Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

*IF* i felt like continuing to pay LL, I think i found a semi- solution.

4 OS still = a full sim. Convert them all to full sims and lose the extra space.

I will run this idea past my tenants, but in all honesty....I want out.


edit: *waves down to Les*

If LL owned a movie theater it would work like this.

100 seats available, so...they sell 200 tickets.

Then say, "you are over using this theater! We will now charge you 75% more. No, you will not get a seat now, you will just pay more. Carry on standing!"

Is this the basic idea here jack?

The best part is how you will not be able to transfer sim owner. Smooth jack.

It is my understanding that they come with 3750 prims, assigned by Linden to the Opensim. So if it works like other land I have been on, when you hit your limit of 3750 you can't rezz any more prims. So there is still lots of room for water and open land.

So how is the SL population overburdening the sims and servers, if they are staying within the Linden-specified prim limits? Linden picked that number, not the buyer. One would think that Linden had costed it all out, and taken into account server demand, yes? That they knew what they could support, BEFORE selling people the Opensims?

Sigh. Business as usual in Linden Land.

Good luck to all of you affected by this.

Princess Ivory

This destroys a line of business. Those who hope to capture all the people flooding out of the capsized land are celebrating, because they are getting a massive windfall, their holdings are worth much more. Those who are getting wiped out, are unhappy. Most of the people who were greedy made a profit by now, the ones who were reasonable are still under water, often to the tune of thousands of dollars.

Very poor business decision, and it will certainly result in unfortunate results for LL.

I think this is a bad move and shows a few inadiquacies of LL

1) Large communities exist that keep tegether on openspace sims - they won't be able to afford this
2) LL's current pricing structure has made the mainland a slum of tract housing and ugly disjointed scenry, if that was all tehre is then I would have left SL 6 months ago.
3) It definately shows a complete lack of management tools available to either client or sim owner - I'm utterly amazed that your only now talking about putting something in the client that will identify what kind of sim your in
4) LL's stated reason is absurd...a sim with 3750 prims and we didn't expect you to use it?

so, respectfully I sugest you start identifying the loaded sims and manage the problem, provide tools and expected utilisation levels to manage it and stop thinking of the opensim users as the providers of the hardware for your ugly nautilas crock

*IF* they'll give back the entry price, i will be perfectly fine. There are ppl that do business plan, and they have planned to diluite the entry price across certain months, so if you change the rules with no grandfathering you force them to abandon these plans and force em to loose all of their entry prices because they cannot sunstain the costs introduced by these new rules. This *IS* Bait & Switch: attract ppl with (false) shiny things, collect chickens, and when you have enough of them, force em to abandon *but* leaving their pockets inside. How do you call this? :/

So the charge will be US$125 instead of US$75 for one Light Openspace Sim. As a renter I pay about $90, so I can expect my rent to up to jump up way too much....so for one quad server (and an AMD Black Quad 9950 is only going for $140 - so 1/16 of that computer gets paid in the first month by the first sim. That quad computer is income of 16 * US$125 = US$2000 per month, US$25,000 per year....seems like a profit center from this end. Right now, with the old pricing of US$75/OS sim, the Gross Income is 16 * US$75 = US$1,200/month, approximately US$15,000 per year. So - the story said there were "thousands" of these sims...so can expect this to make US$millions.

How about this instead - Send an IM to the Estate Owner when prim counts exceed allotment. This could be done with a computer program so no 'person' has to intervene.

If you want, then charge more for computer usage (prim count).....that would be more fair and would do what you want....

Charging $500 for Open Space sims when regular are US$300 is really outrageous. Sounds like someone has been stopping off at Starbucks too much....need to come back to "reality."

*looks around for a petition.....

Verified inworld and through Sarah's response to me here:

http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/1343#comment-12656

She can't read these forums (yet?), but she is back inworld.

My partner and I have a few tiny low-script structures on a parkland and water open space sim. Performance reports indicate total script time is trivial, as is the physics simulation. I guess I'd be willing to believe that our sim takes more resources than a openspace sim with a surfing competition or a space combat RPG, but it would take some serious benchmarks and explanation.

We're willing to pay a premium for *space* and region control - we have no need for additional resources (as compared, for instance, with 1/4 mainland sim). I fail to see how the new pricing will be interesting for *anyone* under any conditions. Furthermore, I'm feeling rather abused by the lack of a any sort of grandfathering - my initial impression is that the resale value of openspace sims has just dropped through the floor, devaluing our investment and forcing us into the position of having to decide between trying to swallow this enormous price increase without obvious benefit (since we're not the abusers) somehow, upgrading to a full sim (vast overkill), or abandoning our work (mainland cannot support our terrain).

If the problem is abusive use, why not impose resource limits? Seriously - how hard can it possibly be? How about dropping the av limit to 20 or monitoring (and presumably enforcing) a script load? Prims and textures really shouldn't be significantly different than on 1/4 of a mainland sim, right, but if you must, drop the prim limit back down. ... Or surcharge for excessive resource use... or even better, migrate together sims with similar resource use (grin).

In the end, it feels like this new pricing will hit the non-abusers a whole lot harder than the abusers.

sigh.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_switch:

There is no substitute being offered. Nothing is being switched.

They offered something and people abused it, causing many, many complaints here and causing far more load on the back end than they expected. They're giving us 2 months notice that they're going to have to increase the prices. Nothing is being switched.

Be pissed off all you want at what LL is doing but calling this Bait & Switch is silly.

Its not about the prims, YES they did put a 3750 prim limit on, now you can max that sim out with prims and its fine WHOO, BUT what about scripts? i mean cummon yea 3750 prims, now 2 scripts inside each prim, 7500, now lets thing they are using a sensor, whoo sim dead, look at the biiger picture, you have residents, they use scripts, they lag the sim with 3750 prims 50-75% of them with scripts in. see the bigger picture.

As an owner of an estate where we have used openspace sims to add scenery and hence value to the estate, nice water areas etc and have absorbed the costs ourselves for improved enjoyment I think the price increase stinks really. I've been hit by performance hogs sharing the same server but I don't see why I should be penalised, my script load is minimal (1/25th of that I would use on a full sim) but I am still lagged by others on the same server and have to restart the sim often so it shifts to a server that's not lagged.

Why not just lock down OpenSpaces so that they CAN'T be resource hogs, if you overuse resources your time dilation and only yours is affected? That's how it works on full sims.

Alternatively, why not introduce a heavy usage version of the openspace, perhaps running 2 per server and offer the resource hogs the choice, move or bring you usage back within line.

I just can't agree with a policy that has attracted thousands of customers into openspace ownership only to increase the price on us by 66%. There were resource hogs before, you know your customers and how we act, so there should be no surprise as to what has happened.

How many thousands of openspaces are there? How many of us are going to lose that openspace becuase of the increased price? Enough for a class action?

Really Linden, you are alienating those that are investing in SL. We put real money in, we pay for your infrastructure and we expect you to deliver a service for that.

I'll sell you my stuff.

You're right. It was just bait.

Got anything good?


Ok.. So, say the average network load per openspace was 50% more than they expected. How would you expect them to deal with this?

I'm just going to repost the comment I left on the blog entry:


This is more than a little astonishing.

I purchased my openspace sim to be used by only one person– myself. While I have heard of plenty cases of scammy unscrupulous residents purchasing openspaces and reselling them with the appearance of full sims to others and fully endorse those portions of this policy announcement that address that problem, the pricing change is without excuse.

I doubt I’m in the minority of people who purchased an openspace for personal use because the previous price reduction put them within feasibility for the average person. To reduce the price by half, remove so many of the caveats around obtaining them and then turn around a couple months later and again double the cost is unbelievable, and I can’t see how a defense of this can be made. It’s not an issue of use, if it was then you wouldn’t have allowed Owners to be made separate than Billing in the first place– that’s a step that LL made, which could not be done through the automated system and required a separate support ticket. I know because that’s how I obtained mine.

If it’s a matter of protecting openspace sales by scam artists then maybe the better course is to simply restrict land reselling in openspaces in the first place. But at the very least a grandfather clause is not just a reasonable expectation but common sense, and that this gets posted without that and with finger pointing and blame towards the legitimate majority at the expense of the devious minority is simply disgusting.

For 66% more than the agreed to price?

so now that you`ve sold a couple thousand additional voids that would otherwise never been bought, your going to force every one to pay an additional $50 a month instead of perma banning the abusers... YEA RIGHT! you just want more money!

so now your chasing every off voids back to normal sims, let me guess, in march/june your going to make it complete and screw the entire grid and raise full sims to $500 aswell

if your goal is to screw estate owners to abandon their sims as they would hardly have any residents, you are going to achive your goals!

what`s wrong, no one wants to buy that piece `o` sh!t you call mainland where abuse is more regular then camping bots on estates???

i will _never_ go mainland and would quit befor i even start to think of owning land that YOU own as you (LL) SUCK (understatement) as a landlord!

I'm not normally one to be critical, but I tend to agree that this approach sounds like a misguided solution to the resource problem. I've not visited many openspace sims so the lag issue is one that's new to me but understandable with so many simulators on each server. Raising prices will almost certainly guarentee that the remaining openspace sims will be used for business rather than personal use, which seems to defeat the purpose of the policy changes. A more amicable solution might have been to lock the resources available to each simulator, or to charge each sim owner according to his or her personal usage as an incentive to be as frugal with resources as possible. I don't know if those options were considered, but if there is any room for a rethink on the matter before the changes go live, the lost faith demonstrated in this thread suggests that one would go a long way to restoring it.

I think it's a good idea to raise the price of openspace sims for those people that are not using them as intended, but the question becomes then, how do you police openspace sims for correct use?

Do you lower the amount of prims again to keep folks who are using them for other than intended uses from using that way?

Raising the price isn't necessarily the correct option, that's not going to stop estate owners who are abusing the original use.

I would place blame on all parties, LL for increasing the prim count, and those that abuse the purpose of the open space sims, including the residents who rent them from estate owners that are misrepresenting the intended use of the land.

I do disagree with raising the price for those people who use open space sims for water features, and landscaping to enhance their own full sims, i.e., intended use.

Infact it is even worse: they aren't convincing you to buy a new product (that you can refuse to), they let you buy a product at a convenient (convenient?? lol.. but we say "convenient) price, and when collected enough customers, they raised the price by 66%... so you'll stop to pay the fees, but you gonna loose your entry price because you cannot pay it anymore.

Selling a service for $100 with a monthly costs of $1 (or even zero) and after a week say: "In two months from now anyone will be charged $1000 monthly", anyone will bail out (because they are forced to do) but leaving the initially $100 on the pot. I think they invented this form of fraud many years ago.

That should have been done from the start. It wasn't. Let me break it down for you.

Doing that now costs Linden Lab money that they don't have a budget for. Doing what they are allows for increased $/CPU cycle with *no* work on their part other than paying Jack to, at the least, look like he's doing something.

Clear winner: Raise prices, recoup costs, spend no more money on development. Tada!

The reality is that Jack, as nice a fellow as he is, probably already had his hands tied and is simply the person on the ship being sacrificed to the sharks. Poor guy.

Mainland? Full Prim Sims?

Good to see your post Master and I agree with you 100%.

Where is M Linden? He acts like he cares like at the SLCC but I never see him respond to any of this? No one wants to hear from Jack as most land owners in SL blame him for the economy issues and now this makes sure that all the estate owners want less than nothing to do with him and his inept decision making. PLEASE M LINDEN WHERE ARE YOU???????????????????????????????

Who is it that can't think themselves out of a wet paper bag there at LL?? Why would you ever try this approach?? Why not make people buy four at once and put them on one server? I can have 100 people in a regular sim but if I convert it to 4 openspaces you want to tell people what to do or make them pay more for it after you sold them like hotcakes knowing full well what people were using them for?? Let people do what they want as long as they have four on the same server. I use my personal open space for working on terrain files for new sims and as a place to get away from the rest of SL. You think I should pay $50 more for that type of use?? Doesn't LL have a drug use policy?? You may want to do some random testing because somone is smoking some crack before thinking this BS up!!!

Fixing it would have been nice.