Your2ndPlace

The latest Second Life knowledge base article of the week available, How can I get more prims on my land?, I bit back on commenting on the announcement. I was going to write that it boils down to the fact that if you want more prims, you need to pay more money. It is that simple. The knowledge base article does point out that there are ways to allow more prims on plots of land - but as it also points out, that means you still only have the same amount of prims in a simulator. In other words, if you want to give people twice as many prims, you need to have half of the land empty.

Not really rocket science.

Some of the comments are good, but I noticed a disturbing trend of what I think of as 'Prim Welfare'. The sad truth of the matter is that people go out, buy or rent plots of land and then either buy things or build things with, quite simply, too many prims. Rather than get creative and live within the prim limits or simply pay for more land, they gripe - they yell, they complain, they jump up and down and perhaps even cry. Lots of energy wasted there.

It is a matter of budgeting one's prims. If you get 512m², you have 117 prims. This should be a hint and a half that one should not get a house over 50 prims, so that you have 67 prims to furnish with. Yes, I know, you avatar needs the toilet and the kitchen - what goes in must come out, and those byte buffets are quite filling these days - so budget for your toilet and kitchen. That super 117 prim bed? You might want to just leave the house out of it and simply stick the bed in the open and convince your neighbors to build walls for you.

I know, I'm ranting a little - but the whining gets really old. Most people start with 512m² plots and quickly outgrow them. They move up to 1024m² plots and more. If that isn't enough, they get more - and the more prim-conscious folks come to a nice even balance of the number of prims that they have for the amount of money that they pay.

Do I think prim limits should be increased? I don't know anyone other than Linden Lab who would turn that down, but let's be serious: More prims creates more resources a server must deal with. Do people really need that many prims? Perhaps for island-sized builds, yes.

The average person? Maybe. Someone mentioned going from 15,000 prims/island to 18,000 prims/island. It is really 14,976 prims per island, but lets run with the 18,000 prims on an island. There are 65,536 m² on an normal sim. This is 128 of the 512m2 plots. That comes up to 140 prims per 512m² plot. 23 more prims? All this ruckus for 23 more prims? If you think you can do a lot with 23 prims, you should be able to do a lot more with 117.

It will never end. Everyone wants Prim Welfare to be started. Everyone thinks that prim limits are directly related to server limits (and no one can nail down what a Class 'X' server is anyway), but it probably isn't. Its probably more to do with... software limits. Database limits. Response times.

Should we have more prims? I don't know. What I do know is that if you only want to spend $X, then you might want to save prims by wearing your house. Because those prims count on a server's load too.

Yes, I'd love to hear LL raise their prim limits, but come on...

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