It's the bottom of the ninth... two men out... and... JACK THROWS A BOMB INTO THE CROWD.

The Openspace program appears to be a victim of its own success:

For those that don’t know, an Openspace is a type of private island that we made available for light use countryside or ocean. We figured that if Governor Linden can have ocean and green spaces, we should let private estate owners do the same. But Openspaces differ from normal regions in one particularly significant way; unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU (so 16 on a quad core machine), sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).

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.

Alright, alright... so Harbour isn't exactly a vast stretch of empty water, but it's not a 100 avatar sucky-sucky hotspot for 10,000 ARC hermaphrodite robotic squidmonkeys from Botswana, either.

*sigh*

So you know what's coming next:

We will increase the monthly maintenance fee from USD$75 to USD$125 per month. This price increase will apply to all owners of Openspaces on January 1st as well as new purchases after that date. There will be no grandfathering of Openspace maintenance pricing.

For anyone owning class 4 Openspaces on January 1st, they will be upgraded to class 5 by end of January, to further improve the experience people have on those regions.

At the same time, we will be increasing the upfront fee for brand new Openspaces from USD$250 to USD$375.

This reminds me of a line by George Carlin: "We're doing something about inflation... we're raising our prices!"

Yeah yeah yeah... perfect example of Tragedy of the Commons... Marketing sells something cheap, no hard limits are imposed on the product, the clever users look at the warnings and crumple them up, and sthat crews over the support and engineering infrastructure for a while until somebody screams STOP! which ends up for whiplash for the customers.

Seen it from the backend with the RL job, and it's never pretty, so I can understand where it's coming from.

Still... this should have been predicted that people would use them for something other than just water and filler land. Second Life is all about people maximizing the utility of resources available... we're clever little monkeys, you know.

And, yes, it also should have been seen as a threat to crashing Mainland sales.(even with free advertising for both Bay City and Nautilus at the loader screens, eh.)

Oh well.

Discussion should be amusing, and Prokofy must be howling with laughter.

Checking... and... eh... time for Coffee For Prokofy to savor the moment.

Touche, mon capitain.

I guess it's time for me to figure out where Harbour is headed.

Checking comments from post and forums... Desperado's looking like it's toast... Bloggers are in an uproar in the group chat...

I have a feeling that this is going to be another case of LL tossing a bomb, then pulling back a bit from the announcement because it was "communicated badly." Watch for the numbers to shift slightly to $110 or $100.

If we fall over ourselves thanking them for giving us heart attacks and then relenting slightly, I guess that's a case of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Rav and Gospeed lament the threat to sailing and flying this change will be.

I stand corrected.