Mainland tier fees lowered?

[Gabriele Graves]

5 hours ago, Sparkle Bunny said:

Ah, so they're not actually interested in getting money from new subscribers, just in minimising their losses from Premiums cutting their costs. Got it.

I don't think LL shares this interpretation from what I read of their announcement.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 11/18/2022 at 2:48 PM, diamond Marchant said:

Winners and Losers IMHO

The big winners in this new pricing are people like me... those who own more than 1/8 region (and perhaps use Premium Stacking to deal with the tier-packing problem). I am able to up my tier and get more sqm for approximately the same cost.

The losers are likely new residents (or new to land ownership) who opt for the new Plus! but cannot have a 512 Linden Home, hence, they must deal with the learning curve of acquiring mainland. My opinion is that the WHOLE POINT of Bellisseria is to make it super easy (as in one-click shopping) to establish permanence in Second Life. It is unfortunate that Plus!ers can't setup  in a Camper, Newbrooke, or Sakura home.

Ah, but wait! there are more losers in this new scheme.

The reduction of tier is about 5% -- if you have land over one sim, and have grouped land, you've reduced your costs somewhat -- now you've got another 5%.

BUT the state tax was a big wallop -- in my case, 8.75%. So for the first time in forever, I raised my prices slightly, but to prevent massive move-outs and refunds, which always happen, I also dropped my group fees, which I think are like hotels charging room tax and are legitimate ways to offset the cost of search/places ads which are 30L per week and add up enormously and quickly -- if your business model is to list 150 of them to enable people to a) find them, because search is pretty broken and b) have a handy list of them so they can hop from one to the other easily -- since in my plan, if you refund the cancelation fee is returned if you rent again elsewhere in the system.

LL isn't required to maintain or help anyone's business plan, which merely exists as a dysfunctional strategy to try to beat all the vicissitudes of the virtual world and the single platform owner anyway. LL competes with its own customers; it has now taken over the rental system that used to be independent, and soon all rentals may have a tax on them -- or all land sales -- or it may be all put in the viewer (something discussed for 20 years) -- or who knows. Virtuality is more volatile than reality in some ways.

So roughly speaking, if you just ate a 8.75% tax not just on the membership, but on the tier cost as well (thus in one sense it is unfair to Europeans who now only have one feature relief in the membership plan, but not on tier -- but then they have free health care and we don't -- quite) -- then you raised your own prices 5L and 10L Lindens which actually meant 3L and 7L, you didn't offset the 8.75% tax -- and then you have the whole economy and its problems which are reflected in various distress signs a) a poor Black Friday b) Lindens firesaling islands now for no set-up fee and just tier). So if you now get a 5% break, you still had an overall cost raise you didn't offset, and your cashout costs are now greater than they were 2 years ago AND the value of the Linden is consistently devalued to 243, and not the value of 242 as it was a year ago.

So if you are in a state with no or less tax; you have large properties that are easily rented; you don't care if your costs are covered by rentals -- or whatever mix of factors that make your world so very wonderful, for someone else, it might not be. 

Again, the purpose of the new 512 accounts is not Mainland; it's to get the Game of Homes people who dropped all their extra accounts when they got Premium Plus and could CHOOSE to come back at least to a 512 in Sakura. That's all that is. If a few homesteaders (in the old meaning of the word) out to the Mainland and stake a 512 and make their sim better, great! Or if some contribute tier to my or another group rentals or project -- great! That strengthens the Mainland and SL as a whole...

...If you view strengthening Mainland as a social good, a value for Linden Lab, and one for the population, and as we know from this and other threads, it is not, uniformly, as virtuality induces class warfare.

But there are so many variables here even in this very controlled and even authoritarian social experiment we signed up for, that we just can't know. Still, my overall sense is that the trend is to populate Bellisseria more, as people are happy and more stable there; to stop "Game of Homes" churn because that makes 5-10-100 extra premium accounts unstable, and able to be lost any time; to sell more private islands; to get more wealthier people on to their own homesteads so they stop complaining of lack of prims in Belli; complaining of the view ruined on the Mainland; and complaining about the high cost of islands.

In RL, a "nation of shopkeepers" as in UK; a class of patels (wealthier land owners and lenders) surrounded by landless farmers in India; sharecropping and Air B&B empires in US history -- pick any model you like, they have mixed reviews throughout history; just like the landless model of Twitter is being dramatically broken and the land model of Mastodon can't survive (to make an inadequate simile). 

People like land. They are used to living and working on it for literally tens of thousands of years and want it online, too. Platform providers don't like land; it is costly server space that drags them down so low they can't stay in business as content sales and taxation can't carry the load. The Metaverse has to solve this impossible equation, in various forms.

 

Edited December 5, 2022 by Prokofy Neva