Linden Labs Second Life accounts terminated

Headline: Linden Labs Second Life accounts terminated

Dated: 6th December 2008

Source: River Ely

Rivers-Islands.com

I started in Second life in September 2006 by creating an account and downloading the viewer. A large software package that was frail, it easily crashed and caused my internet bandwidth to rise from kilobytes per month, through mega bytes and into the giga bytes. Addiction was quick.

Over the next few months we learned what could be done in Second Life, and we learned of the possibilities, they seemed endless, there was something un-limiting about the entire immersive experience. It may have been digital, but it seemed to be so real. It took moments to realise the onscreen characters were, like my own, manipulated by real people, real world views, concepts, choices, idioms, everything! All coming together in a common location in the ethereal three dimension electronic reality transmitted from unknown servers on another planet, or so it seemed.

Today I closed several accounts. I did not abandon them, I transferred the Linden Dollars to my sub account and then selected each in turn for closure. The inventory is mostly no transfer, so nothing gets to be kept these days, and without another ‘Second Life’ to use them in, they are so much wasted funds. I have closed just nine accounts, some seven hundred US Dollars and a total of six quarterly closed accounts saving me on renewal fees. The dollar value lost today to me is about a thousand dollars in inventory losses.

Each account had a character that was unique and had a life of their own. The names are:-
Adia Bury, portrayed in the end as a black skinned gay male, he was used to demonstrate to bigots that homophobia hurts everyone.
Lief Ella, A darling of a girl who loved to have fun.
Caela Shepherd, so close to my own natural identity and created to allow a close friend to explore her own needs in SL.
Arel Allen, I devised to fly around my sims and locate ban lines as an estate owner, I never saw the ban lines, and I did not want my residents to have their second life experience degraded so Arel Allen became the ‘crash dummy’.
Kaela Kingsford, she was my gift to my partner, she played the part of the submissive, and it did not last long.
Lucy Newall, created to explore the sex industry on SL.
River Riggles, A demonic girl and angry at the world and the idiots that run it. She showed them their weaknesses in spades, she made enemies where other people were willing to turn a blind eye and walk away.
Kizzy Kerr, created in the United States, my home and my part of Floridian America. And finally,
Susan Seaton, Author, Creator, Pain in the rear end.




One of the above is the real me. All of them have traits that combine to make me. Each account meant something, they were not bots, and they were active paid for accounts that allowed me to have several different but essential versions of my own real life in the virtual world of Second Life.

Transcript Ends: Accounts Closed Permanently.

Linden Labs, Second life loses another key investor by River Ely.

Linden Labs Second Life loses another key investor.

Today started with a thunderstruck announcement on the blogs, announcing Sarah Nerd is pulling out of her investment in Second Life by Linden Labs. I read her SNE Announcement in a flash. The words went into my head as concepts and came out as tears. If Sarah is going, then who...

I know Sarah, only casually, but as a role model and as a truly good person. I picked up my blogging tool...


Hi Sarah.

Congratulations for holding on so long, it has been a leap of faith trusting in Second Life, by Linden Labs to turn things around. You and I started about the same time in SL, though my partner and I are coming up to retirement and put a lot of our initial start up cost on credit card. Between us (Rivers Islands and NEF Holdings) we had a fair number of islands with over 600 residents, in seemingly no time at all. We saw you and others (Barts for example) doing well and that rallied us. Our business models may have been a little different, but in essence, we all invested in the expensive start up costs to recover that cost over time from the tiers the other players paid to us because they could not afford to buy a whole sim, or a whole void, or a whole parcel on the auctions.

I have already pulled out, my partner is all but pulled out and I doubt we will have an active presence in SL in the New Year. It is sad to see you go under, it re enforces our view that SL has been cheating on us, undercutting our ability to maintain our investments in them, destroying faith in a stable working platform, denying us the basic ability to forecast costs and gauge returns factors. If we cannot work out if we will lose money over time, we will not invest, that would be foolish; we do not give money away for the fun of it.

I fear the statistics for registrations, land use, dollar transactions et al, as exalted by Second Life ‘bean-counters’ like Zee Linden adhere too, are make believe. They are unreal in the extreme. The only person being fooled is the fool himself.

Sorry to see you go Sarah, you have been a formidable representation is Second Life, and your absence is a damning representation to all others confirming Linden Labs Second Life is no longer a place for those seriously interested in creating Virtual Worlds for Profit. The model, has been broken.
Condolences
River Ely


Other blogs by this author can be found at:- http://rivers-rock.blogspot.com/
Sarah Nerds Post, and reply:- http://your2ndplace.com/node/1380#comment-12859

Goodnight Linden Labs, Second Life has finished and we are leaving now.

Another open space has to be switched off. Truth is, I have no idea if mine is the 500th, 1000th, or 15,000th. The figures from Linden Labs are hopelessly inconsistent. Zee Linden, the Financial Officer suggested to me there were 15000 open spaces sold over the last 6 – 9 months.

If other land owners are facing the same loss of traffic and support, I imagine SL is pretty much coming up empty. Here is my ‘Ticket’ to Linden labs Concierge:-

Ticket Description

Summary: Close Region


Ticket Type: Land and Region Issues


Are there multiple monitors?: 1


Region Request: Region is down


Region Name: River Mouth


Preferred Language: English


Details: Please take down 'River Mouth' region as it is no longer needed. River Mouth is now an empty Region. Please switch it off.


Reference Ticket number: [Not Shown]


Attachment:


Solution Solved: (11/11/08 6:43 AM PDT) Hello River!


Thanks for letting us know. I have disabled the region, to prevent further cost. The final deletion will occur in 7 days from now.


Best regards, (An un-named) Linden, Concierge


Action: Close Ticket



Comment:


Sad huh

Linden Labs were quite happy to sell me all those islands, and charge me a set up fee disguised as if I was actually purchasing something. Now they are sold, or as in this case, switched off, nothing, no remorse, no care, and no emotion. (employee name), I don’t know you, but I tell you this, your employer, does not give a damn, and that’s why I am leaving SL after all this is over and done with. The spark of care and the concern is gone from Second Life.


------------------------ ticket closed ---------------------------

Its heartbreaking returning things to owners, you are returning just prims, three dimensional co-ordinates with texture images wrapped about them, but they were made by people, each has their own reason and method, each has their own unique fingerprint and reality, each prim is a reminder that some one loved what they were doing and the reason for doing it. Real people who trusted Linden Labs to look after their real dollar investment in real thoughts and real feelings. The players leave, move on, do other things, leaving you with not just an empty nest, but empty streets, places, communities, islands, hearts, dreams and missing rainbows.

Linden Labs so mismanaged Second Life, they undersold the open space sims, waited until they had sold tens of thousands, and then elected to create a price hike of 66%. Each sim they sold paid for the server they were on, the monthly tier was pure profit, a never ending income stream. Then to scare people silly, so much so, they run away abandoning their things is pure arcane stupidity. It is pure greed delivering financial Suicide. Congrats Linden Labs, you did what Reginald Perrin failed to do, you are destroying the company you have by chasing away customers who have happily invested in your product for years. Reggie admitted selling Grot, useless rubbish and the people flocked in. Yes that was a tv program, but funny as anything. You are doing it for real, it’s not funny, it is scary and sad.

You do not acknowledge your 15,000,000 residents for the most part do not log in. Of the 40 – 60 thousand log-ins per day, 50% are bots that are taking up space to ‘game’ the numbers to make some islands look busy. You don’t have land sales totalling thousands on the mainland, you have a bunch of wanna-be realtors, buying and selling to each other avatar inflating prices. The biggest number of your logins are people on a free ride, and they will not support you.

I, and my colleagues, as Island Owners, bought your product, paid your over priced tier for years on end, without complaining and now you have robbed us of our customers, increased our costs, devalued our investments and now, as we leave, we switch off empty Sims.

Linden Labs and Second Life has been fun, but it’s over and we are leaving.