Adam Spark

You misunderstood. I was speaking about the price. If those prices went up, users would complain about that just as much as people are complaining about fee hikes.

Not everyone likes subscription fees, either. Hike those and you get the same complaints, just from a different subset of users. I'm happy to pay for anything that improves the grid as a whole, and I think making things like getting started with land cheaper will, in the long run, do everyone a lot of good. More user retention and more money for consumers to spend on creations would do everyone good, and I think this will help accomplish that in a big way, especially if the model transition continues.

Agreed. Its a START, at best, but at least its a start.

They have been saying for 5 years now that they plan to shift the overall costs of Second Life from a largely land selling model to more of a model based on fees. All this is is shifting money around, basically. You are paying less for land, more for other things like buying and selling. That land your store is sitting on is becoming cheaper, so yeah, you have to pay more for other things. Creators are nothing without consumers. A benefit to consumers IS a benefit to creators. As more people want in Second Life and see it as affordable just to "play" and buy some land, creators have a bigger audience to target for sales. Take that as a potential win. And any potential win will cost you further investment. Thats business 101, folks. Creators are just hurting themselves by considering everyone else as a lesser class of user. The go getters, as somebody in this thread put it? There are plenty of go getters who would love to be able to afford land but cannot because the monthly fee has one too many digits to make sense of it. Businesses never just slash prices. They might absorb some costs, but they ALWAYS shift money around in ways to make more money. Its why they stay afloat for as long as they do. We have no grid at all without decisions such as these. I see this as generating more interest in SL, both from the perspective of gaining customers for businesses that exist, and getting more creators in the door as well. It might hurt a few creator pocketbooks up front, but I see this as a long term win for the grid as a whole as it makes entry so much easier for people. Make us spend as we grow rather than gouge us at the entry point. I've been saying this for over 10 years. We all want SL to just become cheaper across the board. I would love to wake up tomorrow and find that every price has been slashed 50 percent. I feel it would make the Lab MORE money in the long run. I've (kinda) come to terms with the fact that that just does not work.

A free 2048 tier allotment only highlights how sad it is that premium members can't get that little. I'd accept this if regions were actually sane in price, but sanity and the price of land don't even share a planet. I guess you could say its a start. I would have an easier time swallowing that if Plus was 25-50 percent higher than premium, If upgrading costs twice as much, I kinda feel like these kinds of things should either be tripled in value, or premium should get a boost in value. Give premium 2048 tier and 4096 to premium plus. I want more meat on the bone. Discounts on land prices if you can't give more significant price chops to everyone *cough* you can but you won't *cough*

What works for one, will not work for someone else. NEVER dismiss a suggestion as "doesn't work", because it just might work for you, and nothing will work alone. Don't dismiss anything suggested here, from diet, to exercise, to simple daily reminders, to meds, to therapy, to God. If it does not work for you, or anyone you know for that matter, it might work for the OP and none of them are wrong. To the OP, I pray for you and your battle with this.

Object entry is the ability to move something over to a parcel of land. If you have Build off and Entry on, I cant walk over to your land and build, but I could rez next door and slide the object over.

Some people here enjoy (even create) the drama they like to complain about. They continuously allow themselves to get triggered because it gives them a platform to lash out at, rather than heal, their triggers. Blocking keeps the narcissists from setting fires and complaining about being burned. I normally scroll on by. I don't agree fully on everything, or very much probably, with those I associate with. But if you are interfering with my internal peace, I really fail to see any reason not to block. I love everybody, and I pray for those I block, but I don't need to see somebody's constant negativity. I learned a while ago how unhealthy allowing myself access to it can really be. It made me sick. And in case you are wondering, I'm not speaking figuratively when I say that.

The human voice is as much an instrument as any other, and it takes rest, warming up, and care to use and maintain it, and talent to be able to sing well. A real musician is someone who stays focused on their craft and does not care to spend time on what others are doing. This isn't a competition. There are events with singers, there are events with players and there are events that have nothing to do with music whatsoever. And none of them are less legitimate than the others. Stay in your lane, look in the mirror and give YOUR fans what they want.

That has been there for a LONG time as they began preparing for the still unavailable Premium Plus

I meant visitors. I used the term correctly the first time, the second I misused customers when i meant visitors. I wasn't referring to economic reasons at all. There is nobody who shouldn't be in SL, or online, and I've never given a speck of a reason to make anyone think I've thought otherwise. If the place is meant for visitors, yes they are cutting themselves off to potential visitors. To each their own, I guess. There are great people with no info on file. There are even customers with no info on file. I had no info on file for years, using linden dollars I earned working in SL only. There are also griefers that have been fully engaged in SL, including those who are customers.

Fair, but a vast majority of new folks in SL don't either, so I still think you are shooting yourself in the foot a little bit by closing a place meant for visitors off to those people. That is just me. I would much rather take care of an incident than cut myself off from potential customers to avoid it.

I've never thought of it before, but this is so true. I understand why you need to have payment info on file or used in certain situations. But there really isn't one that requires John Doe avatar knowing. Even the land option to not allow access to those without info on file (which is ridiculous in its own right, but I digress) doesn't require the status to be displayed publicly. The only time you "need" to know anything about my business engagement with Linden Lab is if you see me in a premium only area.

Land and group owners have free reign to operate on their rules. The Linden Lab Terms of Service prohibits mostly illegal activities and they tend to distance themselves from personal activities. Inactivity is not something I would consider a reasonable reason for a paid group, since lurkers can come in and contribute at any time and group membership numbers can help entice people in, but to each their own. They have every right to shoot themselves in the foot like that, lol

Logging in, building, creating landmarks, notecards, scripts, ect. All work pretty close to perfect. Avatar customization is a fairly flawless effort. Changing clothing is only slightly less flawless. Ecommerce is almost perfect, outside of the rare and easily fixable apparent loss of linden dollars (the viewer showing ??? instead of your balance, which is still there on the server). To be fair, its astounding that SL works at all. I've learned to embrace the lag and all its quirks while enjoying the fact that it remains operational. That feat doesn't get the credit the Lab deserves, and is not lost on me.

This, and the fact that a large number of its current userbase agrees with them, is exactly it. The real issue at hand is nobody is committed to making it happen due too the fact that it won't be happening any time soon. There will be people landing on Mars in a decade or two, yet folks have been working towards that goal for a few decades already. Imagine if they never started because at the time they thought "oh that's not possible". I'll give them that its not possible. But it can be eventually. Problem is, the dream for the future doesn't make money today, so sadly it doesn't excite the passion it briefly did in some of us 15+years ago. Phillip dared to dream. Dreams don't make money

Ok, I just wasn't seeing any of it in 2006 while I was watching it from afar or in the few months of my time here I guess. Fair enough

I know SL began in 2003. Early advertising basically sold SL as it is now, a world created by us. As mentioned in the article, it was 2007 that Phillip was quoted as saying “The 3D web will rapidly be the dominant thing and everyone will have an avatar.” I was referring to SL being sold (hyped) to us as part of a future metaverse. That began in earnest in 2007. They briefly worked on making it happen with a pilot project in 2008 that was quickly abandoned. I know SL was initially sold to us as a product in 2003. That was not my point.

No it is not. Going into SL is no less RL than logging into Facebook. Our avatars are controlled by our real selves and we are governed by real world laws and the Terms of Service of a real world company. You can fish for money and hunt for money, similarly to old school "camping chairs" which paid you just for sitting. But, that won't net you money very fast. You could gamble, but only if you are not in a RL area that prohibits online gambling and you have your RL payment info on file (see, this is real. You can fake a lot in SL, but you're still in RL). Plus you'd need some Lindens to start with - unless you play freeplay games, but the return is pretty small, when you win. This may be Second Life, but we still only have one. You get what you pay for in life, and pixels will never change that.

Very interesting article. I think what unfortunately happened is that the original idea and promise for SL was overhyped and ahead of its time. It was sold to us in 2007 as though it was going to take place in 2008, much like 3D printing becoming a buzzword a decade before it could even remotely begin its journey into the consumer market, or how VR became a buzzword potentially decades too early. Second Life as part of a broader metaverse, like Sansar, VR, 3D printers, and other still very futuristic stuff, should have been built in the shadows for a number of years longer than it was. I still say Linden Lab made their first mistake with Sansar when they leaked word of a new platform built "in the spirit of Second Life" long before they could say anything else about it. This led to a mass expectation of another Second Life, which we were never, ever, ever supposed to get. They should have privately developed for at least another year. It might have led to backtracking on the VR pipedream before anyone saw how heavily VR-centric it initially was.

From a development perspective, almost all software is in beta in terms of its simplistic definition of not finished. Beta should be reserved for those programs and platforms not quite ready for everyone. Problem is that's a grey area thanks to those who use beta programs not because they like to test and provide feedback, but because they can download it and therefore it "should be finished". SL is out of beta, but in constant development. Sansar was never really out of beta until it got sold. Sansar's problem is it should have probably been considered an Alpha and not released to the masses for testing and experimentation when it was. Linden Lab dropped word of Sansar a year too early at least.

Sure, companies present Beta as a way of making you think its not finished, in the same way tweaks to existing features are nowadays being advertised as features. 75 additional emojis would never be referred to as a feature at one time, but today it is. Windows 11 is just Windows 10 with a new skin, but if you buy their advertising, you'd think that was groundbreaking. By definition though, Beta is not finished. Sansar wasn't. It got new features and improvements every other day it seemed (only a subset of which were meaningful, fair enough), and was actually considerably better when it was sold off, compared to when it was launched (Especially on the mouse and keyboard side, once they came to their senses and got off the VR bandwagon heading nowhere). Once that stopped being done, it was no longer beta and got sold. They were improving it, they just gave up long before it was good.

Sansar was much better when you consider that as a platform, it was never more than a half baked beta test before they spun it off -- if it isn't still that half baked beta lol. This was a viewer that made SL feel like a half baked beta a few years after it could claim that it was.

Yes, you did. It was super restrictive and gave no hint to the fact that SL was much more than just navigating in your scene, visiting destinations and text chatting. They stated they were going to add some features to it, but it bombed before they got around to it

That's brilliant 🤣