A response from Caledon.

Desmond,

You sound like a very responsible estate owner that has a sound business plan, and back up plan if you need one. If there only more people like you in SL then we might not be seeing as much crying over the price raises as we are now.

Nice post Desmond, if anyone can weather this it is Caledon, I suspect things will balance out in the end eventually , as a lot of the chaff is weeded out, Land is too cheap and plentiful for the amount of people on the grid it seems.
I would like to see the old spec voidsims back with only 1400 prims, so used as they were supposed to be, with only one tennant at best.

I do not question the intentions behind Desmond's post at all. I am not jealous either, although I would openly admit that I could only have dreamed of achieving what he has achieved, which is, frankly, truly amazing.

I would also like to say that I agree with other posters, in that Desmond really is a bright light in this community, and that everything he says is incredibly sincere, genuine and well considered.

In that case I apologize for my characterization of your post. I guess communicating in this form is bound to have limitations.

.d

Similar position, 2 of my residents quit SL the day the announcement was made they were so dismayed. They both had a few weeks of rental left on their OSs but just didnt want any more to do with it. I have shut both those down.
I have the money to keep them running should I want to but actually...I dont want to any longer. I have also had enough.
The rest of the residents are wearing the increase and I shall keep running their sims but as each gets vacated in the future I shall shut them each down.
I am fully expecting another fee increase for full prim sims and mainland at some date in the not too distant future and am looking around at all the other options now available on other grids even though they arnt as developed yet...it will only be a matter of time.

I think Desmond has a good bead on this thing. He's one of the most astute estate owners I've met--we have no business interests, btw, I say that purely out of admiration.

Basically, this is poorly done LL engineering analysis, followed by poorly done LL business analysis, followed by a poorly thought out LL business decision, followed by poorly done LL communications and public relations. All of this violates fundamental engineering practices, i.e, go to your user base first.

Linden Labs, admit you made a mistake, fall back, and come up with an acceptable proposal.

Desmond, hold the line. I'm with you.

I thank everyone for the kind comments, and just wanted to briefly mention something now that we see that the openspace announcement will be revisited by a blog post tomorrow.

* * * * *

We are supposedly dealing with intelligent, clear-eyed individuals making these decisions. I can only assume that when they make significant, deal-changing statements they mean what they say and appreciate the implications.

These are executives ostensibly hired because they are skilled at the art of business, and paid very well for it with our money. Not used car salesmen, not twenty-two year old night managers of pizza delivery, not drunken uncles one apologises for at parties.

That said, whatever statement comes along will undoubtedly be their most carefully considered, measured response.

If the statement is not very, very appropriate to the situation at hand, I think this will fall into the category of 'fool me twice, shame on me' for many of us.

I look forward to not being disappointed.



If anyone remains interested, I shall write something here afterward once I get a sense of things.

Looking forward to it, you're one of the smartest of the bunch.

I'll just say that I'm interested and leave out all the sucking up this time.

The new & revised plan makes me pretty sad. I don't think I've ever been this down on LL before.

Mme. Tsure,
Methinks madame does not recognise sarcasm when madame sees it.....



Msr. Shang,
And awaiting Desmond's response to the "New Deal" being offered. Which for most OS landowners bears a striking resemblance to the old deal, but with 6 months more before the price increases take full effect.....and more limits on the old "homestead".

Regards,

Fogwoman Gray

Thanks Desmond for your stand of a large estate owner , and leader of one of the large successful communities in SL.


I am not dumb, and I long ago remarked the closeness between Caledon and IBM. You will not say more, but what I can say is that there is a close relation between those who come in SL to 1) have a life experience or their dream world, and those who 2) come to represent their company business, for down to earth purposes.

And this relation is: why should companies represent themselves in Second Life, if there would be not the first category to see them??? By expelling openlands owners (this is the result of their action) LL expels contents providers and communities who make the interest of SL, making just pointless to go in. No dreamers, no inworld businesses. No content, no visitors. No visitors, no customers for RL businesses in SL. What will remain??? Only IBM??? But IBM don't need Linden labs if they really want to do business meetings in a virtual world. This is already possible in other places.

I would like to do here a somewhat off topic remark, but this is probably the best place for it.

Now that LL has itself clearly demonstrated that they are not a reliable business partner (for nobody, dreamers or companies) many wonder if they are going into other platforms. Unfortunately, there is no real equivalent of SL yet.

Anyway to design such a platform is a complicated task, requiring a team of engineers with quality assessment people, ergonomy people, user relation people, and even some dreamers or Elves, to account with all the needs.

It also entails to put in place some norms, in order to have interoperability between the different platforms, justt like in the 2D web all the sites are written with the same language.

And only a large company like IBM is able to do this, together with the W3C to put forward norms. (Google could do also, but their Lively is just a joke compared to SL). I would even mean a consortium of companies.

Some norms or services to put in place:

-a new fast internet protocol, establishing a small bandwidth but fixed channel instead of sending packets at random. Useful for close movements, like fight, or remote control in industry, which require a fixed and guaranted ping.

-a new 3D internet protocol, using both http and the previous, which could be taylorable with an object-like definition

-a normalized (or at least adaptable) viewer

-a third party RL identifity checking of users, the only efficient way to curb griefing and other abuses

-an intergrid TP system

-a common asset management for the avatars and avatar clothes

-and some others


If somebody wants to reply to this, please open a new thread in a more appropriate place, or drop an IM to me in world.

After reading yesterday's updated announcement, I sat in silence a bit and decided to do the most useful thing I could think of: shut up and listen to what other people were saying for a while. In fact, the very move that would have dulled or prevented this public relations nightmare in the first place, had it been done.

As such I've read a lot of the comments here, and also answered reams of email, and talked to people in my estate and beyond. We had another short meeting last night about all this - the third in a week.

* * * * *

Here's what I'm hearing.

1) "Dealbreaker." I heard this word a number of times, particularly with respect to the Homestead regions. Most critically, few can tolerate the 20 avatar limit. Rarely do people need to exceed this. But being prevented from *ever* doing it is the dealbreaker. Those larger events are the reason communities are there in the first place.

2) There has been a loud message to me from many, stating that Caledon should consider leaving the main grid, along with some of her sister communities. I'm going to be quite clear: Caledon is not leaving the main grid. Nor am I one to threaten 'we shall leave' or any of that nonsense. There is a point to be made, though: ultimately the overall community decision isn't mine - I can't *make* people stay. Some have fears that private estates are now viewed as mere revenue-takers instead of partners. I've asked everyone to stay calm and see how the chips fall.

* * * * *

Solutions.

First, a possible answer to the 'dealbreaker' issue mentioned above - if it's technically feasible.

I think the answer lies in allowing estates to put all their regions on the same servers, thus allowing them to manage their own resource use.

For instance, region A holds their 50 avatar event at 6p, region B holds their event at 10p - and everything's pretty much okay even if one region impacts the other a bit. It's exceedingly rare that both regions would have an event that size at the same time. This is in fact exactly what happens now, except that we impact other people's regions across the grid instead of just our own.

Let us impact our own regions, and transparently show residents which regions share. This should assist both ultra light use regions and the larger homesteads. Singly owned regions might be able to break through the fixed avatar limits as well, if 'server buddies' are allowed via support ticket, or ultimately the land store estate settings. Share a server with friends to trade off peak resource usage, and get relaxed limits.


Second, the pricing. Here I am at a total loss, as I can't see the books at Linden Research. They will have to make a decision regarding user retention and price point - and fast.

I cannot help them in this, except to say that it won't matter too much either way if the decision is slow in coming.

Every day is a battle for hearts and minds, and people remember how they are treated for a very, very, very long time.

Do you actually think LL will do any of this? (In particular reconsider pricing, as you seem to suggest they might).
-To me, the latest blog looked very much like a "The highest instance has spoken, so there is no appeal. Now deal with it"-statement.

I've been waiting to see what would happen with all of this, as I was thinking of purchasing an opensim myself for a while there. I am very glad I did not. The biggest hit, in my opinion, is that the new limits of 10 avatars and 750 prims renders the entire sim unusable for even the original intended use. This means no boating events, no swimming events, nothing. Unless I am misunderstanding and the open sims are intended only to be viewed from a seperate sim.
s for the Homesteads, this seems a feasable option to some of us, but I will be looking forward to seeing what all of the limits are. In the end, I think that Desmond's idea that openspace sims in a given region should be served by the same server, instead of randomly assigned. This seems the most viable compromise if we do have to accept the restrictions of 750prims and a 10 avatar limit.
For my part, I think that a true solution would be to simply roll back the prim limits to the 1875 that the sims originally were at, to keep the prices at that level and implement reasonable script caps and an avatar limit of 20. With no subleting. The new Homestead idea is a great one, however, I believe it should be the one standing at 3750 prims and an avatar limit of 30. Subletting allowed.

Desmond, the new deal of M linden is:

-openspaces will be renamed "homesteads", with still the 66% price hike, and about the quarter of capacities of a ful sim (limiation in avs, prims, scripts)

-a new product is offered, called openspace, but with a ridiculous 750 prims and 10 avs.

-no mention of grouping sims.

So the proposal of M Linden changes nothing of the one of Jack Linden, just some words are exchanged.

Some of this is technically and procedurally difficult, Desmond. That is not to say that it's not a great idea or that it's not possible but it is worth mentioning and keeping in mind.

LL actively does not want regions that are close to each other on the grid to be close to each other on the physical hardware. If this were to change, a rolling restart of a server failure would mean that all Caledon (or big chunks of it) would all go away instead of only one region.

It seems like this would be additional work on LLs provisioning end - they would need to add some new inputs to the land store that let you specify which regions you wanted on the same server.

There would also probably need to be changes to the sim code itself so that it can understand that it should stay in a neighborhood rather than take the first available sim slot.

I'm sure there are other areas that would need to change, too.

If they went for this, LL would probably require that you do it in even multiples of the number of sims on a core. Like, if you want this capability on your full sims, you have to do it 4 sims at a time so they don't have partially filled servers. For openspace and homestead, I'd guess they'd require at least a multiple of 4 but they might insist on 16.

I do like this idea but I suspect they won't even respond to it - this just smells too much like they are only trying to maximize profile (750 prims, my furry ass!) and really have no interest in making the needed engineering/procedure changes, just so us residents are happy.

I don't know what Linden Research or the users will do.


If I had to guess, I'd say the following might happen:

1) residents holding on through winter

2) deeply serious land market shakeout in late spring

3) growth stalls hard.

At which point, recovery will mean that we shall have to decide if we are the primordial metaverse of the future, or a more cool version of The Sims Online.

* * * * *

I've carefully read what M had to say, and the knowledgebase; also, I've contacted and got feedback from Company technical staff last night - a purely tech discussion, before I ever wrote anything here.

It's *possible* to cluster regions on servers by owner, but isn't done now. It may or may not be *feasible* to do so. That's the question.

Regarding difficulty: I used to run an engineering department that produced hardware, firmware and software as a matter of course - and I personally scheduled roughly a dozen projects across seven development teams at once, as a matter of regular business. I spent a decade myself doing nothing but software. From that perspective, it has little to do with difficulty. Difficult things are done every single day, utterly unseen by residents. It's about budgets, timing, desire to do it, and seeing if it meshes with other long term goals. There are even better solutions possible, given enough time.

Clustering regions by owner might be unfeasible. But it seems that the current options are unfeasible too, if you listen to what people are saying here.

I mentioned this at an office hour with Jack and it was indicated that it wasn't possible, my thinking then was that a responsible estate owner with four openspaces could manage the estate properly if they were all clustered together. I even suggested it might be an option people would pay a few bucks more for. A few isn't fifty but that's a different point.

/me adds "given our pricing change and the reasons we gave for doing it" to the end of that line.

<sarcasm>
I don't know... The whole reason for these changes were the performance problems with opensims. Considering that they had to scale them back to 4 x 750 prims as compared to 1 x 15000, it tells us that a full 80% of their processing power is eaten by the sheer overhead of running four sims in parallel.
Perhaps this computing thing *is* really difficult for them.
</sarcasm>

~afternoon, Thurs 6 Nov 2008 ~


I've been quietly thinking about this whole thing for some time now, and want to mention something on a personal level.

Last year, there had been mention of increasing the prices on older regions to 295/month, from 195/month - a move which would have devastated Caledon at the time. Perhaps killed it; much as I'd like to I can't work 30+ hours a week for free.

I called in, talked to some execs and discussed my concerns. No threats, no promises... and when the smoke cleared there were no price hikes.

It made sense. Growth stayed fairly strong and I was a small part of that - I would presumptuously daresay that Caledon retains residents better than a lot of places. If history is any indication, I've watched growth this year pretty closely. Prices are simply too high for growth. Future gains are being sold to make good numbers today.

Yeah, I've seen the 'happy' stats - but I know inflated numbers when I see them. The grid is crawling with bots and campers - of *course* user hours and concurrency are slowly climbing. I know the land business, and as anyone who actually uses the grid knows, the land market has slid badly aside from openspace sales.

* * * * *

That smart move - the Company not raising rates on my original regions last year by 100 USD/month each - is why I came here, poking at the forums, emailing, calling, trying to work something out. Though it irked me a bit that I'd even have to fight for anything last year.

We are residents and customers. *They need to fight to keep us.*

I've said enough, as have we all. They have my email if they want to use it.

I feel like I've just learned something the hard way.

~ * ~

Very true!

If the LL business model is dependent on keeping or even increasing the current price level while expecting significant growth at the same time, we all have interesting months ahead of us indeed.

This is plain and simple poor leadership from the top. The lack of response is baffling. It would be nice to just feel appreciated.

Desmond, I also want to once again call for a consortium - I know you initially declined. Sometimes leaders are drafted for great causes - I think you would be a great spokesperson/leader for an Estate owners group. I am willing to help all I can but I believe many here believe you can lead it.

Think about it