If you could pay LL to upgrade your mainland sim from class 4 to 5, would you?

After visiting some class-5 sims, my class-4 mainland home, where I peacefully co-exist with a bunch of other land owners, seems to be a bit of a dog. Even when it's running happy. The pain of having to buy a 1/2+ sim and tier and getting everybody to rebuild and all that is enough that moving to a new sim isn't likely.

I know LL doesn't offer mainland server class upgrades but I'm curious if anybody else would like to have this offered.. Also, if so, how much do you (or you and your neighbors together) think this would be worth, in US$ ?

edit: talking a one-time payment here of US$200 or so with _one_ resident taking responsibilty of paying LL.

There really isn't a huge performance difference between class 4 and class 5.

I think it would be cheaper and more feasible to pay your neighbors to de-rez some of their lag-inducing and colliding scripts.

I'd rather upgrade my pie, oddly enough. I don't own a full sim and trying to get my neighbors talked into it sounds like a lot more work than I would want to put into it.

You'd have to have really great neighbors and feel secure that they'll pay their share to pull this off.

I thought that too until I spent some time on a shiny new class 5 then went home..


They were offering class-3 island owners a class-5 upgrade for US$200. With 4-5 people at or above the 1/8th sim tier of US$40/month, I'd think coming up with a good part of US$200 wouldn't be too terrible..

I'd agree, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a touch the control freak and not-so trusting type. Many of the mainland sims I've resided in have had more than the 4 or 5 people as parcel owners, some of whom simply didn't get along.

In other words, it'd be a lot like herding cats, except you'll wind up with more scratches. Also, I can see a lot of room for disaster unless Linden Labs put some kind of escrow type thing in place so that one parcel owner doesn't get "stuck" footing the whole bill.

I'm hoping they'll just upgrade the class 4s to class 6s, whatever they may end up being.

I split my time between a class 5 and two class 4s, and under "normal" conditions, they're pretty indistinguishable. One thing I've noticed, though, is script performance: under unloaded conditions, a class 5 will execute pure script instructions (like a simple arithmetic loop) at least 50% faster than a class 4. For this reason if no other, I believe the claim that class 5s handle more avatars better, too.

But I wouldn't pay to upgrade, especially not with the largely unknown performance impact of Havoc 4 and eventually Mono--maybe then class 5s will be overkill.

I don't think they'd do that.. I'm assuming one person would have to cough up the money up front and then do any cat herding by themselves.

Bonus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SmgLtg1Izw

If it was a one-off payment, yes, but if it was the dreaded tier boost, then no.

I can personally attest to the fact that there is a GIGANTIC difference between class 4 and class 5 sims in terms of how many avatars, scripts and such they can hold before lag becomes unacceptable. No matter what LL seems to think, whether it be the hardware, the coloc center, or some other factor, I know for a fact that the difference is enormous between the two, having constructed popular builds on both.

I know people who would happily pay to upgrade, but LL refuses to do it.

- D

Once some of the things in the pipeline arrive it will cause a boost for everyone.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? This the fable that LL told you.. there is a VERY HUGE difference in performance between class4 and class5 ...we have been *FORCED* to buy a new server (because LL doesn't provide a upgrade program) to migrate our community. The result was not only visible via estate tools, but even a normal user may look *immediatly* at the difference (with the EXACT SAME asset: buildings, scripts, avatars on the land). And im not talking about improvement on the SLS front, but in everything: loading times, avatar "technical" supported by the sim, rezzing times, lag. I believe that on a empty sim (few prims and no traffic) the difference isn't advisable.. but the impact for a "big" community (10k prims used, few script, average of 40av (real avs) on the way) the improvement is drammatic.

I agree.
Home is on a class 3 sim. I have two neighbors on the sim and that's it. A beautiful, lag free island. My work place is on a class 5 mainland sim so I can be close to my friends. Any day is a roll of the dice whether you can stay online or not.

Yes, a class 5 is big boost in performance and any class 4 sim will show improvement when moved to a class 5. But a clean sim is more important to performance than adding another GHz to CPU speed.

Not much performance difference? This is true for sims with less than 20 people on it, after you get 30 people the difference is mega, 40 people and Class 4s start dying, 50 people and Class 5s are still working okayish.... but the Class 4 is dead and buried.

Once a month I cal Live Help looking for a upgrade path. They send me packing. I would love to get the upgrade. I do not see why they would not take hundreds of customer's $200 USD when the class 5 upgrade was in full effect. And we all would have been paying $300 USD a month instead of $200 USD a month for over a year now. Seems like bad financial planning.

I take back what I said. I only hang out on quiet sims, so I probably was not the best person to offer an opinion.

They have been upgrading some older sims to class 5 but there is no official schedule that they admit to. My home sim Lunata was class 3 or maybe 4 and was upgraded to a 5 a while ago. Surrounding sims have also been upgraded.

I take it Class 4 or class 5 means like stars for a hotel right?
Like a 5 star sim is really good but a 3 star is not so good? Is that right? Sorry lol no home, no sim, no opinion so no vote lol. I just wanted to clear it so that i knew what the classes meant. I'll go have a search for more info...

Well I do not live on mainland but I rent estate, which in my case is on a class 4 server. The only class 4 server in the entire estate. But the sim is reasonably quiet, and camping is prohibited. So it's seldom laggy here.
But even when owning mainland, I would never pay for an upgrade. In my opinion, the fact you pay tier, makes the provider (LL) responsible for a well performing environment (stop laughing!). So upgrading theri servers if needed, is part of the deal. As much as a stable client (I told you to stop laughing!).

Greetings, Marcel

Yes I would, personally. My mainland already is Class 5 tho.

Class 5 servers have 4GB of RAM and the class 4 servers only have 2GB.

I don't know how much of that extra 2GB went to the sims but I imagine some did and that it might be a big help in tons-of-scripts environments..

ahhh. that makes sense

I just found out that mine is class 5 already, so it's upgrade the PIE!!

Edit: Sindy, very few of us who don't own the full sim would be willing to 'foot' the bill for the lazy bums what live next door.. especially if those lazy bums are already hogging a good bit of the resources. This is what I was med induced hinting at earlier

What if you could pay a one-time US$25 to get your whole sim upgraded? How about US$10? US$200?

The poll isn't very balanced but I don't think it can be.. What I think a useful end result would be is a chart showing how much people would be willing to pay vs how much land they owned on a sim. I'd guess that it would be pretty flat (and near-0) for people under 1/16 of a sim (4k m2) then start to wobble around 1/8 sim and pick up more as people pass the 1/4 sim tier.

(Sindy, who I know well, has only about 1/4 sim, btw)

How do you find out what it is and how do I find a class 5 to compare it to?

You used to be able to find out by the sim host name but that doesn't work any more. Best way now is to post the sim name and hope somebody can tell by where it is on the map.

Both new continents are all class-5 servers, I think. Anywhere on the huge land masses to tbe NE on the map should be a class 5..