Socially|Mundane

No, this isn't about the Openspace sim controversy. It's about just plain owning sims at all. Any sim. Full sim, Openspace sim. Mainland sim, anything, whatever else there is.

I guess, I should clarify and say "leasing" a sim. Well, when you own a "region" you aren't even leasing it. It's not even really "hosting" the way some people put it, because Linden Lab aren't hosting our creations.

Well, they are, but even though the creations are ours, they are stuck within Second Life, so... they really aren't ours, are they? Only the creative design.

Things that make you go 'hmmmm.'

Okay, so there is a whole industry related to sim... well, region ownership. I shouldn't say "sim" because it's one region to a "CPU" - but four CPUs to a server, so it's really just a quarter of a "sim", isn't it?

So there is a complete industry that has grown-up around region ownership. And the "sucky" part of owning a region and really shone a light on this industry for me.

Okay, before I really confuse the hell out of you, including myself, I'll start-over... this way:

I own three regions. Two full sims and one Openspace (a.k.a. 'void') sim. The first I've had for a year. It was always a residential/commercial sim and I sold parcels on it. The old "buy land from me here on a clean, class 5 sim instead of the laggy, ugly mainland" model.

It went well for a long time... until real world gasoline prices started to skyrocket and RL discretional funds for a lot of people started drying-up. Then Linden Lab started selling these 'void' sims and the bottom of whatever virtual real estate market that was left...completely fell out. But, that's all beside the point I want to make here.

In this process, I also started a themed role playing sim. That's the second full sim I own. It has a market and the role players know they need to help raise the tier each month. That means traffic so the merchants will want to be there, and their market leases help pay the sim tier. A simple model, really.

Eventually, there were some who wanted to add a void sim, so we could have more space. It was added and thus, now I own and manage and am responsible for: three sims and their tiers.

Linden Lab announces the rise in tiers for the void. I don't care, I'll abandon it in the blink of an eye because I really don't care about it. The residential/commericial sim I would hate to lose, but I would dump that one, too if it came down to it and only stick with the themed sim. When I say 'dump' I mean abandon. I might give a go at selling it or even giving it away for the transfer cost, but I won't bat an eye at just abandoning it. And I've already checked the knowledge on the process for doing that. It's not very difficult at all.

So, the role playing traffic (bodies on the sim, not the traffic measurement) has been waning lately. Well, at least during the hours I'm there. Apparently it is popular with a lot of Euros who are there late aat night and early in the morning when I'm not there. However, for those other times, it's not much fun to go to a themed role play sim and there is no one there to role play against you.

So I start shopping for event tools to set-up events and a treasure-hunt that will work off the role play in the hope to get more bodies appearing during these lull-times. And this is where I discover this huge industry. It's amazing, the amount of gadgets targeted at sim-owners. A lot of which are either useless or way over-priced.