Linden Lab introduces new land product, changes for void simulators
Filed under: Economy, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab's new CEO, Mark Kingdon, has announced a new land product for Second Life, based on all the feedback, and vociferous protestation that all but exploded following the original announcement. Reactions to the new announcement are still a bit mixed, with many thinking that this is the announcement that should have taken place originally. After all, Linden Lab already had all of the information prior to the flood of feedback that they received.
Nevertheless, the end result is that void simulators will be available in two flavors: the Openspaces product (now adjusted substantially) and the new Homesteads product. There's a knowledge-base article enumerating the changes, but we'll break it down for you.
Void simulators under the Openspaces product will have significant restrictions applied. Homesteads are very close to the originally announced plan for void simulators, and add a phased price increase (though an educator's discount is now applicable), but have a capacity reduction applied.
The Homesteads product is the simpler one so we'll tackle that one first. Compared to current void simulators, they're nearly the same, but they will have an occupancy cap of 20 (a notable reduction). The Homestead product becomes available on 5 January 2009 at US$95/month and rise to the planned US$125/month on 1 July 2009. Users setting up new void simulators under the Homestead package will pay a setup fee of US$375 per simulator. Conversion of an existing void simulator to the Homesteads plan is free until 9 January 2009. A 30% discount is available on fees for eligible parties. Homesteads may be subject to additional script caps, but that has yet to be determined.
The Openspaces product will have its object limits slashed to 750 prims, and occupancy limits slashed to 10. No educator discounts apply, and pricing remains the same. Land on an Openspaces simulator will not be able to be listed for events or classifieds, and caps may be applied to scripts (but development work has yet to be done for that, so it's still quite hazy). Openspaces are also prohibited from rental or from use as habitation -- but nobody has yet defined what habitation means in this context. We think it means "hanging around in the simulator too much".
All these changes to Openspaces apply from 5 January 2009.
For those of you interested in your bang for the monthly buck, Openspaces are effectively 10 US cents per prim (assuming you fill them to capacity), Homesteads are 3 US cents per prim, and regular simulators in private estates are 2 US cents per prim. That's monthly fees divided by capacity.
So, if you have a void simulator you have a choice of two products, neither of which are quite the same as the product you currently have, and you're going to need to plan accordingly. We don't think there's any additional stretch room for the packages as they stand.
Many of you are wondering why this wasn't the plan from the outset, given what the Lab already knows -- frankly, the user feedback probably didn't tell them anything they didn't already know at the outset of their decision-making.
Linden Lab's priorities as a business don't necessarily have a lot of overlap with those of its customers (which is not an atypical situation). Given that, it's unlikely we'll see any significant revisions to the two options. If you own a void simulator now, things are going to change whichever way you go. You should plan accordingly.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Pavig Lok said on 10:32PM 11-05-2008
So the result is the new openspace you:
* pay 25% of the price of a full sim
* get traffic limits at 10% of a full sim capacity
* get 5% of the prims
* share lag with people you don't know
* face yet to be announced future restrictions
Somehow this doesn't look as good value as the old void groups to me.
Or for a new Homestead sim you:
* Pay about 30% of the price of a full sim with an increase later to 42%
* get under 25% of a full sims resources (25% prims, 20% people etc)
* Get the same pricing increase everyone complained about (that hasn't changed)
* face yet to be announced future restrictions
In contrast.. the old void group package you:
* had to buy 4 at a time
* had nearly a full sim worth of resources (prims/people/etc) to divide up as you saw fit
* could manage lag within your void group
* paid a little over a normal sim price
Soooooooooooo whichever way you cut it this looks like more money for less good stuff. The new plan is more acceptable but certainly not much of an improvement - in fact for "homestead owners" they will actually be getting _less_ than they had under the old price increase.
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Opensource Obscure said on 6:33AM 11-06-2008
> * share lag with people you don't know
> * face yet to be announced future restrictions
Aren't those restrictions meant to avoid abuse - and in the end, to reduce the lag caused by users you share the server with?
It appears to me that enforced restrictions could be the only good result of all this mess. Am I wrong?
Pavig Lok said on 7:30AM 11-06-2008
In reply to opensource obscure:
Not quite..... Each sim slot gets load balanced within a server. As voids run multiple sims per slot they don't actually get the same load balancing as normal sims get so they leak lag into each other. Since voids were decoupled from the clients sim account to migrate willy nilly between servers, there's never been any way to balance lag between them - apart of course from severely nobbling them which is what we're gonna see under the new plan. They'll still leak lag.
Tateru Nino said on 10:43PM 11-05-2008
That is about the size of it, yes. There are two tiers, but each tier gets less than they presently do.
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shin said on 12:24AM 11-06-2008
..and they still have not announced any actual fix for the known problems with the openspaces. They can change the name to homestead, they can lower the max number of people (I don't believe I ever had more than 20 people on mine..more usually 0 to 3), but in the end, they still intend to charge more for a defective product that they have not warned the buyers was defective, and not a fix in sight.
As far as the whining about how we are using them wrong...why the hell did they think they were selling so many? Can any of them honestly state that they thought people were buying 13,000 and more wooded highlands? The kinds of statements they make clearly show what they think of the average intelligence level of their customers actually is...^_^
Corporate hubris at it's finest.
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Loki said on 3:21AM 11-06-2008
Why are Linden Lab so fixated with the $125 mark up? They still are not explaining why it needs to go up to that price, if its to increase stability, then why are we having to reduce the amount of people we can have on the homesteads.
If we cant use the homesteads product as we are now, then whats the point of the price rise?????
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Eris said on 7:42AM 11-06-2008
I still don't really understand the apparent reticence to get rid of the Premium account tax on mainland and sell mainland to any (payment-registered) Resident?
Without the Premium tax mainland would cost 1.3 US cents per metre (and 1.5 if you have to pay VAT) making it the best sqm value in SL. The fact that it comes with neighbours and has terra-forming restrictions would be a fair compromise at the price-point.
Some Premium account holders (other than me) might complain but could be compensated with a much larger Premium land bonus with their account - maybe up to 4096m instead of 512m?
If, as M says, the Premium subscription is irrelevant to their business model then get rid of it, give people more land choices and revitalise the mainland - instead of just slapping price-hikes and reduced-spec's on their existing customers!
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Jay said on 12:58AM 11-07-2008
So, let me get this straight... We can be automatically "upgaded" to a Homestead region that gives you 3,750 prims (as opposed to the 3,750 prims the abused OpenSpace regions allowed) with a price increase to $125 a month (as opposed to the initial $125 a month offer)
What am I missing?
Oh, abuse will go as they will now allow people to live on them. Magic... Pay 66% more without technical changes and the abuse is not a concern any more.
Du rouge à lèvres sur une cochonne
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Tateru Nino said on 1:10AM 11-07-2008
Well, one thing. The specification for the homestead product is additionally reduced from the specification that the openspaces product has had up until now.
Iian Beaumont said on 1:32PM 11-07-2008
Folks - every single one of you is missing the big, terrible truth behind all this. Linden Labs has a trio of bugs in it's viewers. Rather than fix the bugs, they have blamed the users. That makes 4 huge mistakes. The then compounded all of that by basing their pricing decision on the mistakes!!! This is a terrible snow ball of error and it's time the press started pointing it out.
For references on this see Balpien Hammerer's detective work for the long standing texture loading bug issue at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8503?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=85391#action_85391
To quote from another user who sums it nicely:
"Iexo Bethune - 31/Oct/08 02:24 AM -
So, in summary, we've got a texture loading bottleneck, misdetection of video card memory, and rapid flushing of the cache requiring textures to be redownloaded from the asset server, which causes avatars to hit the asset server much more than they should, slowing down the asset server and causing even more requests, descending into a loop that causes a DDOS attack on the asset servers, causing massive instability, and rendering all tests of sim load on all regions unreliable (and removing justification for price hikes on Openspaces, since the load on the OS sims is due to an internal error, and not overuse).
What we have here is a pile of bugs that have come together, in a chain reaction, to ultimately cause massive problems and actually effect the pricing policy decisions of LL."
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That this terrible situation exists is 100% reproducible. Go to any texture rich sim and activate your texture console through the advanced menu and watch while a single texture loads repeatedly - even while you stand still for periods of 30 minutes of more.
Also from that same JIRA come LINDEN LABS OWN FIGURES regarding texture loading in SL - these figures are from DAN LINDEN:
About 80% of the time 512x512 images take ~20 seconds to download.
About 15% of the time 512x512 images take ~37 seconds to download.
About 5% of the time 512x512 images take ~4 seconds to download.
So lets assume that LL is just ignorant of its own self inflicted damage. If this is the case, they surely should place their entire decision on hold until they can get things settled. The only other alternative is that they KNOW about it and don't care. That means that this entire episode is a giant exercise in Corporate "Bait and switch."
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