Do not panic, but your house is on fire
I would like to share the saddest IM I think I have ever recieved.
[20:18] Lillie Yifu: good bye
I think it is useless for me to mention how outraged most of the SecondLife community is at the moment, regarding Linden Lab’s latest decision to give us an in-your-face price hike on OpenSpace sims with no grandfathering clause. Neither on what exact incentives are behind this decision but pure greed and profits.
You may know I’m not the kind to call on a lynch mob. I like to try and be rational, analyze the facts coldly, and try to be reasonable. But yes, I am pissed. Because of the resident side of the things. Linden Labs still misses one major main point about their own community of supporters. We are citizens. We are investors. We are customers. We LIVE in there. We love our Second life.
But now, this latest decision seems to be totally crossing the line for many residents and can easily be described as nearly fraudulent, especially regarding the non-grandfathering clause. It will have major impacts on how each of us residents, content creators, and business people will see Linden Labs from now on, as a company that cannot keep it’s word.
And this, my friends, is a bad thing.
I certainly see how it will impact strongly on the educational, business, creative, social and artistic aspects we happened to reach nowadays, thanks to OS sims. They saved us from ugly, ad filled mainland. Allowed small private ownership of a large nice piece of land with coastlines, so we could place our little house and enjoy our lives.
And one of the biggest spit in our faces is the calling on abuse of technical resources. What of a company that oversells it’s resources like doubling prims on OS sims and then complain of overuse because of their own decisions, penalizing the whole community of people that uses those sims correctly? How is it the resident’s problem if LL cannot QoS or regulate sim usage or network/asset resources? How unreliable asset servers were BEFORE Linden Labs sold massive amounts of OS sims? Those are all questions we should ask them.
OS sims are 16 per quad core machine. They bring 4 times more income to LL (i stand corrected, they make about the same amount). Apart sucking more assets from the asset servers, the only impact an overcrowded OS sim has is to press on it’s virtual neighbours. Nothing LL ever bothered with for mainland. So why the sudden interest?
So, no. Little stores with 2 visitors an hour, like Nimil Blackflag/Lucas Gerard’s LuNi and Autumn Hykova’s Pixel Dust are NOT something I would consider abusive considering their tiers. Not much more than having 16 little stores on a crowded mainland sim. This is all pure bullshit IMOHO and it is an attempt to divide our communities by starting a blame game. Divide and conquer, but we won’t be fooled.
We all know the underlying reason for that is simple.
Maximize profits.
Complain on service abuse on a massive scale and hit your customers with a non-grandfathering clause on a borderline affordable monthly tiers, so lots of people drop their OS sims and they get recycled in new products like mainland or their Nautilus thing.
We don’t really need to dig deeper on the problem to find a solution.
Lindens must know we are citizens.
We create here, we foster here, we provide their content, that makes this place enjoyable.
Putting our tiers on jeopardy, since it’s a steep tiers raise, will affect many talented and emerging content makers, scenic creators, photography artists, sailing and resident communities from everywhere. The raise alone is one thing, but it’s the non-grandfathering clause that will hurt all of the actual owners, pushing them to abandon their land to be recycled.
Attacking our spaces is attacking our content. We are now all stuck to move it, merge it into Class 5 sims, lose hours of work relocating and redoing everything. This is just a big lack of respect for their best and most faithful customer base.
It is a blind business decision, not a very strategically intelligent one. Without all the quality and innovative content created by it’s very involved resident base, SL would be a very unattractive place both for residents and for businesses.
Linden Labs has made many bad moves, but attacking it’s most faithful user base may be the last straw.
We already saw a few very alarmed people, selling and quitting, and our economy is not only undermined but sabotaged deliberately, in such times, I would say it is more than time for public outcry.
You already know what to do. Do it. It’s not true the Lindens don’t listen. They must keep enough of us happy to keep their business viable. Vote the MISC-1776 JIRA issue. Write in the Linden Forums how it affects you and your friends businesses and lives. Make some noise. Pass the word.
We must remain the positive and resourceful community we are. Suggest. Protest. Be inventive. Remember Linden employees just follows their management. But they must hear us all at united saying: fuck NO.
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I won’t do a resource list here, but check on VintFalken.Com she does good recap work.
