Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

There has been talk about many things, things that are being concidered etc etc etc.

I don't think LL was prepaired for the lashback the change has cause .. but what ever they decide to do, has yet to be announced offically.

Well if you liked that one pull my other posts, theres one around here somewhere where I laid out the evil plan as well - yes, burning it from both ends

It's easy for you to get rid of the middleman. Buy mainland. Don't want it? Why not?...chuckles

I dont begrudge a business for making decisions that increase their bottomline. Afterall if they cannot cover their costs and make a profit they wont be here for us. However it would be in their best interest to do so after taking into consideration the effects on customer service and their resources before offerring a product.

The landbarons want to make as much profit as they can so how can they complain about LL trying to make a profit?

Lady, call concierge or hop on live chat and express your intentions. This will get some notes added to your account now, that will help guide them when the time comes. If there is a 2 week window a conversation with them now should open that window a bit.

You thinking I am a tool has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion about openspaces and is nothing, absolutely nothing, but a personal attack against me because you don't like what I have to say or for whatever reason.

As I stated before I am more than happy to discuss the issues with you, and you are more than entitled to feel however you may personally feel about me. However, this is a discussion about openspaces and I have been repeatedly attacked for my views by you and others who do not want to hear them or discuss with me in a productive manner.

Engaging in schoolyard-style bullying and namecalling does not ring true with your portraying yourself as a serious businesswoman with serious concerns about SL and policy changes, or one who is here to run a professional-style land business and treat people fairly.

You may think I am a tool, but trust me, namecalling and bullying people in the forum here isn't driving folks to your islands in droves, no matter if it gives you a momentary sense of pleasure.

This may or may not be the last word, you seem like you want to discuss something because you keep bringing it up, but of course I am not going to bow to your chosen topic of "Let's discuss how we personally feel about Snowflake."

Is M out of touch with the discussion, or did he just overrule Jack Linden and told everybody to suck it up?
http://gigaom.com/2008/10/30/protest-threatens-linden-labs-profitability/

"In a statement provided by his publicist, Kingdon told me, “We understand that this price adjustment will affect businesses and other projects of some our Second Life Residents,” and emphasized the cost increases were only directed at select landowners, who have until January 2009 to adjust themselves to the new rates."

They were being used for rentals before the price change but if they didn't know what was going to happen when they changed the model, and I really have a hard time believing that they didn't see what would happen, they sure as hell knew by the time of this blog post:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/07/08/second-life-virtual-world-expands-35-in-q2/



Deliberate fraud is far fetched I agree, but they knew what was happening and they continued to promote and sell them. The sensible thing to do with a problematic product would be to stop selling it, but hey they were selling like hot cakes and this is where Linden Lab are liable, they turned a blind eye. They are without doubt complicit in what has happened and they should take responsibility. Their refusal to do so is very wrong.

Ok Snowflake, tell us how exactly residents having less money to spend is good for the economy? Tell us how people leaving is good for LL? Is that issue oriented enough?

Actually I feel that this change will not effect bigger land barons as much. The have reserves(profit) and will just raise their prices.

This will adversely effect the smaller hobbiest like me. Over time what started small and manageable has grown into an estate. The tenants are my friends so i run on a very tight margin. A community has grown here, who are atm in distress. I will not walk out on these people and will do everything in my power to keep the community together.

At the same time I am now very hesitant to continue doing business with LL. This is not the first time they have treated me in a way that i feel is unfair.

I have devised what I think is a safe escape plan that benefits my friends and will take action upon Jack's final words on the subject.

So please Jack, We all hang on Your decision....



OT: some amazing things have come out of this, at least in my small part of SL. A quiet but IMO amazing member of this community did something so incredibly generous for me this week that I am having trouble expressing my gratitude. I don't think it is appropriate to point You out, You know who You are and i thank you from the bottom of my heart! And I am doing My very best to surprise You in a similar fashion.

Personally I hope the land barons are hurt and leave.. then lindens will offer alternative products to people who want them and cut out the middle man. I'm fed up with the crying on there end. They got us into this mess, now they need to go. Lindens please do something about this and offer premium account payers something in the medium price ranged. You will find that people will pay for it. 300 dollars is way to much for alot of people but the 125 to 150 range is way more mangeable for alot of us.

A stable grid is good for everybody. Getting rid of people who are gaming the system is good for everybody. Do you agree or disagree?

umm...LL is all profit hun... how many times do we have to pay for the same servers before they will buy new ones.

Take into concideration that on money exchange alone they make 3.5% of every exchange. with a daily average of $281,954.00 USD's exchanged every single day, they make an estimated average $9,868.39 from the exchange of virtual money they do not sell or buy. Its just free money for them. Thats only $296,051.70 of free money every month. thats not even getting into the crazy ammount of money they make off of land fees and estate owners.

trust me.. they are not suffering from lack of profit.

Ouch...Just owning a sim and a few openspaces does not make one a land baron.

Alisha, I too am a small owner of only 1 OSS. I have stated my position in earlier posts and I stand by those positions and suggestions which should be fair to all those involved..

My point was not to agree with the increase but to address the constant posts that accuse LL of being greedy and only doing this to profit. Make all the constructive agruements you want I will probably agree with those but making the arguement that they only want to make money is not a valid one....all businesses want to make a profit...nothing wrong with that ...it is the methods they use that are in question.

Let's start with the adfarmers.

Amount I currently pay Linden Labs each month: $520 USD
Amount I will be paying Linden Labs under this new policy: $0 USD

There are 5,000 mainland sims, which Linden Lab bill people for owning. There are 27,000 private estates for which Linden Lab bill the owners. Now multiply the amount of people who rent from land barons and think about the extra costs that would impose on Linden Lab. Tier would have to go up to cover that.

Yeah, from the announcement it looks like they started analysing what was happening pretty soon after that blog post, so they must have at least had an idea there were problems.

Then remove traffic. instant smooth grid...

And neither are the land barons

Yeah, I don't know what you would call me, (2 full private sims 2 sims worth of mainland and 14 OS sims) but we won't be leaving until there is no sl. Growth will just slow.

On another note. All that talk about that other provider of sims. Looked promising, at least on the webpage. Went ahead and registered this name over there. Consistency as far as names in the virtual world might pay off some day.

Interesting. That's similar for me.

Amount currently paying Linden: $600
Amount soon to be paying: $0

Firelight

Nope never insinuated they were. Just saying that those who do fall into the category should not complain about LL making profits.

Everyone should stop focusing on whether or not LL is trying to cover up, make a profit etc and address solutions that will help us all.

I dont want this increase and have fought hard to avoid it, however attacking a company for trying to increase their bottom line does not really get us anywhere.

They should instead focus on offerring constructive suggestions as I have done.
Read my previous posts.

I'm aware most of this is old news and has probably already been said but maybe there's something of use for someone in here so I'll post it anyway (comments written on Nov 28th but did not have a chance to post until now).

On Monday, November 27, owners of void sims received some bad news. LL announced that they are rising the price on void sims by 40% as of January 2009.

LL claims that they need to increase the OS pricing to balance the increased cost of maintenance for these types of regions. They claim that the use of the full prim allowance on these sims is draining the server network resources, and that action must now be taken to keep things up and running smoothly. Hence, they claim, they must increase the initial setup fee for an OS sim to $375 USD, and the monthly tier from $75 to $125 USD. But how can one server support 15000 prims at a monthly cost of $295 USD (regular sim) while it would take 5$00 (4 x $125) USD to support 4 x (15000/4) prims (openspace sim)? This sounds like an arbitrarily high overhead simply for dividing a regular sim into four separate chunks. It would be very interesting to see some numbers relating to the real computational and data flow cost for subdividing. Do the costs really scale so as to motivate almost the double monthly tier for four OS sims compared to one regular?

LL say that Openspace sims are meant for "light use." As examples of "light use" they mention seascapes or landscapes with a minimum of prims and a minimum of activity. This raises a couple of questions. If Openspace sims are not meant to utilize the 3750 prims allocated then why in this allowance provided with the land in the first place? And why would anyone pay anywhere even near this amount in real USD to provide simply a sea- or landscape to look at?

Yes, many Openspaces are used for residential purposes. People like the amount of space and prims that living on say a 1/4 Openspace sim will give them. Residential areas usually have very little traffic. Unless senseless use of scripts that require massive resources (listeners, physics) are used there are generally few problems with performance on an Openspace residential sim as evidenced by many many OS residential sims across the metaverse. Those problems that do exist may to a large extent be attributable to failures of the Havoc 4 engine rather than to an "overuse" or "misuse" of server resources. Hence the argument that an increase in pricing will help stem "misuse" of OS is null and void because in most cases the problems this action purports to solve are far less severe than depicted in the current LL spin. In cases where misuse is clearly indicated (e.g. by high traffic, lots of physics, lots of listeners) action could simply be taken to stop the misuse.

What will the effect be of an increase in OS land price and tiers? Land owners who use OS sims for creating environments where people want to live will have to increase their prices by over 40% in order to cover the increased costs. It is far from clear that any but a minor fraction of current OS residents can afford such an increase. The alternative is then to close down. Vast regions of landscaped terrain, often with many many hours of loving care put into making a region into a beautiful and pleasant place to dwell in, will simply be lost.

People that live on estates often do so because they have a special feeling for that specific estate. It talks to them somehow; it captures some of their dreams and visions of a better life perhaps. It lets them build their second life, both socially and in terms of content. In doing that they very often create their own things – houses, furniture, vehicles, art, clothes, plants, animals, landscapes... – but not out of thin air. Nothing stands alone. No man or woman is an island. No island is an isolated island. We see things around us that we like; a shape, a texture, a function, a social situation, and what we see inspires us to develop something along those lines. Sometimes we see things we like in a store and simply buy it as it is. Other times we get a component texture, or script, or shape, or whatever it may be – for example by buying it from another content creator – and use it in a novel way. This is how things are created and developed, in SL as in RL

And all of this then also is also part of a sort of SL economy. The new OS pricing system threatens to put severe limits on all of this aspiring activity. If huge number of residents are going to be pushed off their land, and even fewer will be motivated to come, then both the need and the incentive for getting new shapes, textures, or scripts, will diminish. This will have a large impact on the building, furniture, landscaping, and texture "industries" in SL And in the end, if there is really something terribly wrong about using OS sims for residence, then don't you think the market would be able to handle this? If not, why not? Why does this time and age call for communism and dictatorship? Why, in the end, would anyone stay, and keep paying, for something that is not doing it for them? I think we all have to ask ourselves these question from time to time; and at this time I believe the Lindens in particular need to get back to the drawing board and think again.