Just Another Good Idea (JAGI)

Hi [Enter name of new hire], Welcome to Linden Labs.

I recycled the above, I used it for a whole bunch of other people who have come to the forum and said “I am new but we are going to change things for the better, we need to listen to you, give us your ideas”. And we do, we give you all ideas, concepts, suggestions. Some good, some awful and some not worth printing, and every now and them, we come up with a terrific idea and somehow, after all is said and done, it turns into just that, “Just Another Good Idea” (JAGI).

Your product has a lot of rough edges, is sloppy in some parts and is broken in others, the JIRA tells you that but I understand it will cost money and brains to fix a lot of the issues and that could detract from immediate income generation.

So a new JAGI needs to not detract from Income Generation while at the same time, fixing something that is broken.

Your ideas over the past two years have been perplexing, Windlight, Voice, Banning Gambling rather that create local servers, updates needing a whole package to be re-downloaded instead of a module for that package (huh!) so a new JAGI would have to have a value and a point and that could be implemented with minimum disruption.

You product has a huge addicted user base. No matter how much you mess up (and admit for once that mistakes in judgement are too frequent), we are still here. If you ever had a company that needed customer generated feedback, it is this one, but it seems no one at Linden Labs listens to their customers here. So a new JAGI needs to come from listening to us, your user base. (We are for the most part friendly, but remember, we outnumber you a million to one).


To round up, a JAGI needs to continue to generate income and hopefully improve it.

A JAGI needs have value that does not require disruption or a change in infrastructure.

A JAGI needs to be easy to implement, (Those are the best kind, low outlay, huge return)

And a JAGI has to be borne from your customers.


Here is my JAGI

Premium Accounts

The value of the premium account is miss understood when compared with Non Premium account holders. I would change little for the premium account holders. I would make a change to non premium account holders to widen the gap between account holders and non account holders.

1) I suggest that non premium account holders, Alts, Bots, Campers, Greifers etcetera are rewarded with in inventory scrub every 24 hours. ( yes, remove all created and or purchased content). Reason: if the account is to be used to sample SL then it is no loss, allow the character to be persistent but with an inventory cleaned out after 24 hours.

2) Allow non premium account holders to forcibly expire after thirty days. With the name being locked for 30 days more against re-use. How many times do you need to log in and explore before deciding you want to retain inventory and a name?

3) Remove the option to hold funds from non account holders. That way they can’t be ‘gifted’ funds from other avatar accounts and buy weapons or other things that can be used to reduce the quality of game play for those of us who invest into Second Life.

4) If the account is an ALT account, and the account is riding on the strength of a premium account, then for account purposes, it should be part of that account and counted as the main avatar. So if there are 40,000 logged in and 10,000 are ALTS camping or taking up numbers, the true account of logged in accounts should be 30,000.

Or

4a) If an premium account is logged in, and an alternative account for that holder tries to log in, the premium account avi should be bumped off. Restricting one avi to one user. If the second account is a premium account, then allow the second avatar to add to the total number of avatars on line without bumping off the first or primary avatar.


Remove negativity

I am not suggesting Camping Avi’s should be banned, but if you want to set a dozen or forty avatars to camp to swell the numbers for your sim, then pay premium for each one, then we will see how ineffective campers are and Linden Labs will make a tidy sum in the process.

I am not suggesting that people create alts for negative reasons, or for attacking those who have displeased their owners, but if you had to pay premium for your avi in order to attack the other player, then losing your accounts upon detection would be a far more costly process.


Resolve

Simple changes, they have defined values, they increase the revenue for Linden Labs and go some way to creating more visible numbers with more accuracy. It means little or no change for the vast majority of users who already contribute heavily to the success of Linden labs, and the removal of some free accounts ability to grief, camp or clutter, would be an impact appreciated by every premium member that ever existed.

Please vote for my JAGI.

http://forums.secondlife.com reply# 374

Letter to Zee Linden.CFO Linden Labs (Secondlife.com)

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.