KariaKae Karu

Mano, you make a good point, Second Life is a service. And yes they are certainly entitled to do whatever in the world they want to do. But, what they offer in effect is the rental of an educational space. Imagine if you will that you are renting a house yourself. You have been there several years, and at your own expense you've made many upgrades to the home. You only get paid once a year. How would you feel, if half way through the year, your landlord doubled your rent and you could no longer afford to live in your home. So, what are you going to do? Well, you could try to reallocate your budget for the year and cut back on other expenses. (Unfortunately for some institutions that have specific line items in their budget requiring allocated funds to go for only for that particular item, this is not an option) Or you could move, but if you do that, you will incur moving costs, and you will lose all of the time and money that you spent improving your home. This is the reason that all of the educators are up in arms. As the provider of a service LL is either naïvely ignorant of the way their customer's budgeting process works, or they don't care. In either case, it is extremely poor customer service.

I've spent the last couple of years trying to get colleges in my area interested in the incredible opportunities for education in SL. And wouldn't you just know, about the time I've gotten them talked into budgeting for a couple islands, LL decides to up the price on us. LL has been making a lot of unpopular, illogical, moves in the last few months. But, I've got to tell you, at a time when educational institutions are putting freezes on salaries, and cutting back on everything not absolutely essential, this is most moronic move that I've seen LL make. Assuming that the management of LL is not as clueless as this decision makes them appear, I can only surmise that they are trying to encourage educators to go elsewhere.