Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

Mephistopheles McMinnar: In March, when they lowered the price by half and doubled the prims, (the BAIT), the statement in the knowledge base regarding use was this:

"While they can and have been used in other ways, they are not recommended for any other purpose."

...and it remained that. Operative word "CAN".

They accepted a LOT of money in setup fees. You are characterizing this as a stiff price change. This is not just a stiff price changes. This is, (the SWITCH) changing the service itself regarding how it can be transferred, whether non-profits are eligable, limits on scripts, limits on the number of avatars.

This is a total redefinition of the service that they sold people, with full knowledge of how they were being used, and using the word CAN in the knowledge base regarding those uses. You cannot blame people for using something in a way that the knowledge base said they CAN use it.

No i don't because i don't need a full SIM. But a good friend owns over 20 SIMs so i really know what I'm talking about.

I am in awe actually of people from other countries being able to converse in English - I can tell you now my German isn't the best - I could tell you where to go and how to get these but then again that would be downright rude..and its something I don't tolerate generally.

As for laughing at others? Nothing to do with language barriers - to me stupid is just well stupid in any language *shrugs*

Also as for not having any further arguments - hell I've got tons ..like I said come see me in world - would love to have you over for coffee sometime

YOU DON'T OWN ANY LAND??? well hell then..you know all about the economics of land ownership here in SL then - know what its like to pour hour after hour into creating something..damn..silly me!

and yep...as always
Wir wünschen Ihnen einen schönen Tag

Hi M,

I have heard over and over again that Openspaces were not used as oceans or forests but what did you expect when YOU DOUBLED THE PRIMS and allowed STAND-ALONE OPENSPACES? Did you expect us to build oceans and forests in the middle of NOWHERE? You provided us with TWICE as many prims in order to use them for SEAWEEDS and SEASHELLS?

I'm sorry but I cannot believe that you were so CLUELESS. To my knowledge, Openspaces have been around since June 2006 and I have seen them used as residential sims. So you must have expected more such use after you doubled the prims and allowed them to be stand-alone.

Furthermore, I still don't see ANY SOLUTION to the problem of overload. You are asking us to pay more for "homesteads" without offering nothing in return. The only REAL SOLUTION would be limiting EVERYTHING on Openspaces to 1/4 of what is for a normal prim sim (agents, scripts, textures). I see that you are about to apply TECHNICAL THROTTLES to some of the Openspaces, so WHY don't you apply these restrictions on ALL Openspaces?. This way each Openspace could NOT go over its limits and would NOT affect the other Openspaces hosted on the same cpu.

The distinction you make between Openspaces used as oceans or forests and Openspaces used as "homesteads" is not fair either. How can you make sure that oceans will not be used as homesteads? Are you going to check it out, say, every week? What about the "homesteads" that are used as clubs or as heavy residential sims? What then?

On my Openspaces I offer only 1/4 of the land for residential use. The rest is either ocean or forest. There are hardly 5 users on any one of the sims at the same time. This IS light use. So are you going to charge me as much as you will charge an Openspace owner who owns a club and holds events? Are you going to penalize ME and many others like me because in a Second Life where the average RATIO user per sim is LESS than 3 to 1 (in peak time), some people overload some of the sims? Does this sound FAIR to you?

My residents and I feel deeply disappointed by your policy. Splitting the raise in two parts doesn't make any good and it s very obvious that its only purpose is to calm down the turmoil.

I expected something better, like a 15-20% raise on all sims for the staff you would need to hire in order to set restrictions to sims (although this is a cost that you should have assumed it entirely yourselves).. These restrictions should have been put in place before you even considered marketing Openspaces the way you did, instead of asking us to pay so much more for your miscalculations.

I agree that everyone should take responsibility for their own actions. However, Lindens very rarely take responsibility for theirs. They always end up blaming the users, 3rd party support, bragging how they fixed something when its not and eventually have to reopen the issue to try to fix it right this time.

Where are you M?? Hiding under your desk writing your resignation I hope, and please take some of the useless Lindens with you so competent people can be hired and the competent Lindens can actually accomplish something worthwhile without making them look bad by association.

I'm sorry, are you talking about some other Linden Lab?

It isn't. Same KB article:
"As a stretch of open water for boating or a scenic wooded area they are fine,[...]"
Maybe you haven't read the kb article or you read only the half and understood a quarter, don't know.

Plus - as I've posted elsewhere..

If in SL, you manage to make a house in one prim, you sell it and enjoy the monopoly until someone else figures it out.

If in SL, you manage to make a script that runs in no-script areas, you sell it and enjoy the monopoly until someone else figures it out.

You do not stop and think about whether you are "supposed" to do this or not. (Oh no! If I sell one prim houses, 15000 people could have houses on one sim! However would LL make money? I'd better not do that..)

This is the culture that LL have fostered since SL began. For LL to stop it, they would need to quickly intervene in the sale of any of these products before they could make their creators rich, or claw back the money - if they do neither of these, making them is still a good idea. (How much did the creator of megaprims earn before megaprims became freebies? They were #1 item on XStreet so it must have been a fair amount. LL allowed it, so he was rewarded for doing something which it was pretty dang obvious he wasn't supposed to do..)

In any case - LL have actually effectively disproven that argument themselves. They've said that even people who used only 1000 prims on their openspaces - well within even the old limit - should be counted as "abusers".

Whilst it's good that you make money in SL, think how much harder it is for people like me who have no interest in commercial/moneymaking activities to justify such an expense.

Interestingly, the Lindex jumped from 263 to 274 overnight...

The fact is that avatars don't "live" anywhere.

Imagine a cell phone company selling a low-use phone, and saying "We recognize that these phones are and can be used for heavy talking and texting, but we recommend them to be used for light calling".

Well, said company halves the cost of the phones, sells a TON of them, and a couple of months later says "Wow, we know we said you could use these phones as you wished, but now we've decided we suck and we can't handle this heavy use. So, we are going to give you a 50%+ increase in use fees, and we are going to make sure you can only call 2 numbers a day, and while we're at it we are going to fix it so you can't sell your phone to anyone else."

Come on. This is heinous. Make something look really nice, take a lot of setup fees, then gut the agreement, changing the service completely to something that all those people wouldn't have bought had it been the original arrangement. LL needs to address this unethical behavior, or people need to seek restitution.

I think you're misinterpreting the figures. The Lindex is trading in the same band from 263 to 274 that it has for weeks. The Linden continues its slow geological appreciation against the dollar that it has for over a year. This announcement has had no effect on the value of the Linden.

Here's another world to have a look around in... and yes, it is a NEW world, so it's not as slick yet as SL, but given time, it will be.. a plus, they have a currency called Lunas:
3rdrockgrid.com

Prices look pretty decent:

All currency amounts are in US Dollars.
New regions usually take less than 1 hr. to setup after your payment is rec'd.
We accept payments via credit cards/debit cards using PayPal.
Please note: A PayPal Account IS NOT required to pay using PayPal.
PayPal E-Checks are accepted but take 7-10 days to clear.

Region Types:
WaterRegion is water only and cannot be terraformed.
You will not have access to estate tools with water or mainland regions.

3xRegion - 3x (45,000) Prim Region - 65536sq.m.
$25.00 initial purchase Plus 1st month tier of $65.00
Then each following month just $65.00 per month.

2xRegion - 2x (30,000) Prim Region - 65536sq.m.
$25.00 initial purchase Plus 1st month tier of $55.00
Then each following month just $55.00 per month.

1xRegion - 1x (15,000) Prim Region - 65536sq.m.
$25.00 initial purchase Plus 1st month tier of $45.00
Then each following month just $45.00 per month.

.5xRegion - 1/2 (7,500) Prim Region - 65536sq.m.
$25.00 initial purchase Plus 1st month tier of $25.00
Then each following month just $25.00 per month.

.25xRegion - 1/4 (3,750) Prim Region - 65536sq.m.
$25.00 initial purchase Plus 1st month tier of $16.00
Then each following month just $16.00 per month.

WaterRegion - Water Only - 1000 Prim Region - 65536sq.m.
$10.00 initial purchase Plus 1st month tier of $9.00
Then each following month just $9.00 per month.

These Prices effective: 8/22/2008
All Charges will appear from Y-City Web Hosting

You sold people X. If you want to change the rules about what they can be used for, give everyone the chance to refund the setup fees. That would be fair. This was an error on your part, not ours. So give us our money back and let's try again with the new Homestead/Void configuration.

Nothing short of offering the setup fees back will change the fact that this is a bait and switch. And considering recent New York Atty General lawsuits about double secret probation rules in the telecom industry, you should tread carefully with yours.

No. We know that. Linden has as close to admitted it as they've ever admitted anything.
Their landlord is even more screwed up than you're accusing Linden Labs of being.

Something tells me that Beeflin IS being sarcastic. Maybe. He'll be asking for extra price rises next

The new plan is actually more of a bait and switch now in my opinion, and more iffy legally. Before, it was a heinous redefinition of the original service, sure. Now, they are offering you the choice of 1/5 the prims and a stiff restriction on use, or a less-featured, more expensive service.

In other words, in order to keep the prims you agreed to buy before you have to switch to a more expensive, less featured service, after the original setup fee has been paid. That, in my opinion, is textbook bait and switch.

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0024650/

Jack Linden (Character)
from We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004)

We could have known in 2004 that we had to abandon our open spaces he already made a tv movie about it

Second Life's been going to hell since Pony Linden left. I demand a pony!

I think we can use the 3750 prim (but with a LOW number of physic ones) on OS without any prob the lagier thing are the SCRIPTS and specially the AV Conection

That's somewhat off kilter. In a thread like this one post will be taken out of context.

I've got just over 1/4 of my 3750 filled at the moment, no scripted objects worth looking at other than poseballs, mainly land and water. Yes there is a house a whacking 48 prims of it in fact. What does "living" mean? This is not distorting the facts - it's asking a question. Without a edefinition then I used to "live" on Orientation Island if I was actively mentoring.

I didn't make a "fault", I did a lot of research before renting and if I took away that building then I would still be living there as it is where my home it set. Please be sure you're pointing the finger for the right reason when quoting, good netiquette

I predict that there will be some larger businesses that invested in SL that would sue over this fiasco. Everyone with OpenSIMs payed the setup fees in agreement with the product as-is. $75 a month, 3750 prims, and very few tangible restrictions. This price adjustment is robbing people of their investments, and let me just say, they are being optimistic to think that they wont have another company's legal council calling them out on this issue. If the TOS covers their butts in regards to this, most Judges aren't going to look favorably on it.

You see, I can. Why? Well, LL clarified what OS are and that four OS runs on one core. So everyone should know that this will also effect the performance. Lets take a look on a standard avatar in SL. You wear at least a AO, this use scripts, some of them aren't very well scripted and affects the SIM performance. Many residents wear additionally flexi clothes, scripted collars, shoes, earrings, flexi hairs and other gadgets, any script and flexi prim needs cpu power. Scripts with timers or permanent active listeners even more. The most houses and cottages are scripted and you want a lovely place: so you place some scripted hummingbirds, maybe a temp rezzer for a 81 prim piano and so on. But on a OS you have only a quarter of CPU power and every little thing you use will affect the other 3 OS on the same core.

Now you have performance issues and what are you doing? You file a support ticket - but LL make it clear, that they don't support performance issues on OS. On the other hand LL wants happy residents and they take care about problems. In fact that you have 4 times more SIMs on a OS server you need also more support power for this. Support isn't free and LL isn't a non profit organization.

If you want a good performance for living, buy a full SIM, if you want openwater for sailing regattas, buy a OS. If you want your privacy and 65536sqm, buy a homestead and pay more. That simple. But don't tell me, that OS have always a good performance. I've tested some complete empty OS. When i stand, anything is nearly fine, but when i walk the SIM performance decreases drastically (SIM FPS down to 35 and less). I would never live on a OS, in fact i try to avoid OS, because all of them are too laggy, except the few with a forrest or water for sailing.

LL has stung the general population yet again and as u have been around since 2004 I am surprised you are siding with LL What you quote has been explained many times LL allowed, no encouraged their use as spaces other than voids and has been doing it for ages, so again you can't blame people for using them as LL allowed and quoting a piece from 2007 doesn't cut the mustard imho and yes now they have put in place firmish guidelines

But I still want to know do you own land in SL? I do and i dropped my OS ocean as frankly LL can't manage a piss up at a brewery and i will never trust them again, i am just waiting for full island sim tiers to rise along side the Homestead sims and we are out of here as land owners.

PS: Your English is far better than my German

Until you actually put your money where your mouth is perhaps you should just sit back and take a deep breath!..

I have NO lag on my two open sims - I do not put in support tickets..why would I as they are functioning better than the full sim we have..

You have nothing to add to this discussion - no vested interested and are now muted as it would seem to me you are simply here to cause problems - not solve them.