2009 – change for the better?

I’ve been in talks with Spin Martin for some time about his sale of Saijo City. Some time amidst all the hubbub of the Openspace debacle (though I’m sure mostly unrelated), Spin piped up in a friends conference chat and said he wanted to sell Saijo.

Why?

Mostly because he was fed up with the limitations of SL as a platform for his Saijo concepts, and that it was pretty much time to move on. (Spin, if you’re reading this, feel free to correct me, these were just the impressions I got).

In any case, I’d been stressed out about the whole fee increase, and was really put off by being asked basically to put up with a 66% price increase for no visible improvements. In fact, LL is proposing limits on agents per Homestead as well as scripting limits.

It’s true that I really don’t care about the script limits for the most part, and the only times Sylvan hits over 20 agents are Sundays when either Todd or Erehwon DJ (and even that is variable, as we only really hold these things for fun and to be with friends on a weekly bass). BUT. the whole thing about paying $50 USD more a month for that with no actual product improvements had really been getting to me.

I mean – really. Keep in mind here, that most people who own Openspace Sims are probably doing so through third parties… and paying an extra premium to do so. To begin with, I was already paying an extra $20/mo on top of the usual $75. Sticking on with a ‘Homestead’ would mean paying just abut $50 short of a full class 4 region. For the privilege of NOTHING MORE than fewer people able to access the sim, limited scripts, and absolutely no change in available prims.

So i guess this is really a roundabout way to say that I had a chat with Spin and we’ve arranged for some changes in the near future.

I spent most of yesterday tearing down the bulk of my stuff at Sylvan, which has already reverted in ownership to Azure Islands. It was a pretty painful experience, given the time, effort and memories put in, but I really hope it is for the better. Sylvan isn’t going away entirely… in fact it will probably come back with renewed growth for 2009.

But it’s always difficult to start again from the ground up, and doubly so when it feels like I was forced in to making the decisions I made like a subject of Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning. A small part of me wonders when the time will come when I just can’t take it anymore and leave entirely. I really hope that time doesn’t come… or when it does, it comes on better terms than this.