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.).