I had a reply from Zee, it was evasive but seemed to honestly court interest> Sadly it was to join him in world to ask those questions, and i know form bitter experiance, such question and answer sessions degrade into meaning cross conversations with tens of avatars asking different questions at the same time. Typing seems so slow whern you need to fire off a quick question and a small typo can change the question to become meaningless. I knew I had no chance of asking real questions, so I created a note and dropped it onto Zee's Profile...
It reads...
Hi Zee. I know if you are in world the chances of having a realistic conversation with you is about as realistic as hoping a chocolate fireguard will survive the winter. In world too many people talking at the same time, conversations become incredibly disjointed and only fail spectacularly to create meaningful results for the many, unless you are seeking nodding approval from those that have no real concerns and fail to grasp the basic importance of having a CFO actually meet customers.
My concerns are many fold, and though it may seem like I am asking silly questions, its because a year ago I had 12 sims, two of which were open spaces. Over the following months, more and more open spaces came on stream until I started, like many others, to lose residents to cheap and freely available open space sims, and seemingly supported by the Linden Fabric that coalesces to create what we see as second life.
I sold some, had some switched off, nearly lost a seven sims to a thief (Atown Fall) and had it not been for Ethan and Spike Linden intervening to get my sims back to me, I would have lost them. Sadly, the residents had been scattered so I got seven sims back, and no residents to help me create tier. I don’t know if you can imagine what it feels like to go from 12 full thriving sims, to one sim and three open spaces, in less than a year? Through sheer bloody incompetence on behalf of Second Life trend management teams, a catastrophic migration of customers seemed to go un-noticed, yet, I and friends and colleagues were screaming out daily to you asking for help , support, information and most of all, the bloody nosed truth.
I feel if you had been due diligent, you would have compared two important numbers together, the same numbers every sim business owner ran every day, "How many residents do I have, and how much land do I have?"
For me, I had the alarming trend of fewer and fewer residents while my land holding stayed static until I realised my surplus was being eroded paying tier on empty regions. I reduced my holding again and again until I am where I am now, scared stiff I might not make tier next month unless something changes soon. For you and your colleagues, you should have seen a huge growth in land sales, yet not the same proportion of population growth. Had you, like many of us, looked at the map, you would have seen that about 1 user per sim on line at peak logins. That should have rung alarm bells while at the same time swelling your income with the “kerching” of land being created and sold. The numbers must have been there for you. I have gone, in less than a year, from giving you happily tier of $3,500 USD to a very desultory $300 USD.
I am a little angry and a lot sad, for we had settled on a stable and simple business model, and through no fault of our own, it was eroded and taken away from us, I am scared to think of how the big guys were affected, as we are small fry compared. Oh I am happy to deal with market forces and changing trends, happy to play with predictive spikes in sales, pre ordering, buying just in time, manipulating tiers to establish sound customer residences, adjusting covenants until we strike a balance that works, even having to deal with an unfairly allocated VAT. Instead of normally being inclusive, you for some reason that has never been explained, elected to add it to the sale price, thus out pricing Europeans from our American cousins by some 17.5%. When we are talking profit margins of 4, 5, and 9 percent, a 17.5% tax is enough to wipe out any hard earned income completely. That Zee, was squarely your doing as the CFO you cannot elude that responsibility.
So I am not happy, and when I ask to see figures that will confirm my collapsing business is not my fault, i earned a flippant remark from you, that Zee, annoyed me. I wish some days I had time to nip out at lunch and be with the kids. damn, you can switch off for an hour and chill while we are all bashing away on the boards because you forgot to say, 'be back in an hour'. I guess that is some measure of how much you respect some of us.
I want to see the truth, I do know that many of your daily logins are bots, many are alts, but Zee, how many are active customers, and how many of those are capable of buying land. Simple questions I feel. Unless we know how many real land buying residents are in game the rest of the numbers don’t add up. You can visit countless sims that are full of people and they are bots, camping, placed there to swell the numbers, to make those sims look busy, Its cheating and you know it is, yet you simply seem to add them to the figures and happily state that a million people logged in last month. A question I asked was how many of those million were actual accounts? You never say...
My questions you recall were:-
3) What are the current figures for:-
a) Number of avatars per region as I regularly see clutches of sims with not more than one or two avatars on?
b) Percentage of avatars who pay Tier to other players or Linden labs?
c) Number of daily logins divided between Premium members (able to hold land) and non premium members (capable of being a bot)
Another quick point, if you are still reading Zee. I see plots on the mainland where speculators are asking large sums of lindens for, hoping to make a good income no doubt. My question revolved around this. How much land was sold: how much land was reclaimed: how much land was up for sale
Yes I used those colons again as I know what a ratio is and I know too that the figures are not that simple to answer, but the proportional relationships should be leaping off the page at you in all honesty. They will support the fact that you have been creating land at an alarming rate, recovering land at an alarming rate and seeing land churned without being settled upon as the numbers of paying residents does not spread out over the amount of land you have made available.
Am I wrong? Show me I am wrong and I will write an article supporting you to offset the last couple articles I wrote sending messages of gloom and despondency. I would like to do that.
1 comment:
I'm having trouble making sense of what you're saying here, but I have a few questions.
1. What's this about Atown Fall? He has made himself into a rather big deal in Nautilus, buying and flipping land but also setting up a Nautilus town council with himself in charge and recruiting people to campaign against what he sees as ugly builds and poor designs on the content. I found him outrageous, as the first thing he did was mute everybody in his town council group lol.
How can you "steal sims" from someone? Was this one of those deals where you paid an upfront purchase price, but he still retained ownership, then if you were late with tier, he then seized them back from you? That's common. Please explain.
2. Why does it bother you if there are only 2 avatars per sim? Somebody pays tier on every island in the sea. Some of it sits empty as there isn't enough rentals demand, but people don't then go out of business, they try to hang on. But if you see a sim, it has tier paid on it, by someone, so it's part of the world, and that's what people want. Why not let them have this freedom of space?
3. You yourself complain about poor occupancy, as most of the rentals business complains. But why must this market provide you with a business? Why would the Lindens be to blame if there are too many rental agents? Something has to force them out of business when there are too many of them. One of those things is Linden policies killing off arbitrage that works not in their favour, but in the favour of those making a quick buck.
4. You seem to have a hatred for land barons flipping land. Why? You yourself sell land. Now, what is the plan, if you have no free land market, and you somehow restrict evil land barons from flipping land, to enable people to purchase it? Do you think it should be allocated by a commitete on a waiting list? How well do you think that would work?
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