Massively^™

Releasing new server (class6?) could maintain setup price, but it means class5's values go down relatively. Peoples need to think separatly "Setup price" and "maintenance fee". It's different things...

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How come I never heard of these open space sims before now? One of those would suit me fine and i'd snap one up

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I purchased my sim a few months after they raised the price from 1295 to 1695. I always considered that I had a sort of "equity" in my sim in that I could sell it off for a reasonable price. Now it appears that my equity dropped almost by half. I believe the Lindens choose to do this to reflect the current housing market in real life. Now you too can suffer in both the Real Life and Second Life!

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I'm not surprised that Tateru is adopting the Platformist's take on this, that this is "all about hardware". Of course, even if class 5 servers came down in price, they hardly dropped 60 percent overnight now, did they! Computers don't slash *that* far down *in a day*. But of course, the desire to relativize and diminish the sense of land and economy in SL is very powerful in the Platformists, and they would like land to be rolled out like toilet paper for pennies, to be stacked up and not dependent on proximity of servers or contiguousness, and for the balance to shift to created content, not land, as Qie put it so perfectly (for that point of view).

Yet Linden Lab achieved the massive participation in virtuality that it did precisely because it created -- and defended for a time -- the metaphor of land as a commodity, and a free market as the basis for a free society. If there were no private property, no means to make a business, no means to hold and express value, how many people are really going to want to play virtuality for long? The sense of place and property aren't just necessary fictions -- people need them to bother with virtuality.

Killing off this metaphor may give a huge sense of smug satisfaction to Platformists who think the "world" should just exist to be a string of sandboxes for prototyping and stadiums to have business mediums in, and not any kind of deep and rich *life*.

But then...who will pay the bills? The people who bought the land metaphor may be scorned; they pay the revenue for this company, which did not yet make another type of business model.

The common fallacy is that you cannot make virtual land value hold, because it is "endlessly available" and you can always "print one more". But...you can't. It is tied not only to servers but to programmers and software creation and upgrades. So the package of materials sold as "Second Life" are usually constructed into a land metaphor, and the Lindens really shouldn't be so harshly deflating and destroying the metaphor.

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It's evident to even small land owners now, as of 13 May or so, regarding both estate land and mainland, that the appointed caretakers of the land supply lack any of the following:

1. Backgrounds in economics, econometrics or real estate.
2. The ability to do real-time analysis or trend forecasting.
3. Any concept of what the word "value" means.

What is clear, however, is the hamfisted, emotionally charged, reactionary stops and starts of the "Land Dept" as it continuously tries to remove Chandler's Hand from the marketplace and tries to replace it with the hands of meddling fools to "make" things a certain way.

People are angry on the mainland that land purchased between November of 2006 and March of 2008 has already been devalued approximately 50% and, more importantly, buyers for land have, by and large, disappeared, for lack of a better word, as the Land Dept has now injected fear, uncertainty and tension into an otherwise stable, fully-functional market.

As a resident since 2006, I've observed this over and over, however, April 7th's blog announcement, followed by too many new sims - as part of a new continent no less, has brought trading to a virtual halt.

When a company makes a decision to eliminate value from its customers - in many cases here, earned value - then there is something wrong. Either the CEO and CFO are drinking the same Kool Aid or they're asleep at the wheel, because properly run companies just don't take value away, on the converse, it's their job to add value.

There's a right way to achieve lower pricing and a wrong way. The wrong way has been aptly demonstrated over the past few weeks and the person in charge of the land supply should be relieved of his or her responsibilities and transferred to some place where they cannot deteriorate brand loyalty and trust as they have been doing.

Hand in customers wallets - destroying value - Game Over.

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