Jack Linden: ‘Over the last week we have been listening to your feedback and working hard to revisit the original announcement… Tomorrow M will post to the blog. <- this is up now ‘ Let’s hope M also learned from the feedback he got on the write-up of his telephone interview with Hamlet Au. There he gave some very strange answers:

While Kingdon won’t say what exact percent of the world is now comprised of Openspaces (”That’s not a number we publish”)

Luckily we do. (Combination of sources, but # of voids confirmed on in-world office hours by Jack Linden. The rest is simple maths.)

‘We’ve been straightforward about our rationale…‘

Sure. That’s why we went from ‘technical issues’ to ‘different uses from what we anticipated’, right? But ok, if it’s technical issues after all, please fix those, or give yourself & the residents the appropriate means to do diagnostics and cap resources if needed.

“Premium subscriptions are immaterial in our overall business.“

It’s as Inara Pey writes: ‘if this really is the case - that Premium Account holders are “immaterial”, then it could be extension be argued that Mainland usage is “immaterial in our overall business”, as one of the “perks” to Premium Accounts is access to Mainland parcels at reduced tier. Similarly, given the higher level of support promoted by LL for Premium Account holders, it could be said that technical support is immaterial to LL (actually, some would likely argue this is very much the case anyway, but you get the picture). And if Premium account holders are “immaterial in our business”, where does that leave the vast number of “free” account holders…?‘

‘I think we articulated what the intention was [when they were first put on sale].‘

Sure, you did. Vaguely. But then allotting an additional bonus of a few thousand prims to those same openspaces, don’t you think that changes the message you initially articulated?

‘it’s clear the product needs repricing, a lot of folks have built extensive businesses [on them], so it’s not like they’re going to turn the prim count [down]…‘

Why should they? You increased the max. prim amount. You could try to give those people a measurement system to see if they are stressing/lagging anything. Did you try? Right, at the moment if there is lag on a void, it’s impossible to find out who’s causing it, you or your three - randomly selected - server neighbours.

‘In retrospect, would you have done anything different with this Openspaces policy?‘

Dismiss M’s answer completely. I’m sure Mr Hamlet meant the initial launch, prim raise, change from ‘you can only buy four and they are together on a server’ to ‘get one! now!’ (oh btw, it’s on a random server). Tsss. But there I guess you must say, ‘yeah we fucked up’.

Pavig Lok on lag, sim crossings & generalties on voids, now & then.

As posted Pavig Lok in the comments of M and the Openspace Rebellion:

*start* Back in the old days of void sims one bought them as a group - in fact you needed to buy a full sim first and ask it to be split into 4 void sims. All four of those sims ran on the same server in the slot usually reserved to run a single normal sim. So each void in a group got 1/4 of the resources… well not quite… it’s more acurate to say that all four divided up the resources of a normal sim between them.

Four void sims sharing the prims/bandwidth/processing of a single sim was quite a nice thing. They shared the positives and negatives alike. So they also shared lag for example on the bad side… but shared population limits on the good side - you could fit a whole sims worth of people into a single void without causing problems as long as the other voids in the group were mostly empty.

Because a single client owned all four voids in a group they could be managed - if one lagged all lagged so you knew the mismanagement was your own and you could tweak the troublesome sim.

One bonus of voids in a group all running on the same server was that sim crossings (in sailing ships or vehicles especially) between voids in the same group were always absolutely seamless - better than normal sims even… so voids were perfect for sailing about in.

Several months before the “new open spaces” changes, and unanounced by the lab, void groups ceased to be locked to the same server slot. When a sim resets it can go migrate to another server somewhere - geography isn’t important, and sims right next to each other might actually be housed hundreds (soon thousands) of miles apart in different LL colabs.

This is why sim crossing sucks - walking one foot in SL might mean jumping hundreds of miles down optical fiber to a different server farm irl… why we usta end up with a boot up our behinds when we tried at times, like Jeff Goldblum in the fly, only not so cool or drippy.

Anyways suddenly void groups weren’t groups anymore so lost the benefits of all running in the same server slot. This is before they announced the new void product, so let’s see what they lost in the process… and probably should have noticed:

* When a single client owns a group of void sims they can manage them as a group - their lag is their lag, it can be debugged and no witch hunt is required to find out who’s abusing it - lag is the fault of the owner every time. When voids were sold individually - in fact before that when voids were “deregulated” and a group could run on any old bunch of servers rather than all on the same slot, that link broke. Your lag was not your own anymore.

* When a void group (which is one sims worth of resources) is owned by a single owner, it only needs single owner support, like a normal sim. If a sim slot is used by four single void owners then it’s 4 times the customer service for the same resource as a single normal sim.

* Void neighbours are an issue; Let’s look at it this way - a single sim has 8 neighbors, and some of the resources to run a sim handle that bit, border crossings, etc. A united void group has 32 neighbours (4×8) which means 4 times as much neighbour traffic to handle…. but if those voids run as a group in the same sim slot on a server, a lot of those neighbours are the server talking to itself rather than the whole sl grid. If however like now, those voids all run on different servers, one sim slot produces 4 times the network traffic of a normal sim talking to all it’s neighbors.

* Void sims were originally tuned conservatively, but they pushed the limits when they started selling the new product. In the olden days when you split your sim into 4 void sims you didn’t get a whole sims worth of prims - you got 4x the land area, but less than 1/4 of a sims worth of prims on each. This was probably sensible as, with extra sim neighbors, the possibility of more avatars overall, and much larger borders, void sims probably needed to run a bit conservatively. The new void product increased these limits much closer to a full sim worth of prims etc, but obviously disregarded the extra things a void group needs to do to survive.

So long before the new void product was announced the lindens had already put in place many of the changes which should have rung alarm bells around the lab that all was not well with open spaces.

Personally I know at least some of the lindies knew as I was at their office hours months before the new openspaces product was announced winging about the way grouping changes had effected performance issues in void groups rezzable had bought specifically to take advantage of the nice border crossing qualities they previously had. At that time they had started showing problems already - months before any announcement from the lab!

The infamous “privateer space” was to be another void group at that time, and Aley Arai and I had extensively tested the qualities of void groups for a low lag vehicular space sim based on the oldschool space traders - but the changes broke the Privateer design and it had to be reworked vertically rather than horizontally over a 4 sim void group. Unfortunately Aley has since left SL due to other issues with the lab.

It’s not all wine and roses when a new product is rolled out in a system as integrated as the SL Grid, but they have staff who know and can see the train wreck long before it derails. Technically, whatever their public excuse may be, we and some folk at the lab saw the current crisis coming long before the new product was even announced.

Just my two cents as always .. :) Pav.’ *end*

Don’t you just wish you had read Tateru Nino’s ‘Brief History’ in stead? ;)

But let’s sit and wait, for now. Curious what M. has to say. If they will grandfather old voids? Increase the pricing less drastically? Have a ‘real’ openspace version and a ‘medium use’ one? Sim monitor tools? Fixed ‘groups of 4′ on the servers? Or if they would just finally admit they f*cked up, but there’s nothing we can do about it.

Tags: linden, openspace, rant, void

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