Openspace Announcement Discussion with Jack Linden

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-127427

Posted by: JaneyBracken // 15 hours ago // viewed 72 times
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There has been the biggest protest ever seen in Second Life tonight as Linden Labs announced that they are drastically increasing the prices in respect of their Openspace virtual land. To read their reasons go to

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/27/openspace-pricing-and-policy-changes/
They emphasise that the Openspace sims, which were intended only for light use, (for instance, areas of ocean or open land), have been used for other things involving more avatar traffic and development which is putting a strain on the servers at the Linden Labs. This would seem pretty crazy as I have been informed that they increased the amount of prims on these lands to 3750 a short while ago encouraging more activities instead of decreasing the usage.

I have heard from a few people tonight who are clearly distressed at these large price increases, so much so that they are handing back huge amounts of Openspace land because they are unable to pay for the upkeep. This will also involve many charities in SL who relied on this cheaper land to keep going. I am only putting this short report on tonight, however I will be talking to people who will be affected by this from tomorrow. Are the Lindens strapped for cash? Why would they treat their residence with such distain, who knows. It comes at a strange time though when they are trying to attract real business into sl as a cheaper way of running things. Also with half the world heading towards a recession and banks closing along with the stock markets crashing, expecting their hard up customers to pay more would seem extremely bad timing.
Perhaps someone from Linden Labs would like to contact me with their side of the story.

There is a solution that would be a win/win situation.

Why not having opensim converted to half-sims?
With 7500 prims it will be worth paying 125$ /month and land will keep its value..
LL would solve its overload problem.
And everyone will get out of this crisis the head up high..

I am concerned about this. We have 5 core full sims as part of our educational area, with 4 areas used for sandboxes for students, light use areas, art installation space, etc.

We mostly wanted these to have a "nice design" and to make the area appealing, with lots of water and open art spaces. The amount of work to get rid of the open spaces and change the coastline now would be horrendous.

http://vue.ed.ac.uk/sl/plan/vue-map-current.jpg

But, hiking up the rate as suggested for maintenance will make this far too expensive to maintain. I urge Linden labs to rethink this generally... but if necessary for the educational maintenance discount element alone, at least for existing owners. I know our current 3 year agreement to fund the 9 sims (5 full + 4 open spaces) we have cannot simply be increased by the amount suggested, and we could not justify that many areas at the new undiscounted maintenance rates.

Well that is interesting, after posting this..... they changed it to a full sim

:miles:: so nice to see they are correcting their "drag on the servers"

I have an openspace and don't consider I abused anything. I 'bought' it well before the new policy came into effect when such sims had a 1875 prim limit. It was a simple trade off back then. More space/privacy and less prims and don't expect them to run like a full sim.

Initially I used mine as a log in log out hole and somewhere to do some building in relative privacy. Then they upped the prim limits and started actively promoting openspace sims. I never asked them to change anything at all. I was quite happy with my private 1875 prim bolt hole thank you very much. I considered back then that LL was not generally known for it's altruism and waited for the catch.

So now, I get to pay $50 a month more for something I never asked for in the first place whilst at the same time being blamed for being a part of all that is wrong with the grid.

It is the last part that really riles me. To blog in the way that Jack did was unbelievably crass imho. LL were totally complicit in what amounts to deception. They sanctioned the sale of these sims. They put new procedures in place to make buying these sims easier. They actively encouraged customers to buy this product. At no point did they blog or inform the customer that what they were buying was anything other than a mini version of a full sim. That is exactly how they were promoted and that is what people thought they were buying.

For LL to turn around now at this late stage and say we did not realise you were actually going to expect to USE what we SOLD you is sheer lunacy. Do these people log in any more? They MUST have seen from the start what was happening. Sales figures alone must have told them there was something going on. Either they are guilty of extraordinary incompetence or they are guilty of fraud. It has to be one or the other as far as I am concerned.

Either way, they should at least have the decency to blog about this in an honest and open fashion. Admit their mistakes and not try to blame their unfathomably loyal user base for their own ineptitude. To impose what amounts to a severe fine for every OSS owner/tenant is an incredible insult born of arrogance.

Allow estate owners to chose up front which they want. If they want the true voids, then they teir down/prim down/resource down/script down, etc. If they want the current OS-they stay as is and bot them and I would even take it one step further, give them a week to comply and if they don't...upgrade them automatically to a suburban sim that costs more, offers a bit more and handles a bit more. That will make the "land barons" work harder to make sure the resources are not being sucked dry.

In any case...there are options. LL just needs to look at that them instead of screwing over people for using what they bought. Which, as of right now, is what they are doing. You can't fault people for using what they purchased. Inflation is one thing....it happens...although not at a 67% increase and limits placed that takes away value. And definitely not at 67% because LL screwed up by upping the prim that holds more scripts that allows for more load while switching a 4 pack buying to a single buy along with "must be attached to existing private island" to "place it anywhere on the grid you want"

Well that at least proves someone at LL is monitoring our whines....fat lot of good it is doing us though

Let me say the following first.
The buisens i drive may be cosiddered imoral by many of you .
I am renting love rooms .
I do this as i wanted to give peole a place to play. The income does not fully pay the rent but i was willing to cover the losses out of my pocket .

About 6 weeks ago i was moving to 2 open space sims to give people more privacy
as now i could put more distance between my skyboxes.
It was a lot of work to do the move.

I dont think i am overusing the sims as i have framtrimes of 1.2 ms or something.

I thought i would have finaly found a place where people could live out fantasies.
Now im sitting here having tears in my eyes as i dont think i can continue what i have build up for nearly 2 years now. I cant cover the aditional costs so i probaly will have to close down.
I am leasing this simms from the owner and will naturaly as well loose the setup fee i payed him.

Thank you verry much Linden Labs for ruining so many peoples dreams i realy hope that someone some day does the same with yours.

Manu

sadly this is the truth, and very possibly why we have had no feedback at all from mr jack linden nor a word from any other linden, not even to acknowledge this outcry. They dont care, being happy to lose one third of their open space tenants is a very scary thing indeed! what im hoping they may not have anticipated was not only will they lose the tier on those OS sims, but may well (and i dearly hope) lose them as residents too... this will cause a massive ripple effect and ultimately every one will suffer

Because most of the people hit by this don't need 7500 prims.

They don't need 3750 prims.

They don't even need 1875 prims.

Make the three or four special case Linden OpenSpaces into full sims, and roll back OpenSpace to where it was when it was introduced. Let the people using them as full sims upgrade to full sims.

I cannot believe how many refugees from sl I am seeing pour into openlifegrid.com since this news came out. I have sims on both. At least there, although basic at this moment you get 45,000prims for 75US$ on a full sim. Wake up LL before this board goes empty as the last sl resident leaves and turns out the lights.

And why the hell did you ban Sahra Nerd one of our most highly thought of estate owners. I don't believe what your doing here.

If you use 3750 prims you are the bad guy anyhow! You pay to use 3750 prims, but if you do Linden might raise the prices!

Actually, they could lose 40% of the openspaces and "break even", but that doesn't count people who currently have mixed estates and are considering folding the whole thing in because their estates NEED the openspaces... and the savings in hardware isn't enough to turn that from "break even" to "a good business decision"... those computers and racks are bought and paid for, computer hardware depreciates fast, and they're not going to move quickly given the uncertainty they just engendered. My off the cuff guestimate is that each closed openspace nets them about $80-$90 in paid for hardware they can use for new customers. Even at the old rate that's not much more than a month's income.

soo are by linden now all going bullshit in brain??? how much us$ became linden lab every month i think so around 2-3 000 000US$ where all this money going???
from class4 up to class5 maybe not mor like 500 000us$ cost

are all toilets by linden lab in massive gold????
or is this the politik to bring all ppl out of secondlife ???
wy linden lab cut the tree wich feedered him???

Maybe they drive with Hummer´s to work. But this is their right to do, also golden toilets I would

Well at least LL gave a couple of months notice about the changes giving people enough time to decide if they want to pay their tier come January first to the estate owners instead of paying and then the estate owners selling their island or raising the tier so high that people cannot afford it. I never did trust buying from a private party. At least on mainland you know what to expect.

Originally Posted by Chorazin Allen

One thought about the numbers which might be worth keeping in mind. At present 3 openspaces brings in $75*3=$225. Under the announced changes 2 openspaces will bring in $125*2=$250. So, in cold hard math, one in three openspaces can be abandoned and there's no financial loss (and there's the freed-up hardware, power consumption, network bandwidth etc on top of this). Of course there's a massive impact on goodwill as the 2000+ posts here demonstrate..

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now they can also use that 1 out of 3 OS sims that is given up to use for their own land sales like Nautilus which they promote on your log in screen. I want to make it clear I do not own my own sim either full or OS but I had hoped to at some point. I post here so much because I really feel Linden Labs has never really done right by the people that built this world. I think this is beyond belief what they want to do now. And in case you have not been reading the official blog they announced a new infrastructure LLNet coming at the first of the year. Nautlis, LLNET.. does this all add up?

I need someone to explain this to me .... if i was given 3750 prims and I am paying what they asked for ....so why complaining if i used them all.... and still wondering how the extra 50 USD will resolve this???? are they going to upgrade the servers (in my dreams) or just hiring more useless staff??? or is it that they are just getting ready for christmas shopping and they did not have enough cash

Yep, and you can have all the crap there too. I prefer themed sims.

There were no rules, and Ill go back to my original post. Suggestions and rules are totally different, it is Linden that messed up and didnt realize the influx of ppl that would take advantage of a better land offer. It is Linden who did not do their business plan correctly and realize they may actually have to upgrade servers as more openspaces were made available.

How can you limit someone based on a 'suggestion'. Why not set the rules out to start with, and why make everyone pay for your mistake. I suggest upgrading your servers based on the income you have made with the influx of buyers, and set rules for the new owners coming up, not suggestions. I have more then 10 friends that visit my openspace sim, so does this mean im breaking 'rules'. Jeesh, sry I have friends who like to hang out with me and have fun, isnt that what this 'game' is about?

Admit that you did not see a problem coming, or realize how many ppl would jump on an opportunity in SL that they could only dream of in RL. Isnt that the whole point of this game? I would not mind paying extra if I knew now we would have the support we should, that servers would be upgraded, and I and others could continue to have fun. I do mind paying extra under a 'suggestion' that had gotten out of hand due to bad planning on your own part.

I would take an upgrade to help others that do not bring anyone to there sims, I am willing to pay that price for my friends to have a place to come have fun, why not poll openspace owners and leasers and see how many would, maybe then you would actually find a solution that would not hurt everyone.

Kalyrra, by your own words you were a ad farmer and are now a OpenSpace slum lord. You helped turn the mainland into a barren desert of For Sale property and now you have taken a sim that was designed for light use as a way to enhance existing islands, or condsidering the recent change allowing them to be placed as stand alone, intended as residence property, and tried to turn them into a full sim type of use to make money based on an obviously flawed business plan.

You have a lot of damn gaul bitching about LL being profiteers. I have a suggestion, why don't you and Snowflake take your vicious and nasty rants off this thread and go meet in SL and argue. Or better yet, call the WWE and see if you can rent some ring time. Talking about Jail and Killing etc does nothing to promote the cause here. And frankly having someone whose use of these sims is at the core of LL's argument rant about how unfairly they have been treated, only helps further LL's argument.

I definately DO NOT support LL on this and believe if they are even remotely honest about their goal they need to completely rework their plan here. I am more than willing to take hard shots at them when they screw up as they have here. But there is a line to it, and once crossed, anything you say hurts your credibility and detracts from the entire argument you are supposidly promoting. You have long ago crossed that line.

Lets try to keep this reasonably civil, as on topic as possible, and directed at solution if at all possible.

DRD

And I am willing to cancel my membership and shut everything down

I have lost my trust in linden lab, I no longer wish to do business with SL, even if Linden decides to lower prices and keep them at 75/ I will no longer be here to support, will no longer be a customer. I am done with SL very upset and angry. I am only sticking around for the protests so that I can show how upset I am and get my message over for the residents that do decide to stay!

From the blog, and some comments of myself:


>>> "So Openspaces have been incredibly popular as a perk for estate owners, but sadly"

And you realized that now? How do you expect us to believe this since in April, May and June practically everyone abandoned their land (especially mainland at first) and got to get an OS SIM, causing chaos in the already tortured mainland market? Is anyone from LL actually *playing* SL? I am not being sarcastic. It's a serious question.

>>> "Unfortunately most of the Openspaces are being used for much more than light use. "

Really? Again, you saw that in August? After taking upfront setup fees of 250 USD from THOUSANDS of estate owners, money they are starting to cry for now?

Why don't you disclose the statistics of how many people paid you to buy an OS since the new land prices? THAT would be interesting. Or we can just write a program to check your caps servers to see the regions and just visit each and see the prim it supports.

Not that difficult anyway, there's lots of companies out there who do statistical analysis on regions with their visiting bots.

Do you have any idea how many notecards and groups are created by simple "you and me" residents who have rented their own openspace sim? I got 5 just today and day in the US is just starting.

>>> "Based on analysis performed in August and September, Openspaces are being used about twice as much as we expected"

So... What was expected? Buy 3750 prims and use 1200 prims or 1500? Why don't you disclose what was expected in technical terms and what is happening now?

Because if you tell me you expected someone to pay 250 USD setup + 75 USD per month to get 65000 sqm of water + 3 palm trees + 1 boat... then sorry but this is becoming a big joke. And what about Linden Lab employees? When they visited openspace SIMs in May and June and saw they are not 3 palms trees + a boat... why nothing was mentioned then? I have had quite a few (very nice) LL employees visit my OS SIMs for TP problems from time to time... They must be newbies and not see what's the usage (Statistics panel) or just blind and not see how it's built while they were providing support at 128/128/200 of the SIM (like each admin goes to).

You must really think your customers are idiots. All of them. Because that's how you approach them. Sorry

You have the knife and you have the melon as well. You cut it anywhere you want, based on what's on your benefit AT THAT TIME.

>>> "in other words being loaded with double the content/avatar load than we’d expect for a region that is supposed to be light use."

You got to be kidding me. What is the content expected? Don't give 3750 prims if you don't want people to use them... does not need much brain to do that. Run your RDBMS (database) statistical analysis to see and warn estate managers/owners if they are overusing their SIMs...

It's not hard at all to do. But it's much nicer to raise prices = extort your customers that already paid a nice 250 USD for their investment. Nice quick way to make money before selling out or going for IPO. Whoever thought of that should get a nice bonus at the end of the year for increasing revenue in Q1 2009 30-35%. Woohoo!

>>> "Rather than being employed as open areas like ocean with little or no content and traffic, the majority are being rented out to residents looking for a place to live."

And how does this affect you? Are you running XEN? VMWare? What is the virtualization method you use? Linux-vservers? Fork a separate process of the SIM daemon in the same system? Why don't you disclose those as well?

An avatar will use the same prims (ie his capabilities) no matter if he's on mainland/full SIM or openspace. If he has the ability to use 500 prims, HE WILL USE IT no matter what. That's COMMON SENSE. You don't need to have an PhD to realize that. You have statistics of prim and resources usage from mainland and full sims... you didn't know this was going to happen when you give an openspace SIM that works almost as fast as a normal one? If you didn't think of it... make your own conclusions

What's the difference of a script consuming X resources in an OpenSpace and a Full SIM? Can you technically provide the details of your setup?

If not, it really makes no difference for an avatar to be in a full SIM, openspace or wherever. Resources needed A R E T H E S A M E in bandwidth and database and perhaps more in CPU and disk I/O, definately more in RAM.

And NO RESIDENTIAL openspace itself creates more problems than if resident was in full SIM. I can GUARANTEE you that, with data of my SIMs monitoring. You go and get the openspaces that are used for clubs if you don't like them (I don't like them either for the same reasons as you).

Why you don't ask / propose to big landlords so that they have 16 of their openspace SIMs in 1 server? It's theirs, their SIMs can run as slow as they want since the server IS ONLY FOR THEM. Your new tools allow you to move a SIM from a server to another easily. Why don't you propose setting all my SIMs in 1 server exclusively for me? If I want to set it as 4 SIMs or 16 OS SIMs, it's my business. You get the same money and it's only me on the server. How come you don't propose this? Why.... ????

You are going to raise the cost of openspace, without upgrading their capabilities until gradually you just go to a model where we pay for prims used on a SIM and not per estate, ie you will equalize openspaces to full SIMs eventually. Let's see in a year when your developers allow your billing systems to have that whether you'll do or not.

>>> "For some people this has meant a less than great experience with performance fluctuations. The overuse of Openspaces has also put additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing."

Really? HOW? How can SAME usage produce network and DB strain? What is the difference between 15000 prims with textures in a full SIM and 4 x 3750 prims with textures in the SAME SERVER of yours? On the contrary, an avatar getting less textures (in an openspace SIM) uses less bandwidth and database. Are you backing up your claims with facts or just say things for those who don't understand tech?

"I'm selling you 15000 prims and 4 x 3750 and this causes different usage on the latter". Ok.... Sure. Just because you say so... Sure causes but it's for the best

>>> "So higher traffic to and from the servers along with heavier demands on the asset server, both of which impact the overall experience people have inworld."

You will drive me crazy... how can an openspace SIM itself create heavier demand on the asset server? A DB record on the asset server (I assume you use combination of LDAP - SQL?) is the same no matter if it's on mainland/full sim/openspace or wherever. Asset servers have to do with usage increase in general and population increase. Openspaces have nothing to do with it. Prove your point technically. I am not convinced at all. AT ALL

You want to know my view of things? I rent 9 openspace SIMs (even though I have the cash to buy then directly from LL I prefer to pay premium and rent them... You think I'm stupid and pay more? I've seen LL's business tactics and decided not to pay setup fees for land to LL ever again) and they all have residents renting a very nice and cost effective house full featured.

All the times that SL was doing mass server SIM upgrades (ie stress on the DB and asset servers) the openspaces had lag issues, ie 34-35 FPS, even 20 FPS even when only me was in the SIM, at 2000m with 0 textures to download around and 0 avatars on the SIM (!)

All the other times, ALL SIMs were (and still are) at 45 FPS constantly.

Am I using someone else's resources? Let me show if I am... You tell me if my OS SIM really abuses your servers technically:

My ***most active SIM*** right now:

Time Dilation: 1.00
FPS: 45
Physics: 44.9
Agent updates/sec: 8 (8 avatars on the SIM)
Objects: 2247
Active objects: 630
Active scripts: 3642
Script events: 165 eps
Packets In: 86 pps
Packets out: 72 pps

Total Frame time: 2.8ms - 3.6ms
Net Time: 0.2ms
Sim Time (Physics): 0.4ms

Sim Time (other): 1.1 ms
Agent time: 0.2 ms
Images time: 0.0 ms
Script time: 0.7ms

and this is my BUSIEST SIM with tens of residents.

So... You were saying?

Want statistics of my mainland parcel now? Let's see... that will be interesting

Mainland full SIM (I own just 4096sqm on that SIM)

Time Dilation: 1.00
FPS: 45
Physics: 44.8
Agent updates/sec: 3 (3 avatars on the SIM)
Objects: 9560
Active objects: 682
Active scripts: 5279
Script events: 920 eps
Packets In: 109 pps
Packets out: 305 pps

Total Frame time: 20.6ms - 20.9 ms
Net Time: 1.3 ms
Sim Time (Physics): 0.5 ms

Sim Time (other): 1.2 ms
Agent time: 0.5 ms
Images time: 0.1 ms
Script time: 17.5 ms

Tell me why this mainland is better on the server than the openspace SIM. I fail to see how. Show me in technical terms how I'm wrong. Please

Cause I fail to see how openspace (apart from the ones with clubs in them) loads your servers considerably more than a full SIM.

Don't hide the details. Explain in full technical terms since, as you say, you are open and discuss everything in your business (open source client, interconnection with other virtual worlds etc).

Why don't you publish a white paper with how you make things work in openspace?

Give us details. If not, raising the prices means you have no business model, or you have one which is called "get the suckers to pay setup for our new servers, then either take the servers back when they abandon it or collect 60% more from raising prices to the most popular land product of ours".

None of the above is personally addressed to the blog poster. They are addressed to the whole LL executives who are in charge of decisions.

Thank you,

Soy Nakamori

This would be a solution I would go for, I would pay a little more for receiving something more. Will Not pay more and receive less or the same.