Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

I've just learnt today that the creator of the sim where i hold land has decided to give up because of this decision. As of the 5th Novemebr my land wil no longer exist - no refund - nothing!!
The money to buy my plot and tiers I have paid not to mention the time I spent building and creating an SL home has all gone to waste.
I don't think I will be renewing my annual subscription to SL membership and I URGE all premium members to do the same - hit our pockets and we will hit yours.

Even though it's your landlord that's really doing this to you?

He didn't even offer to extend your contract once the new pricing (new pricing which is not set in stone, btw) goes into effect in two months?

I realize that Open Spaces have become a different environment than that for which they were designed. As a developer in another life I can appreciate the back-end issues, especially user support and load balancing. That being said, the proposed solution seems to have more of the hallmarks of punishment rather than of a gentle redirection of efforts. To that end may I propose an alternate solution?

Consider changing the resource allocation scheme. Instead of deploying four open space sims per Class 5 server, deploy three light use sims per server with a proportionate increase in prims at the new price and rates.

There is still a need for open space sims. Perhaps they should only be allowed of they are seemlessly aligned with the parent private estate, with no subdivision allowed.

I haved 10 full sims when Linden introduce the OS and reduce the sim prices.That time I lost US 6.670 with the sims price reduction. But the worse come later when my custumers start to emigrate to OS becouse they have much mor area for the sameprice. So I was forced to invest in OS and convert may full sims in OS too. On the conversion I lost US$100 per simsand I heve to negotiate free weeks with my custumers to move out. Also teh sim need to be clear on the conversion time (about 10 useful days). I converted my last fullsims just a week ago.Now thwy anunce that 67% tier increas making OS inviable for almost all cases. So I already got 66 OS at this time and just 4 FullSims. It its fair to expend US$1.500 to reconvert my OS into full? And what about the custumers I will lost? And what will Linden inovate next? Can we still keep investing on SL???

Full sims are designed to run one per CPU core. Openspace sims are designed to run 4 per CPU core.

Both class 4 and class 5 hosts are have two dual-core processors and either run all openspace sims (16/host) or all full sims (4/host).

I don't know why they run either all full or all openspace. Maybe there's some hardware tweak that's diferent (more disk on openspaces would be a total guess that might make sense) or it just makes management easier.

Or it could be that it seems more fair that way since all sims, openspace or full, share some system-wide resources like disk, memory and enet. Having 4 openspace sims and 3 full sims on the same machine sorta favors the openspaces in every resource but CPU..

I didn't make allegations at all. I explained exactly what happened between the demand (which has always existed) and supply when it became available to exploit. That, Chade is facts. It may not be the ones that suite you or something you could benefit from, but that's not my burden to provide. Unlike you, I like to consider the whole picture, not just one side.

You gave into your customers while even knowing better is of no fault but your own. That's a business decision YOU made. Stating I have an overblown opinion of myself I'm sure makes you feel better since you took the plunge and I didn't, but that's neither here nor there since hindsight is always 20/20.

Now in fairness, the status-quo worked against you. Because others were drooling over the opportunity OS sims made, I'm quite sure you as well as others were filled with a false sense of security that it was a worthwhile investment because that's exactly where the market went, making this statement also true (or as you worded, "fact":



I've stated time & time again that the demand has always been there, the land barons used the opportunity when it presented itself to meet that demand. Yes Chade, that includes you.

To be honest, a part of me doesn't blame you or anyone else because there had to be at some point where the Lab said "they're not using these right" well before the load issue & could have made a crystal clear reminder over what OS regions should be used as a first step to correct the problem. If you come out with a policy and don't stand firm, then the end result will usually be the opposite of the original intent. This is where LL is at fault the most. They left enough breathing room for it to be exploited as well as put a product out without technical controls established. Let's not forget a very very well point made by another poster:



Another fault of the Lab that I 100% agree with. Had there have been extensive QA tests this problem with load or even the prim increase could have been reconsidered/anticipated & further controls/policies established well before presented to the residents 6 months ago.

You now have a large population using OS regions as they're not intended and LL did nothing as it grew into a monster it is today. Who is at fault? Those who initially exploited or LL who didn't pull the reigns back? The logical answer would be LL because their policy allowed flexibility for it to be exploited & did nothing until now.

Now Jack's comments suggest allowing usage beyond the Lab's original intent for OS regions. This in itself doesn't fix the load problem at all. It capitalizes on a market they state they didn't anticipate. Now there's damage control being done to put the market back in it's proper order at the sake of those who invested in it.

Let me make this clear. Although I have no sympathy for those who fed the beast, I don't believe in hanging people out to dry due to your (the Lab's) own mistakes.

All OS owners want the Lab to be held accountable for their mistakes. That's well and good, but there are also OS owners who used their sims properly who want those who didn't held accountable for their actions too because ultimately, it's the latter who are being hurt the most.

So before you cry a river over how bad it is for you because you rented OS regions out for residential/commercial use, look at the sailing group who are looking at losing everything they've had for years now.

If you feel your own case is more justified because how you're being "screwed" compared to them, then yes, I in fact do consider you a greedy bastard.

so if i start paying the extra 50 USD ... means i can use the OS the way i want with no "light" usgae rules??? or is it just paying the extra and still have to use it for ocean or woods scenes only.

You know i really dont see how you can justify the hike in tiers for openspace

The whole idea yes that it was supposed to be just empty land or water...but even that 75 US bucks for EMPTY land and water? thats a bit much i think. Its not fair to users of Second life who already put in hundreds if not thousands into second life ....of money.

The problem is you guys have yet to really fix any of the REAL issues that sl has. instead you have fancey new add ons like winlight and sl voice...which is good but sl voice only works well half of the time... You should focus on improving lag issues on full sims first before you focus on the openspace ones.

the viewer still has many issues with crashes...with people not loading, with a useless cache which does not even save the location you just visited 4 seconds ago.... with peoples avatars showing as glowly blobs when they dont load...with people taking forever to load there avatars which some work so hard to make up. with textures and locations taking forever to rez which really shouldnt..

which problems with inventory losses..the way items can get fused together when you send back a ton of items by a user. the way items get lost.

the way the user buddy list can incorrectly show that a person is offline when he is really online and DOES not have his status hidden.

the way it takes FOREVER to load peoples profiles sometimes.

the way the browser freezes every so often which you dont know if its crashing or just hanging up for a moment...

you know and all you can focus on is openspace tier.....you know that really shows how its really not so much about trying to improve second life and everything but about how much money you can get in your pockets

the simple solution too if you never wanted open space sims to have so much items... LIMIT The PRIMS. to say 500 or so.

ever think about that?

see your punishing us when LL could have easily made simple sims to only have like 500 or so prims for "openspace"

you cant blame us for using something that was a cool idea.

your FULL prim sims have JUST as much lag and issues as open space ones does.

why dont you fix the core problems first before you go raising tiers when basically nothing will change for the land user.

your hurting everyone here. people put enough money into this "game" as it is

why? because it is the ONLY real virtual world that has so many people and you can do so many things in

thats why we put up with the crashes the lag and the issues because basically this is all thats really out there. and when second life DOES work it can be a great fun place..

the problem is raising tiers aint the issue.. im sure you guys are doing just fine with your saleries and such. why not trim a little bit at the top of LL's saleries and put em back into the game.. im mainly speaking about the top level Execs who make a ton of money out of it..

instead of punishing the users who just want to have fun.

a lot of people who would normally never be able to have there own little private sim now will not be able to afford it.

but oh well no matter what i think you say ...its clear to all of us honestly you are only in it for the money

and while Mr. Philip has stepped down i have seen NO new major changes with the new boss or any real promise that things will really change.

just the same old issues that have always been issues with second life...now ...only pricier..

thanks Linden Labs.

i dont own openspace but i rented a few before ...but now i cannot justify myself paying for more then 120 a month US for such sims.

and think of the people who own like 10 of them?

this in the end will hurt us the users more and you know it...but so long as you guys get a ton of money out of it..

hey what does it matter what we say?

if you REALLY care and want to listen to our advice DO what we ask.. dont raise the tier or

go about another way of doing it.

but in the end i think you will do what you wanted to do no matter how many of us yell out in protest.

because thats the sort of reputation you have gotten from the general SL population as of late.

if thats not true? prove us wrong and dont just type up "oooh i hear what you saying " but basically not going to change anything....

if anything i think tier prices for land in general should be LOWER

so that more people who might want to get land but wont cuz of the prices can do so!

Lord knows you get enough money from LL transactions and other things to afford it..

You guys need to look at the root of the problem. The root is jack (and the guy who pays him).

Who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to call clients abusers for using a system BY DESIGN and then charge 70% more monthly because of this "abusive overuse".

Who in their right mind would offer sims with 3750 prims and 100 avs and then be zomg! astonished when people try to use 3750 prims and 100 avs.

Just you jack. That's who.

Anyone with a brain more developed then a lobster can see that OS sims should have been capped at 25 avs to stay consistent. You could have not allowed land division. This plan I made in 10 seconds trumps your work of the past 6 months.

Anyone with even a pulse should understand that an island you can PLACE ANYWHERE on the grid...unconnected to other sims would in no way be a "void sim". You made them attractive. Set a low buy in rate..a few months later, now, you hit us with a hidden stick.
Jack, you have proven to be very, um, unaware of your surroundings or extremely unethical.

Your most unethical action is to con puppy eyed volunteers to create theme lands unpaid that you then sell for profit to people who now can't afford their island you sold them last week behind smoke and mirrors. You da man Jack!

The logical thing to do would be to fire your a$$ and hire someone with two brain cells to rub together. Come on M. Do something useful besides your song and dance. Is this how you build trust and a future? By letting clueless people toss fire on gas?

You guys fired Cory. The man with his head so far up his a$$ he could hardly walk. Now things are looking better, but you still have a few dead fish stinking up the place for no good reason. Jack is the king fish. There's an awful smell coming from Robin and Katt's desk too.

You guys need to put the bong down for a minute and hire a You'reFired Linden. One who wants to rock his tao hardcore.

I am sure I am not saying anything new here...but this raise is outrageous and unfounded. As has been stated before...suppose we all (yes I have an OS too), would buy the new price without complaint and nothing changed....LL would get more money...but the alleged problems would still exist!

Looking at the price / prim /month...OS is way more expensive then a full sim. Let alone the situation where a full sim was divided into 4 OS...the tier would suddenly rise to 500$ all of a sudden!

If I would raise my prices in rl with this magnitude, I'd be out of business. Period.

And as for trust...please show us we can trust you LL, give us an honest answer and a good policy and stick to that! It will take time to rebuild trust...but it is so important. If we don't trust you LL, we won't invest either.

Oh...and to everybody who's complaining about lag on full sims...That was a LOT worse 1,5 years ago...and has improved greatly. We've seen some bumps yes, but that too was a LOT worse early 2007 when I joined. I'd like to see facts, numbers, stats, that prove the problems LL claims the OS sims are causing.

from what I understand there are going to be limitations even with the higher price, and of course we can't get no official answer, you would have thought they would have thought this all through before dumping this on us, really seems to me they were trying to sneak this by us and hope that we don't even give a crud about it.

Unless you're paying for a full sim, they probably don't want you to treat it like one...

*sighs* Guess I will no longer be purchasing anymore. Anyone interested in buying one let me know, I'll now be selling all of mine.

Ok I know this may be a bit unpopular, but who are acrually losing out.

We have been told that the rise is because the effect on the grid of all these OSs is double what was anticipated, and central services etc have been hit hard. All I am hearing is OS owners and renters claiming this is not fair. we should keep what we have at the same price as now, and they should be treated preferentially. What about all full sim owners or even mainland who have seen performance drops because of the increased load. They are losing out too in this.

"Taking it on the chin" implies that you are upset about it for financial reasons.

But yet you accuse me of trolling and having financial reasons for doing so because I have a different opinion than you.

Regardless of anything said to this point, the slated increase on OSS's is all about revenue generation. However, why attack the very foundation of SL...those of us who are spending lindens in commerce and maintaining land? The increases are too great, and will in effect have me turning in all my sims come January of 2009. If additional revenues are desired, why not raise the membership fees a couple dollars per month? Additionally, there are too many non paying avatars running around SL who contribute nothing to our society. Why not give them 30 days free, then require them to pay $9.95 per month?

In the event SL management is only "pretending" to listen to us, I am exploring options in the worlds of VR, and apparently they exist. They dont currently have the bells and whistles of SL, but they will....they definately will. As an example, openlifegrid.com has experienced a boom of 1000 new memberships in the past 24 hours. Their interface is nearly identical to SL, but have a long way to go in terms of available commerce and products. What made SL so great? People...that's what....and at the rate "people" are joining openlife, it wont be long its solid competition for SL. Spend some in the chat rooms of openlifegrid, and you'll be shocked how many disgruntled SLers there are out there.

Management of SL....take heed...for the sake of all of us....rethink the ways of revenue generation.

I would think LL would catch these people trying to sell open space sims off as normal sims to people.. I have encountered 6 in just a matter of an hour..They can catch people for other violations so why not catch and stop them rather than up the price and we all suffer..

I agree with Megan, seen numerous OS sims with an 4.0 object bonus trying to rent them out as full sims. Too many land owners trying to con the system. THOSE should be handled, not the resident that has a little home on an OS.

Also the number of clubs running on OS is extreme.

No, you'll pay more and be pressured to use less. According the blog, Linden will provide "More proactive education by support staff to prevent unfair resource use by Openspace regions."

So the best option is to clear your land, put out a few trees (unscripted of course) and perhaps a tiny Tiki Hut with a one script door and some tasteful 1 prim block furniture. Certainly don't include one of those script intensive sex-gen type beds - all openspace users should take a vow of chastity or face the almighty wrath of Linden as their scripted beds of sin are returned in a coitus interruptus.

Perhaps you can put out a blanket next to the void ocean, but do refrain from rezzing any scripted wave prims or the blue waters might turn into a frozen pixelated mess, and an unsmiling Linden will appear before your eyes and warn you that another violation will result in a 3 day ban and exile to the beta grid.

Just remember, while it's your world. you can only imagine what you might have included in your wonderful sim if only it were a real sim.

Even when it will be a big economic effort for me i would to pay the extra money if we have more resourses in change... and i mean more prims and the chance to use them (the OS) harder.

If load were an issue...remove the traffic bots (by removing traffic). If sim resource allocation were a concern then spank the temp rezzer fools and come up with a better system to allocate a sims resources (I could do this in about 15 minutes). Otherwise you are blowing smoke. Big nasty clouds of smoke.

The problem is meathead design coupled with greed and an incredible lack of foresight of any kind. Not customer over-use.

It's not possible to over-use an OS sim. Just when is it over used? When you have 50 of the 100 avs ALLOWED? When you have 3000 prims of the 3750 ALLOWED? Selling seats you dont have is very unethical and doesn't make friends, Jack.

As to charging schools full price. Why not? It's not like they let you enroll for free

Jack,

I was talking to some folks about business planning, and the following ideas occurred to me. (I suspect they've been mentioned before, but I haven't read every post.)

In order to allow your business (and nonprofits) customers to plan appropriately, there needs to be more notice about price increases. Here are some ideas.

1) Build in an automatic tier increase annually or every 18 months or whatever. And let people understand that it's coming. Maybe 5% or 10%. Sort of the way landlords do. It can even be different for private vs. mainland tier.

2) When you need to make more drastic price increases, then offer a new product with the new price. And at the same time, announce the discontinuance of the old one. Give people a year to move over. This would give people time to adjust their budgets, change the business strategy, or whatever they need in order to maintain profitability.

I'm sure that they're are other ways as well.

I'm glad that you are now giving more notice than before, but while it's better, it's still not enough for the kind of business planning that many people need to do.

Personally for me, you have not responded in time to the current complaints. You keep saying maybe this, or maybe that - but nothing definitive. I can't wait for you to make up your mind, so I've had to adjust my plans based on what limited information I have.

I'm not leaving SL, but I will stop being a landowner. And I will look into other Virtual Worlds to see if they have products that work for me.

I'm not during this out of rage, or a sense of injustice, or emotionally (altho I am sad). You've made a business decision, now I have to determine what I can do. I'm sure I'm one of your acceptable losses. And no hard feelings. I'm sure that Linden Lab has a plan to get through this and have great success as a business.

[It'll take me a few weeks to wrap things up, of course.]

Firelight

A price raise of 66%.. what to say. That is nonsense.. Who is going to pay for just 'space'?!? Trees and water on a sim with 3k+ prims available? That doesn't make any sense at all. As many stated here, an OS will be even more expensive as a Full sim, compared price/prim/month. I am pretty sure there must be other ways to filter out those who abuse OS.

Yes, I have one too... I am there mostly only by myself. Average time that I am there: perhaps only 1hour a day. Do I cause lag by myself? My scripts don't either (I checked that, easy to do). This all seems NOT about performance or openspace being used as it was not intented to, it seems that LL just wants to make more money out of it.

Remember, OS users are those users who actually DO something in SL. They contribute to the Virtual world, as far as I see it. In my opinion, LL will be punishing them with this outrageous price raise.

As you and I have discussed in world, owning is used in the same sense as owning is used for private sim parcels. The addition in this case is I also give transfer rights on the OS for people that BUY it. We all have bottom lines. I have mine and you have yours. One could feel smarted that they just now realize how others were making it work when others werent. Many of us were using a LL policy, which was explained to me personally by Jack himself to offer a product to people they could use in a way that it was worth it to them to pay for. As I've been in this a long time and have a very good reputation many came to me to be "OWNERS" meaning they bought the OS for the LL cost, and paid LL tier for it and had a contract that guaranteed them the right to sell it including transfer it.


Again, like EVERYTHING in SL there are people that game the system. Land is no different. To take away des owner b/c some gamed it is a shame. Use other tools to educate people.

I also do not believe for one second that anyone was able to get LL to bill their designated owner for the tier fee. 1st of all if they are gaming using designated ownership why would they not make any money off it by allowing LL to charge them the fee? Doesn't make sense. I asked myself months ago if direct billing was possible and was told no. One person come forward that was able to get LL to bill the designated owner for the tier and I'll eat a prim hat. Not gonna happen.


One way to keep designated ownership and still have LL CYA is to send an email to the designated owner explaining what it is. To appoint a designated owner a ticket has to be put in. Perhaps have the person accepting designated ownership also put one in. In a way like a transfer.

Designated ownership is not the problem. The problem is a combination of people who just right click and pay w/o educating and others more than willing to sell something then take it back b/c they can.

LL don't take away designated owners. Just make it a process where the person accepting designated ownership has to put in a ticket requesting it.

I have one thing to say about this comment, I do pay to play i hold 3 of my own primum accounts , and one that my husband uses.. and i hold i believe my husband takes advantage of the one extra freebie account, and i hold two or three myself that justify the limits of the general rules , one extra per account allowed which we paid also for having a fee of 9.95 one time fee. if you push for this type of fix, many of us would loose our so called one time fee freebie accounts.. i would think this is not an ideal way to go about things maybe a rethink on how that could be done might actually be a resolution, for basic entrance of feebie accounts perhaps .. and it would also limit new people who didn't have enough time to figure out sl , one month is not long enough for a newbie to figure out things ..

just a thought.. Do you really want LL to do something like that i can imagen how many people would be driven away from our wonderful world.. but then again this falls onto an entirely diffrent topic for later discussion perhaps.

TM