I really do agree that the number of alts needs to be controlled. Currently a non-premie can only have one account without being in violation of TOS — not that anyone pays attention to that rule and not that it’s actually enforceable. I don’t think there’s a limit to the number of alts a premie can have — only on the number that can be attached to a specific email address, but even this can be lifted through special arrangement with Linden Lab. I still don’t understand why anyone needs 20 gazillion alts, except for nefarious purposes, but what do I know?

Thanks for the clarification with regard to the issue of adult-rated venues. I have to agree with you on your specific point, too. Here’s my Standard Quip for “Hi, wanna f***?” — well, standard if I’m in a good mood. I won’t mention the other one here in this public blog. “Why, yes I do! As soon as I get home from work, this evening, and have a chance to freshen up a bit. Your place or mine? Give me your phone number and I’ll call you over as soon as I’m ready. You do have transportation, right? If you need, I can pick you up at the airport. Just let me know your arrival time far enough ahead. And I’ll need some sort of proof from your doctor that you’ve recently been tested for STDs, too. Oh, and by the way, I’m really a guy. I figured you should probably know that ahead of time, just so there won’t be any unpleasant surprises.” (Cut and pasted from my file of Standard Quips) I haven’t had a single “taker” since I started saying that. Most people get a clue about halfway through that, I think.

I know many “payment not on file” ppl and may soon join them myself being sick of being ripped by LL as a “Land Owner<–CASHCOW” for LL.

As for the “Sex Club, I am far from moralising as I have a more than active life in the D/s lifestyle here in SL. That is why I loiter in the “Dens of iniquity” in the first place. Saying that it would be nice to loiter without the constant wave of “Hi wanna F…!” IM’s

Maybe I’m just unhappy with the way LL have let SL slide, so if I have upset anyone, come down to Dark Bliss and spank me for it.

up the prim size, limits, give some warning & ban the huge prims

Thanks for the reply…

Oh, i really think client and sim lag is not only related to the number of avatars in a sim, but additionally to the number of scripted, textured and animated attachments these avatars carry around with them. In my opinion some nube without the nice, but lagging stuff we long termers love to carry around does lag overall performane less than a ao/attachment/flexi loaden long termer.

Yes, i agree that there are essential performance and reliability flaws in LL software. The extremely poor performance of f.e. the Mac viewer is not explainable by user behavior at all, of course. same for DB flaws and all this.

But…mea culpa. The more stuff we use on our avatars and the more uneducated builders use all these HUGE textures (as oversized BMP´s on a 0.1×0.1 prim) and temporary rezzers and all this the worse it gets.

There seems to be a lot of confusion over the issue of how many sims are running on a server. For example, out of the official wiki we have: ” ‘Region’ is a synonym for sim, which is short for “simulator”. The land in SL is hosted on a Linux server, two 65,536 m² (256×256m) regions per server (except for water regions which are 4 per server).” This was last modified on 6 October 2007.

What does it actually cost for the hardware to run Second Life, anyway? These are Linux boxes. I’m sure none of them have the latest, greatest, CPU chips. They don’t need high end graphics and sound cards. The software is free. I’d like to bet I could throw together a home-brew system to run a Second Life sim for well under $500. Give me $500 to worth with and that sim will probably be stable and mostly lag-free with 50 avatars in it. Linux screams when Windows crawls on the same hardware. Use that to advantage if you want to increase performance.

I really have no idea what sort of profit Linden Lab has to turn to break even. They have a lot of employees, an enormous server farm, and likely an overhead that, by itself, could have me living like a queen for the rest of my life if I was receiving that money, myself. Maybe they really need that $11 million a year. On the other hand, I think there’s something to be said for doing a feasibility study on reducing the cost of setting up private sims and, especially, the tier rates, to see whether or not they could accomplish the same thing, or better, by attracting more users as land owners. I’m paying tier on mainland property only because the monthly maintenance fee (they don’t call it “tier”, but, come on … it’s the same thing) for a private island is just too high. Maybe they think they can make up the loss in individual customers by attracting the big corporations to buy up multiple islands, but at some point they’re going to run out of corporate customers. Then what?

I’ll happily pay $500 for a private island set up. Lower the tier rate for that island to $100 a month, and they have a deal. Several, in fact. At least two … maybe more, and that’s just to start. That would make it possible for me to do one of the things I’ve dreamed about. I have some original and innovative concepts for “themed sims”. They will never see reality (OK, virtual reality) as long as Linden Lab is pricing themselves out of the “common” market and concentrating only upon the rich and famous. I’m not IBM, or Dell, or Playboy. I can’t afford it. Neither can hundreds, perhaps thousands, of us “common folk”, and I have a feeling we’d be flocking to the market if only Linden Lab would open it up to us.

Raven @82: Hmm … seems like your reply was moderated out of existence. Odd. It didn’t seem all that bad to me. I’ll respond, anyway. What do you mean by “rein in” the free accounts? Get rid of them? I’m a paying customer. Were it not for the fact that I started as a nopie I wouldn’t be here, now. Do you mean to limit them? How? Actually, I think we need to purge the system of free accounts which are, say, over a month old and have never logged on after creation. That would at least clean out the data base a bit.

I most definitely do agree with you about campers, but likely not for the same reason. Camping is a wonderful way for people to make money here in SL — except that it’s abused by camping ‘bots. Get rid of the bots — not the newbies who really need those camping sites. I was a camper, once, and I saw things go down hill for those of us who needed, and appreciated, those few L$ we could make doing that, when the “professional campers” moved in.

As for your complaint about the sex in Second Life, the solution is very simple. Stay out of “mature” sims. Nobody is twisting your arm to visit those. A great many paying customers are here for the “adult attractions”, and many of the paying customers provide those facilities. If you’re seeing all that openly-displayed “bonking” then I’m pretty sure you’re hanging around the naughty places. I certainly don’t see it everywhere I look. Put your hand in the fire and expect to get burned.

Vivienne @82: Looks like you took Raven’s place, and you make some important points, too. When I had a free account I was spending $80 a month (that’s real U.S. dollars — not Linden dollars) on rent. Yes, I found a way to get money into the system even as a nopie. And that’s more, as you point out, than the average premie pays in, I’m sure — and I wasn’t even getting a stipend for it.

You’re not entirely correct when you say that the number of “attachmentless nubes” doesn’t lag a sim. Every prim, worn or not, and every agent and child agent lags a sim. Here’s why. Any time the relative position of a prim and agent (avatar) changes the server must update the location of that prim in real time to the agent’s viewer. I *think*, although I might be wrong on this, that only prims within the angle of view of the agent count in this update, or at least get first priority. This means that when an avatar moves, every single prim in that avatar’s view has to be updated. If you have an afk camper doing nothing and an avatar wearing a prim skirt and hair walks by, every single prim attached to that avatar, as well as the avatar, itself, of course, has to be updated for that camper.

Ditto with the messagiing from 1.15 and the new messaging system, still failures and message lag in groups there, and although fixed once, the “No permission to post” errors have resurfaced. The aim for externalising it was to improve performance, and yet chat and IM lag is worse, comms with external services constantly failing, and we lost Ratings and something else to provide it…

Dunno what you are doing to the main grid: whether it’s the tweaks you are working on, letting more on (56k cf 50K) or the hordes of CSI people, but the last week it’s been Crashtastic, Lagtastic, and scripts seem borked in lots of sims.

You always seem to do this: just as the grid starts to run reasonably okay, you let a load more on and the dbs and assest servers go to pot, tps fail, crashes occur, and performance drops to way below unacceptable. Perhaps next time you should get ahead of yourselves and not let the extra on until your systems can actually handle them. Growing is not so much about new features and shinies, but keeping people that you already got.

Perhaps if you concentrated more on performance, inv loss and the like, you’d be growing better than having to have corporates invade. But of course that is what people have been asking for since before the Open Letter…

If you did, maybe you’d ask yourself why last month users numbers dropped, and have been dropping in Europe since you gve individual numbers back in May: France and Germany for instance by nearly a third. You think it might be related to performance, lack of non-English support, and the inability of some people to buy Lindens because of the service provider - PP - you use?

It’s certainly not because they got bored with waiting for shinies they didn’t want, it’s because of performance, losing things which cost them real money, and immoral people scamming and ripping off people that LL does nothing about. Latest ruse, because LL don’t bother investigating, is that griefer friends multiple AR anyone who reports them, so the victim gets banned because there are more ARs against them than the griefers. You should have thought this through better like a lot of things.

Yes, some of us are NPIOF scum, because we don’t have credit cards (not every economy is sick and relying on credit to prop it up), even though most online retailers take our debit cards but not PP or LL. We still have businesses. Back in February I was in the top 20 spenders, when there were 60K premiums alone, so we do input, in terms of creativity, and redistribure money even if we can’t buy or sell.

Some simple analysis of your own data and Key Metrics would indicate some stuff. Sure last month Premiums went up by 400, but so did Referral bonuses, they shot up from the normal L$7m to L$10m, so that means a minimum of 10K new premiums, thus if they only increased by 400, 9,600 old premiums either left or dowwngraded, that’s over 10% in one month. A lot of those would have been landowners and creatives. If you consider the month where they dropped 6K, then adding in those 7K new members, means that month established users dropped by 13K, almost 15%.

If you want to get rid of old people, fine, but relying on cycling through noobs is not a good strategy for solid future growth, and smacks of being nothing more than a Ponzi. I trust that is not LL’s aim, but you really, really must address the problems that people have been telling you for months and months: stop introducing new shinies until the system is stable, actually is “rock solid” - lmao - and then you can move forward. By any measure you care to look at, falling land prices, decreasing users, money coming in tailing or being static, SL is sick and needs fixing.

Its good to start doing some surveys, but very disconcerting that it’s taken over 4 years to start addressing inv loss, and intimating that really youdon’t have a clue what is happennning to your dbs. Dbs may not be important to LL and the Tao of Linden, but they are pretty important to all users, especially the people who lose stuff or it’s not there when they want it.

You have an awful long way to go if this is supposed to be a replacement for the web lol.

A free account does not necessarily imply non-spending. I know LOTS of people who are on a free account, rent land from private landowners and spend a hell more of lindens within one month than the average premium member does within one year.

I do not care about your “free sex club” as long as i can simply stay away from it if i am offensed by the seemingly content (which, as a strict religious fundamentalist, i am not even allowed to inspect out of kinda curiosity, hee hee).

Framerates do not depend on the SL economy, nor on the number of attachmentless nubes nor on sexual preferences. And btw, a PG sim including a copy of westminster abbey plastered by fivethousand 1024×1024 TGA alpha textures and 500 sculpties as well as twenty rez-on-temp rezzers will even lag the archbishop of Canterbury to death.