A response to the change in sim obsolescence strategy.

To understand what i am responding to, please view this thread here:

/3/50/29431/1.html

and i quote:



Now to get to the nitty gritty. There are two fundamental flaws to this approach outlined by robin. I shall describe them both, and then, offer the basic solution, which is, pretty much the only solution that most of us are going to find viable.

Problem 1) The assumption that the oldest sims, p2 2.26ghz with 400 fsb, and single channel ram, is sufficient to run an active SL server in SL 1.5 and beyond

problem 2) The assumption that it is possible to 'get a slower sim than you paid for'


I shall start with problem2 first, as it is the most endemic with LL's view as expressed through robin. As of right now, december 9th, 2004, There is only one 'tier' bracket in SL. That is, the land taxes we pay, are the same, regardless if the land we purchased is the most desirable in SL, or the least. We are *PAYING* for our land, in an older sim, every single month. Just the same as any estate owner, i pay LL $195 every time the tier payment is due.

My $195 is not worth less than any estate owner's $195 and neither is the build i fund with it, luskwood. So arguing 'you will not get a worse sim than you have paid for' is basically, to my mind, not a valid statement.. because EVERYONE who owns land, pays for it. And we all pay the same basic amounts. Which means, we should all expect the same basic level of service.


This brings me to problem 1. We have surmised, through *ALOT* of effort on my, and chromal's part, completely BLIND from LL which at the time, was insisting all sims were roughly equal. That this is not the case. In fact i specifically deduced there were three basic performance classes of sims. The oldest sims, which were identifyable by their lack of hyperthreading (aka sim cpu would show as 1.0 not 0.5) The middle sims.. which are the hyperthreading p4's, they are identifyable as all sims newer than the oldest sims, (with 0.5 cpu), and the newest sims (which start somewhere around sim 450-460)

Starting from this base, Chromal with some help from LL was able to specificlly identify the hardware, and the problems with the first sim batch that are causing the performance disparity (mostly memory bandwidth)

We have done very extensive testing, and now so has LL, that has shown these older sims simply cannot meet the minimum level of performance the game is supposed to be offering. The minimum level 'worth paying for' as it were

specific hardware aside, these are the three 'classes' of sims in SL and yet we are ALL PAYING to be on the same hardware. I am going to be paying for an obsolete sim the same $195, according to robin's plan, that someone on a 'dual opteron' deserves, just because they bought their land a year *AFTER* i bought ours?

That somehow assumes that we 'bought' the land with our initial payment... and not the continual month to month tier... which is basically factually incorrect. I could have bought my land for one linden, or 100,000 linden, yesderday, or yesteryear... the PERFORMANCE however is being paid for by my *TIER* which unless i have missed something, entitles me to just as good a sim as anyone else who is paying that kinda commitment to LL.



This brings us to the solution part of the dialog.

As long as there is only one tier structure. There cannot be assigned hardware to sims. ANYONE paying $195 deserves the right to have good hardware. No matter when the land bit was set to their ownership. The short term solution is that the 2.26's have to go. They have a very specifically identified performance problem. And they are *NOT* suitable to run *ANY* live SL server. They can still be given some life as void sims, or fronteir uninhabited sims. But NO ONE in sl should be forced to pay for this crippled hardware, what their neighbor is paying to get a slice of a dual opteron.

1) The oldest servers need phased out now. The world has changed a lot in the past year, and the hardware can no longer support the extensive use of dynamic content that is much more prevalent now than in the past.

2) "About Land" needs to indicate the performance class as some kind of indicator of the land value in this regard, so that people making land purchases are made aware of the hardware performance level they are investing in.

3) With 1.2, we adopted the "web hosting" system of subscription. The thing is, LL has not also adopted the common practice of charging your subscription fee based on the performance level of your host machine. I get the feeling that until such a subscription structure is put into place, as complcated as it may be, these concerns will continue to be made. It simply is never go over well with people when they are paying the same for a below-average quality of service.

eltee,


The "Getting the server you payed for" has nothing to do with the monthly fees. Those are essentialy for bandwidth (And power, upkeep, etc).

But when I pay 1K USD, I am implicitly buying something. As a matter of fact, Linden Labs has said specificly in the past that a sim owners downpayment is the cost of buying the hardware.

So I damn well want that hardware, if I payed 1K for it. Not some obsolete heap of junk because thats what I'm randomly assigned to. I did not spend a thousand dollars so someone else gets a server and I get their hand-me-downs.

Its like if I bought a 2005 car for $50,000 dollars and was given a 2000 car with 20,000 miles on it.

I agree with 99% of what both eltee and Kex have said above.

The KEY for me is that, upon joining, no one ever tells you - and it is not posted anywhere in any documentation that I can find available to a "newbie public that has not yet joined" - that SL has different hardware assigned to different sims. You also don't get to choose your First Land location - so, if you joined/bought land during the Land for the Landless days, well, you got a "better" sim-cpu combo than the earlier people had...

Some difference is to be expected.. some is even acceptable. The question is how much.

I believe that, with the recent announcement that the oldest sims will essentially "revert" back to their previous under-powerd/poor-performance cpu status, anyone who buys land in them from this point forward is either a moron or being taken advantage of.... how can anyone justify paying the same land tier fee for substandard performance?

So.. the "solution" will actually become clear only when LL defines, decides and announces what they mean by "end of useful life". If the current low performance numbers of the oldest sim-cpu servers are considered acceptable at this time, what is the low end of "poor performance" to define "useful life"? How does one define "useful life"? (I still have a 16K TRS-80 Model 3 which uses a cassette to store and load data and programs that can run a functional word processor if I want to go back to it... functional by one definition, certainly not from the perspectives of other definitions.)

At this point, I am seriously considering doing the "drop to tier minimum's" thing.... and take my monthly tier fees with me. This latest policy is yet another example of LL altering the TOS on the spur of the moment - which, according to the TOS they have the right to do. Just as I have the right to make sure that I am being treated equitably in comparison to the people paying more and less tier fees.... something which LL has just annoounced will not be the case in the near future.

That.... or running out and buying up all the land my tier allows in only the newest sims...and moving all my stuff there to ensure that "I get what I pay for".... Wait.. everyone will do that now.. damn.

Sheesh

Who'd wanna be a landbaron anyway when they start having to factor in the performance of the server into their costs in future as well?

I wonder if my April 2004 private island is the same as a December 2004 private island? Anyone who knows how to wanna check for me?

Just go to Help>About Second Life pull down menu.

Look for the simXXX.agni number... if you are above about 400...I forget the low end number exactly.. then you are on the newest class of sim-cpu server combo. Anything below about 100 is definitely OLD.

Those aren't exact numbers. .. I am sure someone will correct them for you... But it gives you a ballpark that you can use until someone else posts

buying a private island in april 2004 kris gets you a mid range pentium 4, probably of trhe sim 300 vintage... not bad, but definately nowhere near as good as a dec2004 opteron.

Of course lusk and perry (being two of the oldest 24 servers) are basically screwed forever under this new 'guideline' even though i'm paying the same $195 you are in property taxes every month, and have paid *MORE* cash than you did purchasing all my land, im effectively a second, or at this rate even *third* class citizen according to the new policy

Private islands are another matter. Honestly i don't think they should be part of the hardware pool at all.. If you buy an island on sim 304, you should honestly *GET* sim 304 and thats it. You shouldn't be dropped back to sim 12 and get 'less' than you paid for... but at the same token if yer not willing to drop back, you also shouldn't get a lick more'n you 'paid for' and you shouldn't get pushed up either. Either yer part of the general server pool, and you deal with the same issues everyone has... or you're locked to a single machine...

Singling out islands as unwilling to drop back but *OKAY* to move forewards is sort of a 'they get the best of both worlds' mentality which essentially means that mainland simmers then *MUST* by defacto get the *WORST* of both worlds (aka we can get dropped to absolutely hideous sims and be rendered unplayable... and additionally the newer sims are going to go to the islands so the 'chance' of us getting a usable sim is now significantly.. *SIGNIFICANTLY* lower than it was before.

Again both points stand:

1) 2.26 pentium sims need to be taken down, *asap*

2) We are all paying the same property taxes... except property taxes are based on value, not just size, and some of us are getting decidedly less value for the dollar

Of course, that'll be the next thing they obfuscate in an attempt to silence player dissent.

Sim performance disparity seems to be an issue in SL, and this is one way of addressing it. Is it fair? Not really. People who own land in newer sims just found out their average performance is going to increase. Conversely, people who own land in older sims just found out their average performance is going to decrease.

This wasn't in the rulebook when anyone signed up.

Part of this is because people believe that LL is not upgrading their hardware to match the increasing demands on the system.

Let me propose an alternate strategy to introduce some honesty into the system. How about we reverse LL's proposed ordering of hardware? So, oldest sims get the shiniest new hardware, and the newest sims get the oldest hardware.

The implications are two-fold:
1) Your performance will only increase as time goes on. This means the value of your land will never decrease. We've talked about the instability of the land market, this is a way to add consumer confidence.

2) You can't sell new land if the hardware can't support new development. It's a way of keeping the system honest. It's time to upgrade the hardware when noone wants it, instead of "evicting" people who were unlucky enough to own "old" land.

There are three basic classes of sims in SL.

1) OLD (these are pentium 2.26's with very poor memory performance. Aka these are the sims that need to be made obsolete These encompass sim1, through roughly sim 75ish (you can immediately identify them by looking at the simulator statistics, and noting the sim cpu slice as 1.0) Lusk on these runs 300 fps with one agent, 50 fps with 10 agents

2) Average (These are the more modern pentium4's encompassing the 'bulk' of the SL sim fleet. Their performance is pretty good, and they aren't anything to complain about. These encompass about 400 sims.. from roughly sim 75 through sim 455) Lusk on these runs about 800 fps with one agent, and about 300 fps with 10 agents

3) the new hotness (these are the dual opteron systems that make up the latest hardware Their performance is absolutely outstanding even though one hardware box runs *two* sims (one on each opteron cpu) They are the sims 455 or so and above. Lusk on these runs about 1400 fps with one agent, about 800 fps with 10 agents


The basic trend is that each successive generation of hardware runs under heavy strain, about as well as the generation previous to it runs under very light conditions.

Now factor into this the LL basic guideline, keep it above 100 fps and pretty much everything is good *EXCEPT* the oldest sims

with 10 agents, lusk is incapable of being 100 fps on the oldest sims... and it has terrible lag in that situation. This is why i will continue to say that the 2.26's *ARE* obsolete to the point no one should be forced to run on them, old sim new sim private public island mainland WHATEVER, those sims are no longer able to keep pace with december 2004's second life and there is a very very accute quality of service issue with the fact they are running.

LL agrees with this now, and they are assumably in the process of replacing them... robins post tho 'muddied the waters' abit in that she is basically saying its 'okay' to run on an old sim for luskwood, because when we 'bought' into SL it was new at the time and even though the software and user base have grown termendously in that time, it doesn't matter enough for us to deserve any better.

Its especially ironic since lusk residents (myself and chromal specifically) were the ones who have done *most* of the work here analyzing performance, and trying to get LL to see these failings

good god francis thats an amazingly well thought out idea... i can only hope LL can see the wisdom in it

The way robin described basically is going to create a 'fungal' effect where the core of SL, the central mainland sims will become less and less desirable over time, becoming even more of jus burned out wrecks of space than they have been already. We've spent a year trying to counter that effect with luskwood and now we're being basically told that sure you've survived the worst in SL, sure you've been supporting us for well over a year now... well tough, you can either be quiet and take a valueless old machine, or move... that really well spell the death of the entire center mainland continent. And quite frankly, the death of SL as a social space as well since everyone will jus be constantly moving out to the newer areas, leaving nothing but chewed up wasteland of half built homes, 16sqm scanners, and long abandoned stores in the center.

In short the center of SL will become a low value 'slum'

Lol.... literally roflmao...

Like this is going to happen.... Think about it.

The newest sims, the ones next up for auction will have the oldest cpu-server stats. Who would EVER trust auction sales again? Who would buy there? No one - except the unwitting and the stupid. Or, perhaps those confuzzled by a land baron - oh wait, that fits into the two classes I already defined.

Seriously. At first glance my thought was - omg, he is just "rewarding" the Lusk group for doing LLs job for them and snapping up the best sims for the oldbies. Then I thought about it and realized it's worse than that. Your solution, tongue in cheek sarcastic or real, is as inequitable as Robin's. It favors one class of resident over others - the only two "reasonably separate" classes being private sim owners and all others - and the private sim owners did specifically get raped when they paid for a server but have been being "pooled" instead of getting what they paid for.

Do I have a solution? Uh.. yeah I do. But most would claim it is unworkable/impractical. My solution is to mass purchase current stat (>400 level) cpu-mb combos to replace all first tier (the oldest) servers. Then continue the pooling as is currently implemented. The private islands need to be handled separately from the rest - and actually are not any concern of mine as I rarely visit and won't throw my money away on one. OTOH, the mainland servers absolutely must have a new "ground zero" level set.

The $8 mill that was invested will certainly not be eaten up by my proposal - barely a fraction of it will be required. And most people think the mid-level servers are currently performing at an acceptable level considering current content/requirements. Simple math - 75 * 400USD (approx due to the quantity discount I am sure could be achieved) to replace these items and you have a near trivial amount of money with a huge PR and customer satisfaction return.

Aretias is just 3 weeks old, when it first came online it showed Sim CPU 0.5 (though I didn't know at the time how to find the server number. The Sim FPS was around 7000. ONE WEEK LATER the Sim FPS dropped to below 400 on an almost EMPTY island..

Checking today, Aretias is running on sim98.agni.lindenlab.com (66.150.245.34:12035) with a Sim FPS of around 1200.

This is NOT what I paid $1000 for just 3 weeks ago...

Hi Korg,

I think you're missing the point of what I'm suggesting. I made my suggestion as a way of keeping the system honest. If you're trying to sell a server that's too underpowered to support active development, noone's going to buy it. It's time to upgrade. This way, the definition of "good enough" is maintained, and there's less room for an unfair estimation of the hardware.

If LL draws the performance threshold fairly, people will buy land in the new sims. If LL doesn't draw the theshold fairly, people will not.

Yes, both allocation schemes favour different people. What if you think of it this way - you're rewarding the people who've contributed the most time, effort and money to make Second Life what it is. Does that sound so bad?

The solution you've proposed (a mass upgrade) is compatible with this idea.

Uh.. As a business customer I expect the same treatment as those who have been dealing with X company longer than I have - provided we are spending the same amount of money.... Time has no value to me in terms of expected treatment. Your current and even previous "contributions" should not determine or influence business decisions with respect to sim allocation in my opinion... not if we are paying the same amount.

The underlying premises of SL, as far as I can tell, are the following:
1. All residents are equal
2. Private sim owners are not equal to mainland residents while on their private islands. However, as soon as they leave their islands/sims, they revert to "Joe Average resident" status and get no more, but no less service than others.
3. Content is resident dependent.
4. Events and activities, outside of specific things Town Hall and PR stunts like Burning Life, are resident dependent/sponsored and will only be rewarded via specific programs.
5. Dwell is king --- unwritten but widely acknowledged metric of "content approval by others" and used to give real USD rewards to the dwellopers.

Given these premises, that someone has been around since beta means nothing to me in terms of "should you get a new server because you have been around longer than I have". (You being a generic here, not you personally).

yer missing the point of frans' post korg. The idea is that frans way LL *HAS* to keep everyone roughly equal, or they will not be able to sell new things. Robin's way, the opposite, means that they *NEVER* have any obligation to keep anyone equal, and if you don't like it, you can move to a new sim

Nope. Didn't miss the point. I agree with the goal.

His way DOES NOT force things to be equal. It rewards older sims/players based solely on longevity.

It does not force anything.

Reread my posts. Reread his. We are actually agreeing on the goal of equity to some extent. We are differing strongly on the **basic premise of how** to achieve the goal.

Disparity in h/w performance is, and always will be, a fact of life. The only way LL could avoid disparity would be to either upgrade every sim on the grid at once, or never upgrade the sims on the grid. Neither is an attractive option.

I can see where people who have vested interests on one side of the equation or the other would naturally take issue. Those in older sims want better hardware, and those that have the newer stuff don't want to give up what they got. I really can't fault either side for their views.

As for me... I'm stuck happily in the middle. Most of my land is in either Hooper (my home), Ganymede (Iraqi War Memorial), or Epimetheus (Tribal Drums). These aren't ancient sims, but they're certainly not the new 400+ numerated ones either.

I assume that we ALL want Linden Labs to take advantage of technology advances and have them always put out the latest and greatest hardware that they can get for the best price. It would be silly, when they go to buy a new rackful of sims, to not buy the best hardware that they can.

Since having a range of performance capabilities is a given, it seems to me that keeping sims tied to a specific piece of hardware only makes sense. Sure... those who are in older sims are going to be at the bottom of the performance scrap heap for now. But when LL does decide to upgrade (and they WILL upgrade over time), guess who's going to end up with the latest and greatest? They'll rip out the lowest performing sims, and give them all the fast stuff. Everybody will get there's eventually. As for me and my mid-level sims... guess who's going to be on the bottom of the scrap-heap when LL does upgrade the old sims.

I hate to even think about how many sim crashes and other problems would be generated if LL tried to rotate sims from platform to platform, and they switched all that software from one machine to another on a rotating basis. Software systems are often flakey beasts, and all it takes is one quirky dependency buried deep in some piece of code to really fuck everything up.

Tying tier costs to sim performance of land owned probably won't happen any time soon. That would be an administrative nightmare for LL, and I wouldn't touch that with a 10' pole if I were them. That also gets into the realm of "performance guarantees", which I'm sure LL doesn't want.

Knowing these metrics about the sims will certainly end up affecting land resale prices. If I'm looking for land, I'd be sure to try and get it on newer hardware so that I'm on a better platform. But in the long run, upgrading older sims when they can seems to me to be a better approach.

- Ace

i guess i favor francis' basic methodology simply cause it 'keeps people honest' in that it will make sure that the slowest hardware on the grid is still 'worth' buying.. cause honestly if you wouldn't buy a sim with it *now* why the heck is everyone living there being forced to 'buy' it over and over, every month with a tier that partially supports that 'initial' hardware purchase, even well over a year afterwards.

i guess what im sayin is if you wouldn't buy *into* 'my' sim, now, why do you feel its okay that i still have to pay as much as you do, for your, much more capable, sim?

aka why should people on old sims pay december 2004 tier for june 2003 hardware?

sure and island owner 'paid' 1k to reserve their sim... would you believe we've paid easily $3k to 'reserve' ours? pieceing it together painfully from greedy neigbors and land extortionists?

sure LL didn get that money directly, but then they have written off the cost of these sims well over a year ago.

By these standards I get a firm message to sell off and wait a year for better servers. Of course the L$ for land will probably triple by then.

As long as everyone is paying the same amount LL should be upgrading all the servers so they are all the same. Starting with the oldest first. I always knew the older servers were not as good as the new ones. I thought that was common knowledge. Just spend some time in the old and new and you feel the difference immediatly. "lag"

As far as I am concerned they can put any fancy terms they want on it, still it isn't right. Replace the oldest sims first. Funny how common sence gets thrown to the side so quickly when rl $ are involved.

Cat

Cory's update this morning to Robin's post..

Or, in layman's terms: we don't care, we don't have to. But some have said that I'm too harsh on LL because they are marginally more responsive than Electronic Arts.

It's not a question of just replacing the oldest servers - and it's not a question of "common sense." It's a question of what to do AFTER you decide to to that and make the investment to do so.

Once you purchase the new hardware,
1. Do you allocate them to the entire grid and run the lottery as it is now?
2. Do you "hardwire"/assign specific servers to specific sims on a 1 for 1 basis?
3. Do you create "mini-pools" and groups?

Each of these solutions has advantages and disadvantages for all concerned.

Personally, I prefer the first solution... replace the old servers and contiue to run the sim lottery as it is now because the current mid-level performers are wokring at a currently acceptable level for over 75% of the people concerned.

If you choose to implement either 1 or 2, then you have created a potential PR and customer service nightmare by creating "haves and have nots"... something we just moved away from I thought.

been doin some thinkin, and a lil talkin with people.. and we came up with this sorta slight tweak to the system as a possibility.

Each sim is brought online on a speicifc piece of new hardware.... say sim 12, or sim 380, or sim 56004 in the year 2043....

when that specific sim hardware becomes replaced, when sim 12 is deemed unfit for main pool circulation... why not then at the same time 'bump' the sim that came online with it, to the 'front' of the queue, aka consider the actual sim refreshed to the new standard, and don't let it fall back down again into the doldrums.


-edit-
basically its just a simple way to say that once the sim you 'bought' into is really honestly obsolete, rather than stayin on the bottom forever, an having a permanent heirarchy, you are considered defacto as havin bought into a new sim and you start back on the top of the heap... its about as fair as you are going to ever be able to get, so long as hardware is unequal (because every sim will spend about the same amount of time at the top, middle, and bottom of the heap as every other)