Probably the more important consideration is simply for Linden Lab to start considering ways to make “premium” accounts actually attractive, and to make uncommitted/non-paying residents feel just a bit like tourists. They should feel incented to upgrade if they are at all serious about the world. And if they aren’t serious, then at least reduce the impact that their presence has on the grid’s infrastructure. This can be done by placing limits on the inventory, attachments, bandwidth, etc consumed by such tourists.

So LL set up free accounts, and they must have recognized that this would mean reduced profit and increased server load. The only profit for LL available with free accounts is on the occassion that they buy money from LL, which means as far as I can figure that they’re doing it for the purposes of advertising their subscriber numbers (they wrote the “1,000,000 accounts” on the sun after all and are consistantly comparing the number to WoW’s, despite it being a well known fact that most of those accounts are alts or inactive).

So basically LL is seeing how many people they can cram into the ship, without any notice that it’s beginning to sink from the weight.

There still is a prim tax in fact, although it doesn’t apply to attachments. To have prims on land permanently you need to pay tier, or pay someone that pays it for you. Premium members pay a prim tax in US$, and support the folks that don’t pay anything towards LL and their usage of prims. But then we also pay towards their bandwidth charges, new servers and everything else. If you’re going to change the system adding extra taxation to the people that already pay, in some case thousands of dollars each month, will never be a popular choice. It will stay unpopular whilst there is a division between the payers and non-payers and you are talking about applying a new flat fee to both.

I am most assuredly NOT in the camp of all free accounts are ‘evil’ are ‘freeloaders’ are ‘useless’ etc. Finding a system that allows SL to develop and support the users, all of them, fairly is a challenge. Simple solutions may look attractive, but there is a wonderful quote to bear in mind: To any situation there is a solution, that is elegant, obvious, simple and wrong.

Or so I have been repeatedly told (bludgeoned with) since my first day in SL.

coco

And has Philip finally ceased his monotonous chant that “Free accounts have no impact on Second Life’s performance”?

Probably a few thousand.

Which is made worse by the likeliness of someone who’s dumb enough to sit in camping chairs all night, is likely wearing a lot of laggy particle bling, high torii hair, and badly scripted high-lag attachments.

LL wants a world where there is no scarcity but 1.)that is a false premise and 2.)that does not contribute to a real economy. LL should introduce scarcity of some kind and it may be prims since bandwidth and rendering time are truly limited resources. Can a good user experience and an economy be built around something like that? Possibly. And I think LL realized this and tried to move in that direction but the user community made them stop. So you can’t lay all the blame on LL.

Linden Lab either has to increase available bandwidth or increase the efficiency of their network protocol. The former is the fastest and easiest solution, but costs the most money. Any normal company would make the people consuming the resource pay for it…but that is not likely to happen.

Personally, I’d like to see a number of scarce resources made less available to free accounts. Perhaps limit the inventory size a free account can have. Cap the bandwidth on free accounts to 100 Kbps. Or how about constraining total texture/prim count on free avatars. Make it so that you have to pay to get flexihair and bling-shoes.

Free accounts should be able to tour around, see the sights, get a taste of the place. But they should be encouraged to pay if they want to really participate in the world. Otherwise, the only way Linden Lab will be able to fund the bandwidth is by raising fees for the few remaining people who actually pay something for the privilege.