Linden Lab Betrays Consumer Market

Absolutely dead on RaR. Unfortunately. This announcement ruins any credibility Linden Labs had. Anyone that actually participated in SL would predicted the rapid growth and use of void sims and managed accordingly. A year ago at 1800 prims opensims were already being used for creative purposes outside the stated guidelines. Double the prims, make them easier/cheaper to get, and duh what did anyone expect? Raising prices on void sims is a desparate move to stabilize a collapsing real estate market.. a collapse brought on by LL dumping land to make money. LL is a business, to survive they need to make money, but they haven't figured out how yet and are only making matters worse. I enjoy the privacy of my void sim. I experience no performance issues. The lack of problems on Rezzable void sims is what convinced me in the first place. I guess with proper management anything is possible. With poor management, only failure. Ever thought of running SL RaR?

They clearly have a load balancing problem, because although the voids have lower prim they can handle same avatar load as a full sim. Biggest issue with a void is the crossing point between voids, but from full to void isn't too bad. But er...duh we saw that last year, so why did LL increase the prim limits from 1750 to 3750? Answer: To make money on selling land to people with large parcels and kill the land rental market--so now they want to "jack-up" prices on the backend. And at the same time they are pushing their new Nautilus land...which has unfair competitiion practices and is cross-subsidized by the land owners!!!! Feel like a sap? sucker? dupe? You should. We all should. /me goes to puke

CTP (cost per thousand prims per month) is sorta a base line number you are right Nock. I think then you should understand features availble in that sim--like avatar loading, physics performance, level of detail (LOD) on mesh. But why would CTP be double on a void than on a full region? Makes no sense. CTP on an OpenSim is a lot lower still--but of course the features available are not the same as on SL.

 I've just added an Openspace sim to my full sim region and I'm not happy (see today's blog post - http://virtual-echattering.blogspot.com/ )

It is about time that Linden Lab started to think of those of us who pay them as customers rather than prisoners. I have to say that it is a while since I have seen such arrogant treatment of a company's customers. They address us as though we were the ones at fault. 

If you buy a sim which allows you to put 3750 prims in the space then what is the problem as to whether they comprise of trees or buildings? 

Hiking the price in such a way is dishonest, bad business practice and I think that they will live to regret it if they don't back track pretty smartish.

I'll keep posting and linking to other blog posts on this subject - just hope the rest of you do too!

This is trully a landmark in history of virtual world space--so I added it to dipity http://www.dipity.com/xantherus/Virtual_Worlds

This is why I  gave SL the middle finger last June. 

Added a group to Flickr to document what may be lost to the grid when content creators are priced out of the land ownership market:

http://flickr.com/groups/openspacevoid/

The latest announcement by linden Lab will create another killing blow to the Second Life Realestate (e)Economy, the whole business economy and impact all residents directly or indirectly.

Again Linden Lab is screwing it's customers (the users/the residents), for sake of short term profit and change over sustained growth. I am getting angry now.....

At a time when Linden Labs should be increasing performance, lowering prices and growing, it instead shows it cannot support growth, its customers or a secondary market/economy.

In the past year servers have become cheaper and faster, technology across the internet has reduced costs of business, look at your phone bill, email & Amazon cloud storage costs.

Folks this is going to be a hard year, and not a time to raise prices or devastate a user base. Linden Labs has its business model ASS BACKWARDS and it's management is incompetent, lets be frank about it.

Anon(by any other name would smell as swee)

You are encouraging people to file false FTC complaints.  Nice.  Thank you for waisting the time of the people at the FTC and taking away the time they should be dedicating to real claims.

If you bought an open sim and have been using it for purposes other than intended.  You have no room to complain.  All FTC complaints will be easy for them to respond to by simply pointing out the rules of use. 

The majority of these people complaining at those who bought openspace as something other than its intention.

If you really wanted to anon so they wouldn't ban you, you shouldn't go around replying as yourself on some blogs and anon on others.  If they ban your for encouraging false FTC report which they have to spend time and money to respond to then maybe you deserve it.

Ask them most closely about their own developments on Open Space Sims.  Look closer at the mainland development and their OWN use of Open Space with complex builds and uses on.  I have seen the Moles work and Linden Lab itself is flogging the a*se out of Open Spaces.

I am not an experienced user, but what are my alternatives?  Can I move to OpenSim or similiar in the next 4 months (will it be stable enough by then).  I am happy to leave Second Life Grid.  

If I was a large asset holder I would be quick smart looking to be public about my translation/migration plans to another trusted Grid.  Those guys hold the power surely, the sims made up of 60 islands and more. They have the community, the vendors etc.  

I am  happy to move to one of their communities as long as it was NOT on Second Life's grid.

@RaR: I don't feel "charitable". Its just an analysis of the "model" behind Openspace and full prim sims. They actually need more resources on the grid than 1/4 of a full prim sim. If this justifies such a huge price hike ... I am not qualified to judge. There is no need to look for sinister motives or conspiracies, though, when plain incompetency is sufficient to explain an event.

Still, what worries me is the totally irresponsible behaviour to constantly experiment with the SL economy (and society) by trial and error.

For the large majority of residents this does not mean much, though. So the boys at Linden Lab might get through with their "playing around" again. We, who try to do business in SL ARE just a small minority. And I am afraid, that even if we all leave SL there will always a next generation of get-rich-quick guys who did not make our experiences and who will "trust" Linden Lab ...

Yeah, this is the same concept as YOU and the Rezzable charging admission to your sims to fix your mis-management issues

It's simple. You are gullable and not educated and Linden loves it. Jacks reasoning for the increase is quite flawed. Hardware is cheap, and I'll be damned if you ever have gotten any real support in SL. I haven't in the 3 years and two accounts I've been there.

There are multiple reasons I call his claims and reasoning "fraud/ bait and switch". First off, I can give details to exactly what the memory and hardware resource usage and requirements are. I may just do it and publish a publically available article and statistics. is for hosting a sim. I assure you their hosting service bullshit is their money maker.

If you want an education in what it really takes, lease your own server and compile opensim. Seriously. It takes 2 seconds to change the name of a simulator. What was the charge for just altering the name of a simulator in SL?

Think about it.  Every charge they have is bogus. You agree to pay most of the operating costs up front with outrageous setup fees, then turn around and pay monthly fees. The hardware requirements that LL describese needed for hosting even 45K prim is inaccurate. My guess, they don't tell you the truth about what they are hosting the sims on. That is the only reasonable assumption I can make with the reasoning the choose to use when bending you over.

 

 

LL is practicing it's business model on live patients. Sooner or later - probably sooner - they are going to kill their business. The pricing screwups over the past 30 months are jaw-dropping.

I too am experimenting.  Fortunately I have never made the mistake of owning land, and now never intend to. What has been learnt can be taken to other virtual worlds.

Tue, 10/28/2008 - 14:02 — Dana Bergson (not verified) wrote:

" I just wish there already was some viable competition on the market (No, unfortunately OpenSim is not ready for prime time, yet). "
 

I host numerous open simulators. And your statement depends on your motive for using opensim. Financial gain as most in SL are dreaming of?  Take a hike newb.

See, just as I wrote above. You are the uneducated gullable type. You believe that even after another service pops up it will produce a platform in which "you" can use to "make money".  What if I told you that I've not lost a single prim, or rezzed a single object that didn't rezz correctly and show up? Would that have any bearing on your judgements? What if I told you that as a unix administrator I have never lost a single object of my own in a year of working with opensim. Would that hold any value to you?  What if I told you that my whole intentions and purpose with what I do isn't for money, but to help give back to those working the projects and donating their time to the betterment of various software's. .Does that hold any real value to you?

The reason Second Life and it's users are failures is due to education. How many times have I heard the same thing over and over. "I am a business man. I own 20 or more sims.", "I own 100 sims, I am a busines owner.". Well if the idiot really wants to believe that, it doesn't bother me. In fact, he doesn't own a damn thing on those servers including his own IP when it really boils down to it. He has no real access to do anything whatsoever on those servers. He cannot manage or manipulate anything whatsoever on the servers.. well, legally anyhow.

Depends on what you want out of it. personally, I love the technology, but I dispise Linden for the fraud they have allowed on the servers for years. I still use the service, but I allow all you business owners to pay for my bandwidth and mysql space by not giving Linden a dime. And of course, I recommend that to others. along with hosting their own grids.

 

Its sorta funny..and I’m not tootin my horn..but a mere happenstance that I saw Jack's post only a few min after it was posted. I told a few folks about it..and it spread like wildfire. I've been in SL now for over a year and a half, and never have I seen this much controversy.

@ Dana--we are investigating alternatives actively now. Eager to see what the real differences will be other than not paying Linden Lab.

It's obvious to me that someone thinks I'm the anonymous who posted the link to the FTC. I'd like to be clear that I didn't, and I'm not the one who made the complaint to the FTC. I just thought it was worth sharing that someone had, and followed up on it and were told it was not a false claim by a FTC rep. It's not my job or any consumer's job to determine whether or not unfair practices have been used or a law has been broken -- that's what the offices of the FTC are for. I don't see any problem with a consumer exercising their rights to resources if they feel strongly enough about it. I'm affected and frustrated by the OSS situation, but I've not claimed that LL was acting fraudulently. Just stupidly. And I have no need to post as anonymous on this or any other blog.

@ Gary, very interesting post. I will need to read it again and think about points raised. ty for sharing.

LL has started to post recent data again--is a good step for them and appreciated. http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php . Sadly you can see the negative impact on island sales but expect this to get much worse as the voids get flipped back into fulls. Avatars spending is up a touch to 419,000 which is about what we expected.