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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'.
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.