Public Service Announcement re: Openspace sims

False. Proven false by actual measurement, and confirmed by Linden Labs a lot more recently than that KB entry. In fact the performance of a NORMAL sim can be effected by activity on other sims on the same computer, due to disk and network traffic becoming a bottleneck. With OpenSpaces this effect can be significantly greater because there is additional contention for CPU time.

I never said anything about a "Carte Blanche", I think a 66% increase in tier is ridiculous just like everyone else. But that doesn't change the fact that (possible a lot of) people were abusing openspace sims. The original per pus of the increase was to make it so OS sim were no longer cheaper then full sims, LL may or may not have tried a money grab while they were at it, I'll leave it for others to decide.

I've been wondering about this.

Webhosts will rent out "virtual private servers" which is really just one server running multiple virtual machines. If one VPS is overloaded does it affect the others as well (to the same degree as one openspace sim being able to make other openspaces on the same server just crawl)?

Or is SL's situation merely another example of LL failing to properly implement something?

But they were not cheaper then full sims. You got 1/4 of the prims for 1/4 of the price. Still 50% higher then mainland tier, I might add.

They now are using as an argument that open spaces are used for more then what they were meant for, but why did they ever double the prim limit then? They made it attractive enough for people to use the sims for more then just sailing, and now they are cashing in. You know, I can imagine the average con artist envies this idea.

If what they say is true (and I seriously doubt that), then they failed to implement something indeed. Resource balancing. Denying any sim more resources then they are entitled to. But as said, I doubt the whole resource excuse is true.

Because it's not the prims that cause the load, it's the avatars & scripts and you can have just as many of those as a full sim.

I'll leave the argument over the myth of cheaper mainland tier for another day.

I agree with the concensus here - it's an abominable move, imo, and I don't believe much of what Jack wrote in the blog.

When they doubled the prims, I assumed it was because they were using newer hardware - faster - and it could take the increase comfortably. Lowering the price and making them available one at a time - encouraging people to buy them - added to that thinking. I still hold that assumption - that openspace sims are capable of running the 3750 prims. But Jack tells us that people are living on them - the scoundrels! If the system can comforbly support 3750 prims, it doesn't matter what they are used for - trees, homes, etc. Either it can or it can't support them comfortably, and my opinion is that it can, which leads me to the conclusion that it's just a price hike for the purpose of getting more money, and that what Jack wrote is just a load of waffle. But on the other hand...

LL may now be trying to get people to dump many openspace sims. The way I see it, SL is not a finished product, and we users are necessary guinea pigs as LL goes about trying to create a viable system. It needs us for LL to see how things work in practise. If that's the way it is, then LL will just continue developing and trying things, regardless of whether or not some guinea pigs choose to call it a day. If that's the way LL sees it, it would be good if they said so, because most of us users don't see ourselves as guinea pigs in the development of the system, and we rightly object to things when it costs us real money.

On the positive side, they have given over 2 months notice of price changes, which is a good amount of time for some people, such as Marcel who has just moved his store to an openspace sim, but even that is no good at all for those who actually bought openspace sims. What can they do with them now? Abandon them in January and lose the purchase cost? Sell them? It's a real downer for them.

Then it would make more sense to lower the limit on the number of avs in openspace sims, and perhaps even mono-only scripts could be done.

I'm to tired to write a long winded rant but here goes.

I blame all of LL's bad moves on one they made around 2 years before I started, that was letting estate owners sell parcels on their sims. People started to move to these private sim to get some privacy at first and then with the rush of free accounts who couldn't get mainland things really started to pick up on private sims. Of course it didn't help that at the time LL was to busy churning out more mainland sims for all the noobs (like me) with their god awful builds that they didn't have enough time to manage the mainland like estate owners could so griefers were rampant just pushing even more people on to private sims.

Right about then is when LL figured out that they were not making as much in tier from one private sim @ 195 vs. a mainland sim with lots of owners @ roughly around 250(max of 320). So they bumped island tier to 295 and raise the setup cost to 1600. This pushed private islands out of reach for almost all the people who wanted land and with the mainland now getting even worse with adfarms most people went to islands. But because of the higher tier & up front cost estate owners had to charge a lot more then what mainland was going for so renters couldn't get as much land as they really wanted.

Then LL makes a series of bad moves, doubling the prim count in OS sim, lowering the setup cost & then the tier, no longer requiring them to be connected to a full sim, and finally letting the estate owners give almost full powers to a renter. This predictably led to an OS land rush killing the market in full sims right after LL lowered the setup cost to 1000.

I'll stop here, it's bed time

Effective Immediately
We will no longer allow the Owner of an Openspace to be changed to a different resident than the Payor.

I guess most will be abandoned.

I understood that a bit differently but, on reflection, I think you're right. The only way to sell them will be to sell them along with the required normal sim, and not individually. I'm not used to private islands and openspace sims, so I didn't catch on right away

I still think less will be abandoned than people think, well initially, again the Lindens watch how many dollars leave SL, get cashed out, they have probably worked out even with this price increase, owners of open space sims will make a profit or break even, albeit vastly diminished.

There is the normal option when costs increase - pass it on to the consumers. Perhaps many consumers (OS renters) will accept the increase.

This I doubt. Upto this moment, using an OS instead of 1/4 region, was the amount of space you could use. We knew they performed less then 1/4 region, but you got a lot of space for that.

My decision to move to an OS this weekend was that amount of space. The prims I do not need, but I loved the idea of a whole region of space. And lucky I am that my estate owner does not ask upfront fees, else they would now be down the drain.

As it looks now, this week I will move back to a double prim parcel. For me, the damage is only the revenue I lost these days. For many others, the damage is much higher.

If my business were not profitable, I would leave SL today. Often I could understand LL in their decisions, but now they simply screwed their own residents. A trick that every con artist would envy. Too bad I renewed my premium a while ago with a whole year, it will be the last time. Completely lost my trust in this poor excuse for a company.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2627
I'm not sure this would reduce load significantly because script load is effectively throttled already, and it would break content for visiting avatars... for example EVERYONE who has a Tiny avatar would be broken. I guess this would be OK for a no-entry sim, but if you just want offsim scenery you're better off using megaprims.

Speaking as someone who rents virtual hosts... absolutely it does, and if you're the one doing it you get a nastygram in short order. Some virtual hosting providers may migrate your vhost to another physical box when this happens, but that would cause an interruption in service if you're not using something like multiple load-balanced vhosts (what they now call 'cloud computing' because it's sexier).

You mean the "official purpose" of the increase, or something like that?
Which they could have accomplished by reverting to the original prim limits.

Some people may stay on their openspaces, even though the price per prim goes up, because of the privacy. Even if I wanted to develop one for rental, I could give a quarter sim of space to one tenant with a decent amount of prims, but they pay a premium for privacy. The profit margin is lower, but you can hit breakeven for just above 2000 L per week. Is 2500 or 3000L/wk unreasonable for 1/4 sim of space and 800-937 prims?

This would have been the ideal move.

After I posted about the scripts, I realised that there's no reason to do anything about them (I read someone else's post ). 4 * quarter avs and quarter prims = one normal sim - scripts and all.

I'm convinced that the change is just about money and nothing to do with the stuff Jack wrote. If it were anything to do with resources, extra money won't change anything - he didn't say that it's needed for extra equipment. What the increase will do is drive people into abandoning OS sims, which will reduce the load, and that's an unscrupulous way of fixing the problem (if it exists), imo.

It's not unscrupulous it's sound business sense. If demand outstrips supply then raise prices. Of course pretending it's got something to do with whatever Jack talked about might be a little unscrupulous.

I know I'll be back 15 pages within about ten minutes but I just wanted to separately add on that as an existing openspace owner (we have 15) I'm not too upset about this and I think it could even benefit my business since a lot of other estates who were cutting it really fine will quickly go out of business leaving the rest of us to mop up their customers.

Product, meet demand. Demand, meet product. Let's make a deal. (=_=)

And...

Double your prices, lose half your customers, make the same amount of money, and save tons in support expenses. (=_=)y

If it wasn't for the profitability, I would have been gone 6 months ago, as I've found precious little to interest me in SL since then. I would be someone who returns for periods, just to play a bit, but that would be all. As it is, I'll stay as long as it's significantly profitable to stay, but that's all.

I know this isn't the same but imagine having bought a car from Ford and then the next year you can't afford to run it so it's in the garage and Ford come around and say "we notice you haven't got road taxt this year, aren't you using the car?" and you say "no the recessions hit me hard I can't afford to run it right now" so Ford say "oh that's ok, we'll take our car back then".

Elan are you cutting them up, or renting solely to one person?