Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

:: steps on soapbox :: but without a microphone, if it matters. Just some thoughts that may or may not have been posted here, but the quantity has prevented me from being able to verify before posting. I will try to keep my thoughts to one post so as to not inundate the thread with many smaller thoughts.


1. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

With all due respect, from one business person to another, from your customers' perspective, it appears that LL has no direction, but instead is floating about in space without having any business plan, organization withing the team, or open minds to providing for your customers their desired product.

Of course the result of such is that both the company and it's customers suffer from instability. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

2. Was the Open Spaces Product well thought out and planned? There are only 2 possible answers.

-----A. Yes. In this case, this plan you set out to execute should be punishable by the law of our land. Yes, RL land. Bait/Switch/Fraud, you name it. I know attorneys are looking into this.

-----B. No. In this case, shame on you and how unprofessional and heartless you have been. You may be rolling in dough, but most of your customers are not. Among SO many things to think about as you consider your heartless approach to this "problem":

Do you realize I see people EVERY DAY on my Islands that have been displaced due to these wishy-washy, vague posts your company has made on this public forum? Let me tell you what they are telling me:

They tell me that their home suddenly disappeared without warning. Why? They don't know because no one informed them and they aren't a forum reader. They tell me, well I just paid tier for next month, and I also spent $150 to purchase my land. 'What should I do?' they say.

What you have done, Linden Labs, has brought out the worst in everyone. Now, land owners (your direct customers) with less integrity than others, have felt you have left them with no other choice but to steal money from their beloved residents in order to recover THEIR investment that YOU have stolen from THEM. How awful I would feel to have not stood by my advertised product.

I will keep my open spaces Islands. Why? Because I take great pride in my business, and because I sold my land on the premise of navigable water. Just because you have decided to come in and attempt to ruin it for me, doesn't mean those things are now unimportant to me. Second Life = Islands, correct? What the heck is an Island without water? You can make things so realistic in other areas, but to obtain simple water, you have made it such that business people must pay an additional $75 per Open Space Island, while you tie our hands preventing us from earning the funds to support it.

----- Possibly a better solution, for me anyway, is a 100 prim Open Spaces Island for $20 a month. That I may be able to call a cost of business, but certainly not $75. For a true void, you do not need many prims. Navigable water is most important to me, because I landscape my Islands for my residents, and don't need another park.

It was not in my business plan to support Islands that do not bring me some sort of profit. I'm assuming you wouldn't exactly like that either. You have not only cost me money personally, but much time as I have to rewrite my business plan. I do not like others to be in control of my business.

Unfortunately, quality residents/customers are not a dime a dozen and they are deserving of respect, information, communication. They also deserve to receive the product they purchased, at the same terms as purchased. I will absorb much of this increase based on what appears to be Linden Labs' simple greed, with a smile on my face. What comes around, goes around in this life.


3. Businesses cannot survive in this economy, RL or SL without REALLY listening to what your customers desire, and then doing everything in your power within your business plan to accommodate them. No, not obligatory listening, or half-listening, but REALLY caring what they desire. It is only then that you can provide it and grow your business. It's a standard not many live their lives by today.

-----A. I encourage you to speak with any one of my more than 75 residents, and ask them, what do you think of your land owner and her business policies/practices. See it's when you are not fearful of their response, all the while earning income, as per the plan, that you have been successful.




Thank you for considering my thoughts,
Valentina Tendandes
:: steps off soapbox::


P.S. On a side note, I wanted to also comment on this person's assumption about his favorite places for sailing and visiting remaining on the grid:



While I can appreciate a positive outlook on most things, I wonder, why do you think your favorite places of all time for visiting and sailing will remain on the map? I think quite to the contrary, for our favorite places on the map to remain after this ridiculous excuse for business management and professionalism is executed, would be a very big surprise.

e) The happy band of LL apologists

isn't that what land is after all one sculpted giant prim?

Let me help you with your spelling..its You're and not your..there ya go..your intelligence, or in this case, lack of it..showed in the first word..saved me reading the rest of your pulp post, thanks ohh..and have a nice day

23 sailing regions with 1 tenant per island, been building it for a year, suffered through your last abrupt devaluation of land, now I can see it was a bad idea to continue and try to recover. When we can teleport between grids perhaps some of you will come sail with us elsewhere as I expect that is where you will find us.

In determining if people will pay the new tiers for homesteads I offer my tenants note to me, my response to him, and I'll just say that I expect the rest of our tenants to follow suit...

--- excerpted ---
[5:31] [DELETED]: Hi Shawwn, maybe you saw the Blog and the News about Low Prims sims and the New Sims.... me and my wife we cant holding the Land, when the Prices go up, also no Tenant will be there when we need to get new Prices for the Sims, a Full Prim sim for Tenants ich much less thanthe New sims. We wanna hold the SIMS this Month and December also. Then we must leave. I say that to you now cause than you have enough time to handle and looking what you to with this two. Im really mad and sry about this. hope see you later to speak about. greetings Silver

--- response ---
Hi Silver, Yes, I am angry as well. If you would like to stay until July, when the price goes up to $125, I will not raise your tiers at all in January and will cover the difference myself. It is alarming what LL has done. We are all in the same boat and I'm afraid they have punched a hole in it. I understand your decision and I appreciate the advanced notice. I will no longer be renting land and will no longer have any land transactions with LL except to pay the tiers for current holdings until they are abandoned.
--- msg end ---

All I can say is... thanks for the memories and the harsh lesson in virtual economics. You sold us these islands, took our fees for the conversions, answered our calls, supported their use as light residential while we expanded.

If you were a store down the street I would be throwing rocks at your windows until you refunded the enormous amounts of fees this has cost. Since you aren't all I can say is, kiss my ass [goodbye], and wave.

I can't help but think (or maybe I've been reading too many Linden blog entries lately) that we will get an announcement telling us that our constructive comments have been heard and they will bring a third product to the table: 1875 prims for 95USD.

Or maybe not......

i want a full refund !! right now right this moment, we get refund if we found tat service is crappy ! REFUND RITE NOW and all others victim like me !

I hope everyone who has had chance to digest the news realises that we are being conned! This is the same price rise with a new name HOMESTEADS...Haha!....but delayed for 6 months. All the comments on the blog and forum have produced no genuine response from LL at all. Same amount of prims (though greatly reduced for basic Openspaces...haha!) and in July 09 same price rise to $125......What on earth is different to the original proposal except that basic OS's will have greatly reduced prims for same money 750 only for $75......just to make a forest....lol)...WAKE UP EVERYBODY......this is unbelievable!!

At this point they could shower us with gifts and do a complete 180 and i don't know that it would matter. They have proven with out a doubt that they just don't get it and are not to be trusted. Now SL will end up paying the costs of poor management decisions.

I love talking with Lindens like this. It's like talking to my cat.



Hmmm... maybe not. My cat has more conversation actually.

I'm a soldier and I really admire the excellent genocide being done these days by the combatants in the Congo. Really good work.

I think they will repond with calling "angry", "passionate" again and then give us a SuperOpenSpace product with 1875 prims for 140 US$ tier per month.
Ofcourse including undisclosed limits to script, textures,avatars, physics burden and datatraffic.

Would you have to already own a full sim to own a homestead?

Its my understanding you would need to own a full sim before being able to purchase the Homestead sim - but stay tuned - that could change in a heartbeat too I'm sure

I'm very sorry to hear that, but there are really hundreds if not thousands of us in that same boat as you right now, and its going to be man overboard soon.

I think if the base product was 1875 prims 10 AV's etc, and allowed rental (realistically only 1 maybe 2 could rent it anyway) - that would go a long way to saving a lot of these types of estates ... which are the types that make SL beautiful. No-one can really afford the new base product specially if they can't rent it out to pay the tier. It's really all pathetic.

At the moment, I believe so. Although everything is as always subject to change on a whim.

KB about OS and what LL means with "light use"

Citate:
"They are provided for light use only, not for building, living in, renting as homes or use for events."

I've saw many posts that tried to distort the facts. Many residents are perfect in this, they always look for failures at LL but they never seen own failures. Why? It's easier to say "it's LL faults, they have to contact me first and not raise the prices that exorbitant.

But i don't think that you or others understand me the right way. I agree that the price changes are too heavy and LL have to thinkover again about the new price structure. But this changes are initialized by US, the residents, because we didn't use the OS in the right way.

Failures and mistakes are on both sides, not LL only. Never reflect your faults to others.

Just me being curious of nature - do you own an land here in SL

this whole agument about used the right way.. is total crap.

If you have a boating event on an openspace sim its abuse too...

In essence LL wants 75 bucks so you can stand on another sim.. and look over at your open space... I can look at nothing for free.

Thanks for the lecture, I'm always willing to learn - and for your information: english isn't my native language. I'm curious how you would write in german. But I'm too intelligent to laugh about other ppl and their typos. But it shows also, that you have no further arguments.

How are we supposed to decide what to do if the detail on limitations are not known?
Scripting limitations are TBD, thats like selling a car and saying we are not sure about how many seats it will have.

After first decreasing island prices Linden took $500 us value from me, now I moved to an open space because I could no longer sell my island land and again Linden bites me by increasing tiers and decreasing abilities on the open space I Live on.

Linden may think this is fair, I shure as heck do not: 750 prims is of little use for anything but a forest, and I have not seen any openspaces with 750 prims on them.

Running 4 openspaces on a server with 3750, just adds up to 15000 prims, just like a regular sim. Limiting to 750 prims means Linden can run 16 sims on 1 server. Guess who is making money then and guess who ends up paying again?

I have a new slogan for Linden Labs:
"Screw the SL residents? YES WE CAN"

I don't get it. Keeping the open water for, well just open water...okay - I totally get that. Will the open water have less prims again? Makes sense to me.

But the new Homestead - will it be 2 homesteads to one simulator? Or will they just pay more for the same laggy service?

We could REALLY use a FAQ, with a list of answerable questions and answers as they trickle out. Maybe I've missed the answers somewhere in the crush, but some of the questions I need answered to make a decision are:
1. Which in-world factors contribute significantly to poor performance? A concise, objective description would help move the discussion along - without it, residents have no basis to determine if what is being offered is fair (or not). prims, scripts, avs, physical objects, textures... what else? Does performance really degrade exponentially w/rt prim count as the latest pricing model implies?

2. Will OS sims share machines with Homestead sims? If so, then you really need to give some guarantees that OS performance will not get *worse*.

3. What does "habitation" mean and why does it have any bearing at all on performance?

4. Why is the original OS product being dropped entirely? 1875-prim OS sims were both popular, effective, and profitable for LL and residents, yet the new new product list has a huge hole between 750 (clear water and desert) and 3750 (1/4 prim). In particular, the original OS sim product was advertised as light *use*, not wasteland - from my perspective, it would seem a whole lot better to retain a product the supports the original intent and price point while restricting the factors that contribute to poor performance.

5. 750 prim seems unlikely to be enough to support the "forest" or "parkland" that continues to be mentioned as a target for OS sim use. The sailing community appears ready to leave also. What happens if nobody is interested in paying 1/4 the price for 1/20th the capability?

6. If LL still wants residents to treat real estate as investment and not as rentals, they need to everything possible to stabilize land value. The choice not to grandfather existing payment schedules devalues land - it isn't a matter of phase-in time so much as it invalidates calculation of amortization of startup costs. This absolutely destroys confidence in the land market. What additional steps will LL take to restore confidence is what it increasingly looking like a failed market?

Sorry Mephistopheles McMinnar but YOU are doing the selective use of info for judgement.
Other proven facts:
- The concierge team DID say the openspace sims can be used for building and living
- LL herself used openspaces for more then water and park in some instances.
- ALL private owned openspaces were used for more then water and park already BEFORE linden lab made the primcount double and started selling the sims as freefloats.

I was just curious.

It will cost me over $4k usd for the first year of getting my own sim, which even though I make money in the game, it doesn't seem like a justifiable expense. Owning a sim wouldn't mean I have more time to be on SL and make things. Most of my time I have now goes to filing DMCAs. :/

I don't want to rent out to people and I really don't need 15K prims. So my hope was that they'd create a tier system for buying private land. Or at least a more middle of the line option, like 7500K prims, $500 set up, $200 a month.