Plurk paste

Dear Wastelands Residents, Regulars, and Visitors,

I am forever grateful to all the Residents and Patrons, past and present, who support The Wastelands in one form or another. You’re all the ones who are really keeping the lights on here, making it a place for everyone to enjoy. Without you all, we wouldn’t be almost 13 years old. So thank you. For everything.

I've have always thought that honesty is the best policy, even if it's a painful truth. To quickly sum up things: we need more new residents, or significant changes will need to be made to the landscape of the estate. So, in addition to a few of my own plans, I am asking for YOUR help to bring in new residents! But, if you keep reading, I’ll detail how we got here, our current plans, and what we hope to improve.

For the past 18 months the occupancy of the estate has been in a steady but slow decline. As I’ve outlined in each community meeting every month, either we’re staying at about the same level, or we’re losing a little ground. I think there were only a handful of times where we actually had any growth, and we then lost it again within a week. All those little losses add up over time, which brings us to today. There’s a certain percentage of occupancy that forces me to consider changes for the long term survival of the estate, and we’re there. We’ve been there a few times in the past, and we ultimately had to retire a few regions because of it.

I really want to avoid this, not just because it’s sad to lose a region, but because Linden Lab changed their prices for new regions many years ago, but regions that were already owned before that change got to keep their old prices: they were “grandfathered in.” If we lose a region, it’ll lose its grandfathered tier status, and tier for any new regions added to the estate later will permanently be higher. I can’t compete financially with other estates who have vast swathes of grandfathered regions, and rent by sheer volume. And no resident would want to live on a more costly region when they could just live in another region of this same estate and have the same square footage of land and the same LI allotment for less money. So in essence, once a region is gone, it’s gone for good – or at least until Linden Lab makes changes to tier pricing. Right now, even if it does comes down to shedding a region, I don’t know for certain which region or regions would be axed.

I’ve been brainstorming with the other Devs as to what can be done. It’s a very complicated issue because The Wastelands is a lot of different things to a lot of people. Whether you own a sparsely decorated plot of land just to support the estate with no other involvement, or whether you participate in all the events, games, community, and role play... we’re all here for various reasons that we find satisfying to ourselves. There’s a lot of love for every aspect of the estate, which makes it hard to determine where and if we’re doing poorly in terms of getting new people to stay. And, from what I’ve been told, most people leave for reasons out of their control: they’re not leaving The Wastelands specifically, but they have to spend less time and money on SL or on non-essential purchase in general so I don’t think there’s a single correct answer about How To Gain And Retain Residents. As such, we’ve been just trying to continually improve different aspects of the experience as we go along.

For instance, I’ve been working on rebuilding Burnt Oak, building a visitor orientation center, and getting the Wild Plants system done for the Game have been projects for a year or more now. I think these projects would add interesting new types of homes using our Outland model, would help new visitors get to know more about what we are all about, and would help stimulate gameplay – and that all of it would potentially convert some of our visitors, regulars, and players into residents over time. Those three things have always been a priority, and progress is always being made, if just slowly. Since the start of this year, we’ve brought the Burnt Oak Drive-In stream back. We were forced to migrate to a different hosting provider on somewhat short notice, but that allows us to use the Press Blog a lot more. We had a land sale that wasn’t very successful, but it’s important to try. We tested some new monster pathfinding and combat logic with dozens of Zombies you could fight. They still need a little bit of work, but we learned a lot. We’ve also made sweeping changes to the game mechanics of the HUD, as well as reducing the amount of false positives for the automatic rules. One of the big benefits of all these HUD changes was vast script performance gains and making script room for new features in the future. Just this last Halloween, we were even leveraging the new experimental Environmental Enhancement Project that Linden Lab is working on; and we added a whole bunch of role-play gossip and lore to go with the seasonal quest. Not to mention swimming and drowning.

But, both inworld and real world, there’s been a lot of minor and some major emergencies, plus a few mandatory Wastelands holiday events that have been more important tasks than those three big priorities. Just because we haven’t finished those three priorities, that doesn’t mean the other Devs and I are being lazy; we’re just dodging all the curve balls being thrown our way this year. I have no doubt that you too are also dodging those same curve balls. For me personally, I still feel guilty about taking any personal free time to to play a game or go out when there’s still so much to do. But I’ve learned from past experiences that if I don’t make time for myself, it’s bad for my health in a major way and just makes things far worse in the long run.

So that’s where we are, and some of why. What are our actual goals for occupancy, and what can we do to get there?

Ideally, my primary goal is to bring our estate occupancy back to to 80% or better by July or earlier. Once there, it should remain there for a couple months to give me the confidence we’re doing all right before we say this is a success. Right now it would take significant effort by me, the Devs, and anyone who is willing to help, as well as some changes to the estate, to get there. I don’t expect this to come quickly, or easily. But I do believe that we can turn this low occupancy strangulation of the estate around. There are two things we’re going to start with, starting today.

What I really want is to find NEW residents, or to bring back people who’ve been offline for years, to rediscover and fall in love with The Wastelands again. For that, I am asking for your help. Yes, you! If you have any old Wastelanders who you’re in contact with who have left SL or The Wastelands, invite them back for an event, or to check out new features! I fully understand if they won’t or just can’t come back. The real world has been tough on everyone over the past two years. Real world issues have always been the #1 reason people have been leaving, and that’s been more true now than ever before. Shit’s rough, yo.

If you’re already a Resident, I’m not not asking you to buy more land, and I don’t want your donations. I wouldn’t stop you, but that’s not our best strategy. I believe a bigger group of individual residents is far better for the health of the estate, than the same amount of residents with just more land. I know this seems unrelated, but did you know that the banana could easily become extinct from a fungus because there’s no genetic diversity? Sure, we grow a lot of one type of banana, and it grows well and ships well and sells well, so the market relies on it. But, even if it’s Top Banana for all these reasons, the fungus can evolve to be better at attacking the plant – and the plant can’t evolve to resist it. It can’t change its fate without outside help from genetic scientists to diversify its genes. Similarly, if a single resident owns a lot of land, but something awful happens in the real world that makes them need to leave, it’s very hard to replace that loss: it will take many more residents who own smaller amounts of land to fill the void. Besides, you should NEVER spend more than what is affordable for your budget on virtual land or games. I don’t want people not eating in order to have a digital space to play. Owning less, but for a longer time, may be better for everyone than owning an unsustainable amount for only a short while.

I know the majority of everyone's friends are already here, and because of that, finding new people will be extra hard. But if you have friends who don’t live here already, let them know why you love The Wastelands, what our current situation honestly is, and see if they want to help! Just don’t be too overbearing about it. I don’t want you to mess up your friendships over virtual land. But if they DO get some land, they get to hang out with you more here, and get to enjoy the larger strange community that we are, and we get to enjoy them, as well.

The Wastelands is also potentially looking to become sponsors for those popular shopping (or other) events. If you know anyone who would have us as a sponsor, and their event is a little bit post-apocalyptic or dystopian, AND reasonably popular, please let me know. At least once a month I hear about visitors who’ve been in SL for years, but they’ve never been here because they didn’t know about The Wastelands. Crazy, right? I am traditionally terrible at marketing, but I’ve been digging around and plan to launch a few ads in relevant inworld spaces and SL related publications. Historically my old haunts for posting ads yielded almost no results. If you have any tips, or want to help, please let me know.

The Devs and I have come up with a plan to help turn this tide around. It is a short term goal that has a certain time limit and occupancy goals. If we can achieve short term goals, or get acceptably close to them before their time limit is up, we’ll raise the bar a little and add more time. We’ll keep doing this until we reach sustained healthy occupancy levels. Our first goal will be to gain 5% occupancy before Groundhogs Day:February 2nd, 2020.

We’re starting with the simplest, least impactful changes, and we’re starting today: we’re going to lower the bar for becoming a resident. Currently, the land purchase price includes four weeks of tier. I am going to halve the land purchase price by including only 2 weeks of tier for land purchases. Hopefully, this will make it more appealing to start out here, without as much of an initial commitment. It’ll also be a help to those trying to show their friends around and/or bringing oldbies back from the void.

If we can eventually meet our primary 80% occupancy goal, we’ll reevaluate this program and choose whether or not to revert back to the normal 4 weeks cost and tier upon purchase. If we fail to meet our goals, we have a couple more backup plans before we have no choice but to retire a region. These backup plans become increasingly more impactful for the estate and its residents who live here, but if we stay positive and try to bring new people in, we can avoid those scenarios.

Finally, I am open to all ideas on how to improve things. Just be aware that I take things at a measured pace, so please don’t be discouraged if I don’t think it’s a good or feasible idea. I have to think of what’s best for the entirety of the estate, how much time it takes, and just how possible it is. Please don’t let that discourage you, and send me your ideas in a note-card in SL, or in an email!

I hope you don’t think less of The Wastelands or me for our current situation. I also feel bad in general asking for your help to fix it. I feel like maybe I could have done more to prevent it from happening altogether, but I’m not sure what I could or should have done differently. What I am sure of is that I’ll always keep trying to make things right, and that I’ll do everything I can to keep The Wastelands going.

Thank you for your time!

– NeoBokrug Elytis