Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

Yes, I know who you are talking about and it is unfortunate - People like that give estate owners a black eye and I would say I agree with you 100%. There are some very good estate owners that proudly claim to be land barons (like Desmond) and I would hate to see him or many others (or us for that matter) lumped with the likes of those unscrupulous indiviuals.

Thanks for the clarification

wow 148 pages of comments. So, I ran a search for comments by M Linden - not a single one! Then I searched for comments from Jack, four or five, but adding nothing to the discussion. So I won't post in the forums any more, apart from letting off steam they serve no purpose. The staff at LL are not listening, not interested.

I always said SL is much more than a game, but now I realize I was wrong - it is merely a game after all.

I always said SL is much more than a game, but now I realize I was wrong - it is merely a game after all.[/QUOTE]


MMmmm it sure is and I think we are being played for fools...

Dear Alicia,
I understand that you don't want to "name names" and respect your politeness.

Using a phrase like "landbarons" without "some" (or "many" if you prefer that), seems to be an unnecessary generalization, though - if you really do not want to imply that it is ALL real estate firms who do this ... we certainly don't do it.

Cheers
Dana Bergson
CEO of The Otherland Estate

true, that`s why i`ve quoted the reply to clarify

changed it

I have noticed what could be described as landbarons selling off openspace land pacels. One guy says in his profile he owns 40 sims, his ad's are all over the classifieds. He is selling 4096 and 8192 pacels on openspaces, with a pathetic amount of prims and saying nothing about the increase. It might not be illegile but it sure as hell is unethical

Right from the initial announcement I have made it known that there possibly would be changes, and had given each resident a list of possible options as well being open for other suggestions. Based on their feedback, I made my initial decisions and once again sent out a notecard to my residents based on LL's decision. I also gave them timeframes to increases with their options for price increases. To be honest most did not respond back, and as of now I have had one abandon their OS.

I will agree that there will be many who will try to get whatever they can out of this, I mean who blames them, they got the shaft, and they know many will not pay these ridiculous prices, even if they are delayed. Essentially nothing has changed on LL's part, and to be honest if it wasn't for my residents, I would probably be in WoW right now.

Its the undercurrent that is there thats the one to be watched if it could be. Many people are still playing but now just not spending in game and these effects will take time to surface. We have noticed some renters from our shops already are now not renewing rents as their sales are dropping and many people here stating they will not spend and just use the game as a chat platform with friends.

Even though time and time again LL prove themselves to be inept with their business decisions SL is still atm the most stable VR out there so if people login and continue to tell others not to support LL via spending/buying L$, going premium or buying land etc. the ripple effect could over the coming months prove disastrous for the game and its players, whilst players continue to use the platform for free.

Personally i think we will see the effects of this fiasco further down the line not in the short term and remember a lot of people do not read the forums, blogs etc. so for some news is filtering down slowly but surely to them.

Isn't that illegal in most places, well I thought deceptive advertising was anyway, ah well LL as ever continue to believe they are above all things. But i'm sure people are reporting them for these clear deceptive advertising practices.

Actually, it is illegal here in Georgia, US. However, if they can claim and substantiate that it was merely a failure to update an advertisement they can get away with a fine.

Avatar Rendering Cost has nothing to do with Sim cost. Prims attached to an avatar are phantom, and about the most important thing the Sim does with them ... running scripts ... doesn't show up against ARC.

I'm not an estate owner, so I don't know what you're actually seeing, but I've been told the script accounting is kind of low resolution.

Though if they're using the really old AOs that didn't use controls and just fired 30 times a second... that could do it.

Except this very thread and the blog post linking it is "A Talk with M Linden" In other words, the CEO himself is reading it and answering all our questions. He is talking, he named the thread that himself so it must be true.

So, now, he knows and will inform his people of this mistake on Monday no doubt over his coffee and croisant.

If it's still there on Tuesday after M Linden has read this, told his minions to fix their oversight and replied to most the questions of his customers then it's false advertising.

After all... Mark would never lie would he?

If you got all those cores and GPUs working together instead of dueling all the time it might help.

( http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/dual.html )

The surprise wasn't the demand, it was the performance impact. What they said was that they expected an OpenSpace to have about 1/4 of a sim's worth of impact on the grid, and it really had about 1/2 a sim's worth of impact on average.

I agree but its still early days and as you rightly say at the moment its not affecting everyone and as i maintain only time will tell. But i think for a lot the trust and faith in LL has largely been lost, we are going to maintain a presence in SL still but have changed things around a bit and will be more closely monitoring the situation as it continues to unfold. But for us its a great and very cheap worldwide advertising platform for our RL business and our costs per member joining our website from here is coming down, so from an advertising perspective for us thats a good thing

The changes aren't here yet, however if someone is being asked to pay more for something that will generally lead to a cut in spending elsewhere, people will tighten their belts.

I for sure have good contact with my Landbaron and she communicates with the group, but what can she communicate more than what is communicated by Linden?

She has numerous OS and so do many of them. Some OS are sold in parts to the customers, if they dont want to pay more tiers, what to do? The customer bought that part of an OS but because of Linden you can not resell your land anymore because Linden does not allow more names than 1 on an OS anymore. It's a huge puzzle to convert OS to regular sims without losing customers and keeping everyone happy.

Same goes for me, I have half a sim and 3 OS for rentals, I am thinking of converting to a regular sim, but that means I will lose 90% of my customers, because a conversion can take up to what 3 weeks? a month when its christmas? When shall i do that IF i do that? ANd is it a wise decision, will Linden not raise the maintenance of a regular sim in Q1 of 2009? One of the many questions that is not answered.

So yes we communicate (of course there are some that don't, I know that) but it is still not clear what the future of land will be because of the lag of communication.

And for all that will say "you're own fault, OS werent meant for that" Yes I have heard that a million times in the past 2 weeks. But it effects to many people in SL, people that have no idea what this is all about. Come up with another discussion than CPU, TOS and whatever. We know it now.

It is the same as in a car, there is a speed limit and everyone goes beyond that limit because you can. You get a ticket for that and you can better your life, but they dont take away everyones car just because some took advantage of what can be done with it. And at this point the price raise will have an effect that MANY loose their land, and MANY loose their homes.

It is also about maintaining a virtual world, making it bigger and better, play in it or do business in it. This procedure is killing it. And no maybe not by this anouncement, but I still fear this is the first of many announcements to come, and next time it will effect more people, i am sure

sorry just had to write off my thoughts

It took me an hour to read the first 57 pages at which point i stopped. So, my apologies if this has all been said before but I want to at least put my hand up and post my views.

My partner and own an OS. Just us. It's our home, it's mostly water, and yes, scripts do run slower on our sim than on a full sim but it has been perfectly acceptable, as has been the lag. We reckoned on this before we bought the sim and accepted a slowdown of performance in return for the increase in space. Besides which, ownership of a full sim gave us management rights, and as a scripter this has proved useful.

We are now faced with a 67% price hike for less. Yes, it's staggered but it is still going to be a 67% increase in the cost of the game come July. My take on this is:

1) LL suggest that at least part of the increase will go towards improving the sim performance of 'Homesteads'. Servers will be upgraded and you will have less 'Homesteads' per CPU. Presumably this is to 'improve our experience'. But we don't need this. Part of 'our experience' is the cost of the game, and LL, I can tell you a 67% price hike puts a severe dent in that! As I said above .. we accepted the performance hit in return for space.

2) LL have said that the 'backend performance' has suffered. This is puzzling. LL have recently gone through major upgrades (Havoc4/Mono) that should have improved matters, and *still* they have to increase prices by 67%? It's been well documented (by LL themselves) that texture loading needs to be improved. In addition, my own feeling is that recent viewer/server changes have been far more damaging to backend performance (Texture caching and texture loading). Perhaps we are paying for LL's bugs?

3) LL failed to appreciate the enthusiasm with which OS sims would be snapped up. Yes, it's been a popular product. LL hit the sweet spot with the price/maintenace costs (now gone a bit sour). Part of the price hike is to reflect the 'value' of the product. I fail to understand then, why the price hike hasn't been on the cost of the product rather than on the cost of the maintenance.

In summary .. Our existing performance is acceptable. I'd be quite happy to keep it at that for no extra cost. OK, I'll accept the 20 USD increase to improve your backend bugs .. sorry .. performance. Fix your bugs, do the communications improvements you have been proposing and don't increase the cost by another 30USD come July. Thanks

How did I pick the wrong battle if he claims 750 isn't enough and I claim 750 is plenty, just come look at my sim before the estate owner claims it back, since I stopped payments and asked him to remove it. It looks a hell of a lot better than most full sims, just not as full. I told him to trust me 750 is enough for an open space sim, now I say come see for yourself. Why do i need to learn if I already nailed it? Creating low prim content and creating low prim sims aren't the same thing, and i'm very sorry, me and my partner did both. It's not hard to use 15000 prims and make a sim look empty, it is hard to use 750 prims and make it look good, doesn't mean it can't be done.
sim = "Brocolitia Ros", I'm sad to see it returned to LL.
Oh also take a look at the stats (Ctrl Shift 1), without being cocky I can say THIS is how OSS have to be used.
And how can you decide what all users want to do anyway? Some people might want more prims to make something more than bumps and trees yes, not all. They should convert into Homestead. $125 is too much in my opinion... well that was an easy decision for me, I got rid of it and now I own more land on our retail island, even saved me a whopping 3000 lindens a month. The only people who are taken for a real ride on this issue are the estate managers with big numbers of them, not the people using them. OSS didn't work out as planned (well let's hope that's true, I don't want to speculate about financial gain by LL) so they needed to change them. If you bought one of them from LL, the purchase is spread over at least six months, and monthly fees will stop when you leave. Get over it.

Once a upon a time there was a land where dream not only was
allowed, they was in deed posibel...

Now it seems different. I think Linden lab hunting ghost and think
its maybe the OS there have maked it all a more bad exspiriens.
Slower rez, Slower building, very bad sim crossing, crashes, LAG
its all seem worse now then I have exspired and still Linden Lab
say its been better option for exploring SL. I fear SL ends like a
game for the rich one wiht more and more limited options for
higher and higher prices. Thats whats make me most sad.

Bertram Merlin

I hope the door lisening

as a moderator, could you please change the title of this thread? 'with' should be 'about' Would do this thread more justice.

Hi Para, thx for this TIP, I downloaded the R15-1 and it is indeed a more stable viewer !

xxx
wildcat

Nail, Head, Hit. It wouldn't take much to set an alarm on the servers that warned when a particular sim (OS/HS, Full or Mainland) was eating resources. This would then allow lindens to examine what was causing the sims to use resources, and take the appropriate action.

A small price rise ($5) so ($80 for an OS/HS) would cover this and allow for inflationary costs.