1. Not sure what clarification one would need. Technically they gave almost a year's notice! If I was silly enough to own an island I'd have started to prepare for the rate hike the day I heard about it.

Then again, if I was at a point financially where I could afford to justify shelling out 195.00/mo on a game then an extra 100.00/mo wouldn't make much of a difference to me!

Posted at 7:16PM on Oct 9th 2007 by SqueezeOne Pow

2. Might be a bad time to hike up the price because people are still losing due to gambling ban. After they hiked it up... they will lose a lot of sims much faster than LL will ever see. At that time... I ensure you that Anshe Chung would be the first to lose their business than Azure-Island estate would.


...stupid Zee Linden.

Posted at 12:20AM on Oct 10th 2007 by Nacon

3. This post has been censured by SecondLife blog moderators:

Lukas Mensing Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Please don't submit your comment more than once.
October 10th, 2007 at 12:38 AM PDT

Robin Linden: “- we are evaluating changes to the configuration of premium /basic subscription models and to mainland tier pricing, but have no specific plans, and again, we don’t expect anything to change in Q4.”
When decrypted, that means:
1- That is why you have been producing lots of regions and new continents to lower the reseller prices of mainland to justify an increase in tier. This, broking the land market on SL. Did the genius who planned this think of the consequences of this on business on SL? It is still not a corporate universe. Do not forget that companies use SL for the hype it produces in real world media, not as second world.
2- Mainland prices CAN NOT be compared to islands prices, here is why:
- Terrain modification on mainland is limited to +4/-4
- Maximum number of avatars is limited to 40
- Service is quality zero for owners on mainland. You can’t restart a region because its lagging to hell or is full of phantom prims etc…
- It is not possible to change server class, even with paying a fee or anything. its random, some regions are on class 5, others on celerons probably if not x486 (…:).
-Performance globally is very low. You justify this by the fact that “it is mainland”…so there are two classes of users, Island users, luxury servers, wonderful environment, great service…and mainland users, “la populace”

To illustrate this mainland quality service, I add here the transcript of a chat with a concierge (no name of the concierge). We were preparing a cultural event on Lauks nest and it was laggy lagyy laggy!!! For info, Lauks nest is on a old server, and the region is still hiccuping at crash limit. Its in mainland:

—-Start————–
Lukas_Mensing: it is empty actually, maybe a restart could help
The concierge: only region changes can be done are not applicable on mainland.
The concierge: (hardware class changes) only for a fee and private regions. We update mainland regions as spares are available
Lukas_Mensing: ah yes. I noticed, Orwood and holt are on better class. I hope Alviso will be updated too. Maybe a simple region restart can help lower the lag actually, not a big change?
The concierge: Sim last changed host 2 days ago and logs since then indicate it running as well as it can, average physics & SIM time dilation
—-End———

You can notice that the concierge is talking about time dilation and average physics, like if these values mean something actually.
Whether he was thinking I am an idiot or simply he doesn’t know how to read statistics (I doubt it).
Tier is already TOO HIGH on mainland for the quality of service you are providing!!!

Posted at 8:51AM on Oct 10th 2007 by Lukas mensing

4. I love the idea that it's as easy to pay $295 per month as $195. People who bought islands aren't silly, SqueezeOne; they wanted to be able to control their own surroundings in SL, were just about able to afford it, and love the SL experience so much that they're prepared to continue. But the extra is what might break the camel's back: its almost double, or haven' you noticed? We're not all fat-cat Land Barons you know!

Posted at 3:06PM on Oct 10th 2007 by Christi Maeterlinck

5. Considering how unstable SL has always been it IS silly to throw that much money into a video game...especially when you look at the close to $2000.00 downpayment. You could have bought both an Xbox 360 and a PS3 and bought close to 5 games a month...and it would be a lot less laggy!

Posted at 6:06PM on Oct 10th 2007 by SqueezeOne Pow

6. I hope that mainland region owners are not hit with any price hikes until the performance is drastically improved. At least I note you had a year warning. Just imagine how you would have felt if they billed you the new price hike at the same time as you received the notice of the hike? That is exactly what happened to us EU sim owners :( So as one who has just been burned by a badly managed LL price rise, I wish no one else this misery for what ever reason!

Posted at 7:52AM on Oct 24th 2007 by Dumisani Ah