.

Of course you can say well we have to raise the prices on things because of new plans being made and new things happening which is 100% understandable but I see people using the new Linden Homes as an example here but be mindful that not all premium users have access to them right now and thus are paying for other users new perks and not their own.

There was an idea somewhere in another post suggesting different levels of premium. Some people really only get premium to make it easier on themselves getting into shopping events. Basic should remain because that is how you get new people to play and a percentage of those new people will become premium.. I am not sure a month free is going to cut it. I think two levels of premium would even suffice, you could have one geared towards your everyday users and then one geared more towards business owners and people who make their RL money from SL more regularly.

I would be one of those people prem membership is pointless to me I have easily sunken 5k or more into one account 3 to 4k in another and a few hundred across my other 3 accounts I have prolly sunken 10k usd over 6 years  so I have paid my fair share for me to keep a membership and to take away groups is not fair to those people  and that 10 is without the land I have rented for the past 5 years LL should leave the groups where they are not removing them from current members but I don't agree with forcing people to pay to play its wrong and if it was Pay to Play I would have kept scrolling. They increased the upload fees in SL so I don't upload as much I upload less often because its BS for the current fee unless you're a high roller. the way SL is going its gonna get to a point people are just gonna get on and I wish SL would think about the smaller people for once.

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So I'm not trying to sound overly harsh...

But if all of this is a byproduct of how badly Sansar seems to be doing (which from all the jungle-drums I have heard is not being well received and DEV is going SUPER slow on), why aren't the resources being deployed into SL to fix up the sort of structural back end stuff that makes groups and all that bad? Why not be spending time, effort, resources into the thing that does seem to have a window of actually keeping on making money?

Is going all VR worth a bunch of moves that could seriously slash the number of free account users, and not by upselling them?

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Dear Linden Lab,

I started out as a non-premium member in SL, now that's not to say, I never paid a dime in SL. As a matter of fact, I did. I paid my mesh hair, mesh body and skin straight out of my own bank. I never bothered with the premium membership, because quite frankly, there weren't a lot of perks... unless one signs up for a year's worth of subscription (which you, LL, will be taking away from some VAT countries). Premium membership would be very worth it, IF it was worth it.

You have mentioned that premium membership provided "premium access" to it's users, but as a premium member, I still struggle to get into high-traffic events (yay Blueberry sales!! Wooot!).  Now, you've bragged about additional groups for premium members, hurray, that's great and hurray for Linden Homes, but some of us don't like your Linden Homes. I just think you could give more premium perks other than the new improved Linden homes and increased group space. The "premium gifts" idea are so outdated... most of the "stuff" you give out are high prim and low quality. Could you offer better perks... like handling tickets in a timely manner, that's a better perk than premium gifts or premium access in my opinion. Also... since you're increasing the premium membership, could you also increase the weekly stipend while you're at it? Inflation you know...? L$300 isn't as "huge" as it was a decade ago. . . I'm okay with the premium membership increase, but show "more experience" of the NOW, of why it's worth buying into it, and not promise that you'll deliver someday... because, right now, I don't think Bakes on Mesh is still happening? Is it or is it not? Did I miss a memo?

All I'm saying is, there are some great and bad news (mostly headache). It's not fair to decrease the groups among non-premium residents. Just because those residents don't pay your memberships, doesn't mean they don't pay to play in SL at all. You've raised the bar and now you're lowering it reaaalllyy down. Can you pleaseee just leave their group spaces as is and just increase the premium members' groups? Why take it back when you've already raised it? You aren't losing anything if the current non-premium residents keep their 46 in-world group spaces. Group spaces are already limited, and it's one of the necessities in starting out a business in SL or managing land in SL. As a small business owner, without customers in my store's group, how am I going to spread the word of mouth about my store? I say, leave the group spaces alone... please? Just give the perks to premium members and don't "punish" the non-premium residents.

As for that 5% transaction fee...I don't like it, but I know SL needs to grow. However, could you please fix the copybot, copyright and griefer issues? Creators are paying LL to help create a SL economy, but they don't have the backing of LL. Why do we still have copybots and griefer issues? The biggest question y'all should be asking amongst yourselves is: How can you keep the creators feel secure in investing at a verrryyy fragile virtual economy like SL? Just keep in mind, without content creators, SL wouldn't be where it is today.

Sincerely yours,
A very concerned resident. 

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This is a giant middle finger to all but a small handful of the SL userbase. Loyal players who have paid their tiers and premiums some for over a decade now, some with thousands of dollars invested into their accounts are rewarded with having to pay an unprecedented even higher premium.

Not only to them, but to the content creators who drive the lifeblood to SL. There's already a fee taken from marketplace sales, a fee taken when the L$ revenue is sold for USD, and now the 2.5% fee process credit is up to 5%. What kind of confidence is that inspiring in the creators who make the content that makes people buy L$ or premium subscription in the first place? What happens by next year when it's decided 5% isn't enough it needs to be 10%?

Only ones happy with this I suspect are land barons who get to pay $20 a month less for each sim which will cause our rent to drop (if they're feeling generous). Feels as if some people who were locked down on sansar have been moved back to administrating SL. That's the only explanation I can think of for this sudden 180 from all the good quality of life updates SL has been getting the past 2 years.

All you have to do is look at that like bar ratio. Come on, LL, It's not too late to douse this dumpster fire.

that like bar.png

Edited by Chainsword Audion
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Honestly, from a sole consumer's standpoint, there is little to no benefit for me to go premium. I've been an SL user for nearly 11 years and in that time, I've never really felt that there is a huge benefit to hold a premium account. Like many, my favorite hobby on SL is shopping and the stipend would cover one to two items per week MAX. The costs outweigh the benefits imo. For $99 annually, on top of having to buy Lindens to simply spend in world, I don't feel that it's worth it. Sure, the early event access and land are nice but those still aren't worth $99 to me. $99 USD in Lindens would roughly be around 25K lindens. I would much rather spend that money on products within the game where I'd actually receive something useful to me (clothing/decor/skins/etc) and my gameplay. 

I did not make this post with the intention to bash anyone who loves being a premium member. I think it's beneficial if you want land, need the customer support, are a creator, are a blogger, etc. But for many of us "basic" members, if this is an effort to entice us to go premium, I feel it does the opposite. A "possible" new linden home on a small parcel with a tiny amount of prims/land impact, a very small stipend and a chance at entering events earlier than some is still not enough for me to see the benefits. 

As many others have said, groups have been an issue for a while but trying to downsize them for basic members is honestly putting a band-aid over a bullet hole. The entire system of "groups" needs to be overhauled instead of penalizing those of us who, for whatever reason, would prefer not to be premium. It's already frustrating enough having to backtrack through group notices to make sure that something wasn't missed or overlooked because IMs were capped or notices never delivered (which, btw I receive offline messages but many times I never receive an email even though I log on to an "IMs capped" message). To add another cap onto that already limited one is frustrating.

I feel for creators, who are being stretched thin more and more and I also understand that LL is a business, first and foremost. All I am asking is to please also have some consideration for those of us "basic members" who also substantially contribute to SL's economy.  

 

Edited by ParisLeShea Cerise
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16 minutes ago, Frankie Antonioni said:

Where was your computer made at? How about your cellphone? Most likely China. Now guess what? Computers, and cellphones are cheaper now days. In 1978, an Apple computer cost $3,000.00. That would be about $15,000.00 today. If not more. California has become too expensive to do business in. So move to Texas, Nevada, Delaware, or Florida. Off shore about 30%, to 40% to low wage countries.

Well, yes, actually Frankie, I was aware of this. We call it "Neoliberalism" and "Globalization," and it's one of the reasons why there are certain companies from which I will not purchase goods and services. Now, it's pretty much impossible these days, such is the stranglehold of neoliberalism, to live without participating at all in the exploitation of cheap labour from the developing world, and the parallel attack upon worker's rights in the developed world, but that doesn't mean I have to be complacent about this kind of unethical corporate practice.

26 minutes ago, Frankie Antonioni said:

But don't get all the workers from the same low wage country. LL needs to get them from about five, or six low wage countries. Because there could be wars, or revolutions. Then there's natural disasters.

You just ooze compassion, don't you? God forbid a natural disaster or revolution disrupt your ability to get support, right?

27 minutes ago, Frankie Antonioni said:

This would be a win, win for LL, and for those that play SL.

Not so much, on the other hand, for the local workforce and the pieceworkers they'd be exploiting to replace them at a fraction of their wages.

But hey, you'd get to keep your group slots for an online pastime that you enjoy. Priorities, right?

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