Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

I own 2 full islands and 7 open spaces. In addition I have half region on mainland I cannot sell for any reasonable amount. If LL goes through with this tier increase I will close my account even if I will lose all my "property". At this point I don't really care. There is no proportion between the tiers and the land value. It is clear to me that SL is a rigged game. I tought about shutting down several times but now my decision is final. I will stay on a free accopunt and I will be a gipsy again as I was when I entered the game 2 years ago. Good luck everyone! Annemarie Perenti

I still believe that in the midst of all these disgruntled people, in the thousands that don't even know about this yet, and in the thousands that have lost substantial investments in SL, there must be a handful of entrepreneurs, supporters and investors willing to push OpenGrid, OpenSim. RealExtend etc to the next level.

Well, thinking about it rationally, new CEO comes in...he has had to promise increased profits to the owners.....as usual....
BINGO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now that made me smile in the midst of all this madness

Rosie, I'm NOT upset. That's why I won't tell you why I'm upset. Because I'm not. Not upset at all. I think this is a positive change and I think LL knows what they are doing, for a change.

As far as me finding another forum to let the "adults" play on, this forum is open to everyone, and your insinuation that I am not an adult is just yet another personal attack on someone who does not share your opinion and dares to say so.

As far as me benefiting, I think in the long run the whole community and economy will benefit, and I have said so many, many times.

This is my personal opinion, to which I am entitled and I don't have to justify it to anyone.

this will make full prim sims more profitable and may be a good move, but did you think that making OS sims so easy to get and resale helped, i feel you may be party to the problem, if you really wanted open spaces then they would only have 500 prims just enough for passing boats and the odd tree, i only welcome this as it will give more value to the full prims sims that some of us paid 1675 us dollars for and became worthless since your new price structure. i also feel that this is aimed at raising the price of mainland. it would also be nice if you spoke to us estate owners instead of announcing to us, we do have things to offer, also this upgrade? is it free, if so doesn't that help the large old estate owners at the expense of us that don't have old class 4 sims

Snowflake, explain to us how this will help the community and economy. We really want to know.

This could have been dealt with in a far more satisfactory manner. Deal with those who infringe and support those who don't.

Decisions like this make business planning impossible. The pound falling has increased all of our costs by over 20% and now you are putting in a rent hike of over 60%. This accumulates to over 100% to UK and most European residents.

We have been involved in a long term plan for SL usage to bring in a number of businesses to work with our educational games on a sponsorship basis.

The pound falling has affected that considerably, but we were still able to proceed. The fact that we needed 8 open sims to go with the 4 full sims we were to buy means that you have increased our budgeted costs beyond any contingency.

I regret that if this increase comes to fruition then you will have lost us. We cannot buy those sims unless our business is properly funded and properly budgeted. You CANNOT budget when your landlord makes such dramatic increases in rents at such short notice.

Mr Linden, if you plan and budget your business on a three month decision basis you are fools. We budget our business on an annual basis, need stability over an annual period and make decisions based on yearly agreements.

Such short term unreasonable actions smack of incompetence. Think of the image you are portraying to your customers here. We would never treat our clients and sponsors in this way, how can you dream of doing it to us.

So, so disillusioned. I hope my rational presentation of this to you is taken seriously.

Oh and those of you infighting with eachother in this blog, for goodness sake grow up. You are detracting from the seriousness of this situation so just cut the personal crap for the sake of all of us.

Many thanks for repeating your opinion for the 15th time to help pad this thread out.

Snowflake , Honestly..


You should just stop. You expressed yoru opinion... fine , now stop fighting with everyone and be on your way you have no reason to troll the forums trying to see how many people you can get a rise from, that is in and of its self the definition of a troll and would get you banned on a lot of forums.

These OS sims used to be purchased in groups of 4, so the estate owner could manage the usage on the server by managing lag producing content on all 4 sims. LL raised the prim count on these sims from 1875 to 3750, doubling the number of objects and scripts running on these sims.

If the OS sims were intended for water use, why raise the prim counts? Then LL started selling them individually so an estate owner could no longer control the lag on any OS sim because he/she had no way of knowing who else was sharing/abusing the server.

This is just short-sighted, profit motivated behavior from Linden Lab. I feel sorry for everyone who purchased these sims over the past 6 months. These sims are now worthless. No one in these tough economic times is going to want to pay $125 a month. The market will be flooded with these things as owners try to recoup their costs. With a $100 sim transfer cost, no one will be able to recoup anything.

I hope there is some organized effort to force LL to refund a percentage of the purchase price. Can anyone say 'class-action'?

I wonder how Anshe Chung will do after all of this? Laughs!

Some people will benefit from the financial crisis the world is going through right now. Those who have the money to weather the storm, and pick up all the pieces from other people's dreams, will do very well. Everyone else is screwed.

This is the sort of thing that hurts innocent people, and the loss of so many OpenSpace regions will harm the SL economy, as well as the areas which used the OpenSpace regions the way they were intended.

This is good ole fashioned "heal the wound by killing the patient" medicine.

No but I do wonder why they purchased a 1 million dollar home when they make 32K per year. It doesn't pencil out, even with the most creative accounting.

This is not about RL pets being killed or RL houses being foreclosed on. No one is going to die from this, or even be deprived of a necessity.

You are the one who suggested I would be happy if someone's RL pet died, which is ridiculous. If you don't want ridiculous answers, don't use ridiculous hyperbole to make your attack.

For fuck's sake shut up. You are messing with a vital blog. Go and play elsewhere!

I don't often post in forums, far too much mud slinging and negative stuff for me, but I feel strongly obliged to add my voice to the huge list of disgruntled SL users.

I feel the discision to increase the tiers by $50 on OS sims is simply just too much to absorb in this economic climate. SL is a luxury for us all, most of us scrape the tier together and have somehow budgeted for it in this global recession. When prices should be falling, LL has taken the greedy corporation stance and raise prices, sticking up two fingers in the faces of the very same people who made it a success.

Personally I can't stretch to find another $50 on top of my $75 a month, it's got to the point where I will have to cut my losses and abandon my OS home. The island will be worthless, I won't be able to sell it. I refuse to pay the increased tier. I WILL have no choice but to abandon it.
LL won't gain an extra $50 a month from me, they WILL lose $75 a month though.

Out of principal, I won't be buying any mainland, maybe LL wants us back on mainland to boost it's failure..........but I won't buy mainland, it's ugly and always will be.
I won't be renewing my premium membership, so LL you lose again on your poor decision making.
I won't be contributing/creating anything positive to SL, again in the long run it's LL who loses.


PEOPLE, JUST CUT YOUR LOSSES AND WALK AWAY. DON'T GIVE YOUR MONEY TO GREEDY LL, THEY'RE SCREWING YOU AT A TIME WHEN YOU NEED YOUR MONEY THE MOST.

I have created a meta-issue to collect technical limitation ideas to openspace load issues. This would be a reference for Linden Lab to pull from when considering potential technical limitations that could be used.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-3335

You forget to announce, next LL will ask for, is reduce the draw distance to 64 m for all..... should be automatically set on MAINLAND, TO REDUCE THE LAG THERE

I'm sure I am not the only person having this reaction... very disappointing.

We bought our OpenSpaces because they seemed to be a reasonable price for region-sized art projects. We didn't want to have to worry about renting land out to break even. (and anyway, they didn't seem to be designed for rentals...)

But now the price for two OpenSpaces is almost the same per month as a full region. I just can't absorb that for a fun project... no park now, no roller coaster, no crazy mad scientist volcano lair, no giant trees....

So, I'll be shutting them down as soon as we evacuate our more interesting builds.

It's just really sad... I was picturing OpenSpaces as a welcome alternative to the usual regions full of desperately packed-in boxy mall/residential rental areas with no yards or anything scenic to speak of.

In a 70 page thread I'm unlikely to see any replies directly to me, so if anyone would like to IM me in-world, please feel free... thanks.

Agreed !!

I’d like to describe a proven pricing model from another industry which I think provides a useful way to reason about how Openspaces could/should be fairly priced.

Back in the days when I bought things like T1 lines, there were three types of service: full T1, fractional T1, and something called burstable T1.

Full T1 is just what it sounds like: you have the full capacity of a T1 line, bought and paid for and reserved for you alone. By analogy, it’s like buying a sim in SL. A fractional T1 was the same thing, only you were buying exactly some fraction of the speed and capacity of a T1 line, no more and no less. But that fraction was yours and yours alone, and priced roughly accordingly.

A burstable T1 was like a fractional T1, except that the limits were soft: you paid for a fraction of a T1, but could actually use as much of the T1 as you wanted to. When your usage exceeded certain limits, though, you’d pay penalties. The penalty prices were such that you’d be better off buying a full T1 if you were a routinely heavy user, but if you were a light user who just had occasional usage peaks, you’d be better off with the burstable T1.

This scheme worked for carriers and for users. Users had a range of options and were economically incented to be realistic about their usage levels. Carriers had a pricing scheme that was reasonably reflective of the burden each user placed on shared resources.

LL’s current Openspace pricing is analogous to selling a burstable T1, but pricing it at flat fractional-T1 levels. There is no hard cap on resource usage, and no economic incentive to keep usage of the shared resources within the hoped-for limits. (Indeed there appears to be no objective metric an Openspace owner can apply to learn whether their use falls within the guidelines, pushes the limits, or exceeds them entirely.)

The revised Openspace pricing corrects neither of those faults: there is still no cap on usage and no economic incentive to remain within the guidelines. That the price is higher will offset these problems to some degree. But the new pricing doesn’t induce people to use their Openspaces lightly, and may instead encourage them to use them more heavily to the extent that the higher price makes them feel entitled to greater service. (I think that effect is quite likely, in fact.)

In other words, the new pricing doesn’t curb overuse, it just limits it to higher-paying customers. I do not think this will do a good job of solving the problems LL is trying to solve. It still amounts to selling a limited resource, but allowing customers to take all they want on the honor system. This usually doesn’t work.

I would suggest that LL add some resource-usage pricing to their Openspace pricing, by analogy to the burstable T1. Openspace users would pay a base rate plus some surcharge calculated on actual usage (or, preferably, on actual over-usage beyond some reasonable threshhold). The surcharge would be designed to cover LL’s resource costs and to make an overused Openspace more expensive than outright rental of a full sim, while keeping a lightly used one affordable. Naturally tools would have to be available to enable Openspace owners to know where they stood.

This would incent Openspace use where usage is low (wide open plains, bodies of water), would recoup costs where usage is variable (when a landowner holds a monthly party, for example), and would discourage their use where traffic is routinely high. By contrast, simply raising the flat rate, as presently planned, will discourage scenic wide-open spaces and other community-building light uses, and seems unlikely to discourage resource abuse by Openspace owners – it will simply shift it to a higher income bracket.

On a separate note from all of the above, I would like to add that unexpected and non-negotiated changes in pricing are a serious problem in and of themselves, over and above this one incident. People considering significant investments in Second Life will necessarily take pricing instability into account and limit their investment-at-risk accordingly, just as real-world investors tend to prefer investments in countries with stable political systems to investments in countries with unstable ones. This will be to the detriment of all of us.

Goony island is a fun place built on an Openspace Sim. I have used almost all the prims allocated to the Sim to create that is regarded by its visitors as a home from home.

The Tier each month is paid for by donations from fans of the Island. Here is a video of the place, if you it then feel free to visit the place and while there maybe consider donating to the tier especially now that it's gone up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_trrGof0ho

Answering when one is addressed directly or quoted is NOT trolling. Neither is defending oneself against personal attacks. One person even said that I would be happy to see someone's pet killed. How ridiculous is that?

I'm very sorry but I believe the Openspace Announcement is not a good way to manage your customers.

Let me ask you this: Which RL company these days believes it can resolve performance issues through increasing prices by 50 % ? None.

Wake up Linden Lab and look around you. The RL economy is going through its worst period all living people can remember.

How many of your customers do you think will have to count their hard earned RL $ twice these days ? The right answer is much more than only a few months ago ... and a whole lot less than there will be in another few months. In other words: We don't have any RL $ to waste Linden Lab. Paying 50 % more for the same kind of a 'service' isn't on.

Granted the idea of Openspace might have turned into something it wasn't intended for by you. But it was you who decided to offer this option. The customer didn't steal it from you.

Whatever went wrong inside Linden Lab that is leading to this fundamental change its you who is asking the customer to pay more. That isn't going to work in this economic climate.

I think you should listen to your customers and try to understand why Openspace started to be used the way it is. Here are a couple of the answers you would get:

... I can't afford to pay the tier fee for a private island ...

... I'm sick of paying for mainland and someone else next to me spoils my view ...

... and so on

Instead of asking your customers to pay more for Openspace you should try to get them to upgrade to a private island where at least they can see an enhanced benefit. And to do so you should make them more affordable.

This way you would fix the issues you are so concerned with and get some of the people that are paying your wages to stick to SL.

I hope you will listen and manage through this

I just wonder how bad this will financially impact Lindens for the people like me that dump a decent amount of money in game just pull the plug, and come up with a more affordable way to communicate and have fun with our friends. punish the people who create the issue, or create limits soo it cannot be abused, and not lose all the money by doing what you are doing. I love it here in SL, but there is a limit to what I will pay to "play". You are seriously affecting alot of lives by doing what you are doing......does this bother you? It would me.....just my opinion, we welcome yours.

William J. Sullivan

A.K.A Saber1 Streeter, Blades01 Slade