Sim Size And Prim Count suggestion

[Isabelleh]

I have been playing Secoundlife for a Long Time and seen many things, along different Alts, From Flexi to sculpts to Mesh, Secondlife is Evolving so Amazingly, But one thing that hasn't seemed to change is a Sim, and there prim count.

Mesh has helped out so much in saving on prim counts but isn't it about time second life, upgrade a little, I know I can't be The first The bring this topic up, which amazes me as why nothing has changed over so long

 

it is $1000 usd to purchase a full 15,000 prim sim. with monthly installments of $300 usd, That's  $15,600 a year...

That is a ton of money, for such a small amount on Secondlife personally I was extremely egar to buy a sim, after playing so many RPG games, I wanted to create my own city on a sim, but The big shock for me was I would need to purchase 9 Sims to create it, The way I envision it, this is my own personal limit.  while playing other games I realised it can take like 5 minutes to cross a area of a map, where secondlife it could take seconds to cross a sim, this was personally a huge let down.

I wound not mind paying The 15k a year if I knew I was getting something worth it, but to be honest I can't see a good reason to bother considering it, it really is a lot of money for such limitations and considering how far sl has come, I still can't see why no upgrade has followed.

They way SL is Right now, in amazing creations take such large amount of space in a sim leaving barely nothing for anything else which is a massive same.

I love exploring main lands and seeing just how huge they are (Even encountering sim crossings still was huge)

they obviously have The technology for huge mainland's, Why not make Sims like 20 times larger, Could you imaging a forest on a sim The size of 20 Sims put together no crossings, actually having a purpose have ground teleporters as it takes ages to walk from one side of The sim to The other and having a prim amount of like 200k The possibilities of creations would be breath taking.

 

The sad fact is, this may never be reality, I can't seem to figure out why they have not done this, there are literately thousands of Sims people have purchased so they obviously, earning a good income 2,000 Sims alone brings in  $31,200,000 a Year not to mention The $Lindens people purchase, they must be able to afford The technology to upgrade Sims by now

So many previous sim owners I have met have told me not to bother, because "It is too much for too little"

this post is mainly my own personal opinion on try to figure out if it is worth buying a sim, spending $15,600 (not including Lindens) a year on something so limited

I would personally love to hear others opinions, maybe if enough speak a change might happen, Do you think they should upgrade Sims from what they are now?

[Sephy McCaw]

It's only 3600 a year for a sim, the 1k is a one of payment to purchase the sim. They also have 4 full regions to a CPU(4 cores) and 8 homesteads to a CPU(4 cores).

Im sure they could give you a full CPU per sim but it would then get super expensive to host all those servers and its not cost efficient,

I am also sure they would also have to change the coding for the sims to register that its using more then 1 core

[Isabelleh]

sorry i just realised i calculated by week not month sorry (^.^)

[Amethyst Jetaime]

This has been discussed many times here, in other forums, in meetings in world with the Lindens and in meetings with the Lindens in RL..  People have suggested all different sizes of sim from mega sims to small ones, and all kinds o combinations of size and number of prims. The most popular request is lowering the tier to something the average person could afford.  LL remains deaf to these suggestions.  Sorry to say it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

[Orca Flotta]

These times are long gone by now, Sephy. They put now up to 16 full sims on 1 server and dunnohowmanymore homesteads. It's simply breathtaking how grossly underpowered SL is. And whenever they come up with a code fix and things start to look better ... LL just goes "whoopee, let's cram more sims onto the servers, let's save on hardware costs."

The lab is probably the cheapest server hosting company that ever existed. And I don't mean cheap for the customers.

 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

---

Orca Flotta wrote:

They put now up to 16 full sims on 1 server and dunnohowmanymore homesteads. It's simply breathtaking how grossly underpowered SL is

---

Every now and then I read this. Never have I seen any source though. (I'm not saying it isn't true, so if you do have a reliable source, please post)

I don't care if LL puts 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc sims on one core, all I really care about is the performance and from personal experience all I can say is my homesteadsim is performing much much better than it did a couple of years ago. The sim contents have barely changed.

[solstyse]

Seeing posts like this a couple of times is making me wonder about profit margin vs. sales volume. What I mean is that there's no doubt that LL is making a killing from the sim ownership fees. But the high cost is prohibitive to many. so I guess the real question isn't whether or not they should lower the cost of sims, or increase what they give in terms of area nd prim allowance for the cost. The real question is whether doing so would help or harm business.

It would be really interesting to learn how they arrived at the prices they set. What data made the prices what they are, and how old that data is. And since sims often end up being subdivided by land barons, how the price that's set now for what you're given would affect them, too.

In other words, would lowering tier gain enough in either new business or retaining old business to overcome the loss to their profit margin and lead to a bigger bottom line? If the data that SL uses to set prices says it would, then prices would be lower. but is this the most current data?

In another post, someone mentioned that LL lost something like 1200 sims in 2012. Which means, at current prices, they would have to sell 1200 sims to make up for the loss. If tier was lowered to, say, $200 per month, then they would have to sell 30% more than the total number of sims that they lost AND the ones that are still around (since they would also be paying the new $200 rate.) I'm oversimplifying a bit. I'm not taking setup fees into consideration since that's a one time fee. In order for this kind of exponential growth, the land barrons would have to pass the savings on to the people who are paying rent for 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 sims, etc until their land is saturated and they need more room to expand their sl businesses. But how would you motivate that? Sure, for the upper echelon of rent-payers, it would become more appealing to tier up then. Some would say "why pay a land baron $130 for a homestead when I can get a ful region for $200 instead of $300. But odds are that instead of getting new land set up, they would rent from land barrons, who have plenty of empty land to go around. That prohibitive $1000 setup fee would see to that.

I think this is most of the reason why begging for cheaper tier gets ignored. Believe me, I wish tier was lower. And I think in the long term, it would be better for promoting growth, or at least shoring up losses. What I wrote in this post is merely playing devils advocate. Sadly, businesses almost never take a deliberate short term loss in hopes of a long term gain. Rather, large businesses tend to be quite short-sighted.  So tier will only lower when the grid shrinks so much that new sales will make up for lost margin, IF LL's timing is good.

Increasing prim counts may be an option that LL would be willing to try earlier than lowering tier. After all, if there are fewer sims on the same machines with no sign of that thrend reversing, then it stands to reason that costs to LL to give more prim allowance for the money would be minimal. But I think the shrinking land has more to do with changing rl priorities for many people. After all, more and more individuals are looking at more and more ways to save money, and $300 per month is quite a large expense. I doubt that there are many people paying the full $300. Many sims are owned by groups, many are subdivided, etc. The problem is that as more and more people become unable or unwilling to pay their share of the land cost, the burden on those who remain get higher and higher, until the group abandons the sim, or there aren't enough renters to support the sim anymore.

So my prediction is that SL will have fewer and fewer sims, and continue to shrink until either the economy picks up in rl enough for people to afford tier again, or it drops below a certain threshold where growth potential can overcome margin loss. And there's no way that LL will tell us what that threshold is.

edit: I just re-read that post I referred to. The number is more like 2700 regions lost. Read it here http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Second-Life-in-2014/td-p/1768165/page/2

[leliel Mirihi]

---

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

---

Orca Flotta wrote:

They put now up to 16 full sims on 1 server and dunnohowmanymore homesteads. It's simply breathtaking how grossly underpowered SL is

---

Every now and then I read this. Never have I seen any source though. (I'm not saying it isn't true, so if you do have a reliable source, please post)

I don't care if LL puts 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 etc sims on one core, all I really care about is the performance and from personal experience all I can say is my homesteadsim is performing

much much better

than it did a couple of years ago. The sim contents have barely changed.

---

The 'source' is the current hardware market. Class 5 sims were introduced at the end of 2006 with 2 dual core CPUs and 4GB of ram and ran 4 regions. Now 6 years later you can buy servers with 64 cores and upto 512GB of ram, it would be a waste of money for LL to run 4 regions on such a machine.

You're right that it doesn't matter in the end tho. As end users all we should care about is the level of performance LL can deliver. Harping about X number of regions on a machine is missing the forest for the trees.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

---

leliel Mirihi wrote:

The 'source' is the current hardware market. Class 5 sims were introduced at the end of 2006 with 2 dual core CPUs and 4GB of ram and ran 4 regions. Now 6 years later you can buy servers with 64 cores and upto 512GB of ram, it would be a waste of money for LL to run 4 regions on such a machine.

You're right that it doesn't matter in the end tho. As end users all we should care about is the level of performance LL can deliver. Harping about X number of regions on a machine is missing the forest for the trees.

---

(I read orca's post as sims per core, instead of sims per server, in that case I'm sure it's true, but I don't see anything wrong with it, since it's the number of cores that are more important than the number of servers)

What I do see in your post is more cores per server. Assuming one core is only as powerful as one core in 2006 was (something that probably isn't true in the first place) and assuming one core of those 64 core servers still holds one full region or four homesteads, I see how people got the idea that more regions are running on one core. (This is what I read every now and then) More sims per server doesn't mean more sims per core though.

I tend to believe the entire issue can be classified as urban legend, at least until someone can show me some reliable figures that prove me wrong.