I was wondering about Eshi’s snapshot of Mos Ainsley.

I think you’re on to something with this.

-ls/cm

another proof of “do what we say not what we do” LL always employs

Uh … whoops.

ooh. And the plot thickens!

This just confirms my belief that the technical overload argument is moot, and that was an administrative decision, probably because they undercut their own market. They pushed that market themselves by lowering their prices and doubling prim counts. Then they drop that bomb. You guys can see it as you want but it’s pretty clear it comes from up, not from the tech department.

I think Codie is right on the mark with this; it’s a stupid management decision based on short-term monetary concerns. For all their statements about how the virtual economy has not been seriously affected by the global economic meltdown, I’m sure they’re as scared as anyone else. Some of this activity is probably as a direct result of that fear–and they’re also not economically savvy enough to realize that they’re introducing more instability and risk by making rash moves to protect their own asses, residents be damned.

SL is going down the drain, just like the economy in America did. Seems that people will be forced to also sell their Second Life houses because they can’t afford it anymore. Tip for the Lindens : If people are mis-using the system you created it’s because you are not capable enough. Don’t let customers pay for your own mistakes. Stupid is who stupid does… we should all leave SL and seek for a better world.

Sigh.

I keep hoping that each bone-headed thing they do is a random fluke. And then they do it again. I guess it is random, in that each time it is some NEW stupid thing they do.

“I want to believe in Linden Lab, I do, I do.”

But I just can’t. They have some of the worst customer service attitudes I have ever encountered ANYWHERE, at any point in my entire life (which in RL years, is a pretty good span of time).

[…] Second Life web resources for October 10th 2008 through October 27th 2008 Raymond Conspiracy Theory - Is LL gaming us? […]

Gotta love it.

“AND I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT, TOO, IF IT WASN’T FOR YOU MEDDLING KIDS!”

thought you might be interested in this Vint….

http://mistyisforeverlost.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/dear-governor-linden-tm-copy-right-all-that-good-jazz/

Also, this should get crossposted or at least linked to the official SL forums where this fiasco is being “discussed.” *cough*

Ah but that’s an optical illusion. At least two of these openspaces are most definitely full sims now, I’ve visited them today to confirm rumours that they’d been switched. I’d wager the other two are too.

[…] You’ll get a kick out reading Vint’s newest find/update…seems the whole “sim overuse” excuse story LL gaves us was just as bogus as everyone believed it to be.  See for yourself at Raymond Conspiracy Theory - Is LL gaming us? […]

Interesting stuff indeed. I see that Mos Ainsley was quietly converted to a full prim sim overnight once people noticed that it was an openspace.

There has been some quick reshuffling to change “the equivalent Linden voids” to try to defuse some of the current outcry.

Thanks for sharing the documentation, Vint.

[…] You’ll get a kick out reading Vint’s newest find/update…seems the whole “sim overuse” excuse LL gaves us was just as bogus as everyone believed it to be. See for yourself at Raymond Conspiracy Theory - Is LL gaming us? […]

Would urge ppl to remember that LL isn’t actually a single entity with a single brain. :) It’s entirely possible that the “intended use” of the Open Space sims by the ppl who originally though of them and made them available was just what they claim it was, but that the person or team who put together Raymond 1-4 was just as unclear on, unaware of, or not taking seriously that “intended use” as were all of the non-Linden employees who did the obvious thing and put as much stuff onto their Open Space sims as they seemed to hold without anything going wrong.

LL has clearly done an *abysmal* job of dealing with and communicating to the users the problems that they’re seeing with the Open Space sims. But even if one part of the lab said one thing and another part did something else, it doesn’t mean anyone was lying or had a secret agenda or anything; it might just mean that people don’t always communicate well. ’cause they don’t… :)

ohh…. smart do you think you are hmmm.. ehhehhhe….

No, this is the usual group-think. It’s retarded. The Lindens made these sims as prototypes of business or recreational use. These builds have no heavy scripts; the boat cannot sail, nothing shoots, it has no scripts. If it has 20 agents, what of it? That’s not 40 or even 100, which people have loaded on to OS sims.

You people fail to grasp that your notion of “light” is completely bogus. The Lindens made it clear on their website.

Funny how you wail and weep about this innocent prototyping and things like Torley grabbing an entire Government Linden full-prim sim on old mainland and putting up neon watermelon stuff never bothers you.

I don’t th8ink that are that good at planning. I think this is a trouble of far simpler nature. A Linden and B Linden don’t talk any more. That is A Linden have no clue when B Linden does, and how the heck would M Linden know then?

Dale & Prok, it’s not just that the sims are there, it’s also ‘Linden Lab was planning 4 openspace builds which would be sold along with new void sim orders. Builds which go into thousands of prims. That proves that they never intended Openspaces to be just empty land, like they’re saying at the moment, basically.‘

(Of which, I admit, have no proof except for my source’s word. Which I’m more than willing to take at the moment… )

Mr Anders, Sho asked me last night: Why attribute to malice, what can easily be incompetence?

I think they should at least admit incompetence if it’s the case… .

Linden is cleary confused about what their business objectives are. Platform? Community creator? Enterprise workspace? Sex RP MMO? (any photos of Linden created brothels yet?–bet those “wouldn’t suck”).

Prok, i would agree with your statement, however I linked to an OS that “governor linden” used for Nautilus.

Their total objects are: 2560 with active scripts at 789

Mystical is 3498 with active scripts at 797

Their total physics FPS is 9.4!
Mystical is at 45 (where it is supposed to be)

If theirs is light….what makes mine so heavy? Scripts are within a 10 point range of theirs and my physics runs a hell of a lot better.

You can follow the link above and compare further on your own if you wish. I have taken this quotes right from the forum boards that were taken directly from a chat that Jack was involved in:

[4:40] Jack Linden: Dimentox: We have talked about technical throttles, and we may yet move in that direction if we decided, for example, to create a truly light use region type with hard script/agent limits

But aren’t these *supposed* to be “truly light regions” already?

Yes Vint, Incompetence are usually much more likely that conspiration, but hell much less fun to argue about.

I think we all agree some people overuse OS sims. I know one art gallery located in a OS sim with almost all the building and gardening in TempRezzers as a way to jump over prim limitations.
Anyway the question is, for me, that LL instead of reacting against that overusers with limitations on agents or scripts are acting against all the users.

Vint: “That proves that they never intended…” again assumes that LL is a singular “they” with exactly one set of intentions, and that’s clearly not true. It’s entirely plausible that the people building those four draft OpenSpace sims weren’t any more cognizant of the Official Intent of OpenSpace Sims than the rest of us were. Quite likely someone eventually noticed this and said “whoa, you can’t put big builds like that on OpenSpace sims, that isn’t what they’re for”; after all, they were never actually released. So really, it doesn’t “prove” a darn thing…

The plot thickens indeed.
I’m sure some more corpses will drop out of the closet on this matter, when you mess with something people cherish, some can get really inquiring and will stop at nothing untill they have some dirty laundry to confront “those who did wrong”.

Dale and others:

It’s not the intent or the misunderstanding thereof, it’s the way LL behaves in dealing with its customer base. They suck at it, and they continue to suck at it. They have some of the worst communication skills of any company I’ve dealt with. Sure, they work hard to explain themselves, but only after they screw up the first attempt to communicate. It happens again and again. It’s that kind of shoddy behavior that engenders a lot of the paranoia (that may or may not have evidence) that happens every time they make some policy change. They’re just clueless about how to deal with their subscribers and you would think they could invest a little bit in some professional help with that. And I do not mean hiring a publicist. They need some real training, not a mouthpiece.

And a little forethought into impact of policy, maybe some actual inworld focus groups, would go a long way toward making better decisions that subscribers and LL can live with.

Vint: yes, they are absolutely horrible at communication! I think they’ve assigned all of their competent customer communication people to the “writing press releases aimed at boring people in suits” department. You’ll get no argument from me there.

But the original post that these are replies to asks if SL is gaming us, and if this project to produce some standard pre-built void sims doesn’t prove that. And I think the answers are that no they’re probably aren’t intentinonally gaming us, and that that project doesn’t prove that they are. It’s much more likely that, as you say, they just suck at customer relations.

Going to Zoe on this one:

The Lindenomics Spin Machine

I opened Google Reader and read Tateru Nino’s article on Massively. She highlights Jack Lindens response to the Openspace sims furor.

Jack implies that the type of usage is a more important factor in the pricing changes than the actual cost of usage, though to be fair, it’s an ambiguous pair of sentences, ‘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.’

The Void Sim Creativity Tax Act of 2008
So….no mention of some people abusing the original intent of the Void Sims.
Now LL recognizes your creative use of them…and taxes it.
See? It’s all good!

(pardon the length, I got a bit long winded)

Pardon me whilst I put on my tinfoil hat…..

I beleive this is all a ripple effect from the banning of casinos and gaming in SL.
When the casinos were banned, land prices and the Linden currency plumeted. Some of the many early ripple effects were the lack of residents / renters on private sims, and the mass availibility of mainland land. With many more people moving into mainland parcels due to the now reasonable sale price, the next outcry was the ad farms…which were there before the people moved in. The Ad farms kept the land price inflated unitil the “ban” on them. After that ban, land prices hit the floor due to supply and demand. Lots of open land relative to a moderate at best influx of new users.
Now for the tinfoil hat portion of the show.
In my sinister theory, Open Spaces were a beautiful place for people to live. Open area, semi private, and nowhere near as expensive as a whole sim itslef. Quite the nice place to ‘move in’ to. Plenty of people got hooked very quickly. It wouldnt take more than a cursory glance to know that SL itself is addictive. With this new product, that addiction is fed even more. And much like a pusher offering the first hit for free then charging for your later visits, LL has jacked up the price. A part of me beleives that was the initial intent.

Less tin, more foil…..
More likely to me is the percived change in the functioning of LL itself. Let me prefcae this with the points that I have no knowledge of the actuall inner workings of LL, I know no one that works there or for LL on a personal level or even aquaintance level. The following is merely my theory based on observation. I am not a programmer, modeler, ISP, or anything in any way related to providing content. I am however, a thinker.

LL is a business. And as such is in business to make money. This is not a bad thing, nor do I have any problem with that. I can, and have on a nearly daily basis, make doctors and lawyers blush at the fees I charge for what I do. The problem comes when the prusuit of short term profit comes at the expense of long term product appeal. Take for example Mono. Rather than going in and fixing the LSL system and its quirks, an external bandaid was applied. In the short term this saves money and still produces a product. Albeit a patched product. Likewise with sculpties. Rather than improving the internal modeling engine, use an external patch. Havoc…apply directly to the forehead. Voice…apply directly to the forehead.
Sure all of these things ‘improve’ the product of SL. I think they are more like the magic paint that Billy Mays hawks on TV. It’ll get the job done, but really…is it right?
It is much more expensive, but going in and actually discovering the root cause of the issue and fixing it are the right things to do, and make for a much longer lasting product.
Open Spaces were just sort of a thing. A band aid to the problem of “User Experience”. Although that term has a wide and varried definition at best, I beleive in this case it is used to define the experience that makes someone want to stay in SL and become a premium member. That, after all, is the goal of LL. Making an virtual creative environment that is enjoyable to as many people as possible.
Creating the Open Space to enhance user expereince was a fix to the problem of banning casinos and the economy that kept useres in world, and spending money. That bandaid however was too small for the wound and now its bleeding through. The only solution is to increase the price to cover the cost of the bandaid and blame the User for abusing the system.

The focus of LL in my opinion has changed from a business in the creative industry to a business providing a product that aids in creativity. The difference in my estimation is that rather than a rich full open environment in which people can create and experiment for a nominal fee, there will be much smaller avenues of creation based on the marketablility and expense of creating that avenue. There is nothing wrong with wanting to maximize profitablitly, and I would never expect anyone to go into business to loose money for a cuase. But do it right. Theres a reason why I pay a huge price for good tools at work. I dont use duct tape to fix airplanes, I dont want the electronic equivalent on a product I pay for.

If you have made it this far..you really need Ambien!
if the grammar police show up, let them know Im in my secret hideout!

YOU FUCKING TARD VINT

ALL IT MEANS IS THAT THEY DEVELOP ON OPENSPACE SIMS BECUAUSE THEY’RE CHEAPER

Another quality post from retardazzble. nice.

If you guys hate the platform so much why don’t you fuck off to opensim already?

*sighs*

First things first, if this was a Rezzable opinion - or had anything to do with it - I’d write it on.. hmm… let’s see… rezzable.com/blog? Yeah, guess that would be the place to put it. I did not, this is something sent to me, and that I wished to share with the rest of the grid. Obviously, this was not just about ‘development on openspace’ but about ’selling with a void’. Quoting: ‘Linden Lab was planning 4 openspace builds which would be sold along with new void sim orders. Builds which go into thousands of prims. That proves that they never intended Openspaces to be just empty land, like they’re saying at the moment, basically.‘ Right.

Speaking for myself - it’s vintfalken.com, not rezzableopinion.com, after all - I don’t hate the platform Second Life. I could never invest that much time & effort in something I hate. I even love the Second Life community - a few exceptions excluded, *Waves at anonymouse*, and appreciate the possibilities of the platform. I just think Linden Lab is doing a shitty - excuse me the language, oh well, looking at yours, it does not mind much probably - job at managing all this. And especially in showing just how much they appreciate & love the community that helped them make what they are now.

As for the looking around, exploring other realms and stuff… I think that’s something I’ve been doing for a while already. ;)

As for the quality of this post, I feel safe saying it’s way better than the quality of your comment.

Oh so your source is a her? Nice, that narrows it down a LOT, thanks :) There arent so many moles.

“Quoting her”

One is never sure inSL, is one? ;)

[…] accusations of effectively Linden Labs lying - with evidence of ulterior motives http://www.vintfalken.com/raymond-conspiracy-theory-is-ll-gaming-us/ ; and, of course, protest groups with serious infighting leading to dissolution of those groups […]

True, we are forced to see everything through a Misty veil.

Next time someone seems so obviously trying to rattle your cage, stop and think why before blurting out an answer.

But thanks for the info.

The honours are err… mutual. If you know where to ‘look for the mole’ that leaked ‘‘Linden Lab was planning 4 openspace builds which would be sold along with new void sim orders. Builds which go into thousands of prims. That proves that they never intended Openspaces to be just empty land, like they’re saying at the moment, basically.’ to me, then there must have been a group of people who knew this - assuming amongst others the LDPW.

If my info was incorrect, you would not know where to start looking ;) But still, good luck. About 50% of the grid has the same sex as my source. =)

Oh, *eurocent drops* if you are talking about This kind of Misty, I was unaware of her post until she pointed it out here in the comments. The fact that she blogs it also, means she’s definitely not hiding behind ‘anonymousity’. Better TP that lynch mob home?

PS. Should you not be attending Jack Linden’s office hours, licking his.. err.. Xcite?

Nice try but no dice on the redirect.

Bottom line is if there’s any kind of sexual activity going on here its you totally fucking over your source.

Way to go :)

Let me know when you have located the two of us and want to join in! :D

Hey Anonymouse, I obviously don’t know who you are but I’m assuming you are neither a LL employee or legal council for LL. Please don’t make assumptions here in “public” about “whodunit” or the consequences involved. If you want to be a PI go for it. Just please don’t release any “hints” untill your positive of the source because anything else is pure speculation at this point. Think of the consequences (not for you but for “her”) if your speculation was wrong…thank you.

Oh, I notice you’ve CHANGED the post where you implicated that your source was a “Her” - thanks for confirming it.

P W N E D

Vint, come find you? Why when we could just call? http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=vintfalken&tld=com

No problem with my info being available, else I would not have put it there, would I? I’m not as ‘lame’ as to shout ‘pwned’ hiding behind ‘anonymous’ (or mouse). ;)

Oh, that other piece of top secret info LL will need if they wish to punish me for this blogpost. My avatar name… arrgh! God save me when anybody finds out that one… . *goes to hide under the desk in fear*

UPDATE: Oh my god! it’s there.. in the whois data… it says ‘vintfalken’.. how does it know that?!!

Honestly, one should not indulge this sort of person, it only encourages them.

In any case, yes, we all know that voids are quite capable of harbouring reasonably sophisticated builds and only fall down with heavy occupancy or intensive scripting (and, in fact, I can point to some very specific points of scripting which work well in full-fat sims but not in starving voids; link messages particularly). And indeed the Laboratory knew that too. It is good, though, to have some concrete examples to which one can point and say “well what about THAT then?”

makes mental note to not leave links laying around least Misty viel becomes someone’s lunch.

Weird…

I’m still holding out hope (shoot me now) that LL will be brave and do the right thing.

We’ll see, but I do feel better knowing that their own employee’s apparently didn’t understand the rules about the OS’s and also *gasp* built on them (slightly sarcastic there, I’m pretty sure LL knows their own rules….) versus using them for boats and trees and a rock! Cause we can’t forget that rock!

My name ACTUALLY IS Anonymouse.

My parents were hippies.

Such a cruel world../cries

Linden are such scammers, first selling openspaces for cheap and then jacking up the price, good thing that other grids like http://www.virtualworld.sl are getting online, those places will be where I will be going in the future and Linden can keep their overpriced land and jack it even more up.

The people I feel truly sorry for are the ones who have bought OpenSpace sims and use them as…….open spaces. Specifically the USS (United Sailing S(somethingorother)) sims.

They have a large number of open space sims which are empty and are used solely for sailing and flying seaplanes - not a single house or skybox and yet they are being punished as well.

I’m surprised that nobody speak about the Immersive Workspace solution recently launched by Linden Lab for the entreprises…

I won’t be surprised to learn that the real reason of all this stuff about Openspace was to avoid to see Openspace competing with their Immersive Workpace (whose the prices will be probably higher than full sim and on which LL put a lot of hopes for increasing their profitability…)

But I’m maybe paranoiac :)

[…] this is true, this is still only a ‘half’ reply to my question If Linden Lab is gaming us with their new openspace policy. No answer to this part: ‘Linden Lab was planning 4 openspace builds which would be sold […]

I hope you are wrong. If not then this is a pretty neophyte example of manipulation and will really piss a lot of people off. LL has a cult following that would be greatly diminished by such an obvious attempt to play them like fools.

“Also, this should get crossposted or at least linked to the official SL forums where this fiasco is being “discussed.” *cough*”

SLX has a good, public forum. I linked it to the SLX forum here.

Thank you for your report on the Second Life Regressive Tax on Open Space Sims.

We welcome you to either attend in person in Second Life or view the live video of a large very photogenic PROTEST event in the original open space sims (the type of sims that will likely go away if Linden Lab’s announced policy stands).

This morning (Sunday Nov 2) at 10AM Pacific time there will be a large PROTEST REGATTA starting from the four open space sims which were the first such sims created in Second Life (Santa Barbara,Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and Santa Catalina sims).

Surrounding Hollywood sim and Starboards Yacht Club these sims will host a PROTEST REGATTA which will be webcast live on the SLCN.TV network (http://slcn.tv). Boats from various SL communities (such as the very popular sailing and pirate role-playing communities) will wear colorful protest sails and flags.

The race course will take the protesting fleet through more than twenty open space sims, each of whose very existence is threated by the Linden Lab policy announcement.

For further information contact MarkTwain White in world or at marktwainwhite@gmail.com

Gally, Re: the openspaces vs immersive workspaces, the Immersive Workspace sims are “sims in a box” - meaning they’re not even connected to the main Grid. For more on this, keep an eye (or feedreader) on Dusan Writer’s blog.