Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

I propose:

Slap some serious virtualization on these OS sims, as they stand right now. Divy up the resoruces per OS so that nobody can steal CPU and memory from their neighbors. That's gonna stop the abusers dead in their tracks right there! Offer anyone who finds the new virtualized sims too restrictive a cheap hand up to a full estate. Let anybody who CAN live with the state of the virtualized sims the opportunity to stay in place at the price point and prims count that they have now.

Keep the Homestead product at $125 but make it a bit richer, but also put it in a virutalized environment, perhaps as a 1/3 of a full sim (5k prims) rather than 1/4 of a sim performance and server resources.

But dont stop there!

A new kind of account - Premium Plus $25.00 US a month
* Able to own a freestanding homestead sim (without an estate also)
* Includes tier for 4092 sq meters of land (not incl homestead of course)
* 500 Lindens per week stipend
* Unlimited IMs (straight to offline email without a cap)
* 50 Group limit (up from the 25 now which simply is not enough for those of us with businesses)
* Ability to pay tier with Lindens at a preferential rate


Up the ante on the current Premium account (at the same price point)
* 1024 sq meters included
* 350 a week stipend
* 30 group limit
* double the offline IM capacity


Make it so anyone with the Premium Plus kind of account can own a homestead sim without having to have an island. Make it only $25.00 to transfer a sim from current landbaron owner to his/her established renters. This will let the little guy step up and take their OS in hand. Most OS renters are paying roughly 110-120 a month for an OS anyways, so for them, the pinch at the end with the price increase would be MINIMAL and there wont be so many "virtually homeless" citizens at Christmas time! If people are gonna pay 120 bucks a month for an OS, they might as well pay you Lindens direct. Whatever reason you think you have for this ridiculous idea that people need an island first, well get over it, it's dumb!

The special account type is of use not just to homesteaders, but would be a MAJOR value add to those of us with business and things who need the extra groups and the higher IM limits. If you need more cashflow Dear Lindens, start adding some freaking value. You have been hemorraging premium users since this whole "cheap OS" thing started.

Get back to basics here, help people to own their bit of this glorious world and quit dinking around with this PR nightmare. You screwed up, BIGTIME. Whoever dreamed up this whole episode should spanked, hard. I have gone through countless pages of this thread and i have yet to see any useful linden reponses. Where the #$% are you guys? What are you going to do to make this right? According to the economics page you are down 228 sims so far this month - it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. The longer you dally around, the harder this is going to be for everyone, come on, butts in gear Lindens!

What, you want an immediate 20%-50% increase n price on top of what they're doing now?

VIRTUALIZATION IS NOT MAGIC.

Even VMWare admits 20% overhead for I/O heavy jobs (like, you know, sims).

And that's about as good as it gets.

Oh, and it's expensive, too.

Yeah, somebody is going to lose. Whatever amount of real world money people are willing to put into SL, the question is how will they choose to divide it up now.

One model is that they'll just pay the increased price for owning or renting land, reducing spending on "consumer goods," in-world "entertainment" (live music, etc), and everything else.

That model is appealing to folks in the land business. If you press people in the land business hard enough, they'll eventually confess that they really think the land business is the only "real" business in SL--and tbh, that's probably more right than wrong. But anyway, this model is doom for commercial content creators. It's fine for LL, though: the vast majority of their revenue comes from land, totally dwarfing whatever they'd lose in LindeX transaction fees of content creators no longer able to cash out.

Another model is that folks will retain about the same balance of spending, just getting less land for the piece of the pie they devote to it. That would obviously squeeze both the land businesses and LL. If we try really hard to see a positive here, smaller parcels will bring avatars closer together; while residents have instead chosen separation and "privacy"--a sort of "suburban SL"--living closer together for a while and maybe interacting more wouldn't be all bad. Oh, and a definite winner in this model: those who make low-prim furniture and builds.

Then there's the "F*ck the Lindens" model, where lots of folks stay in SL but dump their land or shrink it down to a bare minimum. Besides LL, though, resident land businesses would suffer badly from this, although content creators and performers might actually benefit, with more L$s available to be directed their way. Could it happen? People seem to really want to own virtual land, so maybe not; but on the other hand, people may well just put off owning land if they can't afford what they really want to buy. Folks who just can't imagine any less space than a sim, for example.

That's kind of the macro view. One could click down a level and try to guess where land investment will move (e.g., will it go to the Mainland?), but there's enough uncertainty in the above "dividing the pie" problem that predicting a big influx of new Mainlanders is (I think) pure folly at this point.

And the real uncertainty is one-click *up*: the sorta "meta macro" question of how large the pie will be before it's divided. RL economic downturn is a consideration, although that point has been argued both ways. The big question in my mind is how much the pie will shrink in reaction to the OpenSpace problem, the very visible protests, and the distrust of all things SL. At this point, I really think that it's too late: if LL were to reverse the policy completely, the damage would already have been done--both by LL's action and by the breadth and intensity of the reaction.

The inspectors are coming! Wake up and dress like a tourist!!

Oh great, another restriction on creativity. The only reasons Mokoia was split into 4 plots is to separate the audio channels for different parcels, and to stop the running water sounds of the river from drowning out the birdsong in the jungle. Why the hell should that be illegal, and why do people find it so easy to open their big mouths, without thinking, to suggest banning stuff?

Maybe I didn't make myself clear, that's fair. I ment an OSS shouldn't have more than one owner, if the owner decides to split it into 16 plots for whatever reason that shouldn't be a problem, as long as they own all the plots. Although 4 streams of music I would say have a higher load than 1. That's for LL to figure out.

*edit* the temp rezzers now don't take prims from the simulator anymore, they did in the past, at least that's what i'm told.

Until this is possible LL have the freedom to behave like the monopolists they are. I'm sure this is affecting their market calculations. If they were in competition, or believed they soon would be, pricing would be very different. But until the competition arrives, they might as well milk us.

Dear Argent,

As I have mentioned elsewhere:

When Linden Lab introduced the new Openspaces (with double prim capacity), they already had 2 years (in word: TWO years!) worth of data about usage patterns and grid load for Openspaces with 1875 prims. We at Otherland sold this type of land since May 2006, for example.

And when you give people double the prim capacity (on "prim starved" land) it should not really be a huge surprise, that they are using it, or? On The Otherland Estate for example (some 60 full prim sims, some 110 Openspaces), the average prim load is some 10,000 on full prim sims and some 3,000 on Openspaces.

I have to check our old data, but I guess it was 1500 - 1600 on the "old" Openspaces. It's hard to verify but I guess that the script load rose in proportion with the prim load (more prims > more gadgets/furniture > more scripts).

And - in all honesty and fairness - that is hardly "surprising"

I respect your trust in Linden Lab, that basically everything they say is true, that they tell us the whole truth and nothing but the truth, of course. It is still hard for me, to believe in so much naivite with people like Jack, Cyn and others - which I know to be very clever guys from personal experience - that they did NOT anticipate the added grid load, when they DOUBLED the prim cap and encouraged residents to use the Openspaces as isolated islands (they had to be connected to full prims before the changes).

Nobody can prove that, though, without reading minds.

Cheers
Dana
CEO of The Otherland Estate

Exactly, that's the only problem there is right now, not the cut in prims and cpu space they are proposing(read forcing on us), not the raise in price. It's the way they created the problem in the first place.
100% agreed

Well put, unsentimental and plausible.

I honestly think LL need to re-think again the final roll out of this, they should offer actually 4 ranges of products, by re-adding Voids.

Voids / 750 prims / Have to be linked to Homestead/Full sim. 60$/m
note: Limited scripts and avatar limits, no land sales/events
// 150$ Purchase

Openspace / 1850 prims / have to be linked to homestead/full sim 95$/m
note: Medium scripts and avatar limits, sales but no events permitted.
// 250$ Purchase

Also make void/openspace tier paid quarterly. so its better for billing dept. allow free move of these sims whichever they want to classify as, if not its autoamticly homestead.
=====

Homestead / 5750 prims /
Intermediate to full Sim allowed to own/buy like a regular sim 150$/m
// 500$ Purchase

Full Sim / 17,500 prims
Full Island like we have today, with slightly added prims 295$/m
// 1250$ Purchase

====

Corperate Cluster / 25,000 prims
Four islands that are linked together & share prims/resources 750$/m

I only see lag on Sundays when all of SL slows to a crawl.

would be, to send them a similar christmas and newyears gift back. A cooperative and creative one, wich will result in halving all fees for all their products, if enough people are able to bring the strength and courage in. Sooner or later they will start to begging on their knees for our money and offering attractive high-end products for low end fees. People should show some dignity, instead of transforming themselfs into fools while crawling on the floor in front of the monopolists. This thing is in general too expensive. The truth is, that we like the product, but not longer the producers, since they act prepotent and unfriendly and since it is obviously that their targets are not our targets and our targets are not their targets. My opinion.

Frankly, I'm appalled at everyones willingness to blow this off. Guess that shouldnt be a blanket statement, but I am terribly dissapointed at LLs, and getting more so each day, in thier denial of the truth and the fact that the paying residents dont seem to matter. They caused this in the first place. Now its..."dont let it hit you on the way out"mentality. If they continue with this stupidity and greed, I'll be ditching my sim in July. The bastards have to realize that not all of us are doctors, lawyers, accountants, and a wonderful assortment of richies that Lls deems as desirable. I work dam hard for my money-the little i have. I'm disgusted at this and the money they make, and I truly hope Lls someday pays for the insensitive behavour. There will be and are other SL approximations out there-they may be new and full of flaws, but they will get it right. LLs terrible short-sightedness will do them is one day. Ive work for several companies..multimillion dollar figures, and they sunk themselves in 6 months after being prosperous for years, mainly because they got cheap, and greedy-like LLs. I was very happy about the strides theyve made, and finally bought a sim to call my own. A month later, I'm screwed. TY very much Lindens, a bunch of thoreticians and engineers, told they were brilliant and smart all thier lives, who cant seem to become smart enough to blame only themselves for thier own mistakes.

Yeh, I know, and I can just see them looking at that data and going "well, you know, it's not really the number of prims, and things seem to be working OK" and went and doubled the prims, because they didn't expect there to be a problem with it.

Doubling the prims and changing the rules had a number of effects. It wasn't JUST doubling the prims or JUST changing the rules, but the result was a lot more OpenSpaces on the grid. And people doing a lot more on OpenSpaces. And I can well see scaling problems that they hadn't seen when a few people like Otherland were using them biting them in the butt. That's what happens when you have big complex systems and you make a bunch of changes at once.
I'm sorry, you seem to have me confused with someone else. I'm not saying they didn't screw up, and I'm not saying they didn't tell some whoppers in their original announcement. Anyone who claims that everyone should have "known" (by osmosis or something) that you shouldn't "live on" an OpenSpace is just plain full of it.

I'm saying that my own experience with big complex systems going through transitions makes their claim plausible. I do not believe that they were taken by surprise because "I trust them", I believe they were taken by surprise because I've been in their shoes.

I hate that choose.................................

ok i see your point. fair enough, although I don't think the music streams actually use the same lump of bandwidth do they?

Media streams are directly from each viewer to the media server. The sim tells the viewer where to go and that's it..

I haven't read this thread, I seriously can't be bothered. I have just one question...

And it is a question LL need to address urgently.

"Homesteads will also have technical limits for avatars and prims, and eventually script limits as well."

Does LL expect us to pay blindly for a product that they haven't decided the specs on yet?

yes they probably do they are so trustworthy.

seriously - of course they expect you to pay for an undetermined product. they do so because there is nowhere else to go

Dear Argent,I am not sure, if I like option
(1): it is just thinly-veiled example of bad corporate communication
better than option
(2): they were too naive, to forsee the demand (which exploded immediately!) and to overlook the simple fact that 4 Openspaces have to demand substantiually more grid resources than 1 full prim region

The latter is something any competent systems architect with a little experience in networked server architecture can predict/determine. It was something we discussed internally in our team the same week the prim doubling was announced.

No, I am afraid, I can not trust the official argumentation behind the price hike. And if I would, it would shed a rather unpleasant light on the competency of the decision makers at the Lab. Believing that would be rather impolite.

But ... this is fairly irrelevant now. They made their decisions and obviously think they can not step back (for whatever reasons). It is their right to do so. Any non-regulated company has the right to set their prices as they wish (even without any explanation, honest or not).

It is my honest opinion, though, that this is
(1) Another decision which is not well suited to further the trust in this company (not only for inworld businesses, I would like to add)
(2) A decision which actually will add a HUGE incentive for each potential customer to check out the competition and even take some risks, when choosing the right platform for a new project - not because the price on Linden Lab's grid is too high but because you can not depend on Linden Lab as a business partner.

Maybe the latter is the secret intention behind this plan. Send out residents on a diaspora and spread the word about The Second Life Vision ... to be implemented on other platforms.

Cheers
Dana Bergson

Yes... and if you already own one ... you have already paid the setup fee on a service they have not decided the specs on yet and you don't really know that you want.

Who knows what it will be in 6 months. Since they can, at will, replace what ever product they sold to you with what ever product they feel like giving this month ... and still raise the prices for a lt.... ohh nvm just being bitchy again...

Tali you are 100% correct. The goal is to nerf the OSes in a way to make them unuseable. This is evident in the 'unspecified script limits'. Perhaps we will be limited to a max of five scripts running at the same time Price increase...i understand and I think most people would support. These intolerable limits...are not acceptable from a consumer point of view.

I didn't say I *like* either option.

I've just too much experience with young and arrogant coders and system administrators extrapolating linearly instead of going "wait a second, there's a potential N-squared term here".

As well as corporate announcements mixing truth and fantasy. Look at Apple's various statements about long pipeline processors over the years for an example of a big and popular company saying the exact opposite thing at different times when it was convenient... without ever stepping over the line into falsehood.