LL revenue: tier up for more prims

Jarod and I were talking tonight, it's very simple. My land has 220 prim limit, and that's way too low. I'd easily pay another 8 bucks a month for another 220 prims. I'm trying to make a nice looking art gallery in teal, and I own so very little land... so very little... /sniff I don't want/need more land I just want to make nicer buildings on the land I already have.

So, to reiterate: I'd pay more money for more prims. How many others out there would, too?

Each server can only handle a certain number of prims (usually 15000). These prims are distributed on a per plot basis. If you could build more prims on your plot of land than others, you would be depriving everyone else of those prims.
If everyone could just go and buy more prims for their plot, then the server would run out of prims before running out of land, which would lead to someone buying that land and not having prims to build.
SL didnt use to tie land to prims like that, and what I just described happened all the time.
It's kind of a bummer to be paying for 4096 sq. meters of land in a sim and be unable to build anythying because your neighbor feels he has the right to rez dozens of 69-prim chairs in his basement.

Eggy's right. If you change one part of the equation, it throws the rest out of whack. Way back when, I railed against the idea of tying prims to land allocation, but I have come to realize that this really is the best way - because even though we have traded prim banking for land hoarding, at least you know you'll always have so many prims. It's not MUCH better, but it is a little.

In fact, if I'm not mistaken, the whole tying prims to land allocation thing was Eggy's idea in the first place.

I'm dissatisfied with the nature of the equation. It's fundamentally flawed. 15000 prims? Why? Sounds like a slow server issue to me. Is that the case? Dude, buy some xserves and run yellow dog.

Couple things.
1. If they could they would!
2. I'm pretty sure the Lindens know what they are doing hardware wise.

Yepper...

Don't complain, it used to be 10000. 15000 is 50% more than I signed up for back in the day
It's not so much a server issue as a client issue I think.
LL has statistics for everything, such as the average number of FPS people are running at. It was only 17 back in December IIRC.
As people upgrade to new computers and better graphics cards, the avg FPS will increase, and LL might be able to increase that number without changing anything about the servers.

It was posted at one point that the servers are capable of handling many more prims than we currently have, but the bottleneck is in pushing the data to the client and rendering it.

In a situation with sim-wide caps on prims, separating prim from land ownership is a Bad Thing. It's been done, and it is much more flawed than tying land and prim ownership together. The basic problem is it results in situations where one person can buy a minority of the land but a majority of the prims, effectively shutting out people who paid for land there.

If I recall....the SL servers already do run on some form of linux.


- Newfie

Debian, I believe.

I do wonder if we'll see any performance improvements when they move to the 2.6 kernel... which I assume they haven't, yet.

And linking land and prim usage has rationalized things. It's forced people to economize, make tough decisions, and pony up the RL money to pay for the resources they use. It really is better this way; I remember building my previous home, and having to wait until someone somewhere else in the sim deleted something before I could rez a couple more stair-steps or hang another picture or two. Good riddance to those days.

It is Debian. What's more, if they port SL to Linux, one of the Lindens said Debian would be the first distro it runs on.

The 15,000-prim limit isn't a server resource issue, it's a bandwidth issue. The Lindens could easily allow higher prim limits, but it would mean using more bandwidth. As the SL object placement protocol improves, combined with better compression, instancing of linked objects, (if you have 10 20-prim lampposts, what's the point in transfering the data for 200 prims, when you just need to transfer 20 for the object and then put out 19 copies of it?) and similar forms of calculating object placement on the client, we'll see the prim levels rise accordingly.

The servers can handle more prims. Most of our computers can handle rendering them. It's the data transfer costs, both financial and technological, that are too high.

Oh, Cat... I love it when you talk techy to me...