Jack Linden, head of Linden Lab's Land Team, has proferred an update on the policy changes to void simulators that sparked a revolt in Second Life earlier this week. According to Jack, all of the feedback has been read. That must have been an absolutely Herculean task right there, considering that the responses number in the thousands, and Jack is apparently out of town.
Jack implies that the type of usage is a more important factor in the pricing changes than the actual cost of usage, though to be fair, it's an ambiguous pair of sentences, 'We are saying that the use has changed, and continues to do so as people find more creative ways to use them. So the revised pricing is about recognising that change of use and the additional costs and value associated with it.'
Linden Lab themselves, appear to have a slew of apparently overloaded void simulators on the new Nautilus continent.
Protests are still wide-ranging and ongoing, and larger in scale than any that have come previously, which is surprising considering that unlike many, they are not organized protests, but ad-hoc gatherings of plaintiffs. No organized protests in Second Life have ever reached this scale or density. Some users are promoting a 24 hour boycott on Second Life on the first day of December (US time), still others are attempting to intentionally crash simulators on the new Nautilus continent to get the Lab's attention. Actual sign-waving protests seem to have diminished while Jack is out of town, but the furor apparently has not.
The issues with void simulators seem to be just about all anyone is talking about at the moment.
Many believe that the last set of void simulator policy changes were intended to encourage the residential and commercial use of void simulators -- and indeed, there doesn't seem to be any other way to interpret it. If there is data supporting an alternative interpretation of the policies, Linden Lab has not discussed it.
Indeed, as Vint Falken notes, it appears that Linden Lab intended void simulators for exactly the purposes which they are now claiming are problematic, showing four template builds that Linden Lab apparently planned to sell in conjunction with new void simulators, all oriented around the kinds of use that are apparently nixed.
Talk about mixed-messages. We'll have to wait and see what comes of this. What are you expecting? Multiple pricing structures, a reversal of policy, or something we've not thought of yet?
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