OSgrid's plan to reset everyone's inventories to fix its asset server; CW: long (over 5,300 characters), quote-post
One of the worst things that can happen in an
OpenSim grid, except its complete and permanent shutdown, is the inventories of all avatars being wiped clean. It has happened in Metropolis, I think, in 2019. Many of those who were around back then decided to move away to another grid that promised to be more reliable. Those who were AWOL returned later, just to find their inventories completely empty and their avatars consisting of only the white, textureless system body. In either case, their inventories didn't even contain the "building blocks" for standard Ruth, and when they returned, a blank skin, a blank shape, blank hair and blank eyes had to be created on the spot.
Except for what they had installed in-world, if anything, they had to start over from scratch. Not exactly few decided to do so on another grid, basically starting Metropolis' shrinking process.
Now, Metropolis was one of the oldest grids, launched in 2008. When it was shut down in 2022, it was the fourth-oldest grid. For a while, it even used to be bigger than OSgrid. But this age also meant it was dragging around a whole lot of old assets that were no longer in use.
OSgrid is even older. Except for maybe the odd impromptu private test grid to get recently-created OpenSim running, it has always been the oldest grid. It was launched in 2007, so it's a whopping 17 years old now. Also, for most of the time, it has been the biggest grid and basically the "lighthouse instance" of OpenSim where almost all newbies ended up.
In other words, a whole lot of people contributed to the filling of what has been one of the most troubled asset servers in OpenSim for years already. The admins had tried quite a few things over the last few years to improve the situation, only to worsen it. Assets in inventories were broken or missing altogether. Announcements that the situation would normalise in a few months (with an increasing number of months estimated) never came to pass.
What was identified as a major issue are assets that don't exist in-world, and that are broken or faulty to begin with. Some may only exist on the asset server, but others linger in the inventories of avatars, many of which haven't been used in years. A lot of these were stolen from Second Life and haphazardly imported, or they broke upon export already.
So they decided to take this last resort and reset all inventories to get rid of broken content. The announcement came yesterday.
But as it seems, they've received a whole lot of criticism. They may also have been reminded that the total inventory reset with everyone losing everything that wasn't rezzed in-world was the beginning of the end of the once-mighty Metropolis Metaversum. Apparently, the OSgrid admins all pack lightly, and they seem not to be able to estimate how much the still active avatars would lose and have to save or reconstruct.
Sure, it's possible to save your entire OSgrid inventory as an IAR. But that's only possible if you have land, if you have at least one sim attached to OSgrid. So this could also have been seen as a ploy to get those who don't have land yet to host and attach sims so that OSgrid can outgrow the
Wolf Territories Grid again and reclaim its spot as the biggest grid on the Hypergrid. I mean, it's commonly known that OSgrid doesn't take Lbsa Plaza not being the top spot on
OpenSimWorld either. Besides, many simply don't have what it takes to host your own sim, not even temporarily.
And so Dan Banner, one of the admins, changed the asset reset announcement. The OSgrid team had understood how bad an idea it actually is to purge all assets that aren't rezzed in-world and delete everything from everyone's inventories, actually including payware from commercial grids. It would drive people away from OSgrid even faster than the current situation which mostly has them create backup avatars elsewhere.
It would not only drive them away from OSgrid, but over to commercial competitors like
Kitely or Wolf Territories which not only aren't younger than OSgrid, but which have their own powerful asset servers and actually take good care of them. Especially the Wolf Territories Grid comes with the advantage of being only three years old and never having been used as a gateway for mass-importing tons of copybotted content. Also, these commercial grids have stable sources of income in the shape of land rentals. OSgrid doesn't have land rentals at all; all sims that aren't official are hosted by their users and attached for free. So OSgrid only makes money from donations and an annual in-world auction.
And indeed, @
Lone Wolf has
just reported that 87 sims were just recently moved to Wolf Territories via OAR export and import. This greatly reeks of a beginning OSgrid exodus.
This must have caused a change of mind among the OSgrid admins. They still consider a reset, but now they want to try to restore the assets in people's inventories afterwards. That's all we know now.
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