First of all, thanks everybody for their support!
...where's the little heart emoticon... a happy face will do! 
Second, this isn't yet an "abandon ship" call. We're facing some hard financial times. Considering how bad RL and SL economy have been for a few years now, I like to think we held on pretty good so far, considering how ridiculously expensive SL can be. So, don't need to panic just yet.
I'll reply to specific bits and pieces of people's posts here in this one mega-reply!
It doesn't hurt to spend a month looking for people to commit some L$ to the sim, or even try to get creative about how to incent people to do it. RL, the reason they do the pledge drives where they give away t-shirts and mugs is because those drives work. 50-50 raffles work too. Little perks work, that way people feel like they have some skin in the game and aren't just giving away something for nothing.
Well, we can't offer any 'real' items, but if we do get dedicated sponsors, people who pledge to help with the bill every month, I can without hesitation offer them anything I make in SL for them to have. Also we could look into the 'homes rental' idea that's gone about several times. The problem is it's not as simple as telling someone they can have a spot in the sim for an OOC home, there are logistics involved with that, such as area size, prim count, prims vs. cost proportions... Sure in the end getting
something, even if disproportional to the amount of money you're donating, is better than getting just a warm and heartfelt
thank you!. We can look into the possibilities. I'm not beyond offering incentives for our sponsors, it all depends on what everyone will want.
I think a sponsorship would be a tenuous and unreliable thing to try and make happen. Yes it would help us keep the current sim, however I think that the current sim does have a lot of fat on it and there's much more space than is needed for our current population density.
You are correct on both accounts, Sen. I won't point any fingers, but since the beginning I've heard the old "
yeah I will help!" talk, and on the first time they did help, and seemed joyful about it! Some made it to the second time without me having to remind them... but for certain the third time, I had to chase people around and remind them that they committed to help us. Don't take this wrong, I know we have committed and reliable people amongst us, but unfortunately they are not the norm.
And we do have a lot of extra space, and that works both for us and against us.
It's great to have all that space! We can have large-scale events/buildings/stuff happen! You want to be by yourself without a soul within a mile? Go hide in the forst or something and you're set.
But at same time, people spread out thin and that works against social interaction.
I'm afraid there isn't a solution for it.
As for Plan B - I actually like the idea of floating islands. There's so many ways to make that happen - a world torn asunder, the global population reduced to a trickle of individuals. It could make for a very interesting transition in the focus of the RP sim - from terrestrial threats to airborne ones. The introduction of magic-fueled airships, a heavier focus on Lismore as a trading hub (a last bastion for the exchange of currency, goods and ideas) and a new series of threats (airship piracy, winged beasts, 'deep ones' from the sunken world below) all become possible.
Yeah I've had 5 months to plan it, and you're not too far off from what I had in mind.
I've gone ahead and taken a look at Ashtyn's builds for the Plan B, and I actually like them quite a bit. They're a little sparse, but they have everything we as an RP community currently need and use.
Thanks Sen. Those models are bare-bones, of course. They haven't been furnished and many details have been left out, so they look bare and not lived-in like the rest of the sim where we've had almost 3 years to make it our home.
I already tried to RP on the mainland as well but it just doesn't do it for me; whenever I've tried RPing on a RP parcel there, I keep being interrupted by non-roleplayers or have to endure shitty viewer performance, or other inconveniences.
Heck, the biggest reason I rarely TP out of Lismore today is that I can't stand the performance drops I experience by heading to the mainland, and I don't want my computer to overheat (again).
There are ways to minimize and even completely null all of those problems. First, the islands would be high up in the sky, hopefully far away from anything any neighbors might have floating around, so there is no ground-level superlag typical of the MainLand, and the amount of objects at those heights that your viewer would have to render is actually less than what we have in pretty much any level of Lismore.
Second, I considered encapsulating the RP areas with invisible mega-walls, to keep the potential high-flying random person from running into us.
What I would suggest would be to rather move the store we've got way up on top of Lismore to the mainland to release all the prims it consumes, and then downgrade the sim type/prim limit/whatever it is that makes the sim so expensive to reduce the tier cost.
For once, prims is not the problem.
Downgrading the sim is the worse thing we could do. A 'downgrade' would mean turning our Full Sim into a Homestead. Homesteads are very nice if you want a giant open space, but they have 1/4 of the prims of a Full Sim, they have a limit of only 20 people in them at time, and those from the first months of Lismore will remember the frustration of not being able to log in or get to Lismore because the sim was full; Homesteads also have only 1/4 of the processing power of a Full Sim so the lag is unbearable for any social group, and they still cost US$135/month.
but imho, moving to the mainland has to remain a last resort option. All plots that could emerge from it notwithstanding, I'd like to see Lismore stay as a separate sim.
That, and moving elsewhere is a scary thought D:
You are 100% right on all accounts there! It's terrifying!
I would rather prefer a "whole" sim.
Though, if it comes to Plan B, I might be able to help out with a small place, to some degree. (How dubious that ever might sound from someone who made his first post in the forum with this ^^')
Hey, posting has to start somewhere. Welcome to the Forums!
...and I already have the place to implement Plan B. Thank you for your offer, though.
How short are you again on teir this month? I many be able to donate $20 tomorrow, as it is getting into gig season and I work as road crew.
This month's tier has been covered, and we have some rolled over for next month. If you donate tomorrow, it will go for next month's tier. If you donate 3 weeks from now, it will still go for that month's tier, so whenever you choose, it will help. I like to emphasize that nobody pockets a single L$ of what's donated to the sim. It all goes into paying the tier.
This month's tier has been taken care of. Thank you all who helped!
We have about L$40k already piled up for next month, thanks to some very generous donations, so as of now, next month's tier is L$40k short. We have about 30 days to make up that amount.
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