House Natasha

I don't know if anyone else has been following the controversy from LL's announcemnet that they are going to raise tier on OpenSpace sims, but in case you are here's a bit of an update from http://slsailing.com/

I'm interested mainly because it could have a dramatic effect on sailing in general in SL and in particular on the United Sailing Sims, one of my favorite places to sail in SL. In fact, as the site indicates, Mark Twain White and USS were the original impetus and inspiration behind the development of OpenSpace sims.

OpenSpaces are sims which are only allowed 1/4 of the prims of a regular sims, and are intended for things like oceans or forests, or to help add space and atmosphere to a role-play area, perhaps. LL made the announcement of a price increase due to various abuses of the original OpensSpace concept, such as renting them out for residential use. While this could work out alrught if there was, say, one house on the whole sim, some were splitting them up into fourths and renting them out as low-prim housing, which greatly increased the load, and left the renters, who often didn't know they were renting in an OpenSpace with very poorly performing places to live. Unfortunately , the Lindens "solution" will punish EVERYONE who owns an OpenSpace sim, even those who are using them as they were originally intended. If the price hike goes through as originally announced, many people who paid the $250 start up fee and now pay $75 a month will not be able to keep the sims if they have to pay the planned $125 a month. Many of these people only bought the sims shortly before the hike was announced.

My personal opinion is that the best solution will be to make several different classes of OS sims. The lowest should probably actually have reduced tier, as well as a reduced prim count, and could continue to serve such uses as sailing areas. For people who want something cheaper then a full island but with some development capacity, 150-200 a month would not be such an unfair price.

Oh, and by the way, I plan to take part in the protest event mentioned for tomorrow.

Anyhow, here's the posting from Mark Twain White on slsailing:

I am getting a lot of questions about where things are at relative to LL’s BLACK MONDAY announcement of big changes in OS sims. I know that Jane has a full article coming, but I want to step in now and provide a update on events.

Here is the latest as of Friday October 31 at 10:30AM.

I have had a few conversations with Jack Linden that, along with those things that Jack said at yesterday’s public meeting lead me to believe that there WILL be a solution that SL sailing will be able to live with, and golf at Holly Kai Golf Club for that matter.

I told Jack in no uncertain terms that a 66% increase in OS tier will for all intents and purposes end private sim sailing with lots of open water such as is practiced in the USS-SL and elsewhere. I told him that much of the SL sailing community will emotionally if not physically leave SL and seek a new home. Jack is no dummy, he knows we don’t have a place to go YET. But he also knows we WILL have a place to go in the future.

Here is what he told me two days ago:

Hey Mark,
Thanks for the email. As I think I touched on in the most recent blog post, we are recognising that in fact there are those that use Openspaces for the original purpose and that also this may be an issue with there being essentially two usage levels rather than one.
So let us think this through and keep talking to us. We’ll talk more publicly very soon, we know this is a huge issue for you and of course no-one wants to see great projects harmed.

Then at the public meeting yesterday Jack specifically mention the SL sailing community and our situation. Here is the exchange:

[12:11] Patch Linden shouts: =====> Suppose that Linden Labs were to decide to allow truly “low-use” water sims to stay at the current rate, hypothetically….would there be any way to clamp their resource use, such as max frame time or max packets, to ensure compliance?
[12:12] Jack Linden shouts: That’s a great question. We do not currently have a way to do that, to support the genuine ‘open space’ usage with hard limits built into the simulator, but we’ve certainly been seeing in the feedback that some people still want that use. The sailing community for example, who are the classic example of Openspace use.
[12:13] Jack Linden shouts: So we’re looking at how we recognise that different usage level now, including how technically we might achieve that.

I have gone further to propose a OS LITE product that you might call “1500 for 50″. That is: 1500 prims for 50 USD. Such a product would be perfect for a place like USS-SL which would allow us to expand. It’s a long shot, but at least he has a concrete suggestion that would meet the needs of SL sailing’s future in SL as opposed to elsewhere.

We will closely monitor and report.

Meanwhile the PROTEST REGATTA on SAIL ON Sunday is shaping up to be a HUGE visual statement about the situation which will be broadcast virally thru a number of social networking places such as YouTube, Facebook, etc.

Stay tuned.