Further, the idea that they never conceived as to how OS sims would be used is a blatant fallacy – 1875 prims were always more than enough for “landscape and water sims”, so the rise to 3750 could be seen as nothing else but a tacit approval to build-out on such sims. In our case, at least 3 Linden technical support people have visited the sim and never once raised concerns over the use (for the record, the sim is largely landscape but with 3 homes on it).

My own view is, and remains that the whole “67% tier hike” announcement of the 28th Oct was a deliberate red herring put out by J. Linden et al, rather than a “PR blunder”. Why? simply because it created a storm of protest that opened the door to LL announcing this kind of “compromise” deal. I’ve little doubt that a tiered offering of sim types was already on the cards within LL, but they knew that if they simply came out with it in an accouncement, there would be the same storm of protest & ultimately, they’d be left with nowhere to run.

Instead, people were enraged by the proposed “one bite hike” of 67%, letting LL sit back and watch the furore, before issues their “comprimise” deal, getting precisely what they wanted while simultaneously fooling people into believing they had somehow “won” on the issue to a greater or lesser degree.

But when you look at it, overall, LL have precisely what they always intended and tenants (as it is clear they consider us to be neither “residents” nor “customers”) are the worse off.

As to OpenLife – or more correctly OpenLifeGrid, yes there are issues; editing your avatar the first time is a little convoluted (create a shape in you Inventory, wear it THEN edit it, rather than trying to edit the default shape); search is sadly lacking; various Friends functions are lacking, etc., – BUT, for an open source project that is less than a year old, OLG has, in many ways reached the small point of evolution SL reached after 3 years of development.

Sure, OLG is growing off the back of SL in this regard (and one could argue that as such, some of the outstanding tech issues should have been resolved) BUT, it is now supported by a growing band of hard-working individuals around the globe and is attracting serious financial support. With FULL private sims (“private clusters”) having just launched for LESS than the price of SL’s CURRENT OS sim offering, an in-world currency ready to launch, plus Avatar 2.0 just over the horizon, OLG does have a lot to offer people. However, to be fair, it does need to mature a *little* more before it is ready for the average SL user….and I do have private concerns over sim performance: yes, it is great having 45K prims per sim….but that’s potentially a lot of textures to load if they are using UDP (like SL) rather than http – and that could be a performance issue right there when people start using OLG “in anger”, so to speak.

I’ve had an account with OLG for some 4-5 months now, and the changes have been amazing. In another 4-6 months, it may well be ready for a formal “jump” from SL, loss of inventory notwithstanding, but not right now.

Vint had a good overview, in her blog, yesterday.

I understand this solution as “better” than the one before, and understand all this together as one of the worse PR moments of Linden Lab. Because of that i’m sad too about the places we will lost and for “some” openspace owners (not about the ones who were overusing them placing 5400 prims using temp rezzers).

@ Eric: You are ALWAYS welcome to Ursa Major (you know it) and i think is very interesting your project at Open Life Grid (yesterday was trying to make my avatar look good… and was not easy ).

Still, there will be residents who won’t be able to afford the new “Homestead” type sims when they are 125 $, and a lot of beautiful places will still be lost.
But I know it is impossible to please everybody, so I still see this as good progress in management.

I do worry about 1 thing however: what if LL still notices too much stress is on their servers from people who (keep) not using the sim type as it is intended?