Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

OS was never ment to be to do bussiness in.Its ment to be water or park with 1500-2000 PRIM and 500 to 1000 script-I added 1 OS to my 3 full sim to use my sailboat and add some fun stuff for my members like diving/scuba..swim-sail-fishing and surfing. And that works just fine-Filling up a OS with shops and homes wont work, and we all was told so

This issue about open space SIMs and *general* 'abuse' does not make sense because the problems were noted at the onset of the openspace SIM conversion of the original ocean SIMs (sometimes called void SIMs). Back then the prim limit for those was 1875 (more or less), and they worked just fine hosting oceans, islands and modest builds and activities (meaning avie gatherings). Performance problems ensured immediately after the conversions, and since the conversins were the first openspace SIMs to appear, it indicates the openspace conversion itself was flawed. These original oceam SIMs wer not immediately rebuilt, BTW. See: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2219 where people are complaining of cyclic massive perfor manceproblems. Remember this was happening during the initial outlay of converted ocean SIMs.

Next, we all have experienced massive slowdowns even after a couple of spectacular asset server meltdowns that were remedied. Jack's comments imply that was opensim residents actions going beyond intended use. Read this longstanding bug. http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8503, which when generally confirmed, suggests faulty code in the SL viewers have been inadvertantly creating a distributed denial of service attack on the asset servers. Think about this: 50,000 people forced onto these buggy viewers all bashing continuously on the asset servers. Mistakes happen. It will get fixed, thank goodness, but it places any data collected to make this price rise decisoin, invalid or at the very least suspect.

Wrong decision based on faulty analysis is the crux of the matter. I do expect a rescinding of this decision and an apology from Linden Labs.

Honestly,

Everyone now can barely afford to play SL or even own land in SL. Obviously LL saw a decline in land sales and decreased the purchase price to $1,000. Which was a smart move by all means.

Now lets think about the average user... For example, I am paying a $220 tier fee per month for two openspace sims. By December 1st my tier fees will be increased by my estate owner by $50 per sim. This increase will not only be done by my estate owner, but by estate owners across the board. Which leaves me paying $320 per month for these two open space sims.

Which would lead me to believe it would just be more cost effective to purchase a full prim sim from you for $1,000 and pay $295.00 per month for the tier fee. I mean it does make sense as I'd have double the prims, but half of the space. Still a pretty good deal right???

Now here's where the problem starts: I don't have $1,000 to pay upfront for the sim. So are you going to let me pay in installments like my estate owner does? This is why I pay $110 per month for each open space sim even though my estate owner only has to pay $75 per month.

I couldn't imagine if Counties came in and increased property taxes by 57% and told me by January 2009 I'd have to start paying the difference. Does this make sense to you?

#1) Yes, of course when renting is as expensive as owning in RL people buy homes.
#2) When people can no longer afford to pay their mortgages, they dump their house and go back to renting.

You are pushing the estate owners to dump their land. You are trying to push renters to buy land. This would make sense for LL in a strong economy where people had money to buy.

But, plain and simple NOT ALL PEOPLE CAN AFFORD TO BUY, THAT'S WHY WE RENT.

When it's not affordable or reasonable to rent or buy land in Second Life. FORGET IT STOP PLAYING IT's JUST A GAME (Or live in your car)!

Look, I was looking at the SLURL.com map in my browser and I saw a desert. Does this mean yet another land mass showing up and the hardware we funded going to that?



BTW, vote on your stances of this here....

/354/86/289847/1.html

Hi.
I bought my Open Sim at 24th of September. No one of the real estates salers told me on word of the restictions.
I have a notecard that says, i can do what i want on the Sim. Even commercials.
Now LL said it is just allowd to have an ocean,an forrest or mybe a dessert.
I use the sim just for my own, means there is a house an a garden an what i will will have for myself.
For me it seems for moment that i will be get in a fraud.
I really dont know what i can do, if the price/Tier will raise 65% up.
A verry sad Poen Sim Owner.

If LL kills their estate sales biz in preference to the mainland which is a sea of speculators and subsidized strip joints, they will go out of business. I'd rather spend the money on the next version of modo than on people who make me miserable.

they better get the point.

No. But if you load your brand new pickup with EXACTLY 1/4 ton and it breaks down, then you can indeed complain about both the truck and the false and misleading specification. I'm sure you'd contact the seller and complain. What would you say if the shady car salesman, instead of offering to repair the truck, told you that the price you both agreed upon had been way too cheap and asks you to pay another 66% of the original price?

Exactly that is what LL is doing now, because OS sims have specifications too. Just like a pickup designed for a load of 1/4 ton, those sims were designed for a load of 3750 prims and 100 avatars. If not, then why the heck did LL assign these specs? Now it turns out that they can't take the specified load. It would be our good right to contact LL and demand that this deficit be resolved, without any extra costs. But instead, THEY ask US to pay more than we agreed upon at the time of purchase, without doing anything to fix things at their end.

Way to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut!

Study the comments made 29 October on this jira:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8503

Consider the date/time frames of when these clients began causing DDOS on the asset servers.

Could it be the viewer is what caused the system overload and Linden Lab is directly responsible for the entire debacle?

Well it is something to consider anyway. I could not let this one slide into the night silently given the current situation.

I have just abandoned one of my open space sims. The guy who was renting it was so angry about this price hike he said he was moving to OSGrid and didnt even want it until the January increase kicks in. He was using it as a residential sim just for himself and his practice building and rarely used more then 2000 prims.
I have 4 other open space sims. All one resident rented, all small prim use. If the renters dont want to pay the price hike I shall also abandon these losing a good bit of money as these were all bought at the early $400 cost. Im also thinking of jettisonning the full sim. Ive really had enough now. Finis.

There's been some talk about a three tier system with Full Sims ($295/month), Open Space sims ($125/month) and Light Use Sims($75/month?) where light use sims have even more restrctions than Open Space such as 1500 prims, limited script count, limited avatar numbers and so on. When LL performs their oh-so-predictable climb down I view this as being the most likely outcome.

A couple of words about this hypothetical: Please be especially careful to police any light use sims because they will surely be "abused" as thoroughly as open space ones are now. It's only natural for people to try to squeeze as much performance out of their sims as they can. What we don't need is light use sims competing with open space sims for renters and scammers tricking end users into an even worse experience than the one they get on OS sims.

Also, I'm not a huge fan of restricting existing openspaces further. If you raise prices I can do the honourable thing and just eat the extra cost for existing renters and continue the rate I promised them when they started renting. If you lower sim performance I'm stuck with explaining to people that they're getting less for the same money and will certainly lose existing renters.

Congratulations, you have just described 5 overused, "abused" open space sims.

No, but if a truck manufacturer produces a 1/4 ton truck and a few people who bought it overload it they shouldnt then charge everyone who bought one of these trucks but uses it responsibly a 60% fine every month forever just because of the few who abused it.

Im hoping youre being wry here if not...twaddle and piffle

I find it interesting that Jack's udpate says they are NOT saying that using Open Spaces for more than intended is a bad thing and they're delighted it's so useful, but that the use has changed so the pricing is being changed to reflect the new value.

(The above is a paraphrase, of course. Check out the post yourself. http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/29/update-regarding-the-openspaces-announcement/ )

So now it seems like it's not abuse by many of the open space sims, but usefulness of them. So, does that mean the load on the grid really isn't that bad?

Firelight

I would go for this in an instant.

I'm Posting here Lindens not as a sim owner but as some one that might be interested in owning or renting one and my opinion on the subject as simple as i can state it.

The comment about the openspace sims being abused is fairly harsh, people go to openspace sims as a way to beable to have a home or workshop that are on a limited budget, this gives them the freedom to do whatever they like without the consequences of having to deal with nasty neighbors like on mainland.

By increasing the tier on these sims you are not only hurting yourselves but the sim owners and renters on these properties, this hurts you because after you increase the prices you will see a substantial drop in the amount of openspaces that are owned and your hurting the sim owners and renters because they both have to pay 50$ more than they used too. Now 50$ may not seem like alot to you but for alot of us fokes it buys you dinner for a week or puts gas in your car.

My suggestion if these sims are causing so much strain on the servers is to make the cost of full servers a bit cheaper? perhaps bring the tier back down to 195$ or even 95$ on a full server. Unless you guys are trying to force everyone off the private sims and back onto mainland so they have to pay the stupid premium membership along with the tiers they pay now?


Economically the prices need to drop instead of raising, You need to expand the realm not shrink it and by raising these prices you will be shrinking it and alienating a bunch of people.

My Economic Plan:
Full Sims 1000$ Down : 95$ Tier
Openspaces 125$ Down : 50$ Tier

With this plan everyone would be able to have there own little piece of heaven without it costing them an arm and a leg and owning a full sim will finally be affordable. Openspaces shouldn't cost as much as they do to buy even if they are running 16 to a cpu you guys are already taking people for there money i mean come on do the figures

1 Quadcore system 16 Openspace sims at 250$ = 4000$ and Collecting Tier at 1250$ a Month
1 Quadcore system 1 Full prim sim at 1000$ And Collecting Tier 395$ a month

And in jan its going its going up to 375$ to be an additional 2000$, making it 6000$ for *1 Quad Core Computer* I don't know about you guys but i build a pretty decent quad core system for half that.

Common guys....Use some common sense.

/me points at post 2584 by Balpien Hammerer, regarding discovery of a major cause of SL performance degradation. As most techs already suspected... it's not Open Space Sims. What Balpien discovered is the apparent continual, repeated downloading of the same textures over and over again by faulty SL code. His statement therefore that LL should immediately cancel their plans to hike OSS prices seems quite reasonable.

I would like to point out that MONEY != grid performance. Charging more for OSS will NOT make the grid run faster. LOL. It may force people to close down their OSS and thus reduce some overhead demands... but that's surely a below-the-belt, customer-be-hanged method of taking care of the problem, isn't it?

Although I am not a land baron who buys sims and open spaces and rents them, I do own 1 openspace that I live on. The total prims used...1120. The only scripts I have on it are in an intan dance machine and a couple of swimming swans and a feeder. I have kept my OS very operable and have stayed within the guidelines.

My Question is this to you, Jack......Please explain to me the OS that Linden owns called Mos Ainsley. It is an OS sim that is a space station. All but 637 prims have been used on it and it has a shipload of scripts.

I would very much like to know....how you all can bite the butts of your customers... the ones who pay your salary.......including me......about *abusing* OS's when Linden Labs themselves are abusing them?

Absolutely not. LL were very clear that OS sims were for open space use, water, parks whatever, its right there in the name. Of course we all ignored that guideline and went ahead and built houses and had people living on these things in direct contradiction of LLs instructions. In retrospect it's no surprise that they had to step in and do something like this.

Everyone who counters this argument by saying that their sim performed fine miss the point entirely. While your sim was chugging along fine with half a dozen avatars and houses with tintable windows and sex beds and whatever other crap someone else on that core was suffering.

I know the purpose of the change is greed. That is the way business works in the US.
They want me to accept it, give me something in return. More prims would be acceptable. Or Free conversion to a full sim. I would accept that as a good faith gesture that they are not planning to screw the owners of full sims next month.
Not that I actually will trust them - they are a very dishonest and unethical group. But that also makes fussing at them pointless - unethical people do not care when you point it out to the. Need to give them a reason to change, and in this case there isn't much you can offer - they win no matter what we do. You aren't going to get the sheep to get together enough to make a boycott work.
So I'll accept a compromise, where we get something out of this besides false stories of increased costs. Give me something to improve my SL experience.

It may be too late for this. A few posts ago I added a ref to the jira involved.

I think the mob is blood drunk now and reasoning and logic may no longer be a possibility.

For the majority of SL's affected residents, there is not only a 67% increase in this price, but the concomitant increase caused by the currency rates at the moment. With the US dragging the rest of the world's economies into the toilet, our exchange rates are now abysmal.

The $50USD increase now equates to a $90AUD increase per void sim - I can no longer afford to develop the story that was Numidia which was a creative project with no income, just my payment. I can't justify it now, even as a hobby. It's now too expensive.

So it is with great sadness for me and my build partners, that I will be abandoning both Numidia and Zanth.

Well, Jack's latest post seems to indicate that they changed the prices because of the increased usefulness, not because of load abuse.

So, basically, most people used them for more than intended, it works, so they're raising the prices.

Firelight

Couple of points I would like to rehash if I might. First there is a lot of pointing to the support page about Openspaces (https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=4235) and wagging of fingers that we are all abusing the OS. There was never any technical description of how much load is too much load. Anyone can envision a popular public boating area filled with dozens of boats causing more load than say a couple of private homes. So it’s not so much the “theme” of how they are being used but how much load they are getting. Statements like “Openspace regions run four per CPU; as you would expect, this limits their performance”, along with the ¼ price and ¼ prim count versus full sims lead most of us to think of them as “1/4 Sims”. Frankly I was surprised that the avatar limit wasn’t fixed at 25 avatars. So this talk of “abuse” of the openspace offering has really caught us all off guard especially since you, “will not respond to performance issues reported should you not use them in this way”

Secondly we are all trying to figure out how a 66% price hike will fix this supposed performance issue. Is LL going to deploy fewer OS per CPU? Upgrade the excising hardware in some other way? Or is this price hike supposed to send the abusers running? This seems counter intuitive since the “abusers” are likely more able to pay for the increase than someone that just wanted to wrap full sim with 4 water regions. So while the total number of OS will go down, the ratio of “abusers” will only go up compounding the issue.

I know many business associates that are cutting back or just giving up on SL if this move goes though as is. My partner and I are planning on keeping our OS (at a loss) because we need more functionality than one sim but can’t afford 2 of them at the moment. Meet us half way here LL, and give us more options than just paying more or hitting the Abandon button.