Aki Shichiroji

upon some consideration, I'm amazed none of this ever even came up at office hours.

When ARE Jack's office hours? And who wants to place bets it will be a full sim?

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Dancien Graves

Thursdays @ 11am SL Time

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Eirik

My new theory is that Linden Lab are allergic to happiness.

Douchebag Linden: OMG! Defcon 1 procedures! People are enjoying their time in SL! Stomp it out! Take away everything they like in SL!

Newbie Linden: Euhm... what's going on?

Douchebag Linden: Kill happiness with fire!

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Surreal

I'm glad now that I postponed getting one until 2009. LL is starting to feel like Microsoft. Never buy anything until after SP2 comes out.

Wildefire Walcott

I believe they were fully aware that by raising their prices they will be pricing a lot of estates out of existence. I also believe the primary reasons for the change have nothing to do with what's stated in the blog.

• They want people back on the mainland. Perhaps they realized that once the other grids start developing economies and more SL-like capabilities the only thing distinguising SL from the competition would be the mature continents of the mainland. Also remember that if it weren't for stipends, they would routinely make more money on mainland sims than on class 5 estates. And much of that stipend money comes back to them anyway.
• They have not scaled their support staff to account for all the newbie estate owners- and have no expansion plans. It STILL takes up to 3 weeks to get an island transferred to another user. As someone said in another thread, that's not 'concierge' level service. That's the level of service you'd expect from some website who gave you free email.
• They believe they underpriced openspaces. Many folks will lose their ass on this, but established estates will be able to weather the change. Remember when they raised regular estate prices in 2006? They quite openly stated (outside the blog) that sims were underpriced, and history shows that SL continued to grow despite the price hike. So why not increase the price of their most popular existing land product?

This is an intentional effort to reduce the number of private estates in Second Life, and if they go through with it, they will be successful.

Here's something I haven't seen addressed yet, though: Are they still going to charge $100 to transfer a sim to another user, even for individual openspaces? If that's the case, there will be a lot of truly abandoned islands three months from now.

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Cincia Singh

I think according to the original announcement, the only allowed transfers of OS's would be from 2nd person billing back to original owner.

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"Let the sun shine where I lay, keep me young so I may play, and most of all, bless the people I adore, and guard me from the dog next-door." A kitten's prayer.

Wildefire Walcott

No, I was talking about something else: Say regular sim owner A also has an openspace island he wants to sell to regular sim owner B. This is, as far as I know, still a legitimate and supported transaction. It costs the seller $100 USD to transfer the island to the buyer. The thing they are outlawing is the undocumented practice of allowing Regular sim owner A to have his openspace put in the name of non-sim-owner resident C, thereby skirting the restriction that non-regular-sim owners can't own openspaces. This was different from island sales/transfers, and was a loophole that they're now closing.

Raising the prices on openspace sims has actually devalued them for estate owners, since fewer people will be able to afford to rent them (and no one but regular sim owners will be able to 'own' them), so they will be hard to get rid of. Adding a $100 transfer fee to a sim that is no longer desirable and was purchased NEW for $250 is going to mean a lot of people simply abandon.

EDIT: Also, I just confirmed with Concierge that openspace transfers between regular island owners are still allowed (at $100 a pop, or by the hourly rate if it's a multi-sim transfer), and that the blog was only talking about the "alt payer" scenario that some folks have done to let non-sim-owners be direct-billed for their openspaces.

DJQuad

Exactly. My RL job is running a server hosting company. The ocean sims are nothing more than what called virtual dedicated servers (aka VDS and VPS). Setting CPU limits and resource usage is something done for every single VDS and why they can't limit that (not to mention script usage, prims, or the max agents allowed on a sim) is completely beyond me.

This bait and switch b.s. LL is pulling is affecting my SL job too in a major way. We have over 25 ocean sims connected to 25 other normal sims. We do rent them out in 1/4, 1/2, and full sims. One of our greatest selling points was that all residents could sail on them. Residential only, no clubs, no malls, etc. We haven't had a single complaint of lag on any of the oceans sims, even the ones that have 4 small houses on them and one regularly has a lot of parties so there are about 20 residents on one of the quarters during those. We also have an outdoor concert venue on one and have had about 40 during one of the concerts.

Residential use is fine as we monitor the sim performance. It's the ocean sims that they use for clubs, malls, and estate owners overselling what they support are the problem. Why LL would financially punish the ones that ocean sims as they use them responsibly is ridiculous.

Don't bother complaining. LL has never listened to residents and estate owners who pay thousands of dollars every month about their drastic price changes, why would they start now?

Miriel Enfield

I can understand why they would want to weed out some openspace owners, given how the sims are getting abused. However, I agree that this should have been done using throttling, rather than a proxy like a price increase. A price increase doesn't really cut to the heart of the problem, and hurts people who were behaving responsibly. Plus, as Kristian said earlier in the thread, a lot of people want space but don't want to (or can't) shell out for a whole sim. Raising prices on their low cost alternative to whole sims is probably pretty foot-shooty.

Admittedly, throttling would have also generated copious amounts of resident bitching ("waaaah, my scripted animals stopped walking around, how dare you!"), but what doesn't?

Lecktor Hannibal

Come check us out here Openlifegrid.com A Global Community 3D Metaverse built on Open Source Technology
I think you'll be pleased with the pricing structure, stability thus far and community.
Hope to see you there, come visit me at Moire.

DJQuad

Not nearly as much as raising tier prices across the board which includes the vast majority of residents who pay for ocean sims and use them for what they were intended for.

Raising the prim limit to 3750 and not putting any resource limits in was a major mistake. Guess who gets to pay for their mistake? The very people who pay LL for the ocean sims.

What will this tier increase "improve" other than LL pocketing more money from the people they baited in?

DJQuad

It's promising but until assets are shared it's not an option.

Eirik

I tried out OLG the first time it started to get some publicity. Wasn't very impressed then. But it was a while ago, and back then I was still happy in SL.

I'll check it out.

Lecktor Hannibal

Have fun then, LLwill NEVER do that.

Miriel Enfield

I'm not so sure about that. My experience is that damn near everything LL does results in howls of outrage. There'd probably be a bit less shrieking, but I suspect not by much.

Eirik

If they decided now to lower prices and throttle instead - do you think it would really cause much protest still?

It's the very basics of politics and negotiation. Start with something obscene, then work your way down until the other party think they won from you - even if they end up worse after the negotiations than before.

I agree, if they had proposed out of nowhere to throttle, it would have lead to similar protest - though probably less loud and angry.

Miriel Enfield

This is true, though I'm not quite sure they're that clever (or malicious). If their past behavior is anything to go by, this is just their standard incompetence.

But that's all speculation. You could be right.

DJQuad

One day I think they will. Until that happens, if it ever does, open grids are pointless if they're marketed as an alternative to SL.

Beebo Brink

Given all the debates we've had, just on this board, about the abuse of OSS and the ways in which they compromise script performance, I think the protests would be limited to the landlords who were the most egregious offenders. Quite a few people, from Wilde to WarKirby, have voiced serious doubts about certain aspects of OSS, enough that I think a majority of reasonable residents would recognize something needs to be done.

The fact that LL increased prim allotments and made the requirements for obtaining them less onerous points to their complicity in this current situation. It's salt-in-the-wound for them to turn around with a look of innocent dismay at the current situation.

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DJQuad

The people who are "abusing" it are doing so based on the limits LL themselves set. LL is blaming them and raise the cost for everyone. LL are the ones that need to be blamed.

Eirik

I agree, I guess I'm just wishfully thinking.

And I agree 200% here.

When we moved into our OpenSpace sim - I believe we all knew what that meant. The estate owner knew what it meant, I knew what it meant, Rosie knew what it meant, and I'm sure Izzy knew as well.

We've always tried our hardest to keep it as lag-free as possible. Sure we have some unnecessary scripts running, but I can speak for all of us I think that if we found out a script caused lag, it would be removed from the OS Sim immediately. Everytime me and Rosie were shopping for sim decoration we thought about what lag impact something would have. Quite a few times I decided not to buy something, purely because I decided it wouldn't be good ownership to place the item in an OpenSpace.

So to now get punished because some rotten turd sandwiches build clubs on their OpenSpaces, I hate it. I refuse to be taken down because of the inanity of the majority.

Eirik

Pretty nice:

Issue Navigator - Second Life Issues

[#MISC-1776] OpenSpace Sim Prices SHOULD NOT Be Going Up! VOTE To Stop This ridiculous increase! - Second Life Issues

1437 votes. 100 more than the 25 groups one, and in less than a day.

I know, I know. LL doesn't care about the JIRA, and it's just a big facade, to make it seem like they listen ... but at least it shows it's not just the people on SLU who treat this as a problem.

Khamon

True that Daman, I toured the Nautilus sims today and walked through a dozen protests totalling almost two hundred people, of various nationalities, and recognized one, that's one, name. The scope of this deliberate and hateful attack policy update is mind boggling.

One has to wonder though who and what is really behind it. Without going all conspiratorial, there must be some explanation other than the bogus "abuse of resources" one we've been given. If that were true, it would apply to people who abuse the processors and shared RAM on Mainland sims as well. But LL have made it abundantly clear that they won't, in fact can't, enforce limitations there. Eventually we'll see either a money trail or some other type of control factor exposed and then we'll know.

I can tell you this though, if I had ever been foolish enough to go to work for Linden Lab, this is the seventh occurrence that would've prompted me to find another job. And I would never in a million years list it on my resume. That would work for me because my tenure there would've not lasted a full six months; yes, they screw their customers to the floor that regularly.

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Macphisto Angelus

I am finding many references of opensim grids not being an alternative to SL.

I just want to say that it depends on what you are after in SL and want an alternative to.

This is not at DJQuad.. it is just a general observation because though I see many subjective statements about them not being an alternative, many people including myself have found them to be exactly the alternative we were looking for.

It depends what you are after I guess.

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If life is just a joke, why aren't we laughing?

Aki Shichiroji

interesting voice conversation going on over at the sit-in at Linden Estate Services.