Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

LL now creates a "lottery" to give out one, or maybe a few, big rewards for innovation. So first take a few million US$ and then handout a tip. I can see it only as another "insult of intelligence" to SL residents.

There is only one way LL can turn around the disaster they created:
- Admit the burden (overuse) was not widespread or even true at all
- Turn back the total announced price changes
- Say they are very sorry
PLUS
- State in clear words they will make no changes, that impact existing residents, anymore without getting a mayority-vote for it.

Then maybe over time, trust will restore if indeed LL actions can be seen holding to this.
I am afraid it requires a total replacement of management as the arrogant attitude and total under-estimation of the SL population, seems to be baked into this company.

As communication in BOTH directions and making the right descissions was never the strongpoint of this company, I see a sad and short future for SL.

I hope to see you all again in a new world in which I am sure choosing names will be more free but probebly the last name Linden is banned from choosing

I saw a very good remark somewhere that covers a lot:

Linden Lab should adjust their claim: "Business Platform" to "Entertainment Platform".

This ofcourse because it is now very clear that it is impossible to create a healthy business plan for Second Life even if you think short-term.

Prepare for the announcement soon after that says they have been hard at work on improving operating levels

How long has it been since the last post by Jack or M on this total blunder ?

knock knock .....

who's there ....

Its Linden Labs.....

Linden Labs who ?

(Insert deafening silence here on important topics while they pat themselves on the back for giving away $10k ) .....

Replaced, yes (well, maybe), but it is still less than they would have when those new people arrive.

I speculate that before the end of november the drop in islands will exceed 2 k as peoples billing starts to come due and by EOM december. i expect that open sims will be reduced to at least 1/3 of the 15000 that where originally purchased.. and the total number of islands reduced from 26,000 to around 18500 total island or less. that would be 5000 open sims and the rest full sims.


Now lets see if my guts right book marks my prediction.


Now before people go crazy ... take into account that an unknown number of them will convert back to full sims since thats a 4 to one reduction from combining islands, 10000 islands converting to full sims would be 2,500 full sims, i figure 5000 will suck up the price increase give or take... and 10,000 dropped or converted to full sims. The numbers i put up top, does not take into account any dropped or released sims, so the number could easly swing to much lower then what i am predicting.



Since there are so many unknows its not possable to accuratly speculate any loss off actual LL income, only LL will know by the loss of islands due to drops and any numbers on the stats page is not accurate due to the possability of the islands combining.


So in short... don't judge the book by the cover.. .the negative numbers on the number of islands don't necessarily mean anything. If you see LL jumping through hoops to make things right... then you know that the loss is worse then they had expected.

Right now they are not talking.... and thats a clear sign they don't even give us the dignity of having our opinions listened too.. essentially don't give a damn what we say and will do what they want and if we don't like it... we can go.

The "wealthier" will survive. With this move, LL has targetted those on a limited budget.


It did. Thousands of content creators stopped or reduced their SL IP investment. Sure, millions more joined SL (which is what LL were banking on) ... but had both lots been creating, we'd have a hell of a lot better content than we do.
At the moment, we get :
1) new talented users joining
2) learning SL's creativity tools
3) seeing the potential for making some half-decent return on hard-work
4) creating some excellent IP
5) IP gets stolen and is sold full-perm by theives
6) Now semi-pro Content creator scales down their IP productivity after hard lessons learned
Thats the lifecycle tools like copybot introduced to SL. And now even scripts are copied.

So sure there is lots of new IP being created, but the really talented and experienced creators are not doing a fraction of what they could. All it takes is one of their large investments in IP to be ripped to 'turn-them-off', and as we all know this happens constantly.


Upcoming? .... then something like Mwituni ( ) is better than point-for-point, and while there's no news updates on the website about it, as I understand from an 'inside source' it is progressing very well.

We don't know that yet. All we know is it's got a good engine. It's not the engine that makes SL what it is, nearly as much as policy... and no matter how daft LL can be at times, they're the only ones to get that bit right.

Huh?


Expain that one, cause 99% of the time they don't follow their own rules and guidlines... you know lead by example as they say... what good are policies if you don't follow them your self.

Their use of Openspaces for example.... need I say more...


Its like my dads old rule of the roost...


Do as I say, not as I do.

You need to read more Neal Stephenson. In particular I think there's some parts of The Diamond Age that are particularly apropos.

A bad policy followed to the letter is still a bad policy. A good policy that is occasionally ignored is still far better than a bad policy. And, really, the absolutely worst examples you can come up with of LL doing things that look pretty damn daft from out here... and the OpenSpace debacle is far from the first... the very worst things they've done are far better than you can expect from the likes of Sony... and I've seen no indication that any of the other names people bring up as potential candidates are going to follow a significantly different policy than THAT.

For example, from the point of view of content creators, the REAL worst thing LL has done was to ignore the clear notice in X-Flight that it was not supposed to be for general distribution, and use it in their own freebies. And when it was pointed out to them, they promptly withdrew the X-Flight scripted content they were aware of. If they hadn't done that it would have been a terrible precedent for everyone creating scripts, textures, animations, or anything else for which the SL DRM scheme is inadequate.

That's following a good policy, even if not always to the letter, and making good when you stumble.

Who is "we"? You may not, I do. Some others might, most others not. As for the engine I'll tell you that is not a given - there is a possibility that will change too, as they are looking at more efficient streaming as well as support of lower-end hardware (nice to know there are cutting-edge projects out there considering these low-end users), MAC support etc which has been big requests - but the engine will always be way past SL graphics (as realistic environments is a requirement), and large natural landscapes (which OS's hinted at in their short life ... but never delivered either) the norm - because of the intuitive 'islands' : bye-bye 256x256, and hello sailable 'ocean' between islands (in what appears to be no-mans land ... after all its all virtual isn't it?).

Well enough ... or I'll be told off for advertising competition or something stupid ... which may not be too bad a thing (as it'll at least bring some LL input on this blog) ... btw: just remember I only answered a request for info on alternatives we know of.

BTW: You bring up a point : What exactly does make SL what it is? When you analyse it, its obviously a massive investment in manhours which small developers battle to compete with (not saying they always need too - typically smaller shops are 100 times more efficient than the giants), but what really makes SL what it is, is the you's and I's in SL, and the tens of thousands of users LL kicks out with dumb-ass moves like this.


LOL

For my own peace of mind, I wanted to reply to anyone saying mainland sims
are "only" 195/mo of income for LL.

Let's assume each plot I'm about to list is not the free 512 each premium is
allowed and use just base tier rates for mainland.

If a sim is split up according to all one type of parcel, here is LL's income...

00512m2 128plots 005.00tier = $640.00/month
01024m2 064plots 008.00tier = $512.00/month
02048m2 032plots 015.00tier = $480.00/month
04096m2 016plots 025.00tier = $400.00/month
08192m2 008plots 040.00tier = $320.00/month
16384m2 004plots 075.00tier = $300.00/month
32768m2 002plots 125.00tier = $250.00/month
65536m2 001plots 195.00tier = $195.00/month

So it's a bit disingenous to say they only charge 195/mo for mainland sims.
The case of 1 owner only is fairly rare I'd guess compared to the case of say
all 1024's or all 2048's for example. Anecdotal, I know...but I'd be willing to
bet that's the case in actuality.

Just wanted to clarify the mainland earnings. With this information, it should be
fairly clear what LL's true aim is... and has been stated by many people in this
thread so far... drive out OS owners so the servers can be used for more mainland.

Just my opinion...

(not even going to mention the potential of auction price inflation on the
new mainland on these servers...bleh... another can of worms entirely)

You're partially right but your own figures are too straight too. The truth lies somewhere in a middle. I own land spread across several sims so LL's take isn't going to be based on my 2048M parcel at the standard rate but how it relates to a percentage of a full sim and that's the case for several parcel owners.

However yes, Linden Lab will often yield more than USD$195 for a mainland sim but I doubt they ever yield USD$640 and I wouldn't think it often goes over USD$300.

Yeah my guess is that private island pricing is in line with their "average"
mainland earnings. So approximately $300/month.

"We" is everyone on the outside. "They" (or apparently "you" are the people on the inside.

All "we" have to go on is what is public information. And all the public information "we" have is that it's going to have a better engine than SL. Well, just about everything out there has a better physics and graphics engine than SL, so that's neither surprising nor useful information.

What's useful information would be: what will you be able to do in-world, what kinds of editing and creating tools will there be, what kinds of restrictions will there be on content, and so on.

If you have better information, and you can reveal it without violating any agreements you've signed, please let us know. If you can't, then "we" have to stick with what we *can* find out.
One way to answer it would be to look at what SL has that the other systems people keep bringing up don't. Which is where I'm coming from... what I see is that SL encourages you to build stuff, by giving you tools, by setting policies that encourage people to WANT to create (and it's not just the DRM by any means), by making the building process immersive... a natural part of the world, and so on.

And, yes, the SL permissions model *is* a digital rights management system.

Well you toss Sony out there..... they are a perfect example exactly of what having a policy of not listening to your customers does for you.. how many games have they taken and ruined so far LOL and they "used" to have several millions of active accounts in each the various different games they have.

Now look towards blizzard who has and still maintains the crown above all others. they are the 300 pound gorilla of gaming everyone shoots to bring down.

This openspace thing shows a lot of things about the LL company.

a) They have a policy of greed first, problems second.

as pointed out in many previous posts. If the real issue was hardware limitations and they needed to change from 4 sims per core to 3.... they would need to raised prices 25 dollars a open space to compensate for the loss of one sim per cpu..

If they are reducing it to 2 per cpu then double the prim count call it a half sim and charge 150 a month....


to try and state that it costs more to run openspaces then a normal sim with the identical hardware is a rediculous claim at best.


Where did the 125 number come from... its does not fit into any logical place in their pricing for what they charge per cpu for any other land and they have no plan to resolve any of the so called issues.



b) they are not in the policy of being truthfull.

First they tell us these forums are a discusion. carefully picking only questions about the new policy and only 4 or so of them.. is not communications..

Lack of communications well is going to likely cost them lots of customers cause its extreemly disrespectfull to tell someone your going to be some place and not even bother showing up or calling to cancel...

Sony if nothing else they at least made good on conversations.. they may not have acted on what people had to say but at least you knew they where listening.


c ) They are in the policy of pointing the finger, rather then educating and fixing.

They would rather say its your fault things are not right rather then teach you the right way. My personal opinion they should be educating all new sim owners on how to manage their property... they spend 1000 dollars to ge ta sim least you can do is show them hhow to use the tools ... or at least where to find them. LL does NOTHING.. they expect you to already know...



You may like how LL handle some things, that the average user likely does not know anything about or care to,my opinion is they treat the customers as if we work for them... rather then the other way around and the company is slicing their own throats ever so slowly...

The gaming community is not an endless pit of people.. we are more like a floating cloud.. we tend to stick together and trickle in slowly growing bigger and bigger over time... then we peek.. but once we start moving out, we tend to never come back....

Stupid moves that effect litterally 10's of thousands of people in a negitive way.... are not easly brushed under the carpet as growing pains. and are not ignored by those that decide to stay..

Ignoring people compounds that issue a tenfold.

Its a shame to watch LL making the same mistake so many other companies did before them..


get greedy and ignore their employers.

It's ok, I more or less knew this was coming, which is why I've been really careful. Actually the last guy was baiting really hard ("You REALLY don't own any openspaces??!"

I've expressed empathy in a number of other posts in other threads, to, in rough decending order: the groups I feel were screwed over by Linden Labs directly through no fault of their own for using OS regions strictly by the book (the oft-cited sailing communities, etc); the 'all I wanted was to put up one house for my own personal use' contingent; the ones that were screwed over by dishonest representation by whoever marketed and leased them OS regions ("It's basically a full island, the same size, maybe a few less prims, and a hell of a lot cheaper!" (And the people who DID operate like that? Screw those guys...honestly, OS users, take a good long look at whoever leased you an OS region and what information you were given). Everybody else? Caught in an unfortunate bad situation, yes, but an avoidable one.

I'm a land end-user, not a land retailer. Mostly right now I'm doing dev work for others while I get my next personal project together, which is too early to disclose (near the end of Q4 2008. I only got anything done yesterday because I forced myself off the forums for two hours to script). I haven't worked on a retail product in over a year because of these other commitments.

That's.....simply not how a business operates. You DO know that Linden Labs is a company? A for-profit legal entity that provides a product or service for more than it costs to provide it? I mean god, wait until we get to tack 'and increase shareholder value' onto the end of that. At that point we KNOW where their allegiance lies, because it's practically a legal requirement. If people start looking at Linden Labs like that and not as some warm fuzzy friend who gives you stuff for a neato game where we pretend to be foxes and hookers and blowhard outspoken failed-business-mermaids (Hi) owes you the world and we'll have less of these sort of problems in the future.

Well you can count on there being less of this type of problem in the future. just sit back and enjoy the show as the number of people that actually spend money in and on the game keeps getting less and less.

Please keep this thread on topic.

Please don't use the Forums to attack one another.

Thank you.
-- Katt

And don't forget that if any of those plots happen to be sold to a new owner, LL collects tier AGAIN from the new owner even if the plot was only owned for one day before being sold. Whereas with an openspace or private sim, the tier date remains the same and is not re-collected each time upon change of ownership.

If you're referring to 'blowhard outspoken business-mermaid', that was describing me

Blizzard's policies are not noticeably different from Sony's. They also own everything you do in-world, they also control all the content, they also lock down your own computer with heavy-duty and damaging DRM software, and they also have terms of service that make LL seem anarchists.

The "gaming community" don't seem to care about this, that's OK, the "gaming community" can run off back to World of Warcrack for all I care. I'm not part of "the gaming community". I play precisely one online game, and it's not by Blizzard or Sony or any of the other "All your IP is belong to us" companies.

There's precisely one company that's delivered a virtual world, so far. There's a bunch of people working on cloning it. If Linden Labs ends up with the same relationship to Second Life as AT&T does to UNIX, that's fine. But they're not there yet.

And, no, Linden Labs has screwed up all over the place. But they have always stuck to a basic hands-off "we're the platform, you make the content" policy that (among other things, such as the WAY you create the content and the way you interact with it... I'm not going to try and define exactly what makes SL what it is, but I know it when I see it) makes them the ONLY current contender for a real virtual world. Other than people who are cloning SL, there literally is nobody even in the same continent, let alone the same ballpark.

Can you pass that message onto Jack and M considering the title of this topic insinuates that hey, they should be talking here.

Sorry Katt, not to be mean or anything but... it would be easier for people to stay on topic if the topic
"Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden" was a factual situation and they where actually talking.

People are angry and frustrated by the lack of the promised communications and rightly so.

Its really disrespectfull to invite people to participate in something then to simply ignore them after you do.

Kia

I think the sims do a much better job at virtual worlds then LL personally. Not sims online just the sims. A lot of the tools are not that disimilar for creating and you own everything you make... and can sell it if you want as many have done.. only thing missing from sims is sharing the world with other people.

All in all second life is ... just a game.. a game with virtual things and virtual money.. and as such... you are part of the gaming community... and as the cloud passes bye and the money drys up... well it will be a land of bots and diehards.