Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

It took 2 weeks for LL to MOVE my region. Cost me 150usd and loss of revenue during that time.

2 weeks!!! I lost 300usd for LL not doing enough to help me as a customer. THEN, tell me that your just going to raise fees for something I am holding with no value....so I either pay up or get out.

I am a customer, not a tax base.

You would never have doubled the prims, which enticed habitation. On the contrary, you would have done something more on the lines of cutting prim count, and pricing...

but anyway, as usual, it's not necessarily what you do, but the manner in which you do it that sucks... you forced open spacers on us, forcing us to adapt or die, and now you pull them away, dropping these changes on us like big bombs each time.

We're all criminals with loads of money in our pockets.
Oh well.

If they aren't to be used, then why bother even doubling the prim limit? Obviously people who can't shell out for a full sim, who don't want to have to put down payments on land they never actually own, or don't need a full sims worth of prim and power should just move to mainland or not be on the grid at all.

It's now october and LL feel if they add an extra 50USD a month on the tier for each of these spaces they could have a really good christmas party this year
WTG LL




Obviously LL never intended people to use double the number of prims, and perish the thought that avatars would ever enter an open space.



As everyone is aware of the connection between increased tier prices and performance LOL



F**K ME the Lindens are planning a lavish New years bash to




Wow that sounds like a great idea, no really it does for two long things have been unclear, for new users whether they are choosing to pay tier to LL or island estate owners.
Will these new users be told of the fluctions they will experience in tier levels on private estates, possible closures? the problems of extortion on the mainland?


Jack I am sorry to be sarcastic in this post but you must be able to see it seems that not only is the land market of the mainland continuing to collapse, due to LL's inaction on the parcel extortion front, but now Island estate owners are being driven into the ground.

I don't believe the problem is prim use.. A good number ( almost certainly a substantial number ) of openspace sims are used by Roleplay communitys and other such establishments and are very script heavy.

It's the scripts that are causing the abuse rather than the prim use. Just as an example two of the biggest combat areas in the gorean community use a good number of openspace sims. Definitatly not what they were intended for and definitly not alone, I would not be surprised if as much as 80% of openspace sims are being heavily used ( which is heavy script and avatar use ).

Therefore Linden Lab had two options, call these sims for abuse and kick them out, or make sure they're class 5 and raise the price and tweak the way you can get them. They made the logical choice.

Maybe this has been said already but hellllloooo the outcry in those cases was FOUNDED.

No - you were told it it was for open-space usage, Water, Trees, etc. - specifically not for commercial or residential use.

The reality is that MOST people were abusing OS's. LL is changing their policies / pricing to solve the problem. Granted, they are not doing it the best way - there are other solutions I've mentioned in another post.

http://secondlife.com/land/#
hit the openspace thingie and see


hit more info for
https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=4235

OH Jack, you are in the UK like me...so I am sure you are fully aware of the USD against the GBP rates. So with the exchange rates, the LL increased tier rates & the current financial worldwide climate you are affecting nearly every user in here. The only people left in SL will be those who never spend any real money in here! Then LL will not be making any revenue at all. When it comes down to it, no matter how addicted someone is to SL, if they dont have the resources to pay the increasing rates they simply will not be able to pay them. How the hell can LL justify such a huge price increase? Did you really think you would get away with it? Or are you looking to reduce you revenue in this game?

This opens up a new window for rivals! I suggest that LL reviews their decision in their own financial interest in this virtual life, before they loose their loyal paying customers.

No it doesn't, and this is the "fun" (for those that have any reason to laugh at it) part. We're on a grid: a bunch of phisical servers connected together with virtual machines (software servers) running on them. When a simulator boots up it is being put on the first available spot (virtual server) on one of those machines, optimizing the resources.
So each time a server is loaded at it's full capacity (optimization), so whenever you dismiss thousand of Openspaces, the remaining ones will be "packed" together (and not placed across the whole grid to load balance the resources) and the problem (or what they try to tell us it is the problem) will be not solved at all, because even in the eventuality that only 16 openspaces will remain in the end (and it's more than an eventuality considering how "convenient" they will be.. lol), they will run on a single server, exactly as today.
The truth is another, and has nothing to do with performance (so insist to propose solutions to limit the usage is nothing more than loose your time), but with their business predictions: many ppl decided to buy these OpenSpaces because they looked more convenient than other solutions (regular simulators, mainland regions, mainland parcels); LL figured that the product is so "attractive" and then decided to increase the fees.
This is a normal business model > the price increases according to the demand. What is totally unfair it's not the price increase, but the fact that this is not a pay one time product (you buy it and you finished, if the price drop or raise it's not a job of you anymore), but a service with a setup price and monthly fees, so when you "adjust" the price without grandfathering you are not affecting only the new customers, but also the current ones: if you won't to pay/accept the new price, you are forced to leave your setup price ($250; $450 per sim in my case) in the Linden Lab pot.
Where i live (Italy) this is NOT legal, Phone Companies tried to make that joke and they have been forced by the court to refund ppl (if you are going to apply pejorative rules, you must offer to the customer the possibility to "bail out" without any penalization, refunding the purchasing costs), this is to prevent smart ppl doing crazy frauds (selling products at very low prices and then applying crazy monthly fees after a month or so)... but i dunno about USA.

Maybe true. But hey! I would buy openspaces from LL directly but they DON'T LET ME unless I own a sim already. Where is the damn logic in all that? Would someone explain that to me?

They don't want your business. They only want people that spend thousands. They are trying to drive out the smaller users.

So are owners of four sims going to be given the option to convert four OS sims to a full sim for free?

I'm just thinking of trying to protect the homes of my residents... (if I have any left after the recession and this have done their work)

Can we have some guarantees (not that they are probably worth anything) that PI rates are not going to be increased like this... in the next quarter or so?

I was just telling someone (that I invited to SL, I like to invite folks to spend time there) that LL was now in a historic position to reap the upsurge in Entertainment dollars spent around the globe. In any economic downturn, the spending demographic weighs the dollar value of each $L they are going to spend in their limited supply.

LL seemed to be in tune with this, providing better initial experience for new members... providing OpenSpace sims to increase investment and community from existing members... and generally looking hip and smart.

But apparently I was very wrong.
Economic downturn = 60% + increase fees


watch the people flee!

LL does something that most organizations do when things don't go the way they want: trying to use financial triggers take care of things that have gotten out of hand. Why not use the "GOD"-powers of the owners of all SL servers, and enforcing the rules that are made up for open space sims? Too much trouble, so hit them all and hit them hard. So that the ones who can't afford much more are suffering and the ones that make big profits will continue with slightly adjusted prices.

This is a hard hit for non-profit organizations and educational organizations. They are treated even worse than the rest: no adjusted tiers, just pay "commercial" prices.

LL, you're going the wrong way. Use other mechanisms to get what you want!

with the actual recession, I though LL was about to lower island fees and not ask more money again to open sim owners, but after all i was expecting some touch of logic, silly me....

Sadly I think from what Ive read today the idea was for you to build a 15k prim farmhouse and then several 3750 prim fences but keep your farm empty -wags finger

If anyone from Linden Labs is actually reading this mark me down in the severely disappointed column. Better yet, if you have a column for 'last straw that drove a customer to thinking of leaving' mark that too.

This announcement just cries out that SL is not a stable environment. If makes it obvious that LL does not have the resources to make reasonable decisions that impact its residents.

The 66% overnight increase in monthly charges on a product LL originally priced to sell aggressively does upset me and has the appearance of unethical business practices.

More than the 66% increase, what concerns me is that LL seems surprised that its residents would flock to open space sims for residential purposes with the prospect of privacy and tons water while acknowledging with the Nautilus continent that residents love waterfront. LL doubled the prims, made them easier to get, and they are surprised at the result? Does anyone at LL actually participate in SL? Anyone who does would know void sims were already being used in creative ways. Doubling the prims, reducing access limitations and cost, the result was inevitable. LL acted irresponsibly by not protecting its residents with simple limits in the first place. Now they are compounding that mistake by penalizing those that do not over tax the system. There were/are so many better ways of managing this. Avatar limits comes to mind. But instead they reacted with a questionable 66% increase.

Unfortunately the only vote we residents get is with our feet. This practice does not encourage me to invest any more time/energy/money into SL. I love the environment, but have no confidence in management.

im sorry!! that is bogus!

This is the extent of the information they gave us. They conveniently use the word "intended" and say "SUCH AS country side or ocean" This does NOT warn buyers that if they do not use linden labs suggested ideas for their open space sims, they they will be heavily penalized... If they were honest and forthright, they would have given us an exact limit on agents and script usage. Instead they gave us no actual data on what the script limit was, to me this does not qualify as sufficient warning.

"An Openspace is a type of Private Region intended for light use, such as countryside or ocean. Openspaces run 4 regions to a single CPU, and support 3750 primitives. Openspaces are only available to Residents who already own Private Regions."

with LL there is no guarantee.. this is one thing we should have learned by now.
also there are no forewarnings...
changes are announced suddenly, brutally and finally.

I am sitting here with a headache trying to work out whether to buy 2 more OS and convert them along with the 2 i have already into a full sim..so i can implement the expansion plans we had made ... or just kiss goodbye the 2 OS i have and the 500USD i paid for them... and scrap future expansion because i sure as hell cant afford 1000USD in the future if i need more space...

lose 500USD now either way (plus 100 if i wanted to convert) or lose 500 now and another 1000 later.........
add that to the 600 lost on the full SIM when LL downpriced
feels like a rollercoaster ride... no wonder some ppl call this a game.

anyone wanting to abandon 2 OS in my direction? aaaaaaaaaagh

but what if PI get a tier hike too?
I swear when opensims become a viable alternative... i will feel very little loyalty to LL

but maybe that is the goal of LL
targetting companies for their business immersion and getting rid of the ppl who built SL in the first place.

sad sad.. man, i got a migraine!

What's the matter Jack? Bently need a tune up? You're making money hand over fist as it is.
Yeah, I'm on an Openspace sim. I kept the scripts to a minimum and prim count to a third of the total. This was my only chance to "own" a sim so I respected the opportunity. If I start paying this exorbitant amount, (and I won't be) does that mean I can triple my prim count AND put 4 or 5 scripts in each? That's the message you're sending me, boy.

Oh well. SL was fun while it lasted, met a lot of great people. I'd like to think I made a difference with the charity I donated a lot of time to. If I can't afford to rent a proper sized living space, I guess I'll move on, find something else to do.

Pretty sad, boy.



Donovan

There is some probability private / regular islands will follow the same path as openspaces, yes.

Linden Lab has two options in their strategy to (try to) attract corporate business:

1) invest in infrastructure and support, thus allowing far more new regions to show up on the grid

2) sweep away the individual resident that owns regular estates by raising up fees and acquisition prices for the benefit of corporate business

In the current -not so happy- economical context, what do you think they will do?

So, having completed our costings and worked out the prims we need and the script load we would create we now find that not only are our costings irrelevant but we may find that our load level will also be useless in future if this 'guidance' compels openspace users to scale down their activity. We have a small photo accessory shop on our sim which barely covers the cost of the tier and any extra is ploughed back into the island to improve it for the enjoyment of visitors. We're photographers so we set out to create an island full of photo opportunities for anyone to use and enjoy. The script load sits at 2.1 ms and we have 800 prims left . Is this unreasonable use?

I also think this price rise is economic madness. Where sims are being used commercially I suspect the price rise will be passed on to customers causing a general hiking up of prices both for land rental and for sales items. I fear the end result will be an upward spiralling of costs which will deter new users and result in at least some existing users leaving the game. Surely increasing the VOLUME of business is healthy but this will not happen if prices increase too much.

This forum is full of damning messages from owners who have spent much and worked hard to make Sl a more exciting and interesting place. It is these unique developers who make SL special and who use the framework you provide in hugely creative ways. Many are now very discouraged. The loss will ultimately be to SL itself if the costs are too great and/or the rulebook is too weighty and oppressive.

If LL introduce the new tier increase of 125 USD, they can afford to lose 40% of openspace sims and still have the same revenue from openspace tiers.

I think the strategy is to drive 40% of the openspace renters onto the mainland where LL want to increase traffic to attract commercial corporate sponsors... ie. advertising.

It has NOTHING to do with openspaces being overloaded!

I fear that this may be the precursor to full sim tier increases in the future...

Jack's blog post doesn't make any sense to me, unless it's merely a means of clouding a simple price-hike.

Earlier this year, they increased the prims to 3750 - 1/4 of a normal sim, which is right considering the 1/4 CPU share. Now all that's needed is for the maximum allowed avs to be decreased to 1/4 of a normal mainland sim - 10 avs. Scripts don't matter because the number of prims covers that. With that change, four OS sims will be the resources equivalent of one normal mainland sim.

It would be an easy change to make, and it would solve all the issues that Jack mentioned in the blog, and the phrase "light use" would be unnecessary. That's why I am fully convinced that this is nothing more than a price-hike for the extra money, and nothing to do with the so-called issues.