Openspaces being sold as regular sims

Hello everyone

I'm relatively new to Second Life so I don't own land yet. As a result I was shopping around today looking at parcels being sold and a resident named *snip* zoned in and offered to sell me a quarter-sim with the same number of prims as a 4096 block. She called it an "opensource sim". Cough.

I have looked at the Openspaces FAQ and I challenged her on its usage. She swore blind they have the same performance as a regular sim with no limitations apart from prim count.

Obviously this is a scam, or at least misleading. Is this against the ToS? Should I report this? Is this a broken record issue already?

I would suggest omitting the name of the island owner, however from what I read, the island owner has done nothing wrong.

Sure, lower prim regions may not be able to support the quantity of scripts that a full prim region offers. I would not consider using anything less than 1/2 of a open region. A 4096sqm on a low prim region defeats the purpose of a open region, IMO.

i would first take her name out of the post because you could get introuble for TOS violation of using names..
as far as the land being a scam i'm not sure..i have only heard alittle bit about those sims .what i have heard is they are lacking in sokme things but really never paid much attention as to what..

I can't recall for where, but isn't there also a lower limit on the number of avatars that can visit an openspace sim?

Opensource and openspace are two very different things. Opensource suggests something like http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page , which would not be a sim in the Linden grid.

Yes , but it's the same lower limit for all Sims. Zero. When you try to put less than zero avatars on a sims it cries havok.

Openspaces are quite legit. They are, for all practical purposes, a quarter-sim. They cost a quarter, can hold a quarter of the normal sim prim limit, and runs along with 3 other Openspaces on the same hardware used to run one normal sim.
You can only buy them if you already own a normal sim, but nothing prevents you from renting them out after that (and possibly granting full estate management rights over them to your renters).
They were originally intended as a way for sim owners to provide some "light use" landscape around their "true" sim, but restrictions have recently been lifted somewhat, allowing them to be used more like stand-alone sims.

You do not have quite as much horsepower to run them on as normal sims, but since they also hold less prims, it balances somewhat. I wouldn't use them to host big events, but they can certainly be used as a private retreat, much like any rented parcel. I have seen them used as sandboxes, and I am working in one myself, and performance under normal use seems quite fine; no worse than any filled normal sim.

You are, of course, renting them through a third party, under whatever agreement you reach, and as such, all the normal warnings and caveats for renting on a private island applies.
If you can find an island owner or landlord you can trust, and who will grant you estate rights, they can be great fun to play with, since you can get a cheap island with all the possibilities for terraforming and changing landscape, which is well above what you get with a normal parcel.

I just recently upgraded to a openspace sim. If you are looking for a more private place to live it would be an ideal alternative. The prim allowance is 3750 and the server you share is with 3 other openspace sims. The land size is the same as a "regular" sim. I have estate rights to my sim. I highly suggest you do your research first and purchase from a reputable vendor. Prior to my upgrade, I lived at former residence for over a year and built an excellent relationship with the sim owner. So I got an excellent deal on mine through her.

The openspace sims are not designed to support the "workload" of a regular sim, so please keep that in mind if you are looking to place a mall or club there. But if you are looking at one as your primary residence also with a few renters then it would be an excellent option.

Open spaces do not offer the same performance as a normal sim. They are not designed to do so. Hence why they cost a quarter of the price as a normal sim, hence why they support a quarter of the prims of a normal sim.

I asked her if she meant Openspaces and she confirmed that she did.

Also, I have removed her name, thank you for letting me know you two above.

I concluded that misrepresenting an openspaces sim as being as capable as a full one should warrant further enquiry. Perhaps she was lied to by the actual owner, but you'd be damn pissed off if you purchased an openspaces sim only to find it was as slow as hell.

Reputable vendor? If you were to purchase an entire openspace sim, why wouldn't you simply buy one directly from Linden?

I've seen people trying to sell entire sims at a markup on both the purchase price and the tier cost several times now. Is there some restriction as to who can own land beyond the basic premium member upgrade? On top of that, if you're paying someone other than Linden the tier prices (including their markup) do you really even own your new sim?

Because to buy Openspace from LL you need to own a normal SIM first, and buy 4 at a time.

I think they changed it awhile back, you can buy them individually without owning anything prior to buying them

Because LL won't sell you one if you don't own at least one full prim SIM already.

Do you have any evidence to support this, Ciaran? They have 1/4 the prims, but why do you think they would have poor performance?

They are 4 sims on the amount of resources 1 is normally on. Together they have the same performance, but individually I suppose they'd be less than a normal sim.

It's in the FAQ. If one openspaces sim owner decides to populate his sim with low prim rental properties I suspect you're still going to see a lot of scripts and avatars being present, hurting the other three openspaces sims running on that node.

I rent an Openspace sim, and they do indeed have relatively poor SCRIPT performance. Other considerations such as rezzing times, Time dilation, Sim FPS etc appear to be on a par with any regular sim.

The script performance really isn't bad, but it does become quite noticeable the more scripts you have running, and it's a good idea to keep an eye on them and on the scripts running on the AVs who visit, if they'll allow it.

You can check script load of any AV by having them sit on a prim, then checking the load of that prim in the Estate Tools.


All in all, I'm VERY happy with mine, it makes an excellent residential sim.

I was referring to the practice of selling a normal private island sim for $1100 with tier payments of $330 a month. Can someone explain why you wouldn't just buy the sim straight from Linden?

Only thing I could think is someone who got lot of money but doesn't want to use up their SLX limits but doesn't want to increase their credit to LL to buy more.

Well if you are, for example, from Germany, buying directly from LL would include 19 percent VAT. Paying 1100 and 330 to a third party would be less than that.

The question is, are you using the entire sim? If not, how do you stop your neighbours from poor scripting behaviour?

I do think openspaces would be ok if you want to use the entire thing as an extended bit of foliage around what would otherwise be a normal 4096 parcel. Likewise it's a great way to increase the view if you're lucky enough to own a private island yourself and have money to burn.

Overall though my impression of Second Life's land pricing makes me thing they're crippling what could be the new face of the internet. I fail to see how hardware and maintenance costs could be so high, I think Linden must be making money hand over fist, as are most of the sim owners who charge almost a 100% markup on land and tier fees.

I'm equally unimpressed with non-Linden solutions because they lack the population and the chance to make a bit of pocket money from selling content.

The solution as I see it is to allow potential land owners to run their own servers and connect to the grid while allowing Linden to continue to be a central hub for in-world currency, much like how the web and online shopping works now. Too bad the main theme I'm seeing on the forums regarding anything Linden sets out to do is "slow". Rant off.

Edit: Not to mention how upset the land owners would be if land was suddenly devalued immensely. I like to think of them as collateral damage on the road to much greater content creation opportunities.

I didn't look specifically, but the land seller I was looking at had separate European pricing, presumably including various local taxes.

Hi Pecos, I could quote you Jack Linden's quote at a recent office hour but I think that breaks the rules. The idea with an open space, initially, was for it to be exactly that, a few trees, somewhere to join regions, some space.

I'm not saying they have poor performance Peco, but they certainly won't perform as well as a full sim.

Seems pretty niche.

So anyway, I'm not an American but our exchange rate is getting pretty close to yours now. Renting still seems like a very expensive hobby. How many of you actually own or rent land?