I know this post comes late, there's a good reason for that. I was so upset over the recent LL decisions regarding OpenSpace (aka Void) sims that I knew if I posted anything I would not make any sense. Plus, I wanted to see how the fallout came down from the people way more intelligent then I am.
Lillie Yifu originally posted about this issue or at least she's the first one I read about it from, (Helps to have a blog starting with a number Lillie!) and I immediately went to read the Official Second Life Blog. Then jumped in world to whine and complain to my fellow bloggers and friends. Here is selected from the original notification:
So Openspaces have been incredibly popular as a perk for estate owners, but sadly there is a twist. Unfortunately most of the Openspaces are being used for much more than light use. Based on analysis performed in August and September, Openspaces are being used about twice as much as we expected, in other words being loaded with double the content/avatar load than we’d expect for a region that is supposed to be light use.
Rather than being employed as open areas like ocean with little or no content and traffic, the majority are being rented out to residents looking for a place to live. Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems. For some people this has meant a less than great experience with performance fluctuations. The overuse of Openspaces has also put additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing. So higher traffic to and from the servers along with heavier demands on the asset server, both of which impact the overall experience people have inworld.
Here's the issue for me and IDG, Natalis, our home and design center, runs on an OpenSpace sim. We are very careful with it, our script resources routinely take less the 1.2 seconds to compile, we limit the sim usage to 20 people unless we're hosting a concert, our texture cache is very low. Generally we try to be good stewards of what we have in Second Life and we realize that creating a good environment leads to a good reputation and the ability to create on a sim that has more resources better then if we hadn't. Really being forced to design well with a void sim has lead to excellent design on a 'full' sim.
Yes it's often frustrating that we are subject to four other void sims and what they choose to do and that it could impact our sims. I understand where LL is coming from when I see sim owners open clubs on void sims and load it down with scripts and textures. However, what I have an absolute problem with is that LL is using a blunt instrument to reverse direction rather then giving us hard limits and letting us choose to play in them or not. Maybe I'm overreacting, but how do you think they will police 'overuse' will it be an individual decision like so much of LL's policie's are or will we be able to correct things and continue to run our creative space? The paragraph that bothers me from their annoucement is not the price hike, though that's frustrating but this right here:
Lastly we will begin to proactively discuss overloaded Openspaces with their owners. This is important because as with abuse of region resources, a heavily overloaded Openspace can adversely affect other Openspaces sharing the same machine which is clearly unfair to residents who are using them responsibly. We have listened to your feedback on this, and agree that we need to make changes to better support our Openspace users by actively working to keep the performance levels as high as possible. We will also provide some detailed guidance about what ‘overuse’ looks like and how to prevent it.
Combined with the sentence above that said, "Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems." I saw the banning hammer coming down for Natalis and buy extension the way the IDG designers and I do business. In order to get the same 'spatial' relationship if they determine we are overusing, we'll be forced to upgrade to a full sim, at an additional cost to us of $175 a month. That's after the price hike, if you include the price hike it's actually $225 more a month. So.... let's split the difference and call it around $200. As I've stated before, IDG dosen't make RL money yet, I'm still thinking through how much of my personal finances I want to share, but there's no way I can justify an extra $200 a month for a hobby. Especially with the state of the economic times being as they are. This action is really going to hit the 'middle class' of Second Life hardest, the ones who don't own land won't care until their favorite designer disappears and the people who make a ton of money won't be happy but have enough to survive it. (Trust me, there are only a handful of those.) In fact, Lillie, has stated she's leaving SL and the 1000 sims she has that are rented to people are going poof. So one person's impact hits 1000 people. Can you imagine the domino affect this could have? This makes little sense as a business decision for LL, they will lose thousands of dollars.
As of today the issue is looking slightly better, Jack Linden put an update on the blog that in part says:
...I wanted to clarify one issue. As mentioned in the post, Openspaces were intended for space, empty areas of ocean or forest. Take a look at the Knowledgebase article description here. By that criteria, the large majority of Openspaces have more going on than was the original intent. We are not suggesting this is a bad thing, and of course we’re delighted that people have found them to be so useful. And we’re not saying that everyone is abusing resources. 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.
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.
So at least for now it seems that they are not going to 'enforce' the water or forest 'intent' of the void sims and I may be safe. Even if Natalis does get impacted as overuse I will figure something out, but you may not see many more products, from me or anyone if things go badly. And that... will impact Second Life in a very very large way.
If you wish to be constructive and share your thoughts with LL,
then please post in the Second Life forums here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment