Prokofy Neva

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.

Like avatar foot shadows, the ability to bend my little avatar fingers at their purported joints is not something I want or need nor would it affect my SL. Bento leaves me absolutely uninterested; my only hope is that it doesn't mess up pre-existing clothes, skins etc. I suppose that's too much to ask, however. I don't have mesh bodies/heads as I find them Halloween-fright-night awful, but live and learn. Somehow, I don't think that moving from 512 to 1012, which would be a very nice gesture and the sort of LONG OVERDUE nice thing for the Mainland that hasn't been done in ages is NOT the thing that will "change SL forever" for EVERYONE as the Mainland is a tiny percentage. So it could be : o a move to real names - there's some concerted claque that wants this, I think most people don't. o ability to save content offline - but I doubt that o an end to free accounts (many want this because they associate it with griefing; that's because they don't associate it with "Europe, Asia and the rest of the world outside the US" as I do, i.e. customers. o start points not on the Linden welcome areas but custom areas

Do you want a skybox or a parcel. I allow security orbs in skyboxes only, not on the ground. I have some for $100/50. Get the latest listings at the office, see link below.

Well that ties in with this. FWIW, I got Designing Worlds to say this was "positive".

You seem to be making the subjective reading that the "Mainland has emptied out". But the findings of Tyche in her surveys doesn't suggest anything so drastic. I get new customers every day, and new people coming into SL for the first time. To be sure, they don't stick, many of them, but I do my part to help them stick as do others. And that's just my little corner of the Mainland. I see abandoned land, but then I see land selling on the auction. I have parcels on about 50 sims, so I do get around a fair amount but this is still only about 10-15% of the whole mainland and I don't see entire continents. Nautilus still sells for huge amounts. I see high prices on desirable waterfront everywhere, especially in Zindra and some nicer white sandy beaches. And I see people paying those prices and moving in and staying. "Emptying out" isn't the word I'd use for the land mass, which has a diminishing and unstable population in some areas but in others is stable. While you can spend less on a homestead if grandfathered ($95) than you would a whole Mainland sim ($195) you can't have as many people on it and as many scripts before it starts to fall over. I think that's the draw for former Mainland, not parts of islands or whole islands. I'm not so sure there is bleeding of revenue as you say. I think land sales still make up the core revenue for LL.

There's a simple thing the Lab could do but for ideological reasons they don't do it. They could bar certain third-party rogue viewers and bar certain log-ons using proxy sites which would do a great deal to diminish the amount of griefing and theft of copyrighted creations in SL. But because the Lindens are devotees of "open source" and some are even crypto-anarchists, as I've discovered over the years, they don't want to bar the use of proxies or anonymizers because this might stop, say, an Iranian dissident or a Egyptian freedom fighter or an American victim of domestic violence -- let's say -- from logging on to SL. I'm skeptical that there are any log-ons from Iran, but I've had customers even from Uzbekistan and Egypt. They log on normally because they are in privileged classes -- they'd have to be, to have computers with high-end graphic cards and Internet that they can pay enormous sums for (in these countries checking Facebook can cost a day's wages). That the overwhelming use case for these anonymous log-ons isn't about freedom or democracy but anarchic mayhem and crime doesn't deter their thinking on this. But this is one source of the problem. They do hash-ban accounts that repeatedly make alts but I marvel at some of the very obvious alts that return again and again despite having their islands seized from them due to hacking, crashing and theft.

Designing Worlds has just put out a press release with the following statement: "And we also have news of a special show coming this Thursday, November 3rd at 2pm - with discussion of an announcement from the Lab that will impact all our Second Lives! http://bit.ly/2fnboXR And Patch Linden will be in the Designing Worlds studio after the show on Thursday to discuss the announcement." On the web, the video announcer says even more dramatically that this event "will change our Second Lives forever!" https://www.slartist.com/designing-worlds-special-edition-november-3-2016-trailer_bd29c51a0.html So I'm wondering what's up, and the presence of Patch indicated it might be related to that mysterious build (discussed here where Patch makes an appearance). Thoughts: 1. The Mainland is closing, and everyone there will be forced into Linden Homes which they may try to make better to placate us but will still be like a reservation. 2. The Mainland isn't closing, but is going to be forced into "Adult". 3. The Mainland will be trimmed and shrunk. 4. The Mainland will no longer be serviced. PS Designing Worlds is keeping mum on this but has indicated it will be "positive for everybody". Of course YMMV.

Celebrate the holidays in style. Who says witches have to live in broken-down hovels in the dirt? This is a lovely modern room with all the wiccan accoutrements and lovely posh furniture and refined decor. Teleport to Room 4 at Hector Main House  You can ask to remove any or all items for a one-time fee of $25, and can also reset your box for $100/100 prims. The skybox doesn't have holiday decor but it can be added.  Management prims don't count on your count. This is a great area as you can entertain friends in the dining and living areas, sit on the porch and chat, or go to the pond. Boating and seating down at the lake; also snack areas by the roadside.You need an SL vacation!  

Hector Lake is one of SL's gems. It's a beautiful, quiet lake where all the neighbors have nice builds and no eyesores. A Mainland miracle! You can get a small camping parcel for $50/75 prims or $100/150 prims, and management prims don't count! Or ask to remove and place your own cabin or tent. There's a larger lot with ionic's abandoned warehouse (which does count on your prims) or you can have it removed and place your own. Boating and seating areas and also the Main House where you can have dinner and sit by the fireplace.  Teleport to $100 Hector Camp - 150 prims  Teleport to $50 Camp - 75 prims  Teleport to $650 Waterfront -

Winnipeg is a beautiful, quiet riverside sim on the old Mainland.   These are great for horses. As always self-join group, refundable, and group powers include ban, media, change parcel description etc. Yardsales are allowed in the sky. Teleport to Winnipeg $1300 - RENTED Teleport to Winnipeg $1100 - RENTED You'll also find some smaller lots nearby for $750. IM Prokofy Neva

A good reason not to have a monopoly and a single point of failure in Second Life...

Oh, interesting! I still treasure my model of the SS Galaxy and invitation to its first opening years ago. I also have a painting of it at the Bed & Breakfast. Altogether, an ambitious SL project!

I would say possibly United Inshon or Susan Independent. Looks like their style.

Check out my rentals, especially the themed rooms at the SL Public Land Preserve at the lodge in Carlisle. A number of the Land Preserve sites like the Moth Temple in Iris have rentals to help pay the tier on the sim. Also I have special themed homes for a month you can bid on. All very low cost.

Thanks a lot!