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Linden Lab has just announced that it is lowering the tier by $30 a month for homesteads and $100 a month for full regions… but…
Yes there is a but.
In stead of lowering the general tier they are offering you the chance to “buy down” your region and/or homestead of a one time fee of $600 and thus turn it into a ‘grandfathered’ sim.
So you’ll get a discount but you have to buy the right to get this discount.
First things first, it is great that LL keeps hammering away at the tier, they know it is too high and are clearly looking into ways of lowering it as much as they can.
Which must be scary and difficult as it is of course their main source of income and they need every penny they get to not just pay for the electricity and virtual schnaps bill, but also for the development of Project Sansar.
Last November they already lowered the set-up fees by 40% so they are on the right path.
Having said that, $600 is a lot of money.
Grandfathered regions have a lower tier level because back when LL raised tier in 2010 they allowed people who already owned land at that time to continue paying the original lower fee.
Which makes sense because if you suddenly raise rent you risk people running away.
You have to make this decision before October 4th, so you have some time to save up money to pay for this but it will also take at least half a year before you earn your investment back in tier discount.
This offer comes at an interesting time because by the time it ends, Sansar will have opened to a lot more beta testers and if all goes well, we’ll be months away from it opening to the main public.
Who knows how things are going in SL by then?
So, if you own a full region you pay LL $600 and they will switch your land to grandfathered tier, which is $195 a month in stead of the regular $295 a month.
If you own a homestead you pay LL $180 and they will switch your land to grandfathered tier, which is $95 a month in stead of the regular $125 a month.
A good deal and another step in the right direction, but still, $600 is a lot of money.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could say… pay it in 6 instalments of $100?
That way you’d just keep paying regular tier for 6 months and then you get the discount.
Luckily the offer stands for the next 6 months so if you save $100 of your Lindens every month, you’ll be able to get one without making the investment in one big payment.
Lets hope this is another step on the way to more discounts and even lower tier.
You can read the full story on the Second Life website by clicking here.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 
This document came to the surface. If this shows how serious Linden Lab is about their business one might think again before paying these rediculous high fees to grandfather a region.
It is all very shady what goes on at Linden Lab. They allowed the transfer of grandfathered regions for 600 US$ and nobody cared. Now this is just another attempt to grab cash from people. If that document shows anything about Linden Lab their true intentions investing money in Second Life sounds rediculous.
They will open Sansar and know a lot of people will leave so this is just an attempt to keep people paying tier in Second Life
This is something a drug dealer or a con artist would do to a victim.
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What document?
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Unfortunately I agree with the con-artist thinking 😦
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That “document” is a fake. …. I went to the real Linden Labs website press release section and there is no such nonsense there. Link: http://www.lindenlab.com/releases Here is a screen of what the real Linden Lab website looks like: https://i.gyazo.com/74cef12e778ac27bf9fce72724d391d8.png
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“This document came to the surface.”
aka APRIL FOOL. Notice the date, and the fact that that page does not exist.
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Lol, That did take long before the fake document appeared again.
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“First things first, it is great that LL keeps hammering away at the tier, they know it is too high and are clearly looking into ways of lowering it as much as they can.”
WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP! They haven’t lowered the tier once since the $295 tier for private regions was introduced god knows how many years ago.
They’ve ignored every call for tier fees to be lowered and the only thing they have ever reduced was their recent drop for setting up a new regions from the ridiculous $1000 which nobody would pay, to just as ridiculous $600 which nobody needs to pay when regions are practically being given away by owners desperate to offload them
This is a last gasp for LL to try to get people to pay $600 upfront before they realise that their sims are worthless (plus if they want to sell their “grandfathered” sim in the future, they’ll have to pay another $600 transfer fee to do so!
No, no no, absolutely no credit to LL from attempting to squeeze the last piece of money out of people that they possibly can like the bloodsuckers they are.
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Notice the typos and the date…You got Fool’d.
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I just posted this in the General Discussion Blog at SL Answers…..
Have a read….
https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Want-Lower-Tier-Now-You-Can-Get-Grandfathered-Land…
IMHO This is the end of the LL Land Ownership as a business.
Paying a Buy Down Fee of $600.00 USD per region I own to get a monthly rate of $195.00 USD won’t be happening. Why would I? If I owned 5 full regions that is an outlay of $3000.00 USD and I would be forced to reduce my tenant lease rates accordingly so there is no way I would ever see a payback of this fee.
This is nothing more than a dying gasp from the Linden Lab Accounting department to fleece those of us who have been paying $295.00/month for years.
This offer of a rate Buy Down ends very close to the date that the whatever it will be named Sansar starts its active Live Beta/Production Service.
Nice try LL.
The end result will be a lot of us abandoning our investment in our full regions.
This should have been granted to any land owner who has owned full regions [& Homesteads] for a minimum length of time immediately and to everyone afterwards once this qualifying period is met. We’ve [long term small estate land owners] paid our >Delta< Grandfathering cost for years as a higher rate and with the $1000.00 per region setup fees and used region transfer costs.
— Angry Land Owner
NOTE: I've done the math and will let my tenants know my regions are going up for sale [or abandonment] at the end of June
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LL can’t win. no matter what they do people are going to rage against them. If LL just dropped tier it would crash them financially. This is a way to cushion the blow.
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LL have done their fair share of stupid things to make people rage against them. This announcement is another.
I know many think that dropping the price would cut their income – but if done correctly it can have the opposite effect. I cut prices by half across a whole range once (as an experiment) and got a 500% increase in sales. Customers were happier, word of mouth increased, and my income was up.
Where as this loaded offer from LL has just pissed me off – I rent from them on mainland and now it’s the same price as islands but without the advantages (sea, proper landscaping, etc). Now I’ll watch the mainlands around me empty even further
LL management are just so out of touch with their product it’s amazing.
They could do so much better, even with just little adjustments… for instance: how about removing the barrier to purchase from people in those themed Premium member home regions? They either get a house and 117 prims on 512 sq/m in a trite themed region, or they can choose to purchase a 512 parcel, get 117 prims and still have to build a house with those prims. When you are at the 117 prim level 30 odd prims for a house is a big advantage. So people stay in those cartoon slums.
SL would be much healthier if they just made an offer that moved those relative newbies out to mainland – “get a free 1024 mainland parcel for same tier”, would be enough. Their customers would be happier (“more room, yay”), they’d spend more time inworld, spend more in Marketplace to decorate (merchants get a boost), and mainland would fill in a few very noticeable holes and become more vibrant.
And yes tier should go down, but across the board – not just for a select few who can afford to pony up a chunk of change to pay for the privilege.
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How do you know that it would crash them financially? They ar a private company that doesn’t publish accounts so I’m not sure where that info came from.
As jub jub explained, lowering prices doesn’t necessarily mean lowering income, that’s just a basic fact of retail economics.
Full price private regions have become increasingly valueless.
All LL are saying here is “Please pay us the same tier for the next 6 months, but pay $600 of it upfront so we can improve our immediate income”
Could be a cashflow problem, could be a wish to take income in advance in the knowledge that sansar is about to crash the SL economy even faster, who know? What I do know is that their private region price has remained the same for a decade despite vast reductions in the price of the technology, bandwidth, server farm etc in that period and if they really wanted to reduce the tier fees, they could have just reduced them
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OK, I’ll bite. Paid the fee, and will reduce share of tier to my neighborhood over time.
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It’s an option, not super exciting but it’s something. As long as you are looking to stick with SL you will be saving over time. As fas as “If I do this I will have to lower rents, etc.” that simply isn’t true. There are already grandfathered sims out there, one of mine is a grandfathered homestead I pay $95 a month for. Does that information change how much you can charge for rent? Nope not even a little. Wait let me check, nope sky still isn’t falling.
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No, it was in 2006 that the Lindens increased the tier to $295, and grandfathered the $195 sims. And first they did this in secret for their friends in the developers’ groups, and then I blew the whistle on it.
http://alphavilleherald.com/2006/10/sticker_shock.html
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Never knew that’s how it happened, thanks Prokofy.
Geez some oldbie names on that page – i feel newb again 🙂
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IMO it’s a desperation move. As grid residents and region owners why not make a counter offer. LL you pay us all $600.00/region immediately – within 30 days or we all bail on you. And you lower full island tier to $95.00 US/month. Take it or leave it… LMAO!!
And the Turkey Buzzard goes hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssss! 😉
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I fear that any that LL does now it will be always used against them.
Luckily if only one thing comes from this is that more are knowing about open sim.
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Pingback: Linden Lab lowers tier… but… — Jo Yardley’s Second Life | ZZ Bottom misadventures in Virtual Worlds!
It’s a cat that get pushed in a corne and start to make strange jumps. it’s getting surrounded by as opensim and high fidelity. Sansar i do not really see as trustable alternative because it’s still owned by linden lab, and complete hosted in the usa.
But for some sim owners this move can still be interesting, if the keep the sim for 12 months. But there’s a change when new grid open and ther cheap options improve that it can be chaos in the sim market next years.And there’s a change that you profit vaporize when you try to sell the sims.
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In that i don’t have any doubts, Sansar will have no impact on users activity regarding second life, if even if moves as fast as the Ceo needs.
Nobody in their prefect senses will trust LL on another project then Second Life, but sadly also nobody would believed Trump’s could be the president either.
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For me and my community, this is both great a hard news at the same time. We had been waiting for this day, lower tiers, to help secure our place for a long time to come in SL. We are barely making tier now, and have done everything we can to try to keep our estate together. Odd jobs, going with out things, struggling just to keep our home together. Although we would love the lower tier rate, we may still have to end up losing sims in the long run, as we cannot come up with cost to buy out all the sims up front. We have already cut two sims and will have to cut more in the near future.
It would be nice if LL offered long time customers buying incentives, a % off for each year you have owned the sim, or a payment plan to help people with multiple regions take advantage of the deal. That would at least allow us and maybe others from having to scale back more regions.
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You would have to be insane to invest in project Sansar. I heard Linden Lab staffers are underwhelmed by it so it doesn’t bode to well for the future.
That is why Linden Lab now wants to do everything they can to stop the decline in Second Life as that is their regular income.
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Who was underwhelmed, what did they say?
Those few people I’ve heard about Sansar were quite impressed.
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Pingback: Grandfathered rates, looking a gift horse in the mouth. | Jo Yardley's Second Life
Pingback: show #111: the state of vr = ready for primetime? [pt1] | the drax files radio hour [with jo yardley]
All very interesting.
Almost 16 months later and Sansar is a genuinely underwhelming non-event (at least to me when I went in to take a look yesterday). I was so under-impressed that it was a new emotion for me.
As for tier prices – as Prof said in that old link, LL want to get rid of amateurs and let the Good Ol’ Boys Club – and what really amounts to insider trading (LL’s secret whispers to their rich mates – that old ‘20% owning 80% of everything’) – run the entire show.
They’re welcome to it. I really don’t want to be in a world where the likes of Rupert Murdoch owns anything at all and where official decisions are offensive, one-sided and blinkered, so it’s good to know about that; I can cancel my membership now.
SL is no different to RL anymore (if it ever truly was); it’s the rich being permitted to oppress the poor all over again – in a pixel world, for goodness sakes! – with LL’ s blessing and financial encouragement, working as hard as it can to continue making those decisions ensuring sims will ever continue to be out of reach to all but the very wealthy (and llet’s not forget LL’s rl brats who are given private islands for free from mommy and daddy).
Surely someone somewhere is creating a world that’s genuinely egalitarian because Linden Lab appears to have no comprehension of the word.
Perhaps we could gift several dictionaries to their Head Office.
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