Linden Lab once again has stepped into the virtual poop with it’s price increase for Open Space sims announcement on Oct 29.  Since then, the few remaining land owners of Second Life, estimated to be less that 85,000 are in an up roar.  And rightfully so.

As an owner of both a regular sim (Los Arboles) and an Open Space sim, I was shocked to see that my montly open space would go from $75 to $125 per month.  Considering I am still only paying $195 for my regular sim, this is increase makes no sense.

From a business perspective, this completely negates Meta Magic Business model that we have been pushing for the last three months.

Later today, Linden Lab CEO M (Mark Kingdon) is expected to make a further announcement.

This is such a typical Linden Lab mistake.  Lets take the one part of our business that actually is doing well, as fuck it up.

So Openspaces have been incredibly popular as a perk for estate owners, but sadly there is a twist. Unfortunately most of the Openspaces are being used for much more than light use.  Based on analysis performed in August and September, Openspaces are being used about twice as much as we expected, in other words being loaded with double the content/avatar load than we’d expect for a region that is supposed to be light use.

Rather than being employed as open areas like ocean with little or no content and traffic, the majority are being rented out to residents looking for a place to live. Because they were never intended for that level of load this is causing problems. For some people this has meant a less than great experience with performance fluctuations. The overuse of Openspaces has also put additional strain on some of our network and database infrastructure at a much higher ratio than is reflected in the current pricing. So higher traffic to and from the servers along with heavier demands on the asset server, both of which impact the overall experience people have inworld.