Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

HAHAHA like the interview in my sig line, this should be interesting indeed.

Well if this is true then I am waiting with baited breath to see what wise comments are gonna be made

It will have to be extremely good to get this mess cleared up...........not just some smokescreen rubbish

Bugger

Is just me or did this thread have over 260 pages at one time....is there a cap on the number of pages a thread can have because everyday I look at this blog, it only seems to have 245-246 or are they rolling off the first pages?

Just curious

As a quick aside. I'm confused about something. I own a full sim and did own an OS until the announcement came recently - at which time my fed up tenants asked me to trash it so I did.

However at one point before all this when things were running along rather smoothly I had inquired about purchasing another OS. (I had another tenant that was interested) I called Concierge to ask a couple of quick questions regarding this. I was told flatly that I was allowed only ONE OS for each full Sim I already owned. So I am puzzled by the folks who say they have two full sims and 7 OS. How did you manage that? Or did I get a faulty answer from my Concierge rep?

Oh and for what it's worth when I purchased the first OS I explained how it would be used and was told that was fine. I also asked how we would know if we were "overusing" it. I was told they would of course let us know! Yay right.

Exactly that. There is no limitation in number of OS regions as long as you at least have one full prim region.

Immaterial Hmmm my $22.95 per quarter to be a premium member is a drop in the bucket in the scheme of things but since it is "Immaterial" I guess LL doesn't need supporters I pay my "Immaterial" membership fee to in my own way support a community I love (well loved). Corporate greed and the cold hearted owners seem to be pushing SL to become "Immaterial". It's sad that there appears to be no professionals involved in running this monopoly only greedy little bastards. Maybe I'm wrong but by all appearances LL your making yourselves look like all that matters is you and not your community.

Hope your PR Dept. can remove the foot form your mouths and mend this issue ~LAUGHS~

You've been eating sushi?

OMG ROFL I SOOOOO needed the laugh.

The case for a plodding and methodical destruction of the competing business of landowners has been made repeatedly ever since LL dropped the price of these OSR's and announced that they would be pumping them out en masse.

The best way to determine a companies motives is to examine their behavior and make note of what that behavior actually accomplishes, if you can ignore the rhetoric.

People like to call this a conspiracy theory. I would say that you would have to assume an awful lot of accidental providence and a fair amount of downright stupidity on the part of LL in order to ignore the possibility that LL knew what they were doing all along.

Keep in mind that long before any of the sweeping changes that have led to this debauchle, the writing was on the wall for the real-estate market in SL. the release of the viewer code and the reverse engineering of the server code virtually ensured, with LL's active participation, that other grids will eventually open up, introducing competition and vastly reducing the value of virtual land. Arguably it's value should be pinned to the cost of resources in current hosting solutions with a similar profit margin - perhaps $100/mo for a full prim region. maybe $40/mo for an OSR.

With that as the backdrop and LL's active participation in the opening of that market it would be silly to think they have a long-term strategy for renting private islands versus "value added" mainland (if you could call it value-added, but i dirgress). SO we can assume that they see private islands, and their owners, as a temporary cash-cow that will last as long as they have a monopoly on a virtual economy.

So what to do with a cash-cow? Why you milk it, of course!

The idea that LL was somehow unaware of the use of OSR's as residential, and even commercial, sims would suggest that they did not notice the many 100's of them that were already being sold as residential well before they made the decision to make them even more attractive. It was, after all, their land store that was advertizing "Low prim Private island paradise with 1875 prims and 64k sqm!" by the many dozens at any given time. And remember, they were delivering these OSR's manually at the time, with names that clearly suggest their usage, and to locations which are clearly not "forest or water". Then you have to keep in mind that concierge has been providing support for these islands since they were first introduced. Providing rollbacks to restore a residents lost poseballs, etc. To suggest they didnt see it happening is rediculous.

So lets assume the obvious, they knew full well how they were being used.

When they saw it happening they had 2 choices really, smack down the abusers and enforce their guidelines, or jump on the gravy train and ride it.

Doubling the prim count, freeing them from estate boundaries, allowing landowners to buy them one at a time and drop them in isolated locations on the grid, I think these decisions illustrate fairly well which way they decided to go. The changes were designed to accomplish one thing, there is in fact only one reason to make these changes in tandem, to make the OSR's more atttractive for residential use, increasing demand for them.

Having done that they were suddenly inundated with manual orders for them for many weeks. For awhile the demand was so large it took 21 days to deliver them. They sold and delivered hundreds per day, and this was at the original high price of $415 for setup, for many weeks, until the demand finally dropped off.

Meanwhile they were already working on the new land store which would automate the delivery of OSR's. Is it reasonable under any stretch of the imagination to think that they did not already have a plan to lower the price and create a new demand as soon as the store was ready? This is where the bait and switch argument comes in.

Having exhausted demand at the higher price they made the announcement to lower the setup fees for both the full prim sims and the OSR's, inviting 1000s of residents jump into an already overcrowded land market and become "landbarons" in their own right. Its was easy, and now it was cheap, many people were salivating at the thought, others were complaining that they couldnt afford the full prim sims required, and they wanted their own OSR too. Others were decrying the abrupt devaluation of current holdings, myself included. A few of us were predicting the end of the real-estate market and beginning to realize that LL was acting with malice aforethought. It wasnt a popular theory at the time.

Notably, LL was completely silent after the initial announcement, pretending not to see these issues being raised at all. They started the announcement with the disclaimer of light-use and let the feeding frenzy build without a single comment... No responses like, dont buy these if you want to live on them to all the salivating posts, just silence.

My point about their silence? It was out of character for a company so concerned with improving the experience for their residents to ignore so many questions which should have raised concerns about what the users expectations were. Just as it is now for them to remain silent in the face of the reaction to their price hike for so long. I believe they did not want to contradict their use guidelines and make themselves culpable, but also did not want to do anything to qwell the demand. But thats pure conjecture, I admit.

They ignored the warnings of many of us about performance and the effect on the economy. They ignored the questions which directly demonstrated that most of the demand was for residential use. My personal pet peeve at the time was that they continued to sell the full prim islands at the high price of $1675 on the land store, with no notice being given of the pending price change, all the while discussing and price drop and postponing it until the new land store was ready.

This was also around the time they started the trend toward posting blogs with comments turned off and moved the grid status announcements to their own page, some of our comments were very off color, and increasingly off topic as they would not raise a proper forum to discuss private island issues. I accused them of practicing a bait and switch land scam and setting an example for those who would game the system (landbots etc).

So the new land store was finally released to great effect. OSR On Demand was a resounding success. The land glut was a perfectly acceptable tradeoff for low mainland parcel sales as long as the orders were rolling in by the 100s per day.

Meanwhile LL had turned its focus to the mainland cleanup project, rolling out new regions, outlawing advertizing parcels, creating new roads, adding "value added communities" like Bay city and Nautilus... why all the sudden reverse their long standing practice of ignoring all this? Well, we have already established that the Private Island market will only be temporary, so in order to consilidate their user base they are going to have to entice them back to mainland so that they wont jump to other grids when the doors swing wide. And if you are the suspicious sort, perhaps they had an inkling that eventually they were going to have to do something about the land glut they had engineered, but not until it had played itself out.

As will happen when you sell something with no controls on quantity the supply quickly outstrips the demand, suddenly no one could find a tenant for anything. There were nearly as many islands as concurrent users, and the land market was essentially crashed. Of course, this means that instead of buying OSRs through the land store people started selling them at loss in the forums. Sales had dried up, and with it, LLs unsustainable growth spurt.


But LL is all about growth - so how can they possibly re-invigorate the market when they cant add users and cant sell land?

Welcome to the new solution. Raise the price of OSR's beyond the ability of anyone but the worst abusers of them to afford to keep them. Everyone else will be forced to either abandon their OSRs or spend more fees converting them back to full prim regions. The tenants suddenly made homeless by the dumping of OSRs will decide that perhaps its best, after all, to head back to the mainland, since its been cleaned up an bit. The reduction in OSRs will open up computer resources for more mainland to meet that demand, and reduce the load on the infrastructure casued by haivng a region for every 2 avatars online at any given time.

All's well that ends well - With one drastic shock to the system they have solved all their problems; infrastrucure load is reduced, Land supply shrinks, Revenues grow. All they had to do was decimate a few thousand landowners, and if you think they didnt see it coming, even allow for the probability that it was an evolving plan, then maybe you deserve what you get. But no one deserves to be treated like a mark just because they are foolish enough to believe the rhetoric.

As I said at the outset the best way to gauge a companies motives is to examine the effects of what they do. This is not about the users, Its not about abuse, Its about growth and customer retention. These would be laudible motives if they weren't fleecing the residents to fund it, changing their pricing every few months before anyone can recover from the last change. Raking in the fees and teris. LL has taken its operating philosphy from the likes of enron, bush & countrywide.

As I've said before... They are done with us (Private Island Landowners), they have nearly picked our pockets clean. Now they just need our tenants to get the hint and move to mainland so they can push us off the cliff. The only question left is... where to build the cliff? No worries, they will have a nice new continent for it just as soon as the homeless masses are hungry for mainland again

has there been ONE SINGLE POST in this thread so far made by "Jack Linden"?

"discussion with jack linden", my ass.

I think there was a post by him awhile ago. Which stated there would be more posts coming ... well ...

Yes, Jacks idea of a discussion differs a little from me

It's not Jack who makes the policy decisions, it's the top level management of LL. Jack (and all other Lindens who post stuff on the blog, for that matter) are merely told to climb down Linden Mountain and tell us mere mortals what has been decided.

Don't kill the messenger, folks. It's not civilized, and it ain't no use.

True, I guess we should not dump on Jack but this whole thing has been very disheartening and a big distraction. It has been handled in a very insensitive way for those of us who have formed relationships with others here in the SL world.
Time will tell.

I would like to suggest that when we refer to "Jack", We really mean the impulsive side of LL intent on destroying the good faith of long term customers. At least that's the "Jack" I have been posting at.

edit: I have never met THE Jack Linden. I mean him no ill repute.

Personally, I like Jack. Except for his more recent blog posts, he's always seemed like a decent guy.

I thought Jack was a director at LL and responsible for the iteam, conceirge service and the mainland. Yes, he has to take orders from above but it would be a mistake to think he's just some messanger boy..

ON THE BLOG

Openspace Announcement Due Tomorrow
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 11:01 AM by: Jack Linden
Over the last week we have been listening to your feedback and working hard to revisit the original announcement. This blog post is just a short message to let everyone know that we’re now close to being able to share our thinking more fully with you.

Tomorrow M will post to the blog. The post will be our response to all of the great feedback you have provided and will include details about how we intend to proceed regarding Openspaces.

Immediately after the post tomorrow, we will open another forum thread where we will do our best to answer your questions. We understand that many of you are anxious for news, and so I wanted to be sure to let you know that the waiting is almost over.

Ohh wonderfull we get to have another 250 page discussion thread with out any bothersom LL folks coming in to bother us! Joy!

Should be interesting to see what M says.. Some of the things he's said lately really have me scratching my head and wondering if he has any idea how residents think or even if he knows we're here.

/me hopes it's not all just management-speak.

His operational title is "Director of Customer Relations", being "responsible for support services including the concierge team, governance team, private islands and mainland management". What that means exactly, I don't know, but it seems to mean that he is, more-or-less, one of the primary folks responsible for, um, "relating" to customers on behalf of LL, for at least those areas listed. Maybe he means he is "a" Director of Customer Relations, not "the" Director. They could have more than one Director of Customer Relations that cover different aspects of it.

At any rate, his handling of us so-called "customers" would have many CSR managers turning white. :-/

I think he reports straight to Cyn so he could well be The Director of this stuff.

Didn't know Jack owned the gteam. I think that's a new addition to his profile text.

I think Mr. Kingdon is a postdoctoral professor of the Dilbert College of PHBism.

Expect lots of management-speak and PHB-logic.

(Remember: low expectations, less disappointment )

As making bets is illigal, maybe someone should start a poll (who knows how this works)

What do you expect from tomorrows announcement:
1-I will feel some relief as the the new alternatief is reasonable.
2-I Will shake my head but will acept it
3-I will feel even more angry as the announcemnt will be totally unreasonable

Er.. Should have been "scratching my head" not "scratching his head" even though the later is funnier...