Why does it cost serious money to own a sim?

[Stephanie Misfit]

5 hours ago, Richardus Raymaker said:

Oldie here, but sims are to expensive. somethu g around 10$ for a sim would be a good price.

It really sounds like you and Haselden should be considering moving over to OpenSim. It seems like it would better meet your expectations.

[Penny Patton]

I'm going to point out something I say a lot but it bears repeating:

SL users waste a LOT of the sim resources they're paying for. Most full sim builds could fit comfortably within 1/2 a sim or less, comfortably, without sacrificing the amount of content, detail, or even space. 

In SL most content is excessively oversized. Buildings, furnishings, landscaping, all of it is in the ballpark of twice the size it needs to be. Some people feel this is because most avatars are so large, some people feel it's because of the default SL camera settings making everything appear smaller and also requiring a lot of extra headroom. I feel that both these factors and more play into the problem. But, whatever the cause, it makes people waste a lot of the money they're paying for tier.

 I'm not saying that land in SL doesn't cost too much, it does (and as I'm sure others have pointed out, LL is aware of this and are trying to rebalance their revenue streams so that they're not quite so reliant on the high cost of land, but it will take some time before the changes they make will take effect and impact land prices) but I am saying that given how expensive land is, it only makes sense to try and get as much value for what you're paying as possible.

Reduce the size of your avatar and your content. When you make an object twice as big, whether you're talking a chair or a house, it's taking up four times the land area. Mesh objects, especially big items like buildings, often cost more Land Impact the larger they are. Reduce your house to half the size and you free up enough space for four houses, but you'll probably curt the land impact cost in half.

Be ruthless when it comes to Land Impact. Don't waste your limited LI on objects that cost way more than they're worth to you. 

Use rezzers to create environments that only exist when people are actually using them. On any size parcel you can build a house with infinite rooms this way.

When you're building a sim, put a lot of thought into the design. Don't build redundant areas, make sure every area has its own unique purpose. 

If you're comfortable modding, see if you can find ways to reduce the Land Impact of content you use in your sim. Maybe that storefront you bought looks great but the string of lights hanging out front uses up 20LI. By replacing them with a 2LI light string you found on the marketplace you've cut 18 LI from the cost of the building. Some buildings you can cut the LI cost more drastically by setting the entire building to "No Physics" then building a prim shell to replace the physics of the building. Did you know that simple prims such as cubes cost half as much LI when you set their physics type to "Convex Hull"? You only see the savings if you link them together because they each cost 0.5 LI but unlinked SL will count them each as 1LI.

I've got a blog where I go into these tricks and more in a lot more detail. I recommend starting with this article on improving SL's camera placement so it doesn't require stadium sized ceiling space.

[Alwin Alcott]

17 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

I'm going to point out something I say a lot but it bears repeating:

totally agree you say it a lot..

17 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

SL users waste a LOT of the sim resources they're paying for. Most full sim builds could fit comfortably within 1/2 a sim or less, comfortably, without sacrificing the amount of content, detail, or even space.

that doesnt really matter.. people wánt their stand alone, that's what important for most.

Edited May 25, 2018 by Alwin Alcott

[Rob Huntsman]

4 hours ago, Spin Barbosa said:

Wow. If you really believe this, you don't understand how this thing works at all.

Nope, that's honestly all I can see their doing. Then "Weekly" Maintenance all it seems to be is a mass sim restart... Like I haven't noticed any "Patch notes." Like I have been playing this game for a year now haven't noticed anything besides bento mesh for avatars.

I guess there's Animesh to, but I'm still curious what are they honesting tweaking that's weekly. To make the cost so bloody high. The only excuse I got so far is Lindons probably don't want people to own a lot of sims then abandon it later on.

Which does sound fair...

Edited May 25, 2018 by Haselden

[Spin Barbosa]

18 minutes ago, Haselden said:

Nope, that's honestly all I can see their doing. Then "Weekly" Maintenance all it seems to be is a mass sim restart... Like I haven't noticed any "Patch notes." Like I have been playing this game for a year now haven't noticed anything besides bento mesh for avatars.

I guess there's Animesh to, but I'm still curious what are they honesting tweaking that's weekly. To make the cost so bloody high. The only excuse I got so far is Lindons probably don't want people to own a lot of sims then abandon it later on.

Which does sound fair...

They are running an enormous server farm. There is a tremendous amount of work just keeping it running, without making any improvements to the system. You clearly have no concept of what is involved. I'm not saying the prices can't come down. I don't know all of the economics. I'm saying it's not the "flip a switch" you claim it is.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

2 hours ago, Haselden said:

Nope, that's honestly all I can see their doing. Then "Weekly" Maintenance all it seems to be is a mass sim restart... Like I haven't noticed any "Patch notes." Like I have been playing this game for a year now haven't noticed anything besides bento mesh for avatars.

I guess there's Animesh to, but I'm still curious what are they honesting tweaking that's weekly. To make the cost so bloody high. The only excuse I got so far is Lindons probably don't want people to own a lot of sims then abandon it later on.

Which does sound fair...

Features take a lot of time to develop when you do not want to break existing content. And Linden Lab doesn't break old content unless they have no choice, which is why even today we still have two separate script environments because old scripts from 2003-2005 cannot be recompiled for example (A lot of creators used a sourcecode removal utility back then so Linden Lab literally doesn't have the sourcecode of a lot of scripts).

Add to this that the Linden Lab of today is very different from the Linden Lab of 2003, most of them where not here when SecondLife was created. A lot of what they have to do involve maintaining the huge and complex system they inherited.

SecondLife also never deletes anything, once you paid the measly 10L$ to upload a texture, it will remain stored in the asset server until SecondLife dies.

Secondlife's server farm currently spans accross two gigantic datacenters in the USA.

Everytime you save a notecard, everytime you tweak an object and put it back in your inventory, it's a new version that is being stored, essentially for absolutely free.

Some somewhere has to pay to keep all of this running, and since most accounts aren't interested in owning land, It's region owners, merchants and shoppers who bear the brunt of the bill.

This is a bit of an old article, but you get some of the numbers from 2004, then you can extrapolate given that secondlife has grown from 2000 regions to 23000 and from 100k Resident accounts (created, not active) to 54 million.

https://gwynethllewelyn.net/2004/10/03/how-second-life-works-techically-speaking/

Edited May 25, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[Klytyna]

2 hours ago, Haselden said:

but I'm still curious what are they honesting tweaking that's weekly.

2 hours ago, Haselden said:

Like I haven't noticed any "Patch notes."

Perhaps if you spent less time spamming the Roleplay forum with adverts for non-roleplay ePeener-vs-ePeener combat events, and looked in THIS subforum...

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/forum/310-second-life-server/

...and paid particular attention to the threads that start with "Deploy plans for the week...", you might have seen some "patch notes".

Remember, SL is NOT a type-with-your-thumbs Sontendsoft PlayCube-One console peasant friendly "Many-Morons-Online-Rabid-Para-Gamerz-Fatheaded-Pretentious-Shooter", where you get weekly patches to download for your client', a lot of stuff is done SERVER side only.
 

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Remember, SL is NOT a type-with-your-thumbs Sontendsoft PlayCube-One console peasant friendly "Many-Morons-Online-Rabid-Para-Gamerz-Fatheaded-Pretentious-Shooter"

Now you tell me!

[Callum Meriman]

6 hours ago, Haselden said:

I'm still curious what are they honesting tweaking that's weekly

/me taps nose knowingly "Internal logging changes"

[Rhonda Huntress]

On 5/24/2018 at 5:07 PM, Callum Meriman said:

Programmers cost money, as do lawyers, donuts, alcohol, the CEO's car, the rent on the building, the cleaning staff, and so on.

They got bills to pay, they got mouths to feed; there ain't nuttin' in this world for free.
They can't hold back, they can't slow down, though you know, they wish they could.
Well there ain't no rest for the wicked, `til they close their eyes for good.

 

[Embera Bloodrose]

Second life is like real you pay for your property second life has to take care the servers on that property to reset hims and fix things that is what they do. Thing is work your way to things you can start flipping burgers if you have to get a decent job in real or make stuff in second life to make money to own land.

[Chic Aeon]

Just wanted to note that the OP can certainly go to Opensim and have an almost free sim and fill it with either homemade, purchased through Kitely (hence not stolen) OR stolen goods (many being free if not moral or legal).  

So there IS THAT OPTION and perhaps they would be happier there - LOL.

[Pamela Galli]

8 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Just wanted to note that the OP can certainly go to Opensim and have an almost free sim and fill it with either homemade, purchased through Kitely (hence not stolen) OR stolen goods (many being free if not moral or legal).  

So there IS THAT OPTION and perhaps they would be happier there - LOL.

 People just want to get what they haven’t paid for. 

Edited May 26, 2018 by Pamela Galli

[iamyourneighbour]

So you won't have kids building atrocity that will burn two holes through your eye socket. Even with the current tier SL does not lack ugly and poorly managed sims.

[Penny Patton]

16 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

that doesnt really matter.. people wánt their stand alone, that's what important for most.

But it does matter if we're talking simply about the cost of land in SL. If you're paying $300/mo for a sim because you want the space, but then you waste about 3/4 your sim resources, you're paying four times as much for what you're actually getting out of it. That's a lot of wasted money. To put it another way, for all intents and purposes land in this case costs 1/4th the amount the person wasting all those resources believes it costs.

Now, if you're talking privacy, the cost to have your own land with no neighbors whatsoever, well that's another matter. I've long been a proponent of the idea that mainland parcels could be entirely private personal spaces if LL would give us two key features:

1. The ability to hide all content (avatars, objects, everything) on our land from anyone outside our land. Not just make it invisible, but to make it cease to exist beyond the borders of our parcel (so if you had a prim that extended off the edge of your parcel, your neighbor wouldn't bump into an invisible wall).

2. The ability to hide all objects outside our land.

Give us those two features and you'll find that LL would very nearly be delivering the private spaces people have been asking for since day one. With these features you could build a small skybox apartment with  an outdoor patio, and surround it with a sim surround landscape that would only exist to those who were standing on your land. You'd have a clear sky in all directions, no privacy concerns, a gorgeous view, and your neighbor's poorly optimized build wouldn't drag your framerates down. Meanwhile, your neighbor on the very next parcel could have an equally unspoiled view of an entirely different sim surround landscape.

 The only remaining downside would be that other people could still lag the sim for everyone else with excessive scripts or physical objects.

[Richardus Raymaker]

Mainland is really not cheap enough. kt's only 100$ lower then private sime. And on mainland your restricted with terrain editing. And estate. Not to start about neighborns.

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Penny Patton said:

But it does matter if we're talking simply about the cost of land in SL.

no sorry Penny, you'r turning a simply cost subject again in a building issue.

Great you fight for that, and in some things you'r right, but don't put everything in that box.

 

[Phil Deakins]

Your arguments about sizes do hold water, Penny, and what you say would work perfectly if everyone did it. But the reality is that we people want to be pretty much like everyone else sizewise. For instance, who would want a house that other people couldn't walk into?, and would feel like a human in a doll's house if they managed to get in? Even a small size reduction would make it difficult. I once came across a house that didn't look too small but I still could get through the door without crouch-walking, and I wasn't a giant.

It's true that the default camera position has a lot to answer for, but it's the default and, unless the default changes, we residents won't change it to accomodate things. As you know, there are places that make things smaller than usual, such as Berlin, but it simply doesn't work because people have to change the camera position - and manage without being able to see what's around you well enough. Perhaps we could get used to such things, but, as things are now, we donlt need to get used to anything. It just works.

Another default thing is the size of an SL meter. A sim is 256 meters wide, even though that's an arbitrary number. LL could could said that it 512m wide, and nobody would have thought that it's weird. In fact, the land that's in a 256m sim could be exactly the same but be called 512m wide, or 1024m wide, and nobody would think it odd. But it's called 256m, and a meter relates to the size of a person and everything else. So a human avatar needs to have a walking stride of bit less than 1 meter, which means walking across a sim in, say, 300 steps. I haven't tested it so I don't know how many steps an averagely-sized avatar takes to walk along the side of a sim, but I imagine that it's probably reasonably close. And, it that's the case, then the average height of an avatar is just about right. In this case, it's the length of the default SL meter that dictates it.

I'm just rambling. I don't have any axe to grind, except to say that the defaults make sizes the way they are and, although redcutions can be done if everyone did it, it's very unlikely.

 

Edited May 26, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Secondlife was designed as a multi-user shared experience, I don't know why we keep receiving more and more users who specifically refuse this idea but despite that, want their needs filled.

Regions are 256x256 because they are designed to fit on a grid so that walking off the edge of a region leads to the next pretty much seamlessly.

You might not like the mainland but this is what SL was made for and nothing else, the entire infrastructure is built solely with the mainland in mind. Private regions are an afterthought, an exception to the rule, and Linden Lab expects that if you need one or more entire regions disconnected from the main gris, that you are going to develop it into something. That it's there for a special requirement, business or other. And this special requirement comes with a luxury tax.

But no people just want to plop their house in the middle and a sex bed.

[Callum Meriman]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

A sim is 256 meters wide, even though that's an arbitrary number.

knowing that we count from 0....

255 = 0xFF 
511 = 0x1FF

Not arbitrary. Back in 2002 the savings in using half the database bytes likely mattered.

[Phil Deakins]

By 'arbitrary' I din't mean that just any number would do. That's why I suggested 512 and 1024.

The land texture and topography doesn't lend itself to such a low number as 256. Where I am, you only need to go a few hundred meters from the sea, if that, before you're at the top of the rocky peak. If viewing the land without any size references to judge by, it looks like a much bigger area of land., and halving the length of the meter would work better than things do now. Calling a sim 512x512, instead of 256x256 would work better. It would need more serverside, but not much more.

Edited May 26, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Callum Meriman]

Just now, Phil Deakins said:

By 'arbitrary' I din't mean that just any number would do. That's why I suggested 512 and 1024.

512 means you were sending 2 times the number of bytes for x and y through the slow modems of the day

512 means you were storing 2 times the number of bytes for x and y in the 32 bit (4GB maximum) databases of the day

[Phil Deakins]

As I said, it would need more serverside, but not much more.

ETA: yes. back then bandwidth wasn't great.

Edited May 26, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Kyrah Abattoir]

2 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

512 means you were sending 2 times the number of bytes for x and y through the slow modems of the day

512 means you were storing 2 times the number of bytes for x and y in the 32 bit (4GB maximum) databases of the day

You're exagerating, 2002 wasn't the stone age.

[Callum Meriman]

Just now, Kyrah Abattoir said:

You're exagerating, 2002 wasn't the stone age.

If not, what do you think drive the architectural descision to set a sim to <byte,byte,word>?