Need for group ceiling to be raised yet again

Well Lindens. Its that time again. Many people have reached your 25 group ceiling. Its time to significantly raise this ceiling once again. I would say nothing lower than 100 groups, that way it takes us much more time to reach the ceiling and I highly doubt you can fill 100 without having a few groups you can't replace. If you can, then wow!

I agree we need more than 25 - but I wouldn't want 100. Can you imagine the spam? I would guess there is a feature vote on this somewhere.

It seems to me that the longer I've been playing, the more groups I've needed. During my first year here, I never hit the 15 limit--that happened in year two (when I kept hitting it), and now that I'm into my third year, I am constantly bumping against that 25 limit. Personally, because of the size of the databases already topping the petabyte mark, I'd suggest maybe starting users with 25 groups, then adding 5 groups per year for each year they've been a premium member or island owner. (I'm rapidly growing tired of Linden Lab's version of welfare.) Optionally, I'd even be willing to incur a small annual charge, say five dollars, for the privilege of having double the number of group slots available.

But just upping the number? I don't know. While I agree that we need more groups, the database load is heavy enough now as it is. I'd hate to have groups be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back--it's swaybacked enough as it is.

Kam

Not untill we get group mute.

There's an idea: LL claims they are looking for a way to make Premium membership worthwhile, how about letting premiums have 50 groups while everyone else stays at the 25 group limit?

That'd be a way of adding value for the paid residents, without costing LL an ongoing amount of money and without taking-away existing benefits from the non-premiums.

Personally I would prefer to be in as few groups as possible, due to the spam and chatter. I've recently left 2 groups because of excessive blather.

-Atashi

What I find myself wondering is this: why is there a limit in the first place?

I maxed out my 25 ages ago, and have now had to leave groups I wanted to be in in order to be in the groups I need to be in. I'd welcome an increase.

Mari

Heres my opinion: Higher concurrent user base = higher limits.

There's a limit on the number of groups we can be in because adding more adds lag... supposedly. My memory of the last increase is fuzzy... but I seem to recall that was a major factor in keeping us at 10max to begin with.

I find that we need it, as a lot of anti-griefer controls are rooted in group powers tied to the land. Got to be a member of X group to rez objects, object entry, run scripts. This has been the most effective way to control griefers, in my experience. With more and more places putting up these limitations, more and more groups are needed if you want to enjoy visiting people/places SL.

I'd like to see some different types of groups. Perhaps groups that only have information accessible on the SL website (except perhaps for officers) - merchant groups, art gallery groups, etc. I hate like hell giving up my slots to "join the group to rez a prim here" groups.

I'd like a proto-group or truncated-function group. A neandergroup. Or maybe there could be one umbrella "rez a prim here" group that all the groups wanting the "rez a prim here" function could be subsets of. Dunno.

A friend had a wonderful idea, why not more groups but also tabs or categories for them (business, social, sig, misc, etcetera)?

If it actually adds to lag then I vote for max # of groups to be 1

Perhaps theres a way to be a partial member with very limited benifts that adds less to lag. Sorta a perma pass to a groups land or whatever.

The problem for merchants is that every time you open a new stall you need to join another group to prevent autoreturn. This eats away at your 25 very rapidly, never mind other groups you need for social purposes.

But yes, we could also do with an end to the "Pumpernickel Featherbed has left the session" messages. It takes one idiot to post "Hi!" to a group and you then get a rush of "left the session" messages, as everyone tries to avoid the "left the session" messages (thereby generating even more of them).

The problem with groups, and with things like friends lists, is that the amount of data that needs to be pushed around rises approximately with the square of the number of residents, rather than linearly with the number of residents (things like the number of sims, the stress on the asset servers etc are linear).

That is, if a bunch of people all join a bunch of groups, and then start sending messages, the number of bits of data flying around grows at a nastily faster rate than just the number of people does (and we see that with the amount of spam and chatter you get from the larger groups), which is bad for scaling up the grid. Hence the limits of numbers of groups you can join, which limits the problem to linear again.

Well, one solution would be to have two categories of groups.

Category one - as groups are at present

Category two - the same, but with no group chat possible (other functions as normal)

I bet that 90% of existing groups would convert to category two.

40 people in 40 groups, (each with 40 people in them), all merrily IMing away shouldn't be too bad... I would hope!

I'm thinking the lag may be more apparent during teleport, or when avatar's cross parcel boundaries, and the sim needs to check to make sure they have permission to. (if you have parcel lines on, or "show land owner" obviously it checks more than just the current parcel, it checks ALL parcels within viewing distance!)

Who knows how it's architected on the back end... I presume there's more than one 'group' database... then again, maybe it's all stored in the inventory database. (Groups are like avatars, and they keep copies of us in their pockets? Curious thought! )

Whatever it works out to be though, Seifert is certainly right. More people with more groups results in an exponential explosion of group memberships that need to be stored, updated and searched *VERY* quickly, or everyday things like moving around or teleporting into a new area can suffer.

I like Daisy's idea of TWO categories of Groups..

Type A, like we have now, with IM (most useful for clubs, etc.)
Type B, just used for permissions. (most useful for access control)

A long time ago we had only 10 groups allowed.then 15 then 25. When we were raised to 25 people said why not unlimited? Well Can use image the stress on the debate if we all had say over 200. Besides how can you had all the popup screens if you don`t turn them off? Maybe some day later but now unmilited mean even more of a server stess during peak times.......

Why not charge us for them?

I'd pay X dollars for an additional 5, 10 or 20 groups.
Like others, my biggest problem is merchant groups, where you need to be able to set your vendors to the group. The problem with making them "No IM" is that what happens when the group honchos need to get a message out.

Perhaps set vendor groups to Owner IMs only? Would that cut down on server stress?

There's a way around that, in something I make

My understanding was that the limit was to make sure that being a member of a group meant something, as opposed to just joining every group you possibly can to see if anything interesting happens to any of them.

Well that was when what the population was less then 30,000? Nowadays the game is different, the day of owner throwing vip tags etc or me the other way to be invited to a members only location so it was a honored. Like all things in life they change, and we adapt to the current ways of the game...I agree with you Yumi.

Usagi

Honestly, joining just to see what is going on isn't such a bad thing, with the pace that SL is growing at. With more events and things to do, it's becoming absolutely necessary to have some form of update group to send notices so people can keep track of what's going on. Would they rather people continue to do searches for events numerous times per day, every day and stress the search database even more?

No, but if there is no limit on groups what's to stop you going to Search Groups and just clicking Join on every single thing you see?

It means that group IMs and proposals reach a huge number of people, which does cause database load, and that the owners of the groups have no clue how many "serious" members they have as against people who just joined because, why not?

Does seem a sensible idea to make 'more groups' a feature of premium accounts - again, you want to add to the load and costs, you contribute towards it.

Broccoli