Public Service Announcement re: Openspace sims

Cutting into 2 quarters and a half sim, residential only. I know, I know, totally against the guidelines LL gives us and I'm probably exactly the kind of person Jack was accusing of unfairly overloading sims.

Honestly, I don't see that as abusive. I mean, what's the effective traffic there? Abusive is all the people opening clubs. AFAIC, residential use IS light use. How many people sit at home running hundreds of scripts?

But demand was brought about by LL encouraging people to buy OS sims, just a few months ago - by doubling the prims, by lowering the price and tier, by changing it so they could be bought one at a time, and by changing it so that they can be stand-alone sims. They were *huge* encouragements. To up the tier by 67%, for those who bought into it, just a few months later is what I consider to be unscrupulous. If they grandfathered the tier, then the increase would be fine.

hehe

Not quite. There's a significant overhead to each instance of the SL server that's got to be accounted for. There's a Squid cache, the background daemons and servers for things like IM, a pretty sizable software package sitting in RAM running duplicate copies of all the background tasks in a sim (communication with adjacent sims, base load of the physics engine and the rest of the sim software). Which was why it was originally limited to 1/8th the prims of a full sim.

Neither do I. 3750 prims is 3750 prims. They can't be overused. The number of avs in a sim can be excessive, but I don't see that with residential sims.

Yes but, apart from that, 4 * quarter avs and quarter prims = one normal sim - scripts and all.

(Sorry - Monte Python reference)

Stroker has a thread at SLU that he created months ago about OSs being the death of SL. He has a pic of one that has 3 club areas, 2 skyboxes, and the damn thing runs 3704 scripts. If that is a typical OS, I am not surprised at why LL would find that to be abusive.

This is all very interesting, insofar as my estate took part in performance testing of things like enhanced estate features (summer 2006), Havok4 (spring 200 and server side software testing (right now).

Everything we've done has been totally transparent, on the 'up and up' - and I've even had the occasional downed openspace region (due to griefing) crawling with technical Lindens to ensure the region was okay afterward - our usage has been pretty light and never hidden from anyone.

I've had my eye on these regions and their performance for literally years now, and at very least, have some idea of how other openspaces affected *us* on our own. Essentially we never saw a technical problem we could attribute to any other region until perhaps... a few months ago.

We are talking about perfect region FPS, texture loading no worse than on full regions next door, and so forth. There were times when the server side software had memory leaks or whatnot; that was noticeable but always resolved by our service provider within a relatively reasonable timescale. Otherwise, no discernable drop in performance.

Relatively recently, we have had a *few* incidents of otherwise unexplainable performance drops that we can only attribute to other regions affecting us. Over a few months I have seen this... perhaps once a month for an hour or so, among 20 openspace regions. In every case it was instantly cured by a restart.

* * * * *

What I think we are facing, perhaps, is truly egregious abuse - people using tricks to get around the prim limits, or perhaps placing dozens and dozens of camped avatars in the regions.

I'd really like to get this clarified in technical terms, because if that's the issue it's something that simply doesn't take place on my regions. We have occasional large events, but like most estates, the openspaces we have are generally *very* quiet.

So I sense two things here.

1) Openspace regions have been far and away more popular than mainland, drawing heavily against the mainland population. Which is a huge problem if a significant portion of your income is based on 1/4 billion square meters of mainland that won't be going away.

2) Undoubtedly some people *have* egregiously abused openspace regions far beyond the breaking point. But I'm not buying that it was from typical residential use - I see the stats from that daily and it's barely a tickle compared to those who use resource-exploitative rezzers and camp pads. If residential use was a problem, it would have been 10x the problem over a year ago, before the improvements in server side software.

Well! I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

LOL

Des, I agree 100% that this move is designed to benefit mainland at the expense of estates.

LL is taking new interest in the mainland, as evidenced by Bay City, Nautilus, and the adfarm crackdown. I think their ultimate goal is to take back the grid.

Estates have proliferated far beyond what LL had envisioned, IMO. 80% of the grid is private estates, with a huge expansion in that due to the attractive pricing on Open Spaces.

I imagine the original vision was that estates would be sold to Big Corporations for their private virtual world enclaves, while LL corralled all the little users and mavericks on the mainland. But their policies and pricing allowed estates to compete successfully with mainland as private residences. Now they're regretting it.

It's too bad. I own mainland, and I like it. But private estates are really the "free market" solution for this virtual world. In many ways, it would be more pleasant to live under the governorship of someone like you, who actually takes an interest in their residents, rather than the capricious and faceless Lindens.

It will backfire in the end. With no viable Second Life alternative to the mainland, the grid will start to hemorrhage customers to openLife grids. I hate alpha software...but maybe I should start rethinking my loyalty to SL and stake out an early settler claim in a new world...before the flood starts.

Lindal, I think LL wants to see more people like us - large mainland holders. We do what estate owners do, and we add value to the mainland by making it more orderly. Although they still undermine us with Nautilus and Bay City, we have a value and they may intend to sell more full mainland sims in the hopes that more people like us will bite.

I think they have burned the populace once too often, this time.

I've been to tons of OS sims. I live on one, I DJ at a club on one, I have numerous friends that live on them and I've been to live music events on them. I have never encountered performance issues on any of them except for slight lag due to a higher than normal number of avatars, which happens in regular sims as well. I've never been to an OS with three clubs, etc as Stroker's pic shows. While it is absolutely stupid for someone to do that, who set the limits that allowed it? That would be LL.

Just saying that, in my experience, Stroker's example is far from a typical OS.

Or maybe it's the other way 'round: Maybe LL knows open grids are going to eat a huge chunk of its non-Mainland business no matter what they do, once they're really technically competitive and scalable. So, what to do? Get as many existing customers back to the Mainland, in advance of that, perhaps.

It may not work anyway. Those darn OpenSpaces were just too successful, and now it's difficult to predict how many people will just give up any form of land ownership or renting altogether.

I'm personally not that upset at a price increase, it's just the sheer size of the increase.

I'll whine at any price increase just like everyone else, but when push comes to shove I'd still pay $100/month for an openspace even if I can get 1/4 sim at $75/month.

If they raised the price to $100/month (my personal threshold of what I think an openspace is worth to me) *and* allowed people to get them from LL directly then nothing would actually change that much (if only for 1 month to let people migrate over from rentals). And obviously monitor usage and bump the tier up in case of "heavy use" or simply give the choice between having things returned or "upgrading" to a full sim.

Owning an openspace along with an existing sim could remain $75/month but with a few extra restrictions that discourage turning them into rentals such as the land owner *has* to match the sim owner (no group deeding, no land sales) which would make them less attractive as rentals.

---

Either way, there's no shortage of "creative" solutions they could apply to keep the status quo, discourage future abuse and still come out ahead financially.

Then again, Zee could have just looked at the numbers and gone:
13,000 openspaces x $50/month increase = $650,000 extra revenue/month = *rubs hands gleefully* "that should get me a nice christmas bonus!"

(Using Zee since he is the CFO. I doubt if Jack had all that much to do with it other than being BearerOfBadNews Linden)

MAINLAND RULES!

I agree. I'm not upset at all, actually, because I have nothing to do with OS sims - I'm strictly mainland. The people losing out are those who bought them when LL encouraged them to buy - even up to a couple of days ago! It's amazing how many old users posted for the first time in the 'official' thread. This move has upset a *lot* of people.

I won't even whine for myself. I only stay in SL as long as it's profitable, and only because it would be silly to turn the tap off. I might have a little grumble if they increase mainland tier hundreds of percent, but I won't leave while the tap is still running at a reasonable rate.

I think that $100/month number is magic to a lot of folks. So $125 seems an odd choice. It's 1/2 sim Mainland tier... which is totally irrelevant, as far as I can tell. I really can't fathom what the LL marketing department intended to signal with this figure. As I said in the official thread, hard as I try, I just can't envision much of any market for OpenSpaces at that price, so it almost seems as if they're really planning either to phase out the product, or to raise everybody's tier and fees correspondingly. Which at this point really would be Game Over.

I also speculated that the new rate could possibly make sense for some individuals if they could buy direct from LL without a full-primmed Estate sim. But that really would be rubbing more salt in the wounds of many existing Estate owners over-weighted in OpenSpaces. But they may be past saving anyway.

The tier on 2 openspaces will now be more than the tier on 2 full sims in Nautilus City.

Only thing I can think of for the $125 figure is that you become concierge at $125/mo.

But you still need to own a full sim before you can own an openspace so anyone getting an openspace is already entitled to concierge level support anyway .

/me struggles to place brain in gear prior to engaging fingers on keyboard...

My understanding of the situation is that LL has people who have been designated as the payor on an OS receiving concierge service currently. This means that they are getting concierge service for $75/mo as it stands.

If they are going to remain the payor, LL is allowing that to remain for the time being. Otherwise the only option for change is to allow the payor to be changed to the registered owner.

However, as of the new price hike, they will have to pay $125/mo for concierge service just like everyone else.

So yet another reason why LL may feel the OS's are abused, if people who do not qualify for the $125 level are getting concierge support by virtue of being listed as a payor on an OS.