Should We Charge For Scripts and CPU Draw?

I'm going to make my own thread, since once again, blaze is up to taking an idea of mine, a controversial one, putting his name on it, but also making sure he can stand aside and get all the fire directed at me. So go over in blaze's thread and play that game if you want, and put all your dumb slow-loading ass pictures there, too.

My question to Cory was whether LL intended to charge for script usage and the draw on CPU resources.

His answers seemed perplexed, if not even a bit startled. He didn't seem to grasp WHY I was asking it, and most scripters and scriptocentric types seem puzzled if not angry at your desire to take their toys away from them.

He seemed to figure if I was running a well-known rentals business, I was trying to figure out how *I* could charge for it, because his answer was that no, LL would not be charging in this fashion but implying that others could.

I sure couldn't charge for CPU usage because I don't own the CPU! In fact, even if I buy a 65000 size sim, I can't run do a thing about that 512-owner who decides to run pernicious and laggy scripts after I've sold it.

As a renter, I can ban certain scripts. For example, I'm not going to put bounce scripts on, or entertain requests for their use because I view them as weapons.

I've watched how kids on a mere 2048 or even a 8192 can paralyze four sims around them of hundreds of thousands of square meters and hundreds of RL dollar in tier paid for by other people merely by running clubs that have lots of scripted and animated objects, weapons, bounce scripts, listeners, etc. A bounce script not only annoys and angers everyone it touches, it lags the sim, too.

And I simply came to the conclusion that we need to charge for scripts the way we charge for prims.

After all, Linden labs charges for pixelated land and the prims it holds, and they charge for textures.

I'd be for making the scripts charges work more like the charges associated with pixel land and prims rather than textures, i.e. not on a per-item basis, given the millions of scripted actions going on in the world.

Of course I see that deploying scripts would become severely hobbled if everyone had to pay $10 each time they put them out in the world, and I am not suggesting that, so to caricature me in that fashion is silly. I'm not saying charge-per-script at all -- that's not reasonable. I'm saying charge for the fact that scripts draw on the CPU, on the server's resources *in some fashion* and use your techically superior knowledge *to come up with a way to make the draw more balanced*.

Currently any idiot can hog it all, and that is not fair.

This could be accomplished in the same way as land is currently sold and charged for tier based on its prims. After 117, when I go to the next level of 234, I pay more. In the same way, if I use more than 300 scripted objects, let's say, or 100, or whatever that level should be, then I should pay more, as an aggregate. After all, I'm lagging 4 sims -- shouldn't I pay heavily for that "privilege"?

Some thoughtful scripters have tried to talk me out of asking for charging for their special products because they think the solution is just to ban griefers or file AR reports.

I'm sorry, but currently, even if you AR and complain about someone using more than 300 scripted objects on the server where you live, and even if you may own more land than the CPU hog, it is not an actionable offense, so it goes nowhere.

I find that scripters who either live on their free-4096s, live on private islands, play in sandboxes and never touch down on a mainland sim, just don't know what it's like to live on the grid.

There is nothing in the TOS that says *Thou shalt not run 500 scripted objects on a server and lag it for everyone else*.

Yet it's that ability that makes club, malls, mafias, etc. be able to reign supreme and drive everyone nuts. There's simply no curb on their draw on CPU power because it's free and they don't have to pay for it. So they can handily help themselves to as much as they want without any financial or social consequences.

It's great that Cory is contemplating getting a slice of the CPU draw into the land equation. But when? Never soon enough, when it comes to losing droves of customers who can't come in this game and play house in peace (but then, Cory and other Lindens don't really interested in expanding the game in that direction so they haven't really thought about how to do it).

And I'm for promoting this debate anyway, because it might turn out that there's another and faster way to do it than this idea of tying resources to land.

The reason I have some concerns about his slice-solution is that it will make land more expensive, and draw still more of the hatred and anger of the small but influential group that hates landowners and make their lives miserable.

He'll do this in the name of curbing the scripterati and curbing the kids who draw on the script power as if SL is their personal sandbox.

But he'll do it by making it a land-slice issue and that will inevitably up the prices first on his own auction, then in-world.

By calibrating it another way -- paying per actual use -- then there is concentration of the mind wonderfully -- and concentration of the mind wondefully not on a land-owner, but on a script-user. If I can't pay another $75 a month to use 300 scripts, then I won't. I'm for making these charges stick on the engine that draws -- the scripter-runner -- not on any and every landowner.

Meanwhile, Cory is for hobbling me and my business by making me pay $75 a month for more expensive, but still script-free land, because I won't be using all those scripts on my slice of land to which he's tied the increased CPU power. Unless of course he's designed a dynamic way to do this that calibrates my tier each month accordingly -- but that's exactly what I'm asking for.

Now, in my poor, benighted and blighted notion of how he and his servers work, I may have missed something here. If he is in fact increasing his over all power to make the lag go away or the scripted objects numbers work better, sure, more power to him, but he will merely face another rising tide of expectations.

Only a illiterati like this guy would try to get something like this off the ground.

He is clearly a member of the EOE (Envious of Everyone) cliche and as such, responsible for all terrible and socially destructive things that happen in this game that is as important as real world stuff, yessirreebob!

I'm sure he's probably a member of the Sticky-Wickets, too. You know, that group who obsessively cling to the dead horse long after he's been turned into glue?

p.s.: Sorry, I really wanted to make it a 10,000 word Prok-a-like thing, but you know, I actually had to stop when I ran out of things to say. Damn shame it isn't contagious, eh?

p.p.s.: Reported the above post as the duplicate piece of forum spammage that it represents.

Well, it is odd that Cory seemed to do an about face on this.

If you checked his last town hall, he specifically mentioned they were looking for ways to charge for significant XML-RPC usage.

I have believed for a long time that resources should be limited, but not quite in the same way you suggest.

Right now prims are limited by the proportional size of your land . A sim can only hold 15,000 prims total, so the share is divided up into the amount of land area you have in the sim, 512m = 117 prims, 1024m = 234 prims, 8096m = 1872 prims, etc. This tool is built in and does not have to be policed. The land tools simply prevent you from placing more prims than you are allowed.

The same practice could be applied to other resources like scripts, physics, and light. Percentage quotas on these would prevent a single person from owning a 512m plot and cramming it with items that sap these resources from the rest of the land owners.

The server tools already monitor the sim wide performance, per plot analysis would need to be implemented. Obviously you would be able to place any object at first, because the nature of the object is not readily known. If you are found to be using more resources than allocated, the object would be removed and you would be notified, "Your (malicious script object) has been returned because your parcel does not support the resources for its use."

This does not solve all the issues, but its a start. Its built into the system, fairly executed, and does not require manual policing.

Also, the Lindens have mentioned several times that a timeslice system is being considered that divides resources up between land owner and proper sized "commons".
Add to that thier intent to move to Mono, which wil appearantly vastly increase the resources available to scripts.
I think any other method on top of these two additions would be unessesarily stifling.

This issue has already been addressed at length. The planned solution of allocating scripts the way prims are allocated is an excellent solution, and I see no drawbacks whatsoever.

I agree that allocating resources by land ownership is the way to go. That way you're getting what you pay already, so no additional charges would make sense. If they do end up doing this I think they should make it so that land owners who don't use any scripts can share their cpu allocation with a neighbor who could use it.

Scripts have to be allocated the way prims are allocated, Buster, that is precisely my point

Cienna may think you are illiterati too but she'll have a harder time doing that because you're a member of her caste. Of course, she's very preoccupied with preserving the claims to esoteric knowledge this cast has, so don't rain on her parade too hard.

People who respond to my idea with "but they're already going to this" have no pipeline to Linden decision making and can't claim that.

I saw that when a group of players said they needed name/count for prims on land, to control griefers, and make it possible for malls to have tenants without shifting groups, within 7 months, it was in the patch. That's pretty damn fast and pretty damn impressive for any game, and any group of players.

In fact, it represents considerable power, and considerable feting of those players by the game company. In fact Cory Linden looks like a somewhat harried but bemused grandad with his spoiled grandkids in that meeting on land in August 2004.

So I'd like the people who gather around the Lindens to chat like this and get listened to like this to use their awesome powers for greater good besides their own selfish hedonism, like "give me double prims, Grandpa, I'm a big-ass builder" or "give me right-of-way to the teen grid with my cell phone, Grandpa, I'll be good, I promise". Sometimes I see Grampa is unable to say no. Like Grandpa couldn't say no about "too many textures". Can we say "too many textures" Gramps?

The kids just use up all the scripting/CPU/whatsis power. It shows. It makes it uncivilized. Fix it.

Fixing it by putting slices into land like 117 prims per 512 remains a problem because it means putting into land something that will make it cost more but not be used by everyone with that amount of land.

If that would be done in some kind of dynamic way with a shifting tier the way land holdings shift tier over the month, who knows, it could work but I need to understand the mechanics of it.

Um, moving to Mono, which I'm going to assume is not the name of an infectious disease, and "which wil appearantly vastly increase the resources available to scripts" (God, I wish they'd teach spelling along with computer science in our schools) is not something I'm going to hold my breath for. Will it "appearantly" really increase resources? or not?

And does increasing resources merely mean they don't lag the sim? But there is always a rising tide of expectations. The more resources, the more they will be used. You're giving another free solution, Gramps. Find a way to charge for this and you will husband your scarce resources better.




I would never want to be "unessesarily" stifling to um the creative and brilliant. Sure. But I do think that people have differeent kinds of creativity and brilliance and I know some damn creative people living on islands on the grid who even do building and scripting for creative reasons but whose sim is lagged all to hell due to the overuse of scripting resources on a neighbouring sim.

If they are going to tie some newly enhanced resource into land, they may be making it more expensive, we can't know that yet.

If they will merely prune back the innate tendency of a 512 heedless type from hogging the resources, great. I'm all for stratifying the society just a tad bit more so that not every 512 holder can bring a sim to a halt when there are other paying adults on it.

If they "make it so they can share their CPU allocation" with neighbours, that means the neigbhours are paying per script. That's my idea. Thanks for supporting it. If you think the Lindens should give that away for free, then you don't seem to love them as much as you claim.

Prok, as Jillian pointed out and Cory mentioned in the town hall, the move to Mono is supposed to make scripts execute faster by several orders of magnitude so this will hopefully be much less of an issue before too long. Trying to implement anything else before that happens and we see how it plays out would divert development resources away from what's ultimately the ideal solution... make scripts work better and more efficiently. That way everyone wins.

To make it nice and simple, the allocation is a "floor" system. A land owner moves into a new sim, owning 1/4 of it, and plonks down enough scripted prims to use 100% of the total script resources. Then, another land owner comes in, owning 1/8. She plonks down enough resources to use 10% of the script resources. She's below her floor, and so gets it. Original user is cut back and his scripts run more sluggishly - and no, at this point he doesn't get 90% of the resources - he gets 57.5% - his land allotment plus half the remaining, the new land owner also gets half the excess reserved for her. As more move in and start using thier allotted resources, his scripts eventualy become unusuable as not enough resources are available to his scripts. Everyone else using resources below thier floor level notices no slowdown for thier scripts.
Um. I hope that's clear. The point is to make sure everyone gets thier share, and excess is shared accordingly and transparently. Also, it makes the question of "Why are my scripts running so slow?" always answerable with "You're using too much resources."

Except Prok, because he is always a victim.

Thanks for the explanation Jillian. That makes a lot of sense and seems like an ideal way to handle it.

Now that sounds fair, and I like it.

Not only that, but since vistor CPU use would be throttled too, it would stop most forms of sim-crashing griefing...

Summary not found, this topic fails to appease the masses.

Yep yep. Didn't mention it, but there would be a certain percentage set asside for "commons".

works for me

An item of additional consideration is that some of the most annoying things, including particle and certain spin scripts (even at high velocities!), are rendered clientside. So, it's unlikely "scripting pie" will do away with that, and the onus still remains on common courtesy and for neighbors to be nice to one another -- or at least those who want to do such loud things, to all move into a sim together which is specially zoned for LAGFEST 2005.

No.

Scripts are not a tangible resource. Time is not a tangible resource.

With the upcoming release of mono in 2-3 months, script resources will increase and the length of time it takes to process a script with decrease.

You can't argue against relativity and I doubt even you can assign a tangible value to a nanosecond of processing time.

In short, it's not scripts that bring down sim processing resources; it's an uneducated populace. The more we learn about good efficient scripting techniques and if we can stop being isolationist and more community-based... we might even be able to share rather than charge for everything.

you can.

for a longer example of this read the cuckoo's egg by clifford stoll.

tangibility isn't the barrier to setting value. cpu usage can be measured. now the measures can be a bit strange. but measurement allows assigning value.

I've read it.

In the context of SL however, it's a different story.

The problem is that the minute itself never has a value, especially in SL.

For the minute to have a value, it has to have a parallel measure -- x per minute.

Since in SL, processing time is dynamic and proportioned dynamically to server priorities for maximum efficiency and since in the future the amount of time to process a script will get smaller and smaller and the memory resources larger and larger -- charging for something like scripting in SL is backwards thinking.

It also promotes the isolationist "private" rather than "common" thinking. What will we charge for next? Will it impede the technological expansion of scripters in SL? Will it affect the enjoyment of a user? What will the cost then become to an SL user? What will be the cost to the community over a period of time? Will I get charged for rez'ing a car or game of chess I just bought? What if I rez'd it for two seconds and deleted it? What if I rez'd a seat with a sit target and left it out for a week? What if I rez'd 50 listeners for a week? What if I flew my car across three sims? What if I flew my car with 50 listeners across three sims? What if I wore my a/o? Will I get charged per second * memory allocation? Will I get charged for instructions? What about for the complexity of my logical progression? What will be the cost to implement such a system? What will be the processor cost to check my script for it's cost? Will I be charged for a single instance of a script or for every time I rez it in a new sim? Will I get discounts for script efficiency? How will you keep track of where my scripts are and how long they are running? Will I get charged as the creator of the script or as an owner? Will my time allocation in the processor que charge me dynamically? What will the strain on the sim be to calculate how much of a time slice my script received per cycle?

And I could go on...

It is always interesting to me that in the cries for limits on scripting, because it disproporiately uses the resources of a server, there seem to be no cries to limit the number of players allowed on a property. A few avatars in an area causes far more resource usage and lag than even heavy scripting. Now I know that does not fit into the Common People vs the Scripterati hysteria, but what the hell. To paraphrase the dearly departed Sartre, LAG IS OTHER PEOPLE.

It's true. We should impose a charge for visiting any parcel but ones that you own.

We could also take it a step further and charge for attachments, clothing worn (definitely more for alpha), and maybe L$1 per particle. That'll get 'em.

I just one-up'd myself -- charge for every character you type.