Well, we have the announcement now, and of course some great ideas on the lower end of the pricing scale. Homesteads.

However, Homesteads are still fairly useless for communities, and too expensive. It’s great for individuals though, and LL should sell them to private owners at the new price point directly. I think the pricing as an entry level midsim is fair.

Openspaces unfortunately are destroyed as a useful product for community building, it has not even returned to the old method of anchoring the sims (which was a good idea) and are too restricted to be of use to anyone who needs these sims for activities that require space over prims – such as sailing. Sometimes sailing events can put a heavy load on an open water sim for a short time. The big communities need to be allowed to own their own lag, and allow them to absorb the performance shock of the occasional event.

LL, you know the answer and we know the answer. Start renting whole servers to the large communities. That way we can divide a server up as we need.

Here are my thoughts for a “Community Server” product I propose:

Offer a more reasonable pricing for renting out a whole server aimed for communities – which will make it impossible for the subleasing of Homesteads and single sims to be competitive with. Ideally, set it to the approximate rate that barons on the Mainland get, but extended to a whole server. Around 800 a month tier fees, currently. There is room to wiggle here on the price – but most importantly it must make the subleasing of the Homestead product unviable for land barons.

Restrict these servers to community building – that is, all the sims must be connected to each other, no floating them out on their own. Why communities you ask? Well, communities are the magic ticket to a healthy LindeX. People who rent in communities are more loyal, longer lasting tenants. They spend more inworld, they build content businesses that provide products for others to buy. LL wants to encourage this activity for their bottom line.

ONLY offer this solution to established accounts – set at least a 2-4 full sim minimum before being allowed to rent a full server.

Set a minimum number of full prim sims to be used on the server – at least 1-2 sims have to be full prim.

So the results I aim for are:

Encourage community building, so that we have more content related business over the LindeX.

Solve LL’s performance problems by letting large communities own their lag and deal with it.

Satisfy large land barons while discouraging community unfriendly rental policies.

Be competitive with current and future Opensim offerings, which do threaten the stability of Second Life.