HYPOCRISY and lack of clear policy

Linden Lab is currently THEMSELVES filling open space sims with content. If they do not expect the people buying the sims to do this, then there should be clear guidelines to tell their residents what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable use... they should not simply up the monthly rate without warning or consultation.

This is such a stupid and negative way of dealing with the problems, that I am completely astonished. It you had wanted to find a way to offend and alarm a huge number of people and turn them from supporters to enemies, you couldn't have done better.

This hike in monthly charges from $75 tp $125 may well be jusified by the damage that overloaded openspace sims is doing, but it would be far better to offer people guidance about what constitutes fair and appropriate use of these sims, and the chance to conform with the policy, or the option to go onto the higher tier and continue to overload the sims. As it is, you have simply walloped everyone with the same changes, without consultation.

And you should, at the very least, be offering people leadership by using the sims appropriately yourself.
Caliandris

Try my new drug.... I made it better than before...... OOO but you are not supposed to enjoy it. Now that you are enjoying it you must pay more.

Squeeze it for every drop. Give nothing.

Shakes head.

Grandfathering laws in the State of California are well established.

I expect that LL will ask their legal consul about the impact to their bottom line by suits alleging that the quashing of Grandfathering in already existent rental agreements will prove more expensive than maintaining legal precedence? When and if an open space rental is dropped by the region owner, is the legitimate time to recant any further stabilization of current rental prices... merely making a statement that no grandfathering will be enjoyed, is asking for trouble! I personally will fly to California and add my voice to others seeking recourse through the courts, and others will too.

Second, if there is a rent increase, it is only rationalized by the claimed discovery of certain sim's increased bandwidth usage. But then the blog goes on to say, that not only will more money be charged for that increase, but that LL will take measures to reduce or restrict said 'extra' usage 'in addition'?! A BETTER alternative is to charge for actual bandwidth usage, not to make blanket and sweeping claims. Charge people a LOW base fee and then like any California utility, calculate the amount of load a particular sim has on the system as a whole, or within its processor cluster. Establish a standard guideline of usage and rates, and then we will pay for more megabytes of bandwidth per month. Charging everyone an increase because 'some' are stressing the system, is wrong.

Again, that sort of policy has been struck down many times in California courts. For instance employers cannot extort from all employees partial restitution of bulk sums stolen by one or more employees, ...that is simply illegal. California laws have traditionally supported victim claims when such predatory pricing guidelines are pressed. LL will be forced in court to show how a specific user, over used a publicly posted bandwidth... it will NOT be acceptable to merely say, "all users are a single class, some users are exceeding our internal bandwidth thresholds, and thus all users will now pay".

Unlike $2.00 intellectual property violations, people will fly in and petition from other courts for this one...

LL is overstepping its authentic possession of control over this monopoly market. IF we could take all our prim descriptions, scripts, textures, etc... and step over to another server... then fine, they might get away with this... but as a monopoly service that has us ALL trapped in a 'use or lose' situation... I believe the courts will be very lenient in their decisions, for the victims of this effort to extort excessive fees from the entire open space rental base!

Caution to LL!

tralalala.... wow... first advertise and sell thousends ...... than recalculate the rent... oh my.. my holiday is paid now

exactly where openspaces AREN'T designed for!! "with my partner AND some friends..."

low use ?????

Example of Linden Lab OpenSpace sim
/354/1d/289652/23.html#post2194218

The way the sims are used has nothing to do with it. That's a scapefurry. Can't you see that LL is trying to achieve exactly this, us accusing each other instead of them? Doesn't anyone remember the Pastrami tactic, i.e. telling people that the WindLight-enhanced client only lags like hell because other residents are ruthless enough to wear prim hair and shoes?

This is just the same. My god, there are people who use OS sims for more than just a pretty backdrop of a regular sim! Geez, how could they build anything but empty waterspace in there, they weren't supposed to use the 3750 prims we allowed them! And they even let people into those sims, who'd have thought anyone could be so utterly inconsiderate! But theres an easy solution, money can fix everything. Yeah, right.

There can't possibly be any misuse of OS sims.
- Prims: OS sims have 1/4 of the prim count of regular sims. 16 OS sims = same max. prim count as 4 regular sims.
- Scripts: Same here, a regular sim can be filled with 15,000 scripted objects, an OS sim only with 3750 scripted objects.
- Visitors: If that was a concern, LL could easily fix it by limiting the number of visitors to, say, 10 at a time. But they chose not to take this easy step that would really have increased the overall performance. Instead they chose to increase the tier, which will do nothing at all to resolve the problem. It will only fill LL's bottomless pockets and has the nice side effect of making mainland more attractive again, so the real reason for the price increase should be more than obvious.

What is the point of having a 3750 prim limit if you aren't allowed to use it?
ok, but:
A regatta is going to impact performance far more than most houses. A "scenic wooded area" with wildlife, sound, and poseballs is going to be higher prim and texture load than most residences. The first open space sims I saw were for surfing - surely a sim full of scripted waves and a dozen surfers is a whole lot more expensive than two avs in a house.

I fail to see how the policy change will address the performance problems. My prediction is that the new policy will drive out the sims that are actually low impact (because they weren't for profit in the first place) and retain only the high-impact sims (because resource abuse isn't addressed and leaves it still a bargain for for-profit concerns).

I agree. The supposed problem and justification for the price increase is traffic, not prims or scripts. Openspace sim servers have to deal with the exact same number of prims or scripts than regular servers, due to the prim limit of 1/4 of what a normal sim has.

But even in case of traffic - "a stretch of open water for boating". A regatta with 20 people or a club filled with 20 people, it's just the same. I too can't see any practical difference between what LL intended the sims to be used for and what people do use them for.

Exactly. Besides, the people who bought or rented an OS sim were fully aware that the performance might be spotty at times. I was aware of that. Sometimes when I walk though my house, I walk on the spot for a moment. But hey, it's an OS sim, I don't expect it to run as smooth as my main sim. If people actually had the choice between lag and higher tier, I'm sure they'd choose the lag. They already did when they decided for an OS sim, that's why they bought it instead of a full sim.

hi Caliandris
can u let me know what are the land/s u r referrin' to? i mean when u say "Linden Lab is currently THEMSELVES filling open space sims with content. "..
plz let me know
Rael

Well, there is additional overhead for running the sim infrastructure 4 times on the same CPU. I just dont see that the proposed solution will help.
True, though 1/4 the default limit would be 10 avs... and I'm willing to live with that. What is really killing us, though, is that open space sims area allowed the same limits as full sims, and can up their limit to 100, which is just insane with the current architecture (regatta or club).

I'd love to keep billing the same, and automatically migrate OS sims to be CPU co-resident with similar resource-users - perhaps not optimal use of resources, but an neat social engineering approach, ending with high performance idyllic parklands and totally unusable resource abusing sims.

Absolutely right,the renters who use it for personal use are the ones who will suffer with the increase,the ones who use them for profit will just keep going cos they can afford it
So they punished the people who used them properly by raising prices beyond what they can pay ( and of course the estate owners profit on top of the projected rise in tier)
To tell the truth i never realized i could go above the prim limit,but it seems many did,i would'nt anyway
This price increase just so wrong on so many levels,and hurts too many people
I could manage the $95 and all things being equal i could afford that.
Of course we are just discussing the so called abuse theory here,there are so many theories as to why LL did this increase