Phil Deakins

Faithless Babii wrote: This also puzzles me..I could understand it when they had offices in the UK..but now they dont. Makes it kinda unfair that I and others have to pay that extra 20% on sim tiers each month...never seen a complete answer to this much asked question either (dont expect we will get one) Has LL's billing dept. moved out of the UK? If LL no longer has any places of business anywhere in the EU, then they should no longer be charging EU customers VAT. What I don't know is whether or not having a place of business somewhere in the EU means that they have to charge all EU residents VAT. I also don't know whether or not LL has a place of business somewhere in the EU. Does anyone know about that?

Are you sure that LL no longer has an office in the UK. Where is "billing" these days. It was in Gateshead. I know that, if an overseas company has an office in the UK, then it has to charge VAT to UK residents. I don't know if the same applies when the company has an office anywhere in the EU. So I have two more questions:- 1. Does LL have an office somewhere in the EU? 2. Does having an office somewhere in the EU mean that all EU residents have to be charged VAT?

According to the rules that came in a couple of years ago:- Advertisements (not just For Sale signs) must be grounded - those in the pic are not. No dimension can exceed 8m. Those in pic look like they are in compliance with that. No person can display more than one sign in a sim. In short, those signs contravene the rules in more than one way and are ARable.

Marcus Hancroft wrote: ralph Alderton wrote: If Linden Lab want to seriously increase their revenue lowering tier is essential. It's only people who don't believe in SL's potential and future who say that tier is the right price. Tier is currently set at the wrong price, that's why SL is stagnating. LL should let anyone buy a HS without a full sim, lower tier and watch SL boom again. If LL halved tier costs they'd sell tons of sims and more than double their money. High tier costs are strangling and suffocating the whole ecosystem. It's all about the land. I completely agree with this, Phil. If Linden Lab would get rid of the ridiculous $1,000US set up fee and halve the tier costs, many more people would buy sims and start paying tier. As has been said once in this thread already, "I'd much rather sell 100 at $10L than 1 at $1,000L." I don't say that the current tier prices are right. I'm only saying that reducing them substantially would be a huge risk for LL. I completely agree about homesteads. I can't come up with any reason for LL not to sell them to anyone who wants one. Perhaps it's to do with not wanting to get on the wrong side of mega-barons. I also agree about the setup fee. A small setup fee would be reasonable, but $1000 is taking the p..s. It used to be $1750! Would that large estate that you mentioned still be there if the tier was halved? I don't think so. Tier dictates rents. If tier is high, rents are high. If tier is low, rents are low. What can't happen is tier to be halved and rents stay the same. It can't happen because land owners have to compete for tenants, so all land owners would have to bring their rents down to compete and stay alive. With halved rents, that estate owner could make the same profit as with normal rents, so I think the reason the estate is no longer there is probably due to the fierce competition in that market, and not being willing to continue for a relatively small profit. LL bringing out Linden Homes was bad for that market, and may have had something to do with the estate's demise. ETA: The phrase was, "I'd rather sell 11 at 100L than 1 at 1000L" - not 100 at 10L which equals 1 at 1000L I'd rather sell 1 at 1000L than 100 at 10L because there'd be much less in the way of customer service to do

@Randall No, I'm not certain that tier is LL's main income. It's my best guess, and I very much doubt that it's a wrong guess. They did state where their income came from a while back but I don't know where to look for it. I don't recall being surprised by it though, and I'm sure I would have been astonished if by far the biggest chunk wasn't from tier. This is the way I see it... They flooded the market with land, to the extent that they are unable to sell new mainland any more (that's not just opinion), and that means of increasing the company income was dead. Any company will look for ways of increasing income - hence the marketplace. LL's thinking was probably that they would lose some tier due to sellers not needing land, but that would be more than compensated for by the extra they would make from commissions. I doubt that much tier has been lost due to not needing it for stores. Yes, there are loads of people selling in the marketplace without inworld stores - maybe most MP sellers - but would they have bought land and opened stores if the MP wasn't there? I think that most of those sellers are so small that they wouldn't be selling anything if there was no MP. Some of them would try renting in a mall for a short time, but would then give it up. I also don't think that significant sellers would close down inworld because they can sell in the MP. On the whole, they do both. I think that LL made a calculated decision to lose a bit of tier, and expected it to be more than compensated for in MP commissions. It's true that there is a lot more land either for sale or abandoned these days, but I'd put most of that down to LL flooding the market with it, the active population decreasing, and reasons other than the MP effect. But... if LL substantially reduced tier, as many think they should, they would lose a hell of a lot of income at a stroke, and they would have no way of knowing whether or not they would recover much of it. I am sure that there would be a bit of a land rush initially, but I doubt that the extra land ownership would be maintained for very long, as the new tier costs become normal, and other factors that cause people not to own land, and not to own as much land, take over again. Any reduction would have to be substantial to have any effect, so it would be a *huge* risk. Even keeping the general tier costs the same, but adding more levels between the big jumps, would be a huge risk. It would hugely reduce the tier payed by existing land owners, in the hope that they would buy a little bit more. So, all in all, I don't think that LL is killing land ownership with the MP, to the extent of LL's income suffering. I've no doubt that the MP has some negative effect on tier income, but nowhere near the positive effect of the MP income.

Intolerance wrote: Now I have it on good authority that the large land holders don't suffer this fate in the same way as the small landowners do because LL has cut backroom deals to reduce or eliminate set-up fees while also reducing tier on the acquisitions of these select few. The result is onerous though. Large landowners do get the sort of breaks you mentioned, but it's perfactly fair and anyone can get them. All you have to do is negotiate with LL to take, say, 100 new sims, and they'll cut you a deal. It doesn't constitute unfairness or inequality. It's just the normal way of doing business. Llook at it this way. Would someone who pays tier on only one sim seriously think that it's unfair that the person who pays tier on, say, 500 sims is paying lower tier rates? Quantity discounts are normal.

LL has a HUGE amount of land that nobody is buying. They are selling it for 1L per square meter, exept in the auction where they start it at 0.5L per square meter. The price of land can't go down any lower. A few years ago, they liked to keep land prices around the 6L to 7L per meter mark, and they released new mainland sims when prices were rising, for that purpose. Then they flooded the market with new sims and the number of people using SL went down, so the result is that there is far too much land for sale or abandoned now, and it hardly sells at all. So the quantity of land doesn't come into it. LL also introduced free Linden Homes for premium accounts. That, and the extremely low cost of land, caused landlords to lower their rents in order to compete, which is why you see rentals at very low rents. The size of sims is built into the programming of the system. They don't break them into smaller islands, but they do do something similar. Homestead sims and Open Space sims (do we still have Open Space sims?) are the normal size but they support a fraction of the prims, so the tier is a lot less for them. Unfortunately, LL won't sell them to all who want them. They only sell to people who first have a full sim. Incidentally, Homesteads may be the reason you saw some very low rents. There is loads of mainland for sale - loads of it. And it's mostly incredibly cheap. You do have to be a premium member to buy some though. LL's profits: yes, companies do lose profits for various reasons, but very few will intentionally bring it on themselves, which is what they would be doing if they lower the tier or add more tier levels.

You can't actually upload prims, Maya. You only upload textures. (You can also upload animations and other stuff, but sculptmaps are textures, and meshes are similar) With sculpties, the texture is the sculptmap, which turns a prim into the required sculpty shape according to the map (sculptmap), and it costs the same to upload as any other texture - 10L. You can get a lot more "shapely" objects onto a parcel by using sculpty objects, because sculpties are used to create nice shapes without needing to use extra normal prims to achieve the same nice shape. Also, you can use 1 sculpty prim for several object parts. I use 1 sculpty prim for all my furniture that has 4 legs, for instance - 4 legs/feet but only 1 prim. LL charges more to upload meshes. I've forgotten how much because they've never interested me. Mesh objects are treated differently. A mesh object may be created using just 1 prim, but it's counted as a lot more prims for the land. For instance, mesh is no good for low prim furniture (my business) because a piece of existing low prim furniture that uses, say, 5 or 6 prims (sculpties and/or normal prims, or both), would count for a *lot* more prims than that if it were made using 1 prim and mesh, so you could fit fewer objects on the parcel. I'm not sure what you're driving at but, if your landlady told you 1L per prim, then that'll be the rental cost to you, and has nothing to do with uploads or tier costs. LL have been steadfast in not changing the tier structure or the cost of tier, presumably because they'd run the risk of not recovering what they would initially lose, and tier is the mainstay of their income. People often want tier to be reduced, but it would be a huge risk to LL's income, which they may never recover. For a long time, I've had a different idea, which is to have more tier levels - smaller jumps in land and tier costs. Tier isn't bad at the low levels but, when you reach, say, 32k of land, then the next step is 64k - a large increase in cost. After 64k, it's 128k and, after that, it's 256k, each with huge cost increases. If they stuck some more levels in between, it would encourage people to go up in small levels. In both cases, it would initially drastically reduce LL's tier income, and, understandably, they are very reluctant to take the risk, especially since it can't be known whether or not the initial loss would be recovered and even more profits from tier would result due to higher land ownership..

Perrie Juran wrote: I find it interesting that the oath reads, "To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." The problem with that oath is that nobody can stick to it. The best that anyone can do is be completely honest, which is not always the same as telling the truth.

She's mixing sculpties and mesh up. They do charge extra for uploading a mesh, but uploading sculptmaps is the same as uploading any texture. I can't undertand why it comes into this conversation though.

I haven't read all the thread but I think someone did suggest that it may be a change in the way that traffic is calculated, so I'll suggest one possibility that would make very good sense to me. The introduction of "scripted agents", and the banning of traffic gaming, didn't stop traffic from being gamed. Leaving non-scripted agent bots aside, place owners routinely park themselves, alts, etc. on the land to improve the traffic number. So suppose that someone at LL decided to deal with that, by changing the traffic programming to only count nn number of minutes per av, either per day, or per visit (per visit would be a much simpler change). If an av is on the parcel less than nn minutes, all its minutes count and, if an av is on the parcel more than nn minutes, it only counts for nn minutes. To my way of thinking, that would be much fairer than it has been, and it would largely negate the type of "legal" gaming that continues. I've no idea if that possibility fits the evidence though. Some experimenting would be worthwhile.

There's nothing uncommon about the truth. Existance comprises nothing but the truth, and untruth never occurs. Not knowing the truth and not telling the truth are quite common though, but that's not what you asked.

Randall Ahren wrote: Maya is just pointing out that price and demand are inversely related and that virtual goods are highly scalable. Once something is made, it can be copied an infinite numbers of times with no further cost input required. If you've put something up for sale that once sold well at that price, but sales have dropped off, trying lowering the price. It is better to have more sales at a lower price than no sales at a higher price. Exactly! When I started my furniture store, I set my prices low. People told me that my prices were too low, but I always said, "I'd rather sell 11 at 100L than 1 at 1000L". That was exactly what I told them - word for word. It only took a few months before I taking between US$4000 and US$5000 a month out of SL.

Yes, there's US$1 charge for transfering US$ to PayPal, regardless of the amount so that's irrelevant, and a charge for selling L$ for US$, so LL does get some money from that. They also get some the other way - when people buy L$. And they get a cut of MP sales too. LL gets money from a number of sources, but I'm pretty sure that by far the biggest source is tier. If tier was their only income, SL wouldn't need to close, but, if they lost the tier, I've no doubt that they'd have to close SL. As I see it, tier is their staple diet and the other things are just bits of jam on it. Look at it this way. If there were no landowners, LL wouldn't have an income from the land and they'd have a decimated income from other sources:- nobody would buy anything for their land because they don't have any - no houses and buildings, no furniture, no plants of any kind, no club gear, no breedables, etc. etc. - and there wouldn't be much in the way of exchange commissions because people wouldn't need L$, except for clothes, anims (but where would they use them), and such. As long as there are enough landowners to pay enough tier, which would make it so that L$ are worth buying, etc., LL can keep SL going. But the fewer landowners there are, the less income LL gets from all sources, especially tier. If the slow decline continues, there will eventually come a time when there aren't enough landowners paying tier for LL to keep SL going. And that brings me back to my point, that it's concurrency that matters and not creators. If concurrency (people using SL) continues to decline, there will be fewer and fewer landowners paying tier, which will mean that SL will end. It shouldn't happen in the near term, but the decline is continuing.

Carole Franizzi wrote: Correct me if I'm wrong. In theory we could all spend a fortune in creators' shops but if those creators didn't then invest in bigger and bigger plots of land or more and more branches, then LL wouldn't get any direct benefit (more income), right? That's more or less my thinking. Whether or not SL closes down has everything to do with whether or not LL consider it worthwhile continuing. When it's no longer worthwhile for LL, SL will close. So it's payments to LL that matter, and not payments to users (creators). Creators take money out of SL, or they'd like to I made a load of money selling my stuff here, but LL didn't get an extra penny of it, so it didn't do anything at all towards the continuance of SL. (I actually bought much more land than I needed so I paid LL more, but that was because I wanted to eventually acquire the whole sim, and nothing to do with business necessity.) But it's not about creators earning more money and buying more land. It's about users having land and paying tier to LL. If the number of people using SL is dwindling, which it is, then as time goes by there will be fewer people paying money to LL, and there will eventually come a time when SL is no longer worth keeping going.

garey Solo wrote: Yes we've all heard that SL is slowly declining. But why? Because people are so reluctant to spend. No customers no creators , no world. Go figure. SL is in a slow decline but the population spending less money with creators isn't the reason, so supporting creators, by spending more with them, won't arrest the slow decline.

Requiem Lytham wrote: Yes, spending money on Secondlife is what primarily keeps it afloat, but so does the population. To my way of thinking, it's only concurrency that says whether or not SL is in decline, and concurrency is slowly - very slowly - decreasing. It has been for a long time and that downward trend shows no signs of changing. It doesn't really matter whether or not people spend money in SL, and supporting creators doesn't enter into it. If SL was a place where no money changed hands between users, and concurrency was continually growing, then SL would be the opposite of doomed. I'm not suggesting that SL is doomed - at least not in the relatively near future. I'm saying that SL will be doomed when concurrency declines to the point where LL consider it not worth keeping going. LL makes money from tier and, for that to be worthwhile, it requires a lot of people to be paying it. When there aren't enough people using SL and paying tier, then SL will be doomed. User to user money is irrelevant. The trend has been very slowly towards that scenario for a long time now.

I think she meant the V2 sidebar - big ugly thing. The V3 doesn't have one at all, as you said. I think the way the V3 allows the user to arrange the buttons, and to choose which buttons to have displayed, is brilliant - so refreshing after the idiocy of the V2.

I never noticed that. Thank you!

It has bulk upload, or at least it's in the uploads options. I've never seen an "align textures" anywhere and I'd guess that copy rotation, position and size are Phoenix extras? (Don't answer that. I have seen them - just never even tried to use them. And there are a couple of "aligns" in the Phoenix's Textures tab but I've no idea what they do). I know that the so-called radar is a Phoenix extra, and I do find it useful. Come to think of it, copy UUID is a Phoenix extra that I also find useful. So I guess I'll continue with Phoenix for now and just use the V3 for editing mega-prims.

Thanks, Ciaran.

Interesting - thank you.

The question is in the title :)

Cheers, Perrie, but that's not what I meant by "camera controls". The controls I mean are the ones that you can display on screen - with 2 discs that you press on to move the camera's view in various directions. In the V1s, they were small and translucent when they didn't have the focus, so they never got in the way. In the V2 they were relatively huge, black, and never translucent, so they were simply in the way if you have them permanently on-screen as many people do - me included.

Isolde Mistwood wrote: The article frames Second Life as having maxed out its potential, perhaps even implying it is in decline: Second Life *is* in decline, and has been for a very long time. A few months ago, I posted that I see the daily concurrency trough at 31k and that I expect it probably gets down to 30k sometimes. Now it is always* down to 30k and I expect it gets down to 29k sometimes. The decline is *very* slow but it definitely in decline. * always = weekdays.