Is LL Breaking Inworld Business?

by prokofy on 16/03/07 at 6:03 am

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By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Broken Toys Repair & Doll Hospital

Three things came together today that sent a number of inworld business people thinking clearly: the Lindens are breaking inworld business because they don’t need it anymore. Or…are they? They don’t need the handful of “positive Linden flow” inworld businesses that used to make up the bottom line because now they have hundreds of corporations, educational institutions, and many new wealthier customers from countries whose currencies are strong against the US dollar to buy many sims wholesale. Or…do they?

First, the breaking of a rental script that even Brent Linden conceded was updated to “a show-stopper” on the new beta JIRA bug-tester and was something the Lindens are “on”. The bug involves scripts that were put in an objects inventory and set to the non-running state before the 1.13.4 update which now can no longer be be set to the running state via llScriptState(name, TRUE) or by manually clicking the check box on the script window. This affects many vendors as well as anyone who tried to conserve sim resources by setting scripts not to run. Clunk. Lots of vendors and rental boxes not accepting rent, or behaving strangely causing panic, refunds, aggravation.

That’s likely to get fixed, but another “temporary fix” that people thought was just a band-aid solution for database overload in “First Look” is now officially announced as an incorporated feature — to the aggravation of many who relied on it. Soon, the inworld “account history” will be entirely removed from the user panel with all its useful real-time transaction information, in order to redistribute the heavy database load from the world to the web, and you’ll have to go out to the web — and hope that the Lindens will update the page more frequently than the 48 hours it fell back to these last few weeks.

Inworldbiz

Then there’s the big whack of 63 sims — itself, perhaps, not newsworthy as the Lindens have always been committed to land-glutting to make themselves money and break the backs of land barons, but this time all the sims are parceled up to 4096 m2 pieces.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Guess what! The land barons can stop crying. Although no one ever remembers sims being put out this way — the sims destined for auction always appear whole and unparceled — for some reason, they appeared this way. But not all will remain this way. “Oh those won’t remain parcelled – we’ll be joining them up before selling into whole regions,” Jack Linden told me this morning. Stay tuned and watch the auctions — in fact, students of the past few months of auctions will note that they *do* sell 4096s and other sizes from new sims, not just whole sims.

This sort of pre-division of sims before the auction hasn’t been done by LL since June 2005, when they made changes to the mainland sales system that some of us protested because it appeared they were only serving wholesale land baron buyers. Indeed, back then barons proceeded to buy numerous sims for $1000 or only a little more — until the Lindens raised the price on islands, everyone stampeded back to the cheaper mainland sims on the auction, a hardware shortage ensured, and then the price of mainland shot up to $4000 US.

Now, just as the land market is cooling off, with the price dropping a few points at least inworld, land-baron middle-men will be cut off from trying to scoop up wholesale again, as presumably legions of end-users who just want 4096 m2 and a mule to start SL will buy directly off the auction [depending on how many 4096s they put on the auction]. Of course, if the price sinks to $9/m on auction, baby barons will be scooping them up in big batches, and there are now some new auction players with the resources to spend thousands of US dollars just to hold market share and keep prices high — the concept of the price falling faster due to glutting didn’t quite work — but if the Lindens keep up the pace of land-printing it will.

SL Reuters bureau — 50 percent of whose stories in the “economy” category and 43 percent of whose stories in the “business” category are directly about the inworld economy — says inworld business took a surge upward in February — similar to its November surge and unlike its January slump. Adam Reuters is just reading the Lindens’ numbers on their statistics page, but with a weather eye; when summarized in more coherent wire copy language, it almost seems as if there is “improvement” in business even at a time when some people are giving up in frustration with poor performance. We wish we knew what these businesses are! (we know the Lindens ideologically exclude the land business from their figures), and await further sleuthing from new interns and other Reuters folk who will be spending more time inworld. These surges and slumps could be somehow related to people’s real lives and seasonal expenditures, of course, but they could also be explained by a very prosaic reason: business slumps when the game doesn’t work.

This week, many experienced the inability to teleport; transactions weren’t reflected; they couldn’t rez objects or objects came back to inventory even if they wore the right group tag; builds were lost; inventory was missing. Like so many weeks, except somehow harsher as one of the harder patches went in that seemed to break as many things as it fixed. In fact, as we learned from Blue Linden’s office hours this week, the Lindens have a kind of built-in philosophy of “permanent revolution”: SL will never be fixed, because that would mean for it to become static and uncompetitive; SL will always be changing and growing and the concept that you “stop the world and stabilize it” isn’t one you even entertain with millions of people charging in the door.

Inevitably, all new developments will break something, and make new opportunities for other things. Suck it up, and shut up, as the forums trolls will tell you.

Who will care about inworld transaction histories? The casual player doesn’t follow his spending sprees — it’s almost better not to know. When the box hits $0, he buys more. Most residents don’t even know where transaction history on the web page is located, or of its existence.

Inworld accounts are mainly valuable to those businesses trying to serve customers in real time. And precisely because there is so much newbie hardship with learning curves, business owners want to be able to identify who has a problem, and what kind of problem it is — and where it is. Most newbies are unable to notice and read the green chat coming out of a vendor or rental box, understand its instructions, and pay the right amount.

But only businesses with micropayments and customers to serve inworld are going to need this record; big businesses and their metaversal sherpas have no need for account history because they have no need for micropayments or the inworld economy as such; these world attributes aren’t necessary for their own metrics, service, or market decisions — and they certainly aren’t needed for revenue, as they are for indigenous businesses.

Without immediate, real-time records of payments, locations, and problems, however, inworld businesses have suffered losses and customers have grown frustrated. LL remains unmoved, not even having discussed this particular change with “the community”. The database is overloaded — full stop. That means it has to be redistributed and every single Linden in every sector is challenged to beg, borrow, or steal database capacity from wherever they can to “scale up”. Inworld account-history functions needed at best by only a few thousand businesses with heavy customer contact (with at best only a few hundred making a “positive Linden flow” or possible profit) are low-hanging fruit to be eliminated. Why? Because the top businesses likely already have networked vendors or rental systems that already give them totals and locations and names and even keys and purchasing patterns — that is, when they work and sim lag or crashing doesn’t mess them up.

The inworld accounts page had a crude balance sheet with utterly useless information like a total of “all gifts” (rental payments are reported as “gifts”) or total of “unknown payments” and with bouncing payments also throwing off the numbers. The Lindens might have considered just getting rid of this cludge and kept the line-by-line real-time record of transactions, but they felt it was too great a load. In theory, the web — where we are all supposed to be heading with all deliberate speed — will take care of all of this for us. Too bad for you if tabbing down your game lags you out or even crashed your SL; you’ll have to get with the program. And maybe once you go out to the web you should just drop this laggy, once-a-week downloading thingie and go here — and to all points beyond.

As for the land glut, many will greet this development gladly, if it makes homes and businesses more affordable. Likely the Lindens figured out what rental agents figured out a year ago — 4096 is a very popular size, and a growing size, and a financed size, unlike 515s, which were subsidized, and which were even abandoned as people found them too small even to bother with.

A nation of new 4096 propertarians coming to settle the 63-odd sims put out down south will help restore that healthy inner core that has eroded considerably from the old beta-era testers gifted with charter accounts with 4096 m2 tier-free for life (after they paid a one-time annual free for the account) who have been steadily abandoning their games and just not logging in, out of disappointment, disinterest, or frustration. The Lindens have even put out that old core sim dirt that looks like a used car lot in Flint or the substrate of ur-Hobbit land instead of the brown or white sugar stuff (merely not to compete with their own island sales, I guess).

Thus the face of the SL economy will be changing yet again. Smaller businesses that relied on inworld accounts and direct relationships with customers using that feedback will give way to more massive businesses with the resources to network their vendors and information and put all the back end on their own powerful servers and third-party shopping sites (if the latest bug is fixed, and if new ones don’t come in its place). Barons who bought and sold land and kept the market liquid will now have to cancel their trading tier as prices plummet — and Philip Linden will only be too happy to get rid of the middle class of middlemen with their hated arbitrage, and usher in more content-producing masses out of which might come the killer apps.

More resident-to-resident trading of better-developed 4096 properties will likely ensue, because the cost may keep out griefers and script-kiddies from ruining the value of sims on one lot. It depends on whether newbies and midbies are willing to brave the auction to get these cheaper 4096s — and I bet they will. The subsidies of free 4096s for educators have ended, and some of them will buy. $25 a month for a home or business in SL is a completely reasonable expense for the kind of people who have DSL lines and the right graphics card; the Lindens look at actual purchasing patterns, not the whining on the forums of a few people who say they can’t give up a latte once a week to buy a $9.95 account with a free 512 tier in it.

In short, expect more fauxbos, bourgeoisie, clubbers and McMansions in Second Life, more log-on hours, and more revenue for the Lindens in this year going toward the final stretch of whether they IPO or go open-source with their world-changing invention.

17 Responses to “Is LL Breaking Inworld Business?”

  1. Jesseaitui Petion

    Mar 16th, 2007

    If this is the case LL is completely foolish.

    But then again, they`ve proven themselves to be just that; time and time again.

  2. Ordinal Malaprop

    Mar 16th, 2007

    Yes, 4096 is a sensible size to start selling at. It’s large enough that you can actually do something serious with it, have a nice-looking shop, build something you feel comfortable with, have a house and a garden, but it’s not prohibitively expensive.

    More to the point, selling in chunks of 4096 means that you have to be at least reasonably determined to make a go of things to shell out the money in the first place, and you’ll want to get your money back if you _do_ leave, so people are less likely to just not log in for the rest of their subscription leaving a half-built plywood club there; in other words it could help sim blight, though it’s not guaranteed.

  3. Martin Squeegee

    Mar 16th, 2007

    Prok,

    I think you are right but it might not miss out the legions of baby-barons, land barons, plot flippers etc completely as there will always be land to trade.

    Releasing 1008 plots might actually be a good thing and prices might actually increase or at least level as a result. Whilst traders big and small do most of the land buying and selling at some point people with a vested interest in the land actually by.

    Right now they are stuck and have to buy from someone like me. If they can buy direct from linden then for most people that would be great. Now linden being linden will auction – in all the auctions I have seen people pay just a little bit more than they would want to make sure they they get the plot they want. Having invested that money they won’t want to sell for less… spread more ownership around on this basis and the market finds it’s price point and that could be higher than today.

    I am sure that us baby barons could influence the price by buying up some of the regions but as you know 63 in one go is going to be a tough financial investment even for the most successful. Not sure I would put $250,000 into this game?

    I do however think that selling in 4096 plots at least to begin with might produce some better sims – less advertising space and more creative areas that people can enjoy.

  4. Prokofy Neva

    Mar 16th, 2007

    This just in: “Oh those won’t remain parcelled – we’ll be joining them up before selling into whole regions,” Jack Linden told me this morning. Stay tuned and watch the auctions — in fact, students of the past few months of auctions will note that they *do* sell 4096s and other sizes from new sims, not just whole sims.

    This is very odd, as I have never in 2 plus years of watching land in SL *ever* seen them put out a brand-new sim already parceled. That just doesn’t make sense. They sell them whole; they don’t first make them parceled and link them up; they start out as wholes inworld. I’m not getting this…

  5. Amanda

    Mar 16th, 2007

    Here’s a semi-on-topic question. How are any of us supposed to buy anything if we can’t buy Lindens? There has been a “Paypal billing issue” for a week now, and you can’t use Paypal to buy Lindens. LL finally acknowledged it on the 13th, but still hasn’t posted an update or offered advice to those who can’t use Paypal even though they’ve deleted & recreated their payment agreements.

  6. Khamon

    Mar 16th, 2007

    At the risk of exposing my tekkiwikiness, parcel subdivision data are stored in one of the channels of a raw file that describes a sim’s landscape. Other channels store the mesh information and all those settings we can flip on and off. LL are possibly using older raw configurations to quickly terraform the new sims. If the only difference is that the land is presubdivided and has to be joined, that’s not so much manual labour.

    Addressing commercial point, I have to agree that operating an inworld business is becoming more of a chore than a hobby. Advertising support has never been a priority and the delayed transaction feature has taken the cake. My understanding is that we’ll ultimately have an inworld brower that can display the transaction web page inworld. Dunno how current that’ll be. I used to refund money daily to people who’d bought duplicate (copyable) trees. Now that feature of my business is unreliable as I have to think to do it on a delayed basis through the website in the real world.

    But I don’t think it’s a Linden conspiracy. When we ask individuals, they tell us how much they love the wora’uld and admire the compelling nature of inworld commerce. And, to their credit, they honestly believe that they can, and are working very hard to, maintain Mainland World as a cohesive Second Life community. Even those of us that don’t love this world hack at this subproject. It helps greatly that, after having made the firm decision to produce an ambiguous platform to support any project for all people, LL are willing to continue pouring so much development and support money down the hole.

  7. Khamon

    Mar 16th, 2007

    Thanks for writing a concise and cohesive article Prok; I enjoyed reading and responding to it.

  8. Cocoanut Koala

    Mar 16th, 2007

    You forgot that they erase our Classifieds randomly but frequently, and we have to constantly check to see if they are still there.

    coco

  9. Cocoanut Koala

    Mar 16th, 2007

    And – having read a post on this in the SL forums – I just went in world and confirmed it for myself:

    Your classified can disappear under classifieds but NOT in your profile. So don’t think that because it is in your profile people can see it.

    “Permanent revolution?” SL will never be fixed? You can’t stop the world to stabilize it? Well, that explains a lot.

    “Suck it up, and shut up, as the forums trolls will tell you.” Indeed they do. I’m actually bitter about this. When I first joined, I made earnest suggestions for what I thought would be improvements, and gave my opinion on things.

    To my surprise, no one wanted to actually discuss these issues, but focused first on explaining to me patiently why I wasn’t supposed to care about these things, and that I just didn’t understand the bigger picture. Then, when I persisted, the remarks became much more hateful and dismissive.

    The lesson I learned from that – which I repeat to myself each day when I read the SL forums and hear other, newer players, bringing up these issues – is, “You’re not supposed to care.”

    Man, did that get drummed into me. The good news is these fanboys (plain old meanies?) have largely much shut up for some reason. These newer people are allowed to state their opinions without being personally trashed for it. Maybe they just finally became the majority.

    But I’m always sitting there, parroting back my lesson – “You’re not supposed to care.” And I think that part is still quite true.

    To LL, the end is way more important than the means, and the greater vision always much more important than any individuals.

    coco

  10. shockwave yareach

    Mar 16th, 2007

    There are dozens of solutions to the landbarons’ grabbing all the land. Every one of them has a strength and a weakness.

    Me, I’d bring back “First Land” as a parcel of 1024m, and make 1/4 of new sims restricted to people who’ve never bought land before. New land for new landowners. Let everyone get a reasonable shot at having a place to call theirs as a reason to pay the monthly fee. Without any real chance at being able to have decent-sized land and build your own dreamhome, what advantage is there in paying for premium membership? 400L a week? Please – that won’t even buy decent clothing and I can get more lindens for less just by buying them and skipping the whole premium costs.

    The barons did not create SL, build the hardware or write the codes that make the experience worthwhile. I don’t see why a couple of people should be able to game the system and make more money than the people who make it all possible in the first place.

  11. Prokofy Neva

    Mar 16th, 2007

    Coco, I realized the classifieds were messed up but hadn’t figured out exactly WHAT was messed up until yesterday. On my profile, I saw that the ads were still showing. And I even bug reported it, and told Lindens that not only were some classifieds disappearing when not scheduled to expire, others seemed to persist after they should have disappeared. I have so many that I didn’t notice that in fact while some were on my profile, they weren’t really showing up in the actual classifieds list.

    I’m constantly redoing them and replacing them as a parcel rents and I put in a new one. But what I didn’t realize is that I have to scrupulously check the dates and delete any that weren’t on autorenew.

    I noticed a few lots just weren’t getting any TPs and not renting. I thought, hmm, that’s odd, is there something wrong with those lots? Are they stuck on access-only? Do they have prim plywood all over them? I visited them, checked everything, checked the ad (so I thought) and then saw still, nothing happened. I didn’t think to look carefully in the classifieds list itself — sure enough, 3 days of business was lost because the ad wasn’t even visible when I thought it was.

    >The barons did not create SL, build the hardware or write the codes that make the experience worthwhile. I don’t see why a couple of people should be able to game the system and make more money than the people who make it all possible in the first place.

    Indeed they do create SL — they create the communities and often many of the builds on the sims. And even if they didn’t code the sims they buy, their payments are feeding Linden Lab’s bottom line to the tune of 80 percent. The Lindens have a profit-making system where they sell land. They encourage others to have the same profit-making system. If they didn’t have that system, people wouldn’t bother to develop land. Land would sell very slowly; content creators are 10-15 percent of any population.

    This is a capitalist system, even though the Lindens do have fits of socialism at time and have utopian theory that has socialist elements.

    Those who don’t like the land baron system have an understable complaint — I’d like to see changes to it myself, mainly by democratizing the auction system so that anyone can put their land on the auction to be bid on to create more resident-to-resident transactions. But the alternative is to make an open source system or clone of SL and pay for servers yourself. Once you have had some fun playing with servers and solving problems Lindens solve about networks and electricity and workers, you’ll find you have to charge for people’s sandboxes too. The Internet isn’t free; it costs something, somewhere.

    Khamon, are you saying that they are using some old file that has the 4096s parcelled already along with the old dirt from the core sim as a short cut to get the sims terraformed faster? But there are terraforming scripts that do islands very quickly. Surely they can use those?

    >But I don’t think it’s a Linden conspiracy. When we ask individuals, they tell us how much they love the wora’uld and admire the compelling nature of inworld commerce. And, to their credit, they honestly believe that they can, and are working very hard to, maintain Mainland World as a cohesive Second Life community. Even those of us that don’t love this world hack at this subproject. It helps greatly that, after having made the firm decision to produce an ambiguous platform to support any project for all people, LL are willing to continue pouring so much development and support money down the hole.

    I’m not grasping this. You mean when you speak to individual Lindens? And what development money do you see them pouring down a rat hole on the mainland?

  12. Khamon

    Mar 16th, 2007

    Yes, LL can, for instance, save the raw file of Ravenglass. That includes not only the basic terraforming data but the parceling information and odd bits of data for each parcel such as whether or not it’s publically ediatable or buildable or whatever. They can then use that file to instaform a new sim on what I call the Dark Ages of Medieval Nomenclature continent (have you seen those names?). The resulting sim will have exactly the same landscape mesh (ground textures are stored in some file other than the raw), parceling, and parcel settings as Ravenglass did when the raw file was created. I’m simply saying that they may be using some existing raw files that already have the land subdivided into 4096 squares. No conspiratorial implications intended.

    And yes, individual Lindens have often stated privately, and in small groups, exactly the opposite of the lab’s ultimate intention. I won’t say plan because LL have about as much plan as the Cylons. So if you ask them “do you want to foster an atmostphere and tool set that facilitates the success of inworld business ventures?” they’ll say “of course we’re very committed to exploring the compelling nature of mainland commuuuuunity building.” That commitment includes paying a hundred liasons to help resolve neighborly squabbles in the interest of making the mainland seem attractive. Or am I wrong; do those liasons spend more time aiding estate owners than I think they do?

  13. Gaius Goodliffe

    Mar 16th, 2007

    “…and hope that the Lindens will update the page more frequently than the 48 hours it fell back to these last few weeks.”

    Um, that page has been up to the minute for over a week now. When the Account History first disappeared from the First Look viewer a couple weeks back, they said the one on the web page would start being real time on the next Wednesday update, and that’s precisely what happened on the next update, and how it’s been ever since.

    Your conspiracy theories are crazy enough already, throwing in outright falsehoods doesn’t help make them more believable.

    Now that they’ve made that change, it’s actually a heck of a lot easier and nicer for small business owners like myself. I don’t even have to be in-world (although I can be) toI check up to the minute history. Between that and IM-to-email and back, I can get a lot more done off-line than I could before. I sure am glad that LL not only cares but actually understands the needs of small businesses like mine better than you do.

  14. Khamon

    Mar 16th, 2007

    Gaius did you not know that you could check your account history on the website for years? It wasn’t implemented to replace the inworld transaction report but has been a useful feature, in it’s own right, for many versions. The fact that many people find it preferable doesn’t discount the need or feeling of people who relied habitually on the inworld report.

    Still, I’m hoping that an inworld browser window will allow us to access the web services in the client. Perhaps I should change my title to Immersion Smasher.

  15. Prokofy Neva

    Mar 17th, 2007

    >and that’s precisely what happened on the next update, and how it’s been ever since.

    Uh, no. First of all, for weeks it has been at 24-48 hours, which has caused absolute havoc.

    Secondly, I watch this constantly like a hawk — I have to, as I have a constant flow of customers doing stuff, wanting refunds or wanting moves to larger lots or increases of prims and resets or whatever. So I am here to tell you that that page does not, repeat NOT update in real time. It lagged hours for today for example.

    So you’re the one throwing in a falsehood — unless we can speculate that you, with only a few transactions, have a page that does update but I, with hundreds going by, don’t have a page updating. It is not updating in real time!

    As Khamon knows, you also seem completely unaware of the fact that this web-based account history always existed for years — in fact it used to go back to the beginning of your US dollar transactions even, but they dumped that in 2005. Again, toggling the pages is wear and tear, and crashy for some. I do it, but I find it uber-annoying.

    Khamon, you are so touchingly innocent, believing in HTML on a prim. I wish I had your faith.

  16. Khamon

    Mar 19th, 2007

    Sorry, I meant to say inworld browser rather than HTML on a prim. Actually, we already have an inworld browser (F1) but LL won’t let us use it for general web access. We have to edit the byte code and that’s too much trouble with new Firstlook clients coming out two or three times a week.

    Of course the updates will have to be timely, real timely, truly real timely.

  17. Just a Thought

    Mar 19th, 2007

    Funny Prok, the page updates just fine for me – in fact within minutes of several in world purchases they were right there on the transaction history page.

    So sorry – it seems you’re wrong about that 24-48 hour across the board assumption …. Gee, I guess it all has to do with the volume of information that has to be transfered – imagine that!

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