Bring back P2P teleport and Auto Fly

LL clearly knows there is good reason not to bring back P2P or they would have done it in 1.7. They know the stats of lag etc in real time. They could easily do it, as they had the function before, in the very old version.

The biggest issue against P2P is what it will do to the value of telehub land. It's all about the money. Things like what it will do to the artificial zoning created, although somewhat valid, are secondary at best.

HP

I agree that killing hubs will make all land equal in value if all other things are equal. So yes, money can be an issue. Those guys who bought lots of land far from hubs hoping to cash in when the hubs are killed would be very happy if it happens. And those who spent a small fortune to buy land near hubs would be destroyed.

Anyone who bought land not considering the location of hubs wouldn't be affected, that would be no one except some newbies. Everyone considers location of hubs when buying. I guess the fair thing should LL decide to change, they should refund everyone their money for land purchases and let them buy the land back at fair market value.

That would help those who spend thousands of real dollars on hub land, and take away the advantage of those who bought far from hubs to make a huge profit.

It's not merely "can be an issue", it is nearly the entire issue.

HP

Why Not Make It So We Can Have Two Homes! I Have A Casino That I Help Run And Another Piece Of Land I Hate Having To Fly To One Or The Other

Now that's an idea...

Why can't LL give us, say, 5 or 10 'favorite' spots that we can TP directly into? That way there's some P2P capability, and it would still preserve the value of telehubs.

Asking me to support my pov with evidence doesn't do anything toward supporting yours. I suppose we could tit-for-tat this to death and detract from the point of, and only valid argument for, p2p which is that it allows us to travel, socialize, and commercialize as we see fit rather than as the Lindens impose.

Non-p2p supporters would rather live in a world monitored by an oligarchy of overlords who use technological limitations to force us into socially ordered molds. In all fairness, that's apparently what the "community" prefers.

If LL had a good reason to not release use of the existing p2p feature to the general population, they would've stated it. What they have said is that the restrictive travel ability imposed by telehubs is not "efficient.". They've also admitted that telehubs have not lived up to their intended purposes; but they are concerned about the residentially perceived value of the land. It's all a bit contradictory really. Seemingly they just don't want to admit that it was a mistake to entirely remove our ability to p2p.

Some reasonable compromises, such as allowing us to p2p to our profile picks, have been suggested. No Linden has commented on any of those. Perhaps a Hotline post is in order.

I disagree it's the main issue. To me, the value of of my land is secondary to the usefulness of my land. To exlain, my happiness in SL isn't dictated by how much my net worth is. Very few people even consider the value of their land until it's time to sell it.

So, I would say the ability to have a home where I can build or chat privately with friends is above any interest in value.

Also, business owners would be concerned they are not in an area that gives them advantage over their competition. Being near a hub means the business is more likely to succeed. These are real life issues one finds in running a business. You might say 'ah, well, there you go, it proves it's about money.' but I would again disagree, running an SL business might be a hobby or for fun. Making money is part of the fun, and evidence of success. After all, LL promotes SL as a business platform, and some education can be had by learning to do business on SL. In fact, at least one school is using SL to teach basic economics. Students learn about location, product, supply & demand etc.

Hubs offer a way to make land different in more than just appearance, killing hubs would remove these differences and remove that aspect of running a business.

The way I understand it, they already have the code for it and it would only be a matter of turning it on. Do you think they would continue a mistake rather then fix it, so as to avoid admitting the experiment into hubs was a mistake? Why would they openly admit hubs might not be what they were meant to be and then not fix it. If they already admit the error, how are they hiding the mistake?

What I believe is the issue, a few LL employees thought it wasn't a success, and so stated, but those who make the final decision over ruled those opinions based on all the discussions they had or read in the forums.

I would guess that large land owners and telehub land owners are part of the group that's very interested in the value of their land. You, yourself, mentioned a few posts ago about "those who spend thousands of real dollars on hub land". I guarantee you these people are very interested in what happens to their land value.

Add P2P, cut their land value in half, and these folks will scream bloody murder. Even people who don't have thousands, but "merely" hundreds, of dollars invested will be very upset.

Running an SL business may be a hobby for most, but that's enough money to get people quite pissed if you start screwing with it.

HP

Not only would the owners of near-hub land be upset for losing most of their value, those who bought far from hubs hoping to cash in would be thrilled.

When discussing the money issue of the change, we must discuss both sides. By making this change, LL would be talking money (value) from one group of people and giving it to another group, people who own land far from hubs would see a doubling in value as the value of hub land would be cut in half. Both are interested in the money issue.

I would argue those people who own much hub land or people who bought land far from hubs as speculation are by far the minority players. Most of us are small time players. But regardless of any of that, making such a change would take money away from those who bought near hubs, and give that money to those who bought far from hubs.

...sometimes i find the lack of point-to-point teleports a bit choresome, but i have to come down on the side of the people against its implementation for a lot of the same reasons outlined above - and i really don't care one way or the other about land resale value...

...any good study of environmental design or urban and regional planning will stress that heterogeneity is the key to developing vibrant and interesting networks of space, and there are abundant examples of this principle thriving in practice all over SL, both near and far from the telehubs...conversely, one need look no further than the failure of modernism in civic architecture, in RL, for glaring examples of how homogenous regions don't support the sort of organic development of spaces that people want and need to build a diverse ecology of environments - witness brasília or any of le corbusier's city plans, really...be it metorology, biology, sociology, economics, or any system which tends toward equilibrium, it's the dynamic interactions along the boundaries between regions and not the homogenous spaces insulated within the regions themselves which drive innovation, evolution, change, interest, really, across the entire ecology - that's the critical function telehubs serve within SL, and i believe the grid would be a much less interesting place without them...

...now, having said all that, i still think point-to-point teleportations implemented in a limited personal capacity could add tremendous value to the SL experience - say a list of four or five 'favorite' spots in addition one's home location, for quick teleport-from-menubar access...especially given the flakiness of map access on systems plagued by 1.7.x's network-death issue, to require map-centric landmarks for teleporting anywhere but home is a serious usability flaw which mandates posthaste redress, and on that same note the ressing-up lag of impeding builds experienced when flying away from telehubs doesn't fare much better...

...so if we could push for LL to keep the current telehub network in place but add a total of around five home locations to the client, i think that would be ideal...

Ack. No! It would destroy my PTP Teleporter and integrated Directory service!

Is that true, or just belief?

I've very rarely bought anything from a business near a telehub, simply because there's so much traffic and just plain *junk* there that it's too unpleasant to try and walk around, let alone shop. In island sims I've seen malls at the opposite end of the sim from the hub, or even in an adjacent sim, and local teleports to the mall... simply because telehubs are such unpleasant areas.

I find businesses other ways, get a landmark, and fly there. How close they are to a telehub is much less important than how good their products are.

To find out if it's true, look at the most successful businesses and their location. Remember, being near a hub but not at a hub accounts for the hub. I agree being at a hub can slow things down, I would rather own a business within 200 meters of a hub rather than rightnext to a hub, but shhh, don't give out the secret.

The location of the hub is still a main factor.

This is typical. We try to talk about facilitating ease of individual travel and the discussion gets derailed into talking about businesses and telehubs. I find it bizarre that the general population supports the requirements of a few land and business owners over the needs of individuals in the community to travel freely around the mainland.

I have to admit though, anti-p2ps exhibit excellent political skills keeping us all convinced that these baronial economic requirements, on which our world allegedly hinges, are critically more important than our individual freedom to travel where we want when we want.

Linden Lab's purpose is less clear. I've no idea what their justifications are. Frankly, I think they've no idea what their justifications are.

Sounds like we agree, then, that hub land owners will be very unhappy to see P2P (maybe not the degree to which it is affecting P2P implementation, though).



Not sure its quite that simple, but, yeah, some people might make money on the deal. But they aren't complaining.



They may be the minority of players, but I'll bet they get real loud real quick if LL ever decided to eliminate telehubs.

HP

Khamon, your own political skills on the pro-p2p side of the fence are nothing to be underestimated either.

Both sides of this debate have given quite compelling arguments in the past. Until a compromise solution can be worked out that will put both pro and anti p2p folks at ease, I wouldn't expect much more than the status quo from LL.

If a p2p solution was proposed that would:

a) Keep the defacto zoning we have today intact

and

b) Keep the land values that radiate out from Telehub areas intact

You'd then see me, and probably others like me - start gravitating towards your side of the fence. I really do think that's possible, but it will take a lot of bending on both sides to acheive.

Sure they are complaining, about telehubs. They want telehubs to go away to make them richer.

I agree and I'm lazy so I'm going to copy part of something I wrote elsewhere

On the other hand, Second Life imposes limitations for reasons that sometimes are not clear. Probably the most controversial check on virtual freedom is the inability to teleport directly from one location to another at will, usually called point-to-point teleporting. Instead avatars must teleport to telehubs spread throughout the world, and then fly to their destination, sometimes quite far away. This can be a tedious and unreliable process, as flying is impeded by lag, obtrusive buildings, restricted parcels and hostile user security scripts. This restriction seems odd on the face of it because point-to-point teleporting does exist; getting to a telehub is an example, as is logging in to one's home location, and one user can invite another user to teleport to his location directly. But it seems especially arbitrary because previously users could teleport anywhere in Second Life by clicking on the map. They simply paid a small fee proportional to the distance. At some point Linden Lab removed this ability and replaced it with the telehub system. So this is a limitation that strikes some people not only as arbitrary, but even somewhat capricious, in that it took away a commonly used option that wasn't causing any obvious problems. Second Life staff have said that the goal was to foster communities around telehubs, but unfortunately what has developed around the telehubs are malls and advertising. Telehubs have become the equivelant of the ads one has to click through when following a link on a web site. In this case, although the restriction was not genuinely arbitrary from Linden Lab's point of view, the effect is when seen from the user's point of view. It is ironic that so many fantasize about teleportation in the real world, but in this virtual world it has been deliberately hobbled.

http://www.spinmass.blogspot.com/

If I remember right... P2P teleporting was pretty costly.. wasn't it?

I guess it depends on how often you do it. I know I decided it wasn't enough to worry about the cost myself, but I don't remember the numbers. The world was smaller then too.

IIRC it was L$10/teleport.

I wasn't around when pay-to-p2p was present. But two things I know to be true: It was a charge based upon distance, and yes, the grid was much smaller back then.

But the fact that the grid is much larger today doesn't remove pay-to-p2p's usefulness, if you take the concept of teleporting to a telehub first, and then p2p the rest of the way into account.

Assuming you keep telehubs in tandem with pay-to-p2p, it offers up the possibility that folks could Teleport to their telehub of choice, then pay-to-p2p at a greatly reduced price.

Those who wanted to avoid telehubs alltogether, could still do so. Those who wanted to get to their destination faster & easier than they do today, for not a lot of money, could still do so. Those who didn't want to pay a dime, could exist within the status quo as it exists today.

Pay-to-P2P, based upon distance & keeping the existing Telehub infrastructure - would satisfy my two concerns in my post above. In fact, I think pay-to-p2p is one of the best compromises I've seen that plays to both sides of this argument, to date.