Costs of renting sims and prim amounts

[China Rainforest]

I agree that some of the land barrons are really ripping us off, I run  3 sims, the one full sim is 60K a month for 20K prims, but the other that is a different sim owner group, is  72K a month for 20k prims, I do not have the money needed to change that sim over to a lower  cost one, it seems the moving costs of this would set me back 50k, I would love to rent all  3 of my sims from the same place, RGF, they have been around for years, I rented from them 15 years back, also there when needed, never ripping you off and really helpful,

 we can get a homestead with 5.000 prims on it, wouldn't it be great to be able to have a 10.000 prim sim, I think a lot more people would rent those. Lindons if you are reading this, what are the chances of a 10.000 prim sim? also, I am sure if the overall costs of renting a sim were lower, you'd have more people renting sims and creating comunities,I have seen people deserting Gorean RP for example because of the costs of sims.

Edited August 18, 2020 by China Rainforest
spelling mistakes

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

people leave gor not because of the cost of the sim.. but because its gor..

[China Rainforest]

I agree with that too, but I still think we'd encourage people back into it with cheaper sims, 

[Drakonadrgora Darkfold]

what would bring more back into it is less misogyny by the so called 'masters' but that is not going to happen..

[China Rainforest]

I know what you mean,I replied to you in world on this as I was trying to get a chat going on land costs etc, 

 

[Odaks]

I was completely mystified as to what Gor had to do with the OP's post.

Interpreting the subsequent comments, I can only conclude that the answer is, "Absolutely nothing". But have I missed something here?

[China Rainforest]

well i did mention Gor in my original comment, saying I'd seen people leaving gor because of sim costs, but she is right, they left for other reasons too, but my original thoughts are on costs of sims and prims.

[Odaks]

Sorry! I don't know how, but I did miss that reference to Gorean RP, and it was clear enough, too!

 

[ChinRey]

  

3 hours ago, China Rainforest said:

I agree that some of the land barrons are really ripping us off, I run  3 sims, the one full sim is 60K a month for 20K prims, but the other that is a different sim owner group, is  72K a month for 20k prims

Don't blame the landowners, blame LL.

60K a month, is about 230 US dollars after all the fees have been deducted. 72K is about 280 US dollars. Regular maintenance fee for a full region is USD 229 and you have to pay that fee the months the region is vacant too (there will be a few of those). This is with the current historically low L$ exchange rate. A year ago L$ 60K would have been about USD 220 and L$ 72K about USD 265.

Obviously, the first landowner has some discount, at least the region is grandfathered and there may well be some other secret discounts too. If the second landowner has to pay full price, they have to charge as much as 72K to even have a chance of getting a few dollars in return for their investment.

So, the price difference is probably not because one landowner is greedier than the other, it's because they have to pay more themselves. Remember, Second Life is not in any way a level playing field with equal opportunities for everybody. In any case, with those price neither of the landowners are making much money worth speaking of. It's LL who takes it all.

Edited August 18, 2020 by ChinRey
Typos

[Lancewae Barrowstone]

Yeah, I get her point about land size -to- prim counts, coming as a product of only two choices, 20k prims or 5k prims (and yeah, I know the 30k, but setting that aside).  

SO, If Homestead sq meters (SM) =  Full Region SM, then

H = SM + 5,000 Prims

FR = SM + 20,000 Prims

*There is a natural gap MISSING between those two.... for, 

HM2 = SM + 10,000 Prims

That seems logical, natural, desirable thus marketable, and easy to provide.  Is she wrong?  

**Calling LL.  Please Provide. Thank You. Over 'n Out**

[Drayke Newall]

26 minutes ago, Lancewae Barrowstone said:

Yeah, I get her point about land size -to- prim counts, coming as a product of only two choices, 20k prims or 5k prims (and yeah, I know the 30k, but setting that aside).  

SO, If Homestead sq meters (SM) =  Full Region SM, then

H = SM + 5,000 Prims

FR = SM + 20,000 Prims

*There is a natural gap MISSING between those two.... for, 

HM2 = SM + 10,000 Prims

That seems logical, natural, desirable thus marketable, and easy to provide.  Is she wrong?  

**Calling LL.  Please Provide. Thank You. Over 'n Out**

I must be the only person that would rather a higher avatar limit than more LI on a homestead. 5000 LI is plenty for pretty well much every genre for a region in Second Life. If people are struggling to fit everything on a homestead then they need to look for better builds or design their region better utilising perspective or sight line tricks better. Now if we are talking avatar limits then 20 is far to low and should be set to 50.

As to the price issues, well yeah that's just LL to blame not land barons however much we all dislike them.

Edited August 18, 2020 by Drayke Newall

[Lindal Kidd]

This thread is clear proof of the old saying "You can't please all of the people all of the time".  A couple of years ago, land costs were MUCH higher for everyone.  LL reduced that; both the costs to buy land and the upkeep costs have come down significantly.

Did people cheer?  Noooooo!  They still kvetch about how land is too expensive.

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

I must be the only person that would rather a higher avatar limit than more LI on a homestead. 5000 LI is plenty for pretty well much every genre for a region in Second Life. If people are struggling to fit everything on a homestead then they need to look for better builds or design their region better utilising perspective or sight line tricks better.

Let's illustrate it. The prim I'm standing on here shows how much space per prim you have in a 5000 LI homestead region:

This is how much space you have per prim in a 20,000 LI full region:

Of couse, a build should always have some high land impact focus points and also some fairly low LI areas - and even 0 LI open spaces - and we're talking averages here. But I still think these two pictures illustrate the point quite well: If you spend as much as 5,000 LI to fill up a region, your build is probably not as efficient as it should be. If you spend as much as 20,000, you're definitely doing it wrong.

---

Edit: One of our forum trolls left his usual mocking laughter reaction to this post. I won't mention his name since I'll give him the chance to remove it and remain anonymous.

But unlike him, I know how to build and I'm one of SL's top experts in content optimisation. I know perfectly well what I'm talking about and I stand by every word I wrote in this post.

But more to the point, I've proven that I'm right so many times I've lost count. I'm not going to make yet another example, I'll link to an old one instead: https://opqmesh.blogspot.com/2020/03/whats-so-special-about-opq-meshes.html

That dodgy mesh mess on the left of the picture on that page isn't untypical for the kind of content we get in SL today. Imagine all the content of that kind in a sim replaced with high quality equivalents like the tree to the right in the picture. It wouldn't even be difficult to get as much out of a homestead that way as you typically get out of a full sim today.

Edited August 18, 2020 by ChinRey

[Lancewae Barrowstone]

Yes, but these discussions are diversions from the premise of the question, which is why NOT create a full sized region with a 10k prim purchase option?   

Never mind what it's used for.  You might as well tell people in a new car dealership why they don't need that car.  Hah.

I can tell you that in popular roleplay sims where parcels are rentable to many separate and different groups to build their cities, villages, and camps, and who house populations of their own and give them prim allotments each for their huts and furniture and so forth, and then these regions host ascending hordes of outside attackers to come attack them and fill the air with prim arrows so thick you believe you are living in a flying pin cushion, such that even a 30k LI region seems a most utterly desirable thing .  

There is your fuller context. Ok? 

[China Rainforest]

I do understand, that you can build with low prims,I do this myself, my village looks good for the low prims i use, but I like to keep free prims for less lag reasons, if a 10.000 prims sim on the usual size was available, with say 30 people in place of the 20 allowed on homesteads,I'd be happy with that, and I also think this option brings more people to rent a sim, yes I know also of the costs,I am pleased it is lower than years ago, but, evidently it's not enough to keep people, lowering costs, giving a middle option will attract more people and also, they will help the SL economy not only with the renting, but the buying of stuff to put on the sims, and now with new owners of SL, I hope they'll upgrade several things we desperately need, they have a lot of work to do, remember, there are tons of games out there people have migrated to, noteable Conans for the fact you can build there cheaper etc than in sl, I've been in sl a very long time, this is not my original AV, I've seen a lot of changes and marvelled at how good people are at creating, so back to my thoughts, cheaper sims, middle option will help all around.

[KanryDrago]

Hmm renting 3 sims at a cost of 60+60+70 = 190k l$

You do know for a mere 130k l$ you could pay tier on 3 sims and even with the land purchase price you would be in profit within a few months

 

[China Rainforest]

full sim 72K, full sim 60K, homstead 30K, but I am part of a RP and raid conintinant, and thats what I want to be part of. but my point is still about cheaper rents and a middle of the range rent with 10.000 prims.

Edited August 18, 2020 by China Rainforest
hit the button too fast

[ChinRey]

47 minutes ago, Lancewae Barrowstone said:

and then these regions host ascending hordes of outside attackers to come attack them and fill the air with prim arrows so thick you believe you are living in a flying pin cushion, such that even a 30k LI region seems a most utterly desirable thing . 

There's no way there'll ever be 10,000 arrows flying through the air at the same time in a region. It may seem like a lot, yes, but if you actually count, even 1,000 is unrealistically high.

But apart from that, yes, I absolutely agree with you we could really do with a 10,000 prims / 30 avatars option between the full region and homestead.

[Paul Hexem]

6 hours ago, ChinRey said:

  

Don't blame the landowners, blame LL.

60K a month, is about 230 US dollars after all the fees have been deducted. 72K is about 280 US dollars. Regular maintenance fee for a full region is USD 229 and you have to pay that fee the months the region is vacant too (there will be a few of those). This is with the current historically low L$ exchange rate. A year ago L$ 60K would have been about USD 220 and L$ 72K about USD 265.

Obviously, the first landowner has some discount, at least the region is grandfathered and there may well be some other secret discounts too. If the second landowner has to pay full price, they have to charge as much as 72K to even have a chance of getting a few dollars in return for their investment.

So, the price difference is probably not because one landowner is greedier than the other, it's because they have to pay more themselves. Remember, Second Life is not in any way a level playing field with equal opportunities for everybody. In any case, with those price neither of the landowners are making much money worth speaking of. It's LL who takes it all.

 

3 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

This thread is clear proof of the old saying "You can't please all of the people all of the time".  A couple of years ago, land costs were MUCH higher for everyone.  LL reduced that; both the costs to buy land and the upkeep costs have come down significantly.

Did people cheer?  Noooooo!  They still kvetch about how land is too expensive.

Renting an entire dedicated server box from a decent provider (a server box that can run at least one SL region) starts at $70 USD.

The server I manage hosts three Arma 3 server instances, Minecraft, and Space Engineers, a website, two Discord bots, and some server backend stuff. It typically sees 20-30 players connected at any given time, plus the website, bot, and back end traffic, and costs barely more than $100 USD a month. An i9 and 64 gigs of RAM, on a connection rated in the Gbps range. No lag, no latency beyond regional pings. It could easily handle 2 or 3 full SL regions.

No extra setup fee, either.

That mean's LL's running something like a at least a 300% markup. Of course people are still complaining about the land prices.

Edited August 18, 2020 by Paul Hexem

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

That mean's LL's running something like a at least a 300% markup. Of course people are still complaining about the land prices.

If you look at server cost isolated it's more like 1000% but you can't really see it that way since LL not only offers hosting but also some specialized software, support etc., etc.

Even so, even LL themselves agree that the land tier/maintenance fee is too high.

Back when SL was all the rage, LL could charge that kind of prices because... well, because they could. Today with the lockdown driving otherwise sane people to (re)join SL, LL can charge that kind of prices because they can.

Under normal circumstances they keep that price level for two reasons. One is that big changes over night will have a drastic and unpredictable effect on the SL economy as a whole.

The other reason is that they are not used to it is very difficult for any organisation, person or corporation to adjust to a lower revenue stream. LL doesn't have any other sources of income that aren't already pushed to the limit (and beyond) so if they reduce the income from land, they'll have to reduce their overhead or their net revenue or both.

Edited August 18, 2020 by ChinRey

[Drayke Newall]

8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Let's illustrate it. The prim I'm standing on here shows how much space per prim you have in a 5000 LI homestead region:

This is how much space you have per prim in a 20,000 LI full region:

I am not suggesting you cant fit more prims on a region that offers more LI. I am suggesting that you can build exactly the same content for the persons/groups etc needs on the Homestead that would fit on a full sim. Of course there are some cases where a full sim is needed such as malls etc, however for rp content, housing, landscapes etc, they should all be able to fit on the homestead, especially with the larger 5000LI pool, albeit the avatar limit issue.

The problem is people don't build their own content for their own sims and rely on other unoptimized garbage from the marketplace and then complain. They also and mainly don't design the sims properly either and just end up filling it up to the brim with objects, just cause they can.

Unfortunately due to a HDD crash I no longer have most of my old sim build pictures. Scale plays a huge role in it, as well as methods to control objects at a time. Sight lines, perspective etc all play a huge role in achieving the same look as large builds for 3/4 of the LI use. Penny and I have mentioned this numerous times as you are aware. People also rely on, for example, a 10x10 mesh grass object repeated numerous times at the cost of 3 LI each rather than using better mesh grass that covers 48x48 for 1-3 LI. This is what limits a homestead.

For example grass like this a game designer friend and I made which is 3LI and covers 48x48 area and has a greater density than any 10x10 grass. There is also a spiky option that is only 1-2LI at 64x64.

These pictures are all I have left of me and my game designer friends sim now defunct (2012-2016), whereby it all fits on a old homestead (Sim wide for all - City and sandbox in air and forest area -with grottos, fantasy ruins, underwater mermaid area, ship crash etc below linked with transport system) when they had 3750LI and we still had over 1800LI left. All mesh and all mesh had materials applied (they are from SL so low quality and distorted somewhat):

 

Here is a link showing a view from the full sim multi level city that included space port, mall, rental apratments, rp areas, game rooms, lounge, club etc.

http://pytak.net/images/sl/blackdragon_1

Here's an article by Nalates (hope she doesn't mind me posting it) showing more images of the city and what it had http://blog.nalates.net/2013/08/22/bits-and-pieces-2013-34/2/. Like she said in her blog, it was still under construction when she went and it was a lot fuller looking when complete.

Also when we could no longer afford the region we were in the process of optimising it further by reducing the height of some of the areas which, by our estimates would have allowed even more on the sim for the same LI. I'm in no way tooting mine or my friends own horn, however as I said 5000LI is plenty big enough for most peoples needs despite the pics you posted if we could build all that for under 1950LI.

Quote

But unlike him, I know how to build and I'm one of SL's top experts in content optimisation. I know perfectly well what I'm talking about and I stand by every word I wrote in this post.

I agree the content you produce is good and your blog post shows that. But there is a difference between optimisation of an object and optimisation of a region using those objects.

Edited August 19, 2020 by Drayke Newall

[China Rainforest]

we can talk about how people build, good or bad none stop, and I've seen some wonderful builds on many sims, using not a lot of prims,  people are amazing at creating, SL has proven that, but my point was simply, cheaper sims would bring people back to SL, and a middle option on a full sized sim with 10.000 prims would be really good,  a lot of people have deserted SL for other games that they do not need to spend a fortune on.

[ChinRey]

7 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

I am suggesting that you can build exactly the same content for the persons/groups etc needs on the Homestead that would fit on a full sim.

Yes, exactly.

Ummm.... I'm a bit confused right now, Drayke. I get the impression you are trying to argue against my post but what you are actually doing, is repeat and emphasize what I said.

 

3 hours ago, China Rainforest said:

and a middle option on a full sized sim with 10.000 prims would be really good

5000 prims is more than enough for any reasonably well made single level full sim mesh build but yes, not all mesh sims are reasonably well made and some old classic prim builds really need a bit more. So yes, I think a 10,000 prim option between homestead and full region would be a great idea.

The resource waste is only one reason why SL regions are so expensive though, there's also the extremely high hostage hosting markup Paul Hexem pointed out. I find it hard to believe LL will do much about that in the near future.

[Mollymews]

3 hours ago, China Rainforest said:

my point was simply, cheaper sims would bring people back to SL, and a middle option on a full sized sim with 10.000 prims would be really good,  a lot of people have deserted SL for other games that they do not need to spend a fortune on.

is not true that cheaper means more customers, unless is big box bargain store cheaper than cheap and buying the stuff we would not otherwise get because we think we are getting a bargain

i understand that you have a price point that you would like Linden to meet. Others also have their price points. Quite a few people have a lower price point than you. Lots of people would dearly love Linden to include a Homestead region in a Super Premium package for about $US140 a month

at this time I think we can only wait for the uplift to the cloud to complete, and then hope that Linden may start offering a range of different sized packages than they do now

 

[Drayke Newall]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

Yes, exactly.

Ummm.... I'm a bit confused right now, Drayke. I get the impression you are trying to argue against my post but what you are actually doing, is repeat and emphasize what I said.

Oh, well then, I stand corrected. Thought you were trying to show with the pics that you can fit more on a larger sim based on you prim size per land and therefore you cant fit the same on a homestead. Sorry about that.

Still don't believe a 10k LI region is needed though as it wont bring more customers to LL and will end up being like the old open space sim, never used as its price point would hinder it, not to mention I guarantee LL would do something stupid like they did with the Homestead and tie it to only being available to buy IF you have a full region.

If LL want to actually bring in more people buying sims delinking the Homestead from a Full Region would be the way to go or include it in as Molly said the new premium that we are still waiting for after 2 years of it being announced. Trouble is I don't think LL would charge $140 for it like Molly mentioned with LL more likely to charge per month  what you pay for a homestead now + sub price on top of that.

Edited August 19, 2020 by Drayke Newall