Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

OPEN UP THE SERVER CODE (REGION) LL!!!!
Set a pay per support system, like many Linux distribution corps do now e.g. redhat, Novell. (and they are very rich companies, without hurting the userbase with idiotic prices)

Infact you promised this over a year ago!!

LL wanted to decentralize the grid, and promised to opensource the region server code in that path (just like opensourcing the client code is in line with that vision).

Now you are going berzerk with Opensimulator project, which is
1. a third party project
2. way less advanced yet.
3. unstable, and internal workings a completely different from your own code.

If you openup your own code, as you promised, you will get:
1. more paying customers paying for support (see point 3 too)

2. greater userbase

3. even more income, by dropping prices for your own server region orders,
* because not everyone has to access to a colocation box to host the regions on thereselves using the region code.
* By dropping the prices, for private islands and openspaces/homesteads, you get more income, cos more and more will order who are not able to host their own..
* many small incomes, equals a huge pile of income. Base principle for success. (it's affordable, thus a stable paying base, which expands rapidly = more income each expanding period, without loosing income from the current paying customers)

4. More populair as system and more developers will help, mature code. (like with the client code)

5. More merchants on the grid, more new playground, more expenses from residents within the grid (av to av transfers etc)

and a lot more..

as you see, this option will help everyone..

Ps. and you can still keep the opensimulator project up AS A LONG TERM SIDE PROJECT, for InterGrid workings.. which will lead to an even bigger userbase (if doing the right way)

And as i said in previous posts. LL is nothing but thieves. they take and take and take and provide very little in return for the ammount of money they get paid.. I almost loath going in knowing thye are ripping off the secondlife community for millions of rreal dollars and feel justified in doing so.

They cant even finish a god damn highway on mainland.... so they ask the community to help them.... then what did they do with the people that where suposed to be finishing the highways ...they used them to build their new sims... meanwhile people on mainland sitting there with their thumbs up their asses wondering what happened to the road.

They have NOT finished the mainland roads.... they build LL new sims so LL can make money...

The residents of SL are treated like shit by LL.Thats the entire reason private sims are popular in the first place. They do nothing to fix the problems the lag of the game as a whole keeps getting worse and worse lag and crashesand nothing been done about it other then they want to charge more money for it.....

I am just discusted with the greed of this company, They only take in like 76 million dollars a year from land tiers and linden sales alone... not counting any of the land sales or the island purchase costs into that...

the lack of actions to improve its product and the crooked means they use to generate profit. It would be different if they actually did their job, you know what we pay them to do. They have done nothing to earn that extra money especially for offering a lesser service. They do not deserve it and i would quit the game before being forced onto mainland.

Quote:
"M Linden here. Many thanks to everyone who responded constructively with their concerns and suggestions about our Openspaces announcement. We’ve listened carefully and your feedback has led to some amendments to our original plan." (http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/11/05/a-letter-to-second-life-residents/)

We're 2051 (now 2052) replies further and does LL listen??? NO!!! If they would, there would have been:
a. apologizes for cheating SL residents;
b. amendments on their plans: OS sims stay how they are (3,750 prims, 100 avi's, no scripting limits), there's a new product coming called "Homestead" with at least 7,500 prims and no further restrictions, all within a reasonable price (OS US$ 75 a month, HS US$ 125 a month;
c. NO CHANGE IN HOW TO HANDLE EDUCATORS/NON-PROFITS: THEY JUST KEEP ON PAYING HALF THE PRICE, AS LL ALWAYS HAS PROMISED!!!

Jack and M aren't paying attention to this thread. They haven't been since its inception. They don't care, they don't HAVE to care. It's their way or the highway.

Since I no longer have (or can afford) a home in SL, I think I'll spend much of my time in the public areas with a tin cup and a "Will work for Sim" sign. Or maybe a "Homeless, please HELP" sign. I'll do my best to look disheveled and unpleasant. I will ask everyone I see for "Change"


King of the Hobos
Don C

Not so, that bunch is getting hosed too. They will get only a 30% break in price.


Can ya feel the love?
Don C

Which is precisely why I hope we don't lose the initiative to develop alternative energy sources, soon, and kick the oil barrels into the history books.

Something similar may wind up having to be done with the metaverse. Develop alternatives, and kick the crappy old one into the history books.

Well, I just invested in an alternative VW provider. I plan to abandon 4 of my 5 SL 4k parcels by the end of next week (having abandoned 3 already a few weeks ago), keeping my investment in SL to a minimum (including spending money there except for tipping, I have enough clothes, hair, eyes, furniture etc. etc.).
I will be staying in SL as SL so far is the most stable, advanced and attractive platform and I probably will spend more time in SL as in the competitor until the competitor is more stable and more people 'live' there. I can l'live' in even two VW for lower costs than before ))), thats amazing.....
And I can watch the one VW develop, see some old fellows there who migrated already and watch the other VW's (SL) changes in policy very calm and I can have my fun in both worlds (besides my fun in RL). Let's see who wins the battle. Possibly or even probably, I may stay in both VW. We will see......

And to LL: talk!

aaaah, and when I logged into SL right now, I got a survey, if my SL experience is better or worse, guess what I answered

No more crashes eh M? Then why are there regions crashing 2 or 3 times a week? Where is all the money your pillaging from your customers going for cause its not going for the fisher price servers LL keeps using.

Dear M Linden: Since the middle of October I've been doing nothing but crashing. I don't own land. I have a medium sized inventory. I build and script. But it's nearly impossible to build or script when I crash from five to 20 times a day. I have filed support tickets. I wish you'd go read them. Your support department is focussed on having no open tickets, so they close the tickets before they fix anything. Hence I have several recent ticket numbers.

Today I get a note from support telling me not to have multiple tickets open and a link back to support page. I arrive there to find that the ticket has been CLOSED by your staff member who told me not to file multiples!

Catch 22 or 44 or 66 or whatever, this is not support. The problem is not fixed. They keep closing tickets for no apparent reason. And please do read how snotty your "support" people get to a resident for whom this is the FIRST support issue of her 1.5 year SLife.

I'm on the same wire (not wireless), same house, same computer, same DSL, same everything as I have been since I joined. This crashing is new, it is not imaginary, it is mostly likely NOT my equipment (which includes a brand new modem and a site review by my phone company), and which has been going on for the better part of three weeks.

If retention is important, "support" would be a good place to look.

With best regards to you - this is no off thread because of your remarks that "crashing is down. period." When you review my recent logs and read my support tickets you may have a better understanding of residents' complaints.

Crashing is not down. Period. My crashing is way up and support has not done anything to fix it. I have had two tickets cancelled by their end and now this run-around. I hope there is a solution to this. When it works, SL is fabulous. But the last few days, the callous and cranky "support" emails are beginning to make me wonder what is going on down there.

Toady Nakamura

The deafening silence on behalf of the Lindens actually speaks volumes.

You are completely and unequivocally mistaken. What you are claiming is impossible. You're performing MORE physics calculations (the same number of prims over 4 times the volume), you've got more intersim communications, you've got the raw unavoidable overhead of the sim's basic bookkeeping multiplied by four, you've got four copies of the sim software taking up memory, you've got "child prim" and "child avatar" overhead for avatars in the other sims and prims in the 10 meter border zone. You're not saving ANYTHING by culling because Havok4 already groups prims into mutually exclusive zones all by itself.

Four Openspace sims are never going to perform NEARLY as well a single sim handling the same content on the same number of CPUs.

Where "zones" and "portals" give you a performance improvement is when you get to apply more CPUs to the problem. They don't do anything but reduce overall performance if you're running them on the same processor.

If your client is crashing 5-20 times a day there's something wrong with your computer.

It's down because EVERYTHING's down. There's a global economic collapse happening. Congressional hearings had nothing to do with it. Some of it was probably the "election bump" - the gift the oil companies give to the republicans every 4 years, but the roller coaster in housing prices and stock prices had nothing to do with the election and everything to do with the recession.

Well I will be giving up my sim tomorrow. I have never known such a crazy unfair deal in my life. I will be watching the growth of new virtual worlds very carefully and I will move when I feel the time is right. I do not believe LL will remain the market leader for long as they treat there residents like shit and that will be there downfall. What they fail to understand is that the residents have made SL it what it is today and given the chance they will be off as soon as they see a better opportunity.

I don't know, but I imagine there would be higher costs to migrating sims if they can't migrate the cache with them.

As I have expected it, Linden Lab did listen and "improved" their plans with Openspace regions ... or did they?

Everybody who has checked the specs in the knowledge base http://tinyurl.com/5ap45z) will already know that the "new" Openspace product is just a decoy. I can not imagine many people who will find a region useful, which costs 75 US$/month, offers just 750 prims and comes with an avatar limit of 10 and unspecified limits on script performance. And I don't expect that Linden Lab itself envisions many customers for this product (many of their own Openspace-based projects use substantially more than 750 prims ... )

What does this leave? A phased-in price raise with additionally restrictions.

Actually I don't think that asking a little more for an Openspace region than for 1/4 of a standard region is completely unreasonable. A full Openspace region gives you 4 times the area and the same prim capacity as 1/4 of a standard region. The currently suggested pricing constitutes a HUGE premium though, and I don't think it is justified - at least not the prices, Linden Lab intends to demand later in the summer of 2009.

What I find most annoying is the way, this is presented: in the first round with a lot of insulting statements towards customers using this type of land.

And now in the the second round with more thinly veiled accusations by repeating again and again the phrase "original intended use". In the end its the same smoke screen, which Jack Linden tried in thr first announcement: trying to imply that Linden Lab was surprised by the great success of this product and the way customers used it ("against regulations" as they try to phrase it). Please compare this to the facts that

(1) Linden Lab sold a product which featured 1875 prims, no avatar or scripting limits for 75$ per month (and many for 50$/month).

(2) Linden Lab had 2 (two!) full years of experience with this product, when they decided to raise the prim limit to 3750 with no price change at all and instituted many rule changes which encouraged heavy use of these regions.

(3) Linden Lab itself developed "added value" versions of this product, which featured ready made buildings and scenery pre-installed on the land with 2000 - >3000 prims.

Please don't get me wrong: I think a company has the right to demand for its product any price that the management of this company deems right. What I think is bad business ethics, though, are tactics like "bait and switch". Additionally, what I think is just bad business practice is ... shooting yourself in your own foot.

I am not only saying this because this price raise hurts our business (it hurts our customers and what hurts our customers hurts us). I am rather certain that Linden Lab will suffer from this decision, too.

Why I do think so? Simple: Openspace regions - especially in the free floating variety - are the product, which most closely resembles what is possible with the OpenSim technology already. (If you don't know about OpenSim, please check here: http://opensimulator.org/). OpenSim regions and the grids in which they are located, are not ready for primetime, yet ... These grids are still slow and buggy. It is not easy to take your (second) wordly possessions from Second Life into these other grids. It is not even easy to take your avatar shape, skin or clothes with you. The economy in these worlds is not working yet, which results in not many products being available there. All of these worlds are small and they do not have many residents -- especially not many residents online concurrently.

All in all: if you are not an enthusiastic builder or a hermit, who is not interested much in meeting other people, parties, shopping or exploring, these grids are not for you.

But this will change in the next 6 - 12 months. The alternate grids will grow and they will improve.

And then competition will finally arrive. All of these alternative grids will feature substantially lower prices for land. And that at a time when Linden Lab plans for another price raise.!

I guess we all know what will happen then.

That's why I do not believe, that the prices will be raised again next summer ... the world will be changed until then ... and not in the favor of Linden Lab. In the end, their greed will destroy their leading position in the Metaverse. I am not happy about this - as I have been a huge fan and excited supporter of Second Life from the first moment I discovered this alternate world ... but it seems as if no one can do anything against it

Dana Bergson
CEO of The Otherland Group

You are considering the sum of all the processing on the CPU, I was commenting on the lag the users experience ... thats client side. And what needs to be sent down the pipe.

A client having to load 1/4 of the content in an OS will utilize a LOT less traffic than a client having to load all that content in a full sim ... its pretty obvious.

And Havok culling in SL is not as efficient as you may think it is (unfortunately).

I offer this graph which may clarify some aspects of the changes in OS pricing policy. Basically it shows the effective cost of owning an OS for a number of months (horizontal) and writing off the setup cost over that period. The pre-change expected cost (black circles) is compared with the initial change (red) and the revised change (blue) for owners who bought in March 2008 (squares) or in October 2008 (triangles). There are a number of interesting features relevant to the discussions in this thread, which I will leave others to develop.

M is sailing RL in his yacht
J, who is J?
K, Katt still eats popcorn and has a drink

If my company would be in trouble, I would act differently, so I conclude: LL is not in trouble, kind of LehmanLiars they are and enjoy their champagne, cheers LL, but some advice, don't drink too much of that Lehman champagne, you might vomit and wake up with a hedache

p.s. SL (as long as it exists) can be fun even with 0 prims and no home 'winks'

Dana, thank you for your comment.

If LL ignores most of our please as I'm sure they are, I really do hope they AT LEAST have the decency of reading your letter and listening to your reasoning.

Your Otherland is one of the larger estates in SL and a substantial investment which I'm guessing is around 150 sims and many of those are themed Openspace - which is what also makes it what I personally believe is the most beautiful larger estate in SL. It may not be the biggest considering certain SL estate giants, but is like day and night in quality compared to them.

Friends and myself often sail those beautiful islands and found them the best for sailing. I cannot imagine what SL would be like if your islands were not there.

so is MSN yahoo ICQ etc etc etc...

As regards LL repeatedly suggesting that this change in pricing is due to people not using open space as intended, I would hazard a guess they are making that statement on advice from their lawyers. There are trading standards regarding the sale of goods in most countries, and those standards apply to the Internet as well. To change the terms after a sale without having to offer a refund, I suspect you need to prove the customer was misusing the product...

LOL I don't even think they are listening.