Linden Lab responds to void simulator furor
by Tateru Nino 
Oct 30th 2008 at 9:00AM
Filed under: Economy, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Jack Linden, head of Linden Lab's Land Team, has proferred an update on the policy changes to void simulators that sparked a revolt in Second Life earlier this week. According to Jack, all of the feedback has been read. That must have been an absolutely Herculean task right there, considering that the responses number in the thousands, and Jack is apparently out of town.
Jack implies that the type of usage is a more important factor in the pricing changes than the actual cost of usage, though to be fair, it's an ambiguous pair of sentences, 'We are saying that the use has changed, and continues to do so as people find more creative ways to use them. So the revised pricing is about recognising that change of use and the additional costs and value associated with it.'
Linden Lab themselves, appear to have a slew of apparently overloaded void simulators on the new Nautilus continent.
Protests are still wide-ranging and ongoing, and larger in scale than any that have come previously, which is surprising considering that unlike many, they are not organized protests, but ad-hoc gatherings of plaintiffs. No organized protests in Second Life have ever reached this scale or density. Some users are promoting a 24 hour boycott on Second Life on the first day of December (US time), still others are attempting to intentionally crash simulators on the new Nautilus continent to get the Lab's attention. Actual sign-waving protests seem to have diminished while Jack is out of town, but the furor apparently has not.
The issues with void simulators seem to be just about all anyone is talking about at the moment.
Many believe that the last set of void simulator policy changes were intended to encourage the residential and commercial use of void simulators -- and indeed, there doesn't seem to be any other way to interpret it. If there is data supporting an alternative interpretation of the policies, Linden Lab has not discussed it.
Indeed, as Vint Falken notes, it appears that Linden Lab intended void simulators for exactly the purposes which they are now claiming are problematic, showing four template builds that Linden Lab apparently planned to sell in conjunction with new void simulators, all oriented around the kinds of use that are apparently nixed.
Talk about mixed-messages. We'll have to wait and see what comes of this. What are you expecting? Multiple pricing structures, a reversal of policy, or something we've not thought of yet?
 |
Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop. |
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
detailsplease said on 9:08AM 10-30-2008
This article would be a lot more useful with a brief explanation of what exactly a void simulator is.
Reply
Tateru Nino said on 9:29AM 10-30-2008
That's covered in the previous articles in the series that are linked to, specifically here:
http://www.massively.com/2008/10/27/linden-lab-changes-pricing-policy-on-void-simulators/
and here:
http://www.massively.com/2008/10/28/the-spirit-of-1776-second-lifes-second-revolution/
Cyn said on 9:27AM 10-30-2008
I think it's fairly clear that people need solid prices.
Most of us don't buy services based on "give me these features and I'll pay whatever it takes." They buy them based on "I can pay $X and that will get me this subset of features, and I'll deal with it."
LL's assumptions are wrong. If the openspace regions are being overused and are causing issues, hardcode limits into them. I don't think people would be upset about that kind of move.
(And how can you go overboard on a region's limits, anyway? Was it poor programming on LL's part?)
Reply
Wispur said on 9:32AM 10-30-2008
I agree, limit the number of people that can be in a void simulator to 10 and BOOM, problems all solved, across the board. They will once again return to being the empty "voids" they were supposedly intended to be. People who are using them correctly will not be punished, and people using them incorrectly will be encouraged to move to a location with limits that match their needs.
Loki said on 10:12AM 10-30-2008
If LL had announced that they thought the Openspace sims were being used in a way they did not want, we would have listened and worked with any suggestions they might have had to reduce the strain on Openspaces. They did not even attempt to ask us to help them with this issue. They have gone straight ahead with a charge increase, because they dont want us to use the openspace sims the way they apparently originally intended.
Tali said on 2:02PM 10-30-2008
Quoting Cyn: "Most of us don't buy services based on "give me these features and I'll pay whatever it takes." They buy them based on "I can pay $X and that will get me this subset of features, and I'll deal with it.""
That's what makes this a double-whammy. They are changing the specs into something else than what I signed up for (going from light use to something which apparently is appropriate for subletting to tenants, since that's what some people seem to be doing), *and* requiring me to pay heavily for this new product/feature set or lose what I have invested so far.
Loki said on 9:58AM 10-30-2008
If my friends are going to have to pay more each month to keep our beloved goony island, then i would at least hope LL give us sumfin extra to show for it.
Reply
Marianne McCann said on 10:52AM 10-30-2008
I s'pect, once this all comes down to it, we'll see more of a middle ground. The pricing structure that Jack outlined already seems to be *slighly* backtracked on. This seems to be in this paragraph:
"Over the next few days we will be continuing to review the feedback and keep the dialogue flowing with as many of you as we can. If you have something to say, the forum is the best place to say it. It is clear that some Openspaces are being used as they were intended originally, so we recognise that there are different levels of usage that we need to account for."
I say seems, cuz well, you know how th' blog posts are always worded.
As to th' use of LDPW an Openspace, well, that seems like one hand not knowin what the other was doin', which is so, so often the trouble with LL, no?
At any rate, this whole situation has caused more damage than I suspect LL realizes. It goes much further than a price increase, but into how it was presented, how the teams communicate, how much research is done before major announcements, how feedback of those annoucements is handled, and yes, how quickly LL can damage the trust of its users.
Reply
Crap Mariner said on 11:33AM 10-30-2008
-More backpedaling as usual. Similar to like how a cat will go back a few steps, turn, hiss, go back a few steps, etc.
-Simpler tools for monitoring use. Several excellent Torley videos demonstrating it.
-Hard limits, or soft limits with alerts and warnings.
-An update to the TOS/AUP that specifically handles issues of overuse and pathways to upgrade into compliance.
-When a product's specs change, the limitations/expectations will be laid out on the Sales and blog pages, not just "read the wiki" with some weak text saying they're for light use.
-Accelerated growth of alternative grids with an emphasis on conversion of resources/available de-n00bing resources. (Maybe a Torley equivalent there?)
-Hopefully no scapegoats lose their heads over this. Better that people get sense knocked into them, they learn from it, and serve the community better. Dead cadets don't become soldiers.
-ls/cm
Reply
Dirk Talamasca said on 2:07PM 10-30-2008
Linden Lab knew what openspaces were being used for. They have been used as residential sims for a long time since early 2006 by Dreamland, Otherland, Azure Islands, Caledon and several other land businesses.
To suddenly foist it upon the community that they were unaware of this usage and to ask for pity, nay demand pity and raise prices to see that the pity pours in profitably is a total insult to the community.
They need to pull their heads out of their asses and pay attention to the PEOPLE that make SL what it is instead of putting their faith into cheesy, badly themed regions like Bay City and Nautilus that do absolutely nothing to inspire the creativity and diversity that enriches and grows the SL economy. No one wants to live on a parcel that they can't personalize or terraform. It is like charging people to go to prison. Every move they have made lately has raped the economy, driven it into the ground and fostered distrust from the residents that were once so madly passionate about the future of Linden Lab.
Paid accounts are falling off because the people that once trusted and believed in Second Life are no longer reaching out to tell their friends to enter Second Life. Linden Lab never did any advertisement of their own. The residents advertised Linden Lab through blogs and by capturing media attention ON THEIR OWN which in turn placed the spotlight on Second Life. Linden Lab was happy to suck up that recognition but have they done anything to nurture the community that made their success possible? No. Instead they have decided to compete with and abuse the residents that made their success possible and this will be much to their demise because the residents are just plain getting sick of it.
Second Life needs an Obama.
Reply
Prokofy said on 8:46PM 10-30-2008
The sims in Nautilus are not "overloaded". They do not use up all the prims allotted to them. They do not have heavy scripts and avatars present. They do not have scripted items. A non-moveable sailboat, a tree, a rock -- these are precisely the sort of landscaping type of scenes that the Lindens intended OS sims to be for, and exactly how they themselves have used them. They are not putting 100 avatars, with bling, poseballs, weapons, ships, etc. as residents are.
This effort to play gotcha on the Lindens with this one just reinforces the sense that the Lindens are right to raise the price due to resource hogging and dump people who play this kind of ridiculous reverse gotcha game off the sims. The problem is not the Lindens or the sims. It's peoples' over use of them.
Reply
Taff Nouvelle said on 2:04PM 11-01-2008
the sims are not overloaded, the sims ARE an overload. That is the point, there is far to much mainland unsold and they are releasing MORE mainland.
If they need more servers , dont bring more mainland on line.
However it seems that the problems are not what LL has been telling us, there is a problem with the viewerr code that means that textures are being downloaded from the servers and not from the local cache, so that a virtual DDOS attack it taking place on the SL servers which may make it seem that extra resources are being used when in fact it is a program fault that is causing the problem.
If this is the case, (there is a Jira on the problem), then trying to lever more cash out of the SL users to fix it is blatantly wrong.
radar masukami said on 7:24PM 10-30-2008
The pattern grows wearisome. LL makes a bunch of ill-conceived policies, and then everyone erupts in a furor over them, threatens to leave for one of the alternative OpenSim platforms that are years behind SL in terms of development, and then a month later, everyone's forgotten about it and no one has left.
Both sides are at fault, the difference is that LL has admitted it by Jack's latest blog post. The blinged out hair stores being hosted on openspace sims are run by people who will never admit to being wrong about anything.
It gets hard to take any of the parties seriously. A lot of the protesters keep touting their business experience but they sure don't act professional. Pros look at the contradictory message from LL on the openspaces and either say "not for me" or else accept the consequences when the policy changes. The protesters are amateurs in business. The Lindens are too, for that matter, for their communication skills (or lack of them) and their blind meandering with their policies.
Reply
rightasrain said on 7:58AM 10-31-2008
"Boss--the residents are revolting!"
"Yeah, those freaks make me sick"
LL treats SL users, customers like lab rats in some twisted experiment that is making them rich and everyone else nuts. Is this an ARG?
Reply
Vivito Volare said on 8:39AM 10-31-2008
There is too much fury based on too little data, and the data that comes about varies from the imprecise, to the smack-forehead-in-disbelief ill conceived.
In most people's experiences, a full sim has hard limits. As such, when LL announced the stats for an openspace sim, many people (as implied from comments in various blogs) understood these as hard limits. As such, if you had too many Scripts or AVs present, the only one who would be penalized would be you.
However, from comments by Jack Linden on two seperate followup roundtables, not only are these hard limits absent, but they do not know exactly how to implement them [paraphrase]. To me, this is hard to believe.
Then there is the matter of the definition of light use. A largely static environment, with few scripts and a traffic of three to five would fall into "light use." Many of the folks most shocked and appalled (some of whom will be leaving SL quietly, I have no doubt) interpretted it this way.
So, the fact that one or two of those avatars are there full time when logged in, and 4-50 of those +3000 prims are a house type structure, and you suddenly have these residents being told that they were ignoring or stretching the definitions within the ToS.
And let us be fair, the same line that says that OS sims are intended for park-like environments also says that other uses are "not recommended" and there would be no support for performance issues.
Not Recommended. This does not forbid other use. As many people read it, this simply declared that this was a low-performance sim, and to not expect anywhere near the same resources of a full sim.
Reply
Vivito Volare said on 8:45AM 10-31-2008
Oh, yes, then there was Jack Linden's statement
"'We are saying that the use has changed, and continues to do so as people find more creative ways to use them. So the revised pricing is about recognising that change of use and the additional costs and value associated with it.'"
This sounds suspiciously like a child saying "I didn't know you would like it so much. You owe me another dollar because it is so awesome."