Openspace Pricing and Policy Changes – Prices To Rise

As reported in the Official Blog:

“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.

Effective Immediately

We will no longer allow the Owner of an Openspace to be changed to a different resident than the Payor. Initially we will not enforce this change on Openspaces where the Payor and Owner are already different but in those cases the only change allowed will be to set the Owner back to the Payor. This doesn’t affect the parcel level rentals, this is just focussed on the whole region rental of Openspaces.

We will no longer offer an educational or non-profit discount for new Openspaces. As mentioned earlier, this is due to the increased back end resource required for us to support Openspaces in the way that they are now being used. For the small number of Educators that already have Openspaces, we will be contacting you directly to discuss this change.

Next, we will be making changes to the viewer that enable residents to know precisely what type of land or region they are on so that the land market remains as fair and easy to understand as possible. So expect to see changes that much more clearly display to residents whether they are on Linden Mainland or Private Estate, whether it is a Normal region or Openspace and what that means. This will affect various aspects of the Viewer including the inworld Search along with the About Land and Buy Land screens. Making Land easier to understand will benefit everyone, especially new users looking to step onto the property ladder for the first time.

Lastly we will begin to proactively discuss overloaded Openspaces with their owners. This is important because as with abuse of region resources, a heavily overloaded Openspace can adversely affect other Openspaces sharing the same machine which is clearly unfair to residents who are using them responsibly. We have listened to your feedback on this, and agree that we need to make changes to better support our Openspace users by actively working to keep the performance levels as high as possible. We will also provide some detailed guidance about what ‘overuse’ looks like and how to prevent it.

So to recap:

Openspace prices and fees change on the 1st January with no grandfathering.
Class 4 Openspaces will be upgraded to class 5 in January.
Educator discount is no longer available for Openspaces.
No Owner switching for Openspaces unless it’s a full transfer of Payor.
More proactive education by support staff to prevent unfair resource use by Openspace regions.
We’re sure there will be many of you with questions and concerns on the back of this announcement. As previously, there will shortly be a forum created specifically for discussion of these changes so please head over here if you wish to provide feedback. In addition, if you need a more personal dialogue about this post, please contact support as usual. ”

Source – http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/27/openspace-pricing-and-policy-changes/

I wish to protest this increase and loss of benefit to non profits and education!

This is a poor time for such a change with so many facing financial difficulties. Many businesses and individuals rely on open spaces currently due to inability to purchase the more expensive mainland or islands. This increase will cause Linden Labs a huge loss of business and the people responsible should seriously re-evaluate this situation.

I encourage others to vote on this issue if they feel the same and I thank the Lindens for thier time and understanding as to why this upsets myself and others.

Thank you.

Vote here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1776