Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

Exactly! A fellow estate dealer and myself were just talking of this. We the private estate owners have been dealing with trust issues among residents for the last couple of months because so many, hoping to make a quick buck overspent on getting new OS sims to sell. But, the market was flooded with them, so we did not get what we should be making on them. It is not a lie, when I say most of the time we barely made tier. Anyway, these "overextenders", I like to call them, have been bailing out on residents at a consistent rate. My estates are full of people who bought land on an OS sim or owned and OS sim, and they were suddenly given notice that they had to leave within 24 hours. The latest coming just before this announcement.

So yeah, we already have issues with trust, now it will be even worse. But, it will not be bad just for land dealers or land barons if you wish, like myself. Because just as easy as they raised the tier for me, they can also raise it on mainland. Real pricing is affected by demand. Most of the time it is the demand of the consumer, but there are operating cost associated with SL in general. So, if people are so uncertain that they don't even buy mainland, then SL's bottom line suffers more and then you very well could see an increase in the price of mainland parcels.

It can get bad, very fast.

Good luck if you think you can sell your sims. Do you think anyone will buy more new OS given this price increase? Your buyer's pool is very very small, because only those who owned a regular sim can buy an Openspace sim, not any regular resident is even eligible to quality to buy an Openspace sim even if they are willing to pay the hefty price.

Just think about selling them at a loss, or worse yet, forfeit them and abandon them so Linden will reap another profile off of you by reclaiming your hard-earned money for free!

Welcome to the Pac Man game...

Oh i'm sure a certain unnamed baron would welcome the desperate ones with open arms.

So Katt, oh supposid leader of communications ... Where is this mythical "responding" you are touting ? havent seen much. 1 reply from Jack, moderating and a meaningess blub .... 3200+ and counting on valid questions, concerns, nd yet ...

NO NEW NEWS


Shocking.
Well not really.
Typical.
(Yeah thats closer to the truth)

I cant help but feel there is something MORE to all of this..... but, we have no way of knowing until we get some answers and decisions are made.

This isnt going to just 'go away' ..... the longer this is left to 'fester', the worse it will become as far as I can see. Is that the plan????? We are dispensable, plenty more people will join in the future and spend the L$'s ???? I certainly hope not.

I want my belief and 'faith' in SL back.

I believe SL is anything we want it to be, and for the most part, I see business, community, communications and opportunites for all. I would hate to see that deteriorate into a ruthless community where the 'rich' get richer while the ordinary people get nowhere.. thats too much like REAL LIFE !!!

Second life was, to me, a chance to live the dream that everything is possible.

LINDEN'S .... PLEASE PUT AN END TO ALL THIS NEGATIVE ENERGY BEING GENERATED and let us get back to our lives in your amazing second life world.

ANSWERS and communication is vital.

I'm confused, but perhaps I needn't be. Since I'm about to be charged for overusing sims that I don't currently overuse by any stretch of the imagination, does that mean it's ok to go ahead and max out my usage in my void sims?

I don't mean to suggest that everyone who has a void sim should do this, because that would be too much like some kind of coordinated protest. Instead I've decided to set fire to my sims (Lovelace Liberty & Caledon Primverness) using freely copiable fire balls, instead of making content.

Which...y'all Linden's might have noticed...was (nee' is) making money for you. I have the luxury of giving away my content, which means it's gravy for Linden Lab, and in return, you raise my rent 67%.

So, perhaps maxing out your own usage of your void sims would be a good way to live up to Linden's expectations.

Let me propose something that will help Linden make even more money, and solve this overloading problem.

Why not get rid of the freebie non-due paying residents? Your overloading problem is caused by all those extra avatars hanging around SL for free.

So why not forcing them to pay if they want to play. You can make $1,000,000 in a month easily with $10 a month of membership fee for all those 100,000 or more freebies/loafers/alts/what-have-you.

Why are the landowners subsidizing all those "irresponsible" people who hang around the Openspace sims for free?

Seriously, if you really want to know who are the true abusers of the resources, it's those BOTs who populated the sim at every corner to boost their "popularity" in the search engine. Why aren't you fix that true problem that people had complained for so long, and had done nothing about it?

Of course, I know this proposal will generate a lot of out-cry, because I know no one wants to see the free residents go away. But it does solve all those problems of people generating alts for griefing, etc., etc. It solves the problem of overloading. It solves the problem of having Linden to make this lame excuse to jack up the tier price.

I know Linden will never do this, because this will end their hook to entice people into SL for free first, and then get them sucked into buying land and paying more later by jacking up the price. I'm sure Linden will not be dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot.

The terraforming is a huge plus. I had no idea until I realized if I go back to a typical covenant-ruled estate land, from +/- 100m, to +/- 4m.... huge difference. The other estate tools are nice, but the terraforming is the biggie to me, personally.

I love my mountains and I love my sea. It will be hard to give those up.

I opt for your idea, because I see it the same way.

I am a non-paying resident, but I pay a lot of tier. I love SL and I am willing to pay a monthly fee in the hope, that landprices will not increase in return.

What is the problem with getting new residents? They may give them even a three months free membership and after that period they have to pay.

Campers are another problem and removing all these camping-bots is easy and will bring LindenLab even more money. Just change the location search to the same procedure as the search in the classifieds: allow to pay for a better place in the result list. What good is a criteria "traffic" when it can be abused so easily by bots and campers?

just did the math and not going to pay a fracking 110-120 euro a month for a place with a simple house and a couple of trees

i`ll go rent 1024sqm for a couple of bucks and ****** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** the mainland!

I think you are correct,
a quote from a recent Linden press release
"In today's financial climate, every enterprise regardless of size or industry is looking for ways to increase productivity, reduce costs, and boost overall profitability," said Mark Kingdon, Chief Executive Officer, Linden Lab
And we suffer because of this.
Here is the link to that press release -
http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/10_20_08

The best thing we can do as disgruntled customers is protest these very same big companies Linden Lab is trying to (or has enticed) into Second Life at the cost of its Customer Base (Which built Second Life into the success it is now)
Tell them what second life did to you as a customer, tell them you wont buy their product if they participate in second life and lastly warn them of Linden Labs disgusting business and customer service practices.
I'm in the position now were i would like to see LL fail miserably over what they are trying to do to the average customer at the expense of enticing more corporate involvement.

"...I'd rather spend time reading and responding to this thread, instead of moderating...."



Thank you,
-- Katt Linden[/QUOTE]


Katt,

First Thank you for your time, and gracious responses at the meeting you attended.
Second, Given that we have now discovered and confirmed that this situation was caused by the "fix" (band-aid, whatever one will call it)introuced by Linden lab itself, to "patch" the problem crashing caused by a Linden lab update previously, and given that the bleed of cache situation causing the cotinually reloading, in turn causing the major stress on the servers (all caused by the Linden fix), will Linden Lab be "fixing" the technical and technology errors to get this orrected, without incurrance of cost to the consumers. Time is of the essence here for many consumer/members, including myself. We must make decisions affecting our sims, and finances.
Thank you
TIGGS Beaumont

I have been reading this thread since it started, and while I do not have an OS sim (phew I was going to buy one though) I see it all this way.

IF the Lindens (any of them) really cared what was said here and had concerns about OS owners and the price increase, and how to fix it.

THEY WOULD BE POSTING !!!!!

Notice how they are not.....they have made there decision...it stands...move on people... nothing more to see here....

And I say SHAME of Linden Labs for keeping quite....

Jack:

Please explain to me what I have done wrong. One year ago, I came to SL and within a couple weeks I had two goals. The first is that I wanted to be an SL Mentor...in part to payback the kindnesses shown me when I was freshly rezzed. My second goal was to own a sim. I wanted to create for myself a little home, quiet and peaceful, tranquil and serene, unlike anything I would ever be able to achieve in RL.

Six months to the day after joining SL, I submitted an application to the Mentor program. I was lucky enough to become a Mentor. I am proud of that achievement, the work I do and, yes, proud to say I help LL make SL a better place everyday.

As for my other goal I am not wealthy and I view SL, while very personally rewarding, a past time. SL is a part of my entertainment budget. For months, I saved money to purchase a sim. I even planned for the contingency that costs might rise...and budgeted an additional 10% in the event that land cost an/or tier might rise in the time it took to achieve my goal. Last month, I achieved that goal.

And as I get ready to pay my 2nd months tier, I realize that I will only have this home for a short while longer Sixty-six percent is more than I can, and will, absorb. I can't afford to be "house poor" and even though I use no where close to HALF the prims allotted to me, I will be forced to abandon my oasis...and lose my initial investment (something that took months of effort and planning to achieve). I wont be able to sell my land and I wont be able keep my land...so I do feel punished. When I am faced with an increase of that magnitude...and I have done nothing wrong...it is hard to NOT feel punished. Using a purely financial "solution" to solve an operational issue seems unfair, obviously to more than just me? Deal with the abusers...or implement changes that address the abuse, don't make us all pay more money when money will not even do anything to address the issue.

So, I ask my initial question to you Jack and patiently await an answer. You keep telling me every time I log onto the SL website that this is "My world. My imagination". I guess I didn't see the asterisk and accompanying disclaimer..."Subject to change at two months notice."

Thank you for listening,,,

IMHO, once OSs were allowed to be placed anywhere on the grid, makes the knowledge base info mute, as it implies a use beyond what the knowledge base says was originally intended... and on the issue of "light use" it was never subsequently quantified and outlined, so we were all left to guess and interpret "light use" ourselves. After all, who in their right mind would buy/rent an OS in the middle of nowhere, and be expected not to live on it or do anything on it? .... and it beats me as to how something that supposedly uses a quarter of the resources of a full sim can use more than that!! I can see how there would be slight overhead due to the fragmentation of resources, but surely, twiddling with the setting could absorb that. (oh, thats right, this isn't about resources any more, it is about the "new found value" of the OS sims)

----

And on the LL announcement itself

All I can say is: bad timing, bad execution, and in very poor taste. The continued silence is having a disastrous effect on the moral of residents (very tempted to say "cash cows" as that is how I feel I am for LL at the moment).

I for one, had to abandon the rental of my OS earlier last month when my local currency dropped in value by 40% against the US dollar. I felt bad doing so, as my estate owners are wonderful people. I have since relocated to another location, sold off my mainland property (due to the currency drop as well). And after all that, I might be spending less in US dollar terms (almost half), but I'm still paying as much I did before in my local currency terms. There is only so much I can afford to spend on a "hobby/addiction".

Yes, I love my SL. I have met so many wonderful people here that I have the honour of calling many of them friends. To me, that is where the value of SL is, not in LL or SL itself, though I do thank the Lindens for providing this platform that allowed me to do so. I don't have to be in it to enjoy the company of my friends. We can exchange contact details, and maintain friendships in other ways. I have already lost some from SL due to the current state of the real world. (I do enjoy building as well, but I can just as easily download many of the available sim server software and load it onto my PC and build at leassure, without paying anything to anyone, so I don't have to be here to satisfy my addiction to building)

I'm also one of the apparent few (fools that we are) who believed in SL enough to take up a premium account. I don't mind paying for something I enjoy. But there is the issue of good faith and trust. I've only been inworld for just over a year. I've seen a few unpopular decisions being made, and the reaction of the residents. We all adapted somehow and moved on. With this announcement, however, I have to question the trust and faith I placed in LL. It almost feels like the dream is over. Mr M Linden may say that it only affects a small number of residents (as reported in RL media, not anywhere on SL's web site I might add), I hope he has heard of the Butterfly Effect. Just in the past week, the ripples are becoming rather uncomfortable.

I am in SL by choice. I will stay here for as long as I can and for as long as it is a viable place to be with my dear friends. Will I spend as much as I have till now? I'm not sure. Will I renew my premium membership? As things stand now, no.

If we didn't care much for SL, I/we would have already moved on to the next big thing (accompanied by my/our wallet of course).

If we did not care much for SL, would we feel the need to vent out feelings here?

As has been said by many a Linden, this world is what the users have made of it. There wont be much of a world if one alienates the builders of this world.

If money is the main objective of LL, then SL will not be here for long. Like money itself, LL and SL will only have value if and only if its residents/users give it value and believe in its value. Once that ephemeral faith and trust is gone, I'm sure the liquidators will be able to give a value figure on all the physical assets LL has.

LL deserves to be rewarded for a job that is well done. There still might be time left for that to happen.

Dear Lindens, give us back the trust and faith we once had in you. Prove to us we can still trust you, and I will be happy to continue contributing what little I can towards this wonderful utopia. But we are just human beings, limited in time.... we will not wait for ever.

Respectfuly yours
Stress Blister

Sell? No. They've already made sure you can't do that - so I will simply give them up. I take the loss on the purchase price - they take the loss on the tier income. Over time, that tier income amounts to a WHOLE LOT more than the purchase price

BC

[QUOTE NOt Sure Who]
And the Knowledge Base does say

"not for building, living, renting as homes" is pretty explicit.

In fact it's a damn sight clearer than I remember it being last time I looked. Have they just changed it? Or am I getting paranoid too?
[/Quote]

yes, that explicit language is new. just calll it bases covered

There is ample evidence, regardless of the disclaimer, that they knew well before they made them popular, what they would be bought and used for. Not the least of which come in the form of direct statements from concierge. just review the comments made when they announced them, and note their utter silence in response (sorta like here), it strongly suggests that they knew what they were doing and deliberately wanted to be held harmless when it exploded in their faces. speaking of exploding faces...

Hey Mr. Linden... can jaaack come out and plaaay?

So this is the new Linden Business Model

Introduce viewers and server updates that destroy performance .. then blame the residents for their use of the resources they paid for .. and finally raise fees with that excuse and add minimum $5 million/year from this OS increase alone.

I must say it's the most clever solution to raising revenues that I have ever heard. It works only in a monopoly. If there was any competition here the place would be empty by now.

The excuse, however, is an old Linden deflection method " you're having problems? It must be your graphics card, your computer, your ISP ..... etc. etc. "

I have seen the word "trust" so many times in these forums and in talking with residents all over SL. I guess trust is a victim of arrogance and incompetence.

but, if your tenants (if you have them) leave your island and rent on mainland they make alot more money then your tiers.

Also, a point not often mentioned... People seem to think that mainland is cheaper then private islands, but thats not exactly true. If you buy land and hold it forever, sure.

But if you sell your linden land to someone else both you, AND the person you sold it to, pay for the entire month. Parcel flipping is rampant on linden land, which is largely why LL has tolerated the bots buying up parcels and dropping ads on them to annoy their neighbors for so long, They want these parcels to turn over as much as possible. If a parcel sells 10 times in a month then LL gets paid for the entire month 11 times.

"Land Barons", in general, are not so cruddy about it

Thank you dear Lindens.
First you kill the landmarket by flooding SL with sims
Teh you kill the estate owners by cutting the prices on full sims
next thing you do is offer open sims for rediculous prices
and then, o my how is it possible, you say they're not used properly
you, Linden Labs, created the open sims
you Linden Labs gave the number of prims
you Linden Labs didn't monitor the us of open sims good enough
you Linden Labs now destroy the last of the private land owners
seems you don't want us here
so by the end of this year i'm gone

Indeed. I'm one of Zeebster's happy customers. A full sim of terriain with 551 prims on it and I think 4 scripts last time I checked, for the same price as half a mainland sim surrounded by scripted billboards, bling, and other lag headaches. I love it, precisely because there's almost never anyone else there, and there's never any lag.

I do understand that the emergent economics of a decision are seldom apparent in advance, and I sympathize with LL taking a look at their cash flow and deciding that they need to adjust fees. That's just part of running a business.

What grates most is the prospect of being punished for not being part of the problem. I would much rather have hard limits on resource usage than be asked to subsidize other peoples' misbehavior, which is what the announced repricing plan amounts to. I was a concierge LL customer for many years, and more recently I've been a very happy OS customer, but this week has just really been disheartening to me. More so than any other development since SL went live.

Arashiko
人なつき鶴よどちらに矢があたる

Yes.

For those of you making really sensible suggestions about effective communication structures that would be preferred - you're probably wasting your breath. [in response to the latest blog posting by Kat Linden]

LL will do whatever they feel like this week - they do not take any of the opinions or suggestions of those who use or try to use their services.

This post will probably be nixed, but I'm over all the fluff and corp-speak, flip-flopping and slap down that seems to be delivered in a manner that seems to assume my level of intelligence is equal to that of a newt.

After 2 years of it all - I throw my hands in the air, then wash them of this company who seem to think that they can treat the people who have been their support base as if they were so much annoyance.

This blog post [Kat Linden's] is just another example of what I detest most about companies which think themselves a notch or 3 higher than everyone else.

I'm more angry than I rightly should be over a hobby - and therefore it will not be part of my life any longer.

Just adding my thoughts to this thread in case they really are listened to and someone really does care about the customers of Second Life. I encourage everyone to post their thoughts. This is one time where we should not just sit back silently and accept blindly what is happening to and affecting thousands of people on SL. I posted most of this response on another thread but since this seems to be the thread of choice, I'll repost some of my thoughts here.

I started on SL two years ago when I was introduced to it in a university classroom. As many people are, I was amazed by it and found it a wonderful place to be creative and meet people from other countries. It provided me with many opportunities that I will probably never have in my RL. The people here are unique and often some of the most intelligent people I have met anywhere, and I work in a university setting so that is quite a compliment to the residents of SL.

I have lived on five class 5 sims on SL in the last 2 yrs. I finally decided to purchase an open space and I have less lag on my open space than any full sim that I ever lived on. My open space was going to be my final place because it suited my every need and gave me the freedom to create and design my own space. I moved from the other sims for various reasons most relating to neighbors that moved in and created living environments around me that were not desirable to me. Some examples of this were a slave auction house, a play yard for child avators, and an alien experimental laboratory. Mind you, I am not insulting anyone's use of SL for what they want it to be. I purchased the open space at a tier price that I knew I could afford. I would just like to have the right to keep the open space that I have already paid a substantial amount of money for in tiers and in purchase price so that I can provide an environment that is a space of my own dream on SL. That opportunity has been taken away from so many of us. Almost all of my friends on SL moved to or purchased open sims for this very same reason. This decision by Linden Labs has saddened me so much I have barely been able to log onto SL for the last few days.