A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.

[LittleMe Jewell]

14 hours ago, Cheshyr Pontchartrain said:

This is incorrect, Grumpity. You take closer to 3.5% from all transactions, as shown in all my recent sales. For example, I sold L$29,412 and Linden Lab took $4.09 in fees, plus another 2.5% to transfer that money to PayPal. With the new changes, it amounts to 8.5% overhead for every inworld sale, and up to 13% for the Marketplace. I can't stay in business that way.

What Grumpity said was that LL takes a flat $1.49 when you BUY L$. She didn't say anything about the sell fee or the process credit fee.  Your argument is valid for selling and cashing out, but Grumpity was not wrong in what she actually said.

Edited June 8, 2019 by LittleMe Jewell

[sparkie Hallard]

For me it suggests that second life is slowly going down hill.. my sales  are not as busy as they used to be and my store has been going for 10 years.

i think there profits are falling from lack of members now in the game as used to be.. hence why the price hikes. Just like in worldz that died , there was not enough funding in the end. 

I miss the old days when the population was  busy. and economy was booming. If only second life had another media boost like it did back then .

Edited June 8, 2019 by sparkie Hallard

[Kyrah Abattoir]

6 minutes ago, sparkie Hallard said:

Just like in worldz that died , there was not enough funding in the end. 

Inworlds shot itself in the foot by being stupidly cheap. They did the same mistake that every opensim grid to date has done so far. You can't run a healthy grid solely on the idea of "Being much cheaper than Linden Lab"

[sparkie Hallard]

You can out price people too , small business in second life will hurt them with the price hikes! People may turn there back on land possibly which again hurts creators if people then don’t buy to Rez on there sim. It’s a rolling snow ball affect 

 

[Drayke Newall]

52 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Inworlds shot itself in the foot by being stupidly cheap. They did the same mistake that every opensim grid to date has done so far. You can't run a healthy grid solely on the idea of "Being much cheaper than Linden Lab"

No, they shot themselves in the foot by trying to be like Second Life and charging less rather than finding a point of interest. Marketing 101 - a competitor must find and implement a reason WHY people should leave one company and go to another.

Its the same with second life which, has gone downhill due to no new meaningfull, workable or timely implemented features to keep people here. I always wonder what SL would have been like financially and population wise if Labs had listened to its users and added animesh/NPC support prior to when they did? Updated the avatar creation system (and body mesh) years ago when users were pleading to do so. Not have removed the teen grid forcing a new separate and emptier adult grid. Dealt with mainland and regions differently. Not killed off non-profit and educational sim discounts (a huge drawcard for users). Could go on and on. Yes some may have been non profitable however the backlash that followed many of the above was huge to the point where it gouged the userbase.

Experiences and new sharable windlight is a whole other topic. The former promised to all but then implemented only to the unused mainland and the later promised to all with a carrot on a stick of "its coming".

The fact of the matter is that Linden Labs has shot itself so many times in the foot, the only reason they survived whereas the others haven't is because they were the first and got that all important media attention in 2006 and have a loyal fanbase. That, was a time where everyone was on mainland and though it was more populated, it looked active and full all the time. People would actually use the roads to drive to events rather than teleport. This is what made SL appealing, a true definition of a second life. Now all we have is media or reviewers creating accounts and seeing nothing but emptiness reporting as such and leaving. Negatively impacting any advertising Labs do.

You can only beat a dead horse so many times and its getting closer and closer for SL. These premium changes and multi tiered premium has been talked about by users for years to reduce tier prices with no response by labs, yet only now is when Labs decide to introduce it with a give and take attitude. 

Edited June 8, 2019 by Drayke Newall

[Graeme Little]

It is really a simple issue.

If SL is a major activity in your life and you spend many happy hours there doing happy things, just continue paying the increased fee and be happy.
Chances are you are are part of the SL elite and refer to most others as noobs with default bodies, default skins and no profile pictures. You most likely spend your full monthly stipend at the elite shops and supplement your shopping with RL money. You probably own huge estates and need 100+ extra group slots and as many extra offline IMs. You are probably also a content provider who have contributed significantly to the SL success by supporting your customers and actually bothering to respond to their questions and queries. 

However, If SL is only a casual thing in your life, but you do not spend enough time there to justify  increased Premium Membership, down-size and become a Basic Member. Participate in SL activies of your choosing and if you really desire a new body or snazzy outfit to attend a snazzy event, pitch in some RL dollars and buy it. There are many shelters where you can squat with the other homeless to try on the snazzy outfit in private. If you also need a place to build your annual Happy Easter or Merry Christmas card, visit one of the many sandboxes where vast areas of building-allowed land welcome you for 24 hours. 

For me, the only reason I had a Premium Membership, was to have a house!
The "Extra Premium Benefits" never interested me.... "Exclusive Premium Membership areas" never interested me either..... "Premium Gifts", fresh off the old-fashioned sculpty, prims-gazillion table, although generous and interesting, almost always joined their family in the trash bin, A good, knowledgeable friend took me shopping for a reasonable body, skin and a few pieces of snazzy duds to hide my noob-ness. But mostly, I loved owning a house. Hours and hours of decorating, creating my own custom items, buying and moving stuff around, pieces of art, sexy furniture, my own photographs and so many more hours spent being happy and socializing with my friends - and all because I am allowed to own (and manage) my own house.

So, is it really simple for me? I guess not.
If being a Premium Member is the only way I can OWN a house or a piece of land on which I can build and OWN a house, it seems worth it. In fact, this is what I have been doing for almost 10 years. However, what about all those other "Premium Benefits"? I am a member of more-or-less 20 groups, get almost no offline IMs, never use any other Premium Membership benefits (other than the stipend, of course, purely because it exists) - so having land and/or a house was my attraction. 

Unless tiered/sliding-scale Premium Membership is introduced, I guess the only SL attraction I have, has become too expensive for me. It is not unfair, it is not an evil act by LL, just circumstances that need to be evaluated and acted upon. In this age of referendums, I would vote for different levels of Premium Membership. I would vote for the level where I am allowed to buy a 512 or 1024 piece of land and build a house.... *sighs*

Until then... *ring...ring.... hello, is that the shelter? Do you have any vacancies available?"

[Steph Catseye]

My apologies if my points were already mentioned before, I could only fly over the previous 53 pages. Obviously I am joining this discussion a bit late
I am in SL since the first year, had businesses  on my original avatar and this one and made a wonderful living from it for many years until I took a job as a texture creator at a game design studio 

Alright let's humor Linden Labs for a second and applaud them for not increasing membership fees since day one... YAY
Now let's explore reality..

Server prices have plummeted since they were introduced, the actual expenses are a fraction of what they used to be, LL has never adjusted in our favor.
The Graphics Engine, in the version we have today, was outdated the day it was introduced, there was never made the attempt to use a more modern version or an entirely different engine that would take us out of the stone age into the modern world.  Stable FPS is ruined by so many short comings in the overall concept of the environment.
We are still experiencing the exact same lag as 10 years ago despite the fact that bandwidth got up to 1000 times faster.
We, very recently, experienced teleportation issues like in the first years. 
The client Linden Labs is providing is the first thing people change once people get the hang of SL
The content in this world is created by us entirely and LL has their feet on the brake since day one when it comes to development.
Second Life is too complicated to ever become mainstream.

There are other 3D Communities that run on a fraction of the servers, on high end graphics, with subtle details and 90 people in the same room just make no difference to the experience.

Second Life has always been something for the lovers of the concept, it caters a very particular "crowd" and that is what they are banking on now. Giving us the "chance" to renew the membership for the old price, where the monthly increase is lower as the quarterly increase to make people choose the annual subscription... to get one last giant cash flow that will not be used to improve any of those things mentioned above.

If anything Land and Membership prices should have been lowered despite inflation and devaluation of the currency,  an increase of this magnitude is something nobody should go along with unless their SL business dictates it. The power is really in our hands.


 

Edited June 8, 2019 by Steph Catseye

[Drayke Newall]

7 minutes ago, Steph Catseye said:

Server prices have plummeted since they were introduced, the actual expenses are a fraction of what they used to be, LL has never adjusted in our favor.
The Graphics Engine, in the version we have today, was outdated the day it was introduced, there was never made the attempt to use a more modern version or an entirely different engine that would take us out of the stone age into the modern world.  Stable FPS is ruined by so many short comings in the overall concept of the environment.
We are still experiencing the exact same lag as 10 years ago despite the fact that bandwidth got up to 1000 times faster.
We, very recently, experienced teleportation issues like in the first years. 
The client Linden Labs is providing is the first thing people change once people get the hang of SL
The content in this world is created by us entirely and LL has their feet on the brake since day one when it comes to development.
Second Life is too complicated to ever become mainstream.

Sad thing is rather than giving what people wanted and what was needed - SL2 which, would have resolved many things and injected new life into Second Life, we got Sansar, the project no one asked for nor wanted and even though released recently has graphics so far behind modern graphics no one uses it.

Edited June 8, 2019 by Drayke Newall

[Kyrah Abattoir]

13 minutes ago, Steph Catseye said:

Server prices have plummeted since they were introduced, the actual expenses are a fraction of what they used to be, LL has never adjusted in our favor.

I've been running servers for years now and no, they have not "plummeted". They are cheaper yes, but SL has not stayed at a fixed size either, whether it's the visible part (regions) or the invisible infrastructure supporting it.

[Steph Catseye]

Just now, Drayke Newall said:

Sad thing is rather than giving what people wanted and what was needed - SL2 which, would have resolved many things and injected new life into Second Life, we got Sansar, the project no one asked for nor wanted and even though released recently has graphics so far behind modern graphics no one uses it.

Regarding Sansar... VR must run on stable FPS or you have puking customers (seriously) 👩‍⚕️
I believe they are in the vicinity of doing it right. Even major studios working for Playstation reducing graphics massively to increase the experience.

[Drayke Newall]

21 minutes ago, Steph Catseye said:

Regarding Sansar... VR must run on stable FPS or you have puking customers (seriously) 👩‍⚕️
I believe they are in the vicinity of doing it right. Even major studios working for Playstation reducing graphics massively to increase the experience.

VR was dead the moment it came out priced at the cost of a PC rather than for what it is, an accessory to the computer like a headset. The mere fact that an established company thought it was going to be a success to run an entire new project on it despite all the warnings of issues technically, price and health is laughable to say the least. Even if companies are still working on VR it is going no where fast if they have to reduce graphics quality to make it work. Sansar's graphics are so low quality it has no trouble running VR, the issue why it flopped was that no one had a VR headset to use it and that it seems to have monthly DLC's of things that should have been included from the get go.

Mobile is where every game company is heading. Now if labs want to be smart they should find a way to run peoples SL experience on a high end server with full graphics and stream it to peoples PC and mobile devices like many other companies and even Google (announced this year) are starting to do now. Hey they could even add that as a feature to a premium account. OH WAIT, Labs did do that years ago before the trend (SL Go I think it was called) but axed it, great decision that was...

Edited June 8, 2019 by Drayke Newall

[Steph Catseye]

10 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

I've been running servers for years now and no, they have not "plummeted". They are cheaper yes, but SL has not stayed at a fixed size either, whether it's the visible part (regions) or the invisible infrastructure supporting it.

I guess that depends from which angle you want to see things
If you factor in the consumption of bandwidth alone we are talking about 90% if that is not significant or justifies the word plummeting then please forgive me.
If you factor in the hardware that is needed to run a sim 15 years ago and is needed to run a sim today you most likely find that we are not "living" on high performance machines. Threads and processes have possibly quadrupled, hardware today can handle up to 32 times more than 15 years ago. They don't need to invest into growing performance or a growing community, they can simply updates their hardware from 15 years ago with parts that were created 10 years ago which is more than enough and very inexpensive. 

[Mollymews]

30 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

OH WAIT, Labs did do that years ago before the trend (SL Go I think it was called) but axed it, great decision that was...

LL didn't axe SL Go. Sony axed it along with all the other apps that were running on the OnLive platform.  Was about April 2015. Sony bought OnLive to secure the OnLive technology patents for their own (Sony) use, and closed down the OnLive platform

Edited June 8, 2019 by Mollymews
, and closed

[Drayke Newall]

Just now, Mollymews said:

LL didn't axe SL Go. Sony axed it along with all the other apps that were running on the OnLive platform.  Was about April 2015. Sony bought OnLive to secure the OnLive technology patents for their own (Sony) use

Whoever axed it is here or there, the fact Labs didn't reproduce it then or aren't now on their own is what's stupid especially given the push for live streaming of games etc.

[Mollymews]

8 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

Whoever axed it is here or there, the fact Labs didn't reproduce it then or aren't now on their own is what's stupid especially given the push for live streaming of games etc.

with perfect foresight then you or I would own the internets. Tim Cook would still be the lead of Apple, but working for us. Mark Zuckerberg would be a teacher in some minor midwestern college.  Jeff Bezos would still be working in a local bookshop supported by his wife. And Bill Gates would be living out his days in a old people's home. We would own Blockbuster which owns Netflix. We would own Universal of which You Tube would be a subsidiary, etc etc

we know all this would be true because we also have perfect hindsight

[KanryDrago]

24 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

Whoever axed it is here or there, the fact Labs didn't reproduce it then or aren't now on their own is what's stupid especially given the push for live streaming of games etc.

The push for live streaming of games comes from companies that think they can make a buck, not customers who the hell wants to double their input lag. Go try and play an fps or any twitch style game on streaming and get your butt handed to you by those players not streaming.

On live really didnt work for most people the only people who had any liking for it were those people with such low end machines that they couldn't play the game in the first place. Those aren't the type of customer you keep though as if they were into games they would have a machine capable of running it in the first place. Most will play the odd streamed game from time to time is all

[Drayke Newall]

20 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

with perfect foresight then you or I would own the internets. Tim Cook would still be the lead of Apple, but working for us. Mark Zuckerberg would be a teacher in some minor midwestern college.  Jeff Bezos would still be working in a local bookshop supported by his wife. And Bill Gates would be living out his days in a old people's home. We would own Blockbuster which owns Netflix. We would own Universal of which You Tube would be a subsidiary, etc etc

we know all this would be true because we also have perfect hindsight

This is a little different than perfect hindsight. Whilst yes true and hence my previous post of wondering what SL would be like without all the cancelations and mishaps in SL over the years, this goes a little further. It is well known that second life on mobile has been wanted for years and even talked about but they never kept looking into it. It is well known that having to send data of individual textures over the internet and recompile them onto the viewer is a problem, but they never looked into alternatives other than recently with the cloud.

Anyone that used SL Go saw the benefits of the almost instant load times of the render engine. There was no waiting or very little waiting for textures to load, mesh (sculpts back then) to render etc. It solved many of the issues that plague sl today, yet they never looked into it further.

It is one thing for perfect hindsight, however it is another thing completely in not seeing the obvious and exploring it further and implementing it.

11 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

The push for live streaming of games comes from companies that think they can make a buck, not customers who the hell wants to double their input lag. Go try and play an fps or any twitch style game on streaming and get your butt handed to you by those players not streaming.

On live really didnt work for most people the only people who had any liking for it were those people with such low end machines that they couldn't play the game in the first place. Those aren't the type of customer you keep though as if they were into games they would have a machine capable of running it in the first place. Most will play the odd streamed game from time to time is all

Anyone that thinks the benefit of live streaming games is for online MMO or FPS playing is just silly and is not the purpose of it. Additionally once again that is beside the point. SL benefitted from it due to the way it handled rendering locally on the servers in full and streaming it perfectly to the user, no waiting for textures to load. Even if there was a slight delay it would be nothing compared to what we have now. SL is well known for people who run the program on low end systems that it has kept the minimum specs of SL low for years. This would solve that, the precise reason live streaming is good, to run high end graphics on low end systems without negatively impacting those that do have high end systems.

Edited June 8, 2019 by Drayke Newall

[Mollymews]

3 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

It is one thing for perfect hindsight, however it is another thing completely in not seeing the obvious and exploring it further and implementing it.

this is much better way of phrasing your point. For SL Go users it was probably a bit disheartening to see a channel like OnLive that worked for them close. And I understand and accept why that would be disheartening for them

while the benefits of streaming may be obvious to you, they are not obvious to me. I don't use streaming services of this kind at all. I live a long way from the US-oriented data centers. Pretty much the only place in the world that has slower internet data center ping time than me is Antartica.

what LL are doing is stuff like CDN, which has significantly changed my SL experience for the better. I now get content delivered to me from a data center in Australia rather than previously from a data center in the US. LL have plans to take this approach further, more and more content onto servers closer to users where ever they are in the world   

 

[Drayke Newall]

1 minute ago, Mollymews said:

this is much better way of phrasing your point. For SL Go users it was probably a bit disheartening to see a channel like OnLive that worked for them close. And I understand and accept why that would be disheartening for them

while the benefits of streaming may be obvious to you, they are not obvious to me. I don't use streaming services of this kind at all. I live a long way from the US-oriented data centers. Pretty much the only place in the world that has slower internet data center ping time than me is Antartica.

what LL are doing is stuff like CDN, which has significantly changed my SL experience for the better. I now get content delivered to me from a data center in Australia rather than previously from a data center in the US. LL have plans to take this approach further, more and more content onto servers closer to users where ever they are in the world   

 

Shame you never tried SL Go then. I too live in Australia and whilst yes I agree things have certainly improved with the data centers, SL Go was on a whole different level of quickness. There was a slight delay due to ping from memory, but as far as load times go it was near instant. Thing people kept saying was "how can people run sl at full graphics on a Android tablet like that and not make it overheat" not realising that the tablet itself was doing no work at all. Its similar to running a steam game on one PC and streaming it to another pc on the same steam account. One machine does all the work yet the other gets top graphics streamed without any load on the receiving PC's graphics or cpu.

Definitely looking forward though to the rest of Cloud being utilised though and perhaps it is a by-product of looking into SL Go, just a shame it has taken so long.

[Mollymews]

8 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

Definitely looking forward though to the rest of Cloud being utilised though and perhaps it is a by-product of looking into SL Go, just a shame it has taken so long.

/me waves to you from across the ditch

for now it looks like LL are concentrating on the CDN and the AWS hosting of other SL services including region servers. I think when all of this is done and robust/stable then a SL for lighter devices like tablets and phones will come. Might be a streaming mode to it as well     

[Kyrah Abattoir]

1 hour ago, Drayke Newall said:

Shame you never tried SL Go then. I too live in Australia and whilst yes I agree things have certainly improved with the data centers, SL Go was on a whole different level of quickness. There was a slight delay due to ping from memory, but as far as load times go it was near instant. Thing people kept saying was "how can people run sl at full graphics on a Android tablet like that and not make it overheat" not realising that the tablet itself was doing no work at all. Its similar to running a steam game on one PC and streaming it to another pc on the same steam account. One machine does all the work yet the other gets top graphics streamed without any load on the receiving PC's graphics or cpu.

Definitely looking forward though to the rest of Cloud being utilised though and perhaps it is a by-product of looking into SL Go, just a shame it has taken so long.

For the brief time online was alive the future of PERSONAL computers looked indeed very dim.

Nowadays it's the future of "Internet"  versus "Internet by AWS"

[Mollymews]

1 hour ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Nowadays it's the future of "Internet"  versus "Internet by AWS"

there is this as well, true

Internet By being a predictable outcome of unfettered merchantilism

[Theresa Tennyson]

4 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

Shame you never tried SL Go then. I too live in Australia and whilst yes I agree things have certainly improved with the data centers, SL Go was on a whole different level of quickness. There was a slight delay due to ping from memory, but as far as load times go it was near instant. Thing people kept saying was "how can people run sl at full graphics on a Android tablet like that and not make it overheat" not realising that the tablet itself was doing no work at all. Its similar to running a steam game on one PC and streaming it to another pc on the same steam account. One machine does all the work yet the other gets top graphics streamed without any load on the receiving PC's graphics or cpu.

Definitely looking forward though to the rest of Cloud being utilised though and perhaps it is a by-product of looking into SL Go, just a shame it has taken so long.

SL Go wasn't "the cloud", it was "a big airplane flying around in the cloud and sucking kerosene that somebody needs to pay for."

[Coffee Pancake]

Sheesh !

SL (or anything really) being rendered in the cloud and streamed to your PC is a industry with a cool trick looking for someone, anyone, to pay the huge cost of running super computer sized render farms. The business-numbers-business people are really excited about it.

Everyone jumping up and down about how that needs to come back for SL should really go and see the reaction Stadia is getting now. The penny seems to be finally dropping that it will eat a crazy amount of bandwidth, rather than a high cost to stream or netflix subscription model you have to buy games at full retail price, that stay DRM locked in the stadia cloud, sure you can play on mobile devices .. but you're dreaming if you think it will be with mobile data. .... and everyone knows the launch price is cheap compared to what the service costs to build and run, so once you're locked in with a library, guess you're committed.

Then look at how SL could be applied to Stadia. It can't, it has a high rendering impact, no cost to start and a very long shelf life, so it can only be funded by the SL GO model.

Which has already been demonstrated as not something SL users are prepared to pay for. In fact, no one was prepared to pay onlive's streaming costs.

Onlive didn't just find Sony had suck in and bought them overnight.

Onlive invited them over, put the only thing of any commercial value on the table (not the servers or the business or anything else), the patents, negotiated a price, and took their money. 

Sony,  immediately switched off the big fat money sucking pipe that lead directly to the furnaces. 

[Selene Gregoire]

9 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

No, they shot themselves in the foot by trying to be like Second Life and charging less rather than finding a point of interest. Marketing 101 - a competitor must find and implement a reason WHY people should leave one company and go to another.

Mismanagement of funds is what caused IW's downfall. You do not take out a loan to keep your business afloat the way it was done for InWorldz. Why did she move to Panama? Think about that. IW closed due to defaulting on a loan and got her shut out of PayPal which she needed desperately to operate. Then, after her loyal residents raised enough money that was initially supposed to go to pay off the loan, she reopened IW with that money only to have it crash and burn in less than 6 months. 

That's how it went down. I watched the whole thing burn so it didn't surprise me when her second attempt failed even worse than her first.