About the authorGracie Dartmouth is a self proclaimed wanderer/layabout who spends much of her SL time changing clothes and looking for the perfect coin operated boy.
On February 17th, LindenLabs unveiled their Linden Homes for premium customers. As a premium customer, in world for less than a year, regardless of what my “rezdate”
may say (I rolled up an avatar, wandered around for about 20 minutes, and logged out, not to return for several months.), this news made me pretty happy.
I should say now, that while I'm a happy premium customer, I only have the premium account, honestly, because of the stipend. I like to go shopping, and I find that the stipend, plus a few odd jobs here and there, as well as my love of and affinity for bargain shopping more than covers my shopping love.
So, once my income was figured out, next thing was to find a place to live (and of course, unpack boxes.). One soon finds out that the choices of apartments, houses, and skyboxes is just overwhelmingly huge, especially for someone new to the grid. I've personally lived in a handful of cheapy places, while saving and calculating what I'd need to live in some of the more amazing builds.
So, of course, when LL announced the Linden Homes, I was ecstatic, because I wasn't planning on using that 512 allotment for anything. I mean, I'd thought about it, but I had looked around enough to notice that I'd probably find a nice, cute plot, plunk a house down (hoping I could find what I liked without taking up too many of that 117 prims), and within three weeks have the area around me look like a patchwork of crap.
That's one of the cool parts about this, there are four “themed” areas, so all the houses around yours will be adhering to that look, so you won't have any industrial looking buildings near your wizard's tower, or vise versa. And I'm really pleased with the builds, myself, having spent a good deal of time wandering all four areas-great textures, good landscaping, it's just very pretty, and set up to be an actual community.
I've read a lot of the comments people are making, and there seems to be a good deal of animosity about this addition to premium content. While I can see some concern in the rental market, I still don't think folks are looking at it all that realistically.
I think the people who already rent nice homes around the grid do so for a reason. A lot of them aren't premium account holders, and so won't be at all affected by this, and a lot of premium folks pay for the land allotment, for small shops or whatever, so this won't affect them unless they want to tier up. As for those of us who're new or newish, to Second Life, I see it as a blessing and a convenience.
We can set up a home, for no more money than we'd already put in, and get comfy, learn about setting objects, like furniture, begin navigating around shops and check out the massive array of housing items. Then, we'll be able to, at leisure, check out resident driven communities, housing builds, and areas to really figure out what we want, long term, so when we do move on (and we will), you'll have a customer that will be there for more than a couple months.
To close, I honestly think everyone should step back and watch how this goes, even get a Linden Home if you have the means, because I think that, in the end, this will be a good thing for quality homebuilders, and landowners who care about their renters.