Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

The best way to let your voice heard is to use the democratic system to file complaints to Linden Lab's Board of Directors that they are losing your business and trust:

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/people.asp?privcapId=2532360

Let's use the system to beat the system.

And people here wonder where the concept of rebellion comes from? Look no further than the above scenario from Mr. M.

LL/SL may not be a government, but it functions as a community with a hierarchy - even using the language of Governor is indicative of at least that type of structure.

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

No one will remember this rebellion in 400 years, but neither will LL be remembered.

Islands already in existence were grandfathered at their current rates. Prices on new sims after the switch were higher, but people that had already bought didn't get screwed over. With the rapid growth of SL, (at least up until this openspace announcement), the price difference on those grandfathered sims is negligible compared to the goodwill gained by grandfathering them. The only way LL will be able to get any manner of trust again is to announce that all price increases will be accompanied by grandfathered pricing for current owners. Without that, it's just not worth taking the risk to develop areas for people to enjoy.

Respect the community ... LOL


PSML .. and when is that going to happen .. I have been on here most of day while working, and not seen One Linden, Post ONE comment ... its kind of ironic don't ya think, this thread was started by a Linden, and calling it

> Open Spaces Announcements & Talk with M and Jack Linden ...

Not meaning any disrespect to Mutes ..

But .. seriously M and Jack, are you guys Mutes ?

and are you talking to us in Sign Language ?


because I sure as hell am not seeing any of your signs ...

When you consider that the land doesn't actually exsist, it is insane. I can think of much better things to spend my money on, tangible things, not pixles.

I have just had a notice from my landlady advising me how much I will be paying come Jan and July................$132 NZ per month for 1/2 a freaken sim, I THINK NOT!

Shove it LL

and with all the prospective homeless AV's, furniture makers, garden centres and builders are going to experience a substantial loss too

Well your asking us to make a decision and we're trying to do that without all of the information.
You state on your policies page that Script Limits are to be determined and the same with CPU Ratios.
TBD tells me one of two things, this whole mess wasn't thought out, or your looking at making the Homestead totaly worthless by severly limiting Scripts.
We need all of the information to make a informed decision.
I wouldn't buy a house without a inspection or buy a car without taking it for a test drive.

Katt I'm glad you had the time to read that one page.

I work for an airline and having to deal with 224 flights from just my one little airport it would be nice to watch that first bank of 20 planes land and be able to ignore the other 204 flights for the day. But then the passengers, like your users, might get upset.

The posting on the blog was closed because M was going to talk here. Where is he? I asked a question of you shortly after you took your current position....How much communicating are you really doing? If they pay you by the post you are woefully overpaid.

If you are so worried about the fighting and obvious ads fine. Delete them and move on to the questions. Don't insult us by telling us you can only read one page in several days. I'm not attacking you, I'm questioning your work ethic. I honestly believed you were following the rule of...if you don't have anything good to say....then you made that one lame post. Do you have to rest up for a day before speaking again?

Didn't they make the grandfathered class 4 sims pay extra to get voice or did they not follow through on that?

Du rouge à lèvres sur une cochonne

I don't know about class 4s, but they didn't raise the tier on grandfathered class 5 sims. Well, not until this announcement that the OS sims would be raised in Jan.

Firelight

Yes and at least by grandfathering them, they made them a valuable commodity as people still look for a sim on the old tier structure and are pleased to buy them. But that was when Phillip Rosendale was still at the helm now it is obvious the attitude of LL toward the residents that have built and grown sl. They were still rolling out these sims days before the announcement under the guise that they would be 65536 sqm 3750 prims 75.00 a month. Again I say LL do the honorable thing and grandfather the sims that you sold under the conditions that you sold them!!!! What you have done here may or not be criminal but it surely is not honorable and dont give us anymore rubbish about abuse or unintended use because that is simply a lie in which most of us are too wise to buy and many estate owners specifically asked questions about what they were going to be used for and were given the go ahead!

From what one person said, she got her OS sim an hour before the announcement was made. She was very upset since she couldn't afford the higher tier.

Firelight

I would not count out removing all grandfathering pricing on all private sims to be next.

So I should have purchased openspace and do what I am doing on Linden Land and pay less than the $125 per month which I pay now. How is this fair for folks that abide by the rules, term of agreement and have to pay what you charge. So we need to complain and get the teir down huh!!

If they do, I think it will hit some of the older communities hard. I hope they give plenty of advance warning.

Firelight

Apart from the fact that the targeted tier fee is moved from Janurary to July I can't see any change but in the revamping of the product's name to "Homestead".

Ooops sorry, yes there is one change: the "new" Openspace product will have less than half the prim count (750) as compared to the very orginal one (1875). While I personally have no problem with agent limitation, script limitations and whatsoever, I simply can't see the interest of getting a 64K sqm land for $75 a month that has the same prim usage capability as a 3K sqm parcel on mainland where you pay $25 a month.

Or does really the value of privacy and low lag on OpenSpaces justify a $50 monthly difference? Not quite sure at all. Yet again that is a LL tactics to have average residents move to mainland, and get cleaned privte estates for other purpose and other categories of customers (i.e.: very likely corporations and the like).

Last, whenever it comes that all OpenSpaces owners "upgrade" to Homesteads, will this solve the so-called CPU overload by magic? Since this is the only argument of importance pushed forward by LL, we can guess it will. Will it?

Won't 60 days be enough advance warning?

Ok M, I doubt if you'll read or respond to this either, but I've seen this point made several times and I feel it's quite relevant in this case.

Your claim to justify these price increases is that openspace regions are using too large a share of resources.

So why is it that you aren't doing anything about camping, or places full of hidden bots, both of which are dodgy methods of raising traffic?

Why aren't you doing anything about the mainland owner with 16834 sq m running a nightclub or mall, that lags the whole region to death, and frequently maxes out the avatar limit of 40 so that others living there aren't able to access the land they've paid for?

Why aren't you removing traffic altogether, as people have been asking for years, in order to remove people's 'need' to cheat to remain competitive?

What is it about 'unfair use of resources' that you are differentiating, between someone with 3000 prims and 4 people occasionally on a region they are given 3750 to use, and someone on a 1/4 mainland sim with a dozen temp rezzers, security devices, with 30+ people there on a regular basis? Because clearly there is something, as you're killing one and not the other.


Either, or all, of the above, actually benefit Second Life. What you are proposing is harmful.

M, step outside your boardroom and into Second Life, with a disposable anonymous avatar, and invite any of us here to give up half an hour of our time to take you round SL and visit some of the things that residents have created, not for profit, but often at great personal expense to the wider community. Take your eyes off the balance sheet and into the mind of those who have spent the last however many years putting the meat on the bare bones that your company have provided. See SL from the point of view of a user, not an accountant.

I'd like you to answer the following questions please.

1) How many times have you, personally, ever logged into SL for fun rather than a business meeting?

2) Have you ever used the build tools to create anything, however simple?

3) Have you ever attended a resident-run event of any kind?

4) Have you ever bought anything from another resident?

5) Have you ever chatted with a resident that you have come across on the grid?

6) Have you ever tried driving a vehicle/boat/plane/bicycle in SL?

... because the impression we're getting is that you actually haven't got much of a clue how SL works. We're here to help you, all you have to do is ask; you have a fantastic resource available free of charge at your fingertips waiting to be asked.

After all, just think how damaging it would be for a cellphone company's reputation if its CEO admitted he never used one, or had a package from a rival company. Or the Chairman of Ford admitted he drove a Toyota. How can you run a company when you never use its product?

Your court. The ball is in it. Make your decision. As a wise man once put, "you have hours, not days or weeks".

Depends on how much the increase is. And, of course, it will depend on each group/individual siutation as to how much time they would need to adjust to increased costs.

It also depends on the time of year (seasonal variations in budgets) and the RL economy.

Since I don't participate in one of the older communities, I couldn't begin to make a guess.

I do know that a lot of people running businesses here said that 2 months was not enough time to rework their business plans and absorb a 66.7% increase (and some people are dealing with 150% increase). That's one reason for the staggered price increase - to give people more time like many asked for.

Firelight

From the old $195 per month to the current $295.

I did. I bought a 1024 just large enough to put my XStreet and OnRez servers on. I'm getting rid of my island when tier is up in the 15th. I pay 75 USD for the island ... I am only paying 5 USD for the 1024.

This new pricing theme does nothing for growing SL businesses. It's kind of like being over taxed and over regulated in a real life small business. It's much more cost effective AND easier to just let it go and just work for someone else.

Perhaps they are working on those things and will announce them as they are ready.

I suspect that if they are planning on making changes there, you would like those first? Before increasing OS prices?

Firelight

That would be a 100% increase. That's a lot to absorb in 2 months.

I believe that before - when they did the price increase and then ended up grandfathering us, that they agreed to give us a 90 day notice before removing the grandfathering. But I would have to see if that announcement still exists to be sure (since it was over 2 years ago and my memory is not what it used to be).

Firelight

I stand corrected. (Thanks Argos) That's a 50% increase. It's still a lot to absorb in 2 months, but not as bad as a 100% increase would be.

I just don't understand how an unfair use of resources (camping/bots) is ok yet a fair use of resources (within the limits of the land parcel) is somehow abuse.

They haven't tackled the issue of campers/bots/traffic abuse in all the time I've been here ... it's been a problem for many since long before 'low prim sims' were even thought of, so I doubt if it's considered an issue now.

The problem is that someone with 30 bots hiding at 750m above their store is adding to the concurrency, and thus the figures that they can bandy about to investors about how popular SL is; whereas someone using a low prim region within the limits that they bought the region at to use might only be one person logged in for a few hours a day using it as a private sandbox.

It's also why they haven't stopped the influx of non paying accounts - because they like the high 'login numbers', rather than realising and accepting that someone who pays nothing (either through land rentals, purchasing stuff from other residents, buying L$ from the Lindex etc) is actually a drain on resources that those who do pay are subsidising forever.

The business model (paying accounts v unpaying accounts) is fundamentally flawed, and we've told LL that for the last 2½ years so what do they do? Instead of making everyone contribute, just screw over the small % that already pay too much.

In the same way that a WoW character may just be data on a server somewhere, when you've spent many hours and a lot of money/effort building them up to be the highly skilled level 70 character with epic armour and all the bells and whistles, you cannot measure the emotional attachment that people make with their digital alter egos. I remember feeling really sad when Sims Online finally closed down, even though I'd hardly played it for the last 6 months; my pixellated self was dead, and that was the end of it. Snatching away someone's dream that they've built up in SL by pricing it out of their reach, after they've finally gotten enough resources together to get it going, is a big hurt that a lot of people who, in good faith, got hold of an opensim, may never recover from.