LL Openspace Pricing & Policy Change

Just when you thought you had it all....
...LL Openspace Pricing & Policy change:

Beginning 1st January 2009

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.

Link to the official blog entry.

-----------------

Uhmm let me think... this means 4 openspace sims will cost me more than 1 full prim sim in the future. Also means LL will really ask 2000L$ monthly rent for a quad core server with 16 openspace sims on them. At the same time it is said that the current sims are "over used" and they are creating a to "heavy load on the LL assets server".

Right, for one the assets server has been overloaded since it was created cause it is quite bugged. One reason transactions and deliveries keep failing as often as they do in SL. This was already a issue well before OS sims have been sold as stand-alones.

2nd. Rather than reducing the total number of OS sims on one sevrer from 16 to something like 12, which would reduce server load by 30%, LL turns around asking 125$ monthly rent for a OS sim with 3750 prims. This is a increase in monthly sim rental of 67%. This also means that now, after a lot of the large land barons purchased thousands of OS sims, LL turns around and let's this people hang in the air in a attempt to increase the land sale on LL's very own mainland again. 4 OS sims would than cost the owner 500US$ / month were a full simulator is only priced at 295US$.

LL also stated in their blog post, that one reason for the policy change would be... over usage of openspace sims. Funny how anybody would have thought, that after LL increased the total prim number of a OS sim to 3750, anybody would really use such a sim for "open water", sailing or other "low performance usage". Of course people use it to live there or run theri business of such a OS sim. Sorry LL but all your blog post (and IM logs with residents) show is that mainland sales are down, land barons making 25-50$ profit from each OS sim, and you LL.. you want your share of your cake...Poor job LL... but nothing new...