Openspace Redux
One week ago, LL announced a price increase for openspace sims based on them “being rented out to residents looking for a place to live…they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems.” The problems are indefinable to the extent that Jack Linden admitted in his Thursday office hour “With load based issues, it’s hard to predict usage levels, how that will affect the databases, bandwidth and so on, and those issues are emerging ones as the count of Openspaces shot up” and that “there are lots of metrics around usage levels, from simple numbers such as you see in the inworld stats window, to User hours and concurrency for Openspaces. No single figure gives the whole view“. The official metric compilation is apparently accomplished using a somewhat informal method described by the statement “if you explore the Openspaces, you’ll see that set against the intended original purpose, empty areas, very few are used that way these days“.
He finally explained “To be clear, we don’t think that the change of use is a bad thing, we added extra utility to Openspaces ahead of seeing the popularity or net effects, and yes that is difficult because there are some that use them for empty space and many more that do not. So this isn’t about stopping that change of use, it’s about recognising the extra costs we incur, and the extra value residents are getting too“. This is a slightly comforting statement because, taken at face value, it means that Linden goons won’t be tracking me down and forcing me to close the gardens. I’m going to hold onto this shred of hope knowing that any completely different statement might be made tomorrow. I’m also holding onto my quarter of Mainland Taber another month just in case.
This is the sad aspect of it all. Paying $125 a month for an openspace with 3750 prims and access to all of the estate tools, especially if the sims run two to a processor rather than the current four, is reasonable enough. I can live with that. But I frankly don’t think Jack has any real authority to state what Linden Lab will and won’t do next week, or the week after that. Robin’s office hour added the shocking revelation that she apparently has no influence in the matter either. As the VP of Marketing and Community Development, she came to the meeting without permission to apologize for Linden Lab accusing their customers of abusing the system. She even had the audacity to say “What I’d like to hear from you is how you would solve the resource allocation problem” as though we’d been given any idea, beyond hopping from sim to sim, how to perceive and track the resource allocation problem. LL always seems to want the users to fix the things that nobody in the lab wants to add to their Taoish schedule. My personal favorite from her transcript, quoted from this thread, is “Grandfathering is problematic because it creates something like a class system” compared of course to life accounts, Mentors, 40m terraforming on Core sims, liasons, Views, double prim Mainland parcels, JIRA Lords, grandfathered Class 4 estates, et. al. Everything the lab says about the debacle comes across like a pleasantry from a Dalek at a tea party.
At least we have the new CEO’s assurance that We made this change to ensure an optimal Second Life experience for all Residents.” We will be looking forward to that optimal Second Life experience in January. I fail to understand how modifying the openspace pricing is going to magically balance the load and provide an optimal Second Life experience for all Residents, unless LL are falling back on the proven effect of discouraging the user base enough for a notable number to permanently vacate The Grid All Hail The Central Grid.
Addendum November 6, 2008: I was going to post a comparison and profuse exposition after M’s announcement; however, there’s very little to contrast. The price increase is firm though delayed with an interim increase. The openspace option is renamed Homestead. A new and useless option is assigned the “openspace” designation. Avatar and scripting cycle limits will be imposed on both options although I doubt Linden Lab will ever actually finish coding and implementing scripting limitations; that’s too much like real work requiring actual, Tao-free administration.
Finally, Homesteaders are effectively vilified. We are the ones bringing down the grid and we must be exposed and penalized by The Lab All Hail The Central Lab. I’m doubly insulted for maintaining a premium subscription which is, according to M, immaterial to their business. Every Mainland parcel must be owned by an account with a premium subscription; so, surely he didn’t seriously mean “immaterial” or “their” or “to” or fill in whichever complex rationalization of this simple concept makes you feel good.
The good news is that they listened to us, enough to determine who to publicly label as the enemy of the state. It’s sad they won’t publicly explain how these changes will alleviate the fictional loads demanded by the evol Openspacers now Homesteaders. One can only look to the future. Alternate grid providers have a few months to spin their products up to speed.