diamond Marchant

Part 2

It is a mystery why governance has dropped the ball in Bellisseria. I really wish that were the current priority,

Update: changing last line to.... One day a visitor arrived in Weirdsville. He visited the potato patch but bought nothing. On his way out he was heard remarking "In my town our patch is called Safeway and there, a potato is a potato. They all cost the same and we buy only what we need”.

Of course. My example was for a person who does not spend money yet has a very nice time. I am not suggesting eliminating free accounts.

Too abstract? This is literally how tier pricing works. A "pound" corresponds to 1K of tier (1024sqm) and the price is "cents per sqm per year". As you can see, your second purchase is really expensive.

Moving on to the Thursday Meet the Lindens session... I was very happy to have seen Mojo Linden in this live event. He appears confident, knowledgeable, and experienced. I love Patch but I now think only Mojo should answer any question that involves an understanding of engineering. Mojo was respectful of the audience and gave what seemed to be honest assessments of the issues they raised. I don't think he ducked anythig. He has a good attitude and I am glad he is here. Let's see what happens Grumpity, of course, was a huge cheerleader for PP, which (to me) means she was either trying to put on the best face on a difficult situation OR she really thinks "all that work" (not sure what that would be) really improves things. If it's the later, I am worried. She quoted 700 PP subscribers as if that were a great success. I have no idea. I don't even know what number you divide that by to get a percentage. Any guesses on the current number of Premium users? Or the number of Basic members that pay for estates or rent? I did appreciate Grumpity's remarks about Meta and taking them seriously because they have so much money to burn. Thing is, it is not just Meta. The second anyone begins to crack the metaverse nut, they will be well funded in typical blitzscaling fashion. On thing comes to mind after this session. They keep saying how dedicated LL is to a fee-based business model. The competitors will not be. Would it not be prudent to investigate a way of monetizing those who currently pay ZERO. Let's talk lag for a sec. An avatar that pays ZERO contributes just as much lag as one who pays thousands of dollars. If a person just wants to go to clubs or have sex or sail around in a boat... all they need to pay for is (one time) avatar enhancement. And the boat (get a Bandit). They pay LL nothing. Yet they are being entertained just as we are. Why not monetize them? Everybody else will.

hey, my alts are all premium

Yay, we are at 0.001082 percent

Pehaps, but we are not being charged per post (yet) and it keeps us off the streets.

https://accounts.secondlife.com/change_membership/ Get yer Premium Plus here

https://accounts.secondlife.com/change_membership/ Get yer Premium Plus here

What Coffee said. (cream please) What we are witnessing is an existential crisis. We love it here yet see the handwriting on the wall. Brad is a smart business man but we must look at what he does, not what he says (his job is to say positive things in public). Linden Research is an old school twenty year old company. It is NOT Uber, burning cash to grow users. It wants to be profitable. If he were losing money on Bellisseria, why is he adding regions, some of which produce no revenue and have questionable value. Fact is, SL is not easy to scale and the barriers to entry for new users are too high. In addition, he faces intense competition for whatever this market is. The next big player may come out of nowhere. So what to do? You raise prices for the people that are here. You cut expenses as much as possible. And you dance as long as the music plays.

In the town of Weirdsville, the residents LOVE potato, which they buy at the Potato Patch using credits. Very normal. Except that every time you ask for potato, they say how much you can buy and the price per pound. Potatoes please. You get a pound at 3.81 per pound May I have more? Why not? Another half pound at 9.38 But I need more. Fine. Another half pound at 7.03 Still not enough, Ok. Another pound at 7.03 I have a big family Right. Another 2 pounds at 5.27 And guests. Guests?. Another 4 pounds at 3.81 A lot of guests. Party is it? Another 8 pounds at 4.69 And few will be staying over. Interesting. Another 16 pounds at 3.30 Some might be moving in. Very interesting. Another 16 pounds at 2.78 With their families. Sure you know what you are doing? Another 16 pounds at 1.83 (my lowest rate) Actually, I need all the potatoes Yes, it seems you do. From now on, you always get 16 pounds at 3.22 One day a visitor arrived in Weirdsville. He visited the potato patch but bought nothing. On his way out he was heard remarking "In my town our potato patch is surrounded by billboards. But the potatoes are free". ------- From diamond's doctoral dissertation in Economcs, "Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: Marginal Cost of Potatoes Under Monopoly"

Exactly. Our expectation based on Linden comments was double price, double premium, double tier. That would have made PP a no brainer. They would have gotten a GDP boost. Instead we got a bait and switch.

I feel the same way. I just hope there is a plan to migrate us to the Valley Beyond. The part about losing money on Bellisseria... Brad was not under oath and I am not convinced that he was completely forthcoming. I went to Meet the Lindens: Marketing today and experienced a pep rally ("Gee... Second Life is swell). No real new info other than they understand that SL should not go crypto. YaY for that. My main concern as this point in the emotional rollercoaster is that SL has morphed from a game/entertainment enterprise into a financial engineering company. They no longer talk about technical innovation. They don't seem to understand that code can be rewritten and bugs can be fixed . But they know how to raise prices and confuse things so that many don't notice.

This is an excellent point. Many people are repelled by mainland. The one's that are OK with it might be in skyboxes or have enough land to provide a buffer from their neighbors. Also, there are places that are mainland-ish but have covenants to protect you from annoying neighbors. Several are surrounding the Blake Sea. I don't know how to fix mainland. Maybe LL will die on this hill. But... the fix is not to stratify Bellisseria into haves and have-mores. Understand that Bellisseria is NOT scaleable under the current administraion. It takes months/years to build out because it is done by contracted humans. Actual high tech companies figured out in the 1990s that the way to scale up is to build a platform and let the USERS supply the content (hello social media). LL is more like a game/entertainment company in that it feels compelled to create content. Not good.

Half Time Report It has been 2 days since the PP announcement and my impression, based on this forum and inworld comments, is that PP is a disaster, similar to a bad sequel to a beloved movie franchise. The primary reason is... People are wondering if they would be stupid if they went with PP For those looking for value, figuring out how much you pay LL is not simple. My weird spreadsheets attempt to show that LL has a different price for each tier level. Add to that the "tier packing" problem, premium stacking options, VAT, sales tax, your cash flow situation, and the credit card interest you might incur... sheesh! Regardless, PP costs more than Premium on a per unit basis, so the easiest thing to do is just say NO. The "Vegas Perks" (e.g. letting casino whales cut in line) are not compelling. Groups have always been problematic, consequently, people use Discord, inworld chat servers, and subscribers. Prior restrictions on groups were justified by performance issues. Why do anything that might compromise reliability or performance? Just today, Squeaky informed us that Birthday chat stopped working! Texture uploads are simply a cost of doing business. I make textures for boats and aircraft and use local textures all the time. I only pay to upload the final version. The cost of the upload is covered if I sell ONE unit. People always have special circumstances (e.g. bloggers that need a million groups, makeup creators with a million shades). But LL needs to pick a big target audience and serve that well. Hopefully, the next time LL makes it's once-a-year major announcement, it needs to be something that is OBVIOUSLY good to most of us (like Bellisseria was).

On Changes To Linden Homes In the past at SL Birthdays, I have asked the Lindens "what is the Bellisseria secret sauce?" The common answer is "community". I believe this is not true. My experience is that community in Second Life is everywhere... or at least where two or more people share a common interest. The secret sauce of Bellisseria is a combination of value (Linden Homes are a great deal), a lowered (SL knowledge) barrier of entry to home ownership, and fairness. The fairness part is a combination of everyone being treated equally and the covenant, which gives some protection from annoyances. The only change I would advise for current Linden Homes is to devote more resources to governance (fairness) and to improve the allocation protocol. @Abnor Mole has said in this forum that all Linden Homes are different but each has something special. There should not be any bad ones (and if there are that should be fixed). The current allocation protocol for homes allows for specification of a home theme or sub-theme. Why not improve the protocol. For example, allow more selection attributes (e.g. elevation or proximity to another resident) or change the retry algorithm so you don't get a home you have previously rejected. Introducing an ability to select a specific home would erode the practice of fairness, in my opinion. It is not immediately obvious to me how this would even work. Introducing larger Linden Homes would also be a mistake. Residents already have the ability to have any size home they like. It's called mainland. Why go down the rabbit hole of designing a whole new class of grander homes to solve a problem that does not really exist. In summary, make no changes other than to fullfill the promise of governance and improve the allocation protocol.

I agree that it is likely that the price of premium will go up. We just do not know when. Tiers are very confusing. Is this on purpose? In addition to tier included in a plan, you can add on 0.5K, 1K, 2K, 4K, 8k, and 16k. Beyond 1/4 region (16K), you can add additional 1/4 region increments. The MOST expensive tier on a per sqm basis is the level at or below 1/4 region. However, if you never add tier to a plan, you are paying almost land baron rates. This is why stacking premium is the lowest cost way to go. On top of this complexity is the "tier packing" problem... this crops up when you are maxed out and want to add just a little more tier but you get promoted to the next larger tier level, meaning you are paying for headroom you don't need. This is another situation where premium stacking is a solution. This is WHY it is hard to figure out the best plan. It CHANGES depending on how much tier you require. When we thought Premium Plus was simply a doubling of price and included tier, I was ALL FOR it because the 2048 included tier gave you some relief on the "tier packing" problem with price parity. But the Premium Plus as delivered eliminated the price parity, rendering it DOA to me.

I am still struggling with the WHY aspect of Premium Plus as presented on 6/20. One of the fundamental issues of Second Life is "barrier to entry"... that is, all the hurdles one must clear in order to have a full experience. Premium Plus appears to make this problem worse because it is not obvious if you need it. So why does it exist? The first question Saffia asked Patch (on 6/20) was about GDP. That was MY question and it was intended to be a two-parter... what is GDP and why did you talk about it in your SL19B speech? Unfortunately, part two was omitted. (As expected Patch defined GDP as user to user transactions). If asked, Patch might have said that the GDP-talk was just to promote Second Life as a vibrant virtual economy (which is true). I suggest a more relevant motive might have been to promote Tilia to any actual metaverse press that might be listening. With this perspective, Premium Plus comes into focus. Stipend is increased to L$650/week and the signon bonus is L$3000. Recall that Premium offers much less (L$300/L$1000). Premium Plus is a LOWERing of the barrier to spending Lindens because it automatically puts more Lindens in your account... no bothering with having to go buy them when you actually need them. Business owners like to see growth so that $650 million GDP number needs to be BIGGER in 2022. Premium Plus is a GDP stimulator. I am wondering if the Tilia tail is wagging the Second Life dog.

I do not understand this post. First of all, on a Basic Account you cannot own mainland or a Linden Home. We all understand that Premium Plus has new offerings. It is just that for some they are of no value. Now if one of the perks was "governance will act on the ARs you file within 24 hours", that might have gotten my attention.

I am actually angry at this point. I think it is extremely disrespectful to the residents of Second Life to trot out this Premium Plus dog-and-pony show as if they are actually improving anything. It appears they are simply trying to extract more revenue out of a not-growing user base. Mr. Oberwager is a finance guy and is looking for ROI, which is perfectly understandable and reasonable. Maybe be could sell Second Life to an actual high-tech company, one that does not think improving sim crossings (that's right, I said SIM crossings) is too hard cause there is just so much to keep track of.

Moneywise, Premium Plus is a price INCREASE ( except for the 2048 tier level where it barely wins). The following spreadsheet gives the numbers for those who pay annually. Stipend is subtracted off ($60/year for Premium and $131/year for Premium Plus). Notice that three Premium accounts costs $117 and you get THREE Linden Homes. One Premium Plus account costs $118 and you get ONE Linden Home. DOA About the "pick your own Linden Home" scheme, It seems absurd. Suppose you find a choice Linden Home, what are the chances it will still be there after all those hours pass while "the wheels are in motion".

Moneywise, Premium Plus is a price INCREASE ( except for the 2048 tier level where it barely wins). The following spreadsheet gives the numbers for those who pay annually. Stipend is subtracted off ($60/year for Premium and $131/year for Premium Plus). Notice that three Premium accounts costs $117 and you get THREE Linden Homes. One Premium Plus account costs $118 and you get ONE Linden Home. DOA