Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

I'm talking fiscally and emotionally, Vye. I won't disconnect socially here but ultimately other worlds less filled with memory leaks beckon!

Talk!

Talk!
(I gave you the dictionary definition of talk earlier, read it and TALK! )

Ok ,let me get this straight..you pull into a car dealer and see a 40k Hummer that you want to buy,but you dont have the cash or the credit to do so,do you walk into the dealership,grab the first salesman you seee and yell and scream at him and threaten to sue him because you cant afford the Hummer outside?????I didnt think so....do you walk into walmart and buy a toaster,take it home,plug it in,put yer wet socks into it and pull the lever and sparks and smoke fly out.then take the toaster back to customer service at walmart and tell them what you did.Then the Customer service person tells you they cant take it back because you used the toaster improperly,do you then jump up and down screaming bait and switch and yelling that you didnt know that the toaster wasnt sposed to be used for sock drying!!!....ya,thats what i thought.......sadly,in America today,we have millions of people living way beyond their means,not only in rl,but in sl as well.Its going to affect us all in some small way,all of us know someone who has lost their island or special group and place they love because of these new changes,and for them ,iam very sorry.Ive walked a mile in those shoes in the past,so I know.But when those things happend to me,I didnt start protests,and block newbie areas and grief everyone else that i saw.I put my sim up for sale and im still enjoying sl years later,its not the end of the world folks...and for the person who wants people to go to sandboxes and meet creative people there????Id rather spend a day at a fully packed Chucky Cheese with a thousand kids on crack,bout the same result..ty and pax vobiscum

Talk!

the subject here is not if people can afford sims or not, affort second life or not, the subject is the way LL as a company threatens there paying customer base by using a non ethical business approach ! U can explain ya customer base that prices will increase with a few % due to the increasing operational costs into a company (which I doubt cause IT hardware nowadays is cheap), but increasing prices with 67 % knowing that those people who owns OS have only the option to pay the increase or to give back there OS to LL!

do you really think this would work in RL ?

another thing is that paying for an OS or REGULAR sim or even mainland is already a rip-off, why should anyone pay an UPFRONT FEE for this, cause the risk of loosing that FEE is a fact in the future. A decent LEASING CONTRACT gives at the end of the trip an option to buy the 'product', in LL you pay an upfront fee for hardware but you will never own that hardware !

the only right approach in which I have seen passing here in the blog before is a tier charge per prims used no matter where u are on the grid (private islands are most expensive, mainland is less expensive), u use 100 prims or u use 10000 prims. The upfront fee would then not be necessary anymore and could be included into the tier pricing. this approach would also make SL more accessible for anyone (low budget, medium budget, high budget)!

but paying for hardware that you will never posess, no way !

Ok let's do the calculation.

To own an openspace you need to own a full sim, that's important in the calculation.

1 Openspace = $75.

A quarter of mainland taking into account needing a full sim of mainland to make a fair price comparison = $195/4 which is just under USD$50.

You get more space of course on your Openspace, but you're already paying USD$25 a month more for that.

Well, but OpenSpaces *were* selling like hotcakes. And if we think back a few months, it wasn't just Mainland that was hurting: Every Estate owner was basically forced to get in line for as many OpenSpaces as they could squeeze from the Linden pipeline, just to remain competitive.

And the math is either really easy or impossibly difficult. The "goodness" that gave the old OpenSpace such an advantage is the value of having a full-sim worth of space and control. Some Estates divided up OpenSpaces and made a good business--but that was all about price and space, too, but just not full-sim space.

It's pretty difficult to find anybody on this thread (or on the planet?) who'd prefer 1/4 a Mainland sim to their very own original OpenSpace. So whatever math we dream up, it sorta has to end up with OpenSpace winning, or we're counting the wrong beans.

FWIW, in idle moments I've tried to deduce from LL's new pricing and product classes how they project market "goodness" to be quantified: how much is space worth, vs control, vs prims, vs avatar count, etc. I have no useful results to report, though.

I have a sorry history of having worked on systems that kill real people when they *succeed*.

I've mused a bit about OpenSpace virtualization, and it occurred to me that each sim is already partitioning real time into hyperfine slices. In a sense, four sims on a core is similar in overhead to running four *instances* of a virtualization engine. I'm just wondering if there could be some way to leverage the sim scheduler itself to multiplex time across multiple regions. Major hairy change, of course, but really, SL's whole sharding scheme is kind of primitive anyway.

And Argent, if I catch your attention here: Do you know if the texture squid fs cache is per sim, or per server? If per server, there could be quite a performance win if neighboring (or otherwise related) sims were pinned to processors on the same server. (I think I'm stealing that idea from Meade--who rightly points out that LL is averse to putting all an Estate's eggs in one basket of CPUs, so there'd be the cost of simultaneous unavailability to weigh against any performance gain from that.)

Can you please explain that to me Jack? Thanks...

xxxx: Hello Equinox_Pinion, thank you for contacting us. I may be talking to multiple people at the same time, so please describe your issue in detail, and I will be with you shortly.

Equinox_Pinion: Hi xxxx, i am just writing a note to my OS residents who have a whole OS..my questions is...if someone decides to change to a 750 prims sim and just put a tiki, 10 palms and his dog on it...can a couple live on that sim?

xxxx: They can, as long they don't go over the the allotted number of scripts (which will be determined and announced soon).

3nd post...didnt get an answer yet...could you please answer me Jack?

Except Linden charges $75 USD for that 1/4 plot of mainland. not $50

Which is pretty amazing how much tier they can get for a mainland sim if you have 4 different owners in a single sim. $75 x 4 =$300 per month in tier for 1 mainland sim.

Let's do the other calculation ,the one that compares actual demand for mainland against demand for openspaces at $75 over the last 6 months.

Perhaps Linden Lab Lawyers have advised them not to talk in these forums anymore due to legal reasons. That is my best guess at this point.

If you only own a quarter yes. If you own a full sim's worth it works out at $50, mainland tier is on a sliding scale. That's without taking into account the group 10% tier bonus too.

Hey I was saying for months that Openspaces were damaging rentals in other areas. Nobody wanted to listen, least of all Linden Lab.

M.

You continue to suggest you did not know how the OS sims would be used.

But in that context this product was a dumb idea in the first place. Openspace sims were being sold residentially well before any of the price changes or OS enhancements. We told you then that it would kill the land rental market and you ignored us. We warned you about performance when the prim count was doubled. Does it make sense that you should take this already popular residential product, double the prims, lower the price, divorce them from estates, and sell them one by one? Yes, but only if you knew how they would be used and wanted to encourage it.

You continue to suggest you didnt know they would create such a demand.

But in that context this product was a dumb idea in the first place. We told you it was a dumb idea to create a product that would compete with regular full prim sims. You ignored us. Does it make sense that you should create a product with the same prim count as a 16k with 4x the land area, all the advantages of a full sim, and raise the price by only $3 per month? Yes, but only if you want to sell alot of something quickly.

You were warned, you chose to ignore the warnings and plow ahead to pollute the grid. Does it make sense that you should sell these things without controls and fill the grid with 13000 of them before you notice that there is abuse, performance issues, unfettered demand? Yes, but only if you chose to ignore those issues until you were done selling them until no one wants them anymore.

You continue to suggest that the price hike is not a punishment, that it's just about getting paid the right amount for how the product is being used and the demand on your ressources.

But if you had priced them accordingly in the first place then they would not have sold so rediculously well, would not have glutted the land market, would not have created such a demand on your resources. At what point do you accept any of the responsibility for these decisions? If a correctly priced product would have not sold as well then you got paid too much.

Now its time to put the genie back in the bottle. Does it make sense that you would underprice them when them when demand is high and overprice them when demand is all but gutted? Yes, But only if your goal is to profit from your own mis-calculations on the backs of your customers.

Do you wonder why so many people think you might have calculated this from the beginning? The reason is because no one can imagine that a company so smart about secondlife could be so dumb about its economy.

There has been abuse here, it was not on the part of your customers. This was either a calculated fleecing of your customers or... A dumb idea in the first place.



P.S. I would usually end there, thinking that there is no point in being civil or making constructive coments to a company that has calculated their profits at every step of the way, but lets pretend it was just a dumb idea in the first place - The right thing to is to take some of the responsibility and share some of the pain. My suggestion for you is a simple one.

You have said you would raise the price to $95 in January. Let it be enough.

Plenty of the openspace sims will dissappear from the grid , many residents will not want to pay the higher price. You will keep the profits from having oversold the product. The demand on the infrastructure will lessen. The land glut will lessen. Demand on the mainland will rise. And, perhaps most importantly, you will salvage some of the good will you have lost here.

Think about it, It's not such a dumb idea.

Originally Posted by Rock Ramona
***Ok ,let me get this straight..you pull into a car dealer and see a 40k Hummer that you want to buy,but you dont have the cash or the credit to do so,do you walk into the dealership,grab the first salesman you seee and yell and scream at him and threaten to sue him because you cant afford the Hummer outside?????I didnt think so....***

The point is you CAN afford the Hummer! The problem is when you get it home and play with it for a few months you discover that it is being re-called by the dealer for a manditory engine replacement. The 400 HP V8 that you were sold MUST now be repalced by a 60 HP Dihatsu sewing machine motor.

So do you scream at the dealer or not?

Duh

I know this guy, he always talks about the evil oil companies. Well, he has this theory that they wanted to raise gas to 3 bucks a gallon here in the US, but when something goes up a 50% and stays there, people talk congressional hearings and get all grumpeh.

Well, our gas didn't go to 3, it went to 4. Man, people were mad. There were hearings, yadda yadda. Now it is back down, everyone is happy. Of course, my buddeh seems to think soon it will be 3 bucks again, but people won't fuss so much. At least it isn't 4, right?

Sorry, that was off topic I guess. I'll let you guys get back to begging for openspaces to stay at 95 bucks. I mean, not be 125. You know what I mean.

Yes I know, I had to pay that 195 tier because I had to buy up the sim to have the land space, not have any idiots moving in to mess up my vision, no privacy, no real terraforming, no estate controls. Yeah I had the prims, but didn't need them. Open space is still the better deal.

Yeah you need to own a private island to buy them, but you only have to own 1 to get hundreds of openspaces, which should have been limited to 4 openspaces per full region IMO. But then I am not sure why you are comparing a full mainland to a full openspace anyway. The only advantage a full mainland sim has over an openspace is prim count that is it. Everything else is a minus when compared.

**unless you make the comparison from the viewpoint of rental baron. Then I can see your point.

It's a better product, or it was, but you in reality pay more for it.



Well I agree with you about the 4 per region. I'm comparing them because people are inferring that Openspaces are underpriced compared to mainland, I'm pointing out that technically they cost more than a quarter of mainland and with the new pricing structure they will cost the same in tier payments as an individual who owns half a sim in mainland.

Compare that to someone who owns a full sim and the tier payments are poor value for money.

The product Openspaces really damaged are full private sims. They are better value compared to a full private sim's quarter of a region. They won't be when the new price hike finally kicks in, they will be poor value. USD$95 is probably around the right price to compare the extra space to a quarter of a private estate.

Three to a cpu would work out at USD$285 which isn't far off what you pay for a full sim, which sounds about right to me.

You are missing a few things,

1. LL auctions off that land, essentially replacing the setup fees with the auction prices, which can be extremely profitable. Many times the setup fees for private islands per server.

2. LL gets paid for a full month from each resident that holds a mainland parcel for any part of that month. So if you sell your parcel you pay them for the whole month, and the buyer pays them for the whole month as wel. essentially any sale gaurantees LL double the income during the month it is sold. If its sold twice in a month, it gets paid for at least 3x the full tier.

Don't be fooled, a part of this is that they very much want you on the mainland

talk!

Yeah $95 for a homestead sounds reasonable but with no script limits.

My point was the product was underpriced in the first place. Priced at essentially the same cost as a 1/4 sim it offered 4x the area and owners rights. This is why people were converting full sims to OS sims. For my part, 1/4 sims became unrentable accept for commercial use.

I'm not suggesting LL did no wrong or even that my residents will want to pay the extra $20. Truth is I'm done renting residential land for profit. if my residents want to stay I will absorb the extra cost of tiers and charge them nothing but a linden conversion fee. If they want to go then LL will be getting their islands back unless I have a commerical use or want to convert them to full sims for commercial use. residential is dead. Over time I will look for a grid that does not fiddle with its economy so glibly. For now LL has the only game in town for commercial.

There is no win in this for anyone but LL.

That wouldn't make much difference. As far as I can tell, the only thing that will make a difference to the majority of people who are being affected is to allow homes on the cheaper version - for them to stop saying that the same number of prims can be used for this but not for that. 1250 prims would probably be a good number to allow a home with its trimmings but not allow some other things.

However, I still see the only sensible thing for them to do it to simply stop saying how the limits can be used. It doesn't make a scrap of difference if 30 prims are used for a house or if they are used for trees. It's ridiculous to say that they can be used for this but not for that. Set the limits, charge the price, and leave the use of the limits to the buyers. Simple.

Way to go,

I can imagine you got scared LL by seeing private estate owners making money out of it, so you want some of it, for what? Maintainance???? must be a joke

Scaring away the people you need the most, the paying ones,

you want improvement of servers? so they can handle the crappy code

easy: kill the free account option, it will bring you less residents, so less traffic though
the ones you will have are willing to pay up for your services provided and might make
things easier on the griefer part to.

Actually that ain't an option will be killing this world as it was ment to be, though this change
you are making will do the same, and should not be needed,

Little other thing, please show us some forum skills and make sub-thread where you put your answers, insane we have to scroll over 130 pages to find the little bit of answers given so far....

just wait till start of next year and your problems will be solved. people will leave for sure wich should bring you enough cores to play with.


time to enjoy the last weeks on the perfectly maintained grid, hope you guys do the same and have a look around, for a change don't look at your stats and numbers, have a look what has become of all this so far.....