Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

I think it ironic this "solution" was posted today - the celebration of the Gunpowder Plot.

Any rebellious attempts will be punished, and the reasons for it discredited or ignored - even if the rebels have a valid point.

The current LL attitude towards customers is a long way from what Mr. Kingdon envisioned while at organic.com:

http://www.organic.com/

"Our preferred way is working in partnership."

I would like a clear answer please as to why Europeans cannot pay their land tier in L$ and therefore alleviate the extra burden of VAT. We cannot pass this on to our customers and compete with other business in SL and it is causing a great deal of financial inbalance for European residents.

Thanks for the post M, please make sticky notes for everyone to always think twice about causeing PR nightmares. I am more distraught by the PR nightmare, than the mistake made with opensim pricing.

[Edit]

I certainly applaud the alteration, but I'm not quite sure what I'll do, because:
1. 750 prim is 1/20th of a full sim for 1/4 the price. 750 prim in 65K is very very sparse for anything scenic (e.g. "forest" or "park" and very very expensive for what you do get (call it L$6/prim/week).
2. Homestead is overkill for my use, I don't need 10 avs (let alone 20), I'm unlikely to approach the the script limits, and I certainly don't need (or want) classifieds or events.

I guess my prediction remains the same - that "abusers" (clubs, stores, etc) will, with grumbling, jump onto the homestead product, and approximately nobody will want to pay US$75/month for 750prim. Ok - maybe surfers and boaters, but anything with foliage will not have the prims needed to look decent.

Questions:
- why does prim count matter to this degree? This pricing model suggests that avatar count degrades performance linearly and prim count exponentially - really?!?
- will OS sims share CPUs with Homestead sims?
- you still haven't defined "habitation". Is a shipwreck ok? a log cabin? a park bench? a cardboard box? Is it that people set their home location there? or that people tend to hang out at home?

sigh.

Yeah, but those will probably be declared as "Homestead" regions (along with the obligatory "they were always those" comment ), so that argument won't get any traction.

We don't matter, we never have.

SL is an american product, and us non-US players should be grateful that we're allowed to participate.

Unfortunately, the reality is that non-US players make up something like 70% of the playerbase ... but simple things like that have never mattered to LL.

In 23 pages of resedent questions, i could only find 2 posts from Jack and 0 from M... how can this be called a "Talk with Jack and M"?

I don't understand your point. Mainland sims are full sims and have no restrictions on commercial.

Private sims which are full sims have no restrictions on commercial.

The only restrictions on commercial that I see are the homstead and open space sims.

Firelight

That would explain it .....So she will be the one benefitting from the suffering of others?

totally and utterly unexceptable. all you managed to do is talk your way out of making it sound as bad as you did last week. the price increase will still be the same as it was last week. and as far as your jibber jabber about os's being used for things that they were not intended for is no one's fault but your own. when i signed up for sl i was offered an island with 3750 prims available for me to use. now your saying that im abuseing that right. hog wash. in the real world this is called bait and switch which is illegal, and seeings how you are a rl world business what you are doing is against the law. at this point with your so called business tactics my self and plenty of others plan on leaveing your so called island paradise. also by december 31, i would highly expect a full refund on my moneys spent on my island, if not then you will be turned into the better businee beaurau as a spam and bait and switch company. and i may not be a busniess man as yourself, but im sure you would not welcome the publicity this would have on your business and tactics, in fact youd probably be dishing back more money to people then your busness could handle. hence, bye bye sl. i expect a response on this matter by mid december so we wont have to go into the better business beaurau crap.

its very simple really...


lindens are not real money. Linden labs does not sell or buy lindens so allowing you to pay them in phoney currency they created would be pointless and not profitable.

* July 2009 — the maintenance fees for Homesteads will go from $95 to $125 per month

Now or July $125 is still $125 and now it comes with greater restrictions. The restrictions however dont harm me so much but $125Us converted to Australian dollars in this global mess. It is going to kill me.

Even as it was, the fees were starting to hurt but I hadnt considered other options, other platforms. This last week I have. What a sad place we have gone.

No, I'm just easily confused.
See, I'm still confused. What does changing the name of the product do to make things better for them.

Seriously, I don't understand what you're getting at. Really. Honest.

Where are the REAL changes? I would pay 1000 usd tier for a full sim if I had the security, if someone steals from me, AT LEAST he would get banned. But NO, you had the great G-Team working on grief/harassing cases, when SERIOUS issues like all those stolen skins, textures, and copyboted builds, are FLOODING up everywhere. But all we get is "read our copyright policy at ..". ARs, DMCAs... aren't working.

SL IS NOT A TV SHOW. Stop taking decisions based on what people outside SL will think. hiring a company that did "coca-cola" website... for what? to be able to say "OH, SL has the same company that did coca-cola website, doing SL's too!". "SL shows up in CSI!".
As long as SL is taken as a show, you will lose your real audience.

People fake search, with bots, paying newbies for picks, steals content, lots of underage sexual groups in search, and the list goes on and on and on.

But today I woke up. I understood why the real issues aren't dealt with. I wont expect the real changes I was waiting to happen. Things are clear now what this is about. I'll still be here, but not the same.

And Jack Linden, thanks, you were put in a very delicated position, and I think you handled it great. If it was me, I would probably have said something I would ended up fired.

That IS my point. Why do they NOT have the same restrictions that Homestead and OS sims will have? It's unfair.

This policy gives people time to decide what they wish to do.

Yes, well, the comment was in the context of all the openspace sims in Nautilus being over the new prim limits.


We know very little about the performance differences between openspace and homestead sims right now. Either way, having the sim next door move from being openspace to homestead is probably not a loss. At worst, it's a wash but it's not a loss.

LL have their own dictionary. "Conversation", "Dialogue", "Listening" and "Community" all have very different meanings to a normal English dictionary.

While I definitely think this is a fair compromise, I would still like to know more specifics:

1. Script restrictions or limitations on Openspace and Homestead regions
2. Why the reduction down to 750 prims at the same 75USD/mth fee? I could possibly understand a reduction to 1875, but if you are going to implement avatar and script limitations, why must there be any reduction at all?

A response would be great, thx.....Pink

Perhaps its time the foriegners revolted then? I can't think of one valid reason why we can't do this to alleviate the VAT so I'd like a reason or a straight answer why we can't.

I think the new deal for the extra homestead options is generally fair though customers should be allowed to purchase these directly from LL.

There you have it. She has been happy about this waiting for the dollars to roll in since the first announcment. there really is no other explination other then her actually being a linden that would be benifiting from the increased profits.

This policy is, I am almost sure, illegal though I do not have the means to prove it... and it is certainly not good.

It sounds like instead of reducing the load of the CPU, they are going to rather involve a mix of Opensim and Homestead to hopefully balance the load.

It could be the reason they are not posting where the Homestead sims fall in terms of CPU usage.

That also explains why they would cut Opensims to 750 prims among those other restrictions when they worked fine at 1875 with no other restrictions.

That's just speculation of course ...

/me ducks for cover

If this didn't hurt so much, in the wallet and the heart, we should be laughing our heads off at the ridiculousness of the whole situation. LL has had us waiting with baited breath for days, wondering what our fates were to be, only to have us find out that essentially nothing has changed from the first announcement. What is needed is a middle ground/price. Something is missing.. there is a huge jump from the proposed revised, stripped down OS to the Homestead. Why not leave the price increase for the "Homestead" at the $95 per month increase rather than gradually upping it to $125 in July? There is no wiggle room for most folks in these price jumps.

I imagine the two of them are having a nice little chat somewhere and congratulating themselves on their clever way of sneaking this past the residents by mixing around a few words...they didn't say anyone else was included in their talk..notice it's not called a discussion this time - that would mean actually replying to people, not making blanket statements and ignoring the ones they don't like.