Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

I am sad to see this happen. I love Second Life and I love the beautiful people I meet here from all over the world. I love the fantasastic ART that is some of the environments you find in theses sims, weather its mainland, full sim islands or 1/4 OS down to someones beloved 512 first land. I love the brilliant artists vendors who take their time and love to make us look great and have awesome products to make our dream envrironments here come true. Some dont ever see a profit but they are still here because they love to creat beautiful things.

To think that some of these wonderful people might now pack up in discouragement and leave is heartbreaking. They will have to destroy their dreams and places we love to visit and hang out at because they can no longer afford to make places these places for us.

I know that things aren't perfect with how some people use their reasources to offset the
cost of owning a sim or opensim. A lot of kinks need to be ironed out.

So in the meantime when you are finnished buying your pretty clothes and you want to go to these great places you love to visit and hang out and strut your fine lookin self. Don't
pass that donation box and avert your eyes. Think about what the owners do for you at their own expence and STOP and drop a dollar or five or more. If you can't find a donation box, click around to see who the owner of place, parcel or island is and drop them some dollars in donation and say thank you for making a place I enjoy.
Because every $ helps keep it for you to enjoy.

If you frequent a place or hang out there and and are part of a club that enjoys it constantly and never drop a donation. Shame on you!! (specialy if all you do is complain)

You all can help in this way to keep Second Life what it is that keeps you comming back.

Love ya all <3 , *waves

Coco

I think Jack has a very black sense of humour.

Contracts cannot be used to circumvent laws about fraud or extortion or any other form of illegal manipulation of a fair market. Of course, until a court says that is happening here it doesn't really matter. And unethical is not the same as illegal. I doubt this is illegal, merely a disgusting money grab.

I did this because I just had to figure out what possible angle LL had to gain from this, if any, from an economic vantage.

I ran a few regression models and came up with the following.

1. User-to-User Transaction Volume (in Millions of Lindens) - is highly sensitive to the number of Islands on the grid. A 1% increase in the monthly growth in number of Islands generated about 4.4-4.9% additional monthly increase in User Transaction volume. Businesses are big fans of Islands. More islands means more people with a stake in SL, spending more time in SL, buying things in SL that they need to make their islands in SL fun, cool, interesting, enjoyable places to be.

The impact of Mainland sim growth on this and the figures that follow tests out as more volatile. For example, a 1% increase in Mainland sims produces anywhere from a 1.2%-5.4% increase in User-to-User transactions, which averages out to 3.3% (versus 4.65% with Islands) and the result is more unpredictable.

If someone where going just on best-case results, and discounting the downside risk in an adverse global economy (or placing a bet that SL would soon be the only game in town for investors as everything else was falling apart) they might go with the more aggressive scenario.

2. U.S. Dollars Exchanged to Lindens (in Thousands). Last I heard, Linden Labs makes some coin every time you upload some bucks into SL. Here is a pure community of interest; businesses want residents to upload more currency. Linden Labs, too. Islands generate more demand for RL currency to be converted into Linden lucre. Every 1% increase in the growth in number of Islands generates about 2.8%-2.9% additional growth in the volume of currency conversions. Surely, this is a happy thing.

Mainland: Again the wide range of possibilities, from 0.9%-3.8% (2.35% versus 2.85% average for Islands).

3. Linden Dollar Supply (Millions). Liquidity is nice. Right now, there are more than a few RL banks and insurance companies wishing they had more of it... and a few billion individuals as well I am sure. Again, some positive effect, close to a 1-to-1 correspondence (1% growth in Islands corresponds to about 0.9%-1% growth in Linden Dollar supply).

Mainland: While the volatility is high, this is one category where the Mainland wins on average. The range of sensitivities is 0.9%-4.3% (an average 2.6% versus 0.95% average for Islands).

4. Millions of Hours Used. We like loitering in SL. The longer you are here, the more likely you are getting the message to go do something or to get something that requires you to hand Lindens over to someone else and thus become a valued customer in the SL economy. SL is similar to the radio, the television and the internet in this regard.

People who dwell longer on SL develop the tools to move from being consumers of goods to becoming producers of them, as well. And this raises the quality of life for all residents.

Island ownership encourages this progress -first to active consumer, later on to active producer of intellectual property. The sensitivity is about 0.9% to every 1% increase in the number of Islands.

Mainland: Mainland wins here, too, this time soundly. The range of sensitivities is 1.1%-5.1% (an average 3.1% versus 0.95% average for Islands).

5. Premium Accounts. The fees in aggregate may be chump change to Island start-ups and tier payments, but there's a strong intuitive relationship between people who have paid accounts (and payment information on file) and people who can afford to buy clothes, tip and donate well at clubs, and pay rent on residences or, sometimes, tier on whole Islands. This is one of the stronger relations here: Every 1% increase in number of Islands corresponds to about a 3.1%-3.6% increase in the number of premium accounts.

The reverse sensitivities are also true. Anything that decreases the number of Islands has detrimental effects on all of these variables as well.

Mainland: Mainland wins here, as well. The range of sensitivities is 1.6%-6.6% (an average 4.1% versus 3.35% average for Islands).

SOURCES: SL economic data, Excel format. I used the dates from October 2006-August 2008 for this, and incorporated macroeconomic data (month-end closes on the S&P500, unemployment rates, the Tbill and 10-year Treasury note yields). I also coded for three events that I knew of that in this period had significant economic impact (1) the March 2007 ban on casino advertising, (2) the far more significant late July 2007 ban on gambling and (3) the April 2008 change in main sim pricing. I forecast ahead several months (Sep-Dec) to produce the sensitivity results.

Is this accurate? Hell if I know. I just went with the information I had. But for me it explains (beyond the sticker shock of a 66% increase in costs and tier) why this proposal is so threatening to so many businesses and yet might at the heart have some sensible business justification....and offer some light at the end of the tunnel.

As for specific remedies, hey, I am just starting to process this information too.

I'll preface this response by saying I am an active participant in trying to improve SL. I see several names in this thread of people who also try very hard to improve the lot of this environment. And now this decision happens...

I bought an openspace SIM and pay tier on it for low prim sailing and hang out purposes. I run it at less than 50% of the prim maximums, run script loads consistently below 0.8ms total load. Average number of people is 0.3 peak 15 maybe once every two months. Who are those people? Why, they are people sailing through. No rentals, no markets, just plain fun. How much lighter can that be? I'm being penalized with a 66% rise because I freaking CONFORMED with an already marginal situation? Come January if this ridiculous price rise happens, I'll back out of this bad faith change and cancel my OS SIM.And, Lindens, you have stolen $200 from me. Pay me back now.

In the fantasy continent, you will lose at least 10 OS SIMs. The counterminious regions will be broken up into separate islands and all the work elf circle, the Isles of Wyrm, and The Faery Crossing and several affiliate SIMs put forth to create a viable loving unified community will have been torn asunder by your onerous and unethical business decision.

Finally, I have to say this plainly and clearly: you folks are incompent systems developers. You have no notion of quality of service in your day to day operations, you have no idea how to meet service level agreeements, and you are quick to blame your customers as abusers when in fact, as evidenced by the many critical JIRA bugs opened more more than a year, you show no ability to fix major functional and performance bugs. Now your response is to shed capacity and do it in the most egregious way possible. Shame on you!

Whereas in terms of memory and cpu usage, an openspace uses about 1/4 of the resources of a full sim, the network traffic is (I guess) proportional to the number of avatars in the sim.

The network traffic is caused by communication relevant to the avatar to the asset servers, communication services, and to other sims the avatar can see - i.e. is independent of whether the sim is openspace or not.

So a box running 8 openspaces each containing one avatar will generate 4 times as much traffic as a box running 2 full sims each containing one avatar.

So the original pricing (and raison d'etre) for an openspace was not so much the number of prims in the openspace or the complexity of the build but that in general that they would not actually have any avatars in them. Or to put it another way, the pricing of an openspace at about 25% of that of a full sim was on the assumption that only 25% of openspaces would have any avatars present in them at any one time.

That this model was fatally flawed when they reduced the restrictions for purchasing openspaces was entirely predictable. However, it also seems like a near certainty that rectifying the problem by increasing the fees by 66% will hit LL hard.

If all the people in this thread or the 1206 votes in jira drop any openspaces, LL will be facing a net loss in monthly revenue.

LL will be left with a lot of machines to redeploy - the bottlenecks in the central systems (asset servers etc.) are not solvable by throwing more machines at them (even assuming that these boxes were suitable), so most will need to be redeployed as new private sims or mainland.

The RL economy is probably slowing the uptake of new private sims, and as many have observed mainland is already over supplied.

LL probably hoped those displaced from openspaces due to the price increase will move back to mainland. Some may, and some may instead move back to the private estates which were deserted by the exodus to openspaces. However, many will just leave SL entirely disillusioned withl LL, or will use this as an opportunity to reduce their monthly fees to SL given the RL economy putting pressure on their disposable income.

In general, I therefore predict

a) LL tier revenue being hit substantially
b) the population of SL overall going down
c) a even greater glut of unpopulated mainland

Matthew

In my expriences of owning over 100 open spaces, ALOT use them for Privacy and to get away from griefers and stalkers that SL has to offer by allowing free accounts!!!

I am not sure that as we approach 1500 posts that the one beginning it by Katt and the short blurb by Jack, qualifies as much of a discussion. Maybe the name of the thread should be changed?

That's a really nice sentiment I agree, but this would only encourage the extortion, we give away Linden so it can go back into the ridiculous tiers the Lindens are now proposing.......then they win!

Umm... Just because it's in a contract doesn't meant that it's legal. I don't know if the TOS is legal or not. I'm not even sure if it's a contract or just a license. I'm not a lawyer.

But just saying that it's in the TOS doesn't mean that it's lawful. In other words, the TOS is not the answer to every complaint.

Most companies care about customer satisfaction.

Firelight

Question - who in their right mind would pay $370 + $125 a month for a huge empty space? Seems kind of expensive for a sim full of empty terrain and trees! Ocean is free, so are super prims and there are plenty of sim extenders out there that jutt off the edge of the sim to make it look bigger than it actually is.

My humble opinion? LL is poking at the hornets nest on this one. They're just asking for huge collapse of the in-world economy.

For light use - a single house even a big abandoned city made of dummy buildings. That seems logical. Limited compared to what can be done with a full sim, yet however logical.

Another question - why pay $125 for 3700 prims when the Linden cost for 1/2 of a full is ims $150 a month for double the prims. Seems to me like their pricing scheme is suddenly off balance a bit. Who knows, maybe this is the first step in raising tier across the board for all private islands?

But I'll never know! This is the last draw for me. I've been treated like crap by user support by almost being accused of hacking the system when a glitch in the permission system allowed a friend of mine to dump her no-transfer items into a road on my sim, again treated like crap for inquiring about acceptable uses for not for profit sims, as well given the run-around by just about every single landlord that I've had since I started buying land on SL.

As I said in my previous post, I've had it and I'm leaving SL. Obviously LL cares nothing about customer retention, therefore I don't expect any sort of real resolution to this matter. Ever since the company changed their CIO and CEO it seems to have lost focus. As a result, its going to start loosing customers as well.

Is there a way to vote against JIRA bugs instead of for them?

Wow. I paid for an OpenSpace Sim in August, and I currently have a few *hundred* prims on it. I've averaged... 0 to 2 avatars on it. A Day. I've spiked to a half-dozen. And that's JUST fine for what I want it to be and what I planned.

Now suddenly, the up-front investments that I made (expecting to 'spread out' this cost out over the next year to 18 months since I planned to be in the space for that long) along with the money I've spent buying items for the open space (low-prim but high cost) are going to be 'thrown away' if I give it up, since Linden Labs is now suddenly going to extort 66% more per month! Not even a 'short' grandfather period for some of us to figure out what to do, sell items, etc. 2 months notice. Amazing.

In 12 months, I'd have spent $250 + (12*75) = $1150
In 18 months, this would have been $1600

In both cases, you'd add in the various money invested in items, etc.

Now, I'm looking at 8 or 14 months at $50 more per month for an extra outlay of $400 to $700 for that same period, with *absolutely* no change in 'value'.

I've been to several SL conferences, to meet other people from in-world and to generally 'show support' for the concept, as well as to spend time w/ various Lindens and let them know what 'the community members' think. I can say quite clearly that if these are the types of decisions we're seeing after the speeches at the latest SLCC, I won't spend any more of my money to 'come support LL'.

Outside of Second Life, I've started and run successful businesses. I've always been aware of how clients consider the value of a product or a service, and to keep in mind the value *I* get from my clients, in goodwill and word of mouth. I've never treated clients this way, and I think that reading the posts in these articles will be a helpful reminder to me of why to make sure I keep it that way!

I'm washing my hands of spending money in SL for anything that goes to LL's pockets. My Premium account has been made worthless, my items have disappeared and become worthless, the Island project I worked on was made worthless by LL's constant tinkering with land prices, and now my personal openspaces sim that was used completely within the bounds of the system has been made worthless.

I'll be in world, tipping artists and musicians, but from this point on I'm watching for the 'next' good virtual world.

I just bought three open space sims to expand my park. My intentions for my open space sims was to use them EXACTLY as Linden Labs said they intended. But at $125 per month, I won't be able to afford that because there is no way to generate income unless I use them for some sort of business. I bought three because I could afford three. I can't afford more.

Lindens, you HAVE the ability to know who is using them as intended and who is misusing them. You had that ability when you made them available but chose not to use it or put any rules around them other than an honor system. You knew that would fail, but all you said about it was "if you have performance problems, we won't respond".

No, I'm sorry, I'm not buying your line that you have to raise prices on everyone to deal with this situation (that you made). This is not about service. Are you going to use the 66% increase in revenue to improve service on open spaces so I can use them for business? No, you're gonna use it to improve your bottom line and nothing more.

After over two years as a sim owner and live music venue operator (also a money losing activity which enriches SL and for which you provide zero support), I'm probably going to leave SL or go dump my land and go non-premium on January 1st.

An 11% decline in the number of Islands would probably cut the size of the SL economy in half..or set it on a trajectory for that level.

A 24% decline pretty much shuts the grid down.

I hope LL has a lot of committed buyers lined up.

BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: Hi. i'd like to add my 2 cents about the openspace sim issues.
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: first i am not here to call any names
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: i would like to suggest a highly technical solution
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: a full sim can run up to 22ms frame time without experiencing lag. 1/4 of this is 5.5ms
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: if one adjusts for extra over head a number like 4.5ms per open space could be reasonable
Rowan: right. openspaces shoudl be using 1/4 the resources of a full region
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: placing hard limits in the server code to limit the CPU time and bandwidth to the appropriate 1/4 limit would make it so that no one has to police anything or raise any prices... it just lags the one person out if they exceed their limit
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: these "abuses" are all incidents of ppl using more frame time(cpu and bandwidth) than they are allowed.. not an issue of actual content
Rowan: well, of the content that overuses thsoe resources. but i see your point.
Rowan: the technical certainly must be taken into consideration, and will be. however, at this point, we don't have a way to make those restrictions on openspace server hosts
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: i know that you don't have that power... but anyone there writing server code can make that metric and division at an operating system level... just like linux and windows do when they decide which programs get what amount of cpu time when multi tasking
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: i just want you to pass this on to the techs and i hope that this price hike gets replaced with something sensible
Rowan: i'd suggest that you put those recommendations into teh forum post, if you haven't already (i'm only to page 8 of the comments). those are being taken into consideration by jack and the others behind this policy change.
Rowan: please do add your comments there, and i'll pass them on to the team as well
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: i have placed some of this in there... i'm afraid it may get lost in the 1400+ posts
BarronessSaphire_Hausmann: i will post the full thing now though

Could somebody please tell us what page # in all the massive volume of responses to this, we can find any actual replies from Jack or any other Lindens?

What will you do with your sims??? Do you think there will be a lot of people abandoning land??

Is there anyone reading this thread now that intends to abandon their land if this goes through??

I have saved and worked myself to death in order to finally make my dream come true and own some land and was given a certain amount of prims to use....which I'm doing.....and NOW you tell us that your raising the prices? We are all using the prims you allowed us and the fact that your database or what ever cant handle the load....thats your problem not ours. I for one will now have to see if I can sell my land....and have to move...again. I cannot afford any price increase and in the end this will only hurt your revenue...not help.

If you want to protest, a better way instead of harassing people who are not interested and do not care about your cause, would be to leave SL and never return. All your idea does is turn the general SL population against your cause.

/354/1d/289652/24.html#post2194303/354/1d/289652/24.html#post2194303

only this one...

Didnt the lindens think about doing 2 pricing levels, residental and commerical? I live on a open space sim. is residental for a couple on one side and me on the other. We have traffic of under 400 a day. Why cant we still be charged the 75dollars and those using for business be charged at the 125dollars.

I find it very annoying that i have already lost 2 lots of land pervious due to sim owners just giving up the sim. or the land being soooo valueless. Now the lindens are sticking in the boot again?

With all the talk of the credit crunch and global recesssion i find it highly amusing that the lindens decide now to increase the prices. Don't they realise that many people will see sl as the one thing they will have to give up. It's a luxury. Them increasing the prices won't help!

Or maybe the lindens are hoping that enough people will give up the sims which will reduce the load and then they gettin more money as well. I already know of 4 sims that will be given up!

Talk about the lindens being in a win win situation!

An Annoyed
Dawn Shermer

Still no second reply from Jack?

How sad indeed!

I Don't own any OS or Estate I own 1/4 mainland , and even with the value being almost zilch, I was thinking of going OS through a friend. well I am glad I did not sell or abandon, and now I wait for the mainland tier to climb...

What I don't get. LL (SL) is a host, no? just like my website host , I rent server space a DNS from the host farm/company.. over the past 10 years my price has dropped on my host and more and more space and free tools have become available. In fact just this last week I changed my host package down from 10usd a month to 6 usd a month with DOUBLE the bandwidth and storage! .. (the thing is they didn't offer it, I had to find it..

I know LL is the 1st runner in VW's and there isn't many "beta" options, there are others that well may start to bypass as the "residents" of SL flock and start helping build them. BUT still with server cost going down, we should be seeing possibilities of LOWER cost , LOWER tier not higher, I assume that there has been a hiring boom in LL and now we have to pay for it so that the bottom line shows well for the company. As well I believe this conspiracy theory that this is to get more of the mainland that is abandond back... Nautiluis like Bay City is a scam! auction prices are way beyond the means of most and are speculators betting on the drug like effect to re sell...


I am with Vryl, go see her OS and measure it against the space port owned by Gov. Linden.

Something is not right, here.

My Question : Jack what will this mean for mainland tier in the next couple of months?

It seems you and I are the only ones on the forum who see it how it is.

this is all about money it's not about server strain if it was they would have addressed it the mere fact that they have the nerve to come here try to rationalize a 67% tier increase while not offering ONE single thing period to there customers or any idea on how this is going to help make sims better is a slap in the face and a insult to all of our interlligience.

The line in the sand has been drawn and this is one time I am sure the Sl community is not gonna roll over and take this LL you better back off this or you better be prepared to lose alot of your revenue and alot of your customers this is the wrong econmic climate to be tryin to bump tier up 67% on a shallow reason.And backing off I don't mean saying ok ok then we will just increast 100 usd your not offering ANYTHING to your customer with this tier increase period. 4 open sims=15k prims 1 full sim =15k prim you wanna charge us 500 usd for somethin your already sellin for 295 a month and you think ppl aren't gonna be irate? Have you lost your minds?