From a rational, real life business perspective, LL should be charging private island owners LESS than they do mainland land owners on monthly fees, due to the cost savings.

Instead what LL did was maintain concierge service and disband Help Request, essentially abandoning the mainland residency into an ungoverned chaos (no, you can no longer call the mainland “anarchy”, because the distinction between anarchy and chaos is personal accountability). The refusal to provide Help Request saves LL money enough to dump mainland on the market at less than the cost that private island owners, and at lower monthly tier too. This forces less successful island owners out of business, the sim servers they paid for , which LL now has for zero capital cost, LL can repurpose for selling more cheap mainland, which drives more private island owners under, which supplies them more zero-capital cost servers, which lowers mainland costs further.

Ergo, LL is capitalizing itself by deluding and defrauding the small and home businessperson out of their meager savings by making them believe they can make a living in a fair and free market, when the market is hopelessly slanted in LL’s favor and only those who are successful over and above the average, in the private islands, can compete. Those who are not immediately successful, or unwilling to subsidize unsuccessful islands, will lose their investments to LL’s drive to capitalize itself not off of angel investors or IPO stockholders like any self respecting start-up would, but off individuals, ordinary people everywhere who believe in a fair and free market but are getting conned.

Those who work for LL who did not see this before cannot claim it is not obvious now. Does LL consider this fair business practice? Ethical business practice? For all those who claim the estate owners rip people off, we all have a fantastic role model in LL to show us how to do it.

As George Washington once said, government is the great teacher. Here, in our world, LL is the state, and its example is teaching the rest of us.

i have about as much sympathy for you as for the people in the us that bought too much house with a low variable interest rate, now that rates are going up, they expect the federal gov. to save their sorry arses.

can’t afford it with a rate increase, then you really couldn’t afford it to begin with.

do what the rest of us are forced to do, LIVE WITHIN YOUR MEANS

(That is pretty much what this says.)

That being said, I think all this could well be the death of my AV. I used to enjoy this place so much before. So once my current contract is up I will have to think long and hard if it’s worth it.

It would appear LL have lost site of how to manage a community and started seeing members as nothing more than numbers. Such a shame.

As for post 133, some people just expect value for money. Don’t rag on others for being not quite as easiliy pleased as you. i’m glad your sim is running like a gem and that you so eagerly pay through the nose for it without sparing a glance at the long term implications of the majority being unhappy.

The current quality and size of SL, together with emerging competitors like http://www.hipihi.com), do not yet allow focus on profit.

3D virtual worlds can count on high level of forced loyalty (social connections and investments made by their residents), but those assets can also be liquidated or even migrated with a limited cost.

The VAT joke (if not legal consequences) and price increases could be letal at this stage.

Just my personal opinion.