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Second Life MMO Update Creates Virtual Eviction Notices
Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting the Linden Labs press release officially announcing major pricing/allocation changes to PC 'virtual world' Second Life, as reported earlier this month. The detailed effects of the announcement include charging for property owned in-game, but allowing players "a new pricing option with no monthly fees" if they own no land, and the official 'Notes' section on the site points out that the update "...meant drastic changes for some the most creative, dedicated residents." A forum posting mentions that new limits tying "building primitives" to land allocation may mean painstakingly constructed virtual property will need to be demolished: "I have been flying around the world and seeing lots of cool builds on small plots... that are way over their prim limit and will be going away." Linden Lab employees say they are "working on a plan to address" this issue before the January 11th deadline. Elsewhere, an intriguing thread details problems with letting novice players build permanent in-game architecture, particle systems, and textures for this innovative 'virtual world'.
Is that official?
With the developer taking over the job of "Government" to fuck you in the ass all the time...
Why can't they do what they do in the real world, that is, grandfather in any existing structures?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
So all the creative types show up and invest a month or two where they know their efforts won't be wasted by their forward-thinking hosts, then BAM! all those objects, that they really own? Start coughing up rent for it!
Clever, clever bastards.
Fnord.
If you don't pay the property taxes on your home the people with guns make you give them your home.
Just like real life!
To understand the changes you need to know something about the game. The game is made up of a series of 256m*256m connected squares of virtual land. Each one of these squares is a 'sim' and is an individual rack mounted computer (currently around 40 of these in the game).
Each 'sim' is limited in total 'prims' (the basic building blocks for creating anything). Before the latest change that was 10,000 prims per 'sim', after the change it is now 15,000.
What could, and did, happen is someone with very little land could make it impossible for anyone else in that 'sim' to build anything at all.
The first attempt to handle this was through an economy - prims cost money to rez, and money to maintain as did land. This worked well except for a key factor - money was global, the problem was local. The larger the game got (the more sims they added) the worse the situation got. You could still amass enough money to own a small piece of land and most of the prims in the sim.
Another problem with that system is it was way, way, way too complicated. You ended up with Tax on land, primitives (based on size and height) and lights. And you got bonuses and stipends and 'caps' so the money doesn't accumulate in unused accounts and weeee isn't that fun. Stipends were based on ratings compared to other users and could fluctate greatly.
Another side effect of that was there was really no way to plan for a big project. Taxes could fluctuate and grow as the project got larger and there was no way to tell what your stipend/bonus (weekly money paid to you) would be in 3 weeks.
So to solve many problems they tied the amount of prims you could use directly to the percent of the land on that 'sim' that you own. You own 10% of the land? Then you can use 10% of the prims. Now there is no more really confusing taxes. You can plan for builds because the number of prims you can have is known at the start and doesn't change. And no one can come next to you and build their giant leggo toilet of 9,000 prims just so you can't build.
The other half of the story is that these virtual land plots and objects are all being hosted on servers, maintained and run by the makers of the game. Previously everyone was charged the same monthly rate whether they used very little resources or a whole lot. The new pricing allows people to pay anything from no monthly fee ($10 one time) to hundreds of dollars a month depending on how much resources they use. The simplest method is to charge based on land ownership, especially now that prim usage is also tied to land ownership.
The end result? Now you can play for no monthly cost (how many people don't play MMOs just because they don't want to pay every month?), or you can get a substantial amount of land for the same price they were currently paying (1536sqm for existing members), or they can get more land for more money up to an entire sim for $200 a month.
The article says, "Additionally, a new pricing option with no monthly fees allows you to join SecondLife for only $9.95.". Over at their website I see nothing indicating this at all. Anyone have any clue what this means and why it was in the article?
./revolution
it's a similar problem all massmogs face - which is hording and maintenance.
the hardcore players of massmogs love to 'collect', and really hate the idea of 'their stuff' being 'taken away'. they don't like paying tax, they don't like decay, they don't like other players to be able to destroy or steal 'their stuff'.
if virtual money flows in, and doesn't flow out - it always accumulates in the form of 'stuff'.
in this situation, it's much worse than in adventuring massmogs. building is, i dare say, 'the point'. so if one guy owns all the prims in a sim - he essentially 'owns' the sim as no-one else can build there, and his monthly fee alone does not cover the cost of running a single sim.
contrary to other massmogs, where 1 character hoarding items/buildings can create lag, but doesn't actually consume an entire machine.
good luck to the developer. they really have an intriguing problem, that I don't even have a peanut gallery suggestion of how to address.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Second Life is going to ensure its swift demise with this new pricing scheme. They have gone to a lot of trouble to create an architecture which allows them to essentially outsource the creation of artistic content in the world to the players, instead of having a team responsible for building it. By charging for this, they are basically saying that their most dedicated, valuable and creative talents in the user community will now be the most heavily charged (and therefore penalized) players in the game.
So first they wanted to save money by letting people create content, then *shock* discovered that content storage and persistence costs money too? This is the fundamental issue with remote storage and persistence of game worlds anyway. Their real costs are not with the creators, but with the freeloaders who are not creating anything but merely taking up bandwidth and resources chatting and exploring, because their cost of operation is not offset by content productivity.
RIP 2nd Life.
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."