Linden - come take your pound of flesh!

IMHO LL did the right thing in the end, stating that they alloud this to happen whilst counting the setup fee's is both true and untrue I doubt LL went to the trouble of checking in on every OS sim every few days to make sure a cottage hadnt popped up and if it had what would they do prove to me somone lives there.

To all the people who have made your money out of unsuspecting residents great if you had any shred of decency in you then your sim wouldnt be getting abandonded you would absorb the tier and take the cut in profit, I say this as from my calculations and I really didnt go round every OS sim to get every price but you guys where making about 40-45$ ish profit per month (not all but the ones I checked) if im not mistaken arnt the habitat sims going up by 50$? so for those of you who arnt making 40$+ a month for doing nada sorry for your loss and I fully expect you will drop your sims as greed is impatient. Please dont get me wrong every business needs profit but 5$ profit to me would still make me happy.

People are still not informing there residents of the new changes that will be comming into force and alowing them to rent large portions of a sim 1/8 at roughly 30-35$ per month. Fortunate for these people I have/am made them aware of the comming situation so they can brace themselves for the price hike or take alternative action.

To the first poster in this thread if your "mainland" rentals have seen an increase from this then thats fantastic news for you and it just shows the negative effect that this has had on genuine mainland rentals who just cannot compete with those prices for land ammount, the thing is you can say to somone all day long its going to be more laggy but compaired to the rest of sl do you think they care? no they would much prefer the larger plot of land and with megga prims well do you think less prims realy matters when you can build a house filling a whole sim with less than 10 prims?.

Personaly I welcome the change as it allows me to reconsider making rentals again which due to the cost of OS was pointless unless I wanted to run at a loss. LL have tried to accomodate everybody who will be effected where did you think the magic 50$ price hike came from? I think you will find they researched what was being charged for these OS including profit and decided to make that what people will find acceptable to pay not the profitiers but the actual residents.

Sometimes you have to accept change and it doesnt always support the big player yes its unfortunate you have loads of money and hence think you should have loads of power but in leaving the OS the way they were you have been cripling small wannabe landlords (this is just one example of how this effects others) who cannot compete with your prices unless they manage to buy a whole sim and then open spaces.

Also like I said LL isnt without blame in this situation and yes they have made a tidy profit from all the setup fee's however they are the main benifactor business here and life sucks they make the rules and we abide by them if you dont like that then you dont have to signup I personally knew OS where never intended for what they ended up being used for after I first read the FAQ about them which is why I never got into them in that way.

So on a final note lets forget the nastyness that has come to pass and move forward with clean bright intentions it isnt the end of the world except for those who where banking on making a million and or paying for your ferari, and to those you will find another loophole to exploit given time.

Feel free to flame away I have a tough hide just remeber would anyone realy care if money wasnt involved?

Even before the announcement (and by the way I do NOT agree the way LL did things) I already knew for months to stay away from clubs and malls on OS sims.

Not to mention I seen hundreds of OS sims rented out to people with a 4.0 bonus prim to it, making the residents 'think' it was a regular sim? And I do mean hundreds.

I really feel sorry for the residents that used them as private islands, those people were maybe to the letter overusing, but not in my eyes.

Personally I would say let the raise stop at 95us, and have a void 75us with half the prim of current OS sims.

Make homesteads and voids both absolutely NON commercial and you're done. Little more support on the homesteads and you have a fair solution in my eyes.

Clubs and Malls on OS or Homestead, that should be fully discouraged or forbidden. Those are the problems. And make it so that bonusprim count as is, cannot be aplied to those sims so that Dubious Estate Owners no longer are given the tools to mislead residents.

Just my 2 cents.

I agree with Benski. A reasonable price raise would be acceptable, but jacking it up to 125 in July is robbery. When your OS is your homesite, and you keep under the prim limit, and you strive to make your OS attractive and fitting to the area, it's awful to contemplate losing that little slice of dream land, and your break from the real world stress. I think that's the hardest part for so many of us. Our OS's are more to us than LL realizes. Or cares about. Our OS is our creative outlet, our little slice of a paradise that's long been lost in real life and we'll never see again. We can recreate it in SL and have a small taste of what will never be again. For others, it's a different fantasy, but it's no less a spot of pure joy in a harsh world.

LL is functioning out of greed to go up to 125/month in July. If it was going to 95 in July, we would have grumbled, but accepted it. Everything is costing more, and we can accept that the same will hold in SL. But 67% is not a cost increase, it's robbery.

And I've left commercial sims that were on OS's. To me, that is abuse. I won't buy from them, and I won't attend any large functions on them. I'd blame them for this, but frankly, I think LL would have done this even if there had been no abuse at all.

Okay, for the sake of argument, let us assume that LL did not even know what their own people were telling people who wanted to buy OS sims.

Did they suddenly notice the correlation between (what they claim) a performance drop and when an OS was on a server?

If yes, they are not a very good service provider that it would take them this long to see a widespread problem.

If no, wouldn't the natural response be to investigate the relation between OS sims (some or all) and lag?

Where is this cliff? Can someone please drop me an LM in-world? Thanks!

okie, let us forbid cars, because there are scams on second hand cars.
Let us also forbit individual houses, and live in dormitories, because the average content of a house is too small.
Yes I agree, let us keep SL free of all thoses creators and all those people who use it!

What you say is true if LL researched they would find out that residents are paying in rent about $125,for some of us less and for some more,many have VAT on top and some have exchange rates to US funds for me that is 22%
So unless LL allows non estate owners to buy homesteads what we will be paying is a lot more than the $125,and that takes it way out of reach for so many.
I think if there has to be an increase, $95 is a lot more reasonable that $125.
And while i agree $125 is way too much,but if non estate owners could buy homesteads then for those of us who rent it is not way out of line with what we have been paying all along anyway

Why would they be checking to see if anyone lived there? Over two years ago LL said it was ok for people to live on such sims, there was therefore no need for them to check that. I have to give credit to Linden Lab's spin machine, they sure have managed to fool people.



If the setup fee had been paid by the new tenant in full, ie if they've paid USD$250 to the estate owner, and then paid USD$40, USD$50 over the top then hey there's a profit. If it had been a straight rental, which is far more likely with the margins you're talking and I certainly don't see many in the price range you talk of, then after 5 months you're still down on the investment. So where is this big profit?



Good, inform residents, also inform them that Linden Lab can't be bothered to include the price increase on their private region pricing page too:

http://secondlife.com/land/privatepricing.php

I hope you have the consistency to do that.

Linden Lab knew what they were being used for, they made them even more attractive to the usage they were being used for by removing previous restrictions.

Of course people didn't have to buy them, but there was a market for them. These type of sims aren't new, they've been here for over two years and have almost from the word go been used for residential usage and LL said that was ok.

LL have acted on abuse, sim owners have been told not to use them for certain purposes.

LL are pretty much completely responsible for this fiasco and they've covered their arses and refused to take responsibility. They were told all along about the way this product was being used, they knew damn well what led to the explosive growth and then they shafted people. It's very bad form.

There were no Openspaces 2 years ago, there were voids which had very different conditions.

Well maybe if LL sold homesteads themselves it would do away with the scammers,true many did not know what they were getting,i had 1875 prims when i got mine and i was fully aware what it was
That is so mean spirited to say if OS renters fold,the better for sl,we all would like a full prim island but many cannot afford that,me included,so is SL to be only for those who can afford it or can anyone with a reasonable charge afford what we all want,a space to call our own
I rented a plot of land when i first came on sl,it was by the ocean, my own little place,but i soon found out there was no privacy,people came and went and i was not allowed to put ban lines up or deny access,it was at that point i found out about OS
While i did'nt like the 1875 prim limit it was still worth it to have privacy.
And i will add my estate owner monitors his sims to make sure they don't degrade the performance of his other OS sims
Don't you feel a little compassion for those who were duped into renting what they thought was a full sim
But LL's answer is to take the price beyond what is affordable for those who found a little peace of heaven on SL
On my homestead only 2 avatars use it, period, and that is my lover and me,we live 3000 miles apart and to spend time and have privacy there is something only those in the same situation can understand
I have spent many hours making our home special,we both could not stand the thought of losing our home on sl,
We all have our own reasons for owning our own piece of land,that is mine

I have had my OS close to a year now and i have never experienced any performance related problems,my estate owner monitors his islands and that is the reason why
I always find it a delight to get back to my OS after visiting many places on sl with all the lag out there

I'm afraid you're wrong about the name

"For those Island/Estate owners wishing to provide empty areas such as water, hills and forest - we are now offering Openspaces, light use regions sometimes referred to as voids. We have run a few test cases, and based on our experiences, this is what we are now able to offer."

/3/d7/107177/1.html

That's from 17th May 2006 so neener neener!

Yes they did have different conditions, but people were asking back then if it was ok to use them as residential rentals when they had less prims, needed to be purchased 4 at a time and couldn't be placed standalone and Linden Lab said "Yes".

How is the OS being "overused" if you only use what you were sold to begin with? How does a server know the difference between a prim made into a wall or a prim made into a tree? What's the difference between the two to a server? Nothing. Nothing at all. It has no difference, so its a bunch of crap that people putting a house on an OS sim were abusing it vs. putting a tree on it. A prim is pretty much a prim. Scripts, that's another issue, but prims, no, sorry, they are not. If I put a tree photo on a prim, cross it with a copy of it and call it a tree for my OS, the server doesn't know the difference or feel any load difference from that vs. my putting two prims together to form a wall.

So, you tell me, how is it abuse to use the 3500 prims you were sold to use? How many times must it be said before some thick people get it? They ALLOWED you to do ANYTHING YOU WANTED ON YOUR OPENSPACE! The caveat was that IF you used it for something other than their idea of a park or water way, you could not get support for it.

There was no list of forbidden ANYTHING for OS buyers and "owners." Period. End of it. So stop with the crap that people were abusing a dang thing, since using what you are sold, ie. a prim count and some land, under the terms they allowed, was perfectly OK.

Seriously, what a crock of crapola shinola. Its not like LL sold the OS sims and said NOTHING BUT FOREST AND WATERWAYS ARE ALLOWED. They didn't do that. People did what they felt they were entitled to do on them so long as they didn't go over their limits, etc. Now LL is crying foul, pitting resident against resident and stepping back to count the cash from the setup fees, which is likely going to be offset significantly by the amount of them being turned back in.

I'd love to see them tell us exactly how many people said, "Get stuffed" and turned them back in. Think they will? Nope.

Please do not fight in the forums.

Please keep this discussion constructive and productive, or I'll have to close it.

Fair enough on the name, but it doesn't alter the fact they were a different product, and if the current discussion is about the product that was available 2 years ago then it's pretty pointless.

Not at all, the seeds were sewn with the original product. This was then made even more attractive to be used as a residential product when the prims were increased and the restrictions to having to buy four at a time were removed, along with the restriction that it had to be placed next to an existing island.

The original product wasn't as attractive, but it was being used for what is now being termed abuse. The idea that the so called abuse took Linden Lab by surprise needs to be challenged, they were used in this fashion from the start and that is very much part of this discussion because Linden Lab have avoided that fact.

Now I personally find it hard to believe that some of the motivation for the changes, most notably allowing them to be placed anywhere, wasn't driven by residential usage. Why else would you place one with water on four sides? This is an important point to the whole issue and it stems from conversations over two years ago, so discussing that is very valid.

Did I miss something? I don't see anyone fighting.

Think you have hit the nail on the head and driven it straight into the coffin of the so called abuse. Of the LL spin machine claiming that OS's were expected to be solely atheistic, to hold a few trees or a sea without avatars or scripts running, as a near void and any actual use was an abuse.

As why would anyone need to put such a sim on its own!!!!!.

This fact alone means that the OS as defined by the product sold by LL since the changes of prims and released restrictions was absolutely expected to be used and its doesn't matter if the users were boaters, ramblers, dances, romancers, hikers, residents, shoppers the cpu usage attached to the use, would on average be the same. 10 AV's boating on a lake with trees and birds on the land around, would be that same as 10AV's dancing in a club, and much more than the 2 AV's living on a island they call home.

SO LETS NAIL THESE LIES FROM LL and say WE BOUGHT A PRODUCT and WE USED IT and THEY JUST WANT MORE MONEY

Somebody shout AMEN out there!

THIS THREAD WAS ORIGINALLY TITLED
Who is waiting for a response?

...........................................................!!
Whoever is playing silly games by trying to rename ppls threads with vindictive sounding names needs to grow the hell up...

also stop deleting perfectly harmless threads like the poll for how many sims were abandoned/converted... or closing others...

you know all this just makes LL look worse and worse and worse and worse.
you ban ppl for what you call bad behaviour but i think its a case of physician heal thyself.

There was a thread with this title though, I wonder if they're merging threads?

Yes that was my thread! and they took it, incidentally! But I have no power to change a thread's name so that is down to 'them'.

i think that is so weird....
looks like mindgames time...

Do you really believe that? If it were true, of course they would be doing their job and trying to make money for their shareholders, but I don't think it's true at all.

I think they sold far more OSs than they expected, and whilst initially they were delighted by the extra revenue, they quickly found that the rapid growth caused problems with their infrastructure, especially given that there was clearly a lot of use of OSs that was not along the lines intended. And if some people were told that residential use was ok, they probably shouldn't have been, we've seen Lindens going off message on policy time and time again.

In my view the huge price rise had only one objective - to slow, and probably reverse, the rapid growth in the number of sims so that technically they could get on top of the problems. They couldn't simply pull the product, so they had to make it unattractive by raising the price. My guess is that all those abandoning sims in high dudgeon and saying "that'll show them" are doing exactly what LL wanted.