Warm Winter Nights

Aqui está como vamos alterar as mudanças de preço:

1. Vamos manter o produto Openspaces no seu preço original e para o seu uso original (floresta, água, etc.). Existirão limitações técnicas para ajudar a regular a sua utilização, inicialmente restrições de avatares e limite de prims, eventualmente limites para eventos, classificados e scripts. Aqueles de vós que optarem por utilizar os OpenSpaces de acordo com os padrões para que foram criados, poderão continuar a uma taxa de US$75, mas têm de contactar o grupo de concierges para o fazerem.

2. Se pretendem mais que um OpenSpace, temos para lhe oferecer a opção de se mudarem para um novo produto, chamado Homesteads, que se destina a uso ligeiro, tal como arrendamentos de baixa densidade. Para os actuais donos de Openspaces, iremos fasear o aumento de preço para este novo produto durante os próximos seis meses. Os Homesteads terão também limites técnicos para avatars e prims e eventualmente também limites nos scripts..

* 5 de Janeiro de 2009 – Openspaces irão transitar para Homesteads e as taxas de manutenção subirão de US$75 para US$95 por mês.  Oferecemos um desconto de Educação a educadores qualificados no novo produto Homestead. O valor do desconto será o mesmo que em regiões privadas, cerca de 30%.

* Julho de 2009 — as taxas de manutenção para os Homesteads passarão de US$95 para US$125 por mês.

Para informação detalhada nestas alterações, por favor consultem o Knowledge Base.

Acreditamos que isto é o mais justo. Eu e o Jack juntar-nos-emos a vós nos forums durante o dia de hoje para discutir estas questões. Os comentários estão fechados no blog, não porque pretendamos limitar o diálogo ou a liberdade de expressão mas apenas porque esta é uma conversa com os residentes e os forums requerem log-in. Esta é uma política que vamos continuar a manter com todas as decisões importantes. Colocar no blog a decisão, emitir opiniões e discutir nos forums.

Uma coisa que aprendi e outros relembraram durante este processo é que temos uma base de Residentes muito interventiva e apaixonada e temos de os trazer para o diálogo mais cedo, antes de pormos em prática estas decisões. Os inputs que recebemos após a Comunicação do Jack foram prolíferos e muito, muito construtivos. Second Life tem já uma dimensão em que o diálogo de um para um são muito difíceis e os forums são inadequados para um diálogo completo. As Horas de Atendimento (Office hours) revelam-se também curtas. Temos algumas ideias de como incluir os Residentes no diálogo mais cedo que iremos revelar num futuro post no blog e discussão no Forum.

Gostaria de terminar com o seguinte pensamento: Uma área de preocupação dos Residentes durante o último ano tem sido a estabilidade da plataforma. Devido ao trabalho árduo de muitas muitas pessoas, incluindo Residentes, fizemos muitos progressos que estão muito bem documentados. Os indices de crashes desceram. Substancialmente. Ponto Final. E, até esta alteração de preços, o índice de satisfação dos utilizadores era elevado, por isso sabemos que reconheceram e apreciaram os melhoramentos que temos vindo a fazer. Os nossos resultados na melhoria da estabilidade são particularmente notórios se tivermos em consideração que a quantidade de terrenos aumentou imenso este ano. E uma boa parte desse aumento é devido aos Openspaces. No entanto, o plano original era expandir terreno mas expandir carga a uma taxa muito mais baixa. Mas, os Openspaces – em muitos casos – foram sobrecarregados com conteúdo, scripts e avatares por isso os nossos ganhos substanciais em estabilidade equilibraram com o aumento de carga não planeado. Estamos profundamente empenhados em fazer a melhor plataforma dos mundos virtuais deste mundo e estamos a desenvolver grandes esforços. Demonstrámos ainda que podemos cumprir a nossa promessa de melhorias continuadas de estabilidade – mesmo face a um crescimento não antecipado.

Espero encontrá-los no Forum. Obrigado pela vossa paciência, contenção e vontade em trabalhar com a Linden Lab e a comunidade do Second Life em geral. I look forward to hearing from you. Second Life é a maravilha que é porque a Linden Lab sempre trabalhou em conjunto – se bem que por vezes de forma imperfeita – com os Residentes para construir este mundo magnífico e maior que a vida que todos nós adoramos.

Obrigado

After reading Vint’s post about how so many people not understanding English, thus not knowing what the new OpenSpace policy of LL is all about, or knowing it just by mouth to ear, I decided to translate first M Linden’s letter into Portuguese. The Knowledge Base article is not yet translated but I will try to do it during the next few days (no strings attached though ’cause RL is really hitting on me these last couple of weeks).

Here it goes:

A Letter to Second Life Residents – Carta aos Residentes de Second Life

Daqui M Linden. Muito obrigado a todos os que responderam de forma construtiva, apresentando as suas preocupações e sugestões sobre a nossa Comunicação dos OpenSpaces. Prestámos toda a atenção e o vosso feedback originou algumas alterações ao nosso plano original.

Antes de abordar as alterações à política, gostaria de vos apresentar alguns pormenores sobre a nossa decisão e recapitular o que ouvimos do vosso lado. Quando o produto OpenSpaces foi originalmente lançado, a Linden Lab oferecia aos donos de ilhas a oportunidade de adicionarem OpenSpaces à sua terra apenas para uso ligeiro – como um oceano ou um parque. Mas não atribuímos nem impusemos limites específicos e quantificados nos OpenSpaces. Porquê? Por duas razões simples:

1. Como sabem, muitas coisas afectam a performance de um Sim de formas complexas e interligadas (por ex., scripts, prims, avatares, media). Ficámos relutantes em limitar a experiência global e a vossa criatividade através da imposição de limites específicos em todas estas variáveis – em parte porque a Linden Lab sempre foi bastante aberta e acredita na bondade inata dos residentes de Second Life e em parte porque impor limites exige que contratemos pessoal para os colocar em prática.

2. Pretendíamos que este produto estivesse no Mercado rapidamente. OpenSpaces eram muito populares. Alguns donos de ilhas adicionaram oceano e parques, conforme se pretendia, mas muitos construíram impérios – edifícios gloriosos, belíssimas propriedades para arrendamento e outras coisas fantásticas. Uma vez que os donos de terrenos co-habitam no mesmo CPU, se um dono acrescenta um oceano e o outro adiciona uma feira, o CPU que é partilhado fica em sobrecarga. O Residente amante do oceano que seguiu a intenção inicial fica penalizado e nós somos chamados para resolver o conflito. O Second Life é demasiado grande para fazer isso.

Quando analisámos o bom e o mau em muitas conversas, cartões com comentários, e-mails e telefonemas, verificámos que compartilharam muita coisa connosco, mas que existiam três temas permanentes com os quais podíamos trabalhar:

1. Aqueles que entre vós utilizam os Openspaces como foi inicialmente pretendido – para oceano ou parques – e que pretendem ter esse produto ao preço original e estão dispostos a aceitar restrições claras à sua utilização.

2. Alguns de vós construíram negócios sobre o produto Openspaces, definiram os vossos preços de aluguer ou construíram os vosos grupos e, apesar de admitirem terem construído mais do que se pretendia nos OpenSpaces, uma grande e rápida alteração de preços é demais para que consigam absorvê-la.

3. Alguns de vós construíram qualquer coisa entre um oceano e uma feira e querem um qualquer tipo de região “normal” – um preço mais baixo que uma região normal mas com a capacidade de suportar alguma quantidade de conteúdo.

Na história da empresa lançámos três produtos de terreno: Continente, Ilhas e agora os Openspaces. Uma vez que temos complexidade por todo o lado, estamos renitentes em adicionar uma estrutura de preços complexa. No entanto, é evidente que temos de construir um mix de produto e estrutura de preços que ofereça mais flexibilidade.

LL finally answered the resident questions on the OS new price policy and is apparently stepping back on their former announcement. But like I said it is only apparent. Lets take a look at the numbers:

Current Pricing

Open space SIM = 3750 prims; US$75 = US$0.02 per prim/month; 100 avis; no script cap

Full DIM = 15000 prims; US$295 = US$0.0197 per prim/month; 100 avis; no script cap

1st princing policy announced

Open Space Sim = 3750 prims $125 USD = $0.0333 Per Prim/Month; 100 avis; no script cap

Full Sim = 15,000 prims $295 USD = $0.0197 Per Prim/Month; 100 avis; no script cap

New Pricing policy

OpenSpace Sim = 750 prims $75 USD = $0.10 Per Prim/Month; 10 avis; script cap TBA

HomeStead Sim = 3750 prims $125 USD = $0.0333 Per Prim/Month; 20 avis; script cap TBA

Full Sim = 15,000 prims $295 USD = $0.0197 Per Prim/Month; 100 avis; no script cap

Do you still think they backed up on anything? The price increase will occur, only was postponed, but the restrictions to use that weren’t planned on the first announcement (at least from what we can read on Jack’s post on the Official blog) are now being imposed.

I still have some questions and doubt that I will ever get the asnswers for them:

Do all the residents in SL understand what is going on or is the majority not even aware of it or cares for that matter?

Does LL really care about its customers?

How will SL economy, already in a slight downward curve, sustain if the residents don’t trust LL anymore and take away their businesses?

Will this world of ours still be a place to “live” within 6 months if LL persists on just stepping all over us?

The future will tell. For the time being things are not good and I don’t see anyway they can get better.

Earlier this year LL started a new Land policy which included the Openspace SIMs. At a buying cost of USD$250 and a monthly tier of USD$75, many SIM owners started to buy those to join their anchor islands, mainly due to demands from their rentors.

Now LL has done it again.

Like they state in their blog post “Rather than being employed as open areas like ocean with little or no content and traffic, the majority are being rented out to residents looking for a place to live. Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems. For some people this has meant a less than great experience with performance fluctuations. The overuse of Openspaces has also put additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing. So higher traffic to and from the servers along with heavier demands on the asset server, both of which impact the overall experience people have inworld.”

So what are they doing to decrease the heavier demands on traffic and servers? Nothing.

So what are they doing to just ruin everyone’s fun? Everything.

The tier prices will increase 66% (yes you read well S-i-x-t-y  S-i-x percent) i.e. plus USD$50 per month and the acquisition price will be of USD$375.

An increase of USD$50 per Openspace will be unbearable for most of both the residents and landowners (we have a worldwide economy crisis guys, remember?) and I’m sure this is going to make many leave SL for good due to disappointment and many beautiful places disappear, thus making this world of ours poorer and sadder.

I will stay here waiting to see what LL comes up next.

In Second Life like iRL things sometimes don’t go as we wished they would.

After more than one year in Portucalis building dreams, mine and others, together with a wonderful group of friends, I see myself forced to leave.

Lots of things have been happening iRL that have unfortunately reflected in my second life.

Again the relationships between people are the issue. I have seen it before and even helped (or tried to) some friends getting over it, but never thought that my best friend in no matter what world would put me against a wall and tried to force me to choose between her and another of my friends.

How can someone just erase feelings? Impossible! At least for me. So I maintained my position of not choosing which led to my best friend’s backing up and putting an end to our long lasting friendship in a stubborn position if “you are not with me, you are against me”.

Both lives have been affected. My RL is poorer now, in spite of all the very very good friends I have. Loosing someone always hurts. My SL was also affected and what was once a place I called home, has become some where I feel I’m persona non grata. Besides, the business partnership ended and all of a sudden I see myself with monthly tiers I just can’t afford. I tried during the past months to search for ways to keep my little corner in Portucalis, even thought of getting some of the abandoned land for myself, but I realised that would affect badly my RL (thanks God for the holidays that put my mind back on track) and just had to put an end to those crazy thoughts. No way a place that should be my playground is going to affect my daily survival in the atomic world.

So guys I am leaving Portucalis but I am not leaving friends and feelings. It is just a piece of virtual land where I was once happy.

Time to start overwith friends all around me and a smile on my face, taking with me the good memories and leaving the bad ones behind.

Soon I will be posting about the new place and hope you stop by to say hello.

Yesterday I was at home trying the surprise Max left in our garden (loved it sweety) when I received an IM from Ky. He came over and we had a long conversation about a subject I really was totally unaware of – Ad Farmers.

All of us that fly over mainland are sometimes confronted with big columns of cubes rotating announcing whatever, from escorts to stores. I always thought those signs were really cluttering the landscape but never knew what was behind all that – pure and simple extortion.

Me and Ky left to meet rm at the Ad Zoo. I had the chance to learn lots of things about all the struggle they are going through to keep ad farmers away.

The “business” goes like this. Someone buys a large piece of mainland, say 22k sqm, divides it in 1024 parcels for sale at a reasonable and competitive price and keeps in the middle small plots of 16 sqm for sale for L$164 and the 4 corners delimiting those plots (16sqm x 4 = 64 sqm) are sold for L$ 9,999.

By now you find it strange how a 64 sqm parcel, separated in 4 corners can be sold so high. That is when the extortion part comes in.

A newb or any other resident comes to the land for sale, the price is good, if you are a Premium Account you even have 512 sqm free of tiers and buys it. The resident builds his/her/its home enjoys the view and overnight, after most of the plots are sold and build, the once wonderful view of the sunset over the linden sea is now cluttered with big ad columns, rotating and lagging everything.

You want to get your view back? Well you can, but you have to buy those small plots for sale and pay 5 times more than you paid for your 1024 parcel. (see the before and the after in the pics bellow)

Linden Lab took some measures last February to stop this, but it is not easy to fight all the alts created to do this. One is banned after ARs have been done, 2 or 3 rapidly are created. Groups are can canceled, more appear.

The Ad Zoo and other groups are doing a great job, but residents must be aware of this fraud going on. The way these people are making money in SL is pure extortion.

How can we inform residents? By mouth to ear, informing our friends who will inform theirs and so on. Us Mentors could include in the Notecards about Land given to new residents the information on Ad Farmers, so they have full knowledge.

Mainland used to be a good place to live. These dishonest people are not only taking our Lindens but are also compromising the quality of life we all want for our Second Life.

Leave you here some links where you can read a bit more about the fight against Ad Farmers:
http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/853
Avastar’s article

… oppressive regimes, poor economic conditions — that’s what makes an SL user”

At first when you read this you may think that it is one of those eternal oppositionists to Metaverses!

But no, quite on the contrary, those are the unfortunate words of Mr. Philip Rosedale aka Philip Linden, who, as everyone knows, is the resigning CEO of Linden Lab.

These words were spoken in Frankfurt Germany, one of the stops in his European Tour and you can find the whole news at Reuters.

I don’t know about you guys, but I live in a country where bad weather doesn’t apply (ok it has been raining the past 2 days… so???), we will be celebrating on the next 25th of April 34 years of democracy in Portugal and in what concerns poor economic conditions… my dear friends, anyone who can pay for broad band, state of the art computers and still use the credit card to buy Linden Dollars I don’t think we can say we are living under poor economic conditions.

Biting the hand who feeds you Mr. Rosedale (again) is the quickest way to starve. I truly hope you didn’t mean what you said and that it was just a slip of the tongue. Or did you just say it because you can?

Looks like LoL did indeed pay attention to the whole blogosphere and the strike that some blogs did for 3 days (you can see the list here).

Laura Linden provided some clear answers to some of the questions posed and let us hope that the dialogue continues and that all the departments at LoL may follow the example and give us clear explanations about what is going on on the grid – instability, viewers that don’t work properly, inventory losses and all of those things we all know – unfortunately – so well.

Just read in the Official blog of those that cannot be named (aka LoL – thank you M2 for the acronym) that the buying price of private Islands will go down from US$ 1,650 (plus VAT if you are European based) to US$ 1,000 on the second quarter of this year.

After reading the comments on the post and done some thinking – which I normally don’t do hehehe – there are pros and cons on this, once again, sudden announcement.

More issues can also emerge from it, from the mainland prices mentioned in the statistics, to the “cleaning” LoL is doing in mainland. But I’ll stick to the virtual reality I’m familiar with.

Pros

- People who wanted to buy land can now do it with less effort than we land owners did *gasps* 2 months ago

- People who buy land are more pron to be committed to the metaverse owned by LoL, thus assuring and increasing the LoL monthly income – and they are, after all, a company who needs to profit from its activity and not a charity institution for those who want to have a good time online

Cons

- The community is already p****d off with LoL due to its recent policies, from the VAT applied to Europeans to the new trademark policy

- Lowering the prices of the islands will make lots of land businesses to go bankrupt. People who invested real money (we are speaking of the green bills, not the virtual currency) expecting a profit on land sales will now be forced either to sell it bellow cost or just wait till the market prices go up again, loosing money either way.

- Many of the present landowners will once again feel disregarded by LoL and may sell and leave S*d L*e

- Some of the residents that recently ordered an Island and didn’t got it yet will for sure drop the order now – either by opening a cancellation ticket or simply by ordering no payment to LoL to their credit card companies or Paypal. Thus the income previewed by LoL for this month sales will be under the forecasts and will probably make them loose some thousands of US Dollars

- As for the World of LoL economy, it will also suffer from this measure. People will buy islands mostly for business. Even if it isn’t for profit, most of us want at least to recover the investment and have some extra Lindens to pay the monthly tiers and the events hosted at the place.  With an expected increase in the number of islands, the shops, malls, clubs, which are already more than the market stands, will be in an even higher number. With offer being above demand… you don’t need to be an economy expert to figure what will happen.

I’m gonna wait for the next developments and I do honestly hope that LoL didn’t shoot its own foot again ’cause, in spite of everything, it is still great to live in their world with our imagination :0)

Gwyneth Llewelyn has posted a new petition on her blog concerning the new Trademark Policies.

Leave you here an excerpt and you can read the rest of the Petition here.

[...]The issue, however, is even more serious. Although Linden’s prevention of the use of trademarks under the new guidelines could be contested in court, either in the US or elsewhere, possibly appealing to estoppel, as a matter of fact, Linden can – through its new Terms of Service, that all users required to sign to access their content on Linden’s virtual world – simply ban any user that Linden considers to be in violation of their trademark claims. By virtue of the same principle, Linden can simply ban any user that exerts his or her rights to free speech, nominative use of trademarked terms as laid down by US law, or equivalent rights under local legislation[...]