Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

We had every intention of adding 4 open space regions to Languedoc Coeur/Provence Coeur next month. Ideally, these would all be on a single server because we have had our share of performance issues with our existing open space region (Poitou Coeur). We rarely have more than 3 avatars on that region, and have no intention of using any of the regions for anything abusive.

As owners of a sim with a "Provincial" feel, open space is ideal for us. We have hills and trees and lots of water, and the idea is to have beauty. We rent our homes out to people that want to have a place to escape from the trash in SL, and from the pressures of RL.

The price increase of the open space regions will definitely require that we abandon our plans to expand. Three of the regions were already designed and we have been working on the infrastructure for these new areas. However, we lease homes to cover the costs of these regions and the costs will just be too high.

In an article that appeared on Reuters in August (by Eric Reuters), the following were mentioned as contributing factors for the freeze of the land supply on the mainland:

"Linden’s customer base has been shrinking for six consecutive months, and the total number of mainland-owning premium accounts is smaller than it was a year ago.

"A migration by Second Life veterans to private islands and budget “Openspace sims”, which takes them out of the mainland market and depresses prices

"OpenSim. OpenSim evangelists insist — sometimes in heated tones — that their project will only bring new interest and users to Second Life. But in the short term, as Second Life’s all-important power users create OpenSim virtual world grids on their home PCs for free, at least some of them may scale back on charge-incurring Second Life land acquisitions."

It appears to me that OpenSim is going to receive a significant boost from this foolish move. Instead of focusing on developing for Second Life, perhaps our attention should be turned to helping build a system that can provide some possibility of being profitable.

Wow,as soon as i heard about this,i logged onto e trade and bought tons of Kleenex shares and am making a killing as we speak,ty Linden Labs....there are going to be no lawsuits(read the TOS )You are not leaving SL,if youve spent thousand of dollars here you are already a true addict....for those of you who overloaded the sims and knew it,youve had yer spankin,now pony up and quit yer baaawwwin,Linden Lab is gonna do whatever they want,and people are still gonna come,just like the crack dealer down the block from yer front door.what is happening in SL is the same thing happening in RL.Those who can afford luxuries will have them,and those who truly cant will lose them.The tiny few of you that are going to have to drop yer islands are not going to affect LL whatsoever.I feel bad for those who used the sims the right way and may have to give them up,i use those sims for sailing and flying everyday,and even dreamed of having an os myself someday to plop down a tikihut and a hammock.guess we will see what happens,im sure the sky isnt falling

If you ever spoke to LL on the phone... And used what they told you as part of your purchase decision... Say good bye to the TOS. The Digital Signature Act would not apply.

I have been in this game for far too long.. I seen how Linden use to rely on each and every persons dollar for survival and advancement, Commercialization killed that. Thanks Linden!.. I started playing SL when there were 7k people here. I've seen how drastically things have become commercialized and no longer have the same sense of the "game" I did back then. Linden is forever looking to take from the little guy. I understand the debate.. but I also understand that Linden doesnt like people making money with "what belongs to Linden". I have become very disappointed in the way they take jabs at people who do make money from them. Obviously theres an issue of greed not need. Im sorry but for a short while I did enjoy my openspace sim as a residential sim. I have 1875 prims to use and have 600 still not being touched.. *shakes head* why on earth would you create open spaced sims twice the amount. of a light sim.. cause you calculated exactly what people would do. Now that the bait was set you trap them. Sooo soooo Sad *sigh*

Jack, Cyn, somebody -

These are the things that I would like to see addressed;

1) When where and how do you plan on compensating the people you are crushing with these changes which in many cases (mine included) is to the tune of several thousand real life dollars?
1a) you reduce the amount of upfront cost for a sim - effectively reducing my investment by 45percent. A sim originally costs 1795 usd. you reduce that to 1000 usd, therefore forcing the sale price of a sim to be under 1000usd; at best lets say 900 a sim can be sold for 900usd. then of course subtract the 100 usd "transfer" fee and we are down to a recoup price of 800 or roughly a 55 percent loss (1000usd) on my initial investment. Now multiply that by 4 sims and I am already in the red for 4,000.

1b) compound this by now offering anyone to obtain a more affordable and very attractive alternative of having their very own open space sim. Can you see the smiles? the sparkle in people's eyes? I think the "thousands of OS that flew out the door in sales" is testament to that. What did that do to the small land entrepenuer? well they lost renters, cause now...why would someone rent a 1/4 sim from someone else when they can own their very own sim? so....let's say that 1/4(a conservative amount I believe)
of the revenue that was once coming in is now gone for a month, maybe two while owners scramble to find new tenants - can you see the dollars adding up here??

2) You forced the hand of many small land owners to compete with this new turn of events to split their full sims into open sims to remain in this little rat race you are running - oh...and lets not forget that for that priviledge you charged 100 usd. Will you be giving that conversion money back when people say whoooooa, I want my full sim back? -additionally will you be honoring the "grandfathered" tier rate for these sims that are converted back? < just says ago I converted one of mine and I specifically put on the note as I was told by many in concierge that my cost most assuredly would be 50/monthly - don't tell me they didn't know this was coming>

3) Will you be offering a buy out option for all the people that don't want to conform to this absolutely outrageous change in policy? Will you be offering us our money back for our sims ALL of them? Will you be apologizing to the people who just bought OS to realize dreams they couldn't afford before. and will it be YOU that breaks the news to all of the tenants that are going to be losing their homes - or will that be left up to us too?

4) If you are not offering a buy out option then one (probably thousands) might suggest another grandfathering. Change the dollar amount from here on out, do not "tax" or "penalize" people leaving all of US in a no win situation.

5) whatever happened to accountability? Who are your decision makers? Don't you pay people to foresee these things and prevent them from happening? You, collectively, as a corporation made this happen, encouraged it even and now you slap US with the book of wide eyed surprise when it did and to the tune of a 67 percent increase?

6) and in closing I would like an answer to this. What do you think the response would be if Philip Rosedale walked into a board of directors meeting and stated; Some pretty bad decisions were made of late that have sent us way over budget. It seems the following people have not done thier job as *I* intended them to do it, therefore, effective January 1st Tom Hale, Chief Product officer, Robin Harper, VP of Marketing and Community Developement and Mark Kingdon, CEO will all have a 67percent salary reduction. Notify them immediately and if they have anything to say have them write it on my forum.

man would I like to be the proverbial fly on THAT wall.

...and those of us who bought open spaces and set them up to be used lightly as we were told to do, will get refunds right? When we abandon them? All those hundreds of real US$ will be given back? Correct?

I totally agree with Linden Labs about this priceing. Openspaces have been abused, land has been raised in them and owners passing them off as class 5 server land for sale and rent. Its funny how nobody complained when they raised the prim allotment from 1750 prims per openspace to 3750 prims per openspace ( which should have never been done due to performance issues ) but now are screaming about the priceing. The only ppl that will be hurt by this is the abusers, and the people that were conned into believeing they have land on a full class 5. If the openspaces were properly used within the guidelines Linden gave us, there would not be any issue at this time, this is why I only bought full Islands, I never bought any openspaces, I know what Linden said their use was for, and builds should be on a full server, not a void or openspace, you can be lagged on an openspace, even though yours is empty, the 3 others that share the same cpu as yours can have too many visitors and scripts, and there is nothing you can do to fix the performance of yours, the other 3 can ruin your performance, actually it only takes one abuser to do it, so this is a big issue. Besides you are getting the full 65536 sq meters, and paying one quarter price as a full region, the price SHOULD be more than they have been chargeing.

OK JACK::::::::::::::::ITS DAYTIME HERE IN EUROPE::::::::::::::WHERE ARE YOUR ANSWERS TO THE POINTS RAISED !!!!!!!!!!!

Oh probably haven't got any that will make sense to anyone..............or still trying to figure out what strange funny stories your gonna feed us

JACK................WAKEY WAKEY RISE AND SHINE COME ON GET YOUR A.. ONLINE

Ya know, when I first heard about this.... change, I had nothing but anger. I was thinking "Fark SL, I'll never go back.. etc.". Then I started thinking maybe I'd just buy a regular sim but the more I though about it the more I started wondering if that was really a good idea.

What if I spend $1,000.000 of real money on an island, pay $300.00 a month while I build up a business that might cover 20% of that and they bump the tier up to $450.00? I mean, there's no guarantee they wouldn't suddenly decide to do it.

Given the behavior I've seen LL display I'd consider it likely.

It's really a shame LL is killing my little world. I liked it here much of the time and made a lot of friends. It's just a shame.

By the way, why DOES an island cost so much more? Seriously, does it take up more server space or something? I'm not being sarcastic. I'm just curious.

The only real abuses is LL, they can rent mainland sims to people for 195 bucks a months and there is no issue with capacity.

They charge estate owners 100 bucks more a month for the same land they charge 195 for on mainland.

Now if you want 1/4 the prims are twice they price they are cramming 1/4 prim sims 4 for 500 dollars

the price is DOUBLE the cost of mainland prims for full service sims .......

I have never complained once but now I will.. thanks alot Lindens.. no way in hell can I affford 125 a month even just paying half of that... and no discount for NP's.. bye bye Lorien.. [cries]
I can't afford that and being part of a charity organization. not only did it help me and my partner financially to have an openspace. it also was part of many sims to help build the charity organization to grow.. I'm sure some will stay.. maybe.. I know I can't. I struggle too much as it is in RL. we are below our prim count. our scripts do not cause lag on the sim. it's more enviroment then anything. we don't rent any land out..
Course.. that doesn't matter anymore.. I'll miss my sim terribly. Guess I'll go back to being miserable living next door to a strip club or looking at my neighbors circus in the sky from renter homes till I eventually say I have had enough and leave SL. my store never did bring in alot of lindens, but it did help buy groceries for my son and me and on Lorien is where I had my main store. Plus we had just paid up for 6 months a week ago.
Thank you for destroying my happiness of having my own sim,privacy and enjoyment I have had with my partner in a place we could call our own. Thank you for ruining my christmas.
Not all of us have the extra money to just throw away..

I woke up this morning to find out about the changes to Openspace T&C via a Twitter feed.

I own one full sim and have just purchased an Openspace. I use the main sim for client inductions into Second Life and to showcase what I do. The open space gave me additional water space at ground level to make the area visually pleasing and I intended to use the space above for demo areas for clients on some of the problem solving builds that I do. Mostly these would be used one-to-one. The prim availability for an open space was more than enough for what I wanted to do (I've just completed a full-sim build for a client which didn't exceed the prims available on an Openspace). There would be very few scripts running in the Openspace sim and all would be very simple (door open, slide - that sort of stuff).

I understand the concept of light use (limited numbers of prims and limited traffic) and feel that my use of this space would be light. Once the first Openspace was set up I intended to purchase at least two more for similar development. The Openspace sims gave me more space, control over access, the ability to make the whole area look good and, up until today, would have cost me no more than just purchasing a second full sim.

Once comment from Jack did amaze me somewhat: "Rather than being employed as open areas like ocean with little or no content and traffic..." If you don't expect traffic or content then why can an Openspace sim contain one quarter of the number of prims that a full sim can contain? Do you seriously expect us to purchase open space sims just to look at? If you create Openspace sims then people will use them - if they find ways of exceeding the prim limit then treat them through the abuse system and don't punish everyone.

As a professional SL Developer I'm concerned about recommending clients to use Second Life when arbitrary decisions are taken without reference to the community. Some advance discussion with the SLDev community would have been a start. As a real-life business owner I cannot see the logic of punishing your entire client base because some clients abuse the system. Surely you could find better ways of dealing with this. The price increase doesn't seem offer any benefits to those people who already own Openspaces. Currently we pay a quarter of the cost of a full sim and appear to have one quarter of the benefits (at least in prim count). If we are going to be charged more for these spaces we should be able to expect to be able to use them in a proportionate way - that would be a reasonable response from a reasonable company.

Linden Lab - you need to start to show that you understand that we are your customers and that we can expect a professional quality of service from you. You have spent too long giving the appearance of doing us a favour by allowing us to use your system. You might wish to bear in mind that current economic conditions will force most individuals and businesses to reassess their expenditure and this will no doubt impact on you. I will now certainly NOT be adding an additional two Openspace sims until I'm sure that the benefit to my company makes it worthwhile so that is some income you have lost. I guess that there will be others who make similar decisions.

everyone will be hurt to some extent...
but
the people who will really be hurt by it are the people who are using them properly

the sailing SIMS, the scenic SIMS, the one island owner who tacked on one or 2 openspaces for personal light use and a bit more space...

the abusers will just find another way to abuse the system... those after a quick buck will and always do find another way.

There are a few things that bug me about this change, but I'll start with perhaps what might be the most "obvious." What on earth will disallowing the transfer of ownership do to further LL's goals with lowering abuse? Think about it for a minute. It will do _nothing_, absolutely nothing. What do eggs have to do with the price of beer?

Why should LL care if someone other than the person paying owns the sim, so long as it's abiding by their standards (even the strict standards they apparently want for residents) and the fees are being paid? It makes no difference! Why aren't they just cracking down on the abusers, instead of using this as (dare I say) an excuse to raise prices under the guise of "accommodating" how people are using the OS sims?

Why not go with an alternative? Why not open new servers that are only 2 to a processor instead of four, and give them more resources, and have those be the $125 sims, and leave the current smaller sims be? That also gives them an effective way of cracking down on users, because if the users then continue abusing the sim (and please define abuse), they can impose a limit such as: "If you have such and such amount on your sim and this much traffic for this period of time, you will be moved to a half-sim, and you will be charged accordingly." I guarantee you that would keep people in line.

But then, let's look again at their standards. Someone posted the very good example of the Mos Ainsley sim, which has over 3000 prims, and over 800 scripts. It's laggy, and doesn't even come close to what my sim is like. Most people on my sim don't know the difference between mine and a full sim, because I control latency.

My conclusion is, this is more of an excuse to raise prices rather than a real need. I'll sugar coat it a little and say that I don't think all at LL intend this, I don't see them as one great evil entity, but really, be reasonable about this. Give people more options, instead of making the only option they currently have unreachable. If people need sims with more power that are less expensive than full sims, give them sims with more power that are less expensive. I know that if this goes through, our sim will be gone. If those pulling out don't do so out of principle alone, they'll be doing it because of prohibitive cost. Yeah, that's one way to solve latency.

I think that LL see's that the estate Owners are making a Profit now on the Open Spaces -

So ---

1) they Increase the Price of the tier to a fee that is not feasable for Estate Owners to continue to Own them

2) Then LL dominates the Market and offers them to anyone to Own and pay to LL even if they not Own a Full Sim

3) if this is not the case then Expect the Full Sims Prices to be $495 each first Quarter of 2009.

Either way it goes Linden labs is taking over the Market and I think that it is like the Mob comming into your R?L and say Pay up or your Dead !! no matter what you have invested.

So how does this apply to those who use them lightly ?
Why does it take them this long to do something they knew full well when they started flying out of the door?
Why dont they control it by other means ?

We all know the reasons, we are just waiting for you to catch up.

HAHA!!! i love this post!!!

I'll preface by stating I don't own a sim, mainland, island, or openspace. I have friends that do. I rent a space on a full island sim. I'm also active in the sailing community in SL.

I haven't seen such outright blatant contempt for a customer base since Sony Online decided that they could replace their current Star Wars Galaxies players with a mythical target group of defecting World of Warcraft players. They conned the players into buying the Trials of Obiwan expansion, knowing full well they had a secret game-changing patch that would make 50% of the expansion's content worthless, just two weeks later. The end result was that most of the playerbase left, and the mythical new playerbase stayed just that - mythical.

And here we go again.

Whatever the true motives behind this, and I doubt we will ever know, it's pretty obvious that LL knew there was a performance issue at least as far back as August. They knew it again in September. And all through October, up to this point. And yet, they said not one single word to the community. In fact, they continued to take money from the community, selling Openspace sims like they were Wiis at Christmas. You proudly proclaim to businesses that SL is a great communications tool, and yet you couldn't find a way to communicate these issues with the openspace sim owners? You had identified the problem, but you gleefully continued to take money from people knowing you were about to do this?

I'm absolutely disgusted with the lack of communication here, and the ethics of Linden Lab. This is like SWG 2.0 for me. Jack Linden firebombs the customer base on his way out the door for the evening, the only Linden that can even be seen around here is Katt Linden, and all she's doing is editing posts. You're extorting $50 a month more from people, but they will get nothing for it, because you're still going to force them to lower their usage.

So what's the $50 for again? To cover the backend problems that have been an issue since well before you dropped the prices on Openspace sims? Disappearing inventory? Failed teleports? Bad region handoffs? Terrible sim performance? These things have been there all along.

Whatever. I don't think at this point we need to talk to Jack Linden. We need to talk to M. Why don't you come here, M, and tell us exactly what your future plans are. And don't be a Smedley, and lie and spit into our faces while smiling a toothy grin. Tell us if there's a place for the average user here.

SO, i am left wondering what i spent my money on....
I thought light use meant it was light on prims ...ie 3750
This is most definitely a money grab by our LL overseers.
Promote and sell cheap sims, then raise the price by 66%
effectively pushing people to pay more or move to the mainland (read win win for LL)
i can put up with the constant bugs and the fact a PC or Mac that can run high end games at a high frame rate but struggle with SL.
BUT i can't put up with draconian money grabbing greedy hypocrisy.
I have been supporting up incoming designers with small parcels on our open sim, now they will all have to either move, or if they are as disillusioned as i am, just leave SL, this coupled with the fact we may be heading into a depression, way to go to ruin your business for yourselves (LL) and lots of people that make a little cash from creativity on the side.
I had my AV ripped of by a Linden ... OK we dealt with that....
I am increasingly being pushed out by the new updates ( when i started in SL nearly 2 years ago it was very computer friendly)
anyway i am getting more and more angry at this point and i wonder if a class action suit would be possible in the near future.
Does anyone have the original OS info on their computers.... would be good to read the fine print again.

Posted in another thread, but I would love to see a reaction on this from Jack.

Any company pulling a trick like this is completely out of their mind. Would not surprise me if there are going to be class action suits, and they would be won.

Making a product more expensive is not the issue here. Luring customers into buying a product with a substantial maintenance fee, and then making that maintenance fee 66% higher once enough customers took the bait, simply is a swindle.

They made them affordable, easier to buy (1 instead of 4) and finally doubled the amount of prims that can be used, knowing that they would be sold like crazy. And now they put 66% up the price, making them ridiculously more expensive as mainland/normal islands. With nothing more to justify this, then the fact they are technically unable to control the use.As I said, a swindle.

Planning for the worst with Linden Labs, is simply canceling your account, as there is no way you can predict a 66% rise in monthly fees. That's simply impossible. They make it impossible for any business to anticipate on this. As I said: it is not the costs of the product that is the problem, it is the maintenance fees. They conned a lot of people with this, who will have no choice then to abandon their property, loosing the initial purchase price, as well as any business they had. There are no words for this.

Open space sims are a GREAT idea. They give elbow room and beautiful vistas and are the ORIGINAL intent behind OS sims.

People wanted something else though. They wanted the ability to live in the country instead of the city (regular sim) and so started using open space sims for residential use. Problem is (and many people don't realize this) is that there is OVERHEAD dealing with a sim. You are not getting 1/4th the performance of a regular sim, you are getting more like 1/6 or 1/8th.
The solution to the performance problem is to MONITOR the sim - if it gets heavier usage than it should and the USAGE is residential rather than the OS guidelines, then bump up the tier to your new level, move it to LIGHT SIM status, and only run 3 on a CPU instead of 4.

After all, this is fair. You are getting more land for your money.

That said, I expect people to start converting openspaces to full sims. Under the new pricing, openspace sims no longer make any sense at all.

I would also STRONGLY urge LL to drop the price of full sims by $50/month to be closer in pricing to mainland, and to give people an incentive to convert from OS to full sim. That would go a long ways towards quieting the crowd.

Also let us have VARIABLE object bonus so we can have half a sim at 1/2 objects, and the rest at 50% more. That allows sim owners to create "country living" in an affordable way.

Perfectly correct Ellen, Prices should be higher for low prim sims used for building,

However.

That is NOT what this is about, this is about a huge price hike for OPEN SPACE sims, used as intended, for sailing, beach areas, forests etc.
Whilst at the same time LL themselves use the same sims for building.

Okay, I'll tell Concierge that you're gone now so we can clean up your old ad parcels on the Mainland.

Is it bait-and-switch? LL can get away with the price increase for service; there's just no point challenging it on legal grounds. Doesn't mean it doesn't suck--especially for international customers, coming on top of the effects of the strengthening US dollar. But I really don't think a challenge of this would have a leg to stand on in court.

[Edit: This paragraph is all wrong. The announcement merely prohibits the practice of setting up an "owner" separate from the "payor", not the full transfer of the sim to a wholly different "payor." Nobody will ever see this post again, but I'll leave the errant paragraph here anyway.] Where they *may* be in trouble, however, is disallowing resale of the OpenSpace sims. At least on the surface, that has the feel of an uncompensated taking. Presumably LL counsel thinks otherwise, but it seems a gray area. (If *this* isn't a taking, then I sure don't want to hear any more whining from the adscammer Mainland extortionists when their microparcels get price-capped at L$1/m2.)

Two classes of OpenSpaces? I think what got OpenSpaces in trouble was the *previous* change of policy, which made them neither fish nor foul. Had they introduced a new class of sim with the 3750 prims and proper virtualization (see below), they would have been fine for the low-end residential market, and the previous, much lower-primmed sims would have been fine for true void landscaping use. Trying to do both with the same configuration brings us to the current situation, where it will just be cost-prohibitive to have true voids, and that's a shame.

Technical improvement needed. The really lethal problem with current OpenSpaces is the primitive way they share time on the CPU. Some even just slightly more sophisticated virtualization approach would have made it impossible for a single OpenSpace to take disproportionate resources when other OpenSpaces on that CPU needed a share, without preventing any one of them from getting nearly dedicated access to that CPU when there's no activity on the others.

This kind of load-balancing is really not rocket science, and should have been there on day one, for any kind of CPU-sharing configuration of sims. In fact, it's so basic that I can't help but wonder if there isn't just a bug that's preventing it from working as designed. Whatever future direction OpenSpaces take, this really needs to be top of the development agenda.

Yes I agree with the post about raising the prim allowance - if openspace is intended only for use as open sea or empty land - why 3750 prims rather than 1750 or less? As, I guess, what would be considered an over user I do not have a mall or overinhabited land (not for the want of trying) - just a bunch of empty low prim houses and steady stream of traffic of 6 or less - and this makes me an over user? I have been extremely careful with use of prims and scripts and have never had a full parcel out of my three. Where did it say this before I invested time and money promoting SL? The Blog, btw makes it seem to me that even one house is too much for openspace?


Having said this - the decision will mean a much needed cut in the number of sims in SL, force the determined to get a premium account and fullprim and cut the number of servers required - so its a good thing for LL - What about all the people, myself included who invest real money in this though? Is there no other solution at all? Maybe a mid range option might help with this problem?

3am here, so I could be wrong,but.....

It is 4 full prim sims to a server

And

16 openspace sims per server..