A private estate owner can set covenants, reclaim land, and use World/Estate tools, which provides a host of controls you can’t get on the mainland. Hence the difference in pricing. It’s not placing the burden of customer service on the owner. It’s allowing for greater freedom in designing land use rules. That’s why I pay more for a private estate, and I’m quite happy doing so. It allows me to create a very specialized neighborhood for my tenants.

Thats right. Private estates put the burden of customer support on the estate owner, so not only does the sim owner have to pay LL 50% more, but he has to pay for his own staff to support his customers. The mainland sim owner pays 2/3 of the estate tier but gets the same concierge service as the estate owner. You still haven’t shown how that is either fair, or consistent with business practice in any other industry.

Where is the social housing that can be rented for L$5 a week? Where are the free houses that new players can rent for L$0 a week for their first ‘x’ months in SL? Limit the number of prims in each, but create that space where players can call it ‘home’.

Given that ‘blank canvas’ LL encourage returning players to log in and play with their virtual home. Create a whole new range of conservatories, garages, barbecue areas that can be purchased to add-on to the starter home (just as it works in RL). This encourages investment in SL’s myriad of creations.

Actually encourage money trees, camping, surveys, whatever so that people can be inworld and ‘earning’ their L$5 a week. ‘I must log into SL and camp because my rent’s due’ isn’t so far from ‘I hate my RL job but my rent’s due’.

Stop thinking of the housing issue as ‘private islands’. Where are SL’s projects, its tower blocks with cheap rent? Let’s face it, many players are occasional, but the chance to live in SL makes the prospect of play in your own space makes login a more regular occurrence.

Theme the social housing for dwellings that reflects the user’s RL location. The French in Parisian ‘banlieues’, Americans and Russians in ‘projects’ or ‘projekts’, respectively. The Brits in tower blocks. Simply assign an apartment to them, as might happen in RL, and they move in beside their new neighbour, who is both a constant presence and speaks the same language too, thereby creating micro-communities.

Let the associated shopping experience reflect the cultural make up of the resident community (i.e if I want arabic clothes, I go to the virtual Cairo, or wherever) which encourages further sense of ‘local’ community, and maybe, just maybe, encourages micro-communities to pool resources and build their SL experience together.

Allow residents of a particular community to purchase clothes at discount from other SL users, thereby supporting their micro community.

The problem LL has right now is its basis on Anglo-American economic and societal models. I’m guessing mostly an American model, which may be American users concept of it, but the SL world isn’t purely American. L$500 a week rent may be chump change to an American user, palpably it is not to someone whose country has a much lower GDP, and whose concept of money is not based on the US dollar or British pound or European Euro.

Resellers can buy mainland at mainland prices and tier if they want to, private estates are not the same product as mainland.

The problem here is not the discounts but that they are not published and available to everybody. Knowing about their existence is very important to make sound business and investment decisions. If you know that your competition with 20+ sims is paying significantly less than you having just one sim, you realize that you can’t compete and you will not invest in SL. If you don’t know about the discounts, you invest in SL thinking that working hard will give you a chance of success on a level playing field.

Second Life is the only market I’ve ever been in in which the wholesalers pay higher prices than the retail customer.

Playing favorites is likely to raise some questions if you’re the one running the betshop. That said, “evil” is a null term.

And I can’t say it’s not a stupid business decision for Linden to engage in this kind of behavior, where these special prices are not offered to everyone who deals at the same level. It may very well undermine the sense that there’s a competitive market and discourage massive real estate investment — assuming the allegations are true, which is not certain.

I used to own several sims. Due to the whole price dive thanks to the new mainland continents back in 2007 and the 2008 open-sim debacle, today I own only one sim that I maintain to support my own land use within the same sim. Anyone that buys a sim from Linden for a for-profit venture is making a bad choice in my opinion.

Stupid? Perhaps. Evil? No. It’s their company. They can do what they want with it. And it’s my consumer choice. I’ll do what I want with it. Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing.