Ask the CEO

[Drake1 Nightfire]

I have a question...

When are the major bugs in SL going to be fixed? Like the group bug that keeps us from seeing group members in large groups. Or the Forum bug that drops us into the blogs all the time. How about, Why do we have to log in to the forums and marketplace when we just clicked the link from our dashboard where we are logged in already?

Regarding Sansar, you never did answer Jos question about water.. Can we do more with it? Can we create a river flowing down from a mountain? Can we have basements that arent flooded?

[Drongle McMahon]

"The other possibility is that Sansar as a whole evolves into this bigger virtual world."

I think this has to be the key. LL wants to provide the substrate on which that evolution can happen. If they manage to provide something versatile enough and customisable enough, then the "experience creators" will come in sifficient number and variety for the evolutionary process to start. Prokofy is right to pont out how great are the hurdles to be overcome, but that is the challenge I assume LL is addressing; produce a platform where a viable VR can evolve*. Neither we nor LL can know, or need to know, in advance what the size or nature of the experiences will be that may win the evolutionary struggle. Nor do we know that any will survive. That is the nature of the evolutionary process, and also its power to achieve unimagined results.

*this is all, of course, only speculation based on no more than my own unconstrained interpretation of the strange but consistent use of "experience creator". I'm not aware of any statement from Ebbe that should restrain that interpretation. Indeed, if it's meaning cannot be defined because it is to be the unpredictable product of evolution, the absence of definition may be deliberate and appropriate. Perhaps we should simply ask the questions "What is are experience creators, and what will they create?".

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Ebbe Linden wrote:

---

Tyr Rozenblum wrote:

 

ADDED:

1. I was curious also about the possiblity about morphs and head sliders. With the growing popularity of mesh bodies and heads, I was wondering if we would ever get to use the head morphs/sliders in the future? It would probably benefit head creators, as well as those wishing to have a little more HD experience.

 

We will build a highly flexibly avatar system. Not clear that user created avatars will be able to take advantage of our simple avatar customization UI. It's something we would like to find solutions to but is a very hard problem. 

 

2. Animated mesh: I know that I have helped contribute to many users fall im frame rate (sorry guys you know ILU), doing mesh creatures with my partner Nina. The problem is saving frame for frame and over lapping mesh using alpha is just, not a responsible way to do things. Yes we still do it, but its the only way to have any kind of animated pets and animals via mesh. Is there plans in the future to add ACTUAL ways to do animated creatures? You know without killing your friends and loved one's frame rate. 

 

Yes, we plan to support custom skeletons. 

 

---

 

---

Actually, Ebbe, it's not that hard. It does depend tho, whether you will support Blend Shapes embedded in the FBX files. If blend shapes will be supported, then it basically comes down to you choosing what things are done with blend shapes and what is done with bone scaling. You could morph all the body parts with bones, and do the face with blend shapes. This would require an excessive amount of bones. The other alternative is to only use length scaling on the bones, for taller avatars and longer limbs, but do all the other morphs with blendshapes. This would require an excessive amount of blend shapes in all of our meshes and FBX files to accomidate all the blend shapes on the avatar. Either way, you have lots of data. There is no way around that. Blend shape support is a must tho. If you don't do it, then creators will just end up using worse ways to accomplish the same thing.

A basic default skeleton we can all build off of is a must too. It will keep us all creating for 1 skeleton, and not breaking up the market in to millions of sub markets where nobody can find enough content. To handle other types of humanoid like avatars, I think a good idea would be to allow us to attach bone sets to the default skeleton, or allow us to add onto the default skeleton. So, for instance, imagine I want to make a scary vampire with wings on his back. To accomplish this, there are 2 possible ways. I have the default skeleton in my 3D software, and I add the wing bones. I then upload the FBX into Sansara. Sansara looks at the skeleton, and see all the normal bones, so everything is ok, and he will work with normal human animations. My FBX could also include all my custom animation, including for the wings. The 2nd solution would be for me to separate the wings from the vampires avatar, and create it's own bone set, just for the wings. I would then upload them separately into Sansara, and attach the wings to the avatar inworld, with the animations for those bones in the FBX for the wings. The first example is cleaner, overall, but the 2nd example allows for more possibilities and options in the market, meaning, I make wings and just sell different wings people can attach. I would also suggest, that If the first option is chosen, that LL release their own skeletons with the most popular options of skeletal addons, such as tails, wings, and probably ears. I say this because then, for example, an animator like myself could just sell animation for those wings, tails, ears and so on, and everyone is using the same skeletal bones. Or, if you simple set up a naming convention for those bones sets, then if I name my bones the same way, then animation will work for anyone with bones of the same names.

Just my thoughts!

So, will you support Blend Shapes, or not? I still have yet to see the answer to this. It's probably the most important question for avatar creators.

[DejaHo]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

bc their landlord is LL and not another resident

 

LL will likely find itself in the rentals business again even if they are ideologically opposed to Mainland, they will make Linden Homes or something that will turn into the Mainland in time in spite of their aversion to it. They will have to run it "hot" i.e. always on because it will have so many people on it.

 

---

Your ignorance, once again, is on display.  You have no concept of the term 'land' when it comes to the new environment - nor does anyone else who is not in the employ of LL. 

I think what LL is saying is that you build it, they will instantiate (for a fee, of course) -- and the people will come.  It's all about the experience, not the land. And we will pay for the experience.  They don't want to be in the design and building business, they want to be in the physics and game world.   Games within a game so to speak.   

Your imagination, their instantiation.

[DejaHo]

LL = landlords of games and experiences.

[ChinRey]

---

Drongle McMahon wrote:

Perhaps we should simply ask the questions

"What is are experience creators, and what will they create?".

---

Another somewhat related question is who will LL's customers be? That is who will actually buy/rent sims directly from Linden Lab?

Let's do some simple calculations just to get an idea what it's about - and to keep those gray cells between our ears busy

According to Ebbe Linden, a Sansar sim will be "several kilometers" across. He doesn't say how many kilometers but:

• 1x1 km is about 16 SL sims.
• 2x2 km is a fair sized continent in SL.
• 5x5 km is about 400 sims. If you want that as full sim islands in SL, you'd have to pay 400 000 USD in setup fee and almost 80 000 USD/month in tier. (According to the official price list that is. I suppose the big land barons have special deals.) It would also earn you a spot on the top 10 landowners list at gridsurvey.com
• 8x8 km is considerably bigger than the largest continent in Second Life and also more land than the biggest single avatar landowner currently has.
• 13x13 km is more land than the biggest landowner group in SL is known to hold.
• 21x21 km is about what Linden Lab themselves have, that is all Mainland and all the smaller bits they keep for their own use.
• 40x40 km is bigger than the entire Second Life.

Obviously tier per square meter will have to be much lower than they are in SL but even so, let's for the sake of argument assume a sim will be 5x5 km and tier will be ten percent of SL level. That still means 8000 dollars a month on a venture with quite a high risk level.

Of course, this also raises the question what will happen to SL tier and the Linden exchange rate experts tell us is so closely linked to land prices.

This is a big dilemma for Linden Lab. They can't price Sansar land as high as the current SL tier because nobody's going to buy. They can't drop SL land prices that much overnight for a large number of reasons. And there's no way they can maintain such a drastic price difference between the two grids. I wonder what solution LL has planned for this problem.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

But that can only go so far as content creators and their customers will be discouraged if the tax is too high -- presumably the "sales tax" is only a consumer tax and not a creator tax as creators are once again the sole privileged class of SL.

---

You know I love ya!

As a long time student of economics, I understand that sales taxes and corporate taxes are counterproductive. They are both taxes on the consumer, in reality. That is just basic economics. The more you tax, the more things cost, the less people buy. Some economists try to agrue that there is some magic percentage that maximizes revenue for the government, but this doesn't take into account what might have happened without the tax at all. Every government intervention brings unintended consequences that can't be predicted.

I guess you can say the 3D artists are privileged, but that would be because there are so few of us, compared to the rest of the community. Our value is enhanced because there is a shortage. All that said, we don't feel too privileged when despite millions of ways to extend value to us, LL is stuck on taxing our customers and lowering the volume of items that will be exchanged.

As a merchant, I have no problem at all giving more money to LL, as long as they give me more of the things I need to generate more wealth. As I said, there are an unlimited amount of ways that LL could make money off the merchants, yet they don't either see these unlimited amount of ways, or they just refuse to do the work to create those ways. In the past, I've spent thousands of lindens a month on marketing. Over the years, LL has time after times changed these marketing options in ways that have lessened their value considerably. Heck, I remember spending 50k lindens a month on Paid Classifieds, until LL changed it and ruined their value.

Ask any merchant, we all want more and better marketing opportunities, and we'll pay a crapload for them, if those services actually bring us a good return.

Oh, but there is 1 way to tax the 3D artists directly in virtual worlds, and that is by charging more for the uploads, which I'm not really against, as long as I have every option to test the items before I upload it. If LL is just going to do the uploads like they currently do in SL, then NO I would not want to pay more for that crap. As it is tho, at 10L, I regularly upload dozens of animations and meshes testing them to get them just right. I would not do that if they cost 100L.

[Tazzie Tuque]

I hear so much about this Sensar project..  and very little about advancing what SL already has..  this question is specific to format of uplading 3D mesh..    Will SL ever allow uplaoding other formats than .dae? 

I can create in my 3D program but it is impossible to get my work into SL as my program does not save in .dae format..  I would have to save my work in .obj  then import it to blender then convert it to .dae..  then uplad to SL.. I have tried this and it NEVER comes out as it should and therefore is useless.  You say Sansar will have the ability to upload in various formats.. why not SL?

[Prokofy Neva]

No, that isn't what I meant. I don't at all mean big virtual world suppliers which is a different issue.

I mean the higher-end content-creating class that you yourself are in, and your own description of what your demands are for the next virtual world.

And I tried to explain that one of the things that made the economy open and workable in SL, to the extent that it has been, is that all kinds of amateurs could enter the market and sell amateur content, as well as land. The land *internal* market has been very big for the inworld economy.

If the future economy is envisioned as RenFaire -- a few high-end craftsmen make content sales businesses for their own outworld economy, and land is no longer relevant as a commodity (that was always Philip's dream as a utopian and one I disagreed strenuously with him about), then there is only a very attenuated, hollowed out economy, with some people making sales and perhaps a tiny service class around them, and everybody else having to consume.

And I think we have seen that even with the concept of "the masses" as only consumers, what SL has meant to a significant size of users -- the middle class, if you will -- is that they themselves get to create content or sell land and participate in the economy.

[Prokofy Neva]

It's not any ignorance of mine that is on display, but your rudeness is.

What is it with you people and your visceral hatred of land and the middle class of land barons or baronlets? I'm talking about access to the economy by other people than creators.

It doesn't matter if we "have no concept" about what the Lindens may do. We are free to discuss it on the available information and hypothesize what might be good or bad instead of being passive myrmidons. Good Lord, I'm trying to reason and think it through, and you're trying to aggressively pre-cook it.

THAT there ARE land sales of some kind is the first thing to predicate upon because it's not the case that land is just a giant tissue box for free and you take as much as you need to put under content, and content determines (like the old "prim tax" method which the Lab jettisoned after a resident revolt, in case you don't remember).

Any return to content-based/prim-based/land-impact drivers of the model of the economy will cause revolts, packing, abuse, etc.

Ebbe has said the land will be much bigger, so he envisions the continguous issue going away because a land baron will buy a giant square and make his own "continguous" "experience" out of this square because it will run for miles. He might sub-divide it or bring in middle men for re-rentals even under the Aldi management method but in fact that may be precluded if LL bars resales, re-rents, as they do now by tolerating the homestead fiction of rentals. In fact, the imposition of the purchase of a sim and the sidebar of the homestead and never just the homestead has no technical basis but is merely ideological -- the Lindens need to sell higher-prim sims, and force people not to buy huge numbers of these pancakes to flip and re-rent at a mark-up where LL gets nothing -- they need to dampen that effect (which immediately occurred when they first came out with the precursor to homesteads.

The fiction that the homestead is "extending out"  your island with "a stretch of water" as Jack Linden put it was the narrative to sustain it. In reality, hundreds of agents have bought thousands of homesteads to flip and LL can't really object if they want to sell them because people want to play store.

This notion that you can always know the mind of "what LL wants to be in" is also risible, as they have struggled with their own self-identity in this space for a decade. They didn't want to be in the governance or community business. Yet they built Linden Homes. They wanted to focus on user content and stay in the background with trees and roads but they spawned this enormous Department of Public Works with elaborate games, portals, freebies.

The notion that they are merely "a platform" or "an installation" belongs to the earlier FIC concept of the platformistas, where they saw themselves privileged as perceiving everything as a "platform" with the "providers" of that platform instead of accepting the social reality of what they had: a world. Because it had people in it.

Also it needs to be said that the whole concept of "Experience" is condescending, patronizing and belongs to 1930s cinema and not the 2000s of the interactive Internet. It presupposes a creator class that creates Experiences capital E for the masses to merely consume.

Real experience has shown in SL that people want more control over the environment. They like pets because they can do that, and landscaping because they can do that. They don't want to sit and watch something, look at postcards, play mindless cames you can never win due to the Myst-like vindictiveness of their creators.

 

 

 

[Prokofy Neva]

There was a company 10 years ago -- was it called Metaverse? Using Unity? -- that also had this idea. They'd just produce the software. All these designers and programmers would then use it. It never works. The use cases for this are far smaller than you think. No, not educators, because not every educator wants to fuss on sims endlessly and learn 10 skills and home brew servers like Fleep, they want to point and click.

Silicon Valley always portrays software as an evolutionary struggle. There are always losers. There is always "disruption" -- and always of other people, not themselves. There is always "adaptation." There are always "Luddites." People in the food industry or the fashion industry or the home decorating industry never take such a harsh and condescending posture toward their customers.

You're right to ask "what are experience creators and what will they create."

At one level, it's just yet another scripted thingie that could be a golf course or Numbakulla or Kowloon or whatever. A sim, stuff to do, things popping up at you, only more in the viewer and less in the dreaded blue drop-down screen.

At another level, it sounds to me like the Lab has begun to conceive of the Product  or Sub-Product if you will as the Experience, that whether its gardening or sex or concerts or chess, it's an Experience that someone manages, curates, produces. Millions of Us had that concept too, and they had a notion of content as not the discrete pixelated object but the whole gestalt of coming to their sim, taking part in a road race or some kind of competition to make a new Pepsi ad or whatever, and paying content creators not by having them sell discrete objects but merely making the sim which then was a draw.  Then there was Rezzable that made the Greenies.

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussions/Greenies-Closing-Help-Lindens-buy-this-one/td-p/238765

 

All of these businesses in the high water mark of 2006-2007 were failures (Electric Sheep was another one) inside SL because they didn't want to use two of the most obvious old-fashioned sales methods:

o content sales -- discrete objects as commodities as in the rest of SL

o "Paint the Town Red," the Coca Cola concept of the early 1900s when they put their big red signs on the grocery stores or sports stadiums of little towns all across America, and the owners got some kind of fee or commission in exchange for helping to sell Coca Cola's product. This would instantly bridge the gap of the splintered audience that every big marketer has had to face coming in to SL. But not a single one of them would part with a dime to help the INWORLD economy to help their OUTWARD economy. They wanted...ads from other companies?

So Millions of Us builds a giant race trace/village/whatever and fills it up with cool 1950s or 2050s builds and then has Jaguar or Porsche or whatever it was provide replicas. Since this didn't lead to real-world sales by the owners of the replicas because they were kids and housewives and retired postal workers who couldn't afford RL cars like that, it was a bust.

So the business model problem remains but only for inworld or third-party as LL seems to have their minds made up that we will all happily buy content of their chosen few, pay big taxes, and sit on our sims quietly and consume it.

But...the 1950s in America led to the 1960s...

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, and that's why I see what LL's solution will be (though it need not be): tax the middle-men re-rentals agents who buy wholesale and sell retail. Tax them, not their customers, each time they rent out land. Or tax the customers TOO -- every transaction of any kind, from buying a chair to buying a lap dancer to buying a rental will have a tax.

The other way they could phrase it is to say, oh, those $8000 worth of sim buyers will be like the barons who currently get a big discount for bulk purchases. They won't say it's a tax on the little guy, they'll say it's a discount for the big guy.

[Prokofy Neva]

Medhue, I was just admiring your cross animations again the other day, remember you made those for me?

So you know that people will want hair, shoes, pets -- the big ticket items -- and will spend a lot on them.

They already spend $100 a month on land or whatever and will go on if it is cheaper and there aren't taxes on that transaction.

So your notion that your goods are in short supply because your skills aren't replicable (ask the Luddites how that concept worked!) may hold for a while but will collapse, either due to copybotting or the "iron age" of mesh mass production.

But at first -- for months -- a year? there will be a huge rush of people who spend like people always spend at carnivals.

You can claim altruism that you have to worry if your customers are taxed too heavily  it will be bad for business. But you know in reality people will buy like drunken sailors on leave, especially animations and gestures.

I TOTALLY agree that the Lindens have been terribly hidebound/had their heads in the sand/are communists about the whole marketing and merchandising area. They refuse to do the obvious I've talked about for 12 years: return infohub self-paid ads. They refuse to put in a network of Linden billboards along roadsides. They refuse to cut anybody into the splash page or anywhere. The only way you can "market" is by buying those overpriced Marketplace ads that are very variable, iffy and hard to measure even if you match, say, purchases of $0 landmarks to "clickthrough" purchases.

The classified ads in the inworld search are a total morass because search is a morass. You would think that if I paid for $1000 for a classified ad for rentals, and I looked myself up in Land & Rentals my search would put my own properties at the top, but instead, they are randomly filled with other peoples' rentals, too. That is one of the worst uravnilovka/communist aspects of the whole classified ads racket. Reform and streamlining of these ads to be like Google Ads, where you can run campaigns, track clickthroughs -- this would be vital.

Let's start with a little thing: the inability to manage your own classifieds on your avatar under a tab on your avatar. This long ago disappeared for reasons that mystify me. I can't easily pull up, edit, add to my ads ON MY AVATAR. I have to back into doing that by looking up the search classifieds and pulling it out that way. Insane.

Linden should have an upload test sim or sims where there is $0 for tests. Then when you keep those you like and fly to another sim, the fee kicks in.

 

[ChinRey]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

The other way they could phrase it is to say, oh, those $8000 worth ofsim buyers will be like the barons who currently get a big discount for bulk purchases.

---

Keep in mind that the 8000 dollar figure I quoted was just an illustration, not even a reasonably well founded guesstimate to what the entrance ticket for land ownership will be. What we can be sure of however, is that it will be high. All successful SL businesses I've heard of started small and grew over time. That option doesn't seem to exist for the new "land barons" who will be buying Sansar sims directly from LL; they'll have to put a significant investment into the project right from the start with no guaranteed return. Only the biggest land owners in Second Life have the resources and experience needed for this. There are not that many of those and LL will have to sweeten the deal a lot to convince them to come along. Their existing businesses in SL will take a heavy hit from this no matter how it turns out so they may be a little bit reluctant to follow LL into a new adventure with unknown outcome.

What LL seems to be planning is actually to replace their entire customer base (no, not the users but the people buying directly from them).

Linden Lab an its owners are occasionally described as greedy capitalists only interested in the bottom line. Personally I don't believe that for a minute but we have to assume there are some competent business people there and this goes against one of the most fundamental rules in business: It's twice as hard to gain a new customer as it is to keep an existing one and ten times as hard to regain one you've lost.

A profit oriented company will have to be desperate to even consider leaving their existing customers and go looking for new ones.

I believe that sooner or later LL will have to bite the bullet and start offering customer sized packages directly to the end users. Fortunately such a solution won't be too hard to implement but it won't go down well with the power customers they've already recruited.

[Wolf Eriksen]

Does that mean i cannot explore "the world" with a motorbike because you dont provide raods, or provide only smaller or larger private islands?

We critisized the Lab often in SL because of missing infrastructure. And you came over with some raods and railroad tracks.

So will the new platform be a patchwork carpet without infrastructure but with a lot banlining again? I fear that.

[Qie Niangao]

It seems that a customer in Sansarworld will be able to parcel-out the land for which they'll pay the Lab, and sub-let those parcels to their own customers, sort of like Estates operate in SL. My question is about those larger units from which parcels may be carved: Do those lands supplied directly to the Lab's customers have any spatial relationship to each other? That is, would it be meaningful to plot them on a map grid? Or do they pop into existence without reference to any global coordinate system, making them easy to grow and shrink and poof without affecting any possible neighbors, and never needing to move because they're never specifically positioned anywhere at all?

[DejaHo]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

It's not any ignorance of mine that is on display, but your rudeness is.

 

---

One dishes but the other can't handle the truth.

 

Re the other 100 million words you wrote in this thread:   YAWNS!

You have to be the most b-o-r-i-n-g person I have ever read.  And selfish too. 

[Wolf Eriksen]

Does the Lab plan to provide serious informations in more languages than english in future and around sansar?

I am a member of the german community, and i know a lot of guys in spanish communties.

And a lot of them have problems with english, especially when things become complex.

So Lindens, take some money in the hand and look for guys who can assist you in talking to communities having other native backgrounds than the anglosaxon.

I know you can, because for promotion and advertising you have already found a solution.

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

Prokofy Neva wrote:

 

THAT there ARE land sales of some kind is the first thing to predicate upon because it's not the case that land is just a giant tissue box for free and you take as much as you need to put under content, and content determines (like the old "prim tax" method which the Lab jettisoned after a resident revolt, in case you don't remember).

 

---

"Land" has value in Second LIfe only because it's limited, and it's limited only because the Lab built Second Life on an extremely cost/hardware intensive architecture and it is in their best interest to limit it. The architecture of SL was intended originally for a combat simulation that needed instant updating and the ability to dynamically change terrain. It was a world that was very small with no private islands or in-world economy.

The decision was made to simulate this world by simulating land, whether it was being used or not, and this created the mall parking lot dilemma of needing to be built to support the maximum possible load at any moment even when the region was completely empty, while at the same time limiting the maximum possible load to the ability of the infrastructure for that patch of land.

For the vast majority of Second Life "landowners", who only have little private pieds-a-terre, the networking and computing structure necessary is far less than what Second Life does. It's entirely possible to make a simulated world using far less infrastructure for most of the world. Meanwhile, other parts of the world could be designed for a dynamic load that could be far greater than the maximum load Second Life can support in a region now.

A person growing up in a colony on the Moon would think selling air would be a necessary and lucrative field. If they moved to the Earth they may find things to be different.

[AlecDeBoeuil]

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Wolf Eriksen wrote:

Does the Lab plan to provide serious informations in more languages than english in future and around sansar?

I am a member of the german community, and i know a lot of guys in spanish communties.

And a lot of them have problems with english, especially when things become complex.

So Lindens, take some money in the hand and look for guys who can assist you in talking to communities having other native backgrounds than the anglosaxon.

I know you can, because for promotion and advertising you have already found a solution.

---

Wolf, LL doesn't make any sense in English, so it's not surprising that ESLers might have problems.

Are you good at identifying lies, half-truths and hyperbole in another language? Probably not.

Alec - to work out which answers Ebbe has given and which Peter Grey has written for him

[irihapeti]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

It seems that a customer in Sansarworld will be able to parcel-out the land for which they'll pay the Lab, and sub-let those parcels to their own customers, sort of like Estates operate in SL. My question is about those larger units from which parcels may be carved: Do those lands supplied directly to the Lab's customers have any spatial relationship to each other? That is, would it be meaningful to plot them on a map grid? Or do they pop into existence without reference to any global coordinate system, making them easy to grow and shrink and poof without affecting any possible neighbors, and never needing to move because they're never specifically positioned anywhere at all?

---

that ^^

i want to know the answer to this as well please

[Qwalyphi Korpov]

Do we each get to ask one question?

Could it be two? (I think i need two)

Did the answers stop after two days?

Aw crap... I need 5 questions.

Can we have 5 questions?

[Derek Torvalar]

---

Qwalyphi Korpov wrote:

Do we each get to ask one question?

Could it be two? (I think i need two)

Did the answers stop after two days?

Aw crap... I need 5 questions.

Can we have 5 questions?

---

Yes the biannual LL drive-by QA session has now concluded.

Thank you everyone, see you in 6 months.

(If we are still here)

[Frenzy23]

I am 2 years plus on SL...alot has been so great about it...here is my question for you Ebbe.. I would like to know 2 important things that I 'live' in SL every day...one: Will Sansar support in world music streaming for DJ's to work and entertain at virtual clubs? and the second question is around scaled accounts...I know a few people are concerned they can't use RL money to take part in SL...so they have free accounts now...will Sansar be a rich persons playground, and those who cant pay be locked out of more immersive enjoyment?...thanks for you time ( oh yeah, there will be a giant wave of sexual nawty peoples running around Sansar, so be ready for that! )

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, I realize it's ball park and no one really knows. I just think that a seemingly little detail like the "always on" capacity may become the hard rule like "no homesteads unless you first buy a $1000 then $295 a month full-prim sim" that could devastate the land business or make it something all but the very wealthy hobbiests or business people with a variety of other profit centers could indulge in.

Just think if "always on" is something you are forced to buy because you need to be able to always provide land for your tenants when they decide to log-on at a whim. No one will keep to a schedule of log-ons. So all the Lab has to do is remove the ability of any user of land except the outright owner to decide to "always on" or not and you have blown a hole through the SL land business model. The Lab may simply say they don't have the staff or the CPU capacity to do the accounting to book billing to the non-always-on or some variation of that.

I think the Lab will shed the hobbiests and housewives who have even big land empires and only a few tech businesses that probably also have content sales and other business (like Anshe Chung if she is even still in SL) will afford the investment.

But if the Lab is faced with the stark realization that the masses didn't flock to the New World and buy up lots of content and pay them taxes, they might start trying to figure out how to lure some of the big rentals agents out of SL. After all, people need a place to live, they don't want to play in sandboxes all day with other beta testers.

I totally agree that the LAST way to understand the anthropology of Linden Lab is to characterize them as greedy tech magnates who just want cash. The Lab is the most ideological tech company there is, willing to lose money over its goofy metaverse ideology. The funny thing is that I think the early founders were still enough members of the American middle class and the nouveau riche to understand they needed something to sell and people to buy it. Philip was hugely opposed to islands at first and they didn't work and only a few people had them. He wanted the Mainland to be the social experiment he had in mind. In the end to keep going and hire staff, he had to accept the island model and make it work.

MySpace or Napster might fit into that category but even Facebook, which makes a lot of money for some of its shareholders anyway isn't entirely bottom-line oriented or they would do better, they also are driven by Better World ideology.

I agree that to some extent, the Lindens want to get rid of their customers. Most people see the tech proposition as users getting rid of obsolete tech. Who here is still playing their Sony Walkman or struggling with a VCR every night? Everyone moved on to Spotify or iTunes or Netflix or whatever on the Internet. But in this tech case, the manufacturer wants to get rid of his obsolete customers -- indeed has been trying to shake them loose for the longest time.

A company forced to live in the real world and make a profit due to their idealistic but still realistic board members and chair Mitch Kapor would still try to deprecate its customer base if it saw that base as preventing growth.

I think that after a year or less of sandboxing it with the new mesh FIC in Sansara, LL may also break down and revise the structure to enable the customer packages that provide freedom to users.