Turning in 4th and Last OS today

They closed the other thread? Huh? Seemed like a civil conversation was taking place, that's just silly, a little control-freakish if you ask me.

To answer the last poster on the thread named this that they closed, I setup the rides on my sim called French Quarter that used to be next to Blues Bayou, one of the four OS I turned in to LL. The rides are now kind of crammed together, but they fit and work just fine. Blues Bayou was an extension of the FQ, it was a "park" with some rides on it. I was, as I stated, well under the prim limit of what I was sold. "Rides' are just prims that spin around, and they don't use any more scripting power than a sailboat or other water craft, or a circling shark or other sea creature. The traffic on the closed OS is verifiable by LL, they know it was barely visited and how much load it actually did or didn't put on the servers.

I just don't buy the whole "abused" argument and I won't until LL's can establish to me the manner in which an OS sim knows the difference between a script that spins around a ferris wheel, or a script that makes a shark swim in circles in water sims. Nobody would have said a thing if I had used it for water and put some sea creatures in it (like it did in my other OS water ways) that swam around 24.7. When LL can tell me how the heck a sim's software knows the difference and is impacted more by a prim shaped like the wall of a house vs. a prim shaped like a tree, then maybe I'll give on this. Until then, its just silly.

LL could have avoided all of this by stating an acceptable use policy for Open Space sims that prohibited the use of them for anything other than specific things, not a suggested use for them that stated "no support if you use them for other things." That said to me "put whatever you want on here but if its laggy or giving you trouble, don't bother us unless you've made a waterway or forest. They didn't do that. They sold us 3500 prims to use without restrictions, on a huge plot of land, and told us not to complain if its laggy if we don't use it for water ways or hillsides.

Sorry about the loss of your last OS. It's a hard pill to swallow, I know.

Thanks. I don't get it. There was nothing inflammatory in my other post named this same thing. Nothing that should have caused it to be closed. Some trigger-happy person came through and closed over a dozen threads in here, seems to be the most high-profile threads as well. Look, Lindens, if you want us to shut up about this, shut the whole bloody section down. Otherwise, leave perfectly good threads alone. You're making a bad situation even worse with these silly actions like closing down threads. Nobody gets hurt by a thread staying open. What's your point? Some kind of control thing?

I think they want to give the impression that folks aren't writing about the OS problem anymore and have accepted the situation. But we are a little less naive than that.

It seems that Linden Labs want to silence us. The problem with the Open Sim fiasco is going to hit them really hard soon. They have lost the confidence of good, honest people who were part of a strong community and who Linden were dependent on for the economy generated. Now they have widespread bad publicity. They have caused so much anger and frustration that people are stopping using Second Life and launching worldwide anti Linden campaigns.

The true impact of this will be revealed in around three months time. Its going to hit them hard. Do they realise the world is plummeting into recession? People are losing their jobs, their homes and some even their lives. No one is going to waste money in an environment where they feel ripped off or unsure of.

Very bad move.

Well best I get another post in before Katt closes this one, too. Your point is exactly what I've been thinking. In spite of the downward economy I would have likely held onto these OS sims, but with the global economy sinking like the Titanic, it was really poor timing on LL's part to do this. Besides, if you look at what LL used as an example of an OS sim when they put these for sale at these prices with the prim increase, they were loaded with avatars, prims, scripts running. They themselves were "abusing" the OS sims by their example just as they claimed we all were doing. I've said it before, I'll say it again, this was a bad decision and its going to hurt LLs income and goodwill, and its doing it at a time they really can't afford for it to happen in a global recession.

Sorry to hear you had OS troubles Von and also sorry to hear you are being mistreated by the Lindens on this forum.

They moved the thread where we were discussing the Attorney Generals office as well lol it seems that LL wants to sweep a lot of things under the carpet now and in the years I have been with SL this recent fiasco proves to me that there are some people at LL that just want to quieten the vocal people with thread shutting and suspending.

Its a real shame LL does not listen anymore to its customer base, and NO im not a bloody resident I am a customer

I currently have three OS sims, all were rented to individuals and not split up in any way, yes a couple had lots of stuff on them but no complaints were ever received.

I made no profit from them and in fact rented them out for slightly less than they were costing me, I didn't come into SL to make a profit, just to have some fun.

The first of the three is abandoned today, the others will go over the next couple of weeks if someone doesn't buy them to use as the 'fourth' in a conversion.

I expect to sell my last full sim in the next few days as well, I am so depressed about this whole episode, I will definately be abandoning it if I don't get a buyer.

I expect to change my premium membership to a free one in January, so Linden Lab loses out on all the money I've been paying them.

I suspect that there will be lots of others in the same process.

A great pity, but I guess it was fun while it lasted.

Sorry if I am stepping on any toes, don't mean to offend just want to be sure my conversation doesn't get deleted.

For everyone of you who bothers to post these things here in the forum (turning in OS and other sims, changing to free account, etc), I wonder how many say nothing and do all of this, too. I can only suspect that this is going to have a big economic impact on LL, and I full expect to hear of layoffs there soon given the sour real world economy, coupled with disgruntled customers leaving or reducing their cash contributions to LL. I think the timing was really poor on M's side here, give the dour economic recession around the world. The last thing one should do is upset paying customers who are spending money, their "disposable income" on entertainment such as Second Life.

I'm not ready to abandon Second Life. I love it. I love performing here as a musician, and I enjoy the friendships I've made with people around the world because of it. I make good money for playing shows here. Now I get to keep more of it since it isn't going to tier, having gambled that people would rent those OS's from me. They didn't. Couldn't get anyone interested even at cost. I've used most of the money I made in SL to pay for vocal coaching for my teenaged daughter. Now I can afford more lessons without the weight of these OS's on me. Thanks, LL!

Now, that said I have also ordered a region in another emerging virtual world whose name I dare not speak. As that place matures, I'll perform in both places.

good luck with your sims

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We got our new region on OpenLifeGrid, a region called Metaverse, but the whole thing is a leap of faith investment. Until then, I'm keeping the French Quarter here in SL, and I'm still technically the owner of Gibson Island, though we are the caretakers of it, rather than true owners. Tis a shame they did this with the OS, because we had added some to Gibson Island which houses nothing more than some trees and a few free prim guitars.

I converted 2 openspace sims to one full sim on 31 december and on the 1st january I already got a responce asking if I agreed to pay the 500 usd to make up for not having 4 sims to cenvert, after answering the sims where converted inside an hour, yes lindens worked on newyears day and fast too, some do still care.

I just don't understand their thinking. At one time they were getting $37 a month from me. Now, they're getting nothing and I live in a sandbox. $37 is chump change to Jack and M Linden but it's a lot to me.
I will NOT pay the same amount for 1/4th the product. It was stupid of them to assume that I would.

I agree. They were getting around $500 a month from me until December 7th ... now they get nothing. I don't even go in world anymore and I know there are hundreds of others who don't. They closed down my main alt account because I was a little too vocal for their likes!

World of Warcraft is a great deal of fun ))

If that's a stupid assumption, how would you characterize assuming that they'd continue offering a product that was losing money?

Funny. I thought it was because all the Openspaces were overloaded with scripts and prims.

They weren't losing money. If they were why wasn't that what they claimed in the first place?

"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. Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems. 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. 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.

We need to therefore take some steps to improve their performance and better reflect their actual usage levels in our pricing so that we can maintain the best performance level for everyone. As a result, we will be implementing a pricing change effective January 1st along with some policy changes effective immediately." ~ Jack Linden

Funny, over 2000 sims go belly up and performance is still in the pits. Go figure. =(

Don The Hobo

They weren't losing money, they might argue that the time in support meant they weren't making as much profit as they'd like but there's no way they were losing money, it was only in July that they were positively creaming themselves about growth with the product.

They may even have forecast that if they kept growing at the rate they were then the infrastructure wouldn't cope.

The way this was handled suggests they wanted rid of a number of Openspaces and they achieved that.

They were never losing money. What they were losing was the ability to control load, quickly! Eventually it would have become like an arms race owners using more than their share of cpu time and LL having to increase the number of servers to offset the load. You can see, in this scenario, LL would have lost. But under there initial offerings, they lost no money!

So Ciarran is convinced OS as it was was profitable, but LL wanted to get rid of them anyway (why?), and Cappy says they were initially profitable but were doomed to become unprofitable.

Isn't it more plausible that LL was pleased to see growth in something they believed was profitable, but that as it scaled they discovered that OS--as it was actually being used in bulk--was not?

And that the restructured offerings are designed to restore profitability while meeting the needs of two very different use cases?

If the original OS--used as it was actually being used before the restructuring--really was profitable, surely LL would want to do more of it rather than less.

The scaling is likely the key issue, the growth of the product was outgrowing the ability to scale which would have meant that profit would not have met increased support needs. The issues were around performance and support, which impacts the grid as a whole. Now eventually you have a big big problem if you keep going in that direction, so Linden Lab did something about it before it was too late.

As Cappy points out, one way of meeting the needs of scaling would have been to bring in more servers, which would probably have been in a situation where 2 or 3 Openspaces were running to a core instead of the current position of 4. That is definitely an issue that would have impacted profit.



They have less customers now, the revenue stream at this point in time is unlikely to be much above what it was before the restructure, they have spare servers, maybe being used on projects like Blake Sea? One of the products being offered is a steaming pile of pants, hence how few people opted for it.

They'd also like 200,000 concurrent users, but they can't support that at the moment. They'd like more of everything, but that costs money, there comes a point where moving to a better infrastructure is cost prohibitive and it's likely that Linden Lab saw that when they decided to bite the hand that feeds them.

The second price hike won't happen unless there's a big demand for homestead products in the coming months, when again they'd be in the position of needing to invest to support demand. These price hikes, whether by design or not, put a lid on growth of the product.

And there's no reason to want to grow a product that's not profitable.

What emerges is that some significant fraction -- perhaps the majority -- of the people who were loading up the OS sims with avs, prims, and scripted objects were not willing to pay enough for what they were getting to make it genuinely profitable. The market was driven by very soft, marginal demand created by what was ultimately discovered to be a money-losing price structure.

And as the performance tanked the support costs went up, up, up and the profit went negative.

Check Zee's July Economy post, they were profitable alright.



Not whilst they were running four to a core, Linden Lab have a healthy markup on both upfront costs and tier. Their iditotic billing system that allowed an estate owner to transfer billing to someone else was a problem, but that was one that could have been dealt with by disallowing the practice.

They could also have enforced their "We won't support you if you do x" policy.

Bottom line is that Linden Lab couldn't support the demand and decided to stifle said demand. That worked, it was a bad move in terms of customer relations.

Absent support in the server software to enforcing them automatically (which is now on the way, a development cost they would have preferred to avoid and which has already interfered with bug-fixing), enforcing the policies manually falls somewhere between expensive and impossible.

I don't see anything in Zee's July post that proves OSs were profitable, by the way. Just that they sold a bunch of them. You don't recoup a loss per unit by increasing volume. And costing computer services is *hard*, I used to manage staff that did it...it doesn't surprise me at all that it took a while to figure out it was ultimately a loser.