Should We Charge For Scripts and CPU Draw?

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.

To paraphrase the dearly departed Sartre, LAG IS OTHER PEOPLE.

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

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...

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.

I think this whole debate is kinda a temporary thing, anyway. Once we can run our own servers with Second Life (which was a quoted goal), we can zap it how ever we please.

As for the meantime, I like Jillian's take on the matter.

seems to me any software changes to measure individual usage would cause more lag than anything existing now hmmmmmm

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."

Um, yeah, hon. It's clear as a bell.

And what astounds me is that you scripterati would want to be cruel in that way, and make somebody limp around going slower and slower because he was using "too many". Punishment, instead of incentive.

While it may seem counterintuitive, my way is actually kinder to scripters in the long way, by charging for numerical quantities of scripts or draw on CPU power as it can be measured (and I'm willing to hear all the theories about time and slicing pieces to fit with land and the rest but then I need to understand how the meter)

If you want to use a lot of scripts, pay. Then they work fine. You don't get snuck up on and bit in the ass becaues you used "too much" and have to face the tedium of poorer and poorer performance. How does a script start to work "not as well" as it did yesterday. Your house door opens more slowly? Your notecard jams half way through the prim as it delivers to someone? Come on. Just pay if you use over a certain number. Like land. Pay by the highest threshold you used that month. If you want to play on a sim with scripts, pay. Or don't. Maybe the pay doesn't have to be *a lot* like hundreds of dollars. But it can be *just enough* to discourage idiot kids from grabbing a 512 or even a 2048 and driving everybody nuts with all their crap. PAY. PAY TO PLAY. It's that simple.

The servers already measure how many scripted objects there are. I'm going to assume that while we're all in the dark often about WHERE and BY WHOM those scripts are being run, the Lindens /the server operators know where and what they are. Each script after all has a maker and a user on itself. The system might een be set up not to do a poll of usage unless a complaint came in about griefing or lag. Sims where people create innovative stuff and just hack around with vehicles and bugs chasing them on their shoulder and moving houses with changing pictures don't draw complaints from other players so they don't get a request for a poll. Sims with submarines shooting out of sheds blocking everyone's property and bursting in the sky and showering bombs on people do get a complaint and then get a poll and a look-see.

And what is the "commons". In one sense, the commons is Linden land. In another sense, it is an intangible spacing and mode of behaviour that people expect on a sim. One set of people expect to be able to chill with their friends and not have a blimp or a submarine land in their dining room. Another expect that running subs and blimps is so fun that they should just land on all those bourgeois diners who should "get a life if they think SL is about dining". See? It's about clashes of expectations.

And they only way I can think of mitigating those clashes is to be able to have payment and currency help erase the differences by making the person who wants to impinge on sim performance for others -- that's what we're talking about -- pay for that "privilege". Whereas what you're suggesting is that he make himself pay by slowing down.

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.

He is clearly a member of the EOE (Envious of Everyone) cliche

why don't you propose a fee for something you like, such as filling up the forum database with an inordinate amount of words?

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.

If ... there is some new shiny thing that is coming in to make it [addressing this awful problem of people hogging all the scripted object space on their server] all faster, so what?

Anti-business? Hardly. The real estate business, any kind of business with stores needed a stable customer flow, clubs, entertainment, included can only benefit from somebody getting a handle on this problem of scripts and lag. If it turns out that you need to pay more to have the privilege to use more scripts and have more of the servers draw to you, that increases land value, and anything that increases that value and differentiates the value makes the economy richer.

...

And once again -- can I say it too many times -- I'm motivated to raise these issues by the practice of *one person* using up 300-500-600 scripts on a sim though they nowhere near own the most land by a long stretch. It's that kind of gross imbalance I want to address.

Let me say it again, because I'll be forever after misrepresented merely because I challenged the scripterati bastion: I'm not for paying per script. I'm not for paralyzing creativity. I'm not for saddling newbies with extra costs for a few scripts. I'm for making somebody who uses 300-500-600 -- which ever number starts to lag a sim significantly -- having to pay for that privilege as a curb and a deterrent on their heedless grabbing of those resources. That's all!

I'm not intimidated by experts. SL's considerable and complex problems, which aren't just its own problems, need other types of minds to come at the problems than just the usual literal and finite technological mind.

It's important that people *keep asking questions of experts and make them accountable*.

The screaming, arrogant spoiled sense of entitlement you have about these matters merely because of some literal technical knowledge is really out of place in our world because it's not just *your world*.

We all know what it means to live with TOO MANY scripted objects on a server because THEY LAG IT.

Not a single one of you seems to want to grapple with another notion of how to calculate script draw -- the numbers of the scripts, not the time they have to execute, and not the slice they are on the land resource, but the sheer numbers of them, i.e. paying a premium to possess more than 300 of them. That ought to be easy to do.

Time is indeed a tangible resource that is paid for. You all get paid when you put in time, and you should know that. You can complexify that out the wazoo, but you trip yourself up in your own argument the minute you say I shouldn't worry because the next patch will speed things up. That means speed -- less time -- is a value, and makes the game run faster, scripts work better, the value is increased.

If the Lindens think speeding up script executions in the next patch is going to solve the lag problem they've never heard of the concept of "a revolution of rising expectations." Geez, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much FPS! Everybody knows that!

I'm for challenging the technological bastion that has a hammerlock on this world because they refuse to live in it as others do in residential areas where one idiot messes up the sim for the rest with too many scripts, and scripts of the pernicious type. The proposal I make is made to get people thinking and hear all the pros and cons. I have no fear of looking ridiculous for lack of knowledge because it is by pressing this discussion that I can first of all flush out the fact that tekkies even disagree among themselves about how to/whether this charging exercise could be marshalled effectively.

Anti-business? Hardly. The real estate business, any kind of business with stores needed a stable customer flow, clubs, entertainment, included can only benefit from somebody getting a handle on this problem of scripts and lag. If it turns out that you need to pay more to have the privilege to use more scripts and have more of the servers draw to you, that increases land value, and anything that increases that value and differentiates the value makes the economy richer.

There will be people who are prepared to pay the price for using more scripts or CPU power, and those who pay more are less likely to be of the heedless griefing type. That's just common sense. It will mean that investments are more stable, because they don't have to be worried about being griefed all to hell by one idiot on a 512 with a lot of rotation scripts and particles. You're not thinking in the larger picture here of how to make investments worth it, and make the climate more stable on the main grid.

I can hardly believe your fake scenario of a 512 owner now unable to go into business because he can't access a CPU cycle. First of all, if the Lindens can come up with a way to measure, record, bill -- and obviously they aren't going to do that with something that lags the sim itself -- then they are likely to give the same freebie that they give in land at $512 to newbs.

And once again -- can I say it too many times -- I'm motivated to raise these issues by the practice of *one person* using up 300-500-600 scripts on a sim though they nowhere near own the most land by a long stretch. It's that kind of gross imbalance I want to address.

Let me say it again, because I'll be forever after misrepresented merely because I challenged the scripterati bastion: I'm not for paying per script. I'm not for paralyzing creativity. I'm not for saddling newbies with extra costs for a few scripts. I'm for making somebody who uses 300-500-600 -- which ever number starts to lag a sim significantly -- having to pay for that privilege as a curb and a deterrent on their heedless grabbing of those resources. That's all!

As I said earlier, you could even tie it to a polling or a complaint -- if someone lags their sim all to hell irresponsibly, the tax/assessment comes in.

I find the most creative scripters in the game are those who are either on a private island or are on part of a sim, but they are respectful of their neighbours and think about how scripts work and think about others as they work them. It's the uncreative, less talented, just macho types who are deploying all kinds of mainly security and weapons scripts around their lot who pose the greater threat to the peace.


If some way of addressing this awful problem of people hogging all the scripted object space on their server can't be executed in this patch or the next one, or if there is some new shiny thing that is coming in to make it all faster, so what? We haven't yet solved the issue at the heart of the game, which is the tension between creativity, with its maximalizing of content barons and their rights and their opportunities, and stability for other kinds of people, the "what about the people with no talent," the people who "want to play house" who just want to socialize, hang out, consume, try to fool around with some of the game features. There is a tension between these groups of people, that's for sure. Some of them are calling for banning all kinds of weapons scripts they are so angry at having the peace disturbed. Listen to them, they're your customers!

My God, when are you going to start *listening* to your customers instead of condescending to them? It only makes *you* look bad.

Would you make propositions that would affect the development of neurological science if you knew nothing about it? Is any neuroscientist going to agree with your worldview of neuroscience?

I think even the idea that we have to segregate scripting power to the % of land you own a rather terrifying prospect. I suppose there will still be a certain allotment when can use dynamically without getting charged...

This idea is even more apalling.

It's impractical and limiting -- scripting isn't the power of an elite society or a special class of human being. Everyone has the potential to learn it and I encourage those interested to try. There is a free-to-access scripting wiki on the secondlife.com website and numerous residents willing to lend a helpful tip.

Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had a few things to say about the Information Superhighway. He was a fiftyish Yale professor who had just flown in from someplace that had sounded really cool and impressive when he had gone out of his way to mention it several times. His name was Finnish, but he was British as only a non-British Anglophile could be.... Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had been showing up on television pretty frequently. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had a couple of books out. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was, in short, parlaying his strongly contrarian view of the Information Superhighway into more air time than anyone who hadn't been accused of blowing up a day care center should get.

This is reminiscent of that scene from Cryptonomicon where we discover that GEB Kivistk doesn't understand the internet, but still feels compelled to protect the world from imaginary white male technocrats.

We all know what it means to live with TOO MANY scripted objects on a server because THEY LAG IT.

I can hardly believe your fake scenario of a 512 owner now unable to go into business because he can't access a CPU cycle. First of all, if the Lindens can come up with a way to measure, record, bill -- and obviously they aren't going to do that with something that lags the sim itself -- then they are likely to give the same freebie that they give in land at $512 to newbs.

Let me say it again, because I'll be forever after misrepresented merely because I challenged the scripterati bastion: I'm not for paying per script. I'm not for paralyzing creativity. I'm not for saddling newbies with extra costs for a few scripts. I'm for making somebody who uses 300-500-600 -- which ever number starts to lag a sim significantly -- having to pay for that privilege as a curb and a deterrent on their heedless grabbing of those resources. That's all!

As I said earlier, you could even tie it to a polling or a complaint -- if someone lags their sim all to hell irresponsibly, the tax/assessment comes in.

My God, when are you going to start *listening* to your customers instead of condescending to them? It only makes *you* look bad.