adding more prim capacity to land!

Yes, there is a tie.




Your wrong.



's got nothing ta do with space and very little to do with bandwidth.

Ok and that is a tech reason but obviously this can be extended if nothing else as there are double prim sims wehre land there holds twice the prim value of normal cims (they were built for skyscraper usage so more went towards larger builds). Is it a software issue, hardware issue, or both and can it be resolved if people payed for the right to have more?

This is what is making me ask these questions:
Take land and allow NO PRIMS. No hootchie hair, no prim shoes, no attachments of any kind just default avatars and no prim/object making ability. Prim limit of sim is ZERO. How much does that cost LL?

Take above example now and allow attchments How much does that cost LL?

Take above example and allow prims. How much does that cost LL?

I'm thinking Prims cost LL more in storing and bandwidth then the land.

Also just what is the limit of the software and hardware. It obviuosly is not what we are paying for as those others sims with double prim allotment show otherswise.

The so called "double prim" sims actually allow no more prims than any other sims, its a myth. The reason there are only four is that "myth" is costing LL a lot of lost money. (And is, in fact, indicative of one of the problems of the idea)



Provided people are in it, not much more than a loaded sim, bandwidth wise. Some, but most of that comes from textures... prims are fairly efficient in terms of transmission. Thats why when you first enter a sim all the bounding boxes are there, just untextured and invisible. Avatars and textures are the big culprits.



See above.

Ahhh. I see where you are going wrong.

The 4 city sims where an experiment by LL. The sim does not have a double prim allowance, the land that is allowed to be used by us does. This was achieved by making only half of the land available to the users, allowing them to use double the prims.

NVM just saw above post about how the city works...and I can't type either. *face palms*

No, your very much wrong Read what Shwan posted.

ok I'm shutting up then cause obviously there is a limit to the software then that is causing the problem if it was hardware then I would scream as obviusly that is easily fixed by just charging more, etc. And I still can't spell.

Actually hardware doesn't just fix itself by throwing money at it. Even if it were that simple, two points:

1) Some of the problem is on the client side. Not the server side. LL can't "fix" that.

2) How much more do you think the average person would pay? SL is already easily the most expensive online service out there, if you want to do more than chat and build at most one tiny little thing on First Land.

I seem to recall Philip mentioning that LL may be able to give a user an upgraded sim if the user was willing to pay higher costs. I am too lazy to try and find where that was said right now. But it would certainly be interesting to buy a supercharged sim, and am I open to the idea in investing in if such a sim where to be made available.

Due to architectural constraints, one sim equals one server. I sincerely doubt this will change in the near future. So the variable that is available to play with is how good the sim's server is. If you look at computer hardware, the speed to cost curve is roughly exponential.

Let's sell all of a sim under the existing system but one 512x512 lot. The buyer of the last lot wants an additional 5K prims. So we charge the last extra to offset the faster server needed. The problem appears as other people in the sim want to buy more prims: it becomes increasingly more expensive to provide the server, and increasingly kills the asset server/software/etc.

So either: Buying extra prims is severely limited, say to 2/4x your initial grant per land area (such that SL has or can get servers, links and their software to support everyone in a sim tiering up). Or someone else buying extra prims in your sim affects your ability to do so, which lowers your land value and is not fair.

Actually multiplier-prim sims are an interesting idea because they are probably the only fair way to increase prim allocation: across an entire sim. Why? It stabilizes land prices, lag, bandwidth requirements, etc... You know what you are getting and it will not change on you because of a rich neighbor.

Agreed but if it is on the server side more the upgrades would help. With the exception below.



Well Let's say you wanted a full sim worth in Prims but only wanted half a sim in land. If there was a pricing seperate for land and seperate for prim allotment then it might encourage more to buy land. Assuming price currently is 50/50 land/prim cost then you would only spend 75% of the price curently offered for a full sim tier. How many more people MIGHT spend for that.

I would rather pay for more prims myself then land. No land baroning just straight give me what I want and WHAM it's done. Instead of pay $10/month for premium, pay for what ever other tier you want, pay GOM for land (some do, some don't), and then pay L$ for the land.

The problem is that your desire for more prims has an impact on the server. Because prims must be limited to ensure satisfactory performance for everyone, every prim which you take must come from somewhere else. Furthermore, the amount of land which a server supports must also be limited. Because SL is a 3D representation of the real world, we have chosen a solution in which area is linked to server resources. Since prims are tied to area, we also indirectly limit prim usage which also benefits everyone involved. If we switched to another model, in which prim usage were independent of land, we would then be required to scale land area per server. Such a model has a staggeringly vast number of flaws. If area per server remained constant, then vast tracts of land would be rendered uninhabitable due to prim deficiency. If the area did scale as suggested, then the 3D, contiguous world which is SL would be a fractured, everchanging world in which the topography changed as people tiered up and down. If one server's worth of prims is in a 512 sq meter parcel and another server is hosting 4096 and another is hosting 65536, how do you fit these three sims together with all of their various neighbors in a way that is congruous? This alone would be a rather intimidating problem. It might be solved by abandoning the metaphor of the real world, and allowing every parcel to be a disjointed place. Ultimately, I think the land-based allotment of prims is the best solution.

I do think the current model is fine in many ways just to let everyone.

Ardith you speak as if you know the servers and how they are setup well. Are you an employee, have similiar software, or is there some document LL has made about this before that I am not aware of?

I think that was the unintentional "we" which I kept using. Consider it nothing more than a symptom of an unhealthy desire for SL.

I was more curious about the doom and gloom of the disjointed sims you reffered to. Contigous sims would still be contigous as it is not the topology you are changing. Again if theprim usage was exanded, I would say uncap the max prims per sim as well.

What I would like to see is stats from LL or hear more detailed reasons from LL as to why they made the choice they did versus other possibilities. maybe even post it up at the top as a note so these posts stop coming up every week or two.

The resources available to a server are finite. Though one could continue to subdivide the resources in a sim to a nearly infinite degree, the performance which the users would experience would decrease with each subdivision. Because users tend to become irate when their experience degrades too much, we must limit the subdivision of resources. That is, the resources available to a parcel should never decline below a certain threshold. That threshold is dependent on the performance of the server available, which is limited both by current technology and by the need/desire to remain profitiable. That is the reason why the prim limit has previously been increased. It's not an arbitrary value, it's a value which increases as computing power increases.

If prims are made independent from area, then you've got a problem of resource allocation. As it is now, prims are dependent on area and so the resources of each server are more or less equally divided per square meter of the sim. If prims are made independent, then you've suddenly got a disparity in resource consumption relative to area. If you have one 512 parcel consuming the same number of prims as a full 65536 parcel, then you have a resource allocation problem. If you stick with the old system of one server per 65536 m^2 area, then there'll be fallow land whenever a parcel smaller than 65536 consumes a sim's worth of prims. That land would have to remain unused, because no one else could build on it without exceeding the maximum prim limit and degrading performance below the threshold. It would have to exist, because otherwise there would be gaps in the grid.Though we do have some gaps now, this allocation scheme would produce a significantly more porous topology or would require regular rearranging of parcels to ensure congruency. If we instead begin allocating servers based on prim consumption instead of land, then you can keep parcels congruent and you can eliminate holes, but you will create more irregular and unpredictable server boundaries. Considering how problematic boundaries are, this is not necessarily desirable either.

That is how it is now. You are paying for prim usage, it just happens to come with land for free. You can increase your prim allotment on a server by increments of a minimum of three. This is 1/4096 of the total resources available on the server and is represented by 16 m^2 of land.

The term "land baron" is a mistake, it has always been prim baron. They used to hoard default prims, now they hoard land but it has always been to control the resources on the servers.

I missed this quote the first time around. The Lindens could solve this problem (and I do view the commodification of land as a problem) by drastically increasing the supply of land, without even tampering with the way they handle resource allocation. Doing so would drive land prices down, but risks destabilizing the economy.

Merwan said this already in a different form, but I'll take one stab at it.

If you think of tier fees as prim tiers then the issue evaporates. Oh and with your prims, you get land to put them on, what a nice bonus!

Does that help?

Which would seem to be what is happening (releasing more land) as a way to spread activity across the grid more. Consequences to the SL economy are arguable in any sense.

But while these technical/engineering discussions are interesting, no one has yet touched on either of two things:

(1) the capability of a secondary market in prims as a valid approach to resource allocation through a valid (L$-based) price mechanism; or

(2) the possibility that sims are "oversold", in the sense that not all land-owning avatars or others are online at the same time within any given sim.

I've said enough about (1) - other comments welcome.

With regard to (2) the evidence of lag might suggest that cueing theory could help at least as much as trying to spread activity by releasing larger quantities of "land".

Lastly, what would happen if we could sculpt the land as proficiently as we build presently. I'd love to landscape with anything close to approaching a right angle...

Whether or not all residents of a sim are online at the same time is really moot. Most land owners leave their builds up even when they are not online.

Malachi and Merwan (among others) are very helpful in reminding us all that land presently is a proxy for prim capacity. I would add that while its helpful to agree that this proxy is useful, the questions others are asking go beyond definitions, or associations based on the existing land metaphor.

One issue seems to be the best method of distributing of computing resources among competing parties within a single server. Another seems to be user experience - location-based or "on-demand" prim capacity. Still another issue revolves around the fairest way to initially distribute prims to maximize quality of service to the community as a whole. I would add also the price inequalities for generic prim capacity based on whether the prim has a waterfront, or was purchased at auction (in bulk) versus the secondary market in-world.

There's no algorithm for utopia - yet. As far as I know this is not a linear programming problem either. Land is more a navigational construct within SL than it is a pure proxy for computing resources. Tier payments are biased toward prim capacity and not actual usage - they discourage prim accumulation like parking tickets discourage double-parking, but they are inefficient for users and LL alike in that they mostly resemble the health club business model of monthly dues whether you go to the gym or not.

As users we are well within our bounds to question fundamental values or assumptions that affect:

(1) our user experiences (from a LL perspective "quality of service". and/or
(2) the value received for our money/time (from a LL perspective "operating leverage".

and no one is around does it make a sound?

Distribution of land is unequal in that users are able to accumulate land and hold it in unequal portions relative to other users. For instance, the existence of large holders such as Anshe, Anita, etc. and small holders like me. If you take a snapshot of SL at any given time this unequal distribution exists and is accepted due to secondary market pricing - the ability of users to freely buy and sell land at fair market prices. The equity/inequity (fairness) of this may be examined by comparing the effective price per prim paid at each land unit size both above and below the existing tier thresholds which distort actual user preferences based on still another, different discount schedule.

Best use should not be decided by LL or you or me - it should be the "invisible hand" of a price mechanism to fairly apportion the most limited, or critical resource in-world. LL would not have to change its fee structure to allow a secondary market in prims, similar to the leasing/rental programs many large landholders use presently.

With regard to your proposition that no one would buy land in a sim that had no prim capacity left I think there are several parts to my answer:

(1) let's agree that is the most extreme example, and at the far end of the axis of consideration; that being said it would likely be a very stable sim, the plot would be remote and mostly open space with no music streams, clubs, or telehubs, a private space where one could go to change clothes or wait for prims to come available (in other words "raw land speculation";

(2) but more important than the last purchase of land that has no prim capacity (a potential end-state) lets talk about the incentives at the margin - what happens to the land-locked 512 m2 holder who wants his/her 118th prim but finds unwilling sellers or unfair pricing on each of his/her four property lines? Blaze Spinnaker has pointed out the size of this churn recently in statistics released by Philip Linden - prim capacity in plots for sale are wasted computing resources that we all pay a little extra for;

(3) isn't an equally likely end-state less urban and more suburban landscapes with green- or open-space between builds? Don't we already see similar evolution/movement in mainland sims such as Ulverston?; and

(4) don't Islands start out this way? Aren't Island sales booming?

History is indeed a strict teacher with innovation showing the way.

You would create prim-barons the same way we have land barons.

Trust us.

It already happened.

LL's solution to prim-barony is exactly what you see here, and as much as I hate land barony, I'll take it over prim-barony anyday.