price increase

Well here is most of Jacks Office hour anyways.  Looks like I managed to lose the last 10 mins or so when I was on the porch chatting up the mailman.  But it's obvious that people are still very upset including me over the open space price increase..  At this point I just feel as if I was robbed by Linden Labs.  They sold me and I paid for a specific product with a specific number of prims and promise of tier.  Now they realize that they have made a mistake and people are actually using the product and prims given.  Now Linden Lab feels that it was a mistake after marketing a product without fully testing the product.  They messed up, not us.  The only thing I think would be fair is for them to grandfather the prims and tier for the people who they sold these sims to, or else recall the product and refund the purchase price.  They say they can't so that.  They plan to keep our money paid into it no matter what, but they are raising price 67% or changing it to the point that it's no longer what we purchased.  It's just plain unethical and wrong.  I'm very frustrated, along with several others....

[10:59]  Sarah Nerd: Hey Jack
[11:00]  Equinox Pinion: depends on the tier date you will get 500
[11:00]  Qie Niangao: greetings, Jack.
[11:00]  Talarus Luan: Hijack!
[11:00]  Jack Linden: halloo one and all
[11:00]  xstorm Radek: hi Jack :-)
[11:00]  Talarus Luan: Err.. I mean "Hi, Jack!"
[11:00]  Ellen Dressler: HIJACK
[11:00]  HAX Benelli: hello jack
[11:00]  Jarnz Dench: hello Jack
[11:00]  Equinox Pinion: hi jack
[11:00]  Dytska Vieria: hello Jack!
[11:00]  Caitlyn Clawtooth: heyas Jack
[11:00]  Ellen Dressler: oops Hello Jack
[11:00]  Theresa Felisimo: grrrrr lags got me
[11:00]  Alexxa Despres: Hjack!
[11:00]  Liv Leigh: hello { Read more }

I'm at the stage, where everything I thought meant something, seems so unappealing.

It has been hard putting this entry together because I'm fecking furious with Linden Lab right now. I only have one Openspace sim, I have never been that keen on them and have said more than once that I expect them to crash, I didn't envisage that crash would happen in the fashion it has.

Let's just take a step back in time to July 12th, where in this post I said:

"On the blog Zee gushed about the increased size in land mass. He attributed this to new users buying new cheaper islands and Openspaces,and then went onto highlight the price of Openspaces. Shake your money maker.

What he didn't point out was that Openspaces are intended for light use. I have no problem with Linden Lab promoting their product, but promote them for their intended use or support them as normal type sims. They know damn well the boom in Openspaces isn't for "light use".

Then skip forward to yesterday, when Jack showed yet again that Linden Lab wouldn't know what customer service was if it slapped them round the face. The great betrayal over openspaces finally landed. A price increase with no mention of getting better value, oh no, just a plain old price increase. What benefits are people getting for their extra money?
{ Read more }

Well as some of You know last night I wasn't very happy to hear that Linden Labs would be increasing the tier on open spaces sims a disgusting 67%.  I was upset, I was angry.  I realized that this was most likely the final nail in the coffin of my slowly dying estate side of the land business.  You see my rentals on estates have been slowing lately.  I assumed it was due to the lack of new users in SL, and the fact that our RL economy has been bad so people don't have as much play money to throw into a virtual world.  I just can't see renters willing to pay an extra 67% from what they pay now and I don't blame them.  That's not a small understandable increase, that's a massive jump up that most people who budget can't adjust to. 

When they started offering single open space sims everyone wanted one.  No one wanted to rent a 1/4 sim of a full estate when they could have a lot more room and privacy on a single open space.  As a result my full estates started to slowly become bare.  I ended having a few of my full estates converted into open space sims.  I didn't want to, especially since open space sims have basically no resale value but I didn't really have a choice because I could not afford to continue keeping sims that ran under the monthly tier fee.  As a few months went by even some of those sims slowed down as the market became flooded with them.  I sold off a few more estates that I just couldn't afford.  So after doing all of that attempting to adjust, LL comes out with this announcement last night only months after the delivered the last big blow to us.
{ Read more }