A serious (but likely unpopular) question

Well this is different to other MMOGs as in that duplicting items isnt gonna really get you any benefits is it? Unless we are talking about no copy no modify items, which i would say these are type of items that stay serverside anyhow and never store on clientside.


I understand where your coming from but still hackers/crackers/viruses still threaten servers as much as they do clients

It's true that providing networked access to material which you do not want copied or even viewed is not a new problem. I believe it is also likely that the current system is not 100% secure anyway. However, allowing the this material to be persistent client-side would make unauthorised access much easier.

Nothing is 100% secure - the key-based encryption currently used in secure connections e.g. for online purchasing focus on making it extremely troublesome or time-consuming to break the encryption. The data is safe only because it's hard to get at, so it's best not to make it any more accessible than it has to be.

Additionally, by maintaining a centralised asset database, LL has retained the ability to quickly monitor, manage and regulate ALL the assets. You cannot make any changes to objects besides what is allowed by the in-world interface, whereas it is possible to do almost anything to a file on your computer. I can compare this somewhat to giving a class of students homework and then saying either:

a) Get that homework done and hand it in next week (which is the way it's done), or

b) I'm keeping all your materials here. Anytime this week that you want to work on it, you can come on in and do it here while I watch you. Also, you must not work on the problems outside those times.

Now, we all know how good method (a) is against copying and cheating, don't we? How is the teacher going to keep track of all the separate assignments kept by different students to make sure they don't erm.. use a calculator when they aren't supposed to, for example? Method (b), however, gives the teacher absolute control.

I'm not saying that decentralisation is necessarily evil or without merit. There are many good points which I'm sure you're aware of. I am only pointing out the negatives which need to be weighed against the positives:

- Extra processing load for validity checking, authentication, encryption/decryption
- Decreased asset control and security --> developers won't like this, for sure.
vs.
+ Reduced server storage requirements
+ Increased redundancy (assuming people back up their inventories)

Note that I'm assuming there is already redundancy at LL either in the form of RAID or other backups which are standard business practice. In my 20+ years of computer experience, I have known plenty of people who have lost data from their HD for various reasons. True, it's not an everyday occurence, but it does happen, and much, much more often to home PC users than to enterprise setups with proper redundancy.

The only benefit I see in terms of redundancy is that the data is distributed, as you mentioned. However, I'd only view this as a real advantage if I thought it likely that the entire LL system was going to be wiped out, backups and all. As a side note, you may be interested in a P2P program called 'Croquet' ;)

BTW, gaining access to a properly configured server is much more difficult than cracking a file you already have, and for most MMORPGS you only need to have cracked the file protection once to be able to do it again and again and write a program so that everyone else can do it on their own PC without needing to know how. If a security loophole pops up at LL, they can take the asset server down to protect EVERYONE until they fix it.
There are ways to steal and copy without being detected, especially if you can steal from a file you have offline. From this statement, I would guess that you are not very much into developing and selling content. If you were, you would be very aware of the many ways this 'copyright protection' does not protect you, and just how sickened and discouraged you can feel when that happens to you, or someone else. "So what"? And yes, there is benefit gained from e.g. making copy/notransfer items transferrable or making nocopy/transfer copyable, or making nomod items mod, particularly if these are/have scripts.

To reiterate, I'm not putting down the idea - I just do not think a totally client-side storage method is advisable. Perhaps a combination of the two - client-side storage of the items YOU create could very well allow more convenient building and I would support it for that reason, not for saving storage space on the databases because frankly, if you have > 7k items it's likely that the majority of them are not created by you.

In any case, this is an area which LL are certainly going to have to look into in order to support continued growth, and I trust they know enough about their architecture to make better decisions than any of us ;)

P.S. I have always wanted and still want an offline building program. Even though this violates the basic principles of security I ranted about. Hehe.

Second Life needs content creators to make it thrive, creating content results in large inventories of original stuff in the content creators files, such as progress and back up copies, resuable moduals, etc. Do you really want to punish content creators by charging them extra? No, of course not.

If additional fees are needed they should be looking for a basic pay to play fee structure. The majority of Second Life players own no land and create no or very little content. What is the point of letting people have free avatars and free participation in Second Life if you are going to turn around and tax them based on inventory?

Because free players is what brings more RL money into the game for developers. If you're not paying a monthly fee on a game, it's easier for most people to rationalize spending money on cash.

Once you impose a montly fee, you can bet the amount of people buying money ingame will decrease, which will affect the bottom live of most content creators blah blah blah....

At the same time, if SL is no longer a free service, we could expect a high percentage drop in the amount of users in SL, possibly causing lots of accounts to be cancelled. Of course, if that was the case, maybe we'd get a more accurate picture of the SL active population.

I'd be gone for sure! The cost of land is far enough. We have to pay lindens for whatever we have in our inventories too... especially if you want quality items, and not junk or generic freebies. So in essence, we are already paying for everything... The reality is, that LL is making this a corporate game, which was not the intent when they started out. When they started out they wanted to make something for people to be creative, but little by little they have taken away our privileges, bonuses, and much more for the sake of the almighty dollar. If they have issues with the server hosting the inventories, then they should consider making SL like activeworlds, where you store your own inventories, textures, and objects, on your own servers, and not try to store everything on their own, and then ask us to pay through the nose for everything. The fact that we have to pay 25L to rate someone positively and no longer get any type of stipend bonus for it, is ridiculous, why should we be paying to rate someone positively. I know I think twice before rating anyone these days, for just that reason. We pay to be part of SL annually with our being a citizen, we pay for the land, and that is really more than we should be doing.

Andrew, is there any way we could find out if we are above or below average as far as this goes?

Also, having the space attached to land holdings would likely destroy what we do:with Luskwood, obviously we create a lot of things, and those do stay in our inventory. However, Eltee Statosky does hold most of the land, whereas Arito Cotton and Liam Roark do create most of the avatars we produce.

Having everything go to Eltee would be a permissions and coordination nightmare. Having inventory tied to land tier may work in the case of the sole proprietor, bout would really throw a monkey wrench in how group endeavors operate.

That's not necessarily true. Currently, LL may not be returning any profit; their financial backers are probably still funding the business. The LL business plan will clearly have a strategic objective to post an annual net profit by a certain date, but given the fact that (as far as I am aware) the company only has one product (i.e. SL) and that it has only been offering this since mid 2003, my guess is that it is highly unlikely that LL is returning any profit at present.

ok,

if you have to do it, how about tie it in with your tier...i.e. if you have just a free basic account, you would have to pay for extra storage where as if you have a premium account, you either have unlimited or for the first tier you have something like 10 times as much (the same percentages as for your LL allowance) and then multiply it up again for the second tier leve, etc....That way there's still an incentive to maintain land and it won't hit the content developers quite as hard since most (not all...but I'm pretty sure most) own land and have premium accounts.

In my own experience, I'm working on some group projects and half of my inventory (large as it is) is simply textures that would cost me 10L each to upload if I were to just store them all locally, and I already paid to upload a lot of them, so why should I pay to upload them again.