Desudesudesuka
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Posts posted by Desudesudesuka
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On 11/22/2019 at 5:09 AM, Alyona Su said:
Not a tax; a surcharge for using the system. The cost of doing business. If you take credit cards in RL there is a surcharge for doing that, too. There are surcharges for a lot of things. A tax is is your compelled tribute to a government. So you either deal with it or quit.
Even with your semantics it's arguable LL sits in the position of a governing body over SL, therefor any fee is very much an official tax as well. There are usages of "tax" which just use it as a synonym for theft, since taxation is theft anyways. Everyone knows what OP meant, I don't see the point of semantics besides upvote farming.
To respond to the topical reply here to OP's post... Deal with it or quit is a very poor phrase to sling around as SL sees people doing just that, unless you genuinely want to see the game die it's a harmful attitude to spread. OP is attempting to deal with it in their way by discussing it here with the likeminded, and hopefully to be seen by LL.
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Wrong, OP, they just evaded the filter somehow. This has been a thing since fanart and "Porkyman."
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Creators need to start moving inworld, but I've seen malls shut down as things go in the opposite direction due to the issues of management and rental. Despite server costs dropping like a rock LL is still fleecing people for renting servers, which they now rent off the cloud so it's ever cheaper for them. Where's the money going? Gotta be Sansar and champagne. There is such a thing as ripping people off too much when you're trying to run shop a market ecosystem and metaverse. LL sure likes to brag about the work users have done while they undermine it. But it really is their loss, because we'll all be just as skilled and creative when we're forced to move on. LL doesn't create content, there's nothing for them if they chase creators away. And a good way to do that would be reducing the profit margins from a hobby you can barely profit off of to literal slave labour. Doing it solely for fun becomes less viable with the insane land costs and declining amount of people to interact with.
A new creator will have to pay out of pocket to host an inworld store and in my experience the volume compared to the MP is lacking, it won't be worth it.
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Of course because it's trending "pokemon" and "nintendo" are no-nos. All the Pokemon furry stuff on the MP just got nuked.
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Just noticed what Tari had mentioned, and that new automatic unlisting keyword set is spicy. LL seems to be taking an anti-creator standpoint in their actions. We're effectively freelancers working for the grid and by extension LL, but I think the experiment is no longer as important to them as squeezing SL dry until we're all gone - because it is not growing due to lack of advertisement. I'll always hold the opinion Sansar was a waste of money that everyone is now paying for, and it has hastened SL's demise without being the replacement it was perhaps intended to be.
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Making it less attractive to bother selling things in SL. It's already hard to make more than pocket change doing what amounts to working for LL for free. Reminder the marketplace is a service they bought, and then sat on for years without making it any better despite the influx of cash they get to skim from. Now they have decided to try to compete with existing inworld vendors, yet there is no way in hell I or most anyone else would want to pay them a commission for something easily done for free or enabled via a one-time-cost. I would rather pay money to a third party service than let LL rip me off for subpar services as they've always done. It's just rate hike after rate hike without reflecting this in any improvements for users. Even if LL claims to improve the marketplace, it's the residents making all the sims, all the items, and they piggyback on all this work with (mis)management. I've basically given up on the idea of making a profit to cash out because of the game's hastening decline and unfriendliness to creators. I can't imagine many small time creators like myself or new ones wanting to get into it or ramp their game up at this point.
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Thanks to everyone who voiced their opinions, which lead to LL listening. Oh and thanks LL. :^)
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26 minutes ago, FyreRose said:
With all the money that pours into Linden Labs, why haven’t you guys hired some code monkeys (IE tech guys) to fix the bugs that are causing problems with the groups in the first damn place?
One of the "bugs" is easy to fix too. Alt accounts and dead accounts inflate group counts, yet there is no way for group owners to clear inactives automatically. And that cannot be the only optimization that could be made. I find it really hard to believe it's just impossible when that wasn't even done.
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2 minutes ago, ElSolLaLuna said:
There are residents who have a lot of alts that they have not used in years that are still part of groups, and they are slowing those groups down.
This is where you program in inactivity kicking.
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SL needs more users to get more subscribers. The current userbase is either subbed, always too poor, now too poor because of premium increases, or firmly cemented on not buying premium because they have better things to do with their money (a game isn't going to convince them.) If LL's actual strategy is trying to just milk current subscribers and players, SL is the already sinking Titanic and each one of these price increases is an Iceberg ship slamming into it.
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I can TL;DR this as "We're losing money, we need to milk the userbase more." I'll accept it, but I don't think it's sustainable the way it was done and it's not growing the SL economy like that boldfaced claim supposes. The game needs to grow to improve, not just the revenue LL sees next tally. This kind of short-sighted behaviour lacks empathy, which is unsurprising for a corporation due to layers of abstraction from peopling but I expect better than this. You're not gaining users to replace the ones getting scared off.
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1 hour ago, Grumpity Linden said:
We’re not lowering limits out of spite, groups really are quite a strain on our back end for a variety of painful historical reasons, including overloading group functionality instead of having other tools. This subject alone is worth a novel liberally sprinkled with tears. So anyway, we don’t hate basic users, and in fact we work hard to retain our free-to-play offering as one of the most generous across many industries. But yes, no big surprise, we do want to nudge active residents to become subscribers, because we think it’s a great value, and - as many have noted - we’re also running a business. But no, we're not shutting our doors to non-premium residents. Rumors of our insanity and villainy have been slightly exaggerated.
I can complain about everything else because while LL struggles so are users, and it impacts us. This I consider serious and a mistake, if infallibility were behind every decision perhaps this 16th would have been brighter for the users. I'm going with skepticism on this reduction. I do not believe this is going to mobilize new premium users out of thin air/unrealistically out of the existing userbase. This is going to alienate a lot of basic users and reduce their willingness to engage in SL, nevermind paying for it! Unless I saw numbers I even think eating the cost for this pays off compared to what reducing it will do. Other tools are probably worth getting in order because much of SL is relying on these groups right now. So I firmly believe there will be a negative effect once the crunch hits people. The group limits have increased and increased and groups have become more important along with this.
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My ultimate opinion is that we're now paying for Sansar. All big increases to buying lindies and taking out USD began when Sansar hit the field, in the past two years.
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23 minutes ago, Elvina Ewing said:
Merchants are not the only ones who cash out. Land barons need to cash out too, and they are probably the ones who cash out the most. So for cashing out $4000 they were paying $100 before, now they will pay $200. That's quite a significant loss.
I'd like to say that explains the land price reduction, mitigation.
I did nearly glance over it since I'm among the people who will never see value in premium the way it stands. Neither the trailer park-esque homes or the apocalyptic looking land. The numbers there don't mean much to me.
Okay, so to be fair they did update recently with animesh, but with 300% increases abruptly in 2 years it's still not justified based on the level of progress. There is one clear thing correlating to these increases in cost, and it is not improvements to SL. Sansar came out in 2017. I think lots of money that should've improved SL over the years went to Sansar, and here we are.
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14 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:
Owning a region (USD per month):
$295 in 2017, $249 in 2018, $229 in 2019. (Full region, setup-cost for new regions lowered from $305 to $100.)
$125 in 2017, $109 in 2018. (Homestead, setup-cost for new regions lowered from $100 to $40.)
$75 in 2017, $60 in 2018. (Openspace, setup-cost of $75 removed entirely.)Owning land:
Premium's free land allotment was doubled for everyone (from 512 to 1024) in 2018.
512sqm = $4 per month.
1024sqm = $7 per month.I mean, thank god. That won't affect most of us however so that does not offset it to us. Anyone complaining about a minor uptick is unlikely to afford a region as is. If you want to celebrate the reduction, it should be because those prices are actually insane. As LL lowers server rental costs they're coming more in line with reality, here's a humourous quote which pretty accurately assesses land prices - why nobody wants to pay them - and why they must come down.
4 hours ago, Gadget Portal said:Still 229 for a full region.
I can rent an entire server, 3+ GHz, 8 cores or more, with 96 gigs of RAM, for less than that. I guarantee we're not getting that much hardware dedicated to our 229 sim. At best we're getting a VM that's running on a server already hosting others.
And being premium still doesn't offer a lot for the cost when regions are still that expensive.
High membership cost, high L$ cost, high land cost... I'll just go play an MMO that makes me pay one reasonable price and gives me access to everything. Or for the same price as being a member of SL, I'll host an entire MMO for 600 people.
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It's a bit of a meme to say about video games, but I think it's safe to say by this point that SL has lost its soul. LL has lost that focus which was maintaining a vibrant world with a bustling economy they can tax for income. SL is stagnating, and what we can assume while they refuse to share statistics, is that it is slowly depopulating. Interacting with world it's evident we're in decline. At this point for the company it's about damage control, and trying to bump revenue up as the profit margin grows tighter and tighter.
For withdrawing:
1.5% in 2017, 2.5% in 2018, 5% in 2019.
For buying Lindies.
60c in 2016, 90c in 2017, $1.49 in 2018.
We are seeing drastically increasing rate hikes without corresponding improvements in the game. It's getting worse for users, and it is a user run world, which means it is going to get worse for SL and LL.
The increasing fees could even be an indicator that the marketplace is on a downturn, and the amount of "taxes" is dropping accordingly.
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3 hours ago, Seba Serpente said:
It is a big deal to increase things to not get hurt. You would buy $.99 cents french fries in a heartbeat, you woudnt buy $1.10 fries that easilly. Is deep inside the human mind to take some numbers more seriously than others even tho the difference is near insignificant.
I use .99 psychological pricing, and if I had to I would try 1.09 for a similar effect. But I'd rather not ruin the prices to try to mitigate SL becoming less and less profitable. I like offering items to customers at low and gimmicky prices sometimes.
It's not as easy as price raising just to deal with a fee increase though. Most of us will be in competition with others, and it's quite possible to have price matched competitors. Raising your prices isn't a choice to make lightly, it will cost sales.
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2 minutes ago, Kadah Coba said:
2011 it was pushed to 42. If I remember right, there was a technical limitation preventing it from being higher than 25 before this and Oskar or Andrew made it 42 as a reference to HHGTTG.
We've essentially lost the meaning of Second Life. Things look grim.
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A lot of people run alts and 2-3 bucks ends up being multiplied if they have premium alts going for whatever reason. It's also 30 more bucks at the end of the year, it does add up.
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10 minutes ago, Amina Sopwith said:
I don't understand what we've lost?
Read the article.
Agreed OP, the thing is everything they are doing will hurt the economy. There is no trickle down of reduced land prices, this only benefits rich land barons. Removing quarterly and leaving only annual for cost savings is almost predatory. All the poor people playing free, and all the middle class people using premium will suffer, there is no benefit to us in this announcement. The groups are not worth 2 dollars more and the the offline IMs are not worth mentioning. I'm concerned wondering what their next great change is going to be. Premium platinum to pass more savings onto the few alongside more nerfs for basic users? World smorld, it's not like LL is a government and we're trapped playing this game, they alienate the users and we'll leave.
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Hey, someone could be happy about this change, the land barons.
The 99.999% of us who aren't going to save twenties to bucketload of dollars per month? HA. We're the ones paying for that "TOTALLY IMPROVED GUYS :D!" news header though.
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44 minutes ago, Nextio said:
Limiting groups to entice premium membership is actually insulting. It's as if they can't think of another way to entice subscribers, so they keep rehashing this idea hoping to bring in millions of subscribers. How about offering better incentives?
It's also to threaten people unsubscribing, by leaving them with the choice of removing 50% of their groups or never joining another. They have reason to lower basic slots if they want to rely on subs, even if they aren't going to get new ones.
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One approach I'd consider to actually make money: I'd hire creators, starting by trying to buy out some of the bigger ones who show consistent work. They make money convincingly for themselves, and LL, why not take them under the wing? I mean literally offering to buy Maitreya, Belleza, etc., as improvements to the default avatars would be a good place to start, and the game appears less janky to newcominers. If they could not be bought external artists would be hired/commissioned as needed. By controlling the actual content less money would slip out of SL as creators cash out, it would just be part of the budget people are paid. Ultimately I would have LL directly selling avatar components for the now stellar looking default avatars, as well as subscription benefits.
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Maybe they assume we'll go to Sansar when we will not. I have no consumer base there and I don't think anyone working in SL considers trying to start anew there, if it's even possible. I find it asinine that they believe they can go for a full subscription model as their game enters decline. A sub model is something that's good if it's growing, and if you have something to offer. The people with the most to offer in Second Life are the users to each other, not Linden Labs, even if they hold control over the servers.
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More Stores Inworld with Higher MP Fee?
in Merchants
Posted · Edited by Desudesudesuka
Despite words having factual definitions, as is often the case they have many factual definitions, which is why prescriptivism doesn't work. Taxes are a surcharge for using a system as well, you're not really contradicting anything OP said. Personally, I understand what OP meant so I wouldn't pick apart any linguistic choices as it is a bit of a derail or at least unneeded aside. Did you read the post full though? OP didn't even call it a tax, he compared it since it is also percentage, which is fair. And the tax in question was the sales tax which is quite apt for a comparison with the sales fee that merchants absorb.
LL's 10% TAX skimmed off the top, their fee, cut, slice of the pie, whatever, it makes it less viable to use the MP for merchants and sell things in general. Personally I wouldn't charge much more on the MP because it simply isn't viable, there's little money to be made on SL overcharging as a smaller merchant. People are very accustomed to sweatshop tier pricing on 3D objects in this sandbox - ones which they can quite easily do with whatever they please without the artist being able to police it. Unless there's some sort of position you hold that other merchants don't you'll be undercut and someone else valuing their time at a lesser rate will make more L$ in sales volume. There isn't a ton of money to be made from inworld sales unless you are selling things at events, so it's not a great alternative to paying the 10% marketplace tax.