Buy Fee Change Discussion

[Silent Mistwalker]

50 minutes ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:

Like when when my man gets a boo-boo and I come by and RIP off that band-aid, with enough hair to make a cat?

I bet he sounds just like a cat when you do that.  MEEEEEE YEEEEOOOOOOOOWWWWWW! 🤭

[Solar Legion]

1. The JIRA is for running ideas past Linden Lab
2. Many of the ideas I have in general have been covered by others over the years already and I am frankly not interested in restating them
3. What ideas remain are distasteful to many of the types that post here or will simply never happen (No really, they won't)
4. The only ideas I "scorn" are those that - frankly and in my own opinion - should not have made it to text, some of which were implemented anyway

So, anything else you'd like to swing and miss over or are you done?

Meh, doesn't matter anyway.

[Skylar Littlepaws]

12 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Well being I have not seen one idea forthcoming from you in the time I have been here and you scorn the ones anyone else here has had, it does not leave much room for other options, does it? 

I agree, he's criticizing our suggestions and yet he hasn't made any.  We aren't here to tell them to not do it all, we just feel the timing isn't the best time to do it or at least break it up to get to that percentage. 

Edited April 16, 2021 by Skylar Littlepaws

[RunawayBunny]

  

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

SL is, was and always will be a luxury item for most people.  People who don't need SL income for RL expenses.

SL often requires external services for database hosting, stream hosting, sometimes external website hosting for some services. It is only reliable way to provide grid wide service. External services cost money. It is not luxury but necessity SL does not have build in database function or streaming service.

Edit: Probably I misunderstood your post.. I am talking about content creators. Please ignore this post.

Edited April 16, 2021 by RunawayBunny
Misunderstood I think

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

SL is, was and always will be a luxury item for most people.  People who don't need SL income for RL expenses.  Just like any other luxury in RL, be it clothing, dining out, movies, vacations, if RL money is tight, you cut back.  I've dramatically cut back on what I spend since the pandemic began.  I no longer rent on a private region which I've always done and purchased a mainland plot as my base.  I might buy 5000L a month where I used to spend 3 or 4 times more.

Some people have had to cut back on  RL things.  A luxury is hardly something to moan about when it suddenly costs more.  You don't HAVE to purchase anything in SL to sustain your RL.  We need a little perspective here.

I don't disagree. I just don't particularly care for going back to staring at four walls for entertainment. We gave up cable 2 years ago, and we live right on the edge of antenna reception so signals fade in and out. Paperbacks are more than 5 bucks a pop.  Internet is all we have left for entertainment and if things keep going the way they have always gone, we'll be giving that up, too.

How's that for perspective? Not knocking you or what you said because in most cases you are right. Just not in all. And I hope that doesn't come off sounding snide. It's not meant to be.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker

[Skylar Littlepaws]

By the way, @Reed Linden  Why were we informed last minute?  The changes will take affect on April 22nd.   Which is a one week notice.  I have seen other notices that were 30 days notice or even longer than that when price changed for the Premium.

[Reed Linden]

1 hour ago, Solar Legion said:

Congrats, you've just broken any script that is running on the region that has to communicate with any item of almost any kind elsewhere on the grid.

This. I cannot stress enough that this stuff is not easy. This is well put and illustrative of the type of challenges that leveraging the opportunities that AWS provides presents. 

[Reed Linden]

1 hour ago, Adam Spark said:

Linden Lab announced a couple years ago that they would make changes like this to offset a reduction in land prices. I was ecstatic. These were the kinds of fees I was fine with increasing. With all due respect to the listed items this will help with, am I safe to assume that Linden Lab is satisfied with the amount that land prices have been reduced to date, or does Linden Lab agree that the cost of getting your foot in the door with a region is still too steep?

Hi, Adam

 

As I mentioned above, we remain committed to making land ownership as accessible as possible. That effort is ongoing and will continue! 

[Skylar Littlepaws]

2 minutes ago, Reed Linden said:

This. I cannot stress enough that this stuff is not easy. This is well put and illustrative of the type of challenges that leveraging the opportunities that AWS provides presents. 

I know something like this isn't easy to do.  I know the amount of work that it takes and the coding it needs for it to work.  I just thought there was something in-place already to help reduce cost when everything got transition to AWS.  😄

[Skylar Littlepaws]

I'm not sure if it is possible for it to be done, but would it be possible to share the cost factors to the community.  The expenses that it takes to run on AWS server.  

[SeanDiaz]

and in one slap, my 130 usd lands became 10 dollar more expensive, yet the sim lags massively, and more and more changes are made that are in disadvantage of the user, did you guys even consider that for some people this has huge impact? i may as well give up my land now just to avoid that 10 dollar idiotic fee per month....

 

i say UNDO That stupid move!

[Reed Linden]

8 minutes ago, Skylar Littlepaws said:

By the way, @Reed Linden  Why were we informed last minute?  The changes will take affect on April 22nd.   Which is a one week notice.  I have seen other notices that were 30 days notice or even longer than that when price changed for the Premium.

Good question! The answer is that this fee change was a lot harder to implement than we expected (so true of pretty much everything we do here) because the lindex is so intrinsically connected to so many pieces of the overall Second Life product. Pretty much every system needed to be touched in some way or another, including (to our surprise), the Viewer itself. Wrangling the expertise and manpower to get all of those pieces in motion and in the correct state without also breaking things over in, say, Profiles or Groups at the same time was a rather more monumental effort than we anticipated. We didn't want to make the announcement until we had a solid date we could pin to for go-live (none of us like missing announced dates, either), and by the time we had that, we had less flexibility with the rollout timing than we'd have liked. 

[Solar Legion]

1 minute ago, SeanDiaz said:

and in one slap, my 130 usd lands became 10 dollar more expensive, yet the sim lags massively, and more and more changes are made that are in disadvantage of the user, did you guys even consider that for some people this has huge impact? i may as well give up my land now just to avoid that 10 dollar idiotic fee per month....

 

i say UNDO That stupid move!

If you mean the move to AWS, quite too late for that. They'd have to shell out the expense to buy all new hardware - the old servers were shredded.

Like it or not, there is no undoing it.

[RunawayBunny]

I have a question but I am afraid to ask Because I don't understand LL ToS and I don't understand alternate currency in SL.

I provide stream rental service in SL for this service I have a homestead (only needed for rental scripts).

I am thinking moving entire business to web with PHP interface.. close homestead and provide same service with pay pal payment.

Costumer wins, I win. But my question am I allowed to do this?

[Reed Linden]

6 minutes ago, Skylar Littlepaws said:

I'm not sure if it is possible for it to be done, but would it be possible to share the cost factors to the community.  The expenses that it takes to run on AWS server.  

Potentially. I don't have the information on that personally, so I can't speak to it. I do know it's actually fairly hard to quantify exactly how much it costs to run a single region. We have a general idea, but so much of SL is bespoke and each individual region has different needs and requirements that while we can say fairly confidently how much a given machine costs to rent, the rest of what goes into maintaining a region is much harder.

[SeanDiaz]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

If you mean the move to AWS, quite too late for that. They'd have to shell out the expense to buy all new hardware - the old servers were shredded.

Like it or not, there is no undoing it.

i'm talking l$ purchasing, i need 30.000 each month to pay for my lands, that means i hit that new 9,99$ fee every month! and for what? so far sorry to say, i have not seen much improvement in sl, secondlife is as bugged as ever, releases being half checked and pushed out to the public pushing new issues into the world sometimes world or game breaking bugs.... and now i must pay  a premium fee to keep my land?? a land where i still lag so bad?? this does not make sense to me! why punish the ones that upload a lot of l$ each month?

[Skylar Littlepaws]

2 minutes ago, Reed Linden said:

Good question! The answer is that this fee change was a lot harder to implement than we expected (so true of pretty much everything we do here) because the lindex is so intrinsically connected to so many pieces of the overall Second Life product. Pretty much every system needed to be touched in some way or another, including (to our surprise), the Viewer itself. Wrangling the expertise and manpower to get all of those pieces in motion and in the correct state without also breaking things over in, say, Profiles or Groups at the same time was a rather more monumental effort than we anticipated. We didn't want to make the announcement until we had a solid date we could pin to for go-live (none of us like missing announced dates, either), and by the time we had that, we had less flexibility with the rollout timing than we'd have liked. 

That's totally understandable for how to implement it, but why couldn't there be a 30 day notice to activate the increase? So if you announce on April 15th the changes to the fee, why not activate it on May 17th which falls on a Monday?   At least this would give the community a better chance for sharing feedback about the changes, and if down the line you found something useful form our suggestion it could be made without affecting the schedule. 

[Skylar Littlepaws]

2 minutes ago, Reed Linden said:

Potentially. I don't have the information on that personally, so I can't speak to it. I do know it's actually fairly hard to quantify exactly how much it costs to run a single region. We have a general idea, but so much of SL is bespoke and each individual region has different needs and requirements that while we can say fairly confidently how much a given machine costs to rent, the rest of what goes into maintaining a region is much harder.

Is there anyone from the team that can share that information to you?  At least the cost it would need to run for 1 sim.....sorry @Patch Linden, I mean REGION! ❤️

Edited April 16, 2021 by Skylar Littlepaws

[Reed Linden]

3 minutes ago, RunawayBunny said:

I have a question but I am afraid to ask Because I don't understand LL ToS and I don't understand alternate currency in SL.

I provide stream rental service in SL for this service I have a homestead (only needed for rental scripts).

I am thinking moving entire business to web with PHP interface.. close homestead and provide same service with pay pal payment.

Costumer wins, I win. But my question am I allowed to do this?

Hi, RunawayBunny

 

I think your question is valid, but I agree this isn't the place to ask it. I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea. I would encourage you to reach out to our support representatives who might be able to direct you to a better resource than little ol' me.

[Solar Legion]

1 minute ago, SeanDiaz said:

i'm talking l$ purchasing, i need 30.000 each month to pay for my lands, that means i hit that new 9,99$ fee every month! and for what? so far sorry to say, i have not seen much improvement in sl, secondlife is as bugged as ever, releases being half checked and pushed out to the public pushing new issues into the world sometimes world or game breaking bugs.... and now i must pay  a premium fee to keep my land?? a land where i still lag so bad?? this does not make sense to me! why punish the ones that upload a lot of l$ each month?

What in the world makes you think 30 USD is going to hit the cap amount?

[Jenna Huntsman]

1 minute ago, RunawayBunny said:

I have a question but I am afraid to ask Because I don't understand LL ToS and I don't understand alternate currency in SL.

I provide stream rental service in SL for this service I have a homestead (only needed for rental scripts).

I am thinking moving entire business to web with PHP interface.. close homestead and provide same service with pay pal payment.

Costumer wins, I win. But my question am I allowed to do this?

Not all too familiar with ToS myself, but here's my 2 cents:

LL provides us creators tools to communicate with external services. If we charge for those services, LL doesn't really have much of a say, so there's not much stopping you.

Think of how you have all of these streaming music boxes which are linked to people's Spotify accounts. If this explicitly was not allowed, these streaming boxes go against ToS.

I think that when it comes down to it, if you want to set up a payment portal, deal with any bad actors (nonpayment, etc.) and convince your users to transfer to the new service, there isn't much stopping you *right now*

Again, not all too familiar with the ToS, so this could be wrong in it's entirety.

[LittleMe Jewell]

44 minutes ago, Reed Linden said:

Pretty much every system needed to be touched in some way or another, including (to our surprise), the Viewer itself.

 

 

In other words, watch out come next Thursday.

 

Edited April 16, 2021 by LittleMe Jewell

[Reed Linden]

1 minute ago, Skylar Littlepaws said:

Is there anyone from the team that can share that information to you?  At least the cost it would need to run for 1 region.  

There may be, but I think this is maybe not the right forum for that conversation. For the record, I don't think it's a bad question.

[SeanDiaz]

4 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

What in the world makes you think 30 USD is going to hit the cap amount?

30.000l$ bro.

[LittleMe Jewell]

4 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

6 minutes ago, SeanDiaz said:

i'm talking l$ purchasing, i need 30.000 each month to pay for my lands, that means i hit that new 9,99$ fee every month! and for what? so far sorry to say, i have not seen much improvement in sl, secondlife is as bugged as ever, releases being half checked and pushed out to the public pushing new issues into the world sometimes world or game breaking bugs.... and now i must pay  a premium fee to keep my land?? a land where i still lag so bad?? this does not make sense to me! why punish the ones that upload a lot of l$ each month?

What in the world makes you think 30 USD is going to hit the cap amount?

 

I think he is saying that he needs 30,000 L$ monthly to pay for his lands -- apparently he rents -- and thus he'll now be paying US $9.99 every month for those 30,000 L$ instead of only $1.49.