Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

That's true of course but you also seem to be against the price increase. If OpenSpaces are so popular they are crowding out the real sims what would you suggest LL do to balance things out? Assuming for now that some kind of balance is desirable.

I'm beginning to think the title of this thread is incorrect and should just be "
Open Spaces Announcement & Talk". Some feedback would be nice from the "with M and Jack Linden" part

Same like me, because this is a fact, you can't seperate it if 4 OS runs on one core.


Sorry, wrong again. The CPU manages everything in the SIM, positions from the prims, which textures the viewer have to download. Even if the OS are not connected to each other, you haven't a better performance. Your analogy is still hypothetical may work on a turing machine (if you know what it is), but not in practice. I'm really sorry, but i think you don't know from what you're talking about. Maybe I'm wrong but there are some failures in your thoughts.

First thing is that the product should be taken off the market until this issue is properly resolved.

Second thing is that Linden Lab should stop pointing to guidelines that they knew weren't being applied and they themselves said were ok to ignore. It's not like Linden Lab didn't act on abuse of Openspaces, I was at an office hour where a French guy was complaining that Linden Lab had told him he couldn't use an Openspace as a French orientation island.

Then with the BS out the way we can have a proper honest dialogue. I said on Prok's blog that I thought they'd settle on tier of USD$100 a month, this was after the first announcement and before the second.

Compared to a quarter of a private sim an Openspace is more appealing. I have no real objection to restricting avatars to a maximum of 25 with a reccomendation that 10 is enough. Same as a private estate can support 100 but really 40 is enough.

Restricting scripts and such like we'll have to wait and see what the plan is but that should be fine too.

Asking people to pay a little more for the extra space sounds fine to me, this is the discussion we should be having, we should be discussing a USD$25 a month rise. If the aim is to eventually have 3 per cpu and offer a performance increase then a rise of USD$25 is justified, 3 x 100 = USD$300 which is around what a full sim costs, they've now set the USD$95 level which is high as it should go but personally I feel it should stay at USD$75, with technical restrictions until they are ready to give us that performance increase but if they notify us now that 6 months down the line to pay for that increase we'll have to pay USD$25 (Or USD$20 as it now stands) a month more I think most people would buy that, especially now. This would largely get LL off the hook.

The angle that is also being missed is why the initial price is going up? I can see no justification for charging USD$375 a month for a new "homestead". Tier is where Linden Lab make the real money, they could up the price to USD$275 and lower the price of "Openspaces" to USD$225, although I think that's a little high I'd imagine they will sell more homesteads than Openspaces.

For the general Openspaces they should grandfather in those who are currently using them as the so called true Openspaces and allow them to use their current prim allocation with the new technical restrictions but restrict any newly sold Openspaces to 1875 prims, which is a reasonable number, rather than the ridiculously low 750 they are offering.

It's perfectly fair. What is not fair is the new Void sim. This will effect the sailing association. Of course originally I did not know this until I read the Wiki knowledge base... hence I changed my initial response. I guess according to "you" I don't have the right to do this... moving on..

People were always paying for the space in the first place, not the prims. As I have said before, some prefer prims, other prefer space. So you cannot really compare this to mainland in that sense.

No, they will NOT be a poor value. They will still be a great value. If you cannot undertand the simple equation, then perhaps you need to go back to primary school.

Concerning resources, on Mainland people are still sharing one cpu.. there really is NO difference.

Finally, as to my stance on the responbility on landowners, wonders why this would bother you if you are not one of the rotten ones. Yeah, I do have an issue with landowners who are intentionally ripping off newbie renters... as should we all.

Personally I hope to see this action illegal at some point. It's one thing to lease out property and another entirely to ask for more than what the actual purchase price is from a renter.. a renter who will have no rights and who will never technically own the land in the eyes of Linden Lab.

I do hope that at some point LL makes the Homestead available for individual purchase to premium members, waving the estate owner requirement.

In my opinion the fair course would be to maintain the OS product as offered by LL at the original price with the original prim limits. Better define what that means in terms of scripts, etc. But do not change pricing.

Create the new homestead product for residents whose useage exceeds the above. Increase the price relative to how much power the product will have vis a vis cpu useage. A suggestion is two homesteads per cpu with half the price of a private island and half the resources.

Anything less can only be perceived as bait and switch when residents have been buying up these regions and creating homes and businesses for the past six months with the unspoken expectation of relative price stability.

I agree with you on this about maintaining the original VOid sims, prims included at the existing price.

However, I do not think there is a bait and switch here. Originally when this whole fiasco started, I also felt the same as you until some friends and I were talking about server costs. I honestly feel that LL could not have possibly projected the server load and costs incurrted as a result of the huge response to the introduction of double prims on OP sims.

Bandwidth costs are astronomical. It has been reported that Youtube's bandwidth costs are from 1-3 million USD a month. To understand more about bandwidth costs, read here..

http://fishtrain.com/2008/01/17/the-impact-of-bandwidth-costs/

I am sure that LL has been honest with us concerning unexpected server load and incurred costs. They could not have possibly projected these costs since they had nothing to compare to.

I agree with you on this about maintaining the original VOid sims, prims included at the existing price.

However, I do not think there is a bait and switch here. Originally when this whole fiasco started, I also felt the same as you until some friends and I were talking about server costs. I honestly feel that LL could not have possibly projected the server load and costs incurred as a result of the huge response to the introduction of double prims on OP sims.

Bandwidth costs are astronomical. It has been reported that Youtube's bandwidth costs are from 1-3 million USD a month. To understand more about bandwidth costs, read here..

http://fishtrain.com/2008/01/17/the-impact-of-bandwidth-costs/

I am sure that LL has been honest with us concerning unexpected server load and incurred costs. They could not have possibly projected these costs since they had nothing to compare to.

Don't be absurd. USD$125 is way too much.

A quarter of a full private sim costs just under USD$75, how the heck does USD$125 represent good value compared to that?

Don't be ignorant.

It is more than fair.

People were willing to pay 75 USD for only 1800 prims.. this price is for double those prims, yet the price is not double.

There is no comparison to Mainland costs and if you are not intelligent enough to see the difference, then there is no point for me to waste my time to convince you otherwise.

Don't be ignorant.

It is more than fair.

People were willing to pay 75 USD for only 1800 prims.. this price is for double those prims, yet the price is not double.

There is no comparison to Mainland costs and if you are not intelligent enough to see the difference, then there is no point for me to waste my time to convince you otherwise.

Of course it is. The point is the client does not need to download all the extra content when its not there (in the sim) - so therefore the bandwidth used is less. Its really pretty obvious. If you have less content to download, the bandwidth used is less (and thus the lag).

You are assuming that your SL client will completely download all 4 OS's content which it doesn't ... if that was the case then yes of course it'll be slower because of the overheads in managing the content over 4 OS's. But thats not the case (content is downloaded as required - streamed) ... when the original commenter TP's into her shop on her OS SL only needs to load whats "in frame" completely (if you know what that is) and certain content partially. If she were on 1/4 of a full sim her client would need to download all her neighbors stuff too as the density is much higher.


Yes I know what it is, I assure you I do know what I'm talking about I have a few years game coding experience, and it works like that in SL too, we have done tests on this before splitting full sims into OS's.

If you speak to estate owners they will likely tell you that they have less performance problems on responsibly kept OS's than on Full Regions : In fact I think I even recall Dana Bergson (who posted earlier) mentioning that on the Otherland blog.

Additionally its pretty obvious that having a 4 businesses (say one on each OS) would mean less AV traffic on each region which also assists the client (vs mutiple AV's in a full sim region) - that you will know if you've been involved in multi-player games. Yes I know the server still has to do the same (or maybe marginally more work) but we are talking lag to client.

Never-the-less, you are entitled to your opinion as are so many who enjoy the laggy loaded 15000 prim regions, and I will respect that and leave this were it is - as its not really the place to discuss this. Perhaps if more people never came to realize this great advantage of 4 OS's over a full region we would not be having this price increase issue.

However what you will find is that LL have come to realize this as well ... and thats why they have realized the additional value an OS region gives you. I believe the $125 tier is totally ridiculous, but a tier of $95 would be about fair. $75 for the base OS they are proposing is also ridiculous, but at $50 with 1875 prims it could be a good 'void' solution to create the region breaks necessary to maintain good performance between those fully-laden full-sims you are referring too.

No sorry, it's not good value. It's way too expensive.

A homestead 3750 prims USD$125
A quarter of a private sim 3750 prims USD$75 a month.
A quarter of a mainland sim, 3750 prims USD$50 a month.

Yes, superb value there.

Voids didn't sell so well did they!

it most certainly is bait and switch...

they offered a product.

they will stop offering and servicing the product they sold insted they are offering 2 different products, neither as good as the original product and the one thats close is substantually more money...

If they where offering a refund for those that did not wish to choose either product then it would not be a malitious act of bait and switch.... they are not you suck it up or you stop paying and loose your initial investment.

If bandwitdh was the primary reason for the change and i highely doubt that their ISP bill comes to anywhere close to the aprox, 5 million dollars a month or so they make off all land teirs, then why not raise everyones teir...
11000 full sims or so... x 295 = 3,245,000 +
15000 open sims x 75 = 1,125,000 +
5000 x 195 mainland (actually much higher putting in full sim rental rates) = 975,000
5,345,000 per month on tier alone... add in at least another 1 million from linden sales and god only knows how much they make from land sales every month.

If they are pulling in that kinda money a month and cant pay the bills then they should pull the frigging plug.

Read the words.. hello? Do you have trouble understanding simple English? if so, please let me know and we can use a translator. According to your profile you are American, so you should be able to comprehend even something as simple as this.

Let me spell it out once again.. THERE IS NO COMPARISON between Mainland and private estates so STOP comparing. This is NOT about prims but about space and the added perks that comes with owning or renting a Homestead... terraform, land controls, and so on.. and YES space.

well to be correct... 1/4 sim on mainland = 75 a month not 50. if you rent a half a sim or a full sim you get a price break.

That what i've wrote in a earlier post. Most user don't know how expensive it is to run a grid like SL. There is a permanent traffic between the regions and asset servers - don't forget monitoring tools which require also bandwith (Ok, not much for a SIM but in summary it's alot). Other grids may be cheaper at the moment, but they haven't a Grid like SL - and not permanent at least 30.000 users online. If other grids grows like SL, I'm more then sure that they have to raise all prices exorbitant.

I'm sure many users think "Hey i have a flatrate, so LL will have it too" but thats totally wrong. Some users tried to list the costs from LL but in all lists I've missed traffic costs and fees for the datacenters. These two things eats alot of money, each month, even if the SIMs are unused.

Great post Vryl

How many OS sims did you buy? With your own money or that of renter's? Actually they are offering to allow estate owners to convert if they choose to not accept the new price.

Bait and switch? Prove it. I think not. Bandwidth costs are staggering. I doubt anyone can imagine this since we each live in our own little world, especially in SL unaware of the outside world with RL costs and so on. LL has bills to pay just as we all do. If we cannot understand this simple fact of life, then we all better go back to living in our glass houses but not the ones in SL.

Lol well that's an amazing fail. My profile says I'm American does it? Haha.

#

Your reputation is shot on this issue. People have been comparing the product to mainland, of course it's fair to comapre it to mainland. That's how you gauge value. That's how you gauge any value. A television is a television but some have better features and command a better price. You then weigh up whether those extra features are worth the extra price.

Considering you just recently told me that the old voids had less prims it's a surprise that you then say it's not about prims, well it's not a surprise because your opinion flip flops on a regular basis.

USD$125 is too much. USD$95 is probably a fair reflection of the extra space and features.

True. But those clients don't have the advantage of sucking LL bandwidth.

Seriously: For many, the option of hanging out in SecondLife, landless and free, ain't such a bad option. And if that starts catching on, LL is really screwed.

Furthermore, grandfather in existing OS. But sell new ones only in groups of 4 so if the owner lags one of the sims, only his/her other sims suffer. Do not make island ownership a condition of ownership. The resident will be buying a full cpu anyway. If the land is rented, the owner will have to deal with the overload, not LL.

Dear Vryl,

I respect your trust in the honesty of Linden Lab's representatives, of course. I still find it hard, very hard, to believe, that anything happening with Openspace regions was "unexpected" for Linden Lab.

(1) Openspaces are nothing new. They have been sold since spring of 2006. I own some since May 2006, for example.
(2) Since then, they have been used for residential purposes and have been rented out
(3) This should result in a fair amount of data, documenting the behavior of this type of region and its load on the grid
(4) Yet, in the spring of 2008, Linden Lab doubled their prim capacity and lowered prices

Do you really think, it came as a "surprise" to the management or could not be expected, that (a) doubling prim capacity lead to people actually using these prims (b) more prim load lead to additional consumption of grid resources (c) the doubled prim capacity made this product much more attractive and wildly popular?

Honest question ^^

I know Jack Linden for quite a while. He is a very nice, polite and competent guy. But he is certainly not stupid. It is hard to imagine him that naive ...

Dana Bergson

I give up on having an intelligent conversation with the self imposed blind. Have a nice day!

Yea I have no clue.. how would I, I am just a a backwoods netowrk engineer that works for Cisco installing routers into data centers and class C network sites.....

Do you even know the definition of bait and switch? let me find it for you ....

a deceptive way of selling that involves advertising a product at a very low price in order to attract customers who are then persuaded to switch to a more expensive product

vryl says; "There is no comparison to Mainland costs and if you are not intelligent enough to see the difference, then there is no point for me to waste my time to convince you otherwise."

thank you vryl - you are perfectly falling into the tone of m and jack linden.