A response to the change in sim obsolescence strategy.

the amount you paid is immaterial. To acquire a full sim on the mainland costs *FAR* more than island sims do, most of us who have managed to do so have spent in the $2000-3000 range... are we not also entitled to not suddenly be moved to a deathly bad sim?

While there are not enough 'new' servers to support all the sims someone has to be on 'old' servers. I have most of a maingrid sim, and nearly half of another maingrid sim. This land is for group projects, not for 'barroning'. I really don't mind getting put onto an 'old' server every now and then. It would be nice if they are shuffled around so we all get a chance of the new, faster ones. Though at the end of the day I bought the virtual land, not the server it runs on.

On my private island I bought the server. Linden Lab stated as much. The $980 startup cost is to cover the cost of buying a new server, setting it up and installing it in the grid. I want what I paid for....

No Kidding! Taylor and I have worked very hard on our sim to keep it lag free and a good place to live, work, and play. We have been on the developers incentive award almost every month since the sim was created.

Our efforts to keep the island lag free included a lack of clubs, malls, big spinny shit and 4000 particle effects constantly running. So I guess that put us on the low end of simulator resource demand.

So I log on to Briarcliff Manor, find that the island number has dropped from somewhere like 440 to 79, sim fps have dropped from 6000 to 500. This truly feels like a royal screwing here.

Whether this change is due to this new policy, or I just got really unlucky, this is totally unacceptable.

If I put 50 naked avs dancing in a club with 1000 spinny lights and 2000 physics things and 3000 particle bombs, will I get a pretty new server?

And this wont be rewarding the dwell zombies? And this wont be scammed either?

fen-

well today, they moved JAVA to sim10.... we went from a very consistant 1000 FPS to less than 300 after the reboot.

Also, we now have the full server, vs half of SIM277.

the linds told me today, there really wan't that much difference between servers, and i must have a problem.

Interesting....

Walkerman Horus

JAVA Sim!

Hi Walkerman,

We haven't yet gotten the code in place to map the sims to a fixed class of hardware as we've discussed, and we probably won't complete that work for a couple of weeks. Also we are working to move as many of the slower sims to unowned land, but have not completed that work, so hang in there.

I am observing something very interesting when I trade land, something that I thought would have happened a lot earlier.

I've observed lately that gap between Mature and PG land prices is starting to close. A lot of players fed up with clubs, malls, and lag are voicing their desire to me for swaths of remote pg land. not too remote, but just not next to a hub.

I have considered I might be mistaking a rise in land prices with my own conclusion because I've been concentrating on PG lately by chance of what I manage to purchase. But I am biased since I have always favoured PG for this very reason.

Have other players observed this trend or am I just drawing conclusions from my bias?

For those of us who live in the original sims and have stayed there the entire time, this seems very unfair. I understand that from a business standpoint it's good to make the best possible first impression to new users and land owners. But from a pure fairness standpoint, it seems to me that the people who have spent the most amount of time on the old hardware have more than paid their dues already. I fully understand the point that this is an emotional response to a decision based on objective metrics, but it does feel like a slap in the face.

The only fair ways to assign the servers are this...

1. By average resource usage. The sims with the most load get the beefiest machines. This makes the most sense from a practical standpoint, but stands to really shaft some of the oldest members of the community.

2. Random. Have a drawing. Someone's going to draw the short straw, but at least no one gave it to them deliberately.

3. By longest period of land ownership by still active players.

I'm with Chip here...

How the hell am I supposed to keep a mall running in Mocha if they're going to stick me on a server that can barely cope with the load when nobody's there? Events - Don't be silly... Dwell - sorry, you're out of luck...

Thanks LL... you really make me feel special.

I couldn't disagree with this one more, Chip, my friend. This encourages bad coding, irresponsible texture sizing, and so on. It will be like prim hoarding - "use these lag creating objects to get the best server!"

It rewards those who would abuse resources rather than taking the final step of creating anything truly awesome in SL - making it as efficient as you possible can. It also penalizes people who have spent their time in SL, day after day, fighting lag so when you do get a crappy server, its not fun, but its not the end of the use of the sim either.

Regards,

-Flip

I was thinking more along the lines of dwell traps. This would give club spammers a new incentive to send random teleports to their dwell parties - "invite more people to get the best server".

Good points Flip. I personally prefer my 2nd or 3rd options

There are two points:

- most people want to have the same simulator perf as everyone else
- island owners were given the impression that their setup fee was the cost of their own personal server

For the first issue, the answer is fairly easy: switch sims randomly between different hardware regularly. I think this is more or less what happens now? It means everyone is equal, and it means Linden are under a certain pressure to upgrade the sims since slow ones are visible to everyone; some of the time.

For the second issue, how about: island owners get to choose between using a server from the pool, or their originally assigned server? They can choose to switch between pooled/original server at any time, with one month's notice, and possibly a small configuration change fee (10usd?).

Azelda

My concern is that when a person first buys land (or an island - I don't think it should be any different), it seems that a reasonable expectation is that they stay on the same or better hardware in the future. While this may not be optimal from the perspective of overall grid performance, it seems maximally fair to the purchaser. Hence the suggestion that the original class of machine simply stay the same until upgraded.

But Philip,

That only applies to sims bought on that premise as new ...
If you buy into a sim say 6 months into it's life and pay x L$ per sq.m, then find it reduced to half the performance or less... then you'll rightly feel cheated...

I think he just said that wouldn't happen. After some magical date soon to be announced, I suspect:

New SIM hardware >= Previous SIM hardware will always hold true for every sim.

Hopefully this means that SL is going to migrate lower class machines to new SIMs. This way people will not constantly be moving (read: upgrading) to a new sim..

No he said Original Hardware...
Which in the case of my home sim is what it was on about 18-20 months ago, NOT what it was on when I bought it....

from Philip:


The problem I see with that is that someone first buying land hasn't developed it yet, and so isn't hindered by the server performance (unless the sim is already developed enough to strain the older machines). Someone who has owned land for a long time and has developed it for the average server performance may now turn around and find that the performance isn't capable of handling what they've already developed. Should it be incumbant on existing development to redesign to compensate for a drop in average performance over someone who has yet to develop their land? I think that private island owners should have first dibs on the newest servers because their buy-in came with a reasonable expectation that they'd receive the latest and greatest. I feel for you Philip because this is definitely a Hobson's choice no matter how you slice it. I just can't wrap my brain around knowing that after owning and paying for land for over a year, my average server performance is going to go down... deliberately

Not only that Chip, but selling it won't be an option cos nobody'll want to buy it once they know the stats are going to be low... so you'll lose there too, and be forced to buy new land, massively marked up, in order to even keep the same as you previously had. And that's if you even CAN move... For mall owners, it'll be a nightmare.

That too. Fortunately for me, aside from pretty massive texture load, Freelon is a pretty quiet place. This will hit others much worse than me. I say give the best machines to the islands and then randomly assign what's left. I'd feel a lot better knowing it was just luck of the draw. I can't/won't move. I have too much time and energy invested where I am.

Why? They don't pay any more than us.

Only because I think the up front setup cost carries a reasonable expectation of getting the newest hardware. Because of that it doesn't really bother me, especially since the server performance disparity hadn't really been noticed by LL until now. I just don't think saddling the oldest sims with the slowest hardware just by virtue of having had that hardware originally is fair. I don't really care what I end up with as long as the average performance in the sim doesn't drop. A lot of land owners in the old sims have been here since the beginning and this is a rather odd way to reward loyalty. Oh well, at least we can still terraform more than anyone else.

I completely agree with that. I just paid 1500 US$ to buy one new sim so I have newest hardware to run Centre Ville mall on!

Chip, I paid 1500 US$ up front setup cost for mainland sim. And believe me, this was by far not most expensive mainland sim. According to your logic mainland should get best server and cheap island sim should get junk

So I think it is right approach to give old sims old server and new sims new server. And when old become too old, maybe after 2 or 3 years, replace oldest hardware against newest

And I would give priority to telehub sims like Janus. I think I no longer own any land there, but lag there effect many many people every day because it is so busy and so crowded.

That's funny, when I owned a lot of telehub-proximity land, it was laggy back *then*. But I took my experience with me by understanding the real message is - don't anchor yourself near a telehub, where most profiteering activity takes place, which usually results in lag, time dilation, bad lighting, etc...

One thing new people should do is look at sims that have a telehub, and never buy land there. Just makes sense. Wish I had known

Maxx, I agree that people who buy there should know what to expect. But everybody use telehubs, so those places are most used places. So if you try to optimize experience for as many users as possible, then some telehub sims might be worth some consideration. Janus is just one good example come to my mind.