I am not going to rant about Linden's last raising of the OpenSpace prices. Because this time, it's not about running the biz wisely nor respecting the customers. It's about friends leaving second life or retreating because they cannot afford (or don't want to pay too much for) virtual land anymore. This time it's personal.

By Sigmund Leominster, News Editor

A recent blog post by Jack Linden announcing price changes for the owners of Openspace sims is causing anger and outrage among some Second Life™ residents. According to him, the reason for needing to raise prices is because “…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.”

A lot of different blogs, a lot of comments on the openspace rate increase. And so many of them are outraged and blaming LL for their use of openspace sims as residential or business locations based on the fact that LL double the prim quota on openspaces. “Clearly they MUST have wanted me to use this for my booming business!” goes the argument.

Normally I’m not pretty fond of conspiracy theories, but in this case, the word emails come from somebody I - virtually - trust. Would I hand over my RL bank account access to him/her? No, probably not. But will I take that person’s word for it when he says Linden Lab is err.. gaming us? Yes. At least enough to check this out and hear with the broader community what they think. And so the story goes… err, you want pictures first? Ok, here they come:

A while ago Linden Lab - through Jack Linden - hired virtual world content developers to employ at ‘The Linden Department of Public Works’. They build roads and such on Linden Lab demand. One of the things they were asked to build was a space station, a business environment and pretty harbour on Linden Lab owned void sims Raymond-1, Raymond-2, Raymond-3 and Raymond-4 which is still under development.

Why? ‘Linden Lab was planning 4 openspace builds which would be sold along with new void sim orders. Builds which go into thousands of prims. That proves that they never intended Openspaces to be just empty land, like they’re saying at the moment, basically.‘ I also understand ‘that the script count is much higher than Jack Linden is telling residents it should be.‘

If this is true, Linden Lab’s reasoning on why they are almost doubling openspace tier rates is a blatant lie, as they envisioned ‘heavy use’ for voids themselves. This would also explain them ‘upping’ the prim count to 3750. Oh, did you notice the table has enough chairs to seat 20 avatars? The ‘Raymond Conspiracy Theory’ gives us every right to protest Linden Lab’s new pricing policy on openspace sims?

To finish this off, a quote from Jack Linden: ‘We believe in Openspaces as a product, but the pricing just wasn’t in line with how they are now being used. Just to be clear, this isn’t a small minority of Openspaces either, as a general rule they are much more heavily loaded than, for example, the equivalent Linden voids.‘