A serious (but likely unpopular) question

While discussing inventory issues and things in SL with my partner yesterday, it occurred to me that facilities and related costs of inventory management are certain to be higher than those associated with physical land.

Seriously. The items we have in inventory so greatly outnumber the land available in the world that it boggles my mind that they have not implemented some manner of fee over X number of items being managed/stored.

This birthed the question -- why does LL charge us for land to recoup operating cost when inventory must outstrip land to a factor of at least three for operating expenses?

I suppose on the one hand, charging for inventory would have a depressive effect upon content creation, which is certainly counter to a thriving and growing world.

With that said however, there is a point of diminishing return along with a point of feasibility that is going to have to be considered some day. I suspect that 'someday' is closer than may be imagined -- given recent issues with inventory management, etc.

I am hardly one to want to pay for something I do not have to, on the other hand, I'm concerned that existing data management issues in SL may well be due to the reality that inventory storage and management is, in fact, a greater strain than LL thought it would be... on all levels.

I recall clearly that LL asked players to try and cull their inventories during a not-too-long-ago patch. I also recall their saying that the strain of large inventories was causing issue.

Just wondered if anyone else has thought of this? Or contemplated what they would do or be willing to do were it to come to it?

If Linden Labs did that then people would be running out the door. If that happened people would be asking what comes next. The deletion of sims among other things? Or the grid shut down all together.

I bet there's a correlation between items created and items sold. Perhaps a sales tax could cover the cost.

~Ulrika~

Good points, Cienna...

Myself, I'd hope that if and when this became a serious issue, that instead of going in the direction of charging residents for inventory usage, they'd provide a tool to 'offline' our inventory locally.

If I could save my inventory to my HD somehow, I wouldn't mind one bit if LL charged me to store items in world

I don't agree with your conclusion, Ulrika. Though I've got little by way of evidence, I would like to cite the thread which discussed deleting items from your inventory. In that thread, a number of people responded, stating how many items were in their inventory. Of these people, there were many who were not active merchants/creators.

I'd say the problem is pretty endemic, and not the fault of any one party. In this case, penalizing creators by exacting a sales tax is both unfair and ineffective. In such a situation, creators would either realize less profits or would raise their prices to offset the sudden expense of sales tax. Neither of these effects are particularly desirable. Not to mention the fact that it does little to combat those people who create a great deal of items without ever actually selling anything.

I think the ideal solution is to begin charging a fair value for these storage resources being consumed. That way, users have a clear incentive to maintain a clean inventory while the Lindens are ensured that an epidemic of freeloading packrats won't bring the world crashing to its knees.

Also keep in mind how the database works.

According to Adam Zaius (who may be talking crap who knows). There is only opne asset created in the database at time of creation, and every duplication from that point is merely a pointer back to the original asset object. So although you might have 100 of the same item in your inventory, only 1 physical object will exist.

That is of course, until you change its colour or texture etc...

Because every two SIMS requires a dedicated server. Storage space is really cheap these days. It costs way more for LL to host a SIM than it does to make some room for items on disk... that's the reason that jumps out at me anyway. Either that or psychology.

Possibly, but it would take a lot of investigating on LL's part. I think you'd find in some cases that there would be a direct correlation and in others, not so.

Take me, for example, I tinker with builds all the time and have LOTS of crap (good crap, mind you) in my inventory - but I sell 6 items.

IMHO - I think we'll be seeing more changes to the way that fees are calculated and charged. Land, scripts, prims, inventory are all items that could (I stress could) be figured out and tied to the amount of land you own. We do it now with prims and I would think it fair to do it with the rest. Of course, there should be some way for folks to have a gigantic inventory - overage charges, perhaps?

Anyway, that's my opinion - your mileage may vary.

I'm not sure what the exact question was, but I'm guessing that it was "What would you do if LL implemented a limit on how many items you could have in your inventory?"

Easy, I'd start using objects as inventories. Throw what I can't fit in my big one, in an object, and throw it in my inventory. It's a hassle, but it would work.

Inventories issues have nothing to do with disk space really.. The heavy load on the database is the problem. Linden Lab has crazy cool special hardware for their database and it's still straining ;0 And the hard drives are pretty expensive.. They are designed for high load.

Give me the ability to back up my own creations to local storage and you can have my Inv... lock stock and 2 smoking barrels.

As for sales tax... bwahahahhahhahaha what's the Heston line? ahh that's right 'From my cold dead hands'

Siggy.

If we were to get charged a sales tax, or have to pay more to keep your inventory, would you? I really believe that if LL started to go that route people would be leaving. Land tax should be enough to cover the cost of keeping inventory. After all, LL is making a profit or they would be closing down Second Life right away. They are in it for the money or they wouldn't be doing it.
I've never really understood these threads, people thinking up ways for LL to charge us more to play in the world. Is that really what you want to happen?
Just my 2 cents worth.

Who's talking about Inventory issues? I was just answering the question as to why LL charges for land but not for inventory stuff.

As far as taxes go... SL is still too young. No new technology is going to thrive under-taxes, and the psychology of taxes will keep new players away. We don't need taxes yet. Limits on inventory, with the option to buy more? Maybe? Still I think the psychology will be detrimental to SL.

Logging into the world is already such a mind blowing and confusing experience. I think the fact that when people don't know what's going on, the current unlimited inventory system is pleasing (and conceptually easy). I think it's a better idea to re-tool the database, offload things like inventory management to the web, and let people keep all the goodies in inventory, tax free.

What do you think the effect on the volume of requests that go to customer support, limited inventories would have? The cost issues surrounding land and inventories are complex, and I'm sure LL has a good handle on it.

The inventory is a significant portion of the load on the database (number of folders and items) and the asset storage system (number and size of items, including items that are embedded within other items). Many SL residents have rather large inventories, and we expect that eventually we're going to have to impose some policy that encourages residents to maintain their inventories below some number of items (total memory footprint of inventory is a bit harder to monitor and is less of an issue than number of items).

One option that has been kicked around the lab is a monthly (or weekly) per/item charge for items above some threshold. It would be possible to make the threshold a function of account type (premium vs basic) and/or land holdings.

The per/item charge could be viewed as a tax directly on inventory items, or as a charge for extra service.

Hold the phone! When we did away with taxes we went with the monthly fee. So now your talking about a fee over the fee and your gonna call it a Tax. Where is my old box of Linton Tea I got a party to go to

This would have a huge impact on the economy. I would imagine people would end up buying less content if they are taxed for everything they own.

Give us tools to clean our inventory:

1. Multiple copy/delete/move
2. An archive system, whether it be a seperate archive server (Bank), or the ability to archive items on local PCs for those seldom used items

If you place a limit, or fee per item over a certain number without good inventory tools in place, that might have an adverse effect on the SL content creator, and, since they are SL's golden children to an extent, that might not be a great idea. But then again, maybe it is.

I know my inventory is awful, and I will force myself to delete much of it soon.

I would tier down to basic the moment it was passed. Take take take. Enough is enough.

let me download my inventory and manage it myself.

The expense structure for land and the way it's billed for is nice and simple. Each sim requires one server. That server has a cost to acquire and install and another cost to run. That expense can be divided proportionally between the land owners of the sim. Easy.

Inventory is far more complex. Say I make an item of clothing, a shirt. That results in a row being added to a database table containing the details of the item and some storage is allocated for the texture if I use a new texture. A row is also added to another database table to say that that item is in my inventory. If I give someone else that shirt another row is added to say the item is also in their inventory and so very little additional storage is consumed.

To bill fairly for inventory use you'd need a pretty complex scheme and that wouldn't be transparent to the users. To bill transparently you'd need an unfair billing scheme (e.g. charging an amount to each user for each item held regardless of how much storage was used).

Since the bulk of the storage is used for assets such images/textures, sounds and animations LL's idea to charge each time a new asset is uploaded makes a lot of sense (shame you don't get that L$10 back when the asset gets garbage collected but still ) The cost of all the database rows that make those assets into inventory items isn't insignificant, but rolling that into the overall cost of use makes more sense than itemised charging.

Catherine, are you crazy!? The developers required for that interrupt in immersion, which could be viewed as a quasi-griefing tool, would devastate the GOM market due to an outflux of paradigms toward a centralized distribution framework. Couple that with Mono or .NET technologies, and an API for the heck of it, and the land barons would drive us insane.

Wait, that didn't make sense, or, maybe, it made as much sense as not letting us download inventories.

Well, I think most of us saw this comming. I just want to make sure you all are thinking of this in terms of avoiding keeping us from being able to both create and consume. Any one aircraft I make is also three-five textures, three-four sounds, five-seven scripts, an animation, and the build itself.
Plus my experiments, examples, snippets...
I could probably live with a 6-7K item limit before being charged more. But less than that and I'd have to stop buying things to save room.

Wow, and I thought keeping my "Taxes will kill SecondLife" sign was just to be humorous....

We haven't had a really good protest since 1.2 and it's been long overdue.

I'm not sure if it would. Honestly, what I think we'd start seeing are people 'banking' old, unused objects, textures, etc. into prims that they store on thier land or through some 'banking' service to avoid overage charges.

I agree -- there should be something in place to offset the storage and memory requirements on LL's side. There is no reason that I can see why the things YOU CREATE AND UPLOAD cannot maintained on the CLIENT SYSTEM (stored, managed, etc) and have a footprint in SL metaverse memory ONLY WHEN IN USE.

Honestly, that would seem to deal with the issues on both sides of the table (storage, maintenance, and memory for LL .... security, access, and avoidance of additional charages for players).

One of the reasons I posted this thread was because I can see this day coming quickly and insofar as LL is a groundbreaking company with different perspectives on things, why shouldn't they be the first to demonstrate that you can put player 'property' on the player's client and do it right and well for all concerned?