Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Vote to stop Openspace sims from getting more expensive !

Hello there,

If you don't want to see your Openspace getting so much more expensive that it is ridiculous, please vote there (log in with your SL account, but as it's a LL website you're safe) :

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1776

I don't normally do that, and have always been supportive of Linden Lab, but this time they are going to far. Here is a little background :

- LL releases "void sims", aka "Openspace sims", for 1/4 the price of a full sim and 1/8 of their prims. They are insanely slow, but as they're not meant to be lived in, rather sailed in instead, not too much of a problem.
- LL decides Openspaces are not enough of a success and boosts the number of prims to 1/4 of a full sim, makes sense but they are still slow. They work on the speed problem, and make some progress, nothing fancy though since Openspaces are still so much slower than 1/4 of the speed of normal islands.
- After eight months of having Openspaces sell like cakes, LL bumps their tier of by 67% without much of a prior notice (2 months), going from US$75 to US$125 a month, VAT not included. This will have the effect of bleeding most Openspace owners out, and we're seeing a massive protestation. The blog entry is here : http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/27/openspace-pricing-and-policy-changes/
- As a full sim is becoming much cheaper than 4 times an Openspace, it won't be long before LL decides to boost a full sim tier by 67% too, putting it up to US$495 a month !

Do the math. And look at how much you pay for your parcel/sim in L$ or US$ a month. And decide for yourself if you wish to pay more, or if it's expensive enough as it is. Let me remind you that renting a CPU (not even a whole server) for us$295 (VAT not included) a month is already ludicrous. I've never seen a full computer lease that high (even including maintenance).

Marine