Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

Because if you read the text, not just the prim limits, around opensims, you saw they were incredibly restricted in the first place, if not technically enforced. I remember looking at them multiple times going "wow, that'd be a cheap way to sneak some serious low-prim content on" and then going "and if they ever started enforcing, I'd be hosed."

Rather than content enforcing, and risking being accused of selective enforcement, they seem to have gone the internal metrics route: find out how much they are being used, and re-price the service based on those usage statistics. Interesting, and I probably wouldn't have gone that way, but from a technical economics perspective it seems to me to be valid.

I have no wish to see others hurt (and suffering is a personal choice). I do understand, however, that this is ultimately just a big server rental that we are doing from Linden, who right now is the only effective game in town (since it's not the servers, but the *content*, that makes the grid). I wonder how this would play out in a world where Wonderland and others had extant vibrant communities -- or the Open Grid protocols were already in effect. However, that's theoretical; this is the situation we have in front of us, today. My concern with that situation was the excessive increase for only one constituency (edu).

Hope this answers your question.

So far history shows that Linden can pretty much do anything they like and walk away with it.

They expect us to do what we always do … complain a lot at first and swallow it when the time comes.

I have an open space sim and a regular sim … if the tenants aren’t going to pay this for me I’ll drop both. This SL thing is only a way to channel cash to Linden and I’m pretty much fed up with it.

OK, can someone please explain how 4 sims on a CPU is any different to 4 X 16k parcels on one sim on a CPU.

They have the same number of prims, so surely the same load on 4 open space sims as on one full sim.
I must be missing something but I dont know what it is.

4 x open space @ 3750 prims each = 15,000
1 X full sim =15,000

The only extra I can see is landscaping, which is a fixed map.

I have always liked the changes, apart from now, I see groups forming to take LL to court I see people will lose faith and it will cause a slow down in the already slow economy, sorry bad policy at a bad time.

And if you read this Jack, you are aware that they are ARing people who have sale signs on thier land in a 3500SQM land to be exact, something you promised will never happen. you need to clearly state policy as to create less work for the G-Team, and less stress for the people being ARed.


MADNESS? ... This .... is .... SPARTA!

This is the right tactic to take. Too many rip-off artists selling newbies openspace parcels only for the newbies to find out they didn’t get what they wanted (L A G) and the “estate manager/owner” raking in the cash at the newbies expense. Abuse the privilege, pay the consequences. The complainers have nobody to play the blame game at except the abusers of the system, not Linden Lab, not Jack.

I am unclear on how you will be using the extra money you are going to raise from this increase in fees. Are you planning to decrease the number of openspace sims running on each server?

It's hard enough to make ends meet with you crashing the land market Jack. Privet sim owners have not yet recovered from your last "great idea" and you have yet another. Thank for TELLING us how things are going to go because people like myself who have spent well over $50,000 USD on land and almost $200,000 USD on paying LL tier shouldn't have a say right?

I think you are out of touch with the community and have no realistic idea of how what you do impacts your very well paying customers like myself.

What deems an Open Space sim overloaded? What type of traffic numbers?

And if it wasn't suppose to have anything on it... why were they allowed 3750 prims in the first place? (And for this reason I have to assume that prims have nothing to do with overloading unless they are megaprims.)

Looking forward to your response, thank you

With Regular sims, it's 4 sims per machine. With Openspaces it's 16 per machine. 4X the sims. Prims do little to nothing to affect Server performance. It's the 'everything else' that does. Scripts, Management overhead, scheduling, etc. 4x that on one core makes a substantial difference.

OpenGrid

And to anyone that is proposing a solution like: limiting the avs, limiting the script usage... first i say it won't affect my open space (average usage: 2 avatars! ...low scripts.. 70% of water!), but hey when i purchased the product they put their limits on it, and the limits were: 3750 primitives; if they wanted to limit the script usage or the avatar numbers, they would have blocked it server side from the start (eg: 50 avs as in mainland).

So i really don't understand how's possible that this may happens honestly: if you u got wrong with yor "calculation", then solve your errors internally:

- Stop immediatly to offer this product;
- Adjust the servers balance to repair the error (2 openspace per core instead of 4) for the current customers, yes you will "pay" for it, but it's YOUR error.
- After you planned a better solution, start to sell again the product with the new conditions, but for the NEW customers.

I'm "working" here just to pay back my SIM's, because it's a game for me, and 125$ instead of $75 means i have to sell my OpenSpace (because im in EVEN now), and it means i'm forced to loose a nice place i've built (my time) and also the entry price.

As someone mentioned before, this is bait and switch. Probably you have different laws over there, but here it is illegal.

As a scripter, I've begun asking customers "Is it an OpenSpace sim?" when they come to me with strange issues. The answer is so frequently "Yes", and I head over to discover the club/maze/castle/rental they're working on is severely overloading the OpenSpace sim's script time capability.

I think there is a demand for land at the current OpenSpace price point from people who want the autonomy that access to full estate controls provides. However as there are few controls that can be placed on resource utilisation (number of residents on the sim, number of prims), OpenSpace sims are easy to abuse. Many of the OpenSpace sim owners I've spoken to refuse to even recognise that what they are doing is outside of the intent of an OpenSpace sim.

Given that SL doesn't have the technological controls to prevent overloading a sim of any type, and that OpenSpace sims run on shared infrastructure, where's the point of increasing the capability by 50%? I believe the sims are being loaded as much as they can be up to breaking point. Move 'breaking point' further up the scale, and owners will move their load up the scale too.

I don't see a way around policing load actively if you are going to use shared infrastructure and cannot technically isolate load from one OpenSpace instance from another.

All up, I think this policy penalises those who are using OpenSpace sims as they were intended, and will fail to address the resouce contention problems between those sims. Until you can better isolate load from each, it doesn't matter how you divide the resouces, you will have people pushing the limits to the detriment of others.

First, there is a common misunderstanding that sim owners, as a whole, offer openspace sims as a means to rip off the customer – and I can tell you that nothing could be farther from the truth. There are many like myself that followed the flow because we had to in order to survive. It was about supply and demand.

Many private estate owners have converted many of their regular sims, if not all but the one we are required to keep, in order to keep from going out of business. This has come at enormous expense and loss of revenue during conversions. Now, we have to do it all over again in reverse….to then look forward to what new policy decision next? And what about the sim owners who started since the policy changes back in April? Don’t you think that if they would have seen any market for land on regular sims they would have gone that route instead?

There are plenty out there that will say “So, what”….as if being in this business was some “entitlement” that they just happened to miss out on in the first place. I don’t know about others in this business, but the real-world capital I spent investing here was damned hard to come by. I did not win any lottery, I was not the lucky benefactor of a rich relative that died, and no one handed me anything. What money I spent to do this was earned the old fashioned way, over many years of working, as I am now 40.

Risk is always a part of business, that is a given, but what I have seen here this past six months is unreasonable…..there should not be such destructive policy changes that shake the very foundation of the land market as a whole…..and if one happens as an accident or misguided decision, then to follow it by another that is clearly punitive when we are trying to follow demand in the market is clearly irresponsible. This is a lot of money that people have invested here.

Jack, you knew exactly what people were using openspace sims for at a much earlier point than now, and earlier than your analysis. You once stated in an office hour on August 8th, “[13:41] Jack Linden: so {name deleted}, if we offered a form of openspace for anyone to buy, what effect do you think that would have?”. So you knew fully well that there was a huge demand for them from the end consumer, and let sim owners carry on for 6 months like this, supplying this demand. No warnings….no wide-spread action that would get the attention of sim owners to have them not carry on as usual…nothing. Even those of us that would have rather stayed with the regular sims we already had were in a situation of having to go along with market demand or parish. We can talk all day about “intended use”, but this has NOT been a secret to linden lab at all...you clearly let us invest money hand over fist….to only end with this?!

While the sim owners leading the mass supply of openspace sims to use as general land may or may not have been guilty of taking advantage of the situation, there have been an enormous amount of sim owners who have had to follow suit or go out of business. So why now are those of us who have had to convert in order to survive being punished? Why are you forcing us to take such huge losses on the 10’s of thousands of US dollars we have invested? Is this in an effort to save the investments LL has in mainland? If so, does not the fact that private sims vastly outnumber mainland sims, and at a significantly higher profit margin to LL, matter at all? How is this not another poorly thought out decision that effects the very underpinnings of the land market? And what are you to say about all that we have invested and now obviously risk seeing that all go down the drain?

so.... this is basically let me summarize for those who don't want to read you're candyland version of this

We regret that you decided to use 1/4 of a sims resources for 1/4 of the price instead of just throwing the land away and keep paying. Instead we want to charge you near 1/2 of a full sim cost, but don't intend to give you any more than 1/4 the prims or 1/4 the CPU.

Everyone better sell now because nobody in their right mind is going to want to have a thing to do with Low Prim Sims after this.

If Educational users had a special rate... now I'm really confused. These sims are not to be used for anything except scenic space or oceans? But they could be used by educational groups who were given better rates (understandable). I'm a tad confounded by what these sims were to teach if traffic was never meant on these sims either?

Can't wait to hear details explained.. thanks again.

May we please have the choice of a refund for recently-purchased sims?

I'd like a return of my setup fee in its entirety or at the very least pro-rated, having purchased it in good faith and now being told my only options are to choke down this bitter pill or abandon the land.

Hey LL:

I want the $6000 in USD I spent to purchase my 2 Full sims, and 7 open space sims, as well as the L$ spent in the decorations and time invested in building my community.

Want it broken down for you? ok here you go:
$1250 setup, $195 tier
$1675 Setup, $295 tier
$250 x 7 = $1750 setup, $525 tier

Bill total: $4675 setup costs, balance in L$ transactions and the conversion penalties.

Why recently? They wanna change the contract, they have to refund the ppl that won't accept the new conditions. What's wrong here? Are we reinventing the law, or i live on mars?

Plus, if you move this to the attention of real court (doubling the prims / lowering the fees > attract ppl > after six months of thousand ppl caught in the trap > raise the fees by 66%) you'll never know what will happens.. but unfortunately i live so far, and i know perfect that i can't "sue" LL for some "miserable" 250usd.

ok..i don't own one myself, but this price increase is outrageous, gonna blame this on the gas crunch too like the rest of american business?? I rent, have payment info, but this is why i don't buy.
This policy is not very fair, and the sims are overated. why don't you concentrate on fixing the internal issues before you up the prices?

just an idea there, not that anyone listens

I'm not an open space sim owner and despite having experience in most of SL the closest I've been to open space sim management was renting a 2048 from Sarah Nerd (who I'd highly recommend btw). Is the part about making sure the payer and the owner being the same person essentially to close a loophole allowing someone to bypass the must own a regular region to own an open space region limitation or am I totally misreading that part?

We need to spread the words and protest in numbers, forum voices are nothing for LL, they fear in-world protesters.
Lets make full-perm posters, objects, and spread it across the grid!!

Well Jack here is a take away for you. It is clear that a simulator 4 times the existing size with the same 15,000 prims would constitute a more attractive reason for people to buy estate land. The reason nobody wants mainland is because it has no governance really. The hoops you guys have to go through to implement a sensible rule is ridiculous as compared to an estate owner simply publishing and then enforcing a covenant. I.e.; a larger sim with no increase in prims is very attractive. More prims would be great too but the spatial aspects is important.

If the direction Linden Lab has chosen is to drive out non corporate content creators and small businesses then I urge you to just say so right now and be up front about it. Allowing and promoting a massive economy of private businesses to be built and then trying to attrit it out could have negative ramifications all around.

I have some direct questions I would like an official answer to:

Is it Linden Lab's intent to move away from the profile of an ISP and become fully engaged as a content creator in competition with the community?

Is Linden Lab planning to remove small businesses from Secondlife and/or make it so only corporations that have paid a license fee to Linen lab be allowed to market content in Secondlife?

Then all LL have to do is limit the resources to 1/4 of the full amount, problem solved.

Bait and switch. Again.
Of course this statement does not apply to full sims or the mainland and has an expiration date.

.