Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

I strongly believe that the reduction to 750 prims is REALLY unfair in light of having raised them to 3750 before... it is 10 steps backwards.

LL should reduce the prim count for $75/month OS's back down to 1875 OR at least 1500 prims (NOT 750),

OR offer a $95/month tier for a OS with 1875 prims and the same avatar/classifieds limits. I'm sure most of us would be willing to pay the extra $20US a month, even though in this scenario you would be taking away half the prims AND limiting avatar count, scripts, and classifieds/events that we all have been used to.

Please think about those of us who use OS's as a private retreat and sanctuary for ourselves (isn't this what you intended when you let them be disconnected from a full sim?) and maybe 1 or 2 other friends (only 1 other person is even allowed on my OS), AND the only place where we can actually get any peace without being bothered.

Thank you LL for listening, but this still doesn't seem quite right...

I have someone who works at my place who used to work at the AOL call centre in Banglalore.

He saw a bank of phones, all dusty and asked "What are they for?"

He was told "They are the phones linked to the cancellations line. You do not answer them ever, they don't ring. If you pick one up then you'll be sacked."

When people did call on the other numbers and said they wanted to cancel, the policy was "have more time free".

AOL the service provider. SL the aspirant service provider. Hmmm.

The story I tell you was told to me as true and knowing the guy as I do he is a lousy liar and never even tries to.

HMMMMMMMMM

RING RING ... RING RING ...

It's the same except the price rise is delayed. That's not a huge improvement, unless you have an open waterway or forest and then you get to have 3,000 less prims for the same price.

How the heck is that a huge improvement? Seriously!

abandon their homes and live on the streets

Now that I have sims all over the place....and was going to try to make something out of it and use the new open space product..I have just been told they will not waive moving fees.

So this is the last straw for me. I am totally and utterly incredulous.

While having an answer does eliminate the dreaded waiting for a response that so many residents have had to (unneccessarily) endure this past week, I'm afraid that this proposed solution falls short on so many levels.

With the new proposal, LL will be making 26% more for 4 'homestead' sims than they make off a full prim sim (that has no restrictions) - that's at the 95 USD a month rate. While I do agree that limiting av numbers, and throttling scripts is a good idea, the proposed increase to the eventual 125 USD a month is totally unacceptable - as a result, I will certainly be converting my current holdings to full prim sims, then selling them off - as who wants to buy something that will cost 125 a month in 8 months, and I am certainly not paying 75 USD a month for 750 prims and severe script limitations which will certainly impact sailing etc (has anyone at LL actually seen how much script time some of the larger and more exotic (fun) boats use?)

95 a month would have been doable, though still somewhat of a stretch considering it was their fault in the first place. A better idea, and much more doable in terms of usage, profitablility and most importantly the good will towards SL members would be something along the lines of a Homestead offering with the folling specs: 3 regions per server, 5000 prims, 30 av cap, and some kind of resource throttling (the technology IS there) at 100 USD a month - this would be in line with the tier, prims, and av count (close) of a full prim sim - Something like this would still be profitable for LL, be a fair value for residents, and be something that would certainly go a long way to solving what obviously is still a major issue (just look at the number of responses here already)

Any way you cut it, 125 USD a month for 3750 prims, 20 avs, and script limitations is in no way a good value, and beyond the means (and common sense) for most members on SL (the actual words that came to mind were ripoff and total crap, but I'm trying very hard to be somewhat constructive here).

In addition, as many others have mentioned, instead of passing on the costs of the infrastructure and bandwidth costs to those who are already footing a big chunk of SL's bills, why not look harder at ways to reduce some of the other issues that would help cut costs like getting rid of all the darn camping bots that just munch resources, cracking down on mainland abuse (those small parcels that lag out an entire sim) etc. It is very hard for the paying members of SL to see all these problems that have existed for a long time, and ones that have continued to grow. not being addressed and then getting stuck with having to pay more because of 'increased server load'.

One other point I want to make is that the glossing over of the Open Space owners and residents as being just a small part of SL is way off the mark - by LL's own words there are aprox 13,000 OS regions. If you think about it, people who spend the amount of money that it costs to own or rent one of these regions more than likely spend a good amount of time on SL - with concurrency numbers currently running between 40-70k the people who have vested interests in OS regions are not just an insignificant portion of the population, in fact they are quite a nice chunk of the people that are on SL every day.

I implore you M, and Jack (I know you were mostly just the messenger here Jack) to carefully consider the huge response this second announcement is getting and realize that you still have some thinking to do, and some reconsideration (and do it quickly before you lose even more members).

In the end, LL was responsible for this current situation by lack of poor planning, vague and misleading information and representation by Linden Lab employees, and lack of communication with residents. So take the responsibility to fix this, and fix it as soon as possible - you may lose a bit of profit in the interim, but look at the responses here - you will definitely lose a lot more if you don't make some immediate changes.

I can use MSN for free and have all the pricacy i want and no lag LOL

Lol... who knows but maybe he did and he learn great how to do it.
Seriouslly i do not think Jack Linden is happy with this and he is reading us a week ago and this can not be nice to him. But writing since yesterday wait for a solution and coming with a rename seams to me like somebody is making fun of us.


Until today i thought this was a serious company. They had all this (free) feedback for a whole week from so many people... intelligent solutions and they came with a rename. In my country (and they are experts) when you charge more for less we call them thiefs.

It seems to me the problem is this,

Despite having millions of people signed up it is the few tens of thousands who are regular players on a daily basis and who have premium accounts, Now that LL is a corporation it needs to increase its profits year on year to keep its investers happy,

Now there is two ways to achieve this,

1, Increase the nimber of regular players (which they have tried but failed to do as it is a very expensive hobby,

2, Increase prices on a year by year basis to increase profits,

They could be bold and reduce prices in the hope of attracting and keeping new players or just milk the existing ones.

no prizes for the route they have taken,

Thats exactly what I have done. I haven't spend any since the first announcement

I'm not going to spend any more money either.

I've seen Nurien. Nurien is just Sony Home or XBox Live on a PC.

The Blue Mars product ONLY allows content creation by licensed businesses. There is zero end-user content creation.

Mycosm has not provided any information about what their terms of service will be. I've signed up for their Beta, but as of now they're in a pre-vapor state. Their blurb could mean anything.

I live in Austria, small country, a federal republic. 8 million population. The services wich I use here in a specific federal region of maybe 500000 population is the following: as a professional web - and graphic designer, IT consultant for small biz firms and developer of corporate concepts I use the service of a high professional state of the art quality firm for websitehosting for me and my customers. They drive a totaly fast and stable biz on exquisite hardware wich I use for 2,50 Euro a month per website-server. I mean: a full service thing. No restrictions. Literal no restrictions and bundles of goodies for free there. Software, CMS, Blogs blablabla. All that stuff. Fastest thing on earth and not a single crash in 7 years. In private I use the service of a firm wich provides cable connection to internet and radio/tv. I have there: a 20000 connection to internet, no GB limits, I can be 24 hours a day online, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with no additional costs, extreme fast connection with a few machines online via router at my home, I have some hundreds of digital radio stations and hundreds of digital tv stations available for my home entertainment and the complete service for that is just 43 Euro a month. This is also stable since day 1 and since around 7 years. Also the price is stable. Same as at the first day. And they make profit. I am halfway sure that all the hardware about we talk here is not especially developed for the lab. It is just usual hardware and I hope up to date hardware. I scratch my head every day about the pricing structure with wich we have to deal with LL. Really. K, LL can take any price they want as long as we pay. But since a while we are - this is my impression - only angry and only disappointed and only in discussions in such forums and blogs and fully stressed by money things, instead of playing just the game and having fun. From my view seen, it is not normal what we pay here for the game. Sure, I have no clue about the costs they have and I have no clue about the profit they make at LL. But I have a feeling that it could and should be more fair, measured on other services, localy and globaly, wich are running the same kind of hardware and by the way, a much much better customer relation and service. This is no attack against anyone. It is just my true experience. All I read and all I hear and all I see is: cash, cash, cash, fees, fees, fees, for this and that and that and this. And over night new cash and new fees and so on. Higher and higher. All companied with fighting about money things and technical things with the company. I cannot speak for all residents, but I would prefer some peace in all this and some much more fair pricing. Possible? That is what we want, or not? Reasonable pricing and a polite service without any tricks. And not to open a blog, just for seeing another unexpected price/fee/downleveled service bomb exploding in front of our shocked eyes. Thanks for the attention.

Second life seemed to be a haven in the virtual universe.. a place where the residents can create their own lives and their own rules and where you are not all the time to get onto the next level or compete to others, unless you would like that.
So I started to create this with some friends, first on one full sim, later on I added 3 open spaces so we could have more place for little gardens and small houses and stuff....

My vision changes though....

1. Now I am threatened because 3 open spaces costing in total 150 USD more a month (to which I have to ad 19% VAT). That may seem a small amount of money to a CEO but it is not for someone who has a more or less "normal" salary.

2. And still no way what exactly is LIGHT use. less than 3750 prims? Well it is not possible to put any more on an open space. Less than 10 avatars? I guess there aren't more at any given moment but then I'm not 24/24 in sl of course (the money to pay tiers has to come from somewhere, I have a rl job for that). How many scripts running, or causing how much lag?
As there is not any clue given, I will have to ask the concierge and then he or she will decide, without me being able to have any influence

3. So sl seems to have become an economical universe, not run by really listening to its residents but by trial and error decisions (this way of using open space sims could be foreseen by ANY marketing professional).

Pffff it really gives me a bad feeling now, and I may have to give up my open space sims cause of the cost... to the happy surprise of LL that can have my 750 usd investment back (no way to sell open spaces for anything resembling the investment now so why face the trouble with the risk of having neighbours i dont want....).
Tell me if I'm wrong but this feels as a rip off even if it is not intended that way...

LL only GAVE us a few months delay of tier increase, but TOOK EXTRA by adding now limits to the renamed openspace (Homestead) product.

So whats the next surprice: full-sim tiers up. Grandfather on full-sim taken away?

The thing is, LL next step can come tommorrow and we know they never take small steps.
One must be totally crazy for wanting to pay LL a single cent for total insecurity.

May I intervene and suggest that is not what our second lives need either. We do not need to create our own damage to the fragile thing we call an economy.

Such things are handled for us...

the Lindens understand and care about, so if we all stop spending it in here, maybe they will notice how upset we all really are.

No disrespect to Jack, he is a nice guy though my days of dealing with him are a long time gone.

However: This is his job. He is paid to do this job. Sometimes you have to do things you really don't like as part of your work. Jack, I'd take heart that very few people feel you personally are responsible for any of this and I for one can see how you'd have to pick and choose carefully what you say.

I wouldn't swap jobs with you for all the tea in China (or should that be Tescos these days) though.

it seems that sending feedbacks, thinking about solutions etc.. are useless, because it seems Lindens are unable to understand it. I had an enthusiasm for building things, places where communities or friends can come together and have fun but LL killed it. I was spending all the money come from my SL business to my club and other community things. But from now on SL will not be a place for having fun or hanging with friends for me anymore, there are other grids for it, I will have only a small place and run business , thats all. Thanks LL.

I gotta say, while this is certainly better than the first openspace announcement, it's still crappy. We need to know the advantages of renting a homespace for this to be worthwhile. Basically, it's too much of a price increase from what we can rent a 1/4 sim for, and there's no apparent benefit, especially if you're still cramming 16 of them on one quad core.

More information on Homesteads is needed, because as it is right now, privacy and estate tools doesn't warrant the monthly increase for renting. If I bought one of these sims to rent out to someone else, I have extreme doubts that they'd find the price worth what they get.

PLEASE provide more information on Homesteads to go along with this announcement, so I can make a more informed decision as to what I'm going to do with my openspace sim. If you want ME, as a sim owner, to invest in homesteads ( or keep my current openspace and turn it into a homestead) then you need to convince me I'm getting what I'm paying for.

As a marketing professional, I find it difficult to believe that LL were incapable of anticipating consumer behaviour. I have been in Sl for a little over a year yet I realised.

They have the greatest market research database in the business world and for free! Their consumers fall over themselves passionatelt to tell them what they think. So why can they not grasp that what most of us want is space, privacy and enough prims to be creative.at a reasonable price. We also want a little honesty, competance and stability.

Here in the UK, Trading Standards would probably have grounds for prosecution under The Sale of Goods Act. However having been to the US and discovered that frequently products promise so much more than they deliver I should not be surprised to see this ethos reflected in Sl.

I innocently bought my open sim for the reasons that most of us have, genuinely believing that the new broom was making the sl experience better for us all. Hahaha, the joke's on me.

It's either a cynical ploy by some very sophisticated business machine to suck us in cheaply and then extort more out of us later. Or it is crass stupidity in not anticipating the results of their new order.

I have experience of american companies and know 2 things for definite; 1) they always have a finely detailed business plan and don't bungle along with a strategy of trial and error. 2) The shareholder dividend is the only goal. Hmm tough call.

M Linden - shove it !!!


To all Second Life Residents:

On November 2, 2008 I shut down and returned Raptors Reef region to Linden Lab.

On November 25th I will be closing down Renee Faulds region and returning it to Linden Lab. This means I am closing up shop and leaving Second Life to the greedy pockets of Linden Lab. They have screwed me before too many times but this is the last time. I am leaving and I will never return. Thank you for buying my homes.

Renee Faulds Custom Homes & Structures

I should have got the alt;

Linden Weezles

You're much too generous. They knew why this product was so popular, they just haven't got the decency to admit that.

I also think he is a nice guy and he is not happy with all this. I wouldn't swap jobs with him neither.... too hard to be an honest nice person and come with this today.

Nah, not really. Your not hurting the lindens, your only hurting the content creators in game.

You can buy lindens from many sources outside the control of LL, so they loose nothing. But that great clothes creator, house builder, or artist will end up closing thier doors.