Linden Lab just announced a few changes, good & bad.
The buying Linden Dollars & process credit fees are going up;
- Effective today, the fee for buying L$ on the LindeX will be $0.99 per transaction (previously it had been $0.60 per transaction). These changes impact only buys on the LindeX, and the fees associated with buying L$’s during SL Marketplace transactions remain unchanged.
- On January 3, 2018, the fee for processing credit transactions (i.e. paying real money into a PayPal or Skrill account) will be 2.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum, and no maximum. This fee is currently 1.5% per transaction, with a $3 (USD) minimum and a $25 (USD) maximum.
This means SL is getting more expensive for most of us and those of us who (try to) make a living from SL need to find a way to balance out the extra costs.
Say you manage to make 700$ a month from SL, in the olden days it would cost you $10.50 to send this money to your Paypal account, in the future that will cost $17.50.
Luckily it is not just bad news.
There will be more improvements coming to SL, lots of money (millions of dollars!) are being put into our virtual world to make it even better.
The most interesting thing (for me anyway) is the animesh;
New creative tools. We recently released Animesh in beta, enabling creators to use skeletal animations with non-avatar objects – like wild animals, pets, vehicles, and scenery objects. Coming soon is EEP! (Environmental Enhancements Project), a series of extensions to Windlight that enable you to trade or sell your own environment settings. EEP will also allow Parcel-based environment settings and an extended day cycle too!
This could bring realistic moving NPC’s to SL that are less laggy than current options and also look better.
They can also replace bots.
I hope the EEP! includes the 24 hour day cycles!
Also very exciting;
We continue to make progress in the massive upgrade to SL infrastructure and move to the cloud (we call this project Brave New World). This move will (among many other things), help make SL more performant for Residents around the world, and may also enable us to introduce new products and more flexible pricing in the future.
SL performance and high tier is something many of us would like to see improved upon so this is going in the right direction.
You can read the full official announcement here;
https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/2265-exciting-improvements-to-sl-fee-updates-to-enable-even-more/
Jo Yardley's Second Life 
I could live without increased fees and animesh…
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I never made a single usd of profit in Sl but i spend around 160 monthly. I’m really considering now if i will keep that seeing how LL is placing all its efforts on some i don’t intend to use and there are alternatives to Sl much less expensive. It just feel like i’m the joke that pays for LL Sansar investment, cause LL makes al kinds of promises to improve Sl but the truth is that the old some bugs keep staying.
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Example: Currently to process $5k costs $25, which is the cap. Before that it was $15. Soon it will go to $125, beause no cap. The Sansar disaster will be financed on the backs of SL creators.
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LL knows Second Life is a valid asset and will not go down for at least a handful of Years.
Sansar is still, despite all, a pre beta release and it will take quite a few Years as well to be mainstream and its direct competitors are more advanced (High fidelity), right now, so LL will need to keep the money coming from SL at all costs. Makes much less understandable this kind of decisions that will alienate more users.
And unless animesh is easy to work with and can really allows to create npc’s with a life of their own and looks like any other avatar, it will follow the pah of the pathfinding, nobody will ever use or bore to look at it.
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