Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

So... if an open sim is 'correctly' used, then a FULL sim's rental/resident tier collection has to cover both the full sim and the open sim... like extra taxes collected to keep a park or beach open... So, will private estate FULL sim tier/rent prices be going up also to help cover the new LL fee structure? Will LL's mainland also raise their fee structure? Will the private estate owner be put at an even greater disadvantage to LL's mainland because of this new pricing?

Not jumping ship YET... but thinking so much it hurts

Okay if I am not mistaken didn't an attorney from Pennsylvania sue Linden Labs and wanted Phillip to testify in court in PA and Linden Labs said they have this TOS that protects them from laws in other states and the judge said bullshit. Here is your summons Phillip. or something like that. Could be wrong but I do not think any company TOS makes them immune if they engage in any kind of fraud or switch and bate or any of that stuff.

So you do not have to just contact the California Attorney General. If you feel what Linden Labs has done not right and you want to know if you have recourse check with your Attorney General

You have already initiated the downgrade process. Your account will downgrade to Basic Access on Sunday, 2008-11-02

This is the last straw the broke the proverbial camel's back. Linden Lab arbitrarily changes pricing on Open Space sims decreasing price and THEY set prim limits and usage, then complain when people use the amounts set and raise prices, again unilaterally. This is a joke. I run a fair business and charge my landowners cost for tier but the constant up and down of pricing because obviously neither Jack nor any of the execs at LL went to business school and can't for the life of them build a business model and pricing model just annoys residents. I have enjoyed Second Life, but when all is said and done, it is a game. It is not real life, it works poorly, and it is expensive. I have dealt with a lot in the last two years but you know what? My time and energy is better spent on real life and the money spent can be used for a heck of a lot more tangible things than enriching LL. I will be selling my islands for almost nothing as soon as I can and closing my account. Goodbye and good luck to all who remain, I have enjoyed the time of those of you I have had the fortune to meet and wish you happiness in SL if that is your choice and in RL.

Gabe

Would not be surprised to find out later that the buyers are LL plants going in there buying these parcels at ridiculous prices to get the mainland metrics up for average price paid per meter, next month. I don't doubt anything LL would do, at this point.

I'm pretty much done with this thread. In my opinion there has been countless examples of where this decision to raise the tier on OS sims may not be all about performance. I'll leave it at that, and will do my best to leave this thread, as a professional.

Fellow estate owners and other real estate investors and developers, hang in there. Scale back if you need to, but do your best to maintain a "presence" in this SL profession. It may be of benefit in the next virtual world, once there is one that is viable. You'll have a proven track record.

SL citizens. We've done our best to bring you an affordable alternative to the unregulated mainland. It is our hope that SL will deliver a place that you will find comfortable and will be able to call home. I am sure we'll see each other again. If SL truly delivers, we have no need for private estates, and our profit margin would be greater on mainland anyway.

That being said. Best wishes to you all.

Tony Upshaw
Upshaw Island Management

One other thing struck me about this whole thing.

It's not just the investment in land purchases that the good people in SL make. I build sims and houses and other content. To do this well I have to keep up with the ever increasing drain on my computer resources. This means spending hundreds of £s in upgrades to my hardware so that SL runs better, smoother.

It still crashes. A lot.

But nevertheless I felt it important not to spend my money on other things, but to spend it on getting my PC as fast as I could afford it, so I could enjoy my time in SL. I am sure that many others have made similar investment.

I won't even go into the amount of time and effort that people in SL have dedicated to making it a content rich and enjoyable atmosphere and, more importantly, community. And that, despite the technical hitches, the poor customer service and the sometimes incredible announcements and changes Linden Research have made.

Linden Research really seems to have gone a long, long way from what they said they were supposed to be about.

-----------

Out of interest, I run a 2.7 GHz 6600 Core 2 Quad, with 4GB RAM, 3 x 160GB SATA HDDs, and an nVidia 8800 GT. I also purchased 2 x 22" widescreen flatpanel monitors and one of those cool 3DConnexion SpaceNavigators, purely to make things easier to work in SL. I have a sneaky suspicion my machine could run SL better than one of those so called expensive servers we all seem to be paying over the odds for.

Hey, what where you thinking? !! Dont you understand that ppl have put in ALOT of effort in their open sims. Store owners will have to close their business cuz of this. All my friends are really sad, they have worked hours and hours to get their stores going and then you come with this !!! Shame on you! This isnt fair!! Ppl talking about quitting SL. They are tired of this!!!
Listen to your customers!

Regards

Ui

I see people attempting to defend LL in this. That's inconceivable to me, and here's why. I paid the 250 for the open space in good faith, fully planning to use it as LL intended. Their own stated reasoning for increasing MY price is that OTHERS have abused the open spaces. Yet they offer me no refunds, or anything to account for the fact (which they can easily check) that my open space was properly used. So my choice is pay a 67 percent increase or abandon he region.

That's indefensible.

this is all aimed to push up the price of mainland, you watch the mainland prices, they will rise then they will put more mainland on, draining us of our residents as the credit crunch bites deeper and they don't want to leave sl so they settle for mainland, they have timed this perfect just before xmas

Why are some demanding their $250.00 set up fee back? It is a set up fee, not a deposit or an investment. That money is gone.

In addition to apparently enjoying seeing your name in print, based on the sheer volume of messages you're polluting this thread with, you're extremely ignorant on many of the topics you attempt to address.

Landlords must give 72 hours notice prior to starting an eviction proceeding. After the 72 hours have passed, then they must go to court and file for eviction, after which the tenant must be served, and given at least 7 days notice of an eviction hearing in court. Once the eviction hearing is held, then IF the tenant loses, a court order is filed, after which the tenant normally has up to 60 days to vacate the premises, as long as he/she is making reasonable efforts to do so during the 60 days.

So, it takes at least 10 days to get an eviction order, and close to 3 months to actually evict a tenant.

Where are you getting these *facts* and *figures* from?

If you are going to post, don't make up dummy figures/facts - it just causes disinformation. You are way off just for the record.

To make this sort of rate hike in this way, when the whole world is in the grip of a REAL LIFE financial melt down is not only irresponsible, it is incredibly insensitive to a lot of people who are barely hanging on.

This rate hike will destroy a lot of people when they really could use SL as a way to maintain some semblance of positivity and hope.

I have been in SL now for several years. If there is one thing I have learned is they open these forums as a place to vent, but doyou seriously think they are going to recant their statements? Not in the slightest. My advice... Opensim.org

We have 6 sims. 2 full prim and 4 openspace. when we got ours we had to buy 4 at once, wasn't allowed to buy one openspace then.
We do not abuse the openspace....they are for open sailing for our residents. Now I have to tell them thier tiers need to increase to cover the difference in the new pricing.
We don't make any profit as it is. We did this to help out friends who could not afford mainland.
I think after 2 years we may now give up our sims.

Thanks Linden for ruining our little enjoyment we have while the RL economy is so bad.

Jack -

After reading almost every comment here, and giving this considerable thought over several days, I believe I can understand the quagmire that Linden Lab is now in. While I doubt anyone is still reading this thread at this point, I'd still like to chime in with my two cents.


To understand the problem, we need to rewind back in time to early March, 2008.

The Lab updated the void regions with a new product called an Openspace Region (OSR) [1]. I call this a new product because it was quite different than the existing void regions - higher sim count, different pricing and rules attached. Understandably, this product was met with much elation from residents as it put the cost of a region with a lot of space and a reasonable number of prims into a price range that was affordable by average residents. (Why rent a 16384m parcel when you can own your own island?)

One month later the private estate market was further shaken up by changes to new island pricing - the cost of a new island dropped from $1,675 to $1,000. [2] This was, in essence, a price ceiling imposed by the government on land sales that was below the current market rate.


The effect these two policies was stunning to watch - I had been renting a parcel in a private estate and watched my neighbors move out one at a time, presumably to the OSRs.

Existing estate owners really had no choice in the matter; full sims were no longer competitive in the market. It was either convert a full sim to four OSRs or go out of business. It seemed like this was direction Linden Lab was trying to push estates anyhow - each OSR carried a fourth the prims of a full sim, and roughly a fourth the cost. ($75 * 4 = $300, which is only $5 more than a full sim.) Four OSRs are more trouble for an Estate Management team to keep track of, but the cost was roughly a wash in the end (less the island conversion fee).


Fast forward to today.

The OSR product has been both a roaring success and a stunning failure. Residents love them, but they have been difficult for the Lab to manage. The Second Life software lacks the ability to subdivide a CPU up into four parts, resulting in OSRs being allowed to consume more resources than they were designed for. It's hard to fault residences for this - they have no way to tell if they are "overusing" their OSR. If the Second Life software allowed them to do what they were doing, they were living in the rules. (Clearly, self-policing doesn't work: residents will use all of the computer power offered to them, and the software just kept offering more with out repercussion.)



How should this problem be fixed?

There are three groups of residents here, and they need to be treated uniquely:

- 1.) Pre-existing estate owners that were forced to convert full sims to OSRs to stay competitive.
- 2.) New estate owners that bought OSRs in lieu of renting from the first group or the mainland.
- 3.) OSRs that were previously void sims and have remained light use during this time.

Group #1 is the easier of the two groups to correct. One suggestion that has been made is to unwind the full sim to four OSR transaction by waiving the fee to convert four OSRs back into one full sim. This seems reasonable.

Group #2 is more difficult. Their situation, ironically, sort of mirrors the mortgage crisis we have in real life today. They are faced with a huge increase in their mortgage payment, and are unable to sell their islands because there are (or quickly will be) so many of them on the market. I have several suggestions for solutions:

- 1.) Offer a prorated rebate of the island setup fee for residences that are willing to abandon their OSRs. Someone that bought one the day before the OSR pricing changes were announced could get most (if not all) of the setup fee back, whereas someone that bought one in March could get little. This reduces the number of OSRs on the grid and helps reduce the load on the grid.

-2.) For residents unwilling to abandon their OSRs, grandfather in the existing monthly fee, but make it very clear that it's with the understanding that eventually the Second Life software WILL be upgraded to enforce resource limits and they might not like their OSR once this is in place. (Which is what they were actually buying in the first place, even if the software was not yet ready.)

Group #3 is easy. If the OSR has been treated like the old void sim the entire time, do nothing. They are treating the product the way it was designed to be used and should have their fees remain the same. (Sims that are used for water sports, flying, etc.)


Simply raising the monthly fee helps none of these groups. Group #1 is left in a really poor position - they will now be paying $500/mo for a configuration that was basically forced upon them by economic forces dictated by a change in policy from the Lab. Group #2 is left with an OSR that they have to pay more for, with zero change in service. Group #3 is punished the most as they have been using the OSRs correctly all along, and are being lumped in with group #2.


Remember that we're all on the same team. What's good for estate owners is good for Linden Lab! This is a problem that needs to be fixed, but if we work together we can come up with a solution that works for everyone.

As a matter of disclosure, while I am an Estate Manager on two different estates, I do not personally own a island.

- Bunny





[1] http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/07/announcing-changes-to-the-openspace-product/
[2] http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/04/07/quarterly-land-supply-and-island-pricing-update/

Originally Posted by Delta Sweetwater
Thing is, LL is a profit driven organization, like any big company, they reinvest cash and they also need to pay out stockholders if they have any.

It's a private company no shares.

I got to page four of this thread and realised that we were echoing each other in our disappointment about this.

I cannot afford to maintain the rent on the quarter sim I share with two other people (partnered, and part of my SL family...). It is that simple.

I advocate Second Life constantly in my real life business dealings as an opportunity, rather than merely a game... and thinking how to incorporate this environment into your communications is useful and largely affordable.

When I first registered for Second Life, it was at the urging of Nobody Fugazi, a known SL Blogger, that I am presently going to go read, as I know he will have something to say about this.

I registered, and then never bothered to log in.

It took me another six months before I actually logged in and became interested in it as tool. I am not a video game player. The only game I have played in the last ten or more years is Snood, and that's saying something as far as I am concerned.

Second Life was different. For me I really see it as a place that the world can interact in a way that has more dimension than IM.

I bought my first plot of land six weeks later, and have increased the space around my home with plots on full sims. I spent a solid six months inworld, and progressed to renting two shops on different sims, before my professional life took an upswing and my time became severely limited. I logged in every month paid my rent, paid my tier and logged out. I did this for another six months. So I contributed what I had committed to, to maintain as broad a presence in SL as I could afford.

Later when Nobody expanded Sentience with an openspace, then gave it up through equally ridiculous policies, i rented a quarter of it in the hopes that my neighbours and I could maintain our water views, where it's mostly the three of us, we have friends over... terraform a bit, and have worked very hard to keep our space organic and beautiful.

This arbitrary, blanket and draconian policy you have cooked up here, is going to put a serious damper on what up until now, I have spoken about positively and fearlessly in front of hard sell crowds. I've introduced quite a few of my real world friends into Second Life, and have thusly contributed further to this inworld economy.

It's not much. I know it's not much, but it's my contribution and I am proud and pleased to have done it.

Yet, I must add my voice to the others here, pleading with you to isolate, penalise and appropriately charge abusers to the light use rule, instead of penalising everyone. It's like Peter must pay for Paul, and Paul must pay for all. That isn't fair, and on every level it's really going to hurt Second Life as a viable environment for everyone rather than an elitist one.

Please reconsider your decision. At the very least, in the current doom and gloom economic environment (I've seen so many friends have to give up their land of all types recently because of the expenditure in the face of the loss of the retirement plans and savings) it seems as though you can extend goodwill to those of us who have kept it going, even when we weren't in-world regularly.

Be generous, for generosity breeds generosity.

There is a recognized practice to squeezing out the value from a successful enterprise that has matured and begun to face convincing competition (or obsolescence) - You turn that enterprise into a cash cow. You trade future growth (which you no longer believe in) for capital to invest in other projects.

I think somebody wants to take the intellectual investment of SL - of all of us - capture it and use it to support games development. Theme grids, with specific target markets.

SL is very challenging to market as anything other than an online world.

Now, perhaps they could set up zones on the mainland to accomplish this. No need to create a new architecture, it exists.

Of course, if this takes off, there is the matter of clearing up server space. The Islands, that is. How can we consolidate them? How can we liberate the capacity for new and improved projects?

SL is a great way to make money, potentially. Within a few years, a much wider set of persons will be spending as much time in SL or similar worlds as the large portion of the population in the developed economies that does so on the Internet.

But how to do this most efficiently?

Deliver theme-based experiences. This runs counter to the user-drive content nature of SL, but then again the value of that experience is that it beta tests various experiments, the Lindens observe, and develop theme experiences directed to newcomers, probably along the lines of

1. fewer edit rights
2. simplified avatar development
3. more limited inventory
4. lower skill hurdles to clear in order to play
5. lots more environmental graphics and sound
6. lots less lag
7. significantly higher usage fees
8. move away from diversified economy

In such a world the creative core of SL will become the creative fringe, literally priced to the margins.

But thanks for the cool designs. We will incorporate them into our new game grids.

"Game grid." Sounds like something from the movie "Tron".

Just woolgathering, here. It's either that or wave a sign.

What an absolute and total FARCE. I note that this thread, started by Katt Linden, is titled:

"Openspace Announcement DISCUSSION with Jack Linden"

We're now over 2000 resident messages and counting, and Jack has managed to show up ONCE and post ONE message, basically saying "we're going to do it."

I feel that this is a case of bait and switch to raise prices..with a smile..in the current economic climate. LL seems to forget while we are in SL for many reasons from enjoying others company to making money..it is for the majority an extra in our lives..and entertainment. I hope LL realized this is the perfect way to drive it's residents to the competition and I am sure they will recieve a thank you note soon from competing games. The game gets worse..the prices go up..and the attitude of the powers that be get increasingly smug...poor business practices people..shame on you.

Hi
So you undertook a capacity planning exercise way back when you said each open sim can have 3,750 prim and now that folk are using that you say "Yay, got you, I'm putting up you tiers". Why? The error was yours - you got the planning wrong - you misinterpreted what your residents would use open sims for.
And as for the increase - its incredible. Who in RL would consider increasing prices by over 45% and think they can get away with it.
If you stick with this you'll have upset a tremedous number of residents. Those residents are your Ambassadors in RL. They say to colleagues friends and assocites - "Hey you should get into SL." They're not going to say that anymore - are they?
So your capaicty planning is bad, your reaction is bad, your customer relationship are bad and you are upsetting so many people you'll damage your reputation. Now what did Google release recently? I'm off to look. Maybe I should tell folk about that.

bunny i agree with you
but i feel they wont give conversions free, cos the numbers say that there are not enough private full sims to take them back as they leave the open spaces, the lindens want them to go to mainland, so they will slow the converstion, it will be more profitable for them to let us close them
the numbers of people that they hoped for are not going to happen, so they are taking what bussiness there is, they have done the biggest one a favor by converting all her class 4 sims for free

SL is entertainment and people networking, my price point for this (yours may be different) is about $100 USD/mo. Even my TV (satellite) bill is cheaper and provides me with a variety of programming that I used to find enjoyable. Guess I will be going back to that at some level. Paying >60% more for the same product is not going to work for me and it appears many others too. So my time in SL will drop, my purchases will drop and I may even drop my premium account. (Wonder if I can get time on my son's X-Box?).

I don't own any land. But, I am an avid consumer in SL. Shopping and experiencing the content created by SL's own users is what I enjoy the most. I disagree with what LL is doing and think their reasoning is shady, at best. If this was truly a performance issue, why punish all OS owners? Why not only punish the abusers?

LL is the only game in town folks. To affect true change, you must all vote with your wallets and walk away from SL. Other virtual realities might be some years off but maybe now is the time to start looking at Open Life or Open Sim.

Here's hoping that enough of you leave so that LL gets the message loud and clear.