Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

When I came to SL there was only a free trial period, but you didn't need to pay more than one month after that. You could downgrade to Basic with no penalty.

Just wanted to add in about the basic/premium accounts, the only good that premium accounts does is if you want to buy a very very large amount of land, otherwise its a ripoff in my opinion..so taking out basic accounts would be letting go of a LOT of potential/current customers to pretty much every business. It would be a much bigger impact than what this has done/is going to do if it's gone through with.

The problem is that many places offer that option - but when you try to downgrade they drag out the process for 6 months costing 6 months of service. Once I saw LL was doing good I got a premium account - then found out a user can't buy a whole region on the mainland, so you have to put up with teh crap there. So I went back to basic and bought an openspace. If this price hike goes through I will upgrade to full sim and rent space and prims to my friends that are being forced off their lands cause they can't afford LL's extortionist rates.

I just found another advantage to getting rid of OS. People are being forced to going back to renting 100prim skyboxes so they are buying my 1-4 prim furniture again.
I still think the idea sucks.

Sure, a place to start would be http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

There is a link to a grid list on that page, listing some of the other young grids using the software.

/me ducks for cover now

I think its time Jack climbed down his beanstalk and got his feet on the ground in SL.
Yes some ppl are abusing open spaces but a lot are like me and have a few houses on the open space and do not use the full prim allowance.
Surely it would make sense to punish those who abuse openspace sims and not everyone.
If i remember right there are meant to be monitors that should be checking what is happening inworld or have they climbed the beanstalk too???
If i make a mistake in RL then i pay for it, not someone else, LL increased the prim allowance on openspace not the residents, what did they think ppl would use them for, more trees and water?
I think if LL were to stop all clubs and malls being put on Openspace and limit the number of houses allowed on each os sims most residents would accept the restrictions.
I am a premium account holder and have spent a lot of money in SL and on my island making it pretty and pleasing but the price increase means i will lose all i have worked for, yes you can say go back to the mainland but thats not an option for me. Mainland sucks and the prices are, well, mad to say the least. No privacy and major bug probs, last place i had i kept losing half my house, also to many unwanted guests even with those ugly ban lines.
PPl say try Openlife, i did and its just SL under a different name even the screens are the same and the search, i went on and was able to go to my island so it must be linked, Jack do yoy really thing members of SL are that stupid and gullable?????

I've been kinda biting my lip, thinking the Mainland subject is off-topic, but there seems to be really a lot of confusion about Mainland, so, FWIW:

When new Mainland sims come to auction, any premium account can bid on them. Because full-sim Mainland tier is substantially less than the fee for a full-primmed Estate sim, Mainland has historically been more expensive to buy, but for a whole bunch of reasons, the market for Mainland simply collapsed and new sims couldn't even generate entry bids at auction, so it's been a while since any new Mainland regions have been to auction. So yeah, right now, one can't buy a full Mainland sim except from a reseller, but that's not the usual situation.

Because most Mainland is not owned in full-sim chunks, the revenue to LL is very much greater than $195/sim/month--or, at least it should be, if abandoned parcel rates are low. ("Abandoned" in a general sense: there's a large share of Mainland that's still nominally owned by expired accounts and by groups with too little or no contributed tier.) If not for this high rate of non-performing parcels, and taking into account paid but unused tier, Mainland should generate about $300/sim/month for LL. (Consider that the monthly cost of owning just over 1/2 sim is $195/mo--an effective rate of just under $380/sim. There are various ways to minimize this effect, but there's still a lot of unused tier that LL collects every month.)

Mainland is definitely not for everybody (although it used to be: for a long time it was the only game in town). At ground level, there's usually a lot of viewer-side lag unless draw depth is held down; there's just lots more stuff in surrounding sims, so textures and prim parameters take time to download and render. In some regions there's also sim-side lag (clubs, etc.) and if there are a lot of avatars involved, this can leak to neighboring sims. And the big problem is that there's no control over what moves in next door, so if that happens to be a club or camper-rich mall, you're screwed. On the plus side, the old problems with adfarms have been substantially mitigated by the recent policy; land-cutting and extortion microparcels, however, still abound.

Then you were never on Openlife grid, if you managed to get to your island in SL. Openlife has nothing to do with Linden lab. The only common thing would be the viewer. Some time back, LL released the source code for the viewer. Other clever people are making alternate viewers with features the standard viewer does not have... .etc etc. I currently use Boy Lanes Cool Viewer all the time now. At the moment there is no way of crossing grids with your current avatar and inventory (except for limited experiments between LL and another grid, I forget which)

The argument is that LL have found the demand on overall resources by the OSs is far greater than was originally expected, and has been most noticable since the rapid increase in the number of these sims.

In simple terms, with 16 OSs on a single server, any lag created will affect and be apportioned over all 16, so the fact that you have noticed only small increases of lag, those others on the same server are also experiencing that same lag....and may have done absolutely nothing to warrant it. Same for the full sim and mainland (who always experience lag anyway) they are affected by the increased demands on the grids backbone services.

This texture bug, may have something to do with it, but it is affecting all sims, so when comparing overall loads by various types of sims can be somewhat discounted.

Plus OS sims are now being used far more extensively than were originally intended, and as such this new usage for homes and dare I say businesses, which was never the intention, represents a premium value to many "owners"

If LL can find a way to "hardwire" an existing OS to use only 1/4 of a core, only a 1/16 of their server assets (eg ram, disc etc), only 1/16 of back end services , and only 1/16 of bandwidth, it is only fair to say that the price should remain unaltered.

If they are looking at spreading the OSs out over a greater number of servers eg 3 to a core, or more likely 2 to represent their actual true load on the grid, then a "substantial" price hike is necessary to help offset some of the costs of the new hardware and techie hours to setup (don't forget in this it is also current OS owners who will benefit from any restructuring of server hardware).

If you ask why can't they just apply it to new OSs, then who is going to cover the cost of expanded hardware for all the current sims already bought and used, and already causing this increased load?

At the same time LL needs to look closely at how these OSs are actually being used and develop a correct set of offerings for the future, as stated in previous posts.

As a basis. it must be in a minimum of 3 categories:

scenic.
home.
very light commercial.

And only as long as "hardwired" limits are in place at suitable levels for each, then we can all move on from this debacle.

Unforunately at this time there is no true alternative to SL out there. Some are rapidly closing the gap, but especially for content creators, there is no safe equivalent; unless you are happy to create content that you must give over to the grid owners to allow them to make additional profits from.

I am interested in this discovery. Can anyone give some pointers to more information about this?

OK - found it : http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8503

Get this IM last night (forwarded by mail):
[3:42] Harry Linden: Hi Juliett,
If you are planning to advertise/protest with objects on your land on the mainland please make sure any of the objects comply with the recent mainland advertising policy as stated here: http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/09/....arms-network-advertisers/

I've added SOS flags on any land i have access to. Also on a small mainland parcel. I want to take them off, but they were already deleted (!!) Nothing returned into Lost&Found! The big signs at the neigbourhood still exists!

So i textured my little house at mainland completely into SOS texture.

My answer to Harry Linden:
[5:49] Juliett Beaumont: Thanks Harry for doing my work and removing the flags, that does not fit the policy of 2008/09/12. Two things i'm a bit curious about... 1. Why didnt they return into my lost&found? 2. Why dont you remove the signs in my direct neigbourhood? (about 20m high?)

And you think this is not what you have done in SL?????

We have built this world, landscaped much of it, built ALL of the content, and now LL are pushing us out so that they can use all that we have created to bring the game players in.

Private islands will soon be a thing of the past, I give it about 12 months before prices rise to a point where it is impossible to compete with LL mainland prices, which are already $100US a month less.

This move is the first nail in the coffin of the reseller policy in SL.

LL are beating us because we cannot keep the momentum up, already some people are saying, just suck it up and move on, and LL know this will happen, so they just keep their heads down until we get tired of arguing, put up the price and carry on.

LL are now advertising their pet stores on the login page, and this is a commercial platform??????
No, this is a game now, it was a great platform, a world we could all be proud of, a world that we created, now it is becoming a world that has been corrupted by its owners.

I was thinking of destroying all I have made before I leave, I cant even do that, LL has backups of everything.

The way I'm seeing it, there's mainland which is the laggiest, then there's openspace sims which are in between, and full sims which are the least lag (or supposed to be at least) so I think we should just stick with what we have now and not up the prices because it works perfectly for a majority of us.

Linden has underpriced the Openspace at US$75 per month when they launched it.

A private island (65536 sqm 15000 prims), the tier is US$295 per month.

Openspace (65536 sqm, 3750 prims), the tier is US$75 per month.

Though the prims for Openspace is a quarter of private island, the land size is as large as the private island.

Naturally, Openspace sell like hotcakes. Who in the right mind would rent a quarter of the private island at US$75 when Openspace is at the same price?

So how much should it be? $100? $125?

All has been said before. The only realistic step seems to be sure LindenLab is not getting your money ever again. Take your loss and keep your friends being a free homeless account and go look for alternative grids. I had great times and memories cannot be taken from me. I feel most for people who have spend money and huge amounts of creative hours into this disaster. See you in another Life

The problem is with the product, not the price. The product doesn't seem capable of working as intended. They shouldn't be selling the product anymore until they can fix this.

As for land to prim size ratios and all that, Linden Lab have examples of discrepanices across mainland and estate. Class 4 regions are lower tier yet offer the same prim and space limits as class 5 estates. Bay City and Nautilus offer double prims for the same price as a 1024 on standard mainland.

Changing pricing without changing the product isn't a long term solution.

i myself own a private sim, and really dont give a crap about the raise of open space prices...
but OS owners are being greedy and selfish, look at the bright side they are upgradin your sim, so your sim will run better...

but on the other side u OS owners dont care about the upgrade coz they dont even live on the sim's. u make as many stores and malls as possible and rent them out to earn cash.. have u even been to a mall on a OS? the lag makes u tp out as soon as u take ur first step...

so stop naggin... dont like it move along somewhere else and see if they care.. and btw to the ones that they say they are loggin back in here 2 words for ya "bull shit" i bet that dude is on SL more than anyone and he just wannat to throw in somethin to feel important..

dont look at the price, look at the bright side, ur sim will sit on a better server..

How long are we going to be held hostage before LL makes up their minds and announces how it's going to be. I for one can't make a decision on what to do until I hear from them on whether this price increase comes with better performance for the OSR's.

It's a pity, really. If they would have put a hold on the sale of OSR's and announced that there was/is a problem, I would not have leased my OSR approx two weeks ago. By allowing people to live on them for months, it gave more and more people the idea that this was acceptable.

So, for now I am being held hostage by the fact that no one knows what is going on. I am hoping that they don't wait until the last moment, as my landlord is raising the rates in Dec to prepare for January. So, while you are dancing around the issue LL, please keep in mind that many of us are in limbo while we wait for you to figure out what the hell you are doing.

Where did you get that little nugget of information from? Linden Lab haven't mentioned anything like that at all so I'm curious as to whose told you sims are being upgraded?

Oh and if they raise tier on your private sim I'll expect that you'll happily shrug your shoulders too.

IMHO the main reason this thread and issue has raised so much negative response isn't because so many people are dependent on OS sims. It's the breach of the implied trust between LL and it's customers.

Personally I don't own any OS sims, or have any contact with any, but the fact that LL has no qualms about pulling a major bait and switch on a significant part of the population makes me much less interested in SL. As a content creator it takes significant time and effort to get stuff together which I greatly enjoy doing. However, the realization that LL may make some other arbitrary policy change that forces me out of SL certainly has decreased my own motivation to keep working on SL projects.

I live in an Open Space community. Perhaps these OpenSpaces were not intended for this use, and I can respect that. But our community, our beloved neighbors and friends, we are all going to lose what has been built. And I guess that is the aim of this price increase, to force SIM owners to charge more and move people out. But Lindens are charging more and offering nothing, not more prims, not more space, not even upgraded servers. The SIM owner of the land i live on hasn't even had a conversation with the Linden's about the use on this SIM, and for those who think its impossible to ferret out the OpenSpace SIMS that are being abused, it IS possible, it just requires a bit of "work". I personally think if someone wants to rent on an OpenSpace SIM and they dont like the lag or the pricing (prior to Lindens unrealistic increase) then dont live there. Originally the Linden's said "will not respond to performance issues reported should you not use them in this way.” So, now Linden are taking our communities away. Not to mention that some SIMS have been made available to hold 70+ Avatars....can someone explain to me if they were made to hold 70 Avatars how this is "light use"...the SIM owners are not making them this way, they are provided this way.

I think you missed something in the blog entries. They didn't actually say that you'd get a better server or that your sim would be upgraded. Mostly they said they were raising the price to be more reflective of the use. The only thing related to performance that was said was that they would be more proactive in discussing overuse with the sim owners.

I just noticed what appears to be a slight change in wording on the New Land Owner F.A.Q.

What is an Openspace?
Openspaces are a 16-acre piece of standalone virtual land. Openspaces run 4 regions to a single CPU, and support 3750 primitives. Openspaces are available to Residents who already own Private Regions.
Openspaces are offered to allow Estate owners to create open ocean or land in and around their Regions in the same way that the Linden mainland does. They are intended for "light use" rather than Residential areas with large amounts of content or scripts.

"While they can and have been used in other ways", they are not recommended for any other purpose.

This will flood the linden land store as sims will be droped.so hope you have a new plan of acction for the resseling of all the sims that will be droped in your lap cause im not buying one for the price you put on them now.

"rather than Residential Areas with large ammounts of content..." and "support 3750 prims" still kinda bite each other.