On October 27th, Jack Linden announced Openspace Pricing and Policy Changes on the official blog of Second Life, saying:

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

This consistutes an increase of 67% and 150% in tiers, which is quite unreasonable, particularly at a time of a global financial crisis.

They claim that they raise tiers because Openspace sims have been abused and the extra work the support team has to put into them is not reflected in the price. They claim that:

Openspaces are offered to allow Estate owners to create open ocean or land in and around their Regions in the same way that the Linden mainland does.

“In and around”? Perhaps this was true before March 2009, when Openspaces were bought in packs of 4, had to be pegged to a full sim and they carried 1875 prims only. After March 2009, Linden Labs not only doubled the prims to 3750 per Openspace, but they started selling them one at a time and the Openspaces could be placed anywhere on the grid as stand-alone regions. Who in their right mind would create an “open ocean” in the middle of nowhere and for what purpose? What would be the use of 3750 prims in the open ocean?

There is no doubt that some of the Openspace sims have been abused, resulting in heavy overload. There is also no doubt that these sims are very few. Do you know how many sims there are currently in Second Life? 32000 sims! Have you noticed the average number of users online? It varies from 35000 to 75000. That’s an average of 55000 users online. And that is less than 2 users per sim!

Indeed Second Life is for the most part an inhabited place, yet Linden Labs want us to believe that Openspaces attract all the traffic overloading the servers. How else could they justify the unbelievable raise of 67-150%? Who are they trying to fool?

And how will the raised tiers solve the problem of overloaded Openspaces? If you have read already their blog post, they do not offer any improvements at all; they will start charging significantly more for the same features.

Since nothing is final yet, let them hear your voice. File tickets and post on the forums, stating your objection. On our part, we attend every meeting with Linden Labs suggesting solutions and protecting the rights of our residents and Wonderland’s.