ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A METAVERSE. PHILIP SAW IT, AND SAID "THIS IS GOOD, BUT BIGGER IS BETTER."

Philip decided that SL should be free to all, and created the BASIC account. Newbies began arriving in droves, and Philip saw this, and said: "This is good."

I joined SL as a BASIC account soon after those were introduced, in late September 2005; all you needed to sign up for an SL account was a credit/debit card (which was supposed to be proof that the person behind the avatar was at least 18 years old -- I won't discuss the warped logic of that assumption here).

Almost immediately, SL was overrun with newbie "residents", most of whom spent alot of time gambling, haunting the money trees, competing in "best in... " contests at various dance clubs, and camping (which had just been invented, as well). The number of newbies, all of whom immediately collected huge inventories of freebies as well as things other residents were selling (clothes, hair, cars, helicopters, weapons, etc), soon overwhelmed the capacity of LL's asset servers, EVERY ITEM ADDED TO ANYONE'S INVENTORY ALSO BEING ADDED TO THE LOAD ON THE ASSET SERVERS.

Alot of these newbies came over from various GAMERZ sites, and immediately decided that since SL wasn't set up for their bang-bang games, they'd inflict their pissiness on everyone around them, whether the target was in a "weapons/damage allowed" area or not. The first serious griefing attack that attacked the grid itself took SL down completely in late October 2005.

Many BASIC accounts upgraded to PREMIUM and became landowners, as I did; some of those sold their land to developers (like Anshe Chung) or bought their neighbors' FIRST LAND lots, and put bigger building on the expanded lots. Bigger lots means more prims, and any object that exists on a land lot also must exist (or have existed, at one time) in someone's inventory.

Frin'stance: the Damani prefab villa (32 prims), is a fairly small house, suitable for a FL lot of 512sm; to furnish that house fairly nicely (see photos on my AVALON GALLERIA page), I used almost 400 prims (which included the house prims) but which did NOT include landscaping (apart from 2 potted trees on the front porch and about 5 "toy" trees, each of which were 2 prims. Most of my furnishings, including the potted plants, were fairly low-prim items. I could easily have used 1000 prims to decorate that house, with some very well-done furniture that was very high-prim. I thought the designs were great, but the prims they took up make it not worth the cost either in Lindens or in available prims on my land. If I'd had a decent-sized lot for the house, the landscaping would have added another 300+ prims, including trees, ferns, rocks, water fountains, temp-on-rez butterflies, pathways, outdoor furniture, and lighting. I wondered, when I was a BRAND-NEW newbie, why there were so many nice houses surrounded by vast expanses of empty land (except for 1-prim Linden trees and Linden ferns); the reason is that those nice houses use up all the prims of at least half a sim, all by themselves!

The Damani villa I owned and lived in for all of a month at Project Quickstart was COPY-ENABLED: a copy remained in your inventory in case you tried to do something like change the doors or the wall texture, and messed it up -- then all you had to do was delete your messed-up copy, and rez a new copy out of your inventory. However, just remember: each item, such as a 32-prim house, which is copied from your inventory into SL has just added to the asset server load, and EVERY SINGLE ITEM SET WITH A "COPY-ENABLED" PERM ADDS MULTIPLE COPIES (sometimes hundreds or thousands of copies, if it is a freebie or a popular item that is sold to alot of residents, each copy containing the same number of prims as the original) TO THE SERVER LOAD.

It takes time for subscribers to decide to start deleting freebie junk, and to sort what they rarely use into storage of some kind (usually a box very much like the boxes the freebies come in -- it's a handy way of reducing 100 items to 1 item. This method can cut one's inventory drastically, but it takes alot of time, and you can't easily find something you need without going through the CONTESTS listing of every single box, unless you put only SHIRTS in one box (and name it as SHIRTS), etc. And you still have the sorting prims/objects in your inventory, so while you may go down from 30k items to 5k, there are still alot of items you could cull from that total, given a good inventory control/filehandling protocol.

I remember reading a post in one of the Linden forums (before they shut down most of the ones really used by residents) by a sim owner, who was doing something to do with sim management and noticed a sudden, drastic increase in the number of scripts active in his sim, and a simultaneously sudden slowdown in the framerate of the sim. Tracking down a newbie chick (I think he said she was less than 2 wks old, SL-time, which would qualify her for the title of 'CHICKLET', I presume) who'd just TP'd into the sim, he noted that she was wearing various apparel and attachments that included a truly amazing number of scripts.

Note the comment by Sansarya Caligari (discussing how it feels to log in as an alt): " I felt like I was in strange skin, even though my alt has my same shape, skin, hair, and some of the same inventory items that Sansarya has (though I do have to say what a difference it is performance-wise to own only 1,667 items as opposed to 34,559 items, sheesh!)."