Q3 closed on a high note with an unusually strong September. Talk 11/12 w/Zee Linden

"We will no longer allow the Owner of an Openspace to be changed to a different resident than the Payor. Initially we will not enforce this change on Openspaces where the Payor and Owner are already different but in those cases the only change allowed will be to set the Owner back to the Payor. This doesn’t affect the parcel level rentals, this is just focussed on the whole region rental of Openspaces."

Can you elaborate on this?
it seems people wont be able to buy or sell land on open space?

Can you please explain what is the reasonning behind this comment?

We would appreciate it if you could explain
1. what this means
2. the consequences for land sellers


Thank you
Novellium

Grandfathering at this point is mute for the hundreds of people that have already abandoned their regions........

Sorry Zee, Linden Lab *has* and *is* blaming their customers, Jacks own words were ...

"Unfortunately most of the Openspaces are being used for much more than light use. Based on analysis performed in August and September, Openspaces are being used about twice as much as we expected, in other words being loaded with double the content/avatar load than we’d expect for a region that is supposed to be light use.

Rather than being employed as open areas like ocean with little or no content and traffic, the majority are being rented out to residents looking for a place to live. Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems. For some people this has meant a less than great experience with performance fluctuations. The overuse of Openspaces has also put additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing. So higher traffic to and from the servers along with heavier demands on the asset server, both of which impact the overall experience people have inworld."

This goes against your claims that Linden Lab actually underpriced the product and didn't plan on so many being sold with the impact of it's other more profitable products - resulting in less money to invest.

So, "We're not blaming our customers." is unfortunately a bold faced lie.

Waitaminit. "Real Estate people" buy and sell land as a favor to LL? Huh?

At my tier level (half a sim) tier is about 1L per sq m per month. So, the difference between 5L and 10L is *5 months tier*. High prices absolutely do matter to people. It's in LL's best interest to keep prices low, and they aren't obligated to support any particular business model against their best interests.

If I am not mistaken, there was a bit of a backdoor loophole:

Normally you have the Estate owner who is listed as the estate owner of all the sims and also responsible for all tiers to LL and then the people who buy/rent parcels from them are shown as land owner while the Estate owner is clearly shown.....

There was a way to have LL list the Estate owner as a different party (as in the one buying / renting), and this was being abused by people to try to get Concierge level support when they were simply renting an openspace from someone.

So that loophole got firmly closed, it really won't affect most people in the land business. It helps clear a lot of things up with who really is the sim owner as far as LL is concerned and also keeps the Concierge support team from getting overworked by ones that don't pay the required amount to qualify (Normally only the actual estate owner who owns the full prim sim & any Homestead / Openspace Sims attached to the same account qualifies for Concierge support, unless you own mainland land and your tier is at least $125 per month)

Zee,

I am just back from the chinese with my 2 kids, and I feel right now a very strange feeling in my stomac, I dont know if it is caused by the food or by your answer.

Please forward your 2009/2010 action plan to ya fix customer base, so we can discuss this, transparancy and customer involvement will bring us further. LL is a serverspace provider, so keep connecting the world, the rest inside we ALL will do

Anyhow, one thing I must say, in a bit more than one year, your indeed the first one that reacted throughout the whole blog item, I smell some respect, but guess it are the 'chicken balls' that just left my stomac and got projected on my leather sofa.

tc
Wildcat

ohhh thank you Baal ! i been asking that question for 2 weeks and no one could say what it ment.

Is there ever going to be a point when Linden Labs becomes a public company and we can see you financials. It would be cool to see this to see how well you guys are doing after incorporating way back around 2000/2001 at the height of the Dotcom bust.

Zee, I understand you guys have a tough row to hoe here, but you guys haven't handled this whole issue very well, trying to tell us things we all know are completely false.

For instance, the whole 'network burden' excuse fails because an avatar in an openspace with draw distance on 512 will never rez more than 3750 prims and the 15-20 avs max in the sim. An avatar in a private sim will never rez more than 15000 prims and the 40+ avs in a full sim. Meanwhile, an avatar on a mainland sim with draw distance at 512 will rez approximately 20 sims worth of prims, or about 300,000 prims, plus 600+ avatars. This requires a massive amount of downloading from 20 different servers just to one resident.

THAT right there, is where your network burden is: the mainland. Yet you only charge a mainland sim owner 195 US a month. Your costs of supporting mainland are much higher than supporting estate customers, yet you charge us private sim owners much more. We subsidize mainlanders.

Now, given these indisputable network load numbers, it becomes clear that the proper solution to this dispute is to equalize tiers across the board: make all openspaces 75 US a month, make all full sims, including mainland 295 US a month. Everybody will be equal, nobody has a basis to complain anymore, and LL will raise added funds from the people who put the real burden on the network, to build your private fiber network and other needed infrastructure improvements that will primarily benefit mainlanders.

Mainland owners live there because they understand the risks (lag caused by neighbours, wacko jacko builts, sky flooded with prims, less privacy, etc ........and important limited estate rights)

private estate owners get full control !

I know what I talk about because I sold my private estate (+dumped my OS) time ago and bought me a nice mainland plot (30.528 m²).

I still didnt regretted that descision, and the mainland is also more sociable !

Those prices are way off from what I'm seeing. Is LL looking at some sort of average that discards outliers? Or sanity checking mainland average prices against a median or mode?

If you want to donate to NCI, drop the L$ on the "NCI Golem" account. He's NCI accounting alt who holds all our funds and owns the groups that own our land.

Yes. I am without shame.

At least when it comes to pimping for NCI...

The price of mainland is a measure of the demand for mainland. When the demand is high, LL can sell more sims of mainland. When it is low (like now) they can't. High demand for mainland also leads to higher prices for mainland sims in US$ auctions. In the last round of auctions, most mainland sims sold for the base price.

I have to say, irrespective of whether one agrees with the interpretations and what sometimes looks like a little sleight-of-hand with the numbers, kudos to Zee for pulling a *massive* load and answering lots of questions which have gone unanswered before, as well as some “Oh, that was nice to know” bits of information. Even just a little self-reflection mixed in with the usual party line is a refreshing touch.
Zee, as you are well aware, you’re bearing the brunt of a lot of pent-up frustration. I am still not happy with the recent *decisions*, but your effort here is much appreciated.
Just thought I’d mention it.

This distinction would be generally true if all private sims were isolated - which is not the case. While many are, many are connected up exactly the same as on mainland, including the openspaces attached to normal sims. Perhaps this argument implies that there should be different tiers for connected and unconnected sims?

If it really is the volume of downloads from the asset server to avatars that is the problem, that includes a quadratic term in the avatar number as well a linear term, and I understand that private islands can be set to allow up to 2.5 times the number (ie max 100) of avatars allowed on a mainland sim (40) - so ....??

Good question. Means, and even medians are only useful descriptors for simple distributions. I would really like to see the full distribution of price/m vs area sold (NOT by numbers of transactions, which is hopelessly skewed by the tiny plot market). failing that, could we at least be told exactly how these numbers are derived.

Not at all Zee....90+ residents getting the rug ripped out from under them and their fantastic builds (all homes as we don't do commercial property), while we (the sim owner and I) scramble to fix this situation and try and retain some of our tenants. Sorry, regardless of Jack and M's complete denial that LL didn't realize these sims were being used for more then water and trees, the resident experiance on our OS sims were probably 100 times better then their best Main Land experiance. (and Im sure other OS based estates can boast the same) Come check out Tweakland Estates and you'll see what I mean.

Anyways from the feedback I'm getting from the tenants I'm dealing with, LL lost alot of ground with resident satisfaction over this issue. As posted time and time again, Main Land is just like the wild wild west, no rules, no covenents which equals unsatisfactory experiance in SL.

Zee you've been great answering through out this post and have given some brutally honest answers. Too bad Jack and M weren't as forthright in the Open Space discussions (What am I saying, those weren't discussions.... couple of replies and almost 200 pages of resident responses)

We'll recover in spite of LL's attempt to tank us. Sure made a mess though....

I checked. We currently have no plans to change pricing, and were we to do so we would blog about it well in advance.

That's a better question for jack and the concierge team.

A better way to say it would have been to say that its our fault because we didn't put the proper restrictions on them and then they were naturally used for more than they were intended. Its our mistake. Really. I mean it. Completely our mistake.

Yes, kudos to Zee Linden for replying to virtually every comment in this thread so far. It's obvious that he is replying off-the-cuff without having to simply quote the company line or merely "hearing concerns." He is in a position where he can answer questions meaningfully. This is the sort of communication that customers have demanded for in the past.

I'm not sure it would be prudent from a competitive standpoint to send our 2009 and 2010 action plan more than M already blogged about it here:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/09/29/4-months-at-the-lab/#more-2670

Key areas for the next year are: First hour experience, Mainland Improvement, Experience Localization and product focus. I've watched him commit these things to our board as well...and Mark had a great 8 year track record of success when we hired him from his last company. I may be wrong, but I'm not lying.

I certainly hope so. But in this market its not going to happen for a long time.

Yes youre wrong (and not lying), we want the REAL ACTION PLAN zee, not the one to 'pet' the crowd ;o)

Think I will come over to SF, you mind I bring my kids ?

In response to another post I also indicated that one of the reasons was to better balance usage between open spaces and full regions. We started to see more activity on lower priced regions and if the trend continued, it would have been difficult to support. I think the new product limitations and pricing and the break between open spaces and Homesteads should help re-balance the usage hours appropriately. I'm not sure that equalizing tiers across the board is the proper answer. We have to balance the avatar limits and the sim performance and maintenance fees in a way that the economics make sense for us at the lowest price that we can deliver it. Hope that helps.