Penny Patton

I'm not ignoring. I pointed out there's a higher up front cost. Once you get past that, you have more money to enjoy SL with.

And remember, I'm not arguing that there is no benefit to renting from an estate rather than owning mainland. The flexibility on payment can be such a benefit (YMMV depending on your landlord, of course). My argument about mainland begins and ends with "it costs me less money than the same amount of land in an estate".

No I didn't. I'm a freelancer. In the past month I had four clients bail on me at the last moment leaving me in a terrible financial bind. I can totally relate to that. But because I don't spend my stipend, each of my premium payments, which are spread out across the year, only costs a fraction of what it normally would. As I pointed out, if you save that L$300 stipend, your Premium account only costs about $12USD.

I'm still paying a lot less for land.

Theory? Well, I suppose you could call it a "theory" in the scientific sense. An explanation that can be repeatedly tested, in accordance with the scientific method, using a predefined protocol of observation and experiment, that has withstood rigorous scrutiny. You're saying "it would not save me money, it would just give me more money to spend" but then arguing since you'd choose to spend that money elsewhere it's....not money? And that you don't consider paying half was much to be saving any money because you don't consider paying half the price to be all that big a difference? Look, you can discount the facts if you like, but it's still a fact that I pay far less for my land than you pay for yours. No matter what gets posted in this thread, I am still paying less for my land, than you are paying for yours. Yes, if you buy all your land all at once it costs more up front, but I didn't do it that way. I don't think most people do. But even if you do pay it all up front, you're still saving money in the long term. Like I said to Solar, if you can't help yourself but spend that money then you won't save money, but that's entirely on you. And I feel for your friend, but as you yourself said, it happened because they forgot to cancel their account after being laid off. It's not really the risk you make it out to be. That said, there are certainly benefits to living in an estate. I'm not saying otherwise. I lived in The Wastelands and New Babbage for years and it was fantastic. I loved my time in those sims. If I could afford it, I'd still have my parcels there today. All I'm saying is that mainland is less expensive. A lot less expensive if you take advantage of the cost saving avenues that LL makes available.

No, I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that, unlike usual, there was some gem of reason in your disagreement. Apparently I was wrong!

What you are describing is literally giving LL a bunch of money, then getting some of that money back, doled out a little at a time, which you can spend as you see fit. Whether it be put towards reducing your land fees, or indulging your crushing addiction for overpriced prim hats, which otherwise you'd have to buy more L$ to do. I will grant you that LL does it this way because they want to entice you to spend that money in SL, keeping that money in the SL economy, and their pockets. At least, I think that's what you're getting at. And, if so, I'll even agree that point has merit. You get a little back at a time, never enough to cover a significant part of your tier, but enough to easily spend on some inworld items. It takes some willpower and foresight to do that, and not everyone will have either of those traits. If you can't handle money without spending it as soon as you get it, then the weekly stipend you get back from LL probably isn't going to help reduce your land costs. Again, I agree and I think that is a good point. But for those who can set money aside to apply towards their next premium payment, it is a substantial savings in land costs. One I've personally benefited from for years.

So, Solar, does that laugh reaction mean you disagree? It usually seems to. If so, what do you disagree with?

I always have it enabled. One reason I'm always pushing for content optimization is that in optimized sims I still get 30-60fps despite my computer being nearly 8 years old now. I also occasionally get messages from visitors to sims I've optimized myself, from people who get so much better performance in those sims that they're able to enjoy materials and shadows despite not being able to use those features in other sims.

A premium account costs $72 a year. But you get L$300 back in stipend every week. Add that up and you'll find that amounts to about $60 bucks a year you get back. So in reality a Premium account, and the accompanying 1126.4sq.m. of land only costs you $12 a year, or $1 a month. You're also not limited to one Premium account. If you create three Premium accounts that is $3 a month for 3379.2sq.m. 1024sq.m. by itself costs $7 a month. So if you went that route 4505sq.m. costs you only $8/mo. Half what you're currently paying for the same space in an estate, and you get a little bit more space to boot. As for the upfront fee, it depends on how long you have the land. If you keep it long enough, eventually the amount you save in tier every month will exceed the amount it cost you up front to buy the land. And remember, because of the 10% tier boost, as you increase the amount of land you pay for, on mainland, the more free land you get in addition to what you're paying for. You don't get that deal with a private estate. And that is how I make the statement that mainland is a cheaper alternative to private estates.

Only if you're willing to shell out for your own private region. Which is prohibitively expensive for most. You...need to have a Premium account to own mainland. And it's a cheaper alternative to a private estate regardless of how much land you want. In fact, because of the 10% bonus, the more land tier you want to pay for, the more tier you get for free on top of it. I think most people underestimate just how cheap mainland can be if you take advantage of all of the cost saving options. In addition, Linden Lab has simply not provided the alternative you're suggesting to those who want a private, isolated parcel with no neighbors. Such an option does not exist, at least not within the price range of most of LL's customers. Someone like me, who does not have the spare cash to toss at SL, is stuck between my mainland option, or no land at all whatsoever. So, there are multiple explanations. Even more if we add in the additional explanations I gave in my last post that you seem to have glossed over. That's a good question that I don't think people are giving due consideration. I think there are people in SL who do love the mainland, in concept if not in execution. As I pointed out above, the options and tools for landowners are severely underdeveloped and I think mainland could be thriving if not for that. But by that same token, I would say there are people who don't really care for mainland and if there was an alternative within the same price range I think a lot of people would jump to that. If LL provided both the much needed development of landowner options and tools and a price equivalent alternative to mainland for those who want more privacy, then I think there would be a lot more people owning land in general in SL.

I have to agree with SolarLegion on this. Look what you made me do! Are you happy?! But seriously, if it were possible to get tiny private estates of any size, for the same price of an equivalent mainland parcel, directly from LL with absolutely no difference other than the lack of neighbors then sure, you and animats would have a point. But that's not the case. Mainland is far cheaper, there's no covenant of extra rules to follow, and I have to reiterate, the problem isn't even always that one has neighbors, it's the lack of control one has, due entirely to a combination of underdeveloped land tools and a lack of customer service from LL, over the effect one's neighbors have on their mainland experience.

My thoughts on mainland: Mainland is cheaper than most people think: Yes, even at L$1/sq.m (which you can get by requesting LL to sell you abandoned land) the initial purchase cost can be prohibitive and maybe LL should look into changing that. HOWEVER, the actual tier is less than people think. First, you need to have a Premium account to own mainland in the first place (own, not rent). This means 1024sq.m. of your tier is already a part of your Premium account. You can cash out your Premium stipend to pay for your account, further reducing the cost. It covers most of it, leaving you paying something like $14 a year. That means owning 1024sq.m. costs you only a tiny more than $1 a month. You get 10% more mainland tier for free. So that means the above line isn't entirely correct because if you're just using the initial 1024 that comes with your Premium account, you're actually getting 1126.4sq.m. of land for a little over $1 a month. And that scales. So if you decide to add another 1024.sq.m. on top of what you get with Premium you're getting 2252.8sq.m. This is because you can create a group and contribute the tier on your account to the group for that 10% bonus. A lot of SL users, even many who own mainland, don't seem to know these things. I think both Premium accounts and mainland would be more popular if LL did more to point out the value. Presentation matters. Qie is spot on, making mainland areas look good would make buying that land more appealing to potential landowners. LL has never seemed to understand that presentation matters and that lack of understanding costs them money every day. LL, hire an Art Director if you don't already have one. If you do have one, what's the problem? Are you not listening to them? Have you crippled the position by not including your art department in matters of development? What's the deal here? On a related note: Stop making it possible for one bad neighbor to ruin an entire sim for everyone else. Seriously, LL. All it takes is one person to buy a tiny parcel of land in a sim and they can ruin the whole experience for everyone else. But it's never just one person, is it? Of course not. And it's not just one way in which people can ruin the experience for their neighbors, either. Lag. I've owned the same mainland spot for years, and it has always been a laggy sim. So laggy that when people come to visit me they often bring up the lag. I've filed trouble tickets with LL but I always get the same response: There's someone, or multiple people, in the sim using excessive resources. They say they'll bring it up to those responsible, but nothing ever changes. Ugly or disruptive mainland builds. You see it in this thread, people saying they want walls around their mainland parcels because of their neighbor's builds. And other people complaining that the walls themselves are a problem. Not only can a neighbor's build be unsightly, but it can easily be a source of performance loss, killing framerates just because of how unoptimized the content they choose to use is. I've suggested in the past that LL could introduce a feature allowing people to only have content on their parcel be rezzed for anyone on that parcel. It could even work both ways, so you could build whatever you like on your parcel and it wouldn't be rendered to anyone outside the parcel. It would certainly give people more privacy, but it would also make it easier for people to actually render their own mainland builds, without their neighbor's content hurting their framerates. I've presented this idea on the Jira and at viewer development meetings, where I've gotten two different responses from Oz Linden. At one time Oz said they felt this was a great idea and that they'd look into making something like that happen. Maybe not exactly like I described the feature, but with similar goals in mind. At another time Oz told me there is no way they would ever implement a feature like that because they don't want the mainland to become disconnected islands where no one socializes with their neighbors. (ETA: Not picking on Oz here, he's just usually presiding over the viewer dev meetings I've been to, and he's only saying what has always been LL's official policy on these matters.) So who knows where LL stands on the issue right now. What I will say is that LL seems to believe they can force people to socialize. You see it in the second statement I received from Oz, you also see it in LL's refusal to give SL users a "silent log-on" mode so you can log in without anyone being notified. You also see it in LL's negative reaction to any suggestion of offering smaller, individual user sized private land offerings, a suggestion to which they have at times given the same "we don't want the SL to become disconnected islands where no one socializes with their neighbors" response. To their awful "Recommendations" profile feature. Remember that? Where LL would take whatever interest tags you entered in your profile and use that to spam your email with a list of suggested random strangers they wanted you to send an unsolicited friend request to? And they'd throw your profile at other random strangers telling them to send you an unsolicited friend request? To this idea that you can force people to socialize, Linden Lab, I regretfully have to bring you a message from my people, the humans of Earth, whom I'm not sure you have any experience interacting with: You can't force people to socialize and expect it to turn out well. It does not work. It has never worked. It will never work. STOP TRYING TO FORCE PEOPLE TO SOCIALIZE. You're only making things worse. However, you can make it easier for people to choose to socialize, which would actually be beneficial to both you and your customers. And that brings me to my next thought on mainland: It should be a lot easier to relocate if you own mainland. Right now, it is an expensive hassle if you decide you don't like where your land in SL is and you want to move. For any of the reasons given above, or any other reasons for that matter. If someone decides they want to move to another part of the mainland, it is going to be a painful, expensive process. And it's probably going to take a long time to make it happen, too, depending on how much money they're willing to lose in the deal. In addition to mitigating some of the above problems with mainland, it would also encourage the development of communities. This is how you get people to socialize, Linden Lab, by making it easier for likeminded people to come together on mainland and create their own communities. There's literally thousands of people out there on the SL mainland who have no interest in interacting with the neighbors they're stuck with or, worse, actively hate some or all of their neighbors. There's thousands more who don't own mainland at all (either renting in private estates or just not giving LL any of their money at all) because of how easy it is to get stuck with bad neighbors. Not to mention all of the people who have at one time or another tried the mainland thing, had a bad experience because of bad neighbors, and just decided that as much as they liked the idea of having land in SL, the reality of it was just not worth the money. It's not that they're anti-social and hate people, it's just that due to the nature of mainland, they're stuck with the neighbors they have. So they build walls, or skyboxes, or sometimes erect deliberately awful builds to try and make neighbors they don't like leave. If Linden Lab made it easy for those people to relocate, many of those people will probably try to spread out to empty sims, and others would instead move to live closer to friends who also own mainland. And those friends will have friends of their own who will want to get in on that. Before you know it, you have a whole bunch of people with similar interests socializing together and working things out so they can integrate their builds in with one another into virtual towns and cities. If that had been possible since the beginning, the SL mainland would probably be a patchwork of thriving communities, similar to what you see in themed estates like Caledon and The Wastelands, rather than the walled off parcels of isolation like much of it is today.

It's been a long time since I bothered with the Jira. I was pretty active on it for years and it is fair to say a lot went ignored or dismissed out of hand in that time. A lot of the bugs and issues I reported then are still problems now. But again, I don't know if the same people handling the Jira now are the same people who were handling it back before I gave up on it. Gawd, I just realized how long it's been since I posted anything there. Well, if things have improved, that's great. Maybe I'll try and bump one of my old issues if it's still listed there.

You're absolutely right. Texture use and avatar attachments were both out of control pre-mesh. Mesh just made the problem worse. And mesh isn't the only problem, it's one of many. I don't expect LL to change based on any forum posts, but simply spreading information around, even if it's all been repeated over and over, does have some small impact. Every so often I get a message from someone wanting to know more about how this or that SL feature works, or how to better optimize their work. Some of them content creators who ended up changing their approach to content creation for the better. That's all I really hope for when posting.

I'm not certain what the relationship between LL and the Moles actually is. It seems to me that they're more like contractors than employees and I'm under the impression they have no more input on SL development than we do.

The complexity at least. LI doesn't take texture use into account at all, which is why it's exploded to ridiculous levels. LL needs to find a way to reign that in. I think the best way would be for texture use to affect LI. It's not a perfect way of dealing with it, but I think it will provide the right encouragement content creators need to watch their texture use more carefully. And before anyone worries this would mean lower res textures, I want to point out a few things. A lot of the mesh content I've seen in SL uses textures with lots of wasted pixel space, meaning most of that texture's memory isn't actually being used in the content you see on screen. Tighter UV wrapping would fix this without altering the appearance of the object at all. A lot of content creators use numerous high-res textures on small, barely noticeable objects in a scene. That drinking cup on the table should not be using as many textures as (sometimes more than) the table itself. We need to be smarter about how we do simple, common texture effects, like lights and shadows. LL should really provide a library of common textures like shadows and light effects so instead of every object in a scene having it's own separate, yet nearly identical, square floor/wall shadow, they could all be using the same single texture instead. I have to admit, that stung. Still, I think a lot of that has to do with communication at the lab. When I point out nasty graphics issues on the Jira, does someone in Patch's position ever see it? Or does it just get dismissed by whoever is cleaning up the Jira issues that day? And no individual can be everywhere and read every forum post at once. Not to mention turnover. I've been in SL since 2005, documenting issues since at least 2007. I can't imagine that when LL hires a new employee they tell them to scan 10+ years of forum posts and user blogs to see what needs to be fixed. In an ideal world LL would have an art team that, collectively, would know all this stuff we post about. As far as I know it's just Patch and the Moles right now and to get their attention we either need to show up at an office hour being held at noon on a work day, or wave our arms while shouting into the forum and hope the right Linden sees it.

Someone saw a post I'd made on the forum and had questions about it, so I went over to help and wound up seeing a lovely art installation they were in the middle of building. And all of it was done entirely in prims. So there are people still building in prims.

I think what they mean is that avatars should have had limits in place from the beginning, before people ran wild with unoptimized content and using models not intended for realtime rendering. I think we can all agree that yeah, they really should have. There's a lot LL could have, and should have done from the beginning. But they didn't. I'm not sure that the Lindens working on SL now were in their current positions, or maybe even working for LL at all, at the time LL was making all these bad decisions, so I don't want to lay these problems at their feet, but I agree something needs to be done now. This is why I advocate the introduction of simple, easy to use tools residents can use to get all the information they need, in a form that makes sense to them. Land Impact is not a bad system in itself. It's got a few things that need to be worked out, but the basic idea is fine. Land grants you X number of "Land Impact" points and everything you want to rez costs a certain number of points. Simple! Easy to understand. There is no reason a similar system couldn't exist for avatars. Add in tools to see the number of points or whatever an object costs, make it so creators are incentivized to provide that information on the marketplace, and make it so people can easily pinpoint attachments that are eating up a lot of their points. But giving the people tools to work with has to come before any limits are put in.

You're not entirely wrong. But there are ways LL can improve things moving forward. Like Coffee points out, old content can be grandfathered and new restrictions could only apply to content made going forward, or weighted to not have so much of a cost. And as I've pointed out, how LL introduces any new caps on avatars, and the steps they take leading up to that, can determine how much the average SL user is actually affected. It's something that needs to be approached with planning and consideration, but it can definitely be done without the worst case scenario you're talking about. Not doing anything, on the other hand, will make it so hardware requirements continue to rise, performance continues to fall, and SL's decline will be that much faster.

SL already does this for content you rez on land. You have a limited abount of Land Impact points to work with. LI cost of an object is based on its complexity. It has always done this for content you rez on land. Prior to LI, it was done with prim limits. I've been in SL since 2005 and it has always been this way. Are you suggesting no one except a tiny handful with professional skills creates content designed to be rezzed on land? No, of course not. Coffee isn't suggesting limits to strict only professionals could adhere to them, just basic common sense restrictions which anyone with the ability to make content in the first place will easily be able to work with. Including those who create just for fun. The only people who will truly be negatively affected by what Coffee is suggesting are those who purchase or steal content not created for SL, then import it to SL and try to pass it off as their own work, which would allow actual content creators of all skill levels to thrive a lot more.

I totally get why people have concerns concerns. I get why someone who never got heavily into game modding, or who never went to school for this sort of thing would hear "caps on avatar attachments" and imagine the worst. Without some sort of background in game art and design, none of what we're discussing here is obvious and I can see how someone hears talk about forcing content creators to "use fewer polygons and less texture memory" and imagine it means uglier content, or forcing them, personally, to give up an outfit they just bought last week. Hell, even as someone with a background in all of this, I'm concerned about how LL might go about implementing the necessary changes because even if they do the right thing for the right reasons, if they do it in the ham-fisted, thoughtless way they've demonstrated in the past (sometimes the very recent past), it could all blow up in our faces. I get that. The problem is Linden Lab themselves. They shouldn't be learning things like this from random users in their forums. They should have people on staff who both know all of this on a professional level, and who also have the experience in Second Life to understand how best to implement that knowledge. And so far they have never, not once, demonstrated this. Instead they've consistently demonstrated the opposite, even bragged about their lack of knowledge in this area, for about 15 years. Recently they've been saying things that could indicate that this has changed, and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt on that, but until they actually demonstrate that sort of change with action, I totally get how people expect the worst from them even if they understand that everything we're saying about content and optimization is correct.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and you'll find all creative people who want to take their skills to the fullest have learned to embrace certain types of limits. You wouldn't accuse artists who have worked hard to build their skills and creativity to a point where they can succeed in the gaming industry of being less creative because of the limits they understand enough to work with, would you? Or any other artistic profession, for that matter? Of course not!

I'm also going to end up in the naughty corner, because I've been advocating limits on avatar resource use for over a decade. HOWEVER, at the risk of repeating what other people may have already said, I do not believe LL should suddenly drop a restrictive Avatar resource cap on people overnight. There is a process LL should patiently follow to work this in without completely infuriating everyone by forcing them to trash much of the content they've paid for and still use regularly. LL needs to begin by providing documentation, explaining to content creators in no uncertain terms why they need to optimize. Why it's important. What to look for when creating content, and how best to create high quality content that doesn't kill people's framerates just as effectively as a griefer tool. LL needs to provide tools to content creators that allow them to more easily optimize their work. Tools that show people how much VRAM and how many triangles their content is. Tools in the form of dynamic tips that remind users about why the content their attempting to upload may not be suitable and suggestions on how to fix it. Etcetera. LL needs to provide a better jelly doll system that works on VRAM and triangles rather than ARC calculations. When people increase the cap or disable this feature they should get a short popup explaining the performance hit they will take as a result, so they know why the feature exists in the first place. LL needs to provide all users better tools to manage their resource use. It should be easy to inspect any object and see it's texture use and triangle count. It should be easy to inspect your own avatar and quickly identify content that is resource intensive, in terms of VRAM use, polygons AND script use. Being able to see this information easily will help people make more informed decisions. LL needs to make it so you can examine an object and see every LOD, both in numbers and visually. So people can avoid content that falls apart due to poorly set up LOD. LL needs to fix LI calculations so that people aren't punished for properly utilizing LOD. LL needs to communicate the importance of optimization to the SL userbase at large. Login screens, teleport screens, etcetera can all be used to provide people with useful information on a regular basis. LL needs to overhaul the marketplace, providing sections to list an item's VRAM use, triangle count, see various LOD levels, and LL needs to incentivize sellers to utilize these features, so that their customers can make better purchasing decisions. LL needs to work with content creators, telling them these caps are coming but also showing them how to reduce the cost of the content they've already made, and all future content. A lot of, maybe even most, existing SL content can be greatly reduced in resource cost through relatively simple fixes, LL needs to make content creators aware of that. Maybe a part of the marketplace overhaul could be the addition of redelivery and update delivery features, so when creators update existing content, their customers can get those updates easily. LL needs to announce any sort of Avatar resource caps well ahead of their actual enforcement. I'm talking at least a year! Maybe even two years, and this is AFTER LL has done all of the above which will probably take them a couple of years to get through. When they announce this they should also point out that the tools they've been providing all this time show people how much of the coming caps objects use. LL should also display the new caps at this time, even if they're not enforced, so people can see if they are over. Again, the tools LL should be providing by this time should help people identify problem items. However, if LL has done all of the above first, most people should be relieved to find they are already under the coming caps, without having to have done anything themselves beyond replacing old items with updates as they're released, and simply buying new content as they normally would. If LL takes the long view on this, they can introduce limitations on avatar resource use without wholly disrupting the SL community, or inciting any riots. There will still be grumbling, to be sure, but LL can mitigate the worst of it through patience and planning.

I still regularly use prims. Mostly boxes. Lots of mesh, mostly mesh, but sometimes all you need is a couple of prims to achieve what you're going for.