Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

I'm sorry, but this so called compromise is totally unacceptable. This is biased against estate users. Mainland owners do not have these restrictions. They are allowed any type of commercial usage that they want.

Do you propose that ALL mainland users and estate users both share these obsurd restrictions? Truly you can see just how unfair and prosperous this is?

I just spoke to Scout Linden who says that Mainland usage cannot be compared to 4 OP pr Homestead sims to one CPU since a mainland sims is an entire reagion and cannot tac the systems. I beg to differ!

People on the Mainalnd tax the heck out of the ONE shared server for all parcels on a sim. Where are their restrictions too? You want to tell me that if you have 4 1/4 sims sharing ONE region in the mainland, that the same possiblity of taxing the server does not exist? Show me the difference.. so pissed here.

This whole nightmare is getting worse and NOT better!!! You want to tell me that after having my store on an OP sims and even indorsed and told it was perfectly well within the safe range that I may have to give it up and move to mainland or just buy a full sim when it's not needed?

Some may call that a form of extortion.

I'm so curious what you will do when a more worthy competitor comes around and blows Second Life out of the virtual market? Continue and this rate, and you will have no users.

Not happy!! Grr

I still can't see why LL can't do the following...

1. Restore the Open Space option where 1800 prims are allowed for light use and must be connected to a full sim. $75 tier. (good for sailing and open country, desert, etc, No renting, building allowed as such).

2. Keep individual OS sims for use anywhere with 3750 prims. Tier price at $95 rising to $125 after one year (good for small homes, private usage but no stores, clubs, malls allowed).

3. Introduce a middle sim with 7500 prims to benefit. $190 tier rising to $250 in one year (good for small business and bigger homes but no clubs allowed).

3. Keep full sims as they were.

4. Keep mainland as it was.

I may be wrong but I'm sure a lot would be happy with something like this.

M,

perhaps this letter is worthless becuase you have already made your policy and likely wont change it again.

Well your reasoning on why you originally designed the openspaces (without limits) read to me as (your numbered points) 1) kindness of sl citizens and their MONEY and 2) MONEY.

to comment on your kindness-of-sl-citizens-reason-giving no limits on the creative SL people who are nice and probably wont take advantage-of-us.. ........ *sigh*.. this logic is SO incredibly flawed, i cant even begin.. oh but i will try..

1- you are a BUSINESS and you know it. Philip has made that clear to us before, and your recent partnerships have made that clear (and of course your island fees make that very clear) you sell a product, a platform, for others do what they please and be responsible for what they do

2- relying on the kindness of others for your business policy is bad business. even SL citizens. oh come on! even i dont! you invite chaos if you do, and with the world as big as it is, its simply idiotic to think 100% of the people will go on the honor system.

i assume you are a great business man, else you wouldnt be a CEO of a multi-million dollar company, so i am having a REALLY hard time believing this kindness-as-a-reason thing.

therefore the only other reasons left are 1) money and 2) money. (citizens money)

M.. i beg you. THINK before you do this again. and i do hope youve learned from this, because youve created a PR disaster. I personally am looking at LL with completely new eyes than before.


thank you for changing your policy to keep the prices low and thank you for not throwing peoples objects out (although heavy users of openspaces should have known what they were getting into and they should be thrown out). you say you wanted to avoid making a complicated price structure but golly, you sure made it really complicated.

im just really confused about what you guys are thinking over there, why you would make a policy without having a large discussion first (the discussion came second, and i wouldnt even call it a discussion. it was M talks once or twice, citizens yell, M makes decision period.

<shakes head>

Amilie

Look lets say you had an openspace sim. And you put not a single prim in it. Your cost will remain at 75 a month. However if I understand this you will be cut back to 750 prims in order to stay at 75 a month. This is like a dealer selling you a car so much down and so much a month. Then they tell you they want to up your payments or they are coming back and ripping out your A/C, radio, few tires, seats, steering wheel and on and on until you have about 1/4 of your car left.

They need to define "habitation".

See previous messages on this point... the land I currently "live" in in SL has been built up as "an open woodland area" and "an open ocean area" for two years. By their logic, I've been living in an area appropriate for an OpenSpace for longer than there's been an OpenSpace product. So the term 'habitation' is meaninglessly vague.

And they also need to explain how you can satisfy the requirements for staying an OpenSpace (defined in the middle of the KB article) if that's going to actually be enforced.

So let's analyze this a bit shall we....

1. Throttling down the OS to 750 prims, well below the original. Making them virtually useless for the space that the blog posts states they were originally intended.

2. Still increasing the price on the "Homestead" to $125.00/month, albeit a few months down the road.

So, by calling them "Homesteads", are we expected to suddenly shout hallelujah? Selling the same increase under a different name is still the same result:

Unacceptable by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't see this changing anything. The Land Lindens must have a pretty low opinion of the Residents if they think that by changing a few terms that all will be made nice again.

Hi M,

Nice try there, but actually you didnt change a lot. All i see is that you take it a bit slower on the tier raise., but in the long run, ppl who stay her longer then july are still screwed as hard as they are now. You offered us a product and we took it, now you raise the price and what s more, for 125us$ we prob even still get a scriptlimitation which we dont have now, so you raise the price and lower your service. Figure that out!!!
You tell us you invented a new concept called homesteads, but thats not the new concept. We always had homesteads, you just changed the name from openspace to homestead.
What you actually created new is what you now call openspace with 750 prims, which is actually a pretty bad deal if you look at it, since you get only 750 prims for the amount of money we payed before for 3750 prims or even months ago for 1800 prims. Have your servers become lesser quality then before since now all of a sudden they cant even support 1800 prims anymore?
Like is said, nice try and many ppl might even buy it, but nothing changed here, except that you had a real good thinking about how you could better communicate and hide the fact that you still screw ppl with a 67% tierraise.
So heres my conclusion:
1.Gratz on the strategy, I do believe you listened to us and learned how to screw ppl without them seeing it in the future.
2.Basically nothing changed, you just gave us a few more months before you do what you always wanted.
3. I m waiting when the anouncement will be given that the price of private full sims also has to be raised with 67% since ppl became creative with sculpties,megaprims, temp rezzers and stuff like that.

So how does that effect (let alone benefit) the residents one way or another?

Well yea they listened. Some of us would not touch the new style open space sims because there was something funny about them. They were clearly configured for more use than allowed. Something was wrong with the picture and you do not bet a business on something like that.

Now we know that if we do not really need a full regular sim and have a light business anyway that seldom has more than a few avatars at a time on the sim then we can opt for $125 (plus landlord fees) instead of $295 per month for a sim we never really use to full potential.
---------------------------

But this leaves us with a question. What about the estate manager screen privs? There was a lot of grief over that aspect. What happened there? Will homesteads be transferable?

to take a look at competitors, the global economy and into our pockets. Then I would maybe come to a decision, to make only 2 land pricing models for full sims: mainland and island. Full manland sim = 75$/month - full island sim = 100$/month. Just to hold old residents in game and to bring new residents in. Just driven by some real life facts. And maybe, make a social rebate offer about 50% to ex-employees of the Lehman Bank, Morgan Stanley Bank, Fannie, Freddie and whatever they're called themselfs and so further and so on. And since I am from Europe. VAT included in all prices. This, I, personally, would find wise. Somehow.

Because I dreamed last night. It was a bad dream. I saw one millionair sitting on north continent, one millionair sitting on south continent and one millionair sitting on east continent, each of them: alone. Watching the sun going up and down all day. But somehow their avatar-faces looked very bored. Kind of not amused. A bit sad. Maybe.

Dear Mr. Klingon,

My initial urge is to respond with sarcasm but I will resist the temptation. To be frank, I have always found your product overpriced for the level of technology, reliability and customer service offered. I cannot find any grounds that would allow me to accept a price rise of any magnitude with a clear conscience.
However, I do admire your skills in the presentation of this issue over the last couple of weeks. Textbook, Mr. Klingon, textbook.

Beam me up Scotty. This world is too hostile for co-habitation.

ZOMG, do you just love to argue with everybody or what?

No.. Sorry.. You're right.. If somebody in a full sim lives next door to over-primmed openspace sim, there's no possible reason they would be happy to see it upgraded to a homestead sim.

I don't believe using more than 750 was EVER a violation. Most of the issues are caused by people either using them for rentals or for heavy scripting, businesses etc.

If you have a beautifull forest at 3750 prims visited by an average of 5 avatars at any point with a maximum you ever see of 10 and zero scripts running ( other than avatar hosted) then your fullfilling the intended use.

OTOH if you have 749 prims and are renting the sim to 4 people who have a multitude of poseballs etc. and you also have a small low prim, high script vendor.. then your in violation.

Well you might be able to live in a tree, as long as you don't have a tree house but it's pretty clear what they mean. If it's not obviously a park or open area of scenery it's not an openspace and a house really doesn't fit the bill for a park or an open area of scenery.

What kind of solution is that? A enormous prim reduction for a 75 $ opensim? And wheres the change for those who can only maintain the actual Open sim (cost) for having own land in sl? A long time raise til its then 125 $ as LL wanted it ...what a change...
Nothing is achieved withthis solution, absolutely nothing...its a smokescreen tactic...and people are offended, will loose there homes and even may leave SL (im understanding that..im thinking myself of it).

The Open Sims gave people the chance to actually participate in creating the SL enviroment. A big part of Residents just dont have the resources to maintain a Full Sim or now the so called homestead sims. There is something in between missing. Something where people still can have an open sim and maintain it.

If you (LL) want people back on to Mainland...then do something against that wildgrowth there... Wide areas of mainland are just ugly and its not a wonder that no one wants to live there. And if someone is living there and tries hard to make something nice hes to much restricted. Its then no wonder that people wanted to have Open Sims to live one.

The good old Open Sim with 3750 prims /75$ per month was filling the gap and is now stripped away from the residents. Im sure im not the only one who is very disappointed.

I have to look for new land because i rented one and a half open sim which i cant hold in the future...and i see it personally as a forced restriction of my creativity.

The idea to convert to Homestead was likely on the books the moment openspace sims were upgraded from 750 prims to 3750 prims.

Homestead sims will go the same route.

Its called unintended use. It wasn't prohibited.

No Kiss.

No Vaseline.

Just a patronizing pat on the head and business as usual.

Its actually briliant if you think about it. There are four options:
- people continue to use reduced spec OS. Great, now you can have more sims on a server because they are so lightly used (remember, the servers were configured for 4 x 3700 prims, not 4 x 750). Which means higher margin.
- people upgrade 4 OS sims to a full sim. Fine, revenue is not affected and margin isn't either. With some luck you may even get people to pay the extra 250 if they have less then 4.
- people upgrade to Homestead. This has the specs of the original OS sims (the one's you undoubtedly used for your business case when you launched OS) but a higher price. The higher price means the same server will now bring in more revenue. Great, same costs and higher charge = higher margin.
- people abandon OS sims (which I think many will do). Sims that were recently purchased at 250$ a piece. Short term this means revenue loss but it means the servers have been paid for and can now be used for either mainland expansion or new private sims. In both cases this brings in one time fees for hardware that has been paid for already. And once these servers are all back in use tier revenue will be back to the same levels as well.

I have to say I'm impressed, a plan that just has no downside to LL is presented as something that was created because they listen to their customers...

I hereby call for a full server custom deal.

Start renting out full dedicated boxes.

Develop a control panel, which would allow the renting company to create and kill sims as required. They can allocate as many prims as they like, as many scripts as they like, as many users as they like, because they aren't sharing the machine with anyone else.

Allocate purchasers of these boxes a block of grid space, within which they can move their sims around freely. They can pay to expand the grid space, pay to split the grid space into two blocks.

If bandwidth usage is an issue (which it shouldn't be... my 100mbit unmetered costs me $140/month) then you can cap the pipe.

Care to allow the community to decide how to manage the resources?

ihey you jack jack over here i got a ? for ya y not make it where we can get homested sims with out haveing to own a full region i mean that sounds cool to me i mean the fact price is what it is but i cant affored a full sim and you dont give us poor users any chance of buying a sim like os and homested with out owning a full sim come on help a user out
looks like you guys are trying but there has to be a better way thanall the bashing going on here i understand you got a job to do and it aint your falt but make some more ways for the basic user to own land i mean main land is ok if you want a small pice of land with junk every where i have a 512 lot and put it in a box so i didnot have to see any junk around me but with such low prims on that lot i hade to rent a os from some 1 and id rather pay my 75 a month i pay for it so ll for my own land then who i do i mean make it so we can buy just a home stead and not have to get a full sim to do it thanks a basic poor mand in sl trying to have fun and not waste half my pay check to do so

First, for someone to "live next" to an openspace sim you have to share the same estate owner, or at the very least have allowed the owner of that openspace to connect to your sim...

Second, a homestead IS an openspace with a new name, although they may eventually plan to upgrade to 3 per CPU, at the moment... They're still 4 to 1.

It's all a wash...

We will still be paying the original amount by July....

Jack and M... you have achknowleged that ppl are using sims as homes, the main guestion i have is.... now that you have made this extra class of sim, can we get them from LL direct without having to own a full sim!?

You still need to own a sim to own a homested.. so you have to rent or you have to buy a full sim and a homested and become your own landlord.