Look, linden doesn’t care whether you lease your sims or not. They don’t even know who does and who does not. That is not their business. Their business is to lease the sims to you. To any fool willing to pay it. Why is it that every time people invest into something they feel as though the company is responsible to provide something that has nothing to do with the service they provide? Does it work? Is it what they said it was? Yes it is. It’s a virtual piece of land. So there you have it. Why do you think it’s Lindens job to do anything else?

You choose to host with Linden and pay for the server to boot. Who’s responsibility do you think it is for your being gullable?

Linden could care less if you sublease your virtual disk space or not. That was not the deal when they leased it to you. There is no commitment from Linden stating anything about what you should do with your over priced simulator. You ordered it, and they delivered it.

Your open letter is a joke. If you don’t want the sim, there is a blue button that allows you to give it back to Linden. Then you won’t have all those fees you whine about.

This is where people need to take a REALITY CHECK. LL can get away with it because people like you pay for it, seem to find some value in their vastly over-inflated prices. Like some people will pay $200 for a Prada key ring. The mind boggles.

ppl with more money then brains obviously

Give Linden lab a Loaded firearm and they will shoot themself in the foot EVERY TIME!

“Spike Linden: The hardware that you use also costs us more in fee’s to our providers too, did you not think of that?”

It’s not a good thing for the uneducated to deal with companies. It never has been. Education in the field would give better understanding as to how people in business work. But in terms of the continued “hardware” argument, I assure you that it’s simply not a good argument.

There will be increasingly more educated working towards various paths that will bring about change. It certainly will not happen with Linden Lab it appears.

My recommendation to those who enjoy SL is to not invest in it. If you want a sim for personal use, wait until they beg. To put up so much money upfront, to pay such outrageous monthly payments after doing so is insanity. Your better off getting an education and a few skills about yourself and be in the KNOW of how silly Lindens response to the public is. I have simply heard far too many claim they are business people in SL because they divide server space and lease it to others. It takes no skill or brain work at all to play the big shot in SL.

3 years, two accounts, and I do not lease anything at all. And for the argument of free accounts being eliminated, I’m sorry, but unless its free it has no value at all. And the purchased made within the service entitles one to be able to access.

While island fraud isn’t as prevalent as you might think from reading the Herald, it’s scary enough. And the real problem about this so-called “buying” of land is that you cannot easily resell it at will. Oh, sure, you can set it for sale, if your land baron has incorporated that feature (not all do). But you’ll have a terrible time reselling it, as anyone can tell you who is doing this now in the sea of yellow on the private island servers. Nobody wants to buy it for what you paid; even $1/m is too much. And you can’t liquidate it to land barons, because they don’t go around buying up such parcels except on the mainland.

A sim *owner* has more control — but not a sim tenant, even if he is called “an owner” because it is deeded to his group. He can’t reset his sim, of course, and usually other features are shut off — and he can’t liquidate his land.

I keep my private island on the same system as on the mainland because I find that it’s just a hassle — and misleading — to “sell” islands. People then want to get out — and they can’t sell their land, and then they either default, or feel screwed and misled. I want the tenants to feel secure, and it is simple more flexible for them to rent normally, without a fake upfront purchase. I can also enable them to donate mainland tier if they have it into the group but use that as a discount on the island, as it is all the same group. They get the same powers over their land as they would if they were in Dreamland — they can ban, deed media, return non-group prims, etc. So it seems pointless to add this layer of fake “ownership.”

I fail to see how you can be a “slumlord” in Second Life. The roofs don’t leak, the toilets don’t plug up, the sinks don’t stop, there are no roaches. I rent land for the most people, and people put up their own houses, and under my rules, they look good. It’s not like it’s hoboland. My townhouses are attractive, custom-built, and good-looking. There aren’t any “slums”. Providing low-cost rentals for people isn’t being a “slumlord” but providing a service much in demand.

The idea that the islands somehow save Linden management headaches is bullshit. Island owners are the most fussy people in SL. The Lindens are constantly getting calls from owners complaining about their sims ostensibly being stacked up too many to a server, or being paired with laggy sims, or needing to be moved to a new location, or moved away from a new location after drama and scandals.

While they can follow scripts or reset their sims, they can’t always fix their problems of invisiprims, or if they accidently return everything, they need the island set back in time (the tools make it easy to make mistakes). With all the constant reselling of islands, and with the constant churn with transfers especially of opensource sims, island owners keep the Lindens totally hopping, and make more work for them, not less.

I looked at my record of tickets and chats in the last year. I rarely have to contact a Linden more than once a week, and that is only briefly to ask them to reset a sim that has problems. This isn’t any “$25″ because the hours and hours of customer service are way more than that.

I fail to see why someone with a product that has more features enabling more autonomy needs to pay less for it — it runs faster, and has more control. The customer service is very similar, or even more for islands due to all the churn and “issues”. Ask the Lindens, they will tell you this.

Far from having “better access” to newbies, mainland can actually have a worse experience as newbies entering SL at welcome areas can be driven away by griefing and stupidity. Meanwhile, the private islands are constantly included in the Lindens’ special orientation schemes whereby new sign-ups can opt to go to a private island empire upon entry — directly, bypassing grief-filled WAs. Intlibber’s BNT has been one of these options for quite a while. I also think anyone accessing the newbie stream like Intlibber is doing should PAY for that privilege. It should be a license you purchase. It’s a legitimate activity, is a scarce resource, and should be paid for, not dished out as a favour to FIC. For Intblubber to be blubbing that he doesn’t have newbie access like the mainland does when he is on the fucking splash page for sign-ups lets us know what a phony he is.

I run a resident-designed infohub, and I have some of my main rentals near the orientation island. This does not give me rentals. It may sell a bit of content for my tenants in malls nearby, but newbies usually don’t have money. It’s a very long term prospect, and a very small percentage of the business. But someone signing up for SL and guided into a property upon sign-up is more likely to be a customer.

I really have to LAUGH OUT LOUD at the idea that private islands are “subsidizing” the mainland business or that mainland has “better access to noobs”. Islands get the lion’s share of business, the lion’s share of Linden attention, and earn more. Hard to imagine how this in any way “subsidizes” the business of people who work very hard on the mainland completely unrelated to islands, or who combine islands and mainland. It’s absurd. Only in the paranoid and feverish imaginings of Intlibber’s extremist libertarian extropian ideology could this be the case. Of course, he is always playing the entitlement game.

While premium accounts have been dropping, people keep buying mainland. They buy it because they want to buy from Linden Lab, not from flakey island owners who might skip out on them, or have a lot of rules or mandatory themes. One would think with this ability to hand over “99 percent of the power” that there would be a veritable stampede to private island renting. But the whole point of this very article above bemoaning lack of business lets us know that there is a total glut of these islands on the market now, not getting absorbed by the new signups.

LL does not want the retail customers to be *landlords*. They want enterprise, government, non-profit, education. That’s their big push now — we are not needed. They didn’t “change course,” this has been their plan all along: to make the mainland be the Linden Estate run as Anshe would run her continent or Desmond his continent with good builds, spruced up public areas, high-content rentals in themes, etc. etc. It is all very deliberate to compete with those resident businesses because they do have the customer service laid on to handle people and in fact they may find that the end user happy on his 8192 or 4096 or 512 makes less trouble for them then the cranks on the Concierge List.

Again, I have to uproariously LAUGH OUT LOUD at the idea that private islands “subsidize” the mainland. As I mentioned, mainland sims COST MORE. DUH. Islands are only $1000. Mainland inworld or on the auction usually costs twice that. Premium mainland of the beauty of an island can be triple that. Therefore those big purchase prices are attractive to the Lindens — they can do less, and earn more.

There are many better ways to make money with this kind of investment than being a “third party game services provider”.

I fail to see why zoned sims need to have $295 tier on them. What more rights will they have on them? The mainland isn’t practical, with its multiple owners on one sim, to have things like sim reset, script monitoring, returning prims, etc. People will howl at the idea that some other person could decide their scripts should be returned or monitored. Nothing of that sort will be happening. The Lindens can only expect one thing from zoned land: that it will sell for more, and be more attractive, and end some of the destabilization, abandoning, and churn which makes them more work. Civilization will make less work.

Then goes on to contradict herself: “Mainland has way more costs and much worse occupancy. It has far more vulnerability to griefing and ad farms.”

Prok, you simply cannot logically justify the absurd bias in tiers here. Private sim owners, having estate powers to handle most admin and customer service issues, eliminate a huge amount of costs for Linden Lab. Private sims cost the Lab very little beyond server costs (which are running them about $25 a month per sim, given four sims on a quad processor server, which most datacenters retail rent at $100 per month or less). In the instances where we need to contact concierge for something, it is truly for an issue that we cannot address ourselves. As such, private sim owners SHOULD get a lower tier rate than mainland tier rates. Private islands should be paying 195, and mainlanders should be paying 295, if you go by who is costing the Lab the most. Yet it is the reverse, and those of us in the private island business are subsidizing your mainland business. We do more of the work and we pay more of the tier and you get better access to noobs. So the authors complaints here are entirely valid and Prokofy’s are not.

Prok goes on… “Because it meant that an end user could buy a mainland 4096 and pay tier of $25 US a month and have full control over his parcel, or pay $50 in rent to an island struggling with $295, and not have full control.”

Sorry Prok, but this is very serious misrepresentation of the facts, but so typical of mainland landlords like yourself. The fact is that a) private sim owners have far more control than mainland sim owners, and b) residents of private sims under estate owners, paying the estate owners tier (NOT rent), have full control of their land just as they do on the mainland buying land from Linden Lab. The whole group control of land schemes you need to pull in Ravenglass simply are unneccessary in a private sim. I sell parcels to residents in my sims all the time, they have full control of them just as on the mainland. If they buy a full sims worth of land from me, either an openspace or a full sim, I can offer them even far more power than they would have as a sim owner on the mainland, because I can give them estate manager power in that sim alone, so they are able to handle 99% of the work of managing their sim.

Now, I have seen mainland slumlords like yourself buy some private sims and continue to operate on the land group control scheme like you do on the mainland, when it is totally unnecessary in private sims. Your customers truly are renters because you refuse to let them own the land outright and pay you tier. Conversely, ours are landowners, and we operate no differently than Linden Lab does in being the allodial title holder but not the fee simple deedholder.

Even better, we can sell land to accounts without payment info, so I do disagree with ponygirls problems with new account holders. Free account holders are a large part of private estate owners business and we at BNT Holdings welcome them to own land in our estate. Many people are perfectly capable of bringing money inworld, they just don’t trust LL with their payment info for good reason (LL’s customer db was hacked in 2006).

Now, proks claims that LL doesnt want retail customers is clearly false. What they have done is to do a complete turnaround from last year. Last year when they ended Help Request and abandoned their free account customers, they said they did so because they projected needing to hire another 300 liasons to provide customer service by the end of 2007. Well they have clearly changed course and are seeking to compete against the estates, as they see we in the estates provide better service, better security, and because of that can earn higher tier.

As for those children out there saying “its just a game you are throwing your money into”. Well I dont throw any money into it, and the fact is that we estate owners, who do make up 3/4 of the sims, ARE the ones who built SL, and we ARE the ones who subsidize the money-losing mainland, and subsidize mainland landlords who pay less tier than it costs Linden Lab to support them. YOU kids may be playing a game. We are not, we are running third party game services provider companies, if you want to get all technical about it.

I have been hearing that there is talk of tiers being at 295 in the zoned sims, to reflect the much higher cost of administration LL will be taking on to service those sims. This would be proper and if LL does this, indicates that they actually do recognise these facts.

If you doubt anything I am saying here you are free to come buy a parcel from me for 1 Linden, pay tier to the mailbox, and exercise full control of your land just as you would on the mainland. Our land listings can be found at http://www.bntholdings.com pick a parcel and IM one of our estate managers listed there.