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Why are land tiers so high still?


StenMystique
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is there a simple reason why land tiers are so High?  I travel and explore SL and I see abandoned all over and have never seen a change in land tiers. Is there a reason the tiers have never been lowered to perhaps allow more people to own land and create in SL??

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LL is here to make a profit first and foremost.

 

Other reasons.  

Server space costs lots of money.

Bandwidth for said servers costs alot of money

Hardware costs alot of money

Having employee's costs alot of money

 

Could they possibly get by on a lower tier, sure, but people who are in the mind set of "IT SHOULD BE 20 BUCKS" have lost their poor little heads.    the lowest tier range which they could possibly handle right now and not have to change or do things ot make SL survice would be the 195.00 USD tier they have on the grand father sims, which is basically 100 USD off the current full sim pricing.  

 

 

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Sorry, but that reply just doesn't make sense anymore. We live in a world now where broadband is more common and cheaper, computers and servers pricing has come down drastically since the day Secondlife was introduced and are much more numerous not to mention storage medium has gone up drastically in size and capability.  I doubt you'll ever see $20 sims, I don't think it's unreasonable the  price should have dropped as the capabilities have changed and become more pronounced.  Add to this all the abandoned land about doesn't exactly add to Linden's Labs profits. Perhaps it's past time they revisited this

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None of us know what SL's profit margins are.

Some folks think they are insanely high.  Personally I think they are high but not insanely so.

That said, first off regarding Hardware/Server Space/Bandwidth, it's still not as cheap as some folks think.  You are not going to be able to run a SIM with a $5.00 a month GoDaddy Account.  ;)

Then you have Staff.....those employed directly by LL and Support, much of which is outsourced.  This all costs money.  How about Attorneys and possibly others that LL needs to keep them in compliance with FinCen regulations? 

What's the going rate for a Senior Software Engineer?  They don't come cheap.

Add to this that we are currently helping to support the R&D for the next generation platform.

It all starts to add up.

 

 

 

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StenMystique wrote:

is there a simple reason why land tiers are so High?  I travel and explore SL and I see abandoned all over and have never seen a change in land tiers. Is there a reason the tiers have never been lowered to perhaps allow more people to own land and create in SL??

Re, Abandoned Land.

Grid Survey Reports puts it for Mainland at around 14%.  Many times I think people confuse Undeveloped Land with Abandoned land.  There are many people on Mainland who live in the sky and never bother to do anything at ground level.  Prims are precious after all.  So you can get left with the impression there is more abandoned land than there really is.

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Arguably, one of the architecture problems that SL suffers from is the notion of 1 core per full sim.  A sim has to be ready to run and although they may idle, utlimately, that core needs to be ready for that sim at any given moment.

What they really could do with at this point would be servers that ran scripts, servers that sent assets, a different group chat architecture and so on, an architecture where say a prim could have a script in it and still execute on a script server, while letting the empty land sim completely shut down.

So as I see it, the issue is that they have to keep servers committed to a large degree even if a sim is empty, they can't just drop the price like web hosting packages which really require no R&D for the platform, it's a totally different offering.

Recovering from price drops is difficult, SL isn't going to suddenly become more popular because of lower price, all that will do is reduce LL's income and I doubt they can afford to do that.  Look at all the other grids that have come and gone, each with the promise of $20 regions.  Low price wasn't enough to attract the masses and no doubt LL will have watched that closely and realised that the price is fine, for them.

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Drew Bhalti wrote:

the lowest tier range which they could possibly handle right now and not have to change or do things ot make SL survice would be the 195.00 USD tier they have on the grand father sims, which is basically 100 USD off the current full sim pricing.  

That's not correct actually 195 USD is the monthly tier for all Mainland sims. All regular Mainland sims that is. The Heavy Metal sims cost about 650 USD a month each but nobody ever actually rent those of course so that price is just a meaningless number. (It's possilbe there are a few other extra expensive sims too but I've never hear of any.)


StenMystique wrote:

Perhaps it's past time they revisited this

Way past and that's part of the problem. Tiers were set back at a time when server costs and hosting services in general was much more expensive than they are today. Tier is actually amazingly low by the standards of that time. But for some reason LL, who is usually very good at long term strategic planning, completely missed the boat here. They didn't notice that everybody else's pricing were slowly creeping downwards and they didn't understand the long term negtaive implications of keeping a price level way above the market standard. When they finally woke up, the difference was simply too big for them to fix it in one big step. Of course, they could have done it step by step but that's just not how things are done there. It's all or nothing at all, no half measures.


StenMystique wrote:

Add to this all the abandoned land about doesn't exactly add to Linden's Labs profits.

So do all the DOA projects that was never closed down. I've already mentioned the Heavy Metal sims. There are remnants of other simiar projects all over SL. Each doesn't cost much to maintain but they add up. Not nearly enough to explain the inflated tier though.


Perrie Juran wrote:

None of us know what SL's profit margins are.

Some folks think they are insanely high.  Personally I think they are high but not insanely so.

They have to be. Second Life is a small fish in the financial market but not so small it would go unnoticed if it performed significantly better or worse than the average.

But that leaves one important question. Everybody agrees that tiers are too high. Even Ebbe Linden has said so officially and so did the previous LL CEO. So the prices are high but the profit margin isn't, where does all that money go? I think the answer to that is that LL actually looses money because of those inflated prices. It's not about abandoned land really, it's the total number of users and sims. LL could have made more money if they lwoered the prices and increased the volume and they know it. Easier said than done though.


Qie Niangao wrote:

Is there a recent Mainland Census available? Because the last I saw was from June 2013 (with the 14% Abandoned figure), and
.

Last I heard was it was down below 13% again and slowly but surely sinking. That's my impression to from the parts I know. When I bought Coniston in - actually it was June 2013, the month that 14.2% number is from - most of the sims around were abandoned. Today there is hardly a single abandoned parcel in that area of SL.Can't say for sure if that's typical for Mainland SL. The landowners here have spent quite a lot of time and effort to improve the area as a whole sicne then and that clearly has made it more attractive to others too. Even so, when I travel around on Mainland I think I see less abandoned land now than back then.


Sassy Romano wrote:

What they really could do with at this point would be servers that ran scripts, servers that sent assets, a different group chat architecture and so on, an architecture where say a prim could have a script in it and still execute on a script server, while letting the empty land sim completely shut down.

I agree completely with you there. That's how it should have been done. It's way too late for SL though, it would essentially mean rebuilding the software from scratch. What does surprise me is that LL doesn't seem to have thought about it for their new project and nor has High Fidelity.


StenMystique wrote:

I know just getting around mainland it seems I fly through alot of abandoned land. Just the little I see makes you wonder about a mere 14 percent

I don't think there is a direct realtionship between abandoned land and inflated tier. People didn't leave SL when they abandoned Mainland, they moved out to the islands and the tier there isn't any lower. Abandoned land does add to the running cost of course but hardly enough to explain a tier as high as what we have.

The abandoned land plague has a completely different explanation. Linden Lab neglected their duties as the real landowners of Mainland for a long time, allowing most of it to deteriorate into a slum nobody wanted to live in. They did eventually take action but it's a huge task and not finished yet and of course, it'll take even longer to get rid of the reputation than to get rid of the filth.

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Good explanations Drew. Honestly all this started when I was flying over some mainland and noticed entire tracks empty. After flying around for a half hour not seeing much in development but a large amount of land listed as abandoned I landed and thought this might be nice to build and enjoy. That was until I saw the tier price and thought, why in the world would I want to pay that much a month for something I'm just fiddling with for fun?? Just seemed illogical to me to have prices so high while so much land seemed marked as abandoned. Would I like to own land and learn to build and develop it still?? Oh yes I would but the justification for goes out the door when you balance the high price of the tier vs that this is just for fun.

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It can be very misleading to judge abandoned land merely by the sims around where one usually visits / resides.

If you reside on "posh land" as I did until my last bit sold last night, you will think most of SL land is in the hands of long term residents and any vacant plots sells for hundreds of real life dollars.

If you reside in the middle of some old mainland sims, you will think the place is a near vacant lot, and likely you will fail to consider that nobody else wants to live next to the guy with the giant magenta building that has an ejaculating anatomical-bit sculpty fountain out front, and walls 40m tall textured alternatingly in either glowing magenta or with animated low-res gifs of people 'in the act'... (and I'm not talking Shakespeare).

(and yes, I once had this as a neighbor, though not the fountain, that was on another plot).

 

What my own annecdote has observed is that mainland has become subjectively zoned. People have fled areas that have bad builds - and around these areas there is a lot of low cost or abandoned land. People have flocked to areas with neighbors who build things they like... and around these areas land gets very pricey and/or hard to find.

- Judging by what is just around us can be very misleading.

Judging by flying through can also be misleading because your path could zip through a blighted region or a posh region both of which are out of sync with the bulk of land on the sims to the left or right of your fly-path.

(Zindra is a great metric for this. Fly through some parts and my bad description above is tame... fly through other parts and the builds are very beautiful. The extremes on both ends are very present on Zindra. Very old sims also have a similar effect: sims full of ancient abandoned builds of lifetime members who left build perms on... that are absolutely horrible to be near... and then posh sims of residents who really care).

 

It'd be nice to se that grid survey again. Because otherwise we're all dealing in annecdotes basd on what our own personal patterns of travel in SL reveal...

 

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  • 3 months later...

Labs are here to make a profit yes and so are alot of players too.. I mean   I seen  player charge like  three times the price to sell their land than labs asks for   in tier  sometimes 6 times as much  it is rather sad  to see cause I think that  for most who want to buy  mainland  land is to save money not blow    more 

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 year later...

I think they are trying to squeeze the last juice out of the turnip before it's done in by Project Sansar.  It makes sense to keep tier where it is and use that money (turnip juice) to push Sarsar to completion faster.

I've taken a long hiatus from SL but will return when Sansar officially launches.  I expect it will fix many of the issues I had with SL and Opensim.

 

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Matthew Kendal wrote:

 

I've taken a long hiatus from SL but will return when Sansar officially launches.  I expect it will fix many of the issues I had with SL and Opensim.

 

So it's clear you didn't read anything about Sansar ... it is and will be not something as SL and also no Opensim

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