Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

I purchased two openspace sims days before the announcement of the price increase. I understand the problem and understand that Linden Labs has the right (if you want to call it that) to raise fees but I feel I've been placed in a corner. I bought two sims with the understanding that they would be low use. However 750 prims doesn't allow for much more than an ocean sim. Ok so my fees will increase by 50 USD per sim. However with that increase I still have less than I bought since there is a new avatar limit. I feel that I've been place in a corner. If I opt to keep them openspace there is not much I can do to make them interesting and pretty to look at with the 750 prim limit. If I go to a Homestead level I am still getting less than I purchased and I'm paying more for it. I don't think that is fair.

Actually I'm not sure anyone 'took advantage' of it ... rather used them within the limits they were given.

If you're allowed 3750 prims, then you can use 3750. If you're using temp rezzers to get 8000 then that's abuse, not using 3745.

Perish the thought :|

Col, you don't get it. People are complaining because they have bought things not knowing what they got into. I didn't buy personally, I rented because I didn't feel happy to invest. I love my OS. It was my fairyland but it was purely for me to have something pretty and named what I wanted it to be, where if I wanted I could turn it off the grid. I knew what I was getting into. I now have 1/4 of what I signed up for with my landlady who is one of the most honest, trustworthy and decent people in Second Life so it's for sure not her fault.

It's people who have NOT abused the OS who are really unhappy. When I say rent I don't mean a little part of an OS, I had free reign to make it pretty and live on it (because living on it meant at worst standing on it, swimming in it or sitting around on it, sure as hell hasn't had much else. And to me it was beautiful but now, it has to go. Frankly if they backed down (which they can't they need the money) completely I'd be going anyway. Why?

Cos like many others, the trust and goodwill is GONE and it can not be replaced.

The problem with Openspace being too heavy on the servers was because LL offered something they could not deliver if it was used anywhere near its limits. Its like streaming, you offer 25 listeners at x kbps because the know most of the time there will only be 10 listeners. When 25 are using the service, the package is not cost effective.

LL sets limits that it knows cannot actually be used in order to make the product look more attractive. For example, in the new chart in the Knowledge base, LL claim the limit for avatars on full sims is 100. What they fail to tell you, but as anyone who actually uses SL knows, by the time 40 avatars are in a sim it is suffering from severe lag. By 60 avatars, some individuals will crash out. By 80, no one can move at all, and the sim itself will crash. So, 100 avatar limit? It might as well be 1000.

Openspace was the same - when people used it, the servers could not handle the load. It was not the users fault, since only an outright liar would claim they expected people to pay $75 a month for water or a few trees.

Even now, it is to be decided how many regions would share a server, yet the price has been set. This would be a vital ingredient in determining price, so it is more likely it is TBA because it will remain at 4 per server for Homesteads, and the extra price will make no difference whatsoever to performance.

I am not sure why I keep posting though - no one in LL authority is taking any of this seriously.

Not responding doesn't automatically mean they aren't taking this seriously. No doubt they are taking it very seriously but they have probably stopped reading. Same on the blog usually, an answer early on then silence.

This thread is a train wreck of course! What did anyone expect?

...it would likely be 3 per core..... its in one of his posts in the 1st 30 pages ^^

Don't forget

http://www.openlifegrid.com

No LL is not taking it seriously. Not only this forum thread - this has been going on for a week and the latest announcement was to rename the product and stagger the price increase. The rest is fluff.

We are posting to the wind...

The civilian control that I matched LindenLab with an American presidential election, and used the mood.I felt that I should have done this announcement in another time.

It is necessary to think calmly to both Linden Lab and a resident.I thank for acceptance of some suggestion.However, there are basic thing many who is not solved.Loyalty for the Linden laboratory fell.

Does a mainland restore popularity? Probably there will not be it, too.

Please think about why Openspace got popularity to many residents. It was the Utopia of the resident which it disfavored in Mainland.Mainland became beautiful.However, it is not beauty to stare wide-eyed at.The past was too dirty. And it`s not personal space.Lindn Lanb was said to leave SecondLife by the person betrayed in a mainland, the open space. Is it different?

In addition, the many people judged that the corporate culture of Linden Lab was weak.In fact, weak Linden Lab and the virtual world.It can contribute to load reduction that a resident passes in OpenLife or Open SIM.If there is much it, you should publicize it. With a raise price notice.Let's reduce a person as much as possible.It`s　very good.

The people flicked out by Openspace remain in SecondLife. However, there is not already the heart in Linden Lab.

Mr. President(M Linden).
A system and the price do CHANGE. Do you leave CHANGE of the heart of the people?
You changed. But We can`t CHANGE.Please control the mind of the resident which cooled down.By wonderful civilian control.

Akko Yoshikawa / SLZIN HLDGS.Japan

Highly unlikely. They run 4 full sims per server. He probably said 3 per core is a possibility.

Fortunately though there a lot of us there that are not in it for the money and are able to buy and run sims there and allow others to use it to experiment building etc. The money we now spend there is less than what we paid LL for our ocean OS.

Also the currency will be coming online with the new viewer due out in the next couple of days although at the moment with no currency people are not getting charged to upload their stuff which is a good thing being able to port your products to the new grid for free, which is what was intended

woops sorry i ment 3 per core....my bad o.O

I've always felt that it was greed that ruined SL in the first place - it just goes to show that when you have a bunch of people who were so disillusioned they now don't care about crashing (used to it from SL), lag occasionally (used to it from SL), not being able to log in sometimes (used to it from SL), av not looking it's best (used to it from SL and at least no shoes and hair up your jaxy), not many people around yet (used to it from SL and when you see a green dot on the map you go OOOOOH and go see who it is and say hello LIKE WE USED TO HERE LONG AGO!!!).

Yeah there's no scripts, the viewer has problems but tbh no more than when in SL. I've only met one disagreeable person so far and that was someone with a bee in their bonnet with their preconceptions from SL and an inability to listen to what was being said to them ... everyone, manifestly, has been delighted to see other people in a way I simply have not seen here for years!

I own 3 openspaces and a sim, i payed 1700 for the sim and they lowered the price to 1000 making me loose 700 USD value right off the top, now this making all of my assets worthless.. I don't make a penny from the game. i only provide a place for people to go and enjoy them selves. I put much more money in the game then I have ever made from it.

I want to walk away from it all... but i have a responsability to those I promised to help but the second those services are not able to be met, I will close my doors and toss away the key.

Excecutive decisions.... excecutives should lock them selvs in their fancy offices and mind their own bussiness and let the people who really know what they are doing do their job. things in the world would run much smoother.

I found solution for this problem: "ONE SIM ONE PRIM" Business plan

There no serious talk about this topic... to blame opensim owners for making lag is just funny...

I have a viable solution.

Let's give LL one benifit of the doubt. That being that they are somehow losing money or having performance issues with OS SIMs in their current configuration.

Bottom line, let's say they have no choice but to make SOME kind of change.

These things need to happen.

1) LL needs to apologize openly and take the blame for the current state of the OS SIM situation. Admit that they hosed it up good and have NO CHOICE but to make changes.

2) They need to offer a FULL refund to ALL OS SIM owners of the setup fee they paid. Give them a chance to back out of the OS SIM without losing more than their time spent on their builds and their monthly teir they have paid to date.

3) They need to come to some solid conclusions on prim limits, avatar limits, script limits, and any other limitations necessary, and show in the contract that they will not raise any fees or impose new limits on a new SIM buyer for at least a year.

4) They need to offer something better than a homestead SIM. AND LET ANYONE PURCHASE THESE!!

Split it into two types of "Economy SIMs". And put a limit of 3 Economy SIMS per processor.

a) Residential Economy SIM - Full Size SIM - 3750 Prims, no other restrictions - $100.00 per month.

b) Commercial Economy SIM - Full Size SIM - 3750 Prims, no other restrictions - $100.00 per month.

c) Put only Commercial SIMs on the same server with other Commercial SIMs, and Residential SIMs on the same server with other Residential SIMs. A person with a residential SIM should not have to suffer with lag from another SIM on the server that is commercial and lagging down the processor with tons of vendors. Let the businesses deal with the lag they create from their vendors and traffic. If an SL business can't get the job done on a "Commercial Econony SIM", then they obviously need to get a full SIM for their business.

5) Openspace SIMs should be $25.00 a month, and only can contain trees and water with a prim limit low enough that you can put more on a processor without it affecting any other SIMs.

I agree absolutely. Same thing happened with me. Thought at first this was a genuine response by LL.....then read on and what do I find....just a way of getting what they wanted in the first place....Hope that all the original protestors do not fall for it! It is an illusion.....same price hike but in different clothes!

Tell wich beta grid, to go too LOL

www.openlifegrid.com is where many have gone, and I suspect many more will go - though it is very basic right now

I am wondering if this new "proposal" will change the CPU use. I think not. Homestead owners will still co-habitate on CPUs!!!

So basicly I think there are still 4 Homesteads to 1 CPU. The only thing that is changed is an increase in the amount of cash LL gets for the same amount of users per CPU. That in it self does not degrese the load on a CPU!

The only benifit I see is the extra open sim product line.

Dear M Linden

Why do you charge us 400% more for OS sims than for mainland? You get on average about 100 USD per mainland sim with your unitization rate of 68% and premium account with free land.

So you get 400 USD for a mainland server and ask us for 2.000 USD for an OS server, can you please explain to me why? And I DO want an answer on that!

PS: Are you sure you are the right guy for the job?

Have you guys ever thought about hiring some public relations people? No, really, I'm talking about ones who are actually good at their jobs.

Just a thought.

There are a lot of posts from folks who apparently expected a complete reversal of the original announcement. That was never in the cards. It seemed perfectly clear in the original announcement that LL was repositioning their low-end product to something that approximated their margin on other products.

I'm sure there are people who will leave SL now, and that may be a rational move for them if their entire SL experience depended on cheap OpenSpaces without firm usage restrictions. And that's understandable: that product at that price point was incredibly attractive and popular, so anybody who set up a business or other activity based solely on that specific appeal may have a difficult time adapting to the repositioned product(s). Of those, some of the extreme rugged individualists may indeed enjoy pioneering one of the grids based on the opensim project; I'm sure the opensim folks could use the help (not so urgently from content creators, really, as from folks who can bring the platform source up to some parity, and to head-off the dire scaling problems ahead). I have to say, though: for those who've said the Mainland is an unbearable hardship, opensim is not going to be a comfortable place yet.

Some of us have been trying really hard for many months to make existing Mainland a viable option again. We, too, could use your help.

What I really intended to post in this message, however, was a rational analysis of the various land products LL now offers, and exploring where there might be market opportunities now. We can be sure that the large Estate owners are doing this analysis now (or have done already): to them, every big change is an opportunity; they have the capitalization to take advantage of it, and that funding gives them "big picture" perspective. So, I thought it would be good to figure out where those opportunities would be; there's no reason they have to be the only ones to benefit from such changes.

But we're all missing an important piece of information: although we now know the changes in the low-end products, we don't know what's ahead for full-sim fees and Mainland tier. We need at least a six-month pricing roadmap for these products, too. Otherwise it's impossible to guess where the new Openspace and Homestead products fit.

Indeed, how could one know whether to convert four existing OpenSpaces into one full sim, if one doesn't know what will happen to full sim fees in, say, January?

In a very general sense, it's clear that LL recognizes the premium that people are willing to pay per prim in exchange for control of a full sim, or even just a whole lot of surface area within a sim. Homesteads, for example, cost the same per month as half-sim Mainland tier--and in comparison, buys twice the surface area and half the prims, and (with the script and usage limits in place,) some reasonable assurance that the performance will be stable, in contrast to the Mainland. Plus the Estate management tools, and possible isolation from the lag of neighboring sims and from the annoyance of neighboring builds. So that's part of the market position of the product--*assuming* the Mainland tier remains unchanged.

But we don't know that. So all such analysis is kind of futile, or at best, speculative. And that's a poor place from which to make rational business decisions.

Yeah... yet I suspect the 750 prim limit is intended to act as a partial automatic barrier to the kind of use they want to avoid. It's a really crude throttle: ineffective at controlling actual load while at the same time reducing the utility of the product for its intended purposes. But I suspect prim count is one of very few things they really know how to both enforce and explain to buyers. (Avatar count and script timeslice being the others.)

I can't really come up with any other reason for that radical reduction in prim count. Quite idiosyncratically, I personally would be fine with 750 prims, but that really is just me; most folks prefer the look of many more prims than I do, and I think they have good reason to be disappointed by having so little to work with--when we know that primcount in and of itself has almost no impact on load. So that's pretty disappointing.

Totally off-topic, but I recently moved from the US to Canada; US wireless and ISP services are wonderful in comparison to the nightmare north of the border.

Thats damn well condescending and very unprofessional Katt.

We are your customers, We pay your wages.

The last person who said "Let them eat cake" ended up out of a job... remember that!

I don't think anyone expected a retraction Qie, or at least not anyone living with their feet on the ground. It's the flim flam that's come with it that sticks in my craw.

(And off topic too - yeah I was stunned by the treatment my partner got from his ISP after his cable box got struck by lightning - not exactly something you can blame your end user for is it, Act of God and all that - I always assumed comms in the US would be pretty amazing so I was rather shocked at what service he had as options in a very nice part of the States where I'd have thought there would be expetations of excellence ... learn something new every day!)