Openspaces and "light use"

I've been pondering the meaning of this paragraph from the website: -

"It is therefore important to understand what these Regions are. They are provided for light use only, not for building, living in, renting as homes or use for events. As a stretch of open water for boating or a scenic wooded area they are fine, but we do not advise more serious use than this and will not respond to performance issues reported should you not use them in this way."

I can understand their message: OSRs are not meant for heavy usage.

However, as people who build and script will know, there are good builds and bad builds; good scripts and bad scripts.

If I make an OSR, I can fill it with the laggiest and primmiest "scenery" - trees spewing particles, powerful scripted weather systems, waves - and use it for (scripted and physical) boating and recreation...clearly this would be considered as NOT being light use. On the other hand, if I make a simple unscripted (or even low scripted) 50 prim house and the OSR is restricted access to me only, and I only visit once every few days, I am NOT imposing a large load on the server, even though I'm technically "living" there and it is considered as "residential use".

I attempted to discuss this with a Linden today and whilst she was helpful in a general sense, I felt she was constrained by the fact she couldn't be seen to be encouraging the usage of OSRs for anything more than just sitting around waiting for the occasional boat (which for 75USD/month is quite a lot!) even though she agreed with the comparison above (I felt). She said eventually that if I could "swing it" so that 750 is enough for a home, and it's low scripted and low usage then "more power to ya" but that LL couldn't "support" it.

I understand her point, they can't be expected to help with performance issues if an OSR has more than its intended use. But surely, if there are performance issues, a simple delete of the builds, followed by a restart from the Estate Owner and THEN a request for assistance if that doesn't fix the problem should be "supportable". I'd be happier if they were clearer in their rules: i.e. "NO houses" or "this is your maximum scripts allowed"...etc.

Has anyone else any experience in this area? The basic premise is that not all houses are packed full of prims or scripts, and that not every house is used to hold wild parties or orgies (not that there's anything wrong with that necessarily). I have a plot of land on the mainland which only I ever go to (because I've set it up that way), that I only spend about 5% of my SL time on and which doesn't have many scripts running on it - could this usage not be transferred to an OSR in a responsible way?

As currently marketed by LL, the only viable use for an OpenSpaces sim is to create a body of navigable water off the coastline of an existing sim, or between two sims. For example, if I had a normal sim with a boat dock right the the sim edge, and thre were no adjacent sims, then although I could rez a boat there, and could see what looked like lots of water surrounding my sim, I can't sail past my sim edge. I could, however, pay an extra up front fee and an extra monthly charge to add a 256 M x 256M area of water in front of my sim that I CAN run my boat out into. That, in a nutshell, is about the only valid and acceptable use for the OpenSpaces coass of sim today. Maybe I could put a jumping dolphin or two out ther, for looks... Very expensive water for something you can hardly use.

A "Homestead" sim, which is pretty much what an OpenSpaces sim was after they initially increased prim count and lowered prices on them, but is now at a higher cost per prim than any other type of sim, is the lowest-cost class of sim that LL says we can "live" on. But since you also have to already own a full-use sim to buy a Homestead, that means most people just looking to have a Homestead sim of their own, with the equivalent of a quarter sim's resources and full privacy, must rent that parcel from a land baron who owns at least one normal sim. And bear in minds that Homesteads and OpenSpaces are both more limited on avatar counts per sim than a normal sim is.

In short, neither product is worth much at all, any more. They trashed the value of them intentionally, so people would buy Mainland or Full-sized sims instead.

Yet they want people to buy homesteads now. I got an email in the past week encouraging me to buy a homestead. What a crock. Why, when it's not proportional to the cost of an island, has less performance, and the price is going up in July?

They slew, drew and quartered the goose that laid the golden egg.

Residents tried to tell LL that the one possible saving grace for Homesteads would be if an individual could buy one directly from LL, as their only sim. Expensive per prim, yes, but it would have been the cheapest real privacy on the Grid. But no, LL refused to consider that, so ya gotta rent your Homestead from a land baron, instead.

I own an estate; they are trying to get estate owners to buy homesteads.

I am not buying any Homesteads anymore. There is too much uncertainty about the future.

I am very sure that the price increase coming in July will force a large shift in market dynamics and I am feeling a little exposed with the current Homesteads I own. So, until things get clearer, I am not investing in LL servers anymore.

.d

Ditto here, I used to spend maybe 10k -15k a week on stuff while bumming around Sl, now i really dont want to spend a dime because it all seems rather pointless now. I hate that feeling but thats what its come down to.

I don't own any homesteads. My guess is that those who own homesteads didn't get that email. I had to laugh a bit. I was like, are you effin' kidding me? I smell desperation.

I rent a "homestead" currently and i guess im trying to either forget that in July the price will just become completely ridiculous or somewhere i am still holding on to the hope that LL will see some sense here and stick at the current price level which seems about fair and managable for me personally. Either way its like it or lump it apparently.

Well this is the problem I have. I have a homestead of my own and while I *just about* tolerated the price increase from 75 USD to 95 USD, I will probably find that it becomes completely poor value for money in July unless it is competely self-sufficient. I'm therefore faced with selling it off or downgrading to an OSR if I do keep it.

However in the latter scenario, it doesn't make much sense to sell it on as an OSR since the conversion fee from Homestead to OSR is 125+100 = 225. That would mean I'd have to keep it as an OSR for about 8 months before I start to save on the downgrading...which sucks. There are no good options here other than selling it on.

If I had a Homestead or an OpenSpaces sim that I didn't have a clear and viable use for, cost no object, I would sell it now, or abandon it to LL it if I had to. Better to fold your cards, eat the loss, and walk away from the table, rather than staying and being slowly bled to death.

I can see some very limited uses for both types of low-use sims, even afer the price hile. But not for anything that has to be competitive with the cost per prim for mainland or normal private island parcels. For example, if I had a large and beautiful collection of private island sims, it might be worth the expense to me to have some navigable wayer to play in, just off my harbor area. Or a Corporate or University build might have a use for the lower-prim, lower-cost sims to fill in around a core area, so it doesn't look so small and isolated without the "fluff" around the edge.

But I'll say again, it is extremely unlikely that any Homestead sim will be able to justify its cost-per-prim after the price hike this Summer. Anything that would be only existing for what was within that Homestead would be better off relocating to 1/4 of a normal sim.

I'm not surprised. The grid shrank from 30,000+ sims to around 25,000 in four months. I bet LL has a lot of unused servers that they're contractually liable for.

Hey, I just realized...I'll bet that's why they're making the new Adult Continent. It's a place to employ some of those idle servers!

That wouldn't surprise me. The question is whether anyone is going to fill the vacuum left on mainland. Even though it will remove the blight of some poorly designed sex clubs being your neighbor on mainland, it just creates more downward pressure on land prices that may or may not be met, depending on the amount of demand for adult land and how much the positive buzz leads to people coming into SL and buying land.

Oh that is awful. I own an island, but I didn't get that email (and I don't have a homestead or openspace either). Wonder if I will get one soon?

You know, I cut the Lab a lot of slack during the OS debacle, but to hear that they are pimping them out again now, that makes me very angry.

I don't own a homestead anymore but I did once. I guess LL are targetting these adverts carefully because it would have seriously annoyed me had I got that email, so credit where it's due.