Four days ago, Cinnamin Spice posted the following message on the TG forums:

I’ll repeat the title of this thread for emphasis…
I sure hope that I am wrong here.

I thought about this for a while before posting. But it’s something I feel really strongly about. So, here it is.

I logged on the day that land in the snow sims was released for sale - at 2:03 game time. Now, I consider that to be pretty quick.. not necessarily first.. but… whatever.

By the time I hit the snow sims, no more than 30 secs at most, land had already been sold and a huge amount of one particular plot was already covered with prims by the new owner. I thought it was a bit fast, but initially wrote this off as “man, how lucky for that person”, and “wow, he/she’s good to be able to have both bought all that land and to have so accurately ‘built’ that flat land cover in no more than 3.5 minutes”. Seriously, I chalked it up as “luck of the draw”.

The more I thought about it and the more I have thought about comments made by other residents both before the land sale and afterwards, the less comfortable I am with my initial assessment.

I have reached the conclusion that at least one teen was given preferential treatment by LL in this land purchase process in the snow sims. The extent of this preferential treatment includes prior knowledge of the exact timing of the land release and posting of it as public — and POSSIBLY allowing that person (and possibly even a cohort or two) to log on before normal log on time to get the land before anyone else could.

Because a fair bit of the information I used to reach this conclusion came from private conversations, overheard comments noted in passing as I flew by, and at least one IM that I was privy to offline, I won’t post the individual pieces of information that caused me to reach this conclusion here. Sorry. I would rather be considered an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist than openly and wrongly accuse any specific individual of something like this.

IF IT IS TRUE in ANY sense, shame on LL. How can we residents trust you or any of your employees now? ((I know LL is not a single individual. However, employees of the corporation act AS the corporation and, as such, their actions or inactions reflect directly on the credibility of the corporation as a single entity and on the individuals who work as part of that organization.))

I don’t expect much of an “official” response here - in fact, I expect this thread will be deleted fairly quickly, not just closed. However, if it is true in ANY sense, LL should own up to its actions, publicly ackknowledge them AND explain this to the rest of us.

If this is not true in any sense or any of the particulars, then I apologize for seeing things and publicly commenting on what I think I see.

As I said, I sure hope that I am wrong.

Needless to say, there was a lot of outcry at this- it felt to many residents that Cinn was back up to her tricks of accusing LL of wrongdoing without anything to back it up, sort of the TG equivilant of Profoky Neva.

Guess what? It turns out she was right.

Not only was she right, but Blue Linden proved she was right less than a day later with this post:

As you probably realize, the Teen Grid is not profitable…it would be nice if Linden Lab was a charity, but it’s a business. Because Second Life is free, the only way we make a profit is to sell land. As it happens, land sales on the teen grid are very low. So whenever there is a board meeting and the investors are in the building I get nervous and wonder what we could possibly do to encourage people to buy more land. This is not the fun part of the job, obviously.

We try to make it as easy as possible for residents to own a whole sim, but realize that it’s prohibitively expensive for teens to do so. I thought I should at least attempt to make it easier for teens to buy large plots of land, and in doing so receive the same concierge support that private estate owners receive. I looked up the top land owners and offered some of them the opportunity to reserve some land while we were setting up new regions. If we were able to sell enough land it would make sense to add new regions specifically for large landholders. People could get as much land as they wanted, receive the same treatment, in a scaled way, that MG estate owners receive, and the TG would grow faster. Everyone gets more right? Good idea?

Bottom line? It wasn’t a good idea.

It didn’t result in the sale of one entire sim, and people have been more upset than I’m willing to accept as “growing pains”. We won’t be doing that again. I’m sorry if it came across as favoritism and not a hard look at the numbers of the teen grid. I’m VERY sorry if anyone felt personally neglected in the way the choices were made. I’m MORE than happy to talk to anyone 1 on 1 about it or have a community meeting regarding the way we add regions to the teen grid. We’d like the grid to be something that every resident, parent, Lindens and investor agrees is worth every penny.

No I won’t be closing this thread. Your opinions are very valuable. Please feel free to contact me personally if you’d rather not make your comments in a public forum.

I’m deeply insulted myself that this happened.
While it does make good business sense, as Blue stated, it does not make sense from either a social or moral standpoint, and it definetly is not going to contribute to TSL residents trusting LL in the future. In fact, it’s gone the opposite way- reports state that land is being bought slower and people are dropping teir on the TG. No one seems to trust LL at the moment, and many speculate that even though Blue claimed that it’s never going to happen again, we have no proof of that.

Really, only time will tell on that score, but it’s true the LL made a huge mistake on this one, and it’s going to take time for them to recover from it.

Meanwhile, teens are throwing around ideas previously mentioned by Miss Spice, once again bringing up the debate of ‘Amnesty Week’, where all teens remaining on the MG were allowed to come clean and get away with their stuff. While it’s obvious that this won’t happen again, was it right for LL to do this in the first place?

Personally, I believe that it was. In consideration, it brought over a lot of Teens that LL Customer Support didn’t even know about, and it didn’t create any hard feelings with refugees. It barely even created a ripple among the teen’s who started out there SL careers on this grid. (With the notable exception of Miss Spice) Those refugees brought over their talent and experience, and, in fact, is was five MG teens who started the ball rowling on the TG in the first place- without them, it still might not exist.

The topic hasn’t been closed yet, but it might be soon if it develops into a flame war. Here’s for hoping that sanity and respect prevail over anger and hate!

Update: The Second Life Herald ran this story approximately 4 hours ago, and I’m hoping that they have a contact inside TSL, not a reporter.