Jack ok'ed this use a long time ago !!

We saw very quickly after the introduction of Openspaces that people were selling land on them.

I asked Jack Linden if this was allowed. He said yes !!

This was before FairChang sold any land on Openspaces.

When the prim allowance was raised they knew how they were being used !

Why was this not corrected at that point?

NOT GOOD BUSINESS PRACTICE !!

That is interesting. I guess they never said anything because they wanted us to throw setup fees at them and buy OS sims like mad. And now they want us to pay even more, those of us who can afford it. No matter how we do it. Guess we're supposed to sell a kidney if needed. If we abandon the sims instead, no problem either. Empty server space to set up new regular sims or mainland regions.

No it was great business practice. They were selling so well they just watched the dollars rolling in and turned a blind eye.

Funny how your statement is directed at Linden Labs and when I read it, I think of the estate owners (myself included) who had the same mindset. Offering OS sims for free but with a $100 a month tier. Ordering capabilities from web sites.

I'm not giving LL a pass but these land owners had no problem hopping in the sack with them and now act like they were innocent victims.

Estate owners charge around 98 US a month on an OS and 0.0 US to move in after you transfer this cash to pay the lindens your left with bout 10US profit but dont forget you paid 250US in the first place this means it would take you about 2 years before you started making a profit and now with the new prices should take bout 3 years before you see a profit. Best of luck

Gee -- is this sounding familiar or what? Mortgage crises a la Second Life?

I can't but reiterate

I just invested $1100 to buy three open space sims and attach them to my regular sim (I had to move them to get a nice square). Why? So I could expand my park, the one I've had on my sim for nearly two years. I had no intention of misusing the open spaces. They were intended to be a beautiful place for people to sail, explore, walk under trees, etc.

Now I have to dump them. It was hard enough to justify the monthly expense with no income to offset it. I thought this was what open space sims were intended for. But NO distinction is made between all the folks like me and the folks "hopping in the sack" with the Lindens on this.

Who were the fools?

It's real likely my park and live music venues will be gone by the first of the year. I'm just tired of pouring money into this. All that talk about the future. The Lindens don't look further into the future than their next financial statement. Virtual worlds may be the internet of the future, but with Linden Labs short sighted policies, Second Life is not.

raise price and add tax thats not a strategy its a suicide
and with soo much money invested only 70000 players
thats nothin compared to other mmo
look at blizzard they just reached 11.000.000 players how?
they keep same fee and just add new content that attract more players
i was already sad to see many players leave SL now im thinking on leavin too
so linden team give us a better second life or just give up
theres no good reason that LL keep investing money on somethin that they
arent able to handle and improve

OpenSimulator just did an experiment that allowed a player on an OpenSim (NOT OpenSpace) on one grid to TP to one on another grid hosted by another owner.

The TP was done using a 'Huyperlink' to the other grid/sim.

Maybe the future is to own one sim on SL and many hosted elsewhere?

Just something to think about

If you don't get your inventory transferred between heterogeneous grids, this is just failure.

Who wants to be a newbie again with 5 items in inventory?

If you want to play with this scenario I can set you up in one of the hundreds servers I own which I can just run OpenSIM for you

Trust me, it's not (yet) nice.

Soy

You arrive as a Ruth character with no inventory. The only thing resembling your original avatar is the name, and the fact that you logged in with the same credentials.

No legal way to transfer inventory or other assets. In all cases I have seen, no way to do avatar attachments (which means I can't be a Furry there, even if I manually re-create my entire avatar from scratch).

The last one I checked out didn't even support collisions between the avatar and prims. You could walk on the ground, but couldn't walk on a prim surface, using the default Basicphysycs engine.

The other grids are about as close to SL as a bare wood-lot in the wilderness of the Old West is to a furnished penthouse suite in Manhattan.

Understood but it is a start

You can use a program called 'Second Inventory' to transfer ONLY fully permissive items to other grids. I know that maybe a small percent of your SL inventory.

Once OpenSimulator develops further I can imagine a multi-grid version of SLexchange.com (Xstreet.com now. Maybe this is part of the name change?) that enables creators to sell to different versions of SL and OpenSimulator

The LL monopoly is coming to an end. I hope this is not a panic solution to for coming income loss for them.

Well, Man has lived on the Moon, but I think it's still a bit early to buy a vacation home lot in Mare Imbruum, or overlooking the scenic Tycho Crater...

At the rate they are going, it will be years before the OpenSim and Openlifegrid and similar projects get even vaguely close to what we have now, and LL knows that.

Garth, I do hope your down-scaling goes well. I felt that you were using the OpenSpaces sims quite reasonably, and I have at least one friend who is a tenant on one of your OS sims. Be well, friend.

and even from jack's latest blog of yesterday:

"Thirdly, I wanted to clarify one issue. As mentioned in the post, Openspaces were intended for space, empty areas of ocean or forest. Take a look at the Knowledgebase article description here. By that criteria, the large majority of Openspaces have more going on than was the original intent."

if this was really true, then why raise prims to 3750 per openspace region? lol - no region of empty space, ocean or forest needs 3750 prims, clearly. that, and, how are such regions even useful? how many people really need/want empty sims? very few, at best.

clearly, 6 months ago, they saw this as an opportunity to spike their reported land holdings. as we've all seen, blogs by the new CEO over the past months have boasted about their sqm of land sales doubling, etc.

you can't have your cake and eat it too, LL. i honestly don't mind the price increases. but this ambiguity about openspace use is really troubling.

They changed that? When I tried SI it was only items for which you were the creator.

When I purchased my os sim, I was told I could do "anything I wanted with it". I specifically asked about a place to sell items and was told it was fine! Now my business has grown and I'm finally making enough to cover "most" of my tier, and now I understand my tier will be going "way up"! Now what is my choice?? I'm not paying a higher tier that can't be coved by sales (or almost covered). So, I pack everything up, move off the sim and live in a tree, OR move to the Mainland which I absolutely hate! It's ugly and always looks like its going to rain, and reopen my store there. I don't like either one of these choices! But I have to say one more time "NOBODY TOLD ME THIS"! I'm angry that this information wasn't relayed to me in some way!
Champagnne John

Thank you Garth for this post. I have been so weary of hearing they didnt know...Of course they knew and anticipated this use of these sims. They even gave them more prims than they previously came with. Truth is they wanted to sell thousands of them and they did. Now they want us to pay 125 usd to keep them. End of story LL bites the hand that feeds again and trys to pit resident against resident to take the anger off themselves. If they can make enough people say well good charge the abusers then they will get their money and the illusion of support for doing it.

Oh but wait that hasnt worked to well turns out SL residents are not stupid! Sooo lets change the spin.. now lets talk about "value" If you have a business the land ought to be worth more money cause you have more value.

ughhhh... point is LL needs to stop making sweeping policy and rule and price changes overnight without regard to residents and land owners period. This is one of a series of BAD business moves on the part of LL toward the residents.

1. Flooding the mainland with land without regard to current land owners values
2. Lowering the price of the full sim and thus reducing the assets of estate owners by more than 40% overnight and without warning.
3. Releasing low prim sims with increased prims in lots of 1 not 4, thus requiring many sim owners to trade in full sims for 4 low prims to stay competitive as residents on parcels on full sims fled the parcels in search of more area on the OS sims- and now jacking up the price on those OS sims