Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

Soooo...basically, us who will have to get homesteads will be paying more. But will be getting even less for what we were paying for before.

Righhhht.

Yat was the original "OpenSpace" model.

That's what they said.

What they said was: We listened to you and [...bruhaha...]

What they should have said is: We have to ignore you for our own profit!

Sire Phillip,

Did you ever hear of the term “ good will” that’s what a business is worth beyond the asset value.
Foreign concept to you beach class tyrants. You come into work after 3 months an see how many clients you lost then tell the bean counters to tell you if you are winning. The problem is that the numbers are short term. Dump the open sims, and you get to profit for the year end, next year the game is over.
Noobs do not buy land. Now no one does, you would have to be nuts…lol
Just in case you didn’t get the memo this game is based on land. Like the US if land values go south so does the economy. So it was brilliant of you to make 40% of your land worthless. Do you have a business plan for more than 3 months? Oh yea raise the tax 66%, genius that will work.

And isn't 'Rob' an appropriate name for a Linden... (sorry, couldn't resist)

This issue has not been resolved satisfactorily.

It seems a strange coincidence that the only feedback LL considers relevant was from the FIRST PERSON to reply to the blog entry "Update regarding the OpenSpaces announcement" dated 29th October, when that blog was *eventually* opened to comments! Guess *that* was a fluke! Jack Linden was quick to applaud that resident for their brilliant idea... then disappeared.
Unsurprisingly the announcement from M. Linden today mirrors the suggestion of that 'resident' almost exactly!

Brilliant - Machiavelli would be proud!

Was the feedback of the other 145 other residents who posted to the blog so lacking in merit it didn't deserve a pat on the back from Jack Linden? Or the Jira posts or the forum posts?

Jack and M. Linden, you *KNOW* that grandfathering the sims hundreds of us bought just weeks ago is the only ethical solution to a "problem" you created yourselves!

We bought our islands in good faith and we deserve better!

And burying this issue in the forum is a lousy way to treat your *customers*.

LMAO this is the best post in this sorry thread

Re comparing apples and strawberries: Fact is that SL has become a sad and miserable place for many of us no-longer wanted people who have helped it become the ogre that it is now. NO MONO? Well good cos ever since Mono NOTHING has worked properly for me despite an 8Mb connection and new PC. HA.

FACT: People are excited about other possibilities. Yanno what? I really don't think I am going to miss wandering around empty sims and being in silent clubs where there's nothing happening but woot spamming or just ... nothing ...

FACT: People will put up with a lack of features and with some poor performance admirably when they have goodwill towards a company. So many people have their pitchforks out right now here.

Not a penny more to this company, for whom I was once referred to as a fanboi ... I wasn't one but I put all my support because I thought it was heading towards something good.

Look around you.

Ahaha you have to see this.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy9hQDT6fhI

Nae and Trinity and others- All that extra (primless) open space is not worthless. You cant compare an OS sim with 1/4 sim mainland or private. Consider - you get privacy, control, beaches and nice stuff that you can enjoy. You get the same number of prims but you get something extra. I think you should pay more for it. In rl people pay for environment and protection form neighbors and overcrowding. Why not in SL?

If you can't sell it it's worthless.

Why are you creating a situation where Linden Labs will have to spend time (that is, money) monitoring and enforcing a subjective and frankly meaningless criterion? Avatars don't "live" on sims as it is, they don't use more resources because the prims in a sim are arranged as a "house" instead of a "campfire" or other more traditionally park-like setting. Everything in a sim is scenery.

Hi, I just tried to post a new thread in this forum and it didn't work. Is this forum restricted to one thread only? Do I have to repost my message in that thread? Or are new threads subject to moderation, and I just have to wait? It would be good to have a sticky on that.

What they ORIGINALLY said, a week ago, was "we didn't expect the load from OpenSpaces to be what it is. We can't afford to keep selling them for $75 with that kind of load. So we're raising the price on them."

What they're saying now is "we're still raising the price on the high-load OpenSpace, and calling them 'Homesteads', and we're providing a limited version of OpenSpaces for the original users who weren't causing the load".

You can't create any new threads in the "Linden Forums", you'll have to do it in the resident forums.

Not only us old void sim owners are asskicked (1875 to 750 prims), also the people who were encouraged by LL to buy Openspaces with 3750 prims... A newly developed product and we once again (like alot of times before) we see, LL wasnt aware of the features (bugs?!) of their own products.

Lindens should finally start to use SL at least for 5 hours per day to see what they are actually doing and how it feels inworld!

Juanita, go rent a car, normal mid-range 5 seats... you get a price from the company... at the middle of the rental period the company tells you "Ah we have to raise the prices by at least 50%, we didnt know you were using another of the 5 seats... or all 5 even OH MY GOD!"

What are you gonna tell them?

Jack, this might come as a surprise to you, but even if the products of a company are the most shiny things and the best invention since sliced bread (and LL's are FAR from that definition): a business is *nothing* without someone buying those products.

Buying from a company that first makes big mistakes, then announces to punish it's customers for the management mistakes, then after big protests offering a deception package as "look how great we listen to our customers"? Forget it.

The set up fee for a private region is the same whether you have one sim or four. The difference is the tier.

Tier for one sim is $75. For two, $130, forget what three is, four is $230. That's $230 a month for FOUR full sims and 180,000 prims. One hundred and eighty thousand ...

However you can buy a full sim at $75 and add on water sims to that at $10 each per sim. So, three sims worth of plan water or archipeligos which you can't change and are literally void sims you can travel through but not see anyone else's stuff in your face for $105 a month and with 45,000 prims.

Bye SL. LOL!

How does this help us with the old voids never using them for more than 1875 prims and some ambience?

Where is LL's answer to that, Argent?

What we were originally told when we got the 1875prim voids, I do not have to tell you, right?

"and we're providing a limited version of OpenSpaces for the original users who weren't causing the load"

This is a SHIT tbh.

Good luck with all that, M Linden. I don't care anymore. I'm over in open life. Yeah, they have problems. Their sims crash all the time, it's hard to log in and I look like a noob. They don't have groups or currency yet and LSL is even buggier than it is in SL, but guess what?

They have 24 hour chat on their web site. If I have a problem I can talk to somebody 24/7. I've never once been in there and not seen a developer in chat. If I ask for a feature, guess what? They actually respond to the request, even if the answer is no.

I have no problems giving up my inventory and moving to OpenLife because OpenLife actually gives a shit about me. You people can't even be bothered to show up on time for your office hours once a week, if you show at all (Lindens are no call no shows 50% of the office hours I went to).

Open Life will have currency, search, less buggy LSL and more stability by the end of December from all the land barons flooding over there from SL. With that kind of investment they can develop quickly, and between SL and OL my money is on OL.

Have fun trying to continue overcharging people for land after January. For a $145 setup fee and $75 per month tier you get a full private region with 45,000 prims on OL (no, that number isn't a typo).

There's a new frontier out there.

Snipped a LOT,and he has some points. But this one is wrong. Comcast advertises unlimited downloads - but has limits. Very small ones, actually. You can exceed the limit within a week. Their answer is that normal users won't download that much so it's "virtually unlimited". And the courts buy this.

lets go back to the root, the dream that one man had before he was surrounded by GREEDY businessman & investors!

Philip it is time to come back to the company you have founded, the company you were so proud on. Time to give back the grid to all the people that worked so hard in-world to built this world, scripters, designers, developers, mentors, e.o. Time to work again with those people. Time to listen to those people. Respect will come back and will reflect into one of the best internet scaled virtual worlds. Time to kick out also all the overhead and non-add value people that work for linden. A virtual world is feeded by the dreams of thousands of enthousiastic residents, the success is also determined by these residents, nor marketing companies, consultant nor others can make the difference!

Make the world smaller so people can get together as in the old days, lesser space will boost again creativity, will increase communication, a smaller world will also reduce your needed hardware and therefore overall operational cost and overheads.

It is therefore time for a change ! A change back to the root ! Going back to basics is as in many things the best way to succeed !

wildcat furse for CEO

This is completely absurd.

Hey! Let's drop the price of void sims by an amazing degree, remove most of the restrictions on getting them, change the name to openspace, make some nebulous statement that they're intended for "light use" while doubling the prim allocation and assume the residents will understand our psychic mind rays that mean "Well no, you can't actually USE the prims. They're magic prims. You're supposed to only pay 75.00 a month to show off to other residents how great your skills with Terragen are" and sit back for a few months while the mad rush to get them kicks in so we can turn around and not just ramp up the pricing, but blame the users for it at the same time! Five stars!

Again, to get the owner of a sim, openspace or otherwise, set to someone other than the billing contact required Concierge and Linden involvement. It required the billing contact purchasing the sim, then filing a support ticket to get it switched over to someone else. To act like you only suddenly woke up last week and discovered the wide expanses of openspaces and don't know how they got there is insane.

And prims are all but irrelevant to the performance of a sim. The only factors that degrade a sim are avatars and scripts, not prim usage. Prims can affect VIEWER performance, but not sim. 4000 unscripted prims is about the same hit as a full sim of unscripted prims.

My sim, Sector 7, is an openspace that has about 3000 prims, 97% of them unscripted. The most resource-intensive scripts on the sim are the dreadful CPU killer known as "rotate this prim," egads! I use it as a store which gets a peek traffic of maybe 300 a week if that. Since it's a store, I'm hyper-aware of the negative impact a customer will get if they teleport in to some place that's insanely laggy and impossible to shop in and have built, scripted and set traffic/avatar limits accordingly. I've not abused my sim, I'm under not just the object limit but also the avatar and script limits, and at no point have I cheated anything there in the first place.

Yes, some people abused openspaces. I remember a discussion of a landlord who was abusing the prim multiplier to make it appear that each openspace had the full prim allocation of a full sim, and rented those sims out at the price of a full sim. She's still in SL incidentally and still has assets to rent out.

I don't know what percentage of abuse happened verses percentage of appropriate use, but I really doubt it's as urgent an issue as these proclamations would have someone believe. I doubt this is about abuse, and I doubt it's about performance. It's about people waking up and realizing for the same cost as 1/4 of a sim on the mainland (resident idiots and asshole neighbors at no extra charge!) you can have the space of a full sim with complete control. And as such they vacated the mainland in droves and Jack is upset about that.

If it's an issue of abuse, punish the abusers. As it is, I don't want this stupid "homestead," I want the 75.00 openspace I originally purchased and agreed to.

First, LL did not issue a single warning that the Openspace sims were not compliant with their vision of $75 a month for water or a few trees. The reason is easy to see - it would have reduced takeup, reduced income.

Second, when the shock announcement did come, it was obvious no thought had gone into how residents would respond to it - unless LL always intended to present a terrible offer, pull it back a bit after a week and make it look like the new price hike was good value after all.

I see some of the posters still don't understand what the new Openspace means - it is not just about reducing prims and visitors - if you use the sim for habitation - even 2 of you in a small 100 prim cottage, you break the new terms.

As for the rest, they get a nice new name for the product, with a few techniclal limitations thrown in (which really should have always been there, despite the BS reasoning in the new announcement) and a short grace period before the full $125 is charged. New name, same 60%+ price hike, delayed by a few months.

What many have missed is the new rule that Homestead owners have to be the payee. Even now people are offering to sell the sim and make you the owner, but in fact you are merely renting a sim, and the owner remains the direct payee.

LL has demonstrated yet again that they really have not got a clue how to deal with customers and how to package their product and make announcements. Thanks have been offered for all the constructive comments thousands of customers have made, but in fact nothing much was said that was not already obvious to just about everyone except, it seems, LL.

The absence of an apology for the abysmal way LL handled this fiasco does not inspire confidence in management, it merely highlights an incredible arrogance, and although these new changes are more acceptable to some, few will have restored any respect for such a poor management team.

Don't forget that LL didn't want their pioneers any more LOL

OLG really is in it's infancy and it's no use at all yet for either big business or greifers. I haven't sensed goodwill and camaraderie like this since pretty much when I joined SL in Feb 2006 - and even then I could feel that the chill wind of "party over" was blowing from what others were saying.

Besides, being butt ugly is fun - it won't last. All the passionate, creative types will get there and soon - everyone I have encountered makes things.

Went to work for 8 hours hopeing to come home to answers and all i get is 2 posts by jack and how many from M? wait let me count them.... oh there is none.

If this is the way you reasure your customers that you are listening and taking in what they say, then just close the thread and tell us we wasted our time. It works out to being the same.

You make such huge changes to the pricing structure of a product that so many people use and now that we have concerns we get no real feedback to anything really.

I gota say this is a real let down Lindons.....i really thought you cared about us and our content more than this!