Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

"What is an Openspace?

"Openspaces are a 16-acre piece of standalone virtual land. Openspaces run 4 regions to a single CPU, and support 3750 primitives. Openspaces are available to Residents who already own Private Regions.

"Openspaces are offered to allow Estate owners to create open ocean or land in and around their Regions in the same way that the Linden mainland does. They are intended for "light use" rather than Residential areas with large amounts of content or scripts. While they CAN and have been used in other ways, they are not RECOMMENDED for any other purpose." (emphasis mine).

This seems to me to say it all. Linden Labs specifically states that Openspaces CAN be used in "other ways" besides open ocean or land. They go on to say that such "other ways" are not RECOMMENDED. Not prohibited, not against TOS, not disallowed--simply not recommended. Basically saying that if your intended usage doesn't work out for you, it's too bad--but in no way is said usage prohibited.

No wonder there was, and is, so much confusion about Openspaces.

Oh, there are *censored* where you can rent *censored* and then you have *censored* a cluster of 4 or more sims together for only *censored* dollars. They are then full sims...each with over *censored* prims. Maybe ***thousands of prims together.

But however: everytime when I go in Buddha mode, meditating about the business strategy of a specific company, or all these companies..., I come soon to impressions of snowballs, snowslides and pyramids.

Then I start to see in front of my inner eye (valuta chacra) a processor appearing. Once bought as a single unit by a specific company. And after that a metaphysic process is starting in myself, while this one singular processor or let us call it "simulator", will be reselled maybe hundred and more times, also docked on setup fees hundred and more times to so called "owners" and if that happens not, the one and only "owner" wich "buyed" this processor thing once, is paying the same processor 12 times a year again and again and again, maybe a life time long.

If you count the money and if you wake up from meditation mode, you could come to the idea, to take all the money and buy instead of this one processor again and again and again, some hmmmmmmmm average servers from *censored* firms like for example *censored* and maybe a solar-collector to feed them with electricity and then you have - after maybe 2 years - a mini grid of 24 servers for your own. or 36 or 48 and so on. You pay them then only once. No additional fees. On them you can then hanging around with your friends and wathcing the sun going up and down at horizon in peace.

But back to reality: there is a very clever biz model running, where the secret is, that you own nothing. You "buy" it, you pay setup fees and monthly fees, but you own it not. You pay the same thing every month new, but you will never be the owner. You will be a living slot machine, wich pays out the jackpot to a specific company every month.

It is more or less so, that you doesn't buy a processor for your own. You buy them 12 processors a year while they are selling one processor 12 times a year to you each month the same processor you "bought" once

Tricky huh? This is the secret behind a thing called "tier fee".

tbh that's the best solution.

"These our our recommendations, if your nightclub performs badly on an Openspace with 35 people in it, don't bug us with support requests about its performance".

Many people that want large places of land are (or hire) accomplished builders, and know all the optimisation tricks for textures etc.

Of course there's no doubt that some people have been abusing them by vastly overexceeding their resources; but truly, what is the danger of someone having a small house and bit of privacy on an openspace - apart from LL just making excessive profit, instead of a massive excessive profit?

Golly, Broc, you must really be upset: "overexceeding"? That's almost a Bushism!

FWIW, I'd suggest staying tuned a while before concluding that the newly Nerfed Openspace is ineligible for having a house. I'll bet that eventually the conflicting guidance will eventually resolve in favor of allowing residential use within the limits. A quite spacious residence and some very nice landscaping can fit easily in 750 prims, and if one has more than 10 visitors at a time, one really should have more than an Openspace to host them. (More than a Homestead, too, but that's a different question.) The huge unknown is how they'll limit scripts. Probably for most SL homes, this won't be a big deal, depending on density of stuff like poseballs and scripted-trees, I suppose. (Personally, as a scripter, all these low-density sims were always useless, but then I never met a prim I didn't want to script. )

Good morning *censored*!

Yes, I have had built several areas that got the comments 'you did all this in *how* many prims?' when I had people do a prim count ... including models of larger areas that people thought were going to be replacements.

It always seems such a waste to have a single prim only doing 2 things.

Commenting on the proposed "Homesteads", I think it's pretty much ridiculous to maintain the requirement to already own a full island before an open space island can be bought. If the current status is maintained, then Homesteads are going to bought and run mostly by commercial enterprises and not by those true Homesteaders who just want their own residential island to call their own. What exactly is the difference between someone who already has a full island getting an OS Homestead 1/4 processor and someone just getting a 1/4 processor who doesn't already own a full island?

Personally, I can see in the near future another announcement from LL that Homesteads are being used for building rental properties and not used as Homesteads as originally intended!

155 Pages of posts and comments but still nothing from Linden acknowledging they are even looking at the forum. I guess that says it all.

Still No Data to back up and support the claims that OS's was being " Abused " then M ?

Some might say that would be your first step ! , Showing us where the abuse was supposed to have been happening .

After all , This is about you wanting more money to deal with this abuse situation .

The fact is ... No problem existsed .... you know it ....we know it...and more and more people are being made aware of it .

You set out a disclaimer with OS that absolved you of any responsibility for the running of OS after sale ...



Buyer beware !

So any problems with abused OS's should have been delt with in the usual way , Your now trying to say that you had floods of people making complaints regarding poor running OS's ... So in order to deal with the demand for this supposed problem ... You propose to increase prices by 68 % ?

Am i wrong in thinking this ... You sell a product " Buyer beware disclaimer " Then tell us that you had no idea people would use OS's to live on ( That's a total lie and you know it btw ) and that SOME are abusing it , Why not pull your data out ... See the FEW people who are abusing and deal with them the way other abuse is delt with in SL ....Ignore it !

OS's has zero effect on the performance of the grid as a whole , You allow camping bot's to be logged into the grid 24/7 by the 1000's to game and CHEAT the search system .... Are they not more of a problem regarding performance ?.... No .... you don't see it that way due to it making a pretty number to show people " HEY LOOK ! we have 50 k people logging in per day "...Yet another abuse / performance hog totaly ignored coz it suits your needs

But a few people have a bad experience with OS and your sticking your hand out and asking for money ?

Guy's ... Not only do you FAIL in business ... You FAIL in communication ... You FAIL in the basic understanding of how this platform actualy works ... You FAIL to understand you user base (CUSTOMERS )....You FAIL us .

Show me a company that fails this much and manges to stay afloat ... Not many , And with all the finacial turmoil in the real world at the moment ... Its the bad company that get sucked up first .

Your your sitting on a GOLDMINE here ... Look after us ... we look after SL (Beta testing , Promoting , Creating awesome places and content for you ) and SL will GROW

With this policy , Your sitting on a TIMEBOMB , I have lost count how many people are here trying to warn you of what could happen if you screw this up...and so far all evidence is pointing to you have screwed it up .

It was not broke .... Don't Fix it ... And for sure don't screw the little remaining loyalty you had left from us devoted SL users ( Customers ) .

Still talking Jack ... M ?....... Helllooo !

They really dont care about us. We are just numbers for them.
My proposal is: let them fuck themselves. Openspaces owners must just all abandon their lands and make linden loose 45% of their business. They wanted to eat a big piece... maybe they get a big piece of nothing!

Agree.

SL is a luxury. When you cut back, the first thing to cut back is these optional unreal fantasy land expenses.

Christmas is coming, and we all feel the pinch. I'd rather spend my real money on real things to real people.

Linden is just too fake. Just a scammer for your hard earned money.

Lets see how long this comment takes for a responce !

It will be a big piece of nothing ..... Far FAR less than the forcasted profit that they first thought .

Lostmedia, i followed a link from an earlier posting to the JIRA , and was astounded to see that there is good reason to believe that the "abuse" *and* a lot of Second LIfe other performance issues may be due to the way textures are managed in the viewer. At lest 2 clear bugs have been identified and acknowledged by the Lindens. One of the posters there (Iexo Bethune) summed it up as follows

So, in summary, we've got a texture loading bottleneck, misdetection of video card memory, and rapid flushing of the cache requiring textures to be redownloaded from the asset server, which causes avatars to hit the asset server much more than they should, slowing down the asset server and causing even more requests, descending into a loop that causes a DDOS attack on the asset servers, causing massive instability, and rendering all tests of sim load on all regions unreliable (and removing justification for price hikes on Openspaces, since the load on the OS sims is due to an internal error, and not overuse).

DDOS, is distributed denial of service.

The progression from 2 or 3 clear bugs to the loading problems that triggered price hikes is speculative but not implausible. Notice that the date where the bugs were acknowledged was 29th Oct, and even if you allow some days for the full impact of the bugs to be realized, it would seem that Lindens had this information at the time of the initial blog post.

Food for thought, huh?


I wonder when and if those bugs will be fixed and released to us. I'd say there's an excellent case for a mandatory viewer upgrade myself.

Comme convenu dans le groupe SOS hier, je poste ici un message en français pour exprimer mon mécontentement.

Vous avez raison Linden Lab, "Homestead" est une nouveau nom mieux adapté "qu'openspace" on le confond trop souvent avec "Opensim."

Nous avons mis des mois pour aménager nos espaces, cela nous a couté du temps, mais aussi de l'argent, beaucoup d'entre nous l'ont fait avec passion.

Du jour au lendemain, vous changez tout et nous n'avons plus qu'à recommencer le travail? et payer plus cher pour le refaire en plus? Et bien, non!

En plus, c'est fait d'une manière honteuse où vous traitez presque vos clients de délinquants, qui n'auraient pas appliquer les conventions initiales des Openspaces... Alors que vous avez fermé les yeux pendant six mois, quand dans votre base de données regorgeaient d'annonces de location.

Bien facile tout cela après avoir encaisser l'argent.

C'est en grande parti vos "résidents" qui font "votre monde".
Vous n'avez aucun respect pour eux, en agissant de la sorte.
J'ai suspendu mon compte Premium, je ferme ma galerie cette semaine, et je ne mettrais plus un cts dans Second Life, afin de ne pas cautionner vos agissements.

Thanks Linden Lab for Your Respect of our World and our Imagination.

Si votre but est de libérer des serveurs, je crois que c'est une bonne stratégie, Si ce n'est pas le cas, on peut vraiment parler d'incompétence, et dans les deux cas, vous nous prenez vraiment pour des vaches à lait.

Bye bye LL

The issue isn't prim usage. It's scripts, avatars, and other resources that are currently not restricted that are being overtaxed.

Oops forgot to say that the link I followed is http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8503.

BTW, I went off and verified the cache bug myself before I posted. I Went to a texture rich place with no other people to disturb things and hung in the sky and rotated my avatar slowly; Using the Text Console (Advanced menu, Consoles) I could see textures being repetitively loaded, even after along time. Then I just hug looking at one scene, and sure enough periodically the viewer would reload textures that had not changed. So I'm one fo 50,000 viewers (less the bots perhaps!) unnecessarily reloading textures for an unchanging scene. Any wonder the asset server cluster is dieing from overload?

Oh, and the automatically selected value for my graphics memory was initially incorrect also.

erm, you miss the point i think.. they could lose the tiers from 1/3rd of the OSR's and be making the same amount of money in tiers as they are now, have much less of a strain on the grid, and increase the sales on the mainland, all at the same time. Your solution meets their goals rather handily in fact. if they stick with the 67% price hike for OSR's then there is only one conclusion you can draw from that, they dont want your business, they already picked your pocket when you paid the fees

Unless you can figure out how to make this hurt their mainland sales then you simply cant hurt them much. The exhorbitant fees we paid have already ensured them a profit.

I will say tho, i was surprised to see my $L 100k trigger at 262L/dollar go off on lindex this morning. So the SL economy is feeling it. Thats the lowest exchange rate in 8 months since i set it there.

btw, once again posted from the wrong browser. This comment is from Joshe Darkstone, not Primby Bloch, his account was logged in when I posted it.

... all of us, who are not native english-speakers! Those who cannot or don't bother to pronounce their thoughts here in this forum. The german Threads are equal to this one here. I am embarressed to see how my money is being burned. I have lost my faith in Linden-Labs economical correctness. For my part the only solution is: Enjoy SL but No more investigation!

... two of the biggest violators being:

1) campers/zombie traffic inflators
2) security systems (totally unnecessary where nothing can be 'stolen'

An announcement banning both of those unnecessary resource hoggers would have got a far more positive response, and provided far more benefit to SL overall than a blanket price increase for nothing else.

It's treating the symptoms, but not the cause.

You know, a friend of mine told me this morning that three parcels opened up for sale behind a dance club that a lot of people regularly go to. He said that they are being sold....get this for over 30KL 2056 sqm and 525 PRIMS! I really had to laugh because on another grid where I am as well I have a full 65km private estate with 15000 prims for $50USD a month LOL

Who wants lag and unwated people. Mainland is not for me at all.

Anyone else getting excited?

I mean, its just gone 7am on the West coast and I just bet that M has been sat at his desk all weekend reading each post diligently and working on his next installment, ready to post at bang on 8:00.

Because to further ignore what's going on would border on the ridiculous, not to mention that it goes far beyond appalling customer service and past the levels of normal manners.

Talk to us Lindens....this one doesn't seem as if it is going to quietly simmer down and disappear. Be professional and deal with this now; I fear that you're running out of chances.

I, for one, would appreciate an apology, lots of transparency and another rethink. My deadline is 21st December - on that day my tier at the current rates runs out and I will be abandoning. Without moving to Mainland.

Merry Christmas.

I dumped one of the 2 OS's I have yesterday and the guy from linden lab was so friendly lol and they did it in less than 30 mins LOL, which means they really dont care and i bet this is their plan ....less people to deal with and more cash from the rest.

My avatar "lives" in a park and open waterway.

There's no way for a script to find out how big the sim it's in is, so every script in SL that has a reason to care (like, vehicles) has "256x256" hardcoded into it.

There are other internal hardcoded limits, but this is really the big one.

well you know who they are going to go after next when they lose half their revenue from OSs.......next thing you know, private estates will go up to $500 a month and mainland monthly land allowance will go up 50%.