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Second Life MMO Update Creates Virtual Eviction Notices
Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting the Linden Labs press release officially announcing major pricing/allocation changes to PC 'virtual world' Second Life, as reported earlier this month. The detailed effects of the announcement include charging for property owned in-game, but allowing players "a new pricing option with no monthly fees" if they own no land, and the official 'Notes' section on the site points out that the update "...meant drastic changes for some the most creative, dedicated residents." A forum posting mentions that new limits tying "building primitives" to land allocation may mean painstakingly constructed virtual property will need to be demolished: "I have been flying around the world and seeing lots of cool builds on small plots... that are way over their prim limit and will be going away." Linden Lab employees say they are "working on a plan to address" this issue before the January 11th deadline. Elsewhere, an intriguing thread details problems with letting novice players build permanent in-game architecture, particle systems, and textures for this innovative 'virtual world'.
Why can't they do what they do in the real world, that is, grandfather in any existing structures?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
So all the creative types show up and invest a month or two where they know their efforts won't be wasted by their forward-thinking hosts, then BAM! all those objects, that they really own? Start coughing up rent for it!
Clever, clever bastards.
Fnord.
Not sure what you meant by "retail game". It is not boxed and sold in stores if that is what you meant. You have to download it. You don't pay for the software, but for using the service.
The changes they made had negative effects on very few people (although they are quite vocal about it). Basically the changes allow them to scale up their server hardware in a more sensible fashion by allowing people to optionally spend real dollars to buy more in-game real estate.
The old system was inflationary and allowed old users, particularly those who spend 24 hours a day online to tie up all the system resources. While some of these folk are very talented and produced some good builds, others just produced large inefficient builds that slowed things down for everyone. Bigger is not necessarily better.
It's not possible to get an economy right the first time, and those of us around for the beta were told that there would be several changes, if not continual changes to the economy. Any player who was caught by surprise on this must have been in game so much they forgot to read their e-mail.
To understand the changes you need to know something about the game. The game is made up of a series of 256m*256m connected squares of virtual land. Each one of these squares is a 'sim' and is an individual rack mounted computer (currently around 40 of these in the game).
Each 'sim' is limited in total 'prims' (the basic building blocks for creating anything). Before the latest change that was 10,000 prims per 'sim', after the change it is now 15,000.
What could, and did, happen is someone with very little land could make it impossible for anyone else in that 'sim' to build anything at all.
The first attempt to handle this was through an economy - prims cost money to rez, and money to maintain as did land. This worked well except for a key factor - money was global, the problem was local. The larger the game got (the more sims they added) the worse the situation got. You could still amass enough money to own a small piece of land and most of the prims in the sim.
Another problem with that system is it was way, way, way too complicated. You ended up with Tax on land, primitives (based on size and height) and lights. And you got bonuses and stipends and 'caps' so the money doesn't accumulate in unused accounts and weeee isn't that fun. Stipends were based on ratings compared to other users and could fluctate greatly.
Another side effect of that was there was really no way to plan for a big project. Taxes could fluctuate and grow as the project got larger and there was no way to tell what your stipend/bonus (weekly money paid to you) would be in 3 weeks.
So to solve many problems they tied the amount of prims you could use directly to the percent of the land on that 'sim' that you own. You own 10% of the land? Then you can use 10% of the prims. Now there is no more really confusing taxes. You can plan for builds because the number of prims you can have is known at the start and doesn't change. And no one can come next to you and build their giant leggo toilet of 9,000 prims just so you can't build.
The other half of the story is that these virtual land plots and objects are all being hosted on servers, maintained and run by the makers of the game. Previously everyone was charged the same monthly rate whether they used very little resources or a whole lot. The new pricing allows people to pay anything from no monthly fee ($10 one time) to hundreds of dollars a month depending on how much resources they use. The simplest method is to charge based on land ownership, especially now that prim usage is also tied to land ownership.
The end result? Now you can play for no monthly cost (how many people don't play MMOs just because they don't want to pay every month?), or you can get a substantial amount of land for the same price they were currently paying (1536sqm for existing members), or they can get more land for more money up to an entire sim for $200 a month.
Yep, i just went from a quarterly account to this new option. It means you get to play the game but only have to pay once, no monthly fee. However, you get no land. (recall that the second part of this update in economics is that the capability to build is tied directly to your ownership of the land) There are public build areas (sandboxes) where you could still build, but there may not be much point as you'll have no where to put the stuff. I suppose this is a good option for those who prefer the Events or just exploring. There is a lot of good content in Secondlife...
I suppose one could build in those areas, and sell to gamers who do have land... (i am not an expert; i'm not sure about that)
It's not a bad system (the overall changes, not just this one-time pay account). If you're good, you can build things that will earn you real money. That's US Dollars, not L$.
If you're curious, download the free trial, try it out for seven days. Talk to actual Linden people in game. Get better data than from a cranky old gamer like me.
-s
I believe that this one-time fee option is viewable on a specific page on the Second Life site, but for whatever reason (probably due to the proximity of the announcement to Christmas?), this page is tricky (impossible?) to find through the main Secondlife.com site.
Anyhow, it's there, just badly linked to, so it works right now - I'm kinda tempted, actually.