Bartholomew Gallacher

Somewhere during 2007. I still remember being on the beta grid back then, I've never seen so many Lindens at the same place and same time ever after this again.

If you want my sympathy for that your business is now running down the hill, go looking somewhere else. Business is business, it sometimes calls for tough decision and sympathy brings you nowhere. Linden Lab understands this good enough, because they are still in business. So the question is do you? Whatever.

A welcome and long ov Well Linden Lab has always been acting that way. Welcome to Second Life! Furthermore: the only constant in business is constant change. If you are unable to adapt and it hurts you, then it's your fault to have not diversified your income streams in time upfront.

Oh this is wrong on so many levels, really... first of all Opensim does not scale well. It's pretty much unlikely that with the current code base it would be possible to run a grid as large as SL on Opensim base. Then Opensim has stuff, which SL has not and sounds good in theory, in reality it's just an utter mess. Like Hypergrid teleports, three or so different iterations around, and all of them have their own set of problems which lead to a big fragmentation of the Opensim space. Indeed something which SL has not, but fragmentation makes it painful to use and pretty useless. And of course there's stuff SL has, which Opensim has not, like a good and quick physics engine. SL uses Havok, Opensim's physics engines are really low quality compared to that. SL has pathfinding, which Opensim has not. And most of all Opensim is was too fragmented overall, and has not really a lot of people. So that's the most important thing SL has which Opensim has not: lots of people. Nice try of derailing, but no one forgets about that. It's not about that LL tries to make money, which always is quite clear in that world. It's about that they are increasing fees in a type of manner and scale which is completely unparalleled before without providing any visible added value to the platform, so it just makes them look like the money grabbers which at the moment they are.

I don't care with which quirky and skewed lie fairy tale justification the lab might come up with in order to justify this increase. For me this is just pure money grabbing, nothing more and nothing less. I am unwilling to buy any L$ at all as long as this ridiculous scheme is in place!

It's good that it has finally been launched, by the price tag coming with it is just ridiculously overpriced. Especially for something which you would get 10 years ago for free, and nobody asked for its removal back then anyway. It's pure insolence. LL should have instead made it maximum around the average price of a common state of the art mesh head or body for every resident, and cutting the fee in half if you got three month or longer premium status. Something like that. For comparison: if you want to rename one of your characters in Blizzard's cash cow MMORPG World of Warcraft you've got to pay 10US$ for it.