Void sim $50 tier increase

LL's business model is one where the more popular they get, the more they have to increase prices since most residents don't pay for their resource usage.

I'd personally much rather see everyone be forced to pay for accessing SL and have the population cut in half than LL looking for new revenue by increasing tier every time Q4 comes along (this is the third tier increase I've been around for, three years in a row).

(Edited to add that they could just adopt the same billing strategy webhosts use: storage, CPU usage and bandwidth usage are three billing criteria. If you stay within the limits of your plan you pay the monthly fee. If you overuse either CPU, storage or bandwidth you'll get charged extra fees)

You are entitled to your opinion as much as anyone else of course, but your reasoning behind makes no sense whatsoever.

They (LL) made it as interesting as possible to purchase open spaces, and everyone renting or buying one knew what they were getting. At least, they could have known. The only thing that happens now, is that they will make it impossible for most of the renters to stay, as 125 dollars is ridiculous.

Furthermore they did do anything to prevent fraud, if you read the forums here and elsewhere, much fruad takes place with normal estates. Selling parcels and then selling the sim, or simply kicking users.

Really, I do not see how this does any good, exept for the pockets of LL.

1 User agrees!!!

And this is not even a normal tier increase. It is simply harvesting money from people they lured into buying open sims.

A little voice inside my head is saying this is just the first thing they've gotten to, in this round of price increases.

Yep, I think this quarter we'll all be getting screwed with rate increases.

And also: If it makes sense, it isn't allowed by the Tao of Linden.

2 Users Agreed.

I may be out of bounds here, but why the hell would anyone want to pay $100 per month USD for land they can't build on?

I have an open sim. I built a little skybox on it, and my partner has built a Starblazers Yamato a bit higher up. We're thinking of dumping the open sim for other reasons, but if these sims are truly there just for people to look at and say, "oooh, scenery!" what is the point?

I have lived on an open sim for the past couple of months. I poured my heart into my build and so far have used 2000 of the 3750 prims for my castle and gardens and a couple of small houses I let my friends stay in. This price increase is going to destroy everything I have done in SL. A sad day indeed.
Now I have the choice. go back to mainland , take the offered 1/4 regular sim from my landlord, downsize or get out of land all together, quit SL.

What will happen now? It seems as though they want to kill off open space sims all together..who will pay that price to have a water or forest never mind people like me who want to just build a nice place to get away?

When all the open space sim dwellers have to go back to regular estates or mainland the land barons will up the prices and we will all get screwed over again...

Well this definitely kills our using Openspaces ever again in the future. And now instead of buying a 2nd sim to attach to our current Estate we'll just go with the cheaper mainland with a nice 1/2 sim for the same tier fee of an Openspace.

Every time LL does something boneheaded, people predict the death of SL. Or a huge out flux of people. They say that people will "vote" with their dollar. The only problem is that there is no viable competition. You can't take that dollar elsewhere. So it comes down to quitting SL, reducing your usage in some meaningful way, or keep going. While I'm sure people do all of these things, I'm not convinced that it will impact LL the way one would hope.

Take this, for example. As someone pointed out elsewhere, if LL retains 60% of their current OS customers, they'll break even on teir. Plus have some hardware left over.

Will it impact the economy? Yes, I'm sure. But perhaps Nautilus will as well. Who knows?

I will say this though: the moment SL does have true competition, LL better watch out. Though I wonder if that will ever, in fact, occur.

So, who does this really hurt? As usual, Linden lab has made a decision without any consideration to the consequences of that decision. The people who are abusing the Openspace sims by renting them out, putting malls and clubs on them, etc. are deriving income from the sims, and are far less punished by this move than the people who were using them to complement existing sims with parks, waterways, etc. The responsible users were not deriving any significant income on these sims and have no way to recoup the new costs except to start abusing the openspace regions.

Nice move, Linden Lab. Way to screw the people who were doing the right thing and encourage the abuses you were trying to prevent.

Shades of the stupid decision making and dishonest dealing the mentor group just got, and the other bad decisions that were made that screwed the customers before that. It's just one backhand of the customers after another. Who is at the wheel over there? Seriously, who is in charge? Doesn't it occur to ANYBODY that before you make a decision, you should try to analyze the likely results of that decision?

Whatever open sims are "meant" to be for (and what they're meant to be for officially, and what they seem to actually be for in reality don't appear to be the same), people have invested in them. I "own" a parcel on an open space sim, and yes, it's used for a residential building, as are the other parcels. I can live with the lack of prims by very careful building (no much eye candy, but still not all that bad) and I have a decent squre metre-age for the floorplan. All this on a tight budget.

Sure, maybe the land owner is an unscrupulous cad for renting out parcels on open space for purposes other than doing naff all, but she's also incredibly helpful, friendly and approachable.. I have never had any problems with performance on my bit of land, and so far as I can tell neither has anyone else on the sim. But I am going to have a problem when the tiers go up as I honestly don't think my humble 125 prim allowance is worth the best part of 1k a week. And there's no way the sim manager can afford to keep the prices down with this increase. So I will be leaving as I cannot afford to pay the new amount, and she will almost certainly lose business and money. So who gains? Will everyone suddenly see a new improved performance increase? Will open space tenants find themselves with the same land/ prim count on superior estates?

I suspect the only winners will be LL as they will pick up those who are dedicated enough to get premium accounts and shell out for mainland. A short sighted policy as although my money might not go directly to LL they certainly get a large chunk of it out the fes they charge the estate owner for the land I then pay tiers on. In the long run I can seea lot of people who run things the way I do either giving up entirely or simply being yet another user rather than creator or provider.

Which is exactly what a lot of landowners, especially with private islands they were renting out, predicted when they cut the price of Openspaces. A lot of people were complaining about the devaluation of their land, and predicting the end. I'm sure the availability of rentals on Openspaces, with land looking very cheap per sq.m. has contributed to the drop in mainland prices.

My guess is that LL didn't foresee the huge growth in Openspaces, and certainly not that there would be so much Openspace land being rented out. They always said that Openspaces were for light use, and my impression was that the original intention was for them to be little more than landscaping round a central normal sim. Even when they allowed individual Openspaces without being attached to a normal island, I'm sure the idea was that they'd be used for a modest house and grounds, rather than the way a lot of them have been used. The idea seemed to be it was a cheap way to own a sim for your own use, not a way to set up a rental business on the cheap.

I never saw the attraction, I'd rather stick to my 22000 sq.m. and 5000 prims than have 65000 sq.m. with only 3500 prims. When my landlord considered turning most of her estate into Openspaces, I told her we'd leave, and I think most of my neighbours would have too, we're not prim efficient round here .

It's hard on those who used them the way they were meant to be used, especially those in Europe who get hit with VAT, on top at the same time as the dollar is strengthening, (in August the monthly tier on an Openspace was £44 including VAT, when it goes up, with the falling pound it will be about £97) but they never promised the low price would be forever.

LL weren't going to clamp down on the misusers and there was no proviso on misuse. They just said they wouldn't support them. LL knew what these were being used for, they've been selling like hot cakes.

I like the idea of people who are bogging down and misusing the OS sims paying more for it (however I did live on one, and I can promise you my neighbors and I were FAR from bogging it down), but I wish they wouldn't price punish the ones using them as intended. Might as well at that point get a regular sim for what your paying for it. I knew what I was getting when I rented on an OS, so I wasn't fooled into getting something less for my money. I don't think people like that should be punished either...oh my, this is a hard argument, I'll just shut up now.

1. I should NOT expect to lease a open space to anybody but to myself, as I cannot sell the land like I normally do for full prim regions?

2. I should expect some policing of my use of open space regions, despite the class 5 upgrade and 50usd more per month?

If I understand "No Owner switching for Openspaces unless it’s a full transfer of Payor." correctly, then open space regions will not be able to be abused as they once were.

Seems to me this is over-correcting the problem.

I can not afford this! It is hard enough getting someone to rent as it is!! Now it will be impossible!
seems to me more a matter of greed than anything else
do we get increased prims now??

A landlord could in theory rent out the parcel the old fashioned way - sell the parcel in the system and take payment in L. But the extra step of having the tenant be the payor cannot be done.

Yes, considering the way LL acted as an enabler for the abusers when they increased the prim limits. That was basically giving them the old "nudge nudge wink wink know-what-I-mean"...

To truly see LL's hypocrisy in this, go check out the Mos Ainsley sim. It's a LL owned spaceport built in an openspace sim. Over 3000 prims and over 800 scripts. A handful of physical vehicles that anyone can drive or fly around in. This is how LL is using openspaces, but everyone that wanted to use one for an actual openspace now has to bend over because some people were abusing them.

we own an OS, and yes we used it for our own personal residence, rarely went beyond 2000 prims, even when we allowed others to live there. Kept the scripts down, and enjoyed our privacy. Now, we will be forced out to a small plot on the mainland because, as we are not business owners we simply cannot afford this insane hike in tier. Nor can our friends we lease out to from time to time. Thank You Linden Labs, instead of punishing those who have the giant clubs and the mega marts on these sims, you are punishing the average person who chose to quietly go about there second live

Looks like I will never own land in SL.

If you got an OS through someone else, you never owned it to begin with.

I didn't, but which phrase would you have preferred?

I will never have the feeling of owning land in SL? Technically no one *owns* land.

I consider myself the owner of all my virtual land because my only landlord is LL, who will not kick me off except for the most egregious of behavior, or nonpayment. I don't split that hair that way.