Incoherent Communications from Lindens Labs.

Seems to me, you keep asking for feedback from your customers, but you don't listen to the feedback you get in most cases. Example: Your talking about SL having a big outage for serious upgrades, you typically announce it on the block, and a resident, replies with "Woot, way to go LL!", this warm comment, though needed to be made by the author, and no doubt highly valued by the Linden Lab employee being paid by our subscriptions and fees to do a job, actually contributes zero to the communication and or the process of communicating.

You have a lot of very active, intelligent and serious players, many invest thousands of US Dollars a month in your business, they give you dynamic feedback gained from experiance , borne often from frustration and balanced with a viewpoint that your wage payers have a real issue with. Yet, sadly, "Woot, way to go Linden Labs" seems to get the benefit of proactive feedback and increased communication!

You have an active customer base, your product is, even with is faults, an extremely attractive product for a great many people, you degrade the quality of game play, you erode the functionality, you add more restrictions and you mess around with values and promises. Any other company would be losing customers like a plague was in town, but you don't seem to have realised we are still here, probably because your listening to , "Woot..."

Your Metrics are wrong. You are resolving the land sales market completely wrong by not including the right data in your decision process, I can prove it. Look at the number of sims that are changing hands at silly low prices, and or the number of mainland plots that are not turning over (churning) in a given period of time. You have too much land for the number of players on line at any time.

Your metrics this weekend said, '58,000' users on line... Its wrong. I visited one island with 40, yes 40 campers, all bots, all belonged to the owner of the sim... I went to a function, 50 plus people there, only one avatar was a real person, the rest, were bots. Please, tell us with some accuracy who is on line, ie, 3000 Active users with account info, 20 thousand Guests, 27 thousand concurrent registrations of secondary registrations. in other words, instead of 50,000, its actually only 3000, now that, dear Linden Labs employee, is a metric that would enable me to decide whether or not to have my land for sale at what price.

Communicate, yes please, communicate with real facts, yes please, communicate with honesty, YES PLEASE, communicate looking for adoration and congratulatory woots? No Thanks.

River Ely.

I am an EX island Owner.

Well, the fight to stay afloat lasted a while, and finally died. Of late, visitors to my sims has reduced frighteningly. The land search in SL is so screwed up no one can even find my land, let alone buy it.

I can’t compete with those that have no additional Tax bolted onto their Tier. So my tier is 295 USD plus VAT, their tier is 295 USD even. But even that’s not true. The new corporate members pay their 25,000 USD and get a very low rate if Tier. I cannot possibly complete with them.

Slowly I lost customers, here and there as they went off to buy ‘Open Spaces’ at giveaway prices. Some I lost as they were teased away with a promise of lower tier.

Each vacant lot meant some of my reserve was paying for it. Soon my reserves started to run out, until I feared I would not be able to meet the full round of tiers next time around. I have sold a couple Sims to residents, sold one to my partner and sold the rest off at a very attractive cheap price. I lose out overall!

I don’t want to think of the hundreds of hours I have invested making sure islands work and look pretty and are free from greifers. Don’t want to think of those sims I paid 1760 USD for, don’t want to think of the loss of 40% value, don’t want to think of the dip after the loss of Gambling, or the loss of residents after VAT got ADDED to my tier bill.

Some residents I gave a cheap tier to because I liked them as people, reduced tier, less than half in some cases, and they called me all the names under the sun when they realised their free ride was over. Had one resident threaten me with her lawyers to sue over a 1200 Linden loss to them! Sue me for the cost of a cup of juice?

So now I have no islands, and I blame the lindens squarely.

1) Unfair land pricing policy

2) Badly implemented VAT

3) Unfair advantage to corporate players

4) Lack of support for those who generated their income with low risk to them.

I am now an Ex-island owner, because the Lindens failed to recognise a problem properly, failed to react when a problem occurred and failed to be responsible in the providing a solution to a problem.

Knee- Jerk rule creation and implementation is not a responsible solution when things go bad.

Now, I turn my talents back to building and managing land for other people. Like my Partner in RL, her islands are suffering too and she is close to 'failing to survive'.

She too has spent a fortune in time, money and effort, she too has come too close to being unable to continue. I pray the Lindens will correct their mistakes before she too goes under.

Recognised Effort

Recognised Effort

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Dear Jack, you have seen a wonderful model of how things can be, you have watched it change, you have participated in its evolution, and now, you could admit the way the Island Estate are run is a far, far better way than the almost free-for-all on the Mainland. Please simply acknowledge we got it right and that our model is so much better than yours. Our Resident retention, income generation and stability of content is far in excess of many areas of mainland, and please acknowledge, the reason, ie, we are hands on enforcing rules (Covenant).

We eject, ban, remove inappropriate, offensive, abusive, simply annoying material, attitude, effects simply because, if we don’t, we lose our customers to someone who does. You do not police your mainland areas, you have a team that offer a watered down form of knee jerk reaction as and when you have staff availability and as and when it suits. Worse still, your policing team even have different ideas and concepts. One writer here said it was lucky dip as to who helped on ‘Live help’. On the Islands, you get, in most cases, the estate owners attention pretty darn quickly.


Now, if you copy our model, the chances are good that your estates will improve, is a fact. How about getting rid of auction for mainland, yes, sell them off at the same fixed price and give the buyer the same rights as the estate owners have, know something, you KNOW it will work.


Ah, but your reasons are different, yes, your loyalty is not to ‘the’ customer, but the customers ‘income supply’. It’s as though you don’t care who the dollar bill comes from, as long as it comes in. Why sell a mainland sim for a 1000USD when in auction it might provide two times that value. Why support a moaning and complaining customer, when if you ignore, they go away and are replaced by another and the new one pays just the same as the old one, so no loyalty there.


The amount of mainland you have available is staggering compared with the amount of users, it is truly disproportionate, if you placed all the available and for sale land in to a single continent, it would be larger than the occupied continent. You have too much land. It’s a tool for generating income at auctions, nothing more and nothing less. Please, go ahead and admit it.


Let us remember, you have set tier for island owners at $295 a month, and the scrubby mainland at $195. People who tire of the mainland and want a decent existence find it in the islands. If you police your estate as we police ours, then residents will have no need to visit the islands. Good plan, that way, your island owners will sell less and less land to residents and you will get more and more of the pie slice. Your expectation is that wealthy customers will own an island without a need to sublet it to gather the needed Tier. Ok. So why not drop tier to $195 for island owners, ya know… level playing field, or should I say, as inarticulate as I am, ’a level PAYING field’?



River Ely.
Island Owner, Covenant Builder,
Keeper of residents having set expectation, and supported them.