Server class distinction to be eliminated

The new east US data center should be opening very soon, and that is supposed to be getting a new type of server hardware. That would be why they're doing this now, so they can slip in these "class 6" machines , put them to work without having to sell or upgrade new regions first, and not have to retire a bunch of perfectly good class 5 systems overnight.

OK but they say this "To be clear, after we do this no-one currently owning Land would ever be on lower specification hardware than they are now. But they could find themselves on higher specification hardware." does that actually make sense?

Yep, they're saying that at least for the short term, you'll be on a class 5, but don't be alarmed if your sim lands on one of the new machines now and then, or if the old class 5 machines disappear in the future and you get dragged kicking and screaming to faster hardware without notice.

Yeah I kind of got that as I posted, I'm slow today

When that happens, we hope that the new hardware works at least as well as the old hardware.

A class 6 box is a very different animal than a class 5 box.

I just have one further comment about this whole thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCCWXAp49So

Okay, that's out of my system. Carry on, carry on.

This

Not the same number, but rather that there would be fewer sims without the grandfathered sims. Just like there would be fewer sims without Homesteads.

I know there wouldn't because I know people who can't afford an extra US$100 a month. They'd move back to mainland, rent half a sim or less, or drop back to a Homestead.

In economic terms, Grandfathered sims are picking up a bit more of the tail of the demand curve.

Assuming for simplicity that these grandfathered sim owners don't rent out any land (which is where the usual argument arises), then it seems a matter of where the most margin is for LL. Homestead must be higher margin than a grandfathered sim. Half an estate sim would be better, too: 75% of the revenue to LL for 50% of the cost. Mainland... well, who knows? Probably that represents the real loss to LL: so frustrating the ex-grandfathered sim owners that they leave estate ownership altogether and move back to a 4096 somewhere and pout.

And they'd certainly be making-do with less sim and fewer prims for their money with any alternative, so they'd have good reason to be disappointed. They are getting a substantially better deal than any other arrangement except maybe an educational discount or a lifetime membership.

Of course, if it happens that Raudf is right, none of this will matter. That would be a happy day for everyone. (Well... except rental outfits that couldn't compete without the relative fee advantage, I suppose. I guess that would include mainland, too, unless tier were to be cut along with estate fees.)

I don't know the specifics of the grandfathered sims, the issue pre-dates my time here. Often, though, locking in the beneficial parts of a customers older contract (favorable price) when new prices or upgraded products are announced is a way of avoiding some potential legal liability on contract or fraud claims. If grandfathered rates helped Linden Lab avoid contractual legal tangles then, and the contracts haven't changed, then the legal tangles haven't changed and Linden Lab is stuck with the grandfathered rates indefinitely. If that correctly describes the scenario, then the only way Linden Lab could really get out of those grandfathered rates is to just offer to buy back the grandfathered sims.

LL can afford to have 1/3rd of grandfathered sims dropped without loosing any income.

So unless you can show that more than 1/3rd would throw in the towel and not start paying $295/month then there's no net loss and no reason not to do away with the grandfathered tier.

They never promised that grandfathered tier would last forever, the only thing they ever committed themselves to is a 6 month advance notice.

As far as I knew I thought Class 1-6 was a LL designation rather than an industry standard, no doubt there are various spec/brand class 6's potentials being trialled in the rack by LL already.

Personally I have my doubts on whether a quadcore running 4 sims on 4 hard drives is really better for performance in individual sims than 4 seperate machines, but perhaps it is for data transfer between those 4 sims and takes up a lot less sspace and power.

I wish they'd use all the class 4's for ocean sims around the continents.

And Linden Lab knows the answer to that, and they're keeping the grandfathered sims, so speculation about X, Y, Z (and A, B, and C) is mental masturbation. I'm just saying that there are values of these parameters where LL benefits from keeping them grandfathered more or less indefinitely. Surely that's uncontroversial?

I don't have to show anything. All you've done is aggressively restate my point by suggesting a value for one of the parameters. I'm glad you agree with me.

/me isn't sure what part of my post you're commenting on but yes, the 'class' stuff is something specific to LL.

I'm a little wary of them stuffing more full sims onto a single host. In theory, I guess it should be a net win because the processors are SOOOOOO much faster. They're also talking about using Nehalem, which has sortofa NUMA-like architecture and, in theory, will work quite well with LLs model of one-sim-per-core - memory accesses on a class 6 should be smokin' fast compared to what we see today. It's the stuff like network and disk bandwidth that makes me nervous. LL swore up & down that class 5 wasn't really that much better than class 4 but, well, we sorta all know how long that theory lasted...

I suppose possibly somebody in LL Marketing would be shaking her head in disbelief over how obvious the answer is, but: 1. I doubt it, and 2. My read is that numbers that would work out in LL's favor for maintaining the differential between full-fee and grandfathered rates are pretty darn unlikely.

Call it "mental masturbation" if you like, and in my case it kind of is: I have no dog in this fight. A lot of folks who *do* have an interest in the fate of grandfathering, however, have opined on the subject at length and with some intensity. I've just been trying to get some handle on the objective arguments on either side.

Marketing is costly.

If anyone wants to end Caledon's viability overnight and blow out it's core, well, they better have some serious marketing money set aside for spin control, once several hundred people and dozens of famous content creators start saying how they feel.

And I'm just one estate. Expect D'Alliez residents for instance, far more numerous than Caledon's, to be equally upset.

I'd be finished. I bought those regions for tens of thousands of dollars in good faith, expecting to pay 195/month.

And I lost about 8000 USD to the openspace debacle, so my patience for _any more_ nonsense of this kind is about nil.

Any of you have a spare 1300 USD/month? I'd have to close Caledon. And if I had to spend 1300 a month for no gain whatsoever I may as well go offline and buy a Bentley instead, at least in that case there would be something to show for it.

I could see Second Life on the cover of Business Week again due to this, but this time, going in the other direction as Dreamland, Azure, D'Alliez, Caledon and countless other well respected estates all make the same decision on the same day.

They are right to make the call they are making. It's by far the *least* expensive option on the table.

And if an oldbie like me isn't treated decently, there's a lot more to fear than my filled up 195/month regions, which aren't sitting vacant on the market.

Okay. So this is a straight question from a disinterested Mainlander: Doesn't it logically follow that anybody trying to run any size of rental Estate without the benefit of grandfathered tier is on a fool's errand?

As an aside this thread reminded me that every sim sends its class (along with some other things like where's it colocated) to the viewer but it's just not displayed anywhere so I thought it would be useful to just show that in About / Second Life along with what's currently there about the sim.

The regions I know are class 4 are showing up as class 4; same with class 5 estate full/homestead and mainland regions but the odd mainland sim here and there is showing up as class 7 (all located in "Chandler".

No, not at all. I have far more 295/month regions than 195/month regions myself, for example. I'm living proof it can be done.

But anyone trying to jack up the rates of a healthy estate by 1300/month in one go, even with class 5 performance, is going to implode a healthy estate.

What does land value become, if you've suddenly got huge expanses of empty core land? Wall Street, meet Main Street ~ I just can't do that. Unlike bankers or the feds, I've got to balance the numbers, I can't print $L. I've got 13 regions at 195/month these days, 10 of which are class 4.

I can't take the sudden shock of that kind of loss; I'd have to eat 1300/month and slooowly ease rates up across one or two years maybe. Otherwise people would leave in numbers big enough to destroy the estate. It's too much, too fast... or I eat it and pay anyway. I'd be finished. It literally becomes not worth the risk and effort by a *big* margin at that point.

Advance warning doesn't help either. Note the openspace debacle. The market implodes *instantly* and even if the course is changed later, it's too late. Everyone gets disillusioned in the first 72 hours, screams and ditches out... and now you are just standing in the smoking ruins of a PR disaster wasteland.

Some may think I don't know what I'm talking about, or might argue with me ~ all I can offer is this: if I don't know what I'm doing, as arrogant as that sounds... who does? Show me the expert who can. I see big estates implode all the time because people don't. watch. the. fundamentals. Even Caledon can't reinhabit a dozen regions in time. Imagine instead of eating 1300 I am paying for a dozen empty regions at 295. That's what a 'whoops' would cost. Yep, 1300 becomes 3600 a month if I gamble on higher rates out the door, and lose.

I can survive a lot... but I'd like people to suddenly imagine what life would be like if for whatever reason they got hit with another 1300 USD/month in their personal lives, and got nothing for it.

How many of you would consider that a financial strain to be removed at first chance? How long would you put up with it?

My first child starts college in 11 months. It will cost 26,000 post~tax dollars a year (we make too much to get much aid, but with 3 kids, it's money that has to be spent). I've *already* got what's gonna be a 35,000 USD albatross around my neck for the next 3 years, which will double when my second child goes to college the fourth year. Three years later... child #3.

So that's my scenario right there. I'm not up for losing another 1300 a month, nor can I suddenly goose the estate and squeeze it out of people overnight ~ and I'd feel dirty doing that to them, plus it wouldn't work. People paid TONS for rental rights back in '06.

* * * * *

Linden Research did the right thing for people like me. Whatever else that should be done for others, I'm all for it ~ but leave me to the agreements I made.

If a bunch of people come in 2010 and pay 500 a month, they will be all over raising everyone's current tier too. 195 was *standard*, a deal made in good faith.

No. If you maintain high occupancy you can make a profit at full tier. The grandfathered tier just allows a much healthier margin, and allows the estate owner more creativity in developing the estate. I like to provide free, public areas to spruce up my residential sims. When I chose to upgrade my class 4s (out of necessity; they simply were not fit for residential use anymore), that $2400/year hit I took meant I had to tighten up my land use; reclaim some of my public/scenic areas to use for residential. I'm still doing business, but I have less power to develop the community the way I envision it than someone who can afford to leave %33 more of their sims unrented.

That those with grandfathered lower tier have a competitive advantage on those without is an easy call. The question would be whether there are enough sims with grandfathered tier to make a huge impact or not. If the number of grandfathered sims could only meet a very small fraction of demand, then it doesn't make much of an impact.

Somebody who had the financial means to acquire a large number of sims either pre-Dec 2006 or after Dec 2006 when prices for grandfathered tier sims went way the hell up already had a much more significant competitive advantage than just a break on tier. When you are playing on that level, you are up against some frighteningly sharp people who brought their A game. Even if you were able to slowly build up a rental business by picking up grandfathered sims to expand, you still will be challenged to compete with more established estates that can out-market you. The only way you can maintain a competitive advantage is go niche and offer a specific environment the way Desmond and Wilde do.

Following your reasoning Desmond, LL can never get rid of grandfathering on those sims as the moment they do the impact would immediately shatter your business and yet until grandfathering is ended you have no incentive to ease yourself off them and on to full price sims either.
So it seems your business plan is based on the very shaky premise that LL has to allow your grandfathering forever which acording to all sources they didn't guarantee.

Your comment about it being a "deal made in good faith" does not apply either. They have delivered grandfathered status far longer than most business would on their products and services in today's world. Basing a business on that never changing does not seem practical to me.

Your personal circumstances whilst obviously vexing to you and many, including I can sympathise with you on a personal level, really make no difference to this business issue nor should they. Pricing changes happen to all businesses, those that can cope, cope and those that cannot, don't. That is a harsh fact of doing business, one that many have to face frequently.

So it comes down to how could LL possibly wean you or anyone like you off grandfathered sims in order to lessen the impact on your business? If they gave you 6 months notice (as indicated was promised)? A year?, 2? What else could they do? Even if by some miracle all full sim tier were reduced to USD195/month that would still hit you the next time the pricing for *all* sims were to rise. Would it help if LL could gradually increase the grandfathered sim cost over a period to help with adjustment? This presuming that it is the USD100/sim that is too high. What about an increase of USD5/month/sim until those sims reached USD295? Would that work? That would be a nearly two year introduction period though. What about 10 months and USD10/month/sim? The latter seems more inline with LL's notion of notice.

Would any of these time based ideas really help though unless you were to use that time to introduce new pricing to your customers?
It seems to me that passing on the costs to the customers is the *only* thing that could be done yet you probably took a lot of rent in advance (I have heard you state up to a year's worth in previous threads) which you now feel cannot be post-amended for pricing changes. This a common practice it seems.

It seems strange though to me that there is no clause in contracts between estate owners and renters that say the advanced rent taken is can still be subject to price alterations when LL make big policy changes but will be resisted if possible. Surely that would mitigate some of this pain for you and those like you? Could you implement a policy of not taking rent so far in advance on grandfathered sim maybe so you could adapt quickly once changes are made public?

I realise that probably the horse has bolted on the advance payment thing, plus you would have to deal with some customers going "nope, too much for me" but I really fail to see another path forward from the position of "LL can never stop grandfathering on these sims or Caledon is doomed" and that seem excruciatingly tragic to me.

These are just my thoughts and questions and not in any way meant to cause upset or harm to you Desmond.

This is the thing... I totally understand the grandfathering policy for people who originally purchased the islands under that price (like Desmond did... and me, even!). But the fact that the grandfathered tier persists across transfers between residents for class 5 sims, which are not technically different in any way from full-tier sims does not make any business sense to me at all (from LL's standpoint).

And they have been sick of the class 4's for a while... they KNOW they suck and they don't like supporting the old servers. Why do they allow class 4 sims to transfer at all? Why doesn't the transfer just automatically convert to a full-tier class 5?

The current policy goes way beyond "honoring early adopters," which is how I've heard Jack Linden describe it.