Reed Linden
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Posts posted by Reed Linden
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8 hours ago, Marianne Little said:
Can @Reed Lindenanswer, I wonder:
It is VAT on tier? Can that be changed?
Will LL consider changing the benefits, so Plus can have a 512 m Linden Home?
Will Plus have access to Premium sandboxes?
In order:
We have only changed the VAT policy for membership levels (Plus, Premium, Premium Plus).We can reconsider it in the future! But we have no plans to do so at this time. We're moving into a direction where the various membership types are differentiated not just by price, but by function. Plus is intended primarily to democratize mainland ownership (and was released intentionally with a tier maintenance reduction). Premium, while currently being the 'jack-of-all-trades' subscription level as a result of it being the ONLY subscription level until very recently, remains the membership type for Linden Homes. My intent at the moment, is to move further toward enhancing those differentiators in the future.
No. Same basic answer as above.-
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Y'all have sharp eyes.
Behold:-
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Hi, everyone!
There IS a web user group today. I'm hosting it! I think it may be useful to this discussion to talk a little bit about them.
First, a little about me. I am the Product Manager for our web properties on Second Life, which includes just about everything within the secondlife.com domain (though, with an important caveat which we'll discuss in a moment), as well as many of our backend systems that talk to the web properties, like the billing engine and support tooling. I've been with Linden Lab for 11 years, starting on our Support team and working my way up through engineering. I accepted a Product ownership role 5 years ago. I am a resident and a Linden. Supporting y'all has been my passion since the first day I started answering phone calls and live chats on a busy overnight Friday shift! My focus is bringing the best tools and features to our residents that I possibly can, to make your Second Life experience as fun, fulfilling, and interesting as it can be. If you have questions about how the web properties work, or what new features we have planned for them, or want to talk about ways they could work even better, I'm your guy! And they best way to have that discussion with me is at the web user group meeting today.Our Web User Group meetings have been ongoing every first Wednesday of the month for as far back as I can remember. I've personally been involved with them for the past 5 years, and I inherited running them from Alexa and Grumpity, so I know they go back even further. As I described above, I am the Product Manager who owns our web properties from a functionality standpoint. Here's that caveat I mentioned above: what I don't own is the community policies. We have a few rules at our web user group meetings, the most important of which is that we can't discuss Governance related issues. It's not that I don't want to, or don't care, it's that I'm literally not qualified to do so. Anything I say would, while well-intentioned, almost certainly be wrong.
So, while I personally care about your concerns with regards to the recent policy changes here on the forums, and I want to encourage you to voice them, I want to make sure you all have the right expectations. I will not be able to address them. That said, I will reach out to my colleagues and see if someone may be available to stop by and add some clarity where possible, but no promises.
In the meantime, I welcome your attendance at our user group meeting today, and I look forward to sharing with you all of our recent web features and plans for the future!
Cheers!
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19 hours ago, LucilleAntoinete said:
I enjoy Group notices - although it would be nice to have one button to turn all of them off and back on...
On the other hand, this seems like a neat idea.
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Alright, I'm closing up for the day and the weekend.
Thank you all for the discussion, the questions, and the suggestions. Most of all, I appreciate the civility of the discussion so far. You're the reason why we do what we do, and why we're passionate about making Second Life bigger, better, and more awesome.
There's been some good suggestions in this thread. I encourage you to submit your feature requests through JIRA - our team reviews every request.
If you still have questions about the fee update that are not answered here or in the blog post, please utilize your contact support options! They'll be happy to assist in any way they can.
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2 minutes ago, Cynical Cloud said:
I'd agree with this if the Lab had introduced a lower buy fee for premium users, maybe that's something they should consider? It'd be a hell of an extra incentive to join, and I'm already premium.
Tbh I'd prefer lower buyer fees over a weekly stipend
Quoted so I could get your attention, not sure how to mention someone lol
Attention gotten! I won't personally rule out some premium feature tied to lindex fees in the future, but it's not currently planned.
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3 minutes ago, Skylar Littlepaws said:
The reason why most consumers get upset with companies in general is because there isn't any transparency between consumer and staff. It seems there is changes without at least notifying consumers well advance. I've seen it happen on many online gaming companies, and I have seen the backlash it puts onto people. I don't want to see it happen here which is kind of shocking to see it is happening because this company is great and has done a lot for community, and I want to see it continue to do so. That's why it is shocking for me to see this short announcement to us of being informed.
I agree, and I appreciate your concern! It is our intention to give much more notice in the future.
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9 minutes ago, Skylar Littlepaws said:
Ah! So what made Premium version easy and the buyer fee difficult?
Also, since you said it took a long time to implement it on the buyer fee, why not announce it that you were planning on making the increase?To the first: it was a constant, static value that only had to be changed in a limited number of places and there was no logic change required. In contrast, the lindex had no concept of percentage based buy fees prior to this change, nor did it have the concept of a floor and a ceiling to fees. All of that had to be implemented from scratch. From here on out, we can now change the static values of those fields as necessary in much the same way as we did with Premium prices earlier.
To the second: I cannot give you an explicit answer here. We would have preferred to provide more heads up to the community about this, and in the future it is our goal to do so. In this specific case, it was not possible to do so.
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5 minutes ago, Skylar Littlepaws said:
Since it's hard to implement on a fee change. I assume premium fee was just as difficult to do since it is connected to everything as well. I guess what I am confuse is why was it plausible to give us an advance notice on Premium but not on the Buyer Fee?
Since I did the work on both of those, I can say with confidence that increasing the Premium fee was comparatively easy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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19 minutes ago, Skylar Littlepaws said:
I understand. I thought it was already implemented before switching to AWS. Also what about this comment I made.
We did consider a more phased rollout. In the end, we made the decision that if the intention was to end up in the same place regardless, better to rip off the bandaid all at once, rather than prolong the pain over time. This is why we took such pains to ensure that the pain would be distributed as equitably as possible, and do our level best to leave the most vulnerable residents unaffected.
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2 minutes ago, Skylar Littlepaws said:
I can understand AWS servers are expensive, but wouldn't it reduce the cost down? I'm sure not all users are on a region at the same time. Isn't there some type of code that is implemented that puts that region into sleep-mode and when a user comes into that region it wakes up from being in sleep mode? I've seen this happen in another virtual world where they reduce the cost by putting the land in sleep-mode if it isn't being used.
This is exactly the type of thing we're excited to reinvest in and leverage. More functionality for less! But the road from here to there takes effort and expertise. Not overnight and not free.
The future is bright for Second Life!
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10 minutes ago, ItHadToComeToThis said:
So here are some questions.
1. Moving to the cloud was supposed to lower the costs associated with hosting the regions and increase the level of hardware available for each sim. Sims were supposed to shut down and spin up and allocate resources depending on how many people were in the sim or whether the sim was empty, thus making them more cost effective. So, what is it that specifically requires a hike in the charges for buying linden dollars. Is this really a case of increased costs or is this the new investment group looking for ways to make extra money?.
2. In terms of premium plus, will there be a reduced transaction charge for those who purchase premium plus?. I really feel that there should be benefits to premium plus involving fees and land ownership.
3. I think a lot of us were hoping that a move to the cloud would eventually lower the cost of owning a region. Guessing this is a no go now?.
4. As much as this might annoy some people. Have you considered other avenues such as increasing the upload fee to 15 lindens to help offset some of the cost instead?.
1. It's not a 1 to 1. The updated transaction fee will help offset some costs associated with the move to AWS. To your point, one of the ways we will be reinvesting this revenue is in leveraging the new options the move to AWS gives us to provide exactly the types of benefits you're talking about.
2. I can't comment about the potential benefits associated with Premium Plus - those will be announced when they're finalized and we're able to commit to a release. It's possible!
3. It still might! We remain committed to lowering the barrier to entry for region ownership as much as we're able. Changes to our revenue model (such as increased transaction fees) are part of that process.
4. We have considered many potential avenues of revenue increase, and we're working hard to balance the impact to our residents vs. our own operational costs and needs. It's a very narrow tightrope!-
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Just now, Milk Pixelmaid said:
Are you raising the cost of premium membership next?
There are no current plans to raise the cost of premium membership.
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24 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:
Finally! Any ideas on how that will integrate into the web services / viewer logins?
I have a lot of ideas, but nothing is set in stone yet. With a product like ours (more accurately, many separate but intricately related products), much care needs to be taken to ensure that moving a widget in one place doesn't completely bork something in another service entirely, so our scope will (initially) be limited, I suspect. My (admittedly biased) focus will be on protecting payment methods and account security (passwords, email addresses, RL info) first and foremost, so that would be mostly web-based.
I want this thread to stay on track, so that's probably the last question I should answer about my personal wish list for 2FA.
Thank you all for your interest! I'm excited about the possibilities for it, and I'm glad to see y'all are interested, too.
Back to buy fees!-
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34 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:
Maybe LL could consider taking the extra money it will make from these fee increases and hire someone who can schedule dates for when features or bugs will be implemented rather than leaving it to the inscrutable future. I'd wager a lot more would be accomplished then putting the word Soon to every ETA.
You might be onto something there!
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1 hour ago, Kimmi Zehetbauer said:
Will the 2FA be an option for residents or a mandatory thing? Not everyone has a smart phone or deal with Google.
Hi, Kimmi!
This is slightly off topic, but I opened this can of worms, so I'll own it.
I am still scoping out how I expect this to work so there's nothing set in stone, but my intention is to keep it as non-intrusive as possible. I envision it being opt-in.
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14 minutes ago, Bitterthorn said:
@Reed Linden, are you able to speak to any projects you are excited for in more specifics? I'm especially curious about the onboarding changes as I'd love to bring in some friends to SL to explore but the high learning curve makes it very difficult.
Hi, Bitterthorn
I'm the payments product manager, and I have my grubby hands in a lot of our backend stuff, but not much front end, so the new onboarding stuff is not on my desk, so to speak. I wish I could tell you more about it, but suffice to say that as a company, we're very excited about it and that means we're going to want to share it with you all as soon as we can and in big bold text.
Stay tuned, I guess!
For me personally, I'm super excited to be working on Two Factor Authentication this year, and some updates to our web account management to give you all more options to interact with your in-world avatar/region/etc from the web.-
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8 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:
Hi, Reed,
Can you comment on how this new fee will impact the value of the Linden which has been artificially kept at about 240-241 for more than a year, and throughout SL's history has varied considerably. Will you continue to keep it at US $4.00/1,000 Linden dollars?
Everyone who buys or sells on the LindEx knows that it is not truly a "market" institution, despite some small fluctuations daily, as it is artificially kept at this rate by infusions of Lindens.
Also, Linden Lab used to supply information about the percentage of the concurrency (which is now 30,000-40,000 on average) which spent at certain levels. Can you say what percentage of the concurrency spends at the level of US $25 per month? $100? $500?
What is the number of premium accounts?
Thanks.
Hi, Prokofy!
We remain committed to the stability of the Lindex exchange, and we will continue to monitor that rate closely with this change.
I don't have the concurrency:spend ratios available, but I can say that we're very proud to be at an all time high on premium accounts for the month of March, 2021.
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I am still scoping out how I expect this to work so there's nothing set in stone, but my intention is to keep it as non-intrusive as possible. I envision it being opt-in.
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New Membership plans
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
Possibly! I can't make any promises here. I can only say that we're watching to see how Plus and Premium and Premium Plus all perform together very closely and using that information along with feature requests and feedback to decide where the next/best opportunities lie. I think mid-tier style plans could absolutely emerge as the 'winner' in that evaluation.