Elanthius Flagstaff

Agreed some sort of automatic way to tell what kind of sim you are in is great idea.

On the other hand what happens when people buy a 512 and find it doesn't have enough prims? They buy a bigger one they don't quit the whole game in disgust. Same thing will happen with script performance. People will rent openspaces find they don't suit their needs and upgrade if they can afford it.

So, openspaces aren't the death of SL they're an awesome way for people with less money to dip their toe into sim ownership, make a bit of money, see if their idea works before bursting onto the scene big time.

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Charlemagne Allen

People are greedy idiots or don't do the research when investing their money. I wish I could say people learn from their mistakes when their shady landlord gyps them or something like that, but they very often don't even think to choose a reliable person to rent from.

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Wildefire Walcott

If you have 512m it's on a mainland or private regular sim with regular prims and performance. I don't have to tell you how naive most newbie renters/buyers are in SL. It is a big psychological step for most of them to actually pay money out of pocket for virtual land, and I think that landlords who don't even put the most minimal effort into keeping their tenants informed are doing the entire rental/reseller industry a disservice. If your very first experience renting virtual land is a shitty one, and it was a big step for you to try it in the first place, you're probably not going to be trying it again any time soon. (Have you noticed that most of these landlords don't have any covenants? You get 1/3-or-less the performance of the mainland but all of the neighbor hassles, except maybe ad farms).

I will also note this- I did a lot of work to determine the performance of openspace sims versus regular sims. I tested the sim at what I determined to be a "normal load" based on a sample of ten of my own openspace sims, all of which were only rented to a single paying tenant. I have a sneaking feeling that if I'd used a bunch of full 16-tenant openspace sims as my script-load baseline, my findings would have been less rosy, as sim performance seems to degrade exponentially once you pass certain thresholds. I may try that some day, actually.

EDIT: And I say all of the above as a landlord with 6 regular rental sims that are almost 100% occupied at this point and a bunch of openspaces as well. I like openspaces. I just don't like irresponsible or uninformed people giving them a bad name.

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Stroker Serpentine

Elanthius..the problem is that in every instance (and there have been several dozen to date) The sub-lessor or tenant has no idea what an Open Sim is.

To them this is the "status quo" of Second Life. They become disenchanted with the perceived lack of performance and quit soon after. I know of at least three times I have seen this happen and I dont get out much.

Macphisto Angelus

/me laughs at the phrase "clicky bits" in a Stroker thread.

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Kristian

Fixed.

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Kristian

My personal opinion is that openspace sims are the bees knees (where else can you pull off a build this big for 8kL$ a month?). SL has survived worse supposed dooms.

I do documentation and training for my job. Our motto on letters is 'We can send them a letter, but we can't make them read it.' Resident education is really the same thing in SL. Sure, LLs documentation isn't great, but it's there. People end up in situations like these because they don't bother to educate themselves, and end up making poor decisions. How many questions do you get a day that could be answered if they'd just read your notecards? You put documentation out there, too.

Sarah Nerd

I still like my open space that I live on, and I also like the space and privacy a open space can provide. As long as your not crazy with scripts there just fine.

I have also seen plenty of script abuse on full sims and the mainland.

It's just another option. Not right for everyone, but great for others.

Only problem I have ever had with open space sims is that since they have been out, it's very hard for me to keep my full sims rented. Everyone wants open spaces.

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Humps

I love my open space. I used to have a full sim but sold it after I closed the store. Being used to having a lot of space I bought an openspace a few months before the changes. I just build, tear down, build and not much else on mine. There is usually only Cart or myself there and recently we gave over a corner to a friend whilst she is temporarily homeless. Scripts are usually minimal and I have rarely had a problem with lag or something not working.

I had in the future intended to maybe buy a full prim sim again, especially now that Cart is in SL more (than he used to be). Nowadays though I think I might be content to own a couple of Openspaces rather than a full sim.

Talwyn Mills

It looks like IPS reporting is broken, on a closed full-prim sim I have access to its reporting 0 IPS when I know there are plenty of scripts active.

On the living on openspace thing, my own personal OS SIM is fine, though I do keep an eye on script usage a lot. The SIM's we rent out in the SoCal estate are also OpenSpace, they are residentual, monitored and only three or four plots per sim. And the covenant and land descriptions (when a plots available) state exactly what they are. We havn't had a problem yet.

Gabriele Graves

I would love to buy an openspace sim but cannot afford a full price island to go with it - are there any options available yet that do not include anyone but LL being able to boot you from it at their discretion?

ZATZAi

No there are not.

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Eirik

Your best shot is to find a friend who owns a full sim.

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Tary Allen

Nope, but you can buy it from people you trust

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Gabriele Graves

I appreciate you are trying to help but really I don't trust anyone when it comes to buying land except LL, even then I don't trust them much either but it's either that or have no prims.

Brave Republic

My goodness what an awesome castle build in the background!

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Wildefire Walcott

Just so you know, there are a number of regulars on these forums who offer openspaces, regular sims, and mainland for rent- and not one of them used this thread as an opportunity to pimp their services. We're generally pretty good about that here. There are threads and subforums specifically for advertisements and recommendations elsewhere at SLU. This place wouldn't be very fun to read if every business owner here solely used it for self-promotion. I don't even know whether you're affiliated with that business; just wanted to mention this.

EDIT: And before anyone else mentions it, yeah, I have my businesses in my signature. On SLU the signature only appears once per page, and each user has the ability to turn signatures off in viewed threads. My main issue here is that when you post, the content of your post should be something other than an ad, unless it's a classified or a recommendations thread.

Parker McTeague

i agree to an extent. ace and i have an open sim, and i love it. i wouldn't be able to have the build and landscape without it. and yeah, the documentation is there (somewhere, i presume). but that doesn't excuse the morally reprehensible behavior of renting these without being not just open about it, but actively warning tenants what this type of land is and isn't. a notecard or link to an LL wiki page is the minimum.

and LL is definitely not doing enough.

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Trisha Pinkerton

Me and my partner own a openspace sim too, purely as a home, house and garden , geez would hate to be next to that one i mean jesus who is gonna go to those sad clubs in the first place total waste of prims and way to lag the server

Tary Allen

This is not my business since I don´t have any sort of work, store or business in SL


Sorry if I broke some sort of rule, if I did it was not my intention.

Joshua Nightshade

I didn't really have a problem with her mentioning that Wilde.

Beebo Brink

Sheesh, Chas, blame the victim?

Understanding how land works in SL is not that easy. It was hard enough explaining the difference between mainland and islands to residents, now we've got OpenSpace thrown in as well. The latter requires some fairly solid understanding of how sims work, and how resources and prims are allocated.

As a noob I studied the Knowledge Base, read every pertinent entry I could find, and I was *still* confused because of the overload of termininology which meant nothing to me and was only vaguely definied: sim, region, island, parcel, estate. And it didn't help that just by TPing to a place I couldn'[t tell what was mainland and what was island. Caledon, for instance, looks like a mainland continent even with map view just because of the sheer number of island sims.

Add to that mix the shady practice of "selling" island parcels, which is a term that should only be used for mainland, and it's no wonder new residents have no clue what they're paying money for.

Just how is someone supposed to "choose a reliable person to rent from" when you're new and don't know anyone? I've been on various SL discussion board for 2 years now and I only know a handful of island owners well enough to say they're reliable. But there are probably dozens more with long-standing reputations with their tenants. How do I get information about their reputation? Ask their competitors? Post a general query on the forums? What if the only people who answer are people I don't know?

That's a daunting challenge just for English speakers. A friend of mine is Venezuelan and even though her English is fairly good, and she's been in SL for a year, she doesn't understand most of what I've outlined above, so I'm trying to help her find a place to live by vetting her choices first.

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Wildefire Walcott

I qualified my post by saying "I don't even know whether you're affiliated with that business." The wording she used "Nope, but you can buy it from people you trust" sounded like ad copy to me, so it made me think she might have a stake in the business. That's the only reason I bothered bringing it up.

Also, as I said before, folks here are generally pretty good about keeping threads free of self-promoting spam posts. Things are very different on the official forums where you can't have a discussion about estate land without 30 people chiming in for no reason other than to pimp their estates.

I meant no offense. Perhaps I'm just pissed off that I had to go back to work today after a sleep-filled 4-day weekend.

Wildefire Walcott

Well, let's not forget the root of this problem: The second life client presents all estate land as purchases, even though it's all rental since only the island owner pays the monthly bill to LL. All available land (mainland or estate) shows up in the same interface, using the same terminology, even though only mainland can truly be sold. Mainland rental businesses can't even use the land sales interface, but for estate rentals, they're really just using the tools LL's given them.

I will not disagree that some estate owners appear to be deceptive in their choice of terminology, but the issue begins with LL.

Joshua Nightshade

Well I agree, but at the same time discussions here are full of people talking and sharing different product types. If I'd never seen her post anything but that I would agree that it seemed spammy, but in that context it seemed more like "I had a good experience with this place since you asked for ways to get an open space."

Sleepy weekends are the best.