Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

US$75 Setup fee is a fee that you paid Linden to setup the Openspace for you. Once, it is setup and delivery to you, it's not refundable. It's the same as web hosting.

However, unlike Linden, a web hosting company will not raise the monthly fee. As long as you paid the maintenance fee every month on time, they will not disturb you.

I would like everyone to keep in mind that it is a 150% price increase for a lot of people. Many of my openspaces are $50 a month, even though they are class 5.

Sorry Richard, but who is paying 75? Is 250 for an openspace.




Tell that to the guy over on the other thread saying that LL changing prices like this is common enough to be expected, and therefore anyone buying shouldn't be surprised. When was the last time we had a 150% increase in tier, i forget...

I did a little calculation that may give some insight into the motivation of Linden Labs that this measure is created to generate more cashflow for updating the servers our voids are running on. It is based on the situation of sailng sims in Second life, but for the final outcome nrs would be similar for all kinds of nrs of servers:

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A small calculation. Based on estimations rather than exact nrs. I am not counting voids.

Imagine:

All sailing estates together (USS and others) own 150 voids. A safe guess I'd say.

for the next year all together we will pay:
125*12*150=225.000 USD

Which is 90.000 USD Extra

Imagine..

(they may be running those servers on nintendo's, but I think they are quad or dual cores)

On a quad core server farm they could run the whole lot on about 10 servers. Makes one wonder where all the money goes.

On a dual core they need 19....

as my little calculation points out. ALL of our void sims fit on about 19 servers. Given they charge 90.000 USD extra for our 150 voids, means they charge 90.000/19 = 4736 USD PER server PER year EXTRA.
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This can only lead me to a number of conclusions:

* that Linden Labs apparently either needs a lot of money very quickly
* and/or that they want to get rid of a large number of void sims

their claim that all this money is needed for extra server resources is an obvious and blatant lie, which becomes visible when you grab your calculator. I would prefer if they just told us what was really going on here and account for the extra money we are paying them.
And have this supported by nrs. Calculation.

Another perspective is that they wanted a lot of people to buy them hardware, people responded to their great offer, and did so with the setup fees, with lots extra to boot.

Now, they sour said great offer because they would rather use the hardware hosting all those openspaces for something more profitable. So, they keep the people most apt to pay, cast off the undesirables like non-profits, and end up with the hardware and all that extra cash, with all of us moving back to wherever they steer us with the next Great Deal.

There isn't an emoticon for a middle finger, is there. Hrm.

The answer is Openspace actually reduces the server load (assuming 4 OS sims spread out from a regular sim, having the exact same prims, scripts, textures and avatar load).

Why? Because when you spread out the same prims/avatars into 4 times the area, your drawing distance is the same, so there are more prims/avatars included in the same drawing distant area in a regular sim than 4 Openspace sims.

The server will only update objects and avatars within the drawing distance. If they are out of drawing distance, the server ignores it (otherwise, the servers will have exactly the same load regardless of how many people are online, how many avatars are in the sim.)

So what this means is that in a regular sim, since it includes more prims/avatars within its drawing distance than if you spread this regular sim out 4 times the size. This will require the server to update more assets from the database (i.e, update the prims, update the scripts, update the avatar movements within this drawing distance) compared to the same sim stretched out 4 times the area.

Now, the texture in the terrain will be mapped by exactly the same texture JPEG file (even though the terrain is expanded 4 times bigger, but the texture still came from the same texture file regardless of how many times you repeat the same texture over a bigger area), so this will NOT add any extra load on the asset server when you have 4 times bigger area.

So it is a MYTH that 4 openspace sim configuration increases load on server compared to a standalone regular sim, if both have the SAME prims, SAME scripts, SAME texture, SAME avatar counts.

If they want to accuse Openspace sim owners abuse by having more avatars than it can support, then as the other posts have pointed out already, it is those regular sim owners who abused the avatar count the most by populating them with camper bots.

If they use camper bots to populate the sim, it doesn't matter whether it is Openspace sim or regular sim, it creates exactly the same load to the server.

Yes Vye, I have heard that motivation too. It falls in line with abandoning voids. They could dismantle a serverfarm this way, making their new fiberglass network a bit cheaper on them. Or reuse the void sims paid for with our money to get a higher quality new mainland, which will generate them more revenue.

But given the cheap nature of voids in terms of hardware I would say their current explanation doesn't hold. I'm not going to believe another word they say about this, if it is not supported by nrs and the calculation that produced those.

Well first: the setup fees, as high as they are, are the peanuts in this game. LL lives from the monthly fees, and it's the monthly fees that "kill" the customers in the end if they go up too much.

Secondly, you have a calculating error there. LL can afford to lose 40 percent of the existing open space regions to have the same money as before, not 67 percent. Jack Linden said, that there are roughly 13,000 open space regions around, a couple of hundred owned by LL. Lets say 12,000 are privately owned.

12,000 x $75 = $900,000 per month
7,200 (40% abandoned) x $125 = $900,000
6,000 (50% abandoned) x $125 = $750,000
4,800 (60% abandoned) x $125 = $600,000
3,600 (70% abandoned) x $125 = $450,000
and so on.

While I can't say how many exactly will be abandoned, from what I hear from my customers and friends, it will be definitely more than 40%, more in the range of 50-60% (totally abandoning and not changing to full prim) with an andditional 10-20% abandoning but taking other land.

As you say you'll read all posts I write mine, as I came in sl, I wanted to make it in game and have a nice second life that make me happy to come in game. In few mounths I've learnt many things that made me a builder with work and demands...I bought an open space with friends to have a nice home because I could afford it, that gave me the sensation to make it with my work.
Now at this day, I loose my sim, I won't go living on mainland or private full sim, for severals reasons... the main one is the sensation to fall down in game and go back to the start...that's why I decide today to stop all my investissements in game, I won't buy a new parcel, but just keep a little one I own, I stop all builds or market, I'll come only for few activities, the money I was uploading in game is now to pay my game in WOW, there, the only thing true is that my money won't be abused inside the game, and I prefer this kind of game, even if I think sl is the most interesting game that I know, this one messes with me so I leave, hope you'll be some winners at the end of this story, but I'm sure that you'won't get out without hurts.
Thank you also to make us believe that you understand us and our sadness to loose our paradises, it doesn't change anything but with it some people still keep hoping for better days.

By ocean and tree that mean for ground but in the sky ?

"The Openlife is currently experiencing an unprecedented number of new users and overwhelming demand, as a result we have doubled the number of core services to support Openlife regions. However, it still may be difficult to connect if your destination is busy or full."

Ok I know a lot will see it as "not yet", but it goes to show the impact this price rise is having in the mentality of SL users.

As soon as OpenLife or any other grid has basics like money, and it wont be long if things continue like this then many will jump ship. I'm really considering buying land now. What do i have to lose, $145 plus the monthly tier of $75 that i can stop any time for a full SIM!! Already most likely going to lose my current OS that cost me much more, so investing in SL seems to be a bigger gamble than in OL to me.

Unfortunately, it's not quite this simple. The server definitely still performs internal updates whether there's anybody to see it or not. It's more expensive, however, if it also has to push those updates to viewers. For example, if one sets up a temp-rezzer in a skybox and has a half-dozen avatars around to watch a lot of prims rezzing, it will be really laggy. Start moving the agents out of draw distance, and some of the sim statistics will improve (Network, Image, and I think Agent; maybe Physics, too). But even after all the agents are well away, performance won't return to what it was before the temp-rezzer started.

What we really don't know is the overhead associated with just being a sim. Qualitatively, before the sim does anything, we know that having (essentially) four copies of the sim software in memory and four copies of the scheduler running on a core demands more resources of that server than would a single copy of these things. But what each individual sim--completely idle--does to the network and central services--who knows? It can't be nothing, but it's not anything on which I have even a qualitative grasp.

I believe, however, that the rest of the analysis concerning draw-distance is correct: if a full sim's worth of stuff is spread out over four times the area, the presence of agents should have less impact on (at least) Network and Image downloads, assuming those agents have reasonably deep draw distances.

By this last bit, I'm thinking about my own experience of "commercial" OpenSpaces and regular sims: usually running 64m draw distance, they seem about equally crowded with stuff where I actually am most of the time. So the sims are spending the same amount of effort feeding my viewer, even though across the whole sim area, the OpenSpaces have 1/4 the prim density. (If I were to walk or cam around the sims, though, the OpenSpaces would run out of stuff to feed my viewer much sooner.)

And that starts to touch on another thing that's really difficult to even guess without benefit of measurements: How much load is created by the way things are actually used across the grid, as opposed to how much load they could theoretically create? This is difficult to explain, but consider what it would mean if these OpenSpaces--a popular product--were on average more frequently used by their owners (and visitors, and etc) than the corresponding average quarter-sim of full-primmed Estate land. One could make up a "just so" story that had such a conclusion. (I dunno. Say, because they're a newer product, their users are on average more active in-world than those who've been settled on full-primmed islands for a long time. Or, for commercial applications, businesses are still ranked some by the Traffic metric, so OpenSpace users are compelled to use more capacity just to have something like comparable rankings.) But these are just *stories*--we have no statistics available about any of this.

About Traffic: Just to clarify the problem a bit: trafficbots tend to hang out well outside draw distance of anything or anybody, and usually use a minimal footprint configuration of the libsecondlife client, so there's just much less for the sim to update to them. The point is that, performance-wise, campers (or camperbots) are much worse than trafficbots. (Full disclosure: I've made no secret of my opposition to any use of Traffic for Search ranking: it's punitively regressive and an incentive for absurdly unscalable behavior.) In any case, if my above parenthetical "story" happens to be true, Traffic could indeed be a factor in making commercial OpenSpaces pose disproportionate load on the grid.

Sadly you are mistaken.

Rendering costs and distance between avi's is not what the problem is. if everyone in sl turned rendering down to 64m it would have little to no effect as far as any lag caused by overloaded sims.

Scripts run.. reguardless if someone is there to see then run or not.
80 avis with all their attachment ... do not need to see each other to feel the lag.. go to ANY sim that have 80 bot avi's 700 m in the air to jack their traffic up to know that fact is true. and most of the bots are just noobie avi's with nothing.

On open spaces.....All the scripts are still running, Any phisics lag from one sim will be felt on the others but not seen.. If Total time frame of any one of them exceeds 5.5ms they are already using over their alloted proccessor time for 1/4 of a sim....


If you have 4 sims with 20ms total time frame... that means a single processor is running the equivalent to one sim with 80 ms lag. Simple as that. Its ONE processor sharing the load between 4 sims.

If you have 80 people on one sim or 20 people on 4 open sims you have 80 peoples worth of scripts and movements running off a single processor.


Its not rocket science its elementry math.

To give some more insight on trafficbots/camperbots campers etc..... It indeed won't be serverload caused by only the avatar itself that causes the lag on a sim, as long as they don't suck up a lot of updates as stated above. What will also count is the sitting down.

A poseball sucks about 0.2-0.7 ms of scripttime.
Sims start lagging at 22.3 ms (server lag, this is not the client side lag)
3rd grade calculation: on average 50 campers (without worn scripts) will lag out an empty sim

Take in mind the 50 campers, bots or not, will be updating eachother constantly
Take in mind lots of sims are already restricted at the 22.3 with no people on them
Take in mind ....


Also about lag and scripttime:

It strikes me that LL doesn't inform people very well about OS scripts. I've read numerous posts from people saying: "I don't overload, my scripts use only 1.5 ms". On a normal sim this would be an excellent number. On an OS it doesn't mean a thing because LL is restricting scripttime on those tremendously. I wish anyone good luck trying to generate 15 or so ms of scripttime on an OS.....um no I don't..DON'T TRY!

Very good point in the previous reply about OS having only 1/4th of the 22.3 ms available, but even worse it at least "seems" to be the case that all scripts from the 4 OS on a chip are thrown together then picked out one by one at random. So if a neighbour is dumping scripts worth 40 ms on the chip and the 3 others 5, over half their scripts will be put on hold (LAG!). This would show less than 2.5 ms of scripttime, making the simowner believe he/she has plenty of resources left.

BUT ABOVE ALL:

LL is once again taking the easiest way out... making money without efford.
If they want to reduce load and improve quality for the residents... they should start out by hiring some garbagemen/women for the mainland sims. Any idea how many abandoned, object entry free, build allowed, 512 sqm first land plots are filled with 117 prims of visual and server laggy items? I won't dare to estimate. Yes on demand they might remove an item or two...only to see it replaced with similair waste two days later.

Why not reclaim abandoned first land? (not online for let's say 3-6 months or so)
This is only one thing you can do, but it does paint a nice picture on how LL manages their business

fair enough on the percentage, my bad, good point.

However... the setup fees would only be the peanuts in the game if they would, like any reasonable company, not churn them every few months. Setup fees have to be amortized over the term of the use and add signicantly more cost when the terms are modified shortly after purchase.

Paying $175 ($250-75) setup fee per region, and then having your tier raised in as little as 2 months means that our total cost per region, for those haivng purchased them recently, is as much as $162.50 per month. Since the average OS tenant is probably paying $96 then, well, the problem is obvious.

Setup fees SHOULD be the peanuts in the game, but they are deiliberately using the setup fees as the 2000lb gorilla in the room.

Still it is pretty silly to worry about the numbers too much, except one... $125.

The new pricing is designed to put OS sims out of reach for all but those that are profiting from them commercially. Any loss of fees they incur from losing more then 40% of the OSR's on the grid will be made up for in fees to convert them to full sims, fees to maintain those full sims, inflated auction prices on mainland, and tiers to maintain the new mainland population. They will profit by this move well past the 40% threshhold and will realize a significant reduction in load at the same time, which was my salient point, and still holds true.

When you do take it across the board could you make sure that i can at least walk on mainland sims. Of course there probably isn't any abuse going on there

Duke

A very good point that people haven't grasped - especially at the Lab.

There is a major lack of understanding at LL that most of us would own more land if it was more affordable. Most of us also don't want to have to give up most of that land and turn it into another store/mall/club that drearily looks like every other location on the grid - we want the land to look pretty, and non commercial. But we can't afford it.

All hell would let loose if Blizzard suddenly announced that World of Warcraft was from January going to cost $30 a month per account instead of what it currently is. There's an obvious comparison too, people that have invested months of time into building up their character (skills, money, armour, reputation, friends etc) in WoW are similar to people that have spent months in SL building up their dream home, only to find out that they can no longer afford to maintain that online presence.

beating a dead horse!!!

THIS ISSUE IS NOT ABOUT PEFORMANCE - IT IS ABOUT FILLING THE VACANCIES ON THE MAINLAND, SELLING MORE MAINLAND SIMS or GETTING MORE TIERS FROM OS AND PRIVATE ISLAND SIMS TO MAKE UP FOR SHORTFALLS.

If they are having performance issues it damn sure is not because of Open Space sims.

Duke

Yes and MAINLAND doesn't get estate tools. Get over it. More controls means more fees for the privledge - nobody twisted your arm to get a private island.

And why? It's not because web hosting are good ppl, it's because a) they face the competition (while LL is dominant); b) it would be illegal to collect people with an attractive price, and then increase the price by 66.7% after 6 months so anyone is forced to pay or loose the entry price. Imagine if it would be legal, you would be filled of frauds: I would sell a service with a very fair low monthly fees but with an entry price, after a week i increase the price (with a 60 days notice) by 1000%, anyone can't pay so i'll make my wallet big with all these setup fees, plus i'll have some hardware for free to begin the fraud again. I'm not sure about USA... here where i live you simply can't do this.

Jack, Jack..HELLO WHERE ARE YOU?

are you "reading all the replies in the forum and blog" or are you counting your profits?

either way you should have some time left to answer all the concerned people who pay your check every month....
not that we believe a single word you say...not that i am counting on a constructive answer anyway.... still it would show us you are actually doing something

Starting January 1st 2009 these Open Space Sims will cost
0.0333 US$ per prim (125 / 2750)
(0.0200 US$ per prim in 200 (75 / 3750)
versus 0.0130 US$ per prim for any other land. (195 / 15000)

Effectivly a person that owns an Open Space Sim pays over 2.5 times the cash per prim while having to share server resources.

> How do you justify that Open Space Sims are more expensive than regular sims?!?

There are only two explanations :

- GREED
- HIDDEN AGENDA

The more you try to twist your story by saying you charge more because Open Space sims weren't meant to be used as regular sims the more you're exposing yourselves.
OPEN SPACE SIMS WERE ALWAYS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN REGULAR SIMS!

Just a point here - and by no means do I mean to imply that I 'agree' with LL's current price changes - I don't frankly - however from the TOS:

1.7 In the event you choose to use paid aspects of the Service, you agree to the posted pricing and billing policies on the Websites.

Certain aspects of the Service are provided for a fee or other charge. These fees and charges are described on the Websites, and in the event you elect to use paid aspects of the Service, you agree to the pricing, payment and billing policies applicable to such fees and charges, posted or linked at http://secondlife.com/corporate/billing.php. Linden Lab may add new services for additional fees and charges, or proactively amend fees and charges for existing services, at any time in its sole discretion.


Guess what folks - by BUYING a sim or land or anything else that COSTS YOU MONEY on SL... you AGREE to them being able to change those prices at ANY TIME without notice at their sole discretion. The instant you agree to their TOS - you GIVE UP ANY RIGHTS YOU HAD about the costs....

Don Duke, you said it.... and not only you.
I do however understand OS costs more per prim, you get a visual lag/waste free space to work in. That's worth a lot to me and to others.

Increase in price, yes i can understand they want or need more money to make their business run in a healthy manner. I for one do this for hobby, picking up some money along the way by building and some scripting. Also I can see how people can make enough monthly profit to turn this into their job. I know I could, so I know many others can. What I absolutely CANNOT see is how people who want to run a healthy business in here and are not just in it for a quick buck, are motiveated by LL to do so. I can't see a future in business in SL for me, whether I would want to run one or not. Right now I can't see into the future any further than the 30 days between payments.
To do honest business in here with clients you need honesty at the other end too. That is what this thread should be about, not about all the false statements jack and the rest of the LL team keeps on making.

I can see only a number of reasons for all the fog and lies:

1) LL is pulling out soon
2) LL is run by 3rd graders
3) LL doesn't give a crap

I sure hope it's option 2 or 3

Actually agreeing to a TOS, doesn't remove your rights. If a TOS is above the law of the land, the TOS is illegal and therefore any agreement is null and void.