I dream of wide open spaces

The Open Space announcement from LL was...disappointing. It's the right decision done in totally the wrong way, basically. Yes, limitations needed to be added to the existing, and obviously there needed to be another tier, in between the two.

But this....is verging on ridiculous. To go from 3750 to 750, for the same price, is just... Really, did they think this was going to make anyone happy? And then, the new Homesteads, still to be stacked in 4 (oh, _maybe_ we'll consider 3), since the stacks of the Open Spaces were what they were stating as the problem?

Really now. This is just another way to get people to leave. God knows, I'm considering it (I won't, of course. At least, not until my friends do. But I have signed up for another grid in the meantime, but they're a ways away from being a real threat....but eventually, they will be).

Instead, what I think they SHOULD have done, is make Open Spaces what they were meant to be, what they were SOLD as: 3750 prims. However, add in the hard limits to avatars and scripts to ensure they aren't "abused". Then a midway sim that's stacked in 2, rather than 4, that's more of a half sim, again with limits that are somewhat less restrictive than Open Space. I fear this is a case where they saw all the money they "could" have been making by charging more for the minisims, and got too greedy. There were problems that they should have seen coming (seriously. I saw them coming and I'm not on the damn technical staff and don't know much about their load capacity), and could easily deal with, since they run the whole system.

There's a huge amount of art and beauty that will soon be dead because of the change: places that could have been worked as legit Open Space sims with the limits placed upon them, but which need the higher prim limits (750? That won't go anywhere). A lot of people were able to justify the price tag for sims that served little purpose other than to be a playground of beauty, and SL NEEDS more of that.

I'm sad I won't see them all before they go- I will only see a small fraction of them.