Prokofy Neva

I think because your SL has been so short, you haven't seen enough builds. It's just not true that the world is filled with crappy, out-of-scale builds. Not at all. Go up to the upper left-hand side of your screen, or the section on this web site, and look at DESTINATIONS. Pick out themes you're interested in and travel there. Unfortunately, like real life, SL is a "lookist" colony where you have to look good for people to take you seriously, unless you find some niche where they don't care because some other interest or theme prevails. So you have to dress up to go to a club and not look like a griefer. SL is actually a very big place and you need to fly around more.

It would have to be a notecard or a prim that has the options "no-mod" and "no-copy" with transfer only. Otherwise the customer could copy the proof of purchase and keep sending it.

I think you're just utterly unfamiliar with how rentals work, and particularly with my rentals. Many of my rentals aren't just postage stamps laid out on a grid as some are. They are nice communities with a park at the center or a walkway or trees or some other build of some sort. You can't just "downsize" a big elaborate build you paid for which people are used to having as a kind of landmark or hangout area. If you've already cut up a sim and arranged houses and landscaping all around it, you can't just take a 512 or 1024 and now "cut it out" like a diseased elm tree. This is the larger problem the Lindens have on the mainland. They get patches of abandoned land on sims with great builds, so they can't dump the whole sim and they have no way (yet) to cut out the dead wood and pull together the live wood. Many people have beautiful homes that aren't furnished because they actually do not sit inside them. The home is like a sculpture. They admire it, and sit on the deck outside or go up in their skybox. The home is merely a kind of status symbol. Once again, there can't be "space" or land unrelated to prims. Even on a homestead where you get more space with less prims, there's a limit to how this concept works if you divide up the sim into parcels for people. Prims have to come from somewhere. I don't object at all to content creators selling more and people buying more. I myself commission and sell content and sell gatchas and even sell my own little home-made creations. That's not the issue. What I object to is content creators imagining that the economy of the Renaissance Fair -- the guilds make fancy stuff and we rubes buy it -- is all you need in a virtual world. You need different classes of people and other sources of income generation besides skilled content creators. Land sellers and developers and rental agents are the obvious other class given the make-up of the world. Services of every conceivable type are the other obvious class. But these two classes are scorned, hated, and hobbled, and those leading the charge are the content creators who only think selfishly of their own class interests.

Cedric, well, I probably have more of the lower rent market than you do : ) I have people who drop in $7 one hour and $33 another hour to pay their $100 rental as they earn that money from some payout lot. Lots of non-Americans, people on fixed incomes and such. Lots of little areas, like $40 or $60 camping. I think (hope) most of these people will still appreciate the value of more prims if their rent doesn't go up, as this category of people are the worst offenders for prim overage and evictions when they repeat that offense too often. But a decided percent want lower rent. What I see them doing on their own now is just refunding on their somewhat higher rentals which were just gifted with more prims, on to my lower-cost rentals with less prims which now have more, if you follow me. Some are urging me to cut their rent and keep their prims the same. Right now there are enough options that probably I can accommodate these movements of categories of people but I can see that I'm going to have to create cheaper rentals -- EVEN cheaper. $25/25 prims used to be my rock bottom. It's now going lower.

Callum, you didn't address the issue of the confusion of prim counting. All it takes is one person getting a "region full" message or looking and seeing as if there are these thousands of prims showing somewhere ELSEWHERE on the sim that they didn't put out, and you get a kaching, refund, move-out. A system that is borrowing from the buffer does not sit well with me. Buffers are meant to do things like accommodate a boat moving through the water on that sim, or a very blinged-out avatar with a zillion prims on her walking through. It's not meant to be used to keep a flower farm visible all day. That's my understanding of it. As for your "1,7 or 4x" land, I'm puzzled what these references are. What is 1,7? Is that 1.7 per prim? or what are you referencing? Yes, most malls bill by the prim. So whether they have $1.4 or $1.5 or even $2 per prim (or did), as many of the busiest gatcha malls now charge, they will have to think what to do (and I notice that the big gatcha malls I'm renting from are still thinking and have yet to put out a message but will -- I'll be interested to see what they do). I notice my fellow hard-scrabble Mainland rental agents have just taken this in stride and re-done their billing rates, not given free prims so they make a little more, I guess. So they now put in a hard 0.81 per prim or 0.93 per prim or whatever they put, but it's not 0.66 which is what I will offer in a few former "dollar a prim areas". I had already begun shutting these down in the last 2 years or raising their prices or making some "payment info on file only" because dollar a prim not only doesn't pay tier, it no longer feeds larger lots and the movement of customers through your system to higher-cost rentals as it once did years ago. Not when people can go from a newbie cottage for $150/150 prims to a homestead or even a 4096 because they can buy that 4096 nowadays not for $7/meter but $0.7 per meter.

You must not run a business in Second Life. The bonus gives you tier, which isn't land. It's tier that is a land credit to cover land. But what is that land? Prims. The bonus in to over extra land is to provide more prims. Why else would you need 50 more prims in a grouped land where you just got that 50 because someone put in another 512 of land credit or you yourself and your alts grouped land but have a build across that land anyway. What is 50 prims? It's just a little respite from a build, perhaps a tree or a park bench or something. Even on a larger set-up where tier bonus might give you 500 prims, where will they go? They go only to buying extra prim land on a sim when/if it becomes available. Land=prims. You can't have prims without land. In a group, you can rearrange prims, but they still have to "come from somewhere". I marvel at your inability to grasp why a customer wants to pay half as less for the same thing when he figures out he can. Do you have customers? Do you sell anything? If I pay $50 for 50 prims a week, and I've found out that now I'll get 75 prims for that $50, I easily figure out that for $33 (or even round it up to $35 or down to $30), I can now get the same 50 prims, because my landlord isn't raising his price. So I'll go do that if I'm not a big decorator. My "dollar a prim" cheap areas are now "0.666" areas. Prims have to come from land. Therefore if you have a trend of people wanting what amounts to roughly half price,or 33% off ultimately, you are left with land-prims that aren't renting. So then it has to be sold or abandoned. I haven't said I was going to raise rent. In fact I said I'm keeping the same price. Why not? My cost didn't go up, why raise my customers' price? If anything, some prices will have to go down as people figure out, especially in something like a market stall, or a small store in a mall, that doesn't have that many square meters to start with, that they can't use more prims. But they sure could use half their cost. So if your store costs $100 for 50 prims, and the system will now give you $100/75 prims because you get 50% more everywhere, why not cut your cost? Let's say you used to pay $350 for 250 prims, one of my more popular lots. That's 1.4 per prim. But with the 50% increase, the lot has $350/375 prims, reducing the cost per prim to 0.93. So naturally some customers will say, oh, great, I'll just keep my 250 prims, thanks, I don't need more, but make my rent now $232, or even round it up to $250. So now I have a lot that has 125 unused extra prims that the person is not paying for or using. Sure, in a group these can be juggled and moved elsewhere. But in a mall situation or let's say a lot of little cabins or an apartment building, where/how will they be sold? Depending on the build and the trend on a given sim, then land would be cut out of the "fallow" that used to be used for prims -- water, fields, a big park, whatever, and abandoned. Or the mall will close, as the tier on it can no longer be paid. There are few big successful malls any more in Second Life. They became dinosaurs not only when the Lindens killed the telehubs, which were a good thing, not a bad thing, and further grew obsolete with the trend of creators to want their own either full-prim island or homestead to totally control their store's venue, and make it a place with extras like hangouts and socializing areas and events. There are less even of these "big box stores" in SL than there were because no one wants costs, they want profits, and a store owner can make more moving to the Marketplace. Those malls that survive (I have a few surviving and a few dying) are little, specialized boutiques or themed areas with dedicated shoppers or owners using search skillfully but who also benefit from walk-ins. Now probably the last death knell will sound for malls. I myself am looking at what to do with these situations -- give people the lower prices they want? Put a yardscale of gatchas in the sky to use the prims? Dump land? Perhaps you're only looking at the type of rental that stacks up dozens of people on one big sim, making them all share the same music stream or use those sub-optimal "radio from your browser" devices. But I don't have rentals like that, and many don't. People get dedicated parcels in my rentals unless they are in an apartment building or town house, but those aren't the norm.

I have some Philip Linden bears that I will never part with unless you pay me an enormous amount of money : ) I used to collect them but they are too high prim to put out so I lost interest. Soft Linden has a bear you get from hunting on his home base, look at his profile. Oz Linden has a bear you can get by telling him something about SL he doesn't know (he used to have that offer). That is a VERY hard job to do, but I finally came up with something and got the bear! Most (all?) of these bears aren't copyable so I can't send them to you. The earliest ones were when the Lindens were more in "share" mode; now they make all their stuff non-transfer. Harmony is long gone AFAIK. I've got the rare "Thanks a Million" bear when they reached one millio sign-ups and "Viewer 2" bear and "Billing" bear. You could likely get a bear from Patch Linden and I think Guy Linden and Michael Linden would give you bears. I have a rare Andrew Linden bear BTW. Some day I should put this enormous collection on display. One of my great losses in inventory loss mayhem is the apparently permanent loss of my Exposition Linden card. There used to be Linden trading cards, too. This was an extremely rare one. This was like a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card. But it's lost : (

Yes, as an oldbie that came of age during the period when last names were available, I really love this feature. First of all, it helps in trade-marking. Everyone knew what Chung real estate was or Fairchang engineering (a last name made up of two last names merged when these avatars married in real life). Names were made up randomly, but they began to stick and be associated with certain historical eras of Second Life. If you ran into a Cellardoor, you know you were meeting an oldbie who likely made interesting things. A last name Neva meant you were not an oldbie in those years but today it may confer oldbie status. I really don't like this "resident" stuff. All the scripted devices require that you take that first-name only of a person then add the name Resident to them as if they are all from the same tribe. I think "first-name only" pushes people into these Jennifer123456 type of names that I find annoying. It also means you can't always tell tenants apart easily. It's hard to remember them. The tenants with distinctive last names you tend to remember better. And display names are not the solution. First of all, they constantly change on some people. Secondly, they are not the system name that scripted devices like rental boxes and doors and security actually use, that a landlord actually sees. So from my perspective, it's worthless. I don't understand what the big deal is with these names. The system already enables you to change your name on your avatar itself, and then bothers to make this change through your entire system of creations and your home page and everything else, it seems like a waste, even. If it can use resources to do THAT, why can't it deal with distinct last names? Every avatar is only a number in computer terms, that is given a lettered name on top of that UUID. So what's the big deal? Is this really a strain on the data base? Maybe Lindens got tired of making up the lists of last names -- they ran through everything, from Supreme Court justices in the US to Polish revolutionaries in the 18th century. But then they could also just let people make up their own last names, and thereby put in their real last names if they had a mind to. Again, a system that absorbs the strain of RENAMING everything even every 2 weeks on any given avatar choosing this surely can absorb customer-based user names or a changing generic list.

I'd prefer if an actual Linden could take the time to answer these questions rather than others even with inside knowledge answering them. 1. From what I have seen in my rental groups, the long-standing group land bonus of 10% more prims is still in effect and not increased. It might have been nice to increase this feature, too, but the 50% prims on the land menu is present enough : ) What I do wonder is whether in monitoring performance and assessing the impact of this new feature the 10% bonus has in fact been taken into effect. Every sim has a "buffer" of prims and this 10% bonus comes out of that; it doesn't come out of individual parcels per se because not every parcel is grouped, only the grouped land gets this. I don't know how many people actually group their land and get this bonus; my impression is that there are at least 50% of mainland users but maybe not (Tyche Shepherd might know) and it may be that most people in fact don't know about it, or don't care about it or find it too hard to manage. But I do wonder if thought was given to this for the reason that adding prims to sims needs to take this feature into account, too, and I haven't heard of it. 2. As you know, there are these various devices in Second Life called "temp-on-rez". So there are for example flowers that bloom that enable a very detailed flower to appear that might show even "1,000 prims" although your actual space on your parcel can't hold extra prims. This device is taking advantage of the sim buffer to "temporarily borrow" the prims it needs and go over your hard limit. The makers of these devices swear that they don't affect sim performance but I find that they do. They also sometimes just create at least temporary confusion in tenants or the landlord trying to count prim availability and manage it and that's why I don't allow them on my rentals, others may have other policies. Now that there is mesh, I see less of these devices but I still do find them occasionally in the form of farms, pets, flowers etc. that do this. Has LL taken into account these devices and the "health" of the sim buffer as a whole in evaluating performance? 3. That brings me to my next question. Where do prims come from? Yes, we know they are actually manufactured and delivered like little Amazon boxes all from the magnificent factory out in the sea at ANWR! But seriously, do these 50% more prims come from that pre-existing buffer or are they a new, additional capacity in the actual hardware? That is, are they changed settings or changed hardware? 4. All of the comments Patch Linden has made and various insider oldbies and midbies have made have to do with technical issues and performance issues and who gets what when. But what about the economy? Does Linden Lab still have an economist on staff? Do they think about the impact of technical featuress? From my perch viewing at least a percentage of the economy with my hundreds of customers, I have to say that this feature causes four behaviors: A. More prims? Great! I will keep paying the same rent since you aren't raising the rent, Prokofy, and enjoy my new extra prims! B. More prims? Really? That many? Well, I'll take two, please! Double my rent and give me 50% more prims on that bigger lot! C. More prims for the same price? Oh, great, that means I can now ask you to cut my rent in half (33%) and still have the same prims since I'm not much of a decorator anyway. D. More prims? So what? I only used half the prims I'm paying for any way because mesh has less impact. So are you going to give me a free week maybe? Many of us who like to build and decorate immediately think, "wow, more prims, whee, for the same price!". But that's only the behavior of a percentage of SL avatars, and not the majority. Most people are very conservative. They put out a bed, chair, desk, and plant in their little or even big rental, and they never change it. Ten years go by, and they may not change it. I am not kidding as I have tenants from 10 years ago and I myself have certain builds or areas I like so much I have not changed them in 10 years (although I've swapped out prims for mesh and nicer looking things in most areas). People like stability in their virtual world that they don't get in real life. I even offer to people to deliver them brand new mesh things for a small fee that they can use in their rental. No, they stubbornly cling to their little newbie table they made in their first year of SL and that dresser that their friend made them. People don't always chose things in SL for reasons of "performance" or "look" but for emotional and social reasons. And many people see Second Life as an unjustifiable expense they are often themselves looking to reduce, or their partners or families tell them they should reduce. So the possibility of cutting their rent in half while keeping their furniture exactly as it is, is very attractive. So I have people in all these categories in my rentals. And I can see on some sims or in general throughout the system I might have to cut my land in half or by some percentage because my tenants don't want extra prims, they want lower tier. Lower tier is the bigger request all these years, you may admit. Maybe the prospect of more prims will deter some people's departure, convince some to come back, or get people to buy more land. But these other factors are at play, too. So has any economist thought about what it might mean for the world's economy (more shrinkage in the end) or even Linden Lab's personal economy (less land to sell).

I am not changing my prices at Ravenglass Rentals, but you're getting 50% more prims with the new Second Life feature being rolled out right now by the Lindens! So $150 at the starter lots in the lovely wall community of Jubata gets you 225 prims now, not just 150. So $165 home at the flagship Ravenglass sim will bring you 225 prims now, not just 150, and the management house prims still aren't included! So a $150 bed & breakfast room on the beautiful Hacienda with attached private skybox now gives you not 100 prims but 150! A corner lot on the highly terraformable Cub for $1300 now has not 950 prims but a whopping 1425 prims! A home in Free Tibet over the water for $500 now has not 400 but 600 prims! If you don't see the box is reset IM me, it will take awhile to make the update. Rest assured you get more prims! Note: the new feature is not yet rolled out on every sim but it will be soon so IM me if you can't tell.

You are out of date with this information. There is no rate of 240L per US dollar any more and hasn't been for years. The current rate is 262L per US dollars, go look at the LindEx. For a time, it was much better only 3 months ago, i.e. 248, 250. Not anymore. It is now always at 261 or 262. The more Lindens required to make up a US dollar, the less value that Linden dollar has. So let's say I saved my $300 stipend ($500 is only for grandfathered oldbies) for 52 weeks and then one fine day decided to buy the $72 annual subscription. Oops, the best rate today is 261 and that gives me only $57.69. So that means the annual subscription costs me $14.31 and is no longer free as it used to be. If it were 248, I'd have $60.71 netted, not $69 anyway, perhaps you're forgetting the fees taken out for the transactions which matter because the net is what you have to pay the tier with then. Most people do not save stipends nor do they want to lay out $72 at once for a game. So $300 for the monthly premium subscription means it costs $5.06. Many people do not want to plunk down the cost of latte with all the toppings on it for a game, either.

The Lindens always feel like no good deed goes unpunished, but every good deed of theirs punishes at least somebody so it needs research. I now fully understand at least one big down side to this: the psychology of people who now say "Oh, let me spend 50% less for the same prims" which then slams my business and that of many other people. Another down side might turn out to be that when the 6000 new prims now suddenly available are used on a very crowded sim that already had to be policed constantly to keep out lag, it might even regularly crash the sim, who knows. Or seriously degrade its performance. This is something nerds never believe in and always tell you the problem is your aging computer. As someone who constantly has to visit Ma and Pa on the porch with their rocking chairs, 50 breedables, shotguns and bling laid on tables when they complain to me that "my land lags," I'm here to tell you that lack of user prudence and user crappy computers are part of it, but it's also other factors, like what sims your sim is sharing a server with and whether your sim has been reset in ages and so on. Lee Linden, God bless him, once proudly told me that he had maximum performance on a sim next to mine so he didn't know what I was complaining about on my sim which was on its knees, in part because of some oldbie with a script-heavy submarine they wouldn't put away. Then I noticed there wasn't a single avatar on that sim and realized that for the Lindens, a sim performs its best when we are not there.

Oh, everybody has a sad story in Second Life. You didn't say you had this planned, you smugly announced it as a boon that you could now do because of this feature, as a slap to me, so don't try to backstep on that. You presumed to think that what is good for you is "good for the country" and it may not be. And you slapped at me although you don't know my sad stories which I don't invoke in SL arguments because that's lame. Like I said, everybody has a sad story in SL. You aren't a precious snowflake.

Bloggers should not be so timid and prostrate before Linden Lab. They should report what they know and can find out and then wait for a correction if need be. You know, like real-life journalists unless they live in Russia or China? I still have some sims with 50%, some with no increase, and some with seemingly more than 50% I can't figure out (and also script errors, like the KittyCats saying "parcel is full" even though there are 6000 new prims avavilable and another device constantly telling me the parcel is full but it has plenty of room (that thing was acting up before this tho). Patch Linden confirmed that the new feature involves extra prims but he didn't say how much or whether the islands get it too.

I think it's only 50%, but let's see what they say.

Actually, this seeing of wildly different numbers was due to my own ignorance in not thinking this through. In some areas, parcels are marked off very predictably, 512, 1024, etc. with very uniform prims and it's easy to just then figure everyone in that area now has double. But in other areas it's much more complex with wildly varying sizes, shapes, types. And so you don't know what people will do -- double or not? move or not? But what seems like "too many prims" is just the total of everyone's extra prims, not used yet.

Let me translate that for you. "Whenever I do something in my self-interest I think is eminently good and Prok criticizes it because it is not in his self-interest or the interests of other classes of people, I'll insult him and call him the problem." It's amazing how people like you with such smugness about your merchant class and such hatred of critics and landlords don't realize that your actions that you think are emblematic of your freedom aren't in fact affecting others -- and badly. You downsized and you thought, great, I got the best out of this deal, that's all that matters. You don't look beyond your nose. But Linden Lab lost income, and that is cascading. That's either planned to force people off this product, or not planned and they are hurt once again. Linden Lab having less revenue from their core product -- land in Second Life, not Sansar -- is not a good thing. LL is banking they can wean themselves from land and sell experiences/content/whatever it is that Sansar represents (which is not land as we know it). But they have misjudged this and will find out the hard way. This change means that hundreds of thousands of small-time landlords and some big ones have to downsize too, as their tenants are moving down or demanding their cost be cut in two for the same prims as they are now less. I see a wave of this all over my rentals just because I announced I will NOT charge for more prims when they are free for me. Not every landlord will do this! More people are of the psychology "Oh, let me pay half as much for the same prims" than "Oh, let me enjoy this bonus and keep paying the same price." I am already seeing it after one day of this. The problem with your smugness is that when you harm the world-creators and harm other classes of people, the world then can't go on existing to keep supplying you with customers for your content. It's a balance and an ecology but one that you don't care about. People are not asked to be altruistic in an economy, they are free actors if the economy is free. Ours isn't, it's only partly-free. It's fine to do WTF you want in the finest SL tradition and tradition of free markets in general, truly it is. What isn't fine is to accuse those HARMED by this new development of being Chicken Littles and loudmouths and glass-half-empty liars. Trust me, my sim with people moving down to smaller lots on other sims is as half empty as a half-empty glass can ever get. Well, um, you just explained why there is a down side to this : ) Perhaps you are unaware of what you just did. Pamela is right to say this: "Am I the only one whose blood runs cold when I hear something like this? Because at best, LL gives with one hand and takes with the other. At best." "Change is good for me as a merchant." So why is that good for the entire country? It isn't, because not everyone is a merchant of content. Some are merchants of land, and some are consumers. If you are like many merchants in SL, you may be just nice enough to your customers to keep them buying from you, but never overly nice as to cut into your profits. And you'll have nothing but bad to say about land owners who you feel gouge others and are a shady lot, without differentiation, although your class of people is pristine and a blessing to sim-kind because they Make Content which is God and which the Lindens privelege above all. Of course, as in a country, when you kill off those who aren't in Silicon Valley and make a lot of money with little overhead, and kill off customers, it's not long before you don't have a country or you have fascist candidates. What did you do? You just DOWNSIZED in response to this windfall. Because you CAN. You can't argue with market behavior; it's based on self interest and that's fine. But how does this affect our little pond, our controlled but unstable economy? Linden Lab just lost income. Or. People who rent you land just lost income and THEY have to downsize and spend less on tier or maintenance. I don't mind if people act in self-interest. I do mind when they do it with viciousness, smugness and heedlessness about others they harm, and call those who care about themselves as a class -- just like you do -- or those they serve as a class -- only some of whom are your customers -- are Chicken Littles claiming the sky is falling. I have tenants refunding because they can move to a smaller lot now with more prims for less money. I have people demanding I cut their land in half to pay less, leaving me with the problem of having to abandon land. That isn't the kind of problem one might immediately expect from a "windfall". Sure, some people will stay in place and thank their blessings. Still others might even get MORE prims now that they cost half as much. But not everybody. Many people who earn six figures in real life in Silicon Valley or even five figures in call centers in Columbus, Ohio think that the solution to Second Life is not to drink one less latte, but to dump half their land in SL and pay $4.50 and not $9.00 US a month. And again, you can't argue with their logic. We as landlords are asked to drink one less latte to cover unrented land that people dump, but the customers aren't. It's not wrong to point this out and to point out who sustains YOUR Second Life. The people who enable cheap Mainland rentals that frees up people's income to buy content from you. Hello.

No. It's a bad idea to keep giving perks and better sims to island owners who now only pay $195 and making Mainland hump it for the same $195 for a worse product. It seems that the Lindens are adding prims to islands, too, so soon you will likely able to stop whining about a perceived slight because poor people got a little more that didn't take away from you, instead of you getting more once again. Islands do not cost more. They cost the same $195 tier. If they cost more to set up, that's because you haven't bought a full sim off the auction that actually costs more than an island sometimes. And if they cost more to set-up, it's because they have more features. You can control them, texture them, monitor their performance in ways you can't on Governor Linden's estate, the Mainland. What you are saying is just not true. If you think people will move to Mainland realtors now in huge swathes, you don't understand what I just wrote the island is a preferable product. You also don't understand 10 other things about how this is shaking out which I will write elsewhere.

Oh, stop it. I cannot listen to ANY island owner whining after suffering from Mainland deprivations for 12 long years (and I own an island and a homestead too). Island owners just got the grandfather buy down -- this did NOT apply to those of us who own Mainland sim. Plus, large island owners get an unadvertised bulk discount. Mainland owners do NOT get this. Mainland groups get a 10% bonus in prims if they group their land -- the system adds 10% more prims. This isn't always the boon imagined as you can't always buy more land on that sim to add to your prims, forcing you to put it elsewhere or not use it. This boon for the Mainland of 50% more isn't compensation for all the horrors and losses we've endured for more than a decade: o ad farms and the Bush Guy devaluing land for years on end forcing move-outs, "buying the view" for extortionist prices, and loss of business due to blight o abandoned land with spinning and ugly junk that the Lindens won't remove o griefing with physics, self-replicating prims, etc. that island owners can instantly control themselves and Mainland owners have to wait for the Lindens to handle not even through the Concierge system but through the ridiculous abuse report system which goes nowhere o unmanned vehicles on all the roads which the Lindens allow for geeky reasons which ruin our quality of life, not only with crashes and pileups but with ugliness and out-of-theme stuff -- spaceships on roads, boats on roads, buses on the water, boats on the railroads. Stupid and annoying Those are just the main issues. So I expect island owners to stop whining and also not to get this bonus as they have had many perks and boons over the years (in control and value of their land) that we have not had, and it was high time to rectify this.

You have to make sure this is the cheapest way to pay your Linden tier. Yes, you have to cash out your available Lindens to turn them into US dollars which can then pay your bill. But you have to make sure you cash them out at the best rate. You can either set your purchase of dollars with Lindens to "instant" which is NOT the best rate, or reset your account to enable "Market rate" and study the menus. So you could set to 262 right now and get a better rate than "instant," or even set to 261, wait for some days (risky) when you might sell at a slightly better rate. You'll have to see what the cashout is after fees to see if what you cash out will cover your tier. It used to be that if you set your account to the annual rate and paid $72 US once, the stipend of 500 a week would pay the tier. Now that's no longer the case.

Yes, I realize, but I am seeing quite wildly different numbers. I'm seeing the exact 50% increase, and I'm seeing a 10-fold increase on some sims where I know I only had a limited number of prims. So that may be a glitch. It will settle down and we'll see what the factor really is.

Well, you could ask Tyche what percentage of the mainland is group owned, or maybe she's indicated that already, but it's not the majority. Most parcels are single person owned. The problem you mention occurs, but I wonder how widespread it is, given that if I undertier a group, I get an alert from a Linden in person in Support fairly quickly. I think they do keep a watch on this. My impression as always is that there are certain "favorites" who get a pass on this and seem to disasppear and leave group land untiered for ages and then get it back -- that wouldn't be me or the major landlords, but some of the "creative" and "sandbox" types. There has been a long process -- look at the map -- of the Mainland "emptying out" to the islands or out of SL all together. But I don't think it's an accurate description to describe the Mainland as "emptying out" in the sense of circling the drain. It's not like The Sims Online.

Patch Linden has more or less confirmed what we are seeing inworld -- 50% more prims on Mainland sims. (I am seeing way more in some sims in some groups but this must be a glitch. No, I don't mean the sim's total capacity, I mean the group's total capacity.) Naturally, island owners immediately began complaining although my God in heaven, they just had the gift of the grandfathering buy-down, and we all know that some larger owners get bulk discounts we don't get on Mainland. So let's hope they pipe down as the Mainland finally got a gift after a decade of suffering! What does 50% more prims mean for Mainland rentals? Well, at one level, nothing. Most landlords will likely just pass along this windfall, so that if you charged $1/prim or $1.4/prim or whatever you charge, this now becomes 1.5 prims. That's what I will do in my rentals, and perhaps it will mean that more people will rent now as they get more for their money, even on a 512 or 1024 parcel, going to 175 and 336 respectively now [corrected]. This *might* help the rentals business overall, but we'll have to see. Anyone in the rentals business knows that essentially, you are forced to go lower and lower in price because of the reduction in Mainland customers and the flight to the islands, a process of years. I actually have more customers than I had five years ago and many new ones every month, but I have to charge less because otherwise the land won't rent, especially because other landlords keep dropping down in price, especially those who aren't trying to make costs but just want to defray their own costs of owning a sim or homesteads. To be sure, with the plunge of 10-12 points in the LindEx, a situation which is now chronic and the "new normal," some landlords have had to raise prices, and merchants of course climb up and up with gatcha pull prices in particular ($59, $75, $85, even $100, when once it was $25). To those who use the monopolist Casper rentals or vendors, they make a few clicks to change prices globally -- or not, merely indicating the double prims. To someone like me who doesn't like global systems for a lot of reasons, it's work to change each box -- or not, as global announcements in groups that everything is double is easy enough and it can be done over time. The funny thing about all this is that most people do not use their full capacity of prims in rentals. This may be hard to believe for those who spend days chiseling at their prim counts to fit in everything they want, swapping out constantly, but I see it from the top down and I am here to tell you that most people do not use their prims; indeed more and more, they use half or less due to mesh. That's why it's an odd gift from the Lindens, in my view. A fix of the vexatious problem of not being able to put down mesh on mesh without stupid errors about how "the owner of this land does not allow it" although you are the owner would be more appreciated. For those areas where prims are tight and you are constantly policing, it's a boon, but not really, when all your customers will instantly expect that their prims just doubled -- just as it did globally, and for you -- you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many prims, really. If selling extra prims was one way you could extra a little more revenue out of hard-scrabble rentals on Mainland, that's over now (and for me, it was over long ago as I have pro-rated extra prims in many areas or they don't get bought). Perhaps the Lindens hope that by doubling prims, they will double -- or triple or whatever -- content sales. Maybe so! But I can see what else might happen is that all that rather than purchases, there will be rezzing, and all that pent-up inventory will come out inworld causing more lag in collisions or scripts and people will complain more about performance. I imagine we will get an announcement about super turbo servers that can handle double prims but like all technical things, this may be relative. I personally, for my own little creative projects and sojourns in decorating welcome more prims as anyone would. But ultimately I don't see it as an economic boom even for the Lindens, who may hope they'll sell more land or see less abandonment of land, as there are too many other deep underlying factors causing these problems.

It's in this thread and also Patch Linden more or less confirmed it in the report on the latest rollout.

Oh, I guess what it is, is doubling prims. I see right after the new rollout today that sims suddenly have double the remaining prims than they used to have. Of course, this could be a mistake. But there it is. This is kind of a funny gift - if this is it -- because with mesh, we've already seen the trend toward way less prims or "land impact". I routinely see half or less prims on people's parcels nowadays than they actually rent because they are getting mesh houses that have much less prims than prim houses. So having double prims maybe not even be used, although it will be welcome to some.