OpenSpace Changes -- How do they affect the land market?

I remember reading some Linden wording on open sims specifically warning people not to use them for rentals, or permanent living space, etc. I wonder if their stance on this has changed? I'll dig up the text if someone thinks I'm crazy.

A couple of friends and I rent a quarter sim on an estate. I must say, if the option to move to an openspace sim for the same cost presented itself, I for one would be very very tempted. I assume that these sims can have any starting island topology?

That only works if you can afford a full prim mainland region in the first place, AND that you can sell the remainder off without inadvertantly devaluing the land you keep. Initial cost is still very much an exclusive club. I wish LL would open their eyes and see that they'd make a killing on openspaces if they dropped the stoopid rule about having prior island ownership.
A low prim region would be perfect for me because i currently own over 4k mailand in 2 regions (8192m), one mountain and one protected water. An openspace would cause a tier-up, but in the process I'd have all my land together, could have both types of land/water, would get the horizontal room i seriously dont have now, privacy wouldn't be a question, AND I'd save prims in the process cuz I only live on half my land but have full builds on both.

Not really Rihanna.. Like me, I know lots of people that would jump at owning an openspace.. so you're not wierd. I also don't really buy the minority thing... the amount of people who would BUY an openspace from LL has no real relationship to the number of past/current residents who were, or weren't willing to RENT one from a landlord. Totally different trust and risk factors there...

I would guess that the requirement for already owning an island comes from the costs associated with concierge support.

Taking the market as it is and not how we may wish it would be, it is more expensive that way. Prim for prim, since prims are ultimately what counts, it's 54% more expensive for me as a landlord and what I could do if I wanted to get into the business of developing these things. And that ignores the fact that I'd have to lay out 1675 for an island first, plus the island tier.

The upcharge is that someone else was willing to shell out the $$$$ upfront to buy the sim. It's fair and appropriate that they should recoup their initial investment.

I get this comment a lot when I rent out one of my full 15,000 prim sims to people. "You're charging so much to rent it, that's more than Linden Lab charges."
At which point I wish them luck and tell them that if they wish to pay what LL charges they are free to shell out $1675 upfront to LL instead of renting from me for nothing or a negligible fee upfront.

Elanthius, it's a different market niche - if youv'e got the right residents, they will snap it up at great margins. I've got residents grandfathered in so it's not such a boost for me, but in your 1/2 million square meters of rentals you've got easily half a dozen that would consider a void, I'd bet.

If you and I combined what we knew...

I'm not debating your math on it though.. that's all from your business point of view and is correct. However, not everything valuable in SL is measured in prim count, and it's been proven time & time again that residents WILL pay a lot more for it. Waterfront, protected frontage, unique topography, increased privacy, lack of eyesores.. all are things that command a much higher price. Many people have been waiting for something like this, and keeping the prerequisite of owning an island first is precisely what has got people pissed off.

I can imagine some people might want to buy 4 void sims to make a vaster desertr for tank battles or a low density forest, many other reasons for having void sims, what if you made an actual area for adventure where like RL there really was nothing of major interest between destinations
What if you could get desert or open water sims that only that 1000 prims for $50 per month?
Many may be interested in them as residential too. There's a lot to be said for being completely out of text range and having absolutly total security access control too.

I remember reading something like that in the knowledge base last winter. If we're thinking of the same text, my impression was that it was less a prohibition against living on them than a warning that they weren't designed as living space and LL didn't want to listen to complaints from people trying to push one past its resource capacity. The more recent blog posts have given me the impression that they know people are going to be living on them and don't care one way or the other. I think the change in name from "void sim" to "open spaces" reflects this.

As Tegg pointed out above, if LL really wanted them used only as mostly-empty geography for occasional sailing or adventuring, they could have easily decreased the prims -- they certainly wouldn't have needed to increase them!

I would certainly consider an openspace sim if they were offered separate from islands.

As it is, it is still extremely tempting for me to give renting one a try, but for the fact that I would prefer to have full control over the lands and not be at the mercy of an unscrupulous landlord.

That said... who knows? Mmm. in a few months I may have to reevaluate my stance and give it a try

This is a great development for smaller landowners, imo.

The KB article about Openspace sims does say that they are not intended for use as housing or for a shop or club. It also says that LL will not respond to support issues on Openspace sims that are about poor performance, if said sim is indeed being used for something other than its intended purpose.

On the other hand, I am sure they must know that an openspace sim, especially one on a class 5 server, is quite adequate for a single large home, or a single well-designed business. Certainly, I would expect that a large number of Openspace sims are already being used exactly that way.

The prospect of having to pay the purchase price of a full island, then the monthly fee of a full island, for four openspace sims with half the prims, that you are not expected to be able to rent or lease (as per the KB's usage suggestions) made the original openspace product somewhat inaccessable to a lot of estates.

Consequently, I think what they have done is actually quite clever really. They've made the product much more desirable by doubling the prims, and they've made it much more accessable, by releasing them individually without needing to be a 4-pack, without needing to be 'anchored' or tied to a normal island, and being able now to be placed independantly / with nothing else around.

Regarding the last remaining restriction about only selling them to customers who already own a normal private island, I suspect that they are going to wait and see what happens now that they've made these changes. If they meet whatever sales goals they have set for openspace sims, they will probably keep things as-is. If they find they still aren't moving enough openspace sims, perhaps they will remove or relax that last restriction.

-Atashi

See now that would be a mistake in my opinion. People would abuse the hell out of these sims if LL made them too easy to obtain. There would be tons of these neutered sims all over the grid and i don't think it would be good for LL in the long term, and I think they know this, and therefore i don't think, or at least I hope they would not due this. It would litter the grid with poorly performing sims, and would cause a whole new breed of bottom barrel baby bad apple estate owners reclaiming, and reselling land from under peoples feet.

I own some of these sims, and I value them highly, but they must be handled with care, and that simply won't happen if they are too east to obtain...

You definately wouldn't want to use one of these for a club. Your sim will be on the same processor as 3 other openspace sims. 4 sims worth of scripts will be running off the same processor, and you'll have no way to tell what sims are sharing your resources. Sims tend to start slowing down around 6000 scripts, which would put an openspace at 1500 scripts. 20-30 people attending a club will often be wearing more than that in their attachments.

Exactly, and if LL released them to the masses that's just the kind of stuff people would be using them for and it would be a mess. In fact, it might still happen even with the current PI ownership requirement - but hopefully just not as bad.

These sims are GREAT sims when carefully managed.

More than $400 start-up price and $75 a month tier isn't exactly "too easy", and with premium memberships dropping, I don't think we can be considered "the masses" either. If your dire predictions are correct and we end up with a lot of badly managed sims on the grid, well, if a sim is badly managed, people won't keep going. At worst, we'll have a lot more land mass and water space that people can use to move around within a natural geography rather than having to teleport around with no real sense of place. I sincerely doubt that opening sales up to all premium members would result in any greater percentage of incompetent or unethical sim owners than we already have. There's no reason to believe that current island owners are inherently better sim managers than mainland owners; jerks and fools abound at all income and account levels.

This will probably be a boon to sailors -- they can buy their own deep water sims to connect up the sailable waters. How many island owners would refuse a request for permission to place an adjoining sea sim?

I read the comment more along the lines that some are also charging double the purchase fee up front. I can see upping rent if there is no initial investment, but would you charge $2500 for a full SIM and then also upcharge the tier like that?

I am finding openspace sims for $500+ up front (actually saw one for over $750 yesterday!) as well as $25+ tier packed on top every month. My thought is, at that rate I might as well buy my own direct. (only thing keeping me from doing it is the initial outlay for the full SIM, which I understand is some of the value estate owners are taking on with these openspace sims)

Now if someone said I didn't have to outlay so much initially I'd understand tier would need to compensate.

I'd never ask people not to make their $ back. I wouldn't even ask for people not to make some profit. I'm just looking for someone thats more into it to help people get good land and less in it for the $. I know they are out there. If I can't find one, maybe I will consider becoming that person and offer lower tier openspace sims to others. I know I need to be around SL a bit longer before I'm ready for that tho.

I think there are many owners that can "buy" an openspace for others (if they cannot effort the normal sim upfront cost.. that you necessary have to own to buy an openspace), in the end it would cost nothing to me! ...5 minutes to fill the request and other 5 minutes to give estate tools to the other guy/group, if you don't pay yout tier i'll leave the sim "expires". I see the risk is all on the other side: you gonna give your money to someone (me) with the promise to receive back your island, and the risk would be higher since the other part (again me) isn't earning anything here. But well honest ppl exists.

I'll gently disagree... this was 110% the case with class 4 voids. But not the class 5.

I've seen 100 people packed into Caledon Carntaigh in full formal 19th c style, with near-normal time dilation and sim FPS. It's a common party spot for Radio Riel - typically running 50-60 people for even moderate gatherings. There are lots of adjoining regions to that one, too - it's not in isolation by any means.

Caledon Cymru is another; the 24 hour 2nd anniversary of Caledon was held there, and it was anything but light usage for several hours at a stretch. Admittedly this was with Havok4.

I know this stuff flies in the face of common lore, but these aren't class 4 regions we are talking about here.

If anyone sees a huge gathering of dots in Caledon, it is likely to be one of these events or even an NCI class (Nova Civis Caledon - another class 5 openspace). Just drop in and see for yourself - really. Nobody minds one more, and I've yet to ever hear of a private Caledon gathering with more than 30 or 50 people.

Why it works: Basically, when you limit the static prims in a region, there are fewer opportunities to pack them with scripts, and more importantly: textures. True, the avatars have textures and scripts, but when the rubber hits the road: things really do work.

I'm not a big fan of clubs, but I have no doubt someone could do a club on a class 5 void with great success. Ironically, the prim doubling will make this worse not better, but remember we are also getting Havok 4 soon, and Mono. Good times!

Two very important observations there. First, by far the worst sim lag I see these days is image lag, and fewer prims = fewer textures. (Admittedly, some clubs are a special case, with club-owners and club-goers seemingly in competition for how much particle texture pollution they can push through the network. These clubs are screwed no matter what kind of sim they're on, though.)

And second, the prospect of both Havoc 4 and Mono in the not-too-distant future. Neither of these is a universal win, but both provide substantial improvements in average performance. (Mono is perhaps more important for security, but that's a Different Topic.) Combined, they should make a Class 5 OpenSpace sim perform pretty comparably to today's Class 4s.

Especially compared to a Mainland Class 4. I mean, speaking of "tons of... neutered sims all over the grid"--try the older parts of the western continents. There, we have geriatric Class 4s close-packed: lots of child agents and sim-to-sim handoff communications. In contrast, an OpenSpace sim can be a neighborless island now, avoiding that performance trap.

I believe he were talking about scripts... maybe he didn't followed this:

/327/e7/245053/1.html

...in my experience it seems that openspace sims (class5) are affected heavily on the script front (nor the FPS/Physics) when loaded.

I agree completely.
I also object to the stance that it shouldn't be opened up because they might get abused by a few people, when the person saying this already has a couple of thier own. How hypocritical is that? Everyone else on the grid takes the chance that this island owner wont "litter" the grid with incompetant voids too.

Interesting Desmond.

A couple of the advantages I saw were

-Far lower price to buy and run

Clubs costs are usually far too high for their income, this is an ideal mach

-Encourage minimalism

Less prims would help this a lot. Really you can make a nice club interior with around 500 prims. But whole sim clubs are megaprim purply pink monstrosities. The prims must tempt them lol.

-Community awareness

For lack of a better term. You wouldn't be on 1/4 of someone else's sims hogging resources.

When you have 50-60 avatars, believe me, you got scripts. But you can still move, you can still see the world - most of the critical functions are intact.

And one of the nice things about script loading is that once you hit maximum they still run, just in a less timely manner. For many, many, many script applications this isn't a 'make or break' situation. You'll see objects take longer to output llSay()s and scripted objects will take longer to update position, but by and large, they all still work.

Bottom line, I haven't seen anything in a class 5 void that has shut down a big gathering and caused it to end or move. Now, try that in a class 4, or even a class 4 full region, and you are gonna have a crashfest with that same crowd. I've seen that several times. Maybe it will be better on those with Havok 4 coming in, I don't know.

Would be nice if someone created a minimalist garden style cub with one, have it be an outside club with just a stage area and a gazebo in terms of buildings, I'd try it if I could afford it.