Pandora's Light-Use Sims

by J.W. Waterhouse. Pandora opening her box on a light-use sim where she never, never overloads the sim -- ever.

I find the latest wrinkle in the Lindens' decision-making process around the openspace sims makes me... queasy, I can only say that. First, there was the abusiveness and Stockholm Hostage Syndrome aspects implicit in "an announcement about an announcement" when obviously...if you already knew about the thing you were planning to say you could, well, just say it and not make people wait another 24 hours.

The Lindens did exactly what I thought they'd do which was to stick to their last, and keep their price. It's hard to see that cold, hard fact through all the blizzard of *other* things they are saying, but it *is* what they are saying. The kind of sims that are being used as rentals now will indeed rise in cost to $375 for purchase pricem, starting in January 2009, and at first will cost $95 in tier and them ultimately $125 in tier -- only in July 2009 instead of January 2009 -- a six months' reprieve.

And just as I predicted, they have created another product, an extra-light sim that will continue to bear the name "open space" of only 750 prims that can only hold 10 avatars that really, truly has to be used as water or landscaping -- with the script limits "to be determined" (I predicted it exactly right).

The three-card monte aspect to all this is that they have basically switched the names. They made the "new" product, which will be called "Homestead" (ick), be essentially what everybody already has now called "openspace sim" with the 3750 prims overloaded with even as many as 100 avatars and numerous scripts. Then they gave what is actually the new product the name "openspace" with only 750 prims (there isn't a third option of 1875 prims as was the case pre-March 2008). As one wag on the forums says, essentially, "before whining: $125 tier hike but no restrictions; after whining, restrictions and still a tier hike. Vive la revolution!"

So they've opened up a Pandora's box of endless wrangling, splitting resident groups and pitting them against each other, and pitting themselves against residents -- all over the definition of what "load" is because the Lindens -- these quintessential script kiddies at heart -- have a) never met a script they didn't like and b) never wanted to deprecate or restrict a script in their lives -- ever. Now they will be asked to jump over their own knees and it will be terribly hard for them. I can imagine some of the really die-hard old-school ideological script kiddies leaving the Lab over this. Tekkies HATE the idea of mechanically curbing scripts or CPU or loads -- they want *user education* so that people voluntarily "just know" what to put out (hence their awful concept of making high-prim avatars be browbeaten by "thecommunity" to get them to lighten their usage of facets.

Each and every person who lives on an openspace sim thinks they, alone among islands, are only light users. *Those other people* are heavy users but never them. People will be endlessly tempted or emboldened to use temp rezzers and every other damn thing to overload sims, and will even just do nothing, counting on Linden bureaucracy or inefficiency never to notice them (that actually happens a lot in several areas -- if it hadn't been for a really concerted campaign of howling by angry residents with junked-up abandoned or griefed land in their sim, the Lindens would never have gotten off the dime to finally go reclaim several hundred sims' worth of land and recycle it on the auction, enriching their coffers; yes, that's a good example of how these people are in this to get rich, as they wouldn't think to do this for years on end before, losing the revenue.).

Already, we see all kinds of special pleadings -- educators obviously lobbied and got their discount back but still whinging about the price hike. Artists howling and whining and prancing around on blogs, trying to convince LL that they need to cut deals and prove that their art isn't laggy. Sailors whining and mewling that they are being deliberately shafted -- as if there is an entitlement to have heavily-scripted complex objects with lots of people participating in an event, and the low-cost sims aren't going to be sufficient, but the high-price sims are too expensive.

I have to sort of blink in amazement at that. I mean, if I wanted to realize my long-held SL dream of opening up a mini golf course, I'd realize that I'd have to buy the highest-speed, fullest prim, most robust, highest prim product the Lindens have. I wouldn't whine that they are discriminating against mini-golfers by not making it possible for the $75 sim to have robust mini-golf. MarkWhite Twain can't adequately explain to me why those who sail should have a special compensation of cheap sims to realize this activity in SL. I'm sure there's a deluge of argumentation about why complex scripted sailboats and contests aren't CPU intensive, but I'm not buying.

On the forums, people are now engaged in fierce argument about "living" on a sim versus "going to a park on a sim". 2 people for 2 hours a day being railroaded over to the $125 sim, versus 10 people all day in the $75 park. Well, there is an answer to this: scripts. Poses, houses with doors, security orbs, whatever -- these all have scripts. Waving trees in a park don't (unless they are Khamon's, which are low-impact -- *waves*).

Everyone will point the finger at evil land barons who spoiled it for everyone (like Yifu and the management of her revenue stream!).

But...how many land barons out there *now* will now buy 100 sims at $250 a piece -- or $375 a piece next year -- and pay $95 and then $125 on them? Raise your hands.

I noticed one rather unattractive thing that Anshe Chung is doing right now is hustling $195 full-prim sims out the door. I find that unconscionable. People will be buying these full-prim sims with grandfathered $195 tier, but there is every indication that the Lindens will dump that grandfather, that has now been aging for more than a year. They won't be able to justify it, and if they finish class 5 conversation and move even to 6, they especially can't (I don't think there are any class 4 islands left anyway, they are upgrading them all even if the tier is left at $195). So the proud buyers of the hot reduced-price Anshe sims are now going to get stuck 1-3-6 months from now, who knows.

Still, $375 up front price and $125 tier is better than...$1000 upfront and $295 tier. As time wears away the initial shock, it will come to be seen as PERFECT and there will be a huge rush on them, the size will likely double, and we will see even more loss of the full-prim private island sim and parcels, and of course mainland.

Homesteads -- the new frontier, where the Lindens want to push the population. As if we didn't already homestead here, on our own?

Instead of spending as much as US $300 to buy a 8192 m2 mainland parcel, and then $75 ever after to use the 1875 prims (plus the free 512/117 prims), people will be willing to spend a little more -- $75 -- on the purchase and a little more on the tier -- $50 -- to have a fully-owned, estate-rights, wide open space, terraformable space. We all know they really haven't lagged that bad -- my own sense of this all along is that it is more about arbitrage than about technical performance.

A year from now, the map will be quite different. The mainland is unlikely to grow much on the resident end, although we are sure to see more big continents with butterflies or kittens or some other cute animal motif. Private island rentals may dip, but people will still go on buying them. The main product will be the "homesteads", and buying just one will be like first land used to be. Far from what RightAsRain predicts, I think they will grow SL more this way, as people want to pay the equivalent of a lower-cost cell phone for an SL island, not the equivalent of a used car for an SL island, at least at first. Even if growth is slower than they claim, they will not hide the statistics. But they will have the 30-day memory hole. So it's important to keep snap-shotting it. For example, two years today, I happen to know from my own snapshots, 60 day uniques were at about half a million.

Well, everyone will talk about what all this means for the market and the commmuuuunity and all the rest, but here's what doesn't sit well with me:

The patronizing tone.

It's the first time I've ever seen the Lindens name something they were doing in such a smarmy way. I mean, they have some pretty damn weird-ass names for their sims -- hey, you try making up 30,000 different names! -- but they don't have precious Bide-A-Wee Home quilted-embroidered-sayings sort of stuff like "Homesteads". It makes me throw up a little bit, you know?

The other thing I feel is a...disconnect. Whenever Philip Rosedale used to talk to us -- well, of course, he wasn't really talking to people like me, whom he didn't really understand or care about in any kind of deep way. But when he did talk to what *he* thought of as "you guys" and "thecommunity", it was all these geeks and creators and early adaptors, there was something different about it. And he sincerely talked to them as kind of peers. To be sure, after about June 2005 when he donned the golf duds and went all corporate, he began to sound more plastic in the media. But talking inworld or in statements, he was, I felt, talking about real stuff. It was geeky, it was somehow adverse to small business in ways I didn't like (hates arbitrage), it was fantastically idealistic, but it was still...connected.

When I read this M letter, I feel he is talking down to people he views almost with pity. They -- we -- are people he doesn't really want as customers -- we aren't the people going to the business meetings described so breathlessly on the splash screen -- but who are sort of accidently biting him in the ass, so he's sort of patting us on the head -- for now.

Every time a Linden describes us as "passionate," I wince. I know that when I'm being described as "passionate," I'm also being perceived as "a loser". We are "fans". In a "game". We are not equals in a civic project. We aren't business partners. We aren't even customers. We are some sort of...fan base.

I tried and tried to think of what M's letter reminded me of today, and then I remembered.

Tigger. Dragon's Cove. Remember? *Shudder*.

It's funny, when I read this paragraph from M's letter, I didn't think "FIC" or "SL Views" but people like Crap Mariner, did:

"One thing I learned and others were reminded about in this process is that we have a very connected, passionate Resident base and we need to bring you into the dialog earlier, before putting forward these decisions. The input we received after Jack’s announcement was prolific and by-and-large very, very constructive. Second Life is at a size where 1:1 conversations are difficult and the forums are inadequate for full dialog. Office hours come up short, too. We have some thoughts on how to bring Residents into the dialog earlier which we will cover in a future blog post and Forum discussion."

I thought what this meant was merely that they will blog earlier in their decision process -- or rather, create more simulations of consultation earlier -- not create some sort of "resident panel" (ugh). But of course, they might very well do that, and that's precisely the sort of thing they love.

You know, when the Lindens were determined, for heavy ideological reasons, to put in p2p and remove telehubs, which were engines of commerce (just not *their* commerce), they at least went through these motions of "consulting with the community". At some point it became threadbare, and you could see through their claims that it was "under consideration". Ditto traffic, where we all know they hate traffic and want to excise it, but they went through the motions of having "consultations". That method is sort of a slowed-down version of the program PainPoint I described the other day, but it's for world-changing decisions. Price-changing decisions they prefer to make with PainPoint methodology, which is "Shock and Awe" and then after protest dies down, appear to bind wounds. It's sort of a BDSM dynamic, one familiar to and beloved by many SL residents, who are locked into this painful, symbiotic relationship with the Lindens.

Another way I feel the disconnect is the "riding high on user satisfaction" stuff -- which I think the Lindens have been able to persuade themselves about simply because they...stopped taking splash screen surveys about how people were feeling about SL (they used to have this painfully running across some screen in their office to goad themselves to action). Of course, for those us with old computers ready for...uh...sold foods now at 6 months old (to paraphrase Dave Linden) who can't handle Windlight, user satisfaction peaked...six months ago when even the dumbed-down settings became mandatory.

I can't buy a new sim product for the simple reason that...I have to buy a new graphics card or really a whole new computer if I want to *see and move on* the existing sims I already bought.

The other way I feel patronized is by the spin in this letter claiming that the feedback had "restraint". We all know that it didn't. There was dreadful hate and ugliness on the groups, on the protests, from nasty-assed ringleaders like Kalyrra Heart who had already established a hateful reputation by being an ad extortionist.

But the Lindens managed their way out of this crisis, judging from the forum discussion, in which people indulge in the usual excessive relief, outrageous praise, and sycophantic ass-kissing.

One of the things M says in the letter sounds very practical:

"2. Some of you have built businesses on the Openspaces product, set your rental rates or built your groups and although you acknowledge you built more than was intended for Openspaces, a large and rapid price change is too much for you to absorb."

It's honest -- but...the fact that this comes AFTER SL's most massive protest in its history, and after enormous suffering for both residents and Linden line-workers, who had to get kicked in the teeth, is worrisome, and again -- patronizing.

Is there no recognition at Linden Lab that what many of the premium customers, and a good percentage of the island owners *do* is run rentals and land sales businesses?

The Lindens just keep doing EVERYTHING to discourage this home truth from hitting home to themselves first and foremost, even naming their new product "Homesteads" (barf).

They don't call land sales a legitimate function of "positive Linden flow" businesses -- it is excised from their consideration for totally ideological reasons. It is a mere "acquisition of an asset" and therefore a business cost, not a business.

They have no Linden dedicated specifically to help residents in the land business with the profile of concerns they have, which constantly fall between the stools of Governance and Concierge. For that matter, there isn't any Linden dedicated to inworld business period, because outworld enterprise is only what they want to devote staff time to.

Having rentals, for M Linden, is right up there with making pretty oceans or what he calls "carnivals" on your land (I'm aware of about, oh, three carnivals in Second Life, and hilariously, I'm one of the people who has actually built a carnival on my land, as it happens, Coney Island of the Mind, but let me put it this way: most of my tenants in the cabins there are not riding the roundabouts.)

There's the uncomfortable piece to all this regarding what the Lindens mean by "growth". Yes, there is a growth in concurrency. Yes, there is a growth in those openspace sales. But this is just column A moving over to column B. The 60 day uniques seem to be stuck below the 1.5 million mark -- currently at 1,278,011, and that figure was greater a year ago.

I'm sitting here on the Thompson Reuters sim in Second Life, which is of course, the perfect place to contemplate open space and sim usage, as it is absolutely empty, traffic 114, and has 1231 prims left over to kill on...well, something. I don't know what. I bet they'll retire it soon.

Comments

[Yumi Murakami]

Linden Lab is NOT a force of nature. They are a group of people just like us, and have responsibility just the same.

[Prokofy Neva]

Of course they're a force of nature, like death and taxes. We have very little control over them. They aren't responsible, and they aren't even people, at a certain level. They are Hive Mind, in its nuclear form.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, the absolute worst thing the Lindens have done with all this OS stuff is this:

They have broken the backs of the residents:

They have bullied them into now referring to Second Life land and the world as "the product" and to speak about "products".

Mission accomplished. I'll bet Ginsu Linden is cackling with glee.

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=291220