Jack Bombs the Humper Bunkers

I've never seen the Concierge List so hopping mad, more pissed than the GOMing of the GOM, more angry than the withdrawal of telehubs, more incensed than the expose of the insider island price, more aggro'd than the sudden Bolshevik price drop devaluing sims by 60 percent (now the price is going up more than 60 percent). Furious! (Indeed, those who don't remember those historical lows of SL I've just linked here are doomed to repeat them...)

Jack has thrown a bomb with his announcement tonight that openspace sims' tier will jump from $75 to $125 after January 1, the initial purchase price will go from $250 to $375, and educational discounts will be removed. Worst of all, from the perspective of the land baron sector, the abililty to designate other owner/tierpayers to the Lindens, to completely turn over these products to secondary buyers, will be removed (you have to have a private island to be able to purchase them, and island owners were thus able to make a killing flipping the islands over to renters with full estate permissions).

There is outraged talk of "bait and switch" and lawsuits and attorneys -- but I'm afraid the Lindens have covered themselves pretty well on this one:

On the website, on the page where you order the OpenSource sims, there is this information linked from the Knowledge Base.

"Why are they "light" use?

Normal regions run on their own dedicated CPU, but the Openspace regions run four per CPU; as you would expect, this limits their performance. Openspaces only ever share with other Openspaces on a server.

It is therefore important to understand what these regions are. They are provided for light use only, not for building, living in, renting as homes or use for events. As a stretch of open water for boating or a scenic wooded area they are fine, but we do not advise more serious use than this and will not respond to performance issues reported should you not use them in this way."

Of course, the Lindens themselves, while making this disclaimer, blandly continued to sell these sims and see them overused and "wrongfully" used and never said anything. No blogs, no individual Concierge service chats, nothing.

In fact, after they tested Havoc 4 on the OS sims, and saw they worked so great, they upped the primmage to 3750 from 1875 virtually overnight, and began to sell them like hotcakes. If they performed so poorly or were REALLY for such light use, why the increasing of the prims?! That's what people will dwell on in the "bait and switch" argument, regardless of the disclaimers.

For some reason people think I will be gloating about this, like WarKirby is victory-dancing because now all those customers that bitched to him about his scripted weapons not working on their OS sims will be told to shut up. Stroker Serpentine also got his share of complaints about the bed.

I don't indulge in malicious glee at others' misfortune, the sport of choice of Second Life. I warned against these sims and found them destructive overall of the world of SL in a number of ways, but if one part of the land renting sector is harmed, ultimately all are harmed -- something, of course, my fellow landlords on the private islands never recognize, as they use every opportunity, hourly on the Concierge List, to play both victim and victor, now whining that they "subsidize" the mainland with their higher tier of $295 to the mainland's $195 (Intlibber's preposterous claim on the Herald); now claiming their islands are superior to the laggy and blighted mainland. И рыбку сьесть...as the Russian proverb has it...

I'm trying to parse what affect this will have on the land market, already in a tumult from land glutting, crashed prices, the Nautilus continent competition -- hard to imagine the Lindens would do this, and yet we've seen it before -- they are here to sell server space, not to help your rentals business. They have now raised, lowered, and raised the price three times, periodically glutting the market each time, in the last 2 years or so, raising the price or islands because...well...we never heard why, but the answer seemed to be "because we can, and we have a lot of companies now that will pay the price even if you can't"...then lowering the price to say they are passing on savings to us, now raising the price because they need us to help cover the cost of increased usage/CPU/programmers/maintenance/whatever.

I guess I have some inkling as one competitor on the mainland IM'd me to offer to give me, free of charge, 4 openspace sims, because he will be abandoning them back to LL. We are likely to see LOTS of these kinds of foreclosures! It will be a nasty parallel to real life for those caught in this regard.

For the life of me, I can't fathom why these island girls would buy 100 of these things, because I can't see what their plan was to get paid for them in under a year, given the glut especially. Now, they face $5000 more in charges due to the price hikes, and will have to cut bait to fish, or get out. It will be nasty. And sad to watch. No one should be happy about someone losing their business in SL not because they didn't work hard or were stupid, but because Lucy suddenly pulled the football out from Charlie Brown -- again. Maybe he should know better by now...

The shaking up of the market with glutting, this upheaval, and Nautilus will be felt by several thousand landlords keenly. But the end-users -- many of the 73,000 concurrent log-ons -- will go on blandly buying whatever there is to buy, and not worrying about it. Desmond thinks the stronger dollar and VAT will make it tough for Europeans, but they continue to buy and continue to promise VAT-free rentals to customers.

There's at least one Save Our Sims SOS sort of group starting up again and I'm sure that Jack's office hour on Thursday at I believe 1:00 pm SLT will be crowded with pitchforks and torches.

I think probably three demands at least are reasonable to make, but to make them coherently, people need to get organized in groups (not just one, because people never get along and differ in strategies and emphasis, but several):

1. All conversion rates BACK to the full-prim sims from the openspace sims must be done free of charge, because people already paid fees to convert from full sims to the OS sims, some very recently, and now they've been hosed by this announcement.

2. As Lindens will already now be making discretionary actions based on sim usage, they should reward those who do use their sims only as water filler or bridges on continents or sailing to grandfather their tier to $75/month.

3. If that's not acceptable, then put sims back to 1875 prims for those in fact using them in their "light" mode, and charge the $75 tier.

For so long the Lindens have been talking about making the platform stable. They really should make the pricing on their product stable, since that's just as vital to the world and its economy as the technology.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

Yes yes the sim load doubled. And I know why...
In this thread: http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=73003
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Quote:
Nulflux Negulesco wrote:
Actually, I have had an open space sim for almost a year and I can personally vouch that it IS possible to have a nearly lag free experience while pushing upwards of 6000 prims. If anyone is interested in knowing how it's done and purchasing my equipment that makes it possible then contact me in game. I should be around next week (by Monday I hope) to help you get the most out of your sim.

For those who are wondering, I don't know how this will work on a full sim because I haven't owned one to try it out. If you want to let me play with your sim to see how high we can push your prims without lagging the *** out of it then give me a shout.

Fair warning, I charge by the hour and I'm not cheap (unless you are from Europe in which case my wages probably seem paltry).

Quote:
Nulflux Negulesco wrote:
Maybe I should clarify. I don't use the same temp rezzers that you guys use, I made custom rezzers specifically designed to handle it. I have been told on multiple occasions that my rezzers are the absolute most efficient that anyone has ever seen.

If you don't believe me you can always ask Piedras Chamas who owns at least a dozen sims and continuously tells me how much these rezzers outperform anything he's ever had before. On my sim, when it's not torn down for reconstruction I routinely push 4500 prims with 1500 prims left over to build and trust me, if it lagged I would have taken them out because I work in my sim and I would just not be happy working in a laggy environment.

I guess I would have to prove it... if you want to see for yourself meet with me on monday when I'm not patched into a reaaaaaaallly slow wireless connection.

Edit: I don' think that prim count +50% is the true limit, I've had at least 8000 prims on my sim but when it got that high it really was laggy.
-------------------

So one person named Nulflux Negulesco has singlehandedly managed to possibly utterly destroy Secondlife.

I think there is more to it than the server load. LL could simply delete this guy's account and suspend all the accounts on the sims using his cheat hack and delete all instances of the cheat hack and problem solved.

But they are not doing that are they? No. Some other reason exists. Let's call it forcing the business back onto the crappy looking prim pile called mainland.

LL is going to have to start enforcing building codes if they want the mainland to succeed. I hear that new "continent" is already filled with out of theme illegaly animated texture for sale signs and LL isn't even going to enforce their own rules there are they?

no. But if they stay on the same track with content creation and competing with the other residents then they won't have DMCA Safe Harbor rights (since they will have vacated the ISP status) and I would not want to be them when they get nailed for triple damages on all stolen content in SL.

Therefore I easily predict major changes next year not excluding the elimination of resident created content in SL with content creation being handled by Rivers Run Red exclusively. That should get the competition for SL fired up and running rofl.

[Clubside Granville]

Some people on the Concierge chat were saying maybe the Lindens were doing this so get people to abandon their regions so as to collect more hardware for future Nautilus-type builds. The hardware was already paid for with the setup fees, the zoned auctions are going for ridiculous prices... could the Lindens be that devious?

[Hands Mensing]

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

I think, slowly LL is rolling back on a user generated world. They tried it out, it didn't make that much money for them.

What VRs are making money? Warcraft. Blizzard is making money with Warcraft hand over fist. And when you log into Blizzard's world it is totally under Blizzard's control. In fact, Blizzard and other VR's like it want to add Second Life features but under their conditions. I think user housing in Warcraft has been under discussion for awhile.

LL can't partake in that kind of money without taking back some of it's world. The only users I see holding on to some creation rights are big leaguers like IBM.

Prokofy, I've heard from some friends how you were discussing this issue on the Concierge IM Chat Group, and some comments intrigued me:

"stop talking sense Prokofy, we must keep things nonsensical don't you know"

"This issue is such crap that even Prokofy is making valid, logical points about it ;)"

So I was naturally quite interesting to read your article and see what your logical points are :)

I think that the points are pretty much clear: griping and whining leads to nowhere — but a large group of residents proposing clearly defined demands, like the three points you suggested, are very likely able to succeed.

This seems quite reasonable to me as well. I have no doubt that the vast majority of openspace sims are being used against LL's intentions — although there is enough anedoctal evidence to the contrary, of course. The problem here is, as someone put it (http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/27/openspace-pricing-and-policy-changes/#comment-620594), "living up to Jack's expectations". A group of 6 or 7 friends buys an openspace sim, uses 2000 or so prims to build a small temple where they hold meditation sessions once in a while, bringing perhaps 15 or so people to the sim. Is that "abuse"? Well, technically yes — it's not "open forest" nor "ocean water for sailing". Is it harmful to LL's servers? Class 4 servers definitely managed that kind of "load" 4 years ago, so why shouldn't they be able to handle it today? But what about a shop, with the same 2000 prims, all fully set to sell clothes, with an InviteToGroupBot, a system to measure traffic, and whatever new tools shop owners have invented — is that an "abuse"? Well, it surely depends on how much real traffic is in the shop? (an empty sim does not consume much CPU... although scripts will!)

So where is the dividing line? Granted, it's easy to see if a openspace sim is "only" trees or "only" empty ocean. Is that the only possible use for them? If so, why raise the prim limits? Having 1800 trees or 3750 doesn't really make a difference visually. And why do you need prims on "ocean" sims anyway? So clearly there are a lot of shady areas in "expected usage". Demanding the precise and exact terms of use of openspace sims should be LL's first priority, not vague allusions that "LL will proactively enforce a light usage of openspace sims".

Jack's words: "We will also provide some detailed guidance about what ‘overuse’ looks like and how to prevent it." Ok, I think these "detailed guidance" should have come first, so that we have a clue of what Jack's talking about.

I have always a problem in defending an illegitimate use of a service "just because it can be done". It becomes a tricky moral issue. Granted, LL's non-enforcement of so many things gives people a false sense of comfort: "oh I can do this and that just because everybody does it and LL is not preventing it". I was personally surprised at first that you could actually get parcels set for sale on openspace sims! I wondered why that was possible — how many people were interested in owning a bit of forest or ocean (granted, as part of a mini-continent, it makes a lot of sense for the Estate Owner have cheap sims to provide nice landscaping)? So clearly LL was giving mixed signals: "oh, you are supposed just to use forests and ocean on openspace sims, but sure, go ahead and sell the parcels if you wish".

Also, while I might tolerate that LL charges people for high usage of their services (tying tier costs to actual usage makes a lot of sense for me!), it seems unfair that people actually using opensim spaces as they were intended to be used should see their tier increased for absolutely no reason and without seeing a benefit — just because others are *not* using them "as intended". If residents *are* using it just for trees & ocean, improving the sims from Class 4 to Class 5 will really not make any difference, so there is no justification of the higher tier cost.

Then, what is the real problem, too many prims? I agree — let people pay US$75 for openspace sims with 1875 prims. But I think that "severe usage" is much more than that: it's scripts and avatars mostly (or avatars with scripted attachments!). Well, lower the maximum number of avatars on an openspace sim (easy to do) and the amount of scripts able to be run on openspace sims (hard to do).

Since this is contradictory information from LL, at least when viewed over a more extended period of time, it looks like LL has other reasons in mind besides Jack's explanation, and that "abuse of openspace sims" is just a pretext....

I would definitely subscribe to those 3 points, and perhaps add a few more. Not-for-profits (including universities) have to buy sims (regular ones or openspace ones) with at least a six month commitment. Will they raise prices mid-way? How will that be handled, will they simply send them a new invoice and expect them to pay more? I find this very disturbing and it totally messes up with accounting. At the very least, they should allow them to continue to use their openspace sims at the old price until their agreement (six months or a year, the two options provided by LL) expires.

(And I'm also assuming that universities are not using openspace sims for "intended usage", ie. to add forest and ocean, but to do their classes in them, using regular builds with an attendance of 20-25 students in them)

@Clubside, btw, that argument is actually not very convincing for just a reason: why should LL be using old Class 4 sims for Nautilus, when they're shortly going to introduce Class 6 super-servers (http://www.massively.com/2008/10/07/linden-lab-begins-testing-class-6-servers/), very likely with 16 cores and full 64-bit applications, allowing them pretty easily to handle 16 regular regions or 256 openspace sims, for the same cost of a "normal" Class 5 server? No, that doesn't really make any sense.

In fact, when the new Class 6 super-servers are introduced, I would be expecting a drop in prices (or even forfeiting the setup costs, since LL doesn't make any money from them these days...) — not a raise like Jack announced!

Or perhaps this is just a trick to make people drop their openspace sims (ie. effectively removing them as a product) and slash tier costs in half for the new sims as the Class 6 servers are introduced — effectively making openspace sims a worthless choice, and pushing people to full sims at a much reduced price instead.

We'll see.

[Jane2 McMahon]

Between the open sim decision (raising prims is tacit approval to use for more than light use, IMO) and the gamed mainland auction system, I'm not sure what LL expects. I just wonder what the server load cost is for all the "no payment on file" folks.

[Prokofy Neva]

Whatever you want to say about this, I really don't think the Lindens are so devious as to try to force people to abandon their openspace sims in order to grab them for use on Nautilus-type continents.

Prim increase isn't the same as script capacity, but of course, they correlate. By making the parcels able to be divided and resold to groups, that seems tacit support of rentals.

If you didn't get the message the first time this was done in 2005, and didn't get it in 2006 or 2007, here it is again: the Lindens hate arbitrage. They hate rentals. They barely tolerate them. They wish to get rid of them.

[Prokofy Neva]

I wouldn't be surprised if Jack resigned over this, if for no other reason, than due to the deluge of hate and trouble tickets it will generate, or because someone will want to blame the community backlash on him. And that's sad, as I know basically all Jack has ever wanted to do is to make good sims for people to live on. I've never been able to tell whether it's due to his own incompetence or lack of management experience, or because of some serious static from other Lindens with ideological positions, that he hasn't been able to cope with things like zoning and ad farms. I think it's the latter.

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

Nice post, Prokofy. Well said and your points of order at the end made good sense.

[Yumi Murakami]

I think it's ridiculous that they would ask for even L$75/month for open ocean, honestly - just extend the neighbouring sim's coordinate space by 256 along one axis and let the prims and avs count against it. LL rely far too much on customers ignoring obviously arbitrary technical limitations and it has to stop.

[Crap Mariner]

Prokofy - It's got to be someone higher than Jack, eh. What will be interesting to see if THAT person barks or steps in to come up with the usual backpedal.

-ls/cm

[Stroker Serpentine]

I believe Crap is correct that there is a "backpedal" afoot.SL history commands it. If there is one positive aspect in this it will be the distinction between OS sims and Full Service. It's not a matter of a single scripted item, or two or three. It's a quantative effect. From what little I know of hyper-threaded networks, polygonal (prim) rendering is mostly a client/GPU issue. Programming (scripts) is the true backend hog.

FYI Prokofy, the anecdote is "Cut bait OR fish"

/me is a Master Baitor

[Ewan Mureaux]

We agree, shocker. Particularly the point of a free conversion to full sims for everyone.

Jack has either become mr. unpopular messenger linden or is directly responsible for poor management decision after poor management decision.

[Clubside Granville]

Prim rendering is mostly client side Stroker, but prim physics, collisions and some occlusion calculations happen server side. Scripts are certainly a factor, but from my questions I learned that not only do OpenSpace regions share a CPU/Core, they also share a single Internet pipe. This means everything from inventory transfers to presence information may be stymied by narrow bandwidth which then trickles down to all clients. There are obviously more factors but the shared bandwidth means the various simultaneous connections are affected thus everyone on the grid, not just OpenSpace residents, feels the impact.

[rightasrain]

It's hard to imagine that the Linden exec team didn't sit around their cool virtual board room and discuss this prior to unleashing this storm. If this is the result of futuristic "immersive workspace" meetings then that ain't gonna sell either (or maybe they raising the price on that also?).

[Ace]

I personally think this decision is wholly a financial one. It may be about expected use versus actual use in the sense that the Lab foolishly thought people would only do what they expected with these spaces, and continue to buy $1000/$300 sims to actually Do Stuff.

Sculpty prims reduced necessary prim counts (but not bandwidth or client graphics requirements,which were meant to be a justification for the prim limit) so you could put out a similar amount of "stuff" on a 2008 OS (Open Space), as a 2005 FS (Full Sim). With Mono, suddenly even scripts are probably running lots better too.

So that's bad for business. They want $300 a month for sims, not $75. The problem is that everyone seems to have felt that $250/$75 was a much better deal. Linden Lab will certainly spin this as some form of "abuse", though I am unsure how you can abuse a ring-fenced, allocated resource that you paid for, and that's an interesting attitude considering they've generally been fans of promoting the tragedy of the commons otherwise (like those 40 avatar mainland clubs).

I just think someone in the lab did a lot of sums, and decided that this course of action will ultimately make them more money. I honestly don't think there is any more, or less to it than that.

[Ciaran Laval]

I'm told that Mos Ainsley and Castle Valeria were Linden Lab builds on Openspaces. Neither were open waterways.

Both are now full sims. Does anyone know if they were really openspaces before this hoo ha?

[melponeme_k]

I think the heart of the matter resides in the lackluster subscription numbers in SL. Especially when compared to other game worlds.

SL needs subscribers and they are attempting snag them with builds such as Nautilus. If in a sloppy fashion. I suspect we will get drastic decisions regarding the rest of mainland in the coming year.

How many people are subscribers on the estates and openspaces? If these people leave, will they make that big an impact on SL? I don't think they will and SL is taking a chance on that.

And if they are thinking about subscription numbers, how long with the free account option last? All the major worlds allow one month free, maybe 2 weeks extra if by referral than you have to pay. I think SL made a large mistake by not following the same policy. They certainly wouldn't be grabbing after every last nickel like they are now or competing with the more creative of their customers.

[Ann Otoole]

"

I'm told that Mos Ainsley and Castle Valeria were Linden Lab builds on Openspaces. Neither were open waterways.

Both are now full sims. Does anyone know if they were really openspaces before this hoo ha?"
I do believe they were yesterday. At least the prim counts indicated they were Open Space sims. I did not screen shot it though so no help here.

If true then it is a possible federal felony.

However I'm pretty sure LL can cover it completely so no trace exists. If hundreds of people testify at Rosdale's trial then the jury will likely go with the hundreds of witnesses. If there are any witnesses willing to testify.

I guess it depends on how many witnesses there are for Rosedale's possible trial.

I never ever thought I would ever say those words but today? It looks real bad.

I think SL is history.

[Nulflux Negulesco]

Apparently I have become an evil hacker bent on the destruction of Second Life! 1 15 1n Sekund L1f3 h4ck1n6 your prim counts. Amazing. I won't deny posting the information on my rezzers and everything Ann quoted I did indeed write. However, Ann has put an evil-twisted spin on this story and has used it as a crusade to get me banned from Second Life. I would like to inform you all that Ann's malicious, slanderous attempts at getting me banned have failed miserably. Her initial flurry of remarks on the XStreetSL website backfired and got her banned for a week. Regardless of what she might say I think it speaks more about HER true nature than it does mine. Thank you all very much and have a nice day.

[tgRuby]

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