Socially|Mundane

Today "Openspace" sims suffer a tier rate increase from $75 a month to $95 a month. Tier-fear increases for many people, including myself.

On announcement, openspace sims were dumped en-masse by hundreds, if not thousands of people. One of the good side effects is that it cleared-up the grid a bit. A sim near one of mine was blocking the addition of another — not directly, but close enough that our shared grid borders would overlap and I didn't want to bother getting their approval to have a new sim kitty-corner to theirs, et-cetera, et-cetera...

There is no doubt Linden Lab seriously underestimated the way residents would over-push the limits of the openspace sims. A "full" sim is expensive. Not only in the initial cost of set-up, but also in the tier paid. So when openspaces were introduced to the public at large, people jumped on them and often tried to use them to the same degree as a full sim. Worse, many tried to pass them off as full sims and sell or rent-out land to others and there was no real easy way to know better.

Linen Lab had to suspect this would happen.

I am a professional media artist: video, film, photography, sound design and so on. I work very hard at long hours to ensure my video is optimized to work cleanly with pristine picture and sound when viewed through the internet. I was devastated when I read an industry report that people care far, far less about picture quality and size than they do about other aspects.

Ever since I read this report, it has been drilled into my head that people care far less about the 'quality' of anything than they do about the cost of it. This is why Apple computers are still a minority of the machines in use at large. Not everyone is willing to pay for quality, no matter if they get 'more' than they pay for. Most are "on the cheap" - hence why evil Second Life freebies are so popular and create a nasty entitlement attitude.

So with regard to the openspaces scenario, people saw an opportunity to get their own sim. Like the "American dream" of owning your own land and home, a sim is the "Second life dream" of similar aspiration.

People milked it for all they could. My openspace is used lightly, but not in the way Linden Lab proclaims is the intended purpose. It is about 20 low-prim homes with simple furnishing provided to allow a place to call 'home' for participants in my role play city. Rarely ever more than about four or five people there at any one time.

I'm willing to go the $95 tier. Not so sure about the $125 that hits in July.

In a several emails and blog articles regarding the openspaces situation some information has come out that I find exciting. It has to do with script management.

The problem with openspace sims is that one that is overused and overloaded can really kill other openspace sim on the same CPU. This can happen on full sims as well, albeit not too often. Even though a "full" sim is on it's own Central Processing Unit, there are four CPUs per machine. Even a full sim that is overloaded and wreaking havoc can bog down other full sims on the same machine - because even though there are four CPU cores, it's still the same machine. meaning the same bandwidth on the bus, the same Random Access Memory, the same hard disk drives and so on.

No, I don't know the specifics of each server Linden Lab uses, so I am assuming, based on simple experience here.

One of the things mentioned as an idea — I'm not even really sure if it's an 'intent' on Linden Lab's part at this point — is that eventually scripts can be limited based on parcels. This is one of those 'ding-dong' ideas I only wish were thought-of a long time ago. it will take months to implement such a thing.

Linden Lab will begin a form of implementation on this theme by limiting script capabilities on the openspace sims and then, hopefully, continue developing the idea further into this proposal that estate managers and owners will be able to further refine script allow-abilities per parcel on the same region.

So, the openspace fiasco creates a necessity. That necessity to better control resource usage. Thus the invention of new capabilities and management controls.

Thus, openspace fiasco: mother on invention.