March 8th 2008, the skies darkened, dark forces were at work, Jack Linden posted a blog entitled: Announcing changes to the Openspace product. This would be a post that would ultimately lead to bloody battles in the forums and blog comments, it would pit resident against resident, Linden against Linden, resident against Linden, it would get ugly, but initially everything looked sunny as Jack (AKA The Land King) made the announcement:
“An Openspace is a type of private island intended for light use countryside or ocean. Unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU, sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).
Openspaces will no longer have to be purchased in sets of four at a time, as they have been so far. They can be bought singly, for a setup fee of USD$415 followed by a fee of USD$75 per month.
All other island services are therefore available for single Openspace regions, at the usual region rates, and Openspaces will no longer have to be placed together on the grid, they can be placed apart.”
Somewhere someone sniggered “This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Jack, and will soon see the end of the rebellion.”
The Better Announcement
Another post from Jack appeared on April 10th : Details on the Q2 2008 Island Price Change. In this post Jack informed us that the setup fee for an openspace would be reduced from USD$415 to USD$250. Many people cheered, others scratched their beards and wondered what was going on. However how could we raise our concerns when there were so many happy campers, protest would be futile as someone mused: “What are we going to do? We’ll be sent to the spice mines of Kessel and smashed into who knows what.”
Continue reading “Land Wars Episode IV – No Hope (AKA Five Years On From The Openspace Fiasco)”
