Linden Lab oversees one of the most successful social virtual worlds in existence, but it is still struggling with residents about how Second Life should be governed. Case in point: The debate over the use of "Open Spaces," a virtual world land type that the company designed for residents to use for, common sense would dictate, open spaces like forests and water. As residents took advantage of the lower-priced land tier and over-developed and over-used the land, Linden Lab took exception at the increased CPU drain on their servers, and raised prices.
The residents revolted in typical Second Life fashion. The protests were loud and graphic. The Second Life Herald noting that many of the protests were focused on well-known brands which maintain in-world presences, something that would be sure to draw the attention of Linden Lab as companies complained. Other protesters set fires and otherwise griefed residents in the welcome areas, including flying anarchy symbols and gunfire as shown in the video below.
Linden Lab posted its response to the user complaints today on the Second Life blog, acknowledging issues residents had with the pricing change, and introducing a new level of land ownership called "Homestead" that provides a less expensive option than the original level, yet costs more than the Open Space land.
Also as expected, response from Second Life residents on the user forums appears equally split, with approximately half applauding Linden Lab's response and the other half crying foul, blaming Linden for not realizing that users would abuse cheap land parcels at the outset.
While the protests may be amusing and the back-and-forth between residents and their corporate overlords trivial to those outside Second Life, what it really demonstrates is that virtual worlds are facing an uphill battle when it comes to self-regulation. While many users are happy to abide by a terms of service agreement, there will always be others who want to get as much as they can for as little as possible.
And that's the nature of the 'Net. Other social media sites have struggled with similar issues, ranging from blogs to Wikipedia. Until virtual world companies find a way to oversee users who can't seem to oversee themselves, we'll continue to see these types of disagreements and protests. It may very well be that virtual worlds need as much of a system of government as the real world does.
Image above screenshot from Yacht Club Protest.
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- Analysis: Second Life: Interface, infrastructure and growth woes continue
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- Analysis: Playboy's Second Life sim buzzes, even as real-world brand falters
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- Analysis: Not everyone enamored of Second Life's Open Grid and data portability plans
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Comments
Linden doubled the content capacity of these sims itself last spring. At the same time, Linden made it possible for the open spaces to be subleased to third party users. The company did not complain while thousands were rented and subleased, and users placed all sorts of content on them. Linden provided the technical means for the average user to construct a small paradise or an online business environment. The company made a good short-term profit allowing that to happen. Now, Linden has declared that it never intended for these sims to be subleased or for anything substantial to be placed on them. They expected users to pay $250 up front and $75/month and use... nothing? Well, now we will be allowed to fill 20% of the allowance they originally sold us, for the same price -- but with no sublets and fewer people on each location.
Now that these sims are the hottest thing in Second Life and home to hundreds of unique businesses and the most beautiful settings, Linden says we must accept either a 67% price increase or lose 80% of this content which took weeks or months to develop. Is this the new standard for leading online businesses? As a paying user of Second Life for over a year, I consider it a betrayal of trust. It is very tragic that Linden has not chosen not to reinvest profits in a good product. Instead, the company has chosen to blame its consumers. Linden will withdraw resources it made prominently available and sold as part of a package, before we can get value for our money. Some of us are wondering: once we are forced to leave our virtual homes this way, does Linden plan to rent out the newly freed server space to some mega-corporation? If so, any such corporation should look closely at the history of service in Second Life.
"Linden Lab posted its response to the user complaints today on the Second Life blog, acknowledging issues residents had with the pricing change, and introducing a new level of land ownership called "Homestead" that provides a less expensive option than the original level, yet costs more than the Open Space land."
This is incorrect. Linden Lab has not compromised at all on their price hike; Homesteads are being slated at $125, whereas their original announced increase was $125. All a "Homestead" is, is a new label for an Openspace that falls into their nebulous definition of 'abuse' or an Openspace which refuses to classify itself under terms of service that slash it to 1/5th of its original capacity. Please correct your article with a little more research on why this "compromise" is a heap of doublespeak.
There is no split in the residents who are actually land owners. Hamlet Au's survey shows 45% oppose the policy (those of us who are actual paying landowning residents), 30% could care less (free users), and the rest are divided among other opinions.
The latest 'compromise' is not a compromise. What LL did was to rename the existing "Openspace" sim as a "Homestead". Both have 3750 prims. They are keeping the price hikes on the 3750 prim product.
They have invented this new completely useless type of 750 prim sim they are now calling an 'openspace' that cannot even be used by the sailing clubs that LL is claiming these sims are for. 750 prims and 10 avatars is not enough to have a sailing race in a sim with.
So this is still a case of bait and switch, and given the estate owners are the ones they are hoisting this on, not on any of their mainland customers, estate owners the lab competes against, this is also anti-competitive activity that falls under Anti-trust and RICO Act laws.
We in the Save our OpenSpaces movement are taking this to court in a class action. We are united in this.
The only acceptable solution is thus: Equalize all tiers: 75 US a month for 3750 prim openspaces, 295 US a month for full 15000 prim sims (INCLUDING MAINLAND), and make a new 7500 prim middle weight sim at 150 US a month for those who were overusing their openspaces with clubs and other commercial ventures.
LL's claims we were 'overusing' openspaces and 'burdening' the network are also false, mainland sims put far far more burden on their servers and the network than private sims do, yet they are not changing tiers on mainland sims at all. This is clearly anti-competitive action disguised as a resource issue.
The California State Atty General has already said this is likely consumer fraud, and is investigating. We invite the attorneys general for all other states to open investigations to protect the residents of their states who have become ensnared into what is now clearly a racket.
My reporting on the Homestead as a less expensive option than the original level, meaning a full region, is correct.
I have to say, from a personal standpoint, that I do find much of the caterwauling over this to be exactly the type of whining that prevents Second Life from gaining mainstream appeal. Even from a non-user view (and I asked), the idea that something called Openspaces and priced so much less than a full region was understood to mean "Hey, I can do exactly what I would with a full Region only for way less money!" was ridiculous. Offering Homesteads instead of forcing those who built up their Openspace as a rental site to upgrade to a full region IS a compromise, in my estimation, and $125 versus $250 looks like a compromise to anyone other than those in-world.
It's depressing every time I have to report on issues like this in Second Life, because I realize every time I do so that Linden assumes the best of its users, and while many Second Life residents uphold that assumption, there are just as many out there who prove time and time again that Linden is naive in its belief that users can police themselves. What most users fail to take into consideration is that without mainstream adoption, the best Second Life can ever hope to be is a niche MMOG for people who don't like weapons, and that every time news shows flying penises or protests over zoning restrictions and price hikes that involve griefing in areas that NEW USERS would frequent, it undermines the credibility of Second Life as being anything of real world value. There is no prevailing mentality of "what's good for Second Life benefits all of us" and unless the idea of "what's in it for me" gives way for more of a community viewpoint, I can't see much future for SL at all.
...You have got to be kidding me. Have you even been inworld in Second Life for any reasonable length of time? Ever? What you've written here smacks heavily to me of an outsider looking in on something with zero understanding of it, and trying to apply real world guidelines to something which has never once consistently obeyed them. First of all, your article definitely needs a clear distinction between full regions and openspaces; They are two very different creatures entirely. One is a full-weight 15,000 prim region with a dedicated CPU and no stated restrictions on useage or overhead. The other is a 3750 prim region sharing a CPU with three others, at US$75, originally US$50 on initial offering and in packs of four, at 1875 prims. The "original level" as you have stated has *nothing* whatsoever to do with Openspaces and Homesteads, and the statement is highly misleading at best.
Whining, as well? Yes, this speaks to me even more about how this article is little more than slant journalism. Please go do your research, and write another one. Attempt to check your bias at the door on attempt two. I fully expect, however, that it will not be so, and this comment will likely be moderated. I expect nothing less, after reading the reply, and the original article. Smear and slant. Nothing more, nothing less.
I have just no words for such a bad misleading article as this............
Actually Cyndy, its responses like yours that indicate to the userbase that your story here is nothing more than PR flakmonkey garbage. The only people who think this is a compromise is LL management (there is SIGNIFICANT resistance to this policy among the rest of the staff) and toadies who like to kiss up to management in return for favors.
These are the facts: Linden Lab SPECIFICALLY increased the prim limits on openspaces last march from 1875 prims to 3750 prims. This is undisputed. When you increase resources in a sim, it is human nature that people will expand to fill those resource limits. If this was a problem with how the system ran, they should never have increased the prim limits. This is THEIR problem they are now demanding that WE pay for.
They then set on a marketing campaign to promote sales of these openspaces as 'personal getaways', NOT as "wilderness" like they are now claiming. Why would an estate business waste money on sims nobody uses? LL sold 300+% more openspaces since March of this year than in the four years previous. They raked in 2.5 million USD selling these sims, SPECIFICALLY to people they KNEW were using them for personal getaways and small stores. Now that they've gotten their pound of flesh, they are turning the screws tighter, because so many people abandoned LL's mainland product (mainland continents are awash in lag, griefers, and poor quality trailerpark-type builds) to be able to have some privacy and control over their surroundings. They promoted these sims as equivalent to 1/4 of a full sim.
Their current claims are ENTIRELY FRAUDULENT.
Imagine, if you will, a car company named Linden Cars. They were making this dinky little underpowered jeep for years with small sales. Then they upped the horsepower (and more expensive to warranty) but leased them out at the same price as before. They leased out a ton of them.
Lo and behold, they claim gas prices have risen and break the lease agreements with all their customers, telling them they need to pay 2/3 to 2.5 times more than they were previously paying. How many car customers in todays world would tolerate that sort of thing? The excuse is of high maintenance costs, which the company knew about from the start, and could have projected, but they didnt. They entered into these contracts willingly and they need to eat their losses for their own bad judgement. THAT is how real business works. You screw up, you eat it. LL has NEVER understood how real business works, which is why their reputation is crap.
Except the real issue isnt that people are overburdening sims with 3750 prims. The sim software for openspaces allows people to put unlimited prims down. This is a bug in the software that LL has not fixed. They have never placed avatar limits on sims. There is also the issue of the script and physics engines being the main culprit. When they changed to havok4, openspace performance suffered. When they changed from an lsl engine to mono scripting engine, openspace performance suffered. Rather than figuring out the problem and doing something about it, they blame their customers for using their sims as they had always done so. That, again, goes to how poorly LL treats their customers.
You need to stop being a LL corporate shill and actually start investigating the issue.
Was this a press release by Linden Labs posing as a news article?
Are reporters not supposed to attend the events they report on, rather than commenting on video patched together by others and unattributed? If your reporter cannot even tell the difference between fireworks and gunshots (listen for the whistles for a clue), should she perhaps be relegated some other role (washing the boilerplate?) rather than attempting to analyze video tapes from events she did not attend?
Meanwhile the slanted assertion "While many users are happy to abide by a terms of service agreement, there will always be others who want to get as much as they can for as little as possible." completely misses the point that Linden Lab took several million dollars in down payment for a product that that provided a certain degree of functionality at a certain price, and having been paid by thousands of users, the company has renegaded on what was offered and instead offers a much lower capability at a much higher price. This appears to the FTC to be a "bait and switch scheme" and likely a consumer fraud.
Further LL created a number of examples of use of the product in question which applied them in ways similar to other users, but much later accused other users of "abusing" the product, when Linden Lab itself was unable to state - and is still unable to state what comprises "abuse.".
Further LL, which is in a monopoly situation in world, is creating and marketing competitive facilities to users based on the service fees they are collecting from wholesalers and users who purchased their product in good faith. This is clearly inequitable and may be in breach of anti-trust legislation.
As for your reporter's fascist suggestion, "Until virtual world companies find a way to oversee users who can't seem to oversee themselves, we'll continue to see these types of disagreements and protests" LL is a California Corporation, and it would appear as if Pruneyard vs Robins is relevant and that the right for peaceful and orderly protest in the sight of the public invited to the facilities provided is protected expression.
So it appears that there are things for people to protest about, and to negotiate about, and potentially to litigate about. There are multiple groups formed to address this in multiple ways. All of which suggests that there may be things to actually investigate using a real reporter instead of "Just another two-pence blogger trying to play at being a real newsie" and bloviating without investigation or analysis.
Yours Sincerely
Hermit Barber
Press Officer: Save Our Open Sims (+SOS+) Group in Second Life
Director: Grid Representation Foundation
QUOTE : Cindy Aleo Carrieira "" Also as expected, response from Second Life residents on the user forums appears equally split, with approximately half applauding Linden Lab's response and the other half crying foul, blaming Linden for not realizing that users would abuse cheap land parcels at the outset. ""
First of all Cindy , No split ..Not even CLOSE to equally , This policy effects around 16,000 Islands , If you took the time to actulay read the forum you would see that its only the odd one or two comments that are for the price change , Then if you keep reading the people who first seen it as a better policy realised that it was actualy WORSE and began to see the change was not a change ...but a Re-name of the land .
Second , No one was abusing any resorces , Linden labs sold a product ( Vurtual islands ) , The produce give a clear and defined limit ( prims , The building blockes used to build objects in second life ) , Early this year they RAISED the limit of prims to be used ...And LOWERED the price of the product . The allso made the island's stand alone . This give privicy and a place to live for people who could not afford to invest in a full scale island that holds more prims ..Cheap ... low prim ... privet .
Of course this was an attempt to draw people to buy into the product and they did ... In HUGE numbers , Linden lab's was well aware how the product would be used as they had sold thousends of them to a well known second life " Land Barron " for them to rent out to residents .
This is a clipping from the covenent set up to inform the people renting the island about what the terms of use are ...
" ****Name removed to protect the land owner **** sims provide privacy, flexibility and space in a beautiful and isolated environment. This special "high area" region gives you 4 times as much space as normal sims, for the same price. Zoning of these sims is very liberal, allowing both for residential and light-traffic commercial activities. "
Linden lab's was allways fully aware of how the islands would be used , The upping of the prim limit would be pointless if the land was to be used as a water island , Having it as a stand alone privet island ( cut off from the rest of the secondlife world ) would allso be pointless to have just a water island with a few trees and rocks , ...The lowering of the price and encouraging people to buy this VERY attractive island .... Then after selling them ...Linden labs ( Without notice )announce a 68 % price increase and try to tell ( Well informed ) Residents that was due to the islands being abused !.
Linden Lab's are yet to produce data to back the claim that anything was being over used ,
Bait & Switch !
A poll in the user forum allso asked if anyone who owns a island had any problems with the service and performance of the islands they owned / live on , The number of people who voted that thay did was VERY low , They allso failed in many cases to give a firm reason why they had problems .
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=290457
No abuse was ever taking place , Who would spend $250 Set up fee , $ 75 - $100 a month to use an island and then fill it with prims that would drain resorces and make it difficult to use ?
Mark Kingdon CEO of Linden Lab allso annouced in his letter to residents ( CUSTOMERS ) that Second life was actualy running better that it ever was ...But at the same time trying to tell residents that the Open Sims need a price hike due to them being abused and are a drain on resorces ?
Quote Mark Kingdon CEO of Linden Lab :
"" I’d like to close on this thought: An area of concern for Residents over the past year has been platform stability. Through the hard work of many, many people, including Residents, we have made great strides that are very well documented. Crash rates are down. Substantially. Period. And until this price change, we were riding high in user satisfaction so we know you have recognized and appreciated the improvements we’ve been making. Our breakthroughs in stability improvement are particularly noteworthy because our land mass increased enormously this year. And, a good part of that increase was from Openspaces. ""
Mark Kingdon allso added this comment
""One thing I learned and others were reminded about in this process is that we have a very connected, passionate Resident base and we need to bring you into the dialog earlier, before putting forward these decisions. The input we received after Jack’s announcement was prolific and by-and-large very, very constructive. Second Life is at a size where 1:1 conversations are difficult and the forums are inadequate for full dialog. Office hours come up short, too. We have some thoughts on how to bring Residents into the dialog earlier which we will cover in a future blog post and Forum discussion.""
To date since his letter to residents , Mark Kingdon has not made a single comment , replyed to a single question or made any attempt to contact the residents via the forum ... or any other means for that matter .
Quote : Mark Kingdon CEO of Linden Lab "" Jack and I will join you in the forums throughout the day today to discuss this. Comments are closed on the blog, not because we want to limit dialog or free expression but because this is a conversation with Residents and the forums require log-in. This is a policy we are going to follow moving forward with all major announcements. Blog the announcement, express and discuss in the Forums. ""
Not a single reply by Kingdon to over 1800 comments made on the forum in the last 2 days , They call it " Talk with M and Jack " , Residents are talking , M & jack are paying no attention .
Bait and switch ... Take it or leave it !
The thing is this , WE are well informed customers , We the user know second life inside out , We know how it works ...Second life is not full of spotty teenagers playing a game , Residents BUILT second life from the ground up , If Linden Labs wanted a solution to a supposed problem , Dialog would have been a better way to go than to hit people in the pocket .
I could go on for hour's here about how wrong this policy is and how much it's more of a way of sucking more money fromthe customer for the same product tha LL sold us and now claim that its been abused ... But i won't .
I wanted to point out to YOU Cindy that your report is incorrect , Take the time to dig a little deeper intoit , You will find a REAL story here , One worth writing about and bring into light the mismanagment of Second Life , You will uncover lies and greed by a monoply service provider , And maybe get a feeling of the thoughts of Second life resident's , You will learn that Time... effort and creativity went into building secondlife as well as money ...And that Linden Lab's focus is geared only to making MORE Money !
At the point at which I posted the article, yes, the forum postings were about equally split. I'd note that a concerted effort by S.O.S. like the one I'm seeing here may have skewed it after I posted the article. Let's also establish that Second Life is far from a "monopoly service provider" as it is NOT the only virtual world in existence, and as customers, residents are always free to sell their land and leave.
I'm also assuming that most of the commenters who have posted here have not read my previous articles about Second Life in which I am regularly defending the site. However, the amount of feedback I usually get from non-believers reinforced the stance I'm taking on this one. I also find it ironic that when Linden goes one way with a policy change, everyone references California State Law, yet when a decision goes another way, everyone claims that as a virtual world with residents from all over the world, the application of one state or country's laws should not apply.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned here, but I think anyone assuming that Linden is making money hand over fist as it gouges its residents is way off base. There's a real world economy that's not doing so well out here, and of course Linden wants to make money. If they don't make money, they go under, like a lot of other companies are right now. I also note that I'm not hearing anything about the Openspaces owners who feel wronged that they WERE abiding by the intent of the land and got caught up in this due to misuse.
Also, claiming that "Linden KNEW we would do this by giving us so many prims" is like saying your parents knew you'd drink while underaged by keeping alcohol in the house. You can't argue it both ways. If it's acknowledged that a true Openspace wouldn't need 3750 prims, then a reduction wouldn't really be a factor for those using it for true Openspace use, would it, and taking the extras away prevents the possibility of misuse. The extra prims weren't really necessary.
Hi there,
I think we need to get some facts straight here:
1.We arent just talking about a price raise, but a 67% priceraise(the original idea was to raise it 67% in january) which is just too crazy if ppl know that this is actually often paid with real life money. To raise the price of a product in a crisis like we are in is just crazy and proves the incapability of LL to make a serious financial plan and proves of no respect for the ppl who actually created that whole world and making a rel life living in it.
2. Homestead is actually the version of an openspacesim that WILL rise in price(about 15% now and another 50% in july according to the new blog of LL). So this isnt a lesser expensive option like you state. This is a fact, so honestly you totally blew it there
3. The actual lesser expensive option you talk about will be called openspace, but only supports 750 prims (prims are in short the buildingstones that you use to create something)instead of 3750 which it supports now. The bad thing about this is that you get a lot less prims to build with, but you still have to pay the original price of 75 us$ which you paid for 3750 prims before.So all of a sudden you get less then the product you paid for in the start(it like buying a ferrari and after 6 months ask it back and put the engine in it of a low budget car). Figure that out!!!
4. You state that ppl have been abusing opensims in the past, which actually isnt possible, since we got 3750 prims as a max to build on those islands, so we can t abuse them. They never set a limit on scripts or on the amount of avatars you were aloud there. So wheres the abuse????
5. You write it was ment for water and trees only. To start with, you dont need prims to build water, so that would leave you 3500 prims for trees. Believe me, you dont want to see an openspace with 3500 prims of trees on it. Thats not a forrest, thats a jungle(so a closed space and not really an open space if you ask me). To make a nice openspace with water and trees you wouldn t need 3500 prims, About 1800 would prob be more then enough, but they raised the limit of prims a few months ago from 1800 to 3500 just to make it more atractive to buy it. So if you pay for it, its only normal you use them i think?
6.LInden labs sold aproximately 9000 to 10000 of these openspacesims over the last half year. They knew what was happening, They knew what ppl were using them for, but they never 1 min thought about taking action against those so called "abusers". They just waited untill the sellingpiek was over and then said they d raise it with 67%. Wouldnt it have been more honest to give us prove of the abuse and warn them to not abuse?
7.You state that opensimspaces have a lowerpriced land tier atm, which is actually totally wrong. You pay just as much tier for the 3750 prims on an opensim space as when you would pay tier for 3750 prims on a full sim. All we get is a bit more space to build it on, but the amount you pay for prims is the same.
8. In your last post you state that a reduction of prims shouldnt be a prob, which i totally agree on. Opensims for water and trees dont need that much prims, but it would only be normal that if you take away a percentage of the ppls prims they payed for that the tier would go down also with the same percentage?
9.I ve seen a lot of pressreactions on this priceraise, Most agree with the residents, some don t.
But even those who don t agree at least did an effort to check if what they were telling was correct.
What you did is prob listen to a Linden and swallowed his story without having any respect for the job you do. Don t reporters/writers have to double check their story before publishing it? Some of the things in here i said is my way of looking at it, but some of these points or just hard facts, which you prob didnt even bother to look at. Word of advice: if you wanna write about something, spend some time there and check the prob out yourself. Talk with both parties that are involved and then state your opinion based on facts.
10. One thing you were correct in is that ppl shouldnt grief anyone no matter where in sl. This happened and no matter how upset ppl are they should have respect for other ppl. This however is a serious minority of the protesters. Most groups or maybe even all of them are against griefing other ppl since this will lower the credebility. There are however always griefers in virtual words who abuse moments like this to do what they always do, but now found a way to do it justified(they think). In short, the griefers would be there anyway, no matter if there was a protest or not and maybe its time that LL does something about those idiots that screw up other ppls fun. But if they handle those griefers the same as they do with so called "abusers" of opensims then they ll just raise the price on sims again, saying that griefers overload their servers and this is the only possibility instead of handling the prob itself.
11.If you ever feel like correcting your mistake, throw me an im in SL and i ll be glad to lead you around on some open sims, show you some facts and maybe then you can write a new story.
If any of these words sound too hard, i d like to apologize upfront, but i really think you ve could have done a better job here.
Sorry also for my bad english probably, but i m belgian so i did my best with what i knew.
I fail to understand why, if I have an opinion, it's because it was spoon-fed to me by Linden Lab. No, we received nothing from Linden, and my take on the issues is what I saw based on reports, reactions in the forums, and other stories online. I'm also not sure why commenters keep confusing tier payments for land use with original cost. Openspaces were set up as private regions, and cost $250 as compared to $1000, and the "maintenance fee" was $75 per month vs. $295 per month. The original text was:
"Private regions (Islands) are a great solution for large projects, community development and permanent event spaces. Private regions can be grouped, or joined together to create a contiguous space, so you can add to your land mass as your community and projects grow.
Openspaces (light use regions) are also available so you can add ocean or open park land. For more information, check out our Information on Openspaces knowledge base article."
The problem is what some residents decided was "light use" included rentals, etc. and yes, Linden obviously should have spelled that out clearly since "light use" became a free-for-all in many cases. But again, how could anyone look at that price structure and that description and assume that since scripts weren't limited it was okay to use it pretty much like a regular private region? There is a double standard in play every time something like this comes up. Linden "knew" how Openspaces were being used, so people assume that they are tracking every single region at all times? There aren't enough Linden employees for that. And if they were, the residents would be up and arms that Linden was too much in their business.
Cindy , Its clear you have no grasp on whats going on here , Fine have your opinion , But please try and bein recipt of ALL the facts ,Two sides to every story .
If you want the real story , Dig that little bit deeper ,You will find a better story trust me .
People are saying your just a blogger playing at being a real newsie , I disagree , I think you could " If you tryed harder " find the real story here .
Look at why LL dropped the price ...raised the prims and sold 1000's of OS to a well known land barron .
If LL did not intend them to be anything other than water and a few tree's ... Why raise prim limits and sell them on to somone they know 100% will rent them out as places to live for residents ?
I know how hard it can be to try and change your first opinion of somthing , You form an opinion and will defend it as best you can so as not to look like you was wrong ...Human nature ..we all do it .
But explore this situation a bit more ...With an open minded view .... it will become clear that LL have dropped the ball here and what they are doing is wrong ..... Not to mention will HARM second life a lot more than they first thought , We are residents ... we spend countless hours in SL .... we understand fully all aspects of SL ..... LL have shown over and over that they have no concept of inworld thoughts and feelings ... We are allso the customer .
Regards
Lost
Readers: Opinions and respectful debate is welcome, but insults and other abuse ("fascist?" C'mon!) are not. The thread will be closed if this type of language persists.
I would like to note that Cyndy has been writing about Second Life for the entire time she's been writing for the Standard, and before that on Profy and elsewhere. She is not a noob, nor is she working for Linden Lab. She calls it like she see it, and is not afraid to criticize or question LL policies.
You may not agree with her take on the Open Spaces situation, but the most effective way to make a case for your own point of view is through reasoned, respectful debate.
Sincerely,
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
Cyndy, you DID hear from me. In my estates, out of my 52 sims, 17 are openspaces, and none are overused. All are operated with low avatar traffic, below prim limits, and low scripting. We enforce a lag ordinance in our estates to ensure nobody overscripts.
In real life business, if you sell too much for too little, you dont get to take the product back and demand people pay for more. That is called theft. You are expected to eat the losses incurred by your own bad decisions. Linden Lab sold too much for too little, or so they claim. However you still have not addressed the fact that their mainland product is far more burdening to their network, yet they are not raising tiers on mainland whatsoever.
And no, I dont change my story. I've always agreed that there are RL laws applying to Linden Lab's real life behavior toward their real life customers paying real life US Dollars.
That is a separate issue from whether I think taxation and regulation should govern behavior inworld between avatars. Some behavior should be, but some clearly doesn't apply. For instance, shooting an avatar with a virtual gun to 'kill' them only teleports the avatar to their home point, and only if they are in a sim that allows damage, so obviously applying RL assault and/or murder laws do not apply.
Wether or not government bureaucrats should be inworld regulating behavior is a totally separate issue from whether I suffer real life USD damages due to the real life billing policies of Linden Research, Inc., and whether I deserve access to real life courts over their behavior that causes real damage to my real life person.
If tax and spend big government regulator types want a piece of my virtual pie, they need to get off their real life asses.
Hi there,
let me repeat what you wrote:
my take on the issues is what I saw based on reports, reactions in the forums, and other stories online.
1. I think you need to read the forums again.Yes some ppl were fooled in the start with the new names and prices, but once they saw through it all they fast changed their mind again.
2.You formed an opinion on reports and stories. Remember that fairitails are also stories. I hope you dont believe them. Like i said in a previous post, you wrote an article without knowing the actual facts, without speaking actually to both sides with an open mind.I again invite you inworld to talk to me or 1 of us, listen to us and then maybe write another story about it, no matter if your opinion changed or not.
3. One really important issue that only few ppl already saw is the next thing:
LL actually didnt compromise. Sure, they only charge 15% extra tier till july, so they ll loose the other 50% they wanted during those months. But on the other hand a lot of ppl will now want to live on those homesteads till july( when the extra 50% raise comes)which will really hurt estateowners. Let me clarify my point. Estateowners are allowed to convert 4 homesteads back to 1 full sim for free untill january (because LL does know they majorly screwed up with those openspacesims), after that they have to pay a serious amount to convert them. So i think it s pretty obvious that a lot of estateowners can t convert to full sims untill july, at which moment they have to pay money to convert, which results in an extra loss for them and an extra income for LL. So what LL looses on the lesser tierraise, they ll make up when estateowners have to pay extra in july to convert.
So at the moment estateowners can choose to kick ppl of the homesteads in january which will make them loose clients and friends or get financialy screwed in july.
Again maybe a point you didnt see and might want to talk about to us?
If not i think it s obvious that it s more important to you to stick to your original story then finding out the truth. Who knows you might even make a friend or 2 .
Well..they offered a product for 75USD a month with 3.750 prims to use and let people place them standalone. They told people it is ok to live on them and knew already from openspace sims used before what is on them.
They use the excuse of people "abusing" the sims and say they have more cost related to them. Using sims more doesnt give them more cost, the residents have slower servers and have to deal with the lag. Linden Lab simply lied to all the residients and want to increase the fee for them by 67%!! and after people having protesting against it they even put limits to the new sims which actually would take away the argument they are abused as they cannot be abused anymore with the limits on them.
They even raise the buy price for openspace sims, can you explain a normal person why that should be higher than now as the work is the same they have?
Linden Lab is simply ripping off people and you want to tell us we just have to take it? The only reason they can do that is that they have no competition on the market...YET
So what do you say to a person who bought a sim 2 months ago for 75USD a month...used it the corrent way and faces now an increase of 67%!!! what would you do in real life if someone wanted to rip you off that way..just accept it?
And the worsed thing is, now that they see we dont take their lies to us, they even dont communicate with us anymore! And what about the fact that they had sims like that with loads of traffice and scripts on them running before we asked them about it and they changed them to full sims. How would you feel about such a company?
As soon as other grids are more stable Linden Lab is history. And i do think your article is a really good example for bad journalism.
This article fails to fairly present all the facts. It fails to mention that hundreds if not thousands of people were duped by LL into buying Open Spaces when LL sold them as having 3,750 prim, and no stated limit on scripts or numbers of avatars, for 75 dollars a month. Then months later after selling the OS like hotcakes with a 250 nonrefundable set up fee, tells all the purchasers that the 75 dollar a month rent will increase 67 percent, to 125 dollars a month. I wonder if the writer of this article's apartment or house was suddenly jacked in rent/mortgage costs by 67 percent a few months after she had put down a nonrefundable deposit of 3 x the normal rent/mortgage payment, if she'd think protests about that would be "whining".
I'm not a member of S.O.S, nor do I own an OS. I do however own a regular island, and have plenty of friends who did have OS, and were NOT abusing them in any way shape or form. As a land owner, I see the disturbing implications of a 67 percent price hike in the monthly upkeep of an OS, because if LL would do that with the OS, they probably will do that to the other land types. That in mind, I would recommend that people NOT buy any new land from LL. The risk of a 67 percent increase in your monthly expenses mere months after putting down a large non refundable deposit is a huge deterrent. I dare say many land owners will be getting rid of larger holdings in SL. In the past few months the growth of private estate has not only stopped growing, it's actually shrunk, and continues to shrink.
Bliss Crimson
I was flabbergasted reading this paper on second life, so many there are unaccuracies and false statements. Please Cindy, do an inquiry and check facts before writing about something you don't know!
First, you obviously don't know what is Second Life, and what it is used for. Most people go in Second Life to escape the limitations of the physical world and society. They want to have their dream land, or to be what they like to be, beautiful, with the body and personna they wish (or simply be normal for disabled people. there are many in Second Life, often at key positions).
So the role of Linden Labs is not to impose their tedious roleplay of "land regulation", but to service all the users in an ideologically neutral way. You have an excuse: they seems to ignore this themselves.
When Linden labs offered the open spaces, many users rushed on them. They were much more affordable than the excruciatingly costy normal sims. ($300 a month, it is twenty times more than World of Warcraft). Once the bait swallowed, Linden labs just had to switch the prices... and propose their ugly "mainland" as their new cheap prroduct. Bad reasoning, people prefered to leave the game, rather than having their dream land or hangout besides a motor cycle track or a brothel. So far, 4000 sims are lost, on estimated 12000 open spaces. And this is still a beginning: people not yet received the new bills.
Rather than speaking of "regulation" or "self governance" (of what?), you should consider the suffering of so much happiness suddenly coming to an end. As people go in SL for fun, entertainment, be happy, be free of the physical society hassles and problems. By introducing a (pointless) social struggle in Second Life, Linden labs just spoils the fun. By doing so, they eliminate the purpose of Second Life, and engages it on the same downward path than Lively (Google's virtual worlds, shunned by users for its lack of relevance and ugly avatars, and now closed).
You also state that the residents were "split" in approx 50%-50% way. This is definitively a false and misleading statement. Never were the residents so unanimous. Some months ago, when Linden Labs banned gambling, paedophilia, etc, people debated and were split, because these are real issues arousing difficult philosophical/legal questions. But now the pointless and ununderstandable decision of Linden Labs hurts everybody equally. We all have friends or groups who lost lands.
I would also add that all the creations lost were often magnificient art works, that people built from their hearts and countless hours of work. There is something brutal, ruthless, amoral in Linden Labs behaviour and arrogant speech, to ignore this wantonly destruction of humanly precious content.
Not to speak of course of so many businesses coming to an end, before or after the break event. Anyway, with no customers in work, all businesses are void.
So I give you a bad mark for this essay, for being irrealistic and off-stake, while being so affirmative.
And the newspaper? "The industry standard", what is this? Oh, I place it on my site of not to read unreliable information source. Unless you correct of course. In this case please send me an email :)
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