1.8.0(3) - P2P changes! Huge privacy and landowner rights victory for SL!

I'm not missing it. I simply have a different view of it.

For me, popping in and out of places is PRECISELY the sort of thing that virtual worlds are good for: things I can't do in RL that I wish I could. I've little use for an exact copy of the physical world, especially when I know that the limitations are being imposed artificially. That breaks my immersion far faster than avatars doing things that real people can't.




Don't take the musings of one author, which were written as part of the underpinning of a fictional virtual world, as objective fact. This sort of thing is very much a matter of opinion.

Neal can say whatever he likes about what a metaverse needs or doesn't need, but it has no more validity than me saying that "The human mind simply can't accept a world where pizza cannot be eaten, preferably with garlic butter dipping sauce, and thus, any metaverse which fails to resolve this almost Hegelian conundrum of hungry user (Thesis) and uneatable pizza (Antithesis) will suffer an irreducible dichotomy -- a conflict of disparate Signal and Signifier, crippling the metaphor -- and thus will ultimately fail. Only a Metaverse in which the user and pizza (with sauce) can achieve Synthesis through a happy gastrointestinal apotheosis will enable us to transcend the limits of virtuality, nay physicality."

Which basically amounts to "I'm hungry. SL is doomed if you don't give me free pizza. Words. Words. Words."

Actually, I think I'm on stronger footing. A person might or might not find teleport jarring, but it's pretty certain that a rumbling tummy will remind them that they are on a computer pretty quickly.


Personally, I think teleporting has just as much chance of people being able to accept it as flight, Cubey's Ornithopter, a world where things appear gradually and buildings can be placed in midair with no support, or people with wings and cars on their heads. In other words, some will accept it easily right off the bat, others will take longer, but pretty much everyone can get used to it ... if they remain open to new things.


(And anyway, speaking as a roleplayer, and thus someone to whom immersion is far more important than it is to your average user, I think as long as you have giant Impeach Bush signs floating in midair, immersion is pretty much a lost cause.)

First, I hope they do plan to move people to hubs and not just the nearest open space if the place they have clicked on is closed. For one thing, that would prevent the "but then they just come next door" problem, and for another, provide traffic for the hubs.

Second, your idea about making them go to the hub and THEN click on where they want to go would have been great, too.

Third, regarding the money sink, maybe that wasn't such a great idea, but I think basic members would have viewed it mainly as an inconvenience, and if they got tired enough about the inconvenience, they would view it as another reason to become premium. For myself, if they had instituted this, I would virtually always have used the telehub, cause I'm thrifty in SL that way.

coco

P.S. I haven't read Ben Lindens thing (I don't know where to find it), but I don't buy this business that the teleports were hard to figure out, not for a minute.

P.S. I don't care much about immersion, but I do know that part of it is lost with this, from having played TSO. There was a huge difference between suddenly that doorbell ringing and a person materializing there, and someone flying by and stopping to chat.

However, it's not like we are all of a sudden going to lose the ability to still fly by and drop in. And overall, the loss of that small bit of immersion that will be lost is insignificant compared to the gains achieved through P2P. (Which does not speak, however, to how P2P was implemented, or the lack of compensation to those who bought near telehubs on purpose.)

If you want visitors on your land (and most people do), disallowing teleports to your land would be like standing in front of a moving train because you don't want it to go where you're standing. It's going to go there and if you try to pretend it isn't...well...success will not be wrought.

Hooray for this feature. I like it. I think we've needed it for years. I dare say...w00t.

Land owners will just have to decide "do I want people to get here easily or do I want to have sexy sexy". And, a novel idea here I'm sure ...turn p2p off when you want the sexy sexy....turn it back on when you want visitors. It's like a "choose you're own adventure novel", just without the kid wearing a white t-shirt, 80s jeans and red sneakers on the front!

Point taken on the being plopped into a neighbors parcel issue.

Hmm.

I wonder what the plan is then? Will it be like Eggy said - "Sorry, but you may not TP here, try another location"?

Magnum - re your Hotline post: Do you have any evidence/heard anything about people planning to group together to prevent P2P on their land?

And also, what if they do? I don't get it. If they own the land, and they all get together and decide to de-activate P2P (or if they don't all get together, but just happen to decide that), then . . . so what? It's their land.

coco

http://secondlife.blogs.com/bulkupload/2005/12/_prokofy_neva_a.html

It's no longer the newest entry, but there's the direct link to the entry I was referring to.

I do tend to buy it, because I had several new players state as such to me during the last wave of newbies we got last month following the Times article (I spent a couple of days at the Waterhead WA).

It was probably the 3rd or 4th most common question I fielded - "Why do I get stuck after teleporting?" I don't think it's so much not knowing how to use them as it is lag and getting trapped by as yet unrezzed builds, and I am a bit surprised Coco, to hear you more or less say, (paraphrasing) "no one can be that dumb" - that's rather unlike you.

Also, my best friend started SL a few months ago, and had a heck of a time with hubs, although, he is on a rather poor DSL connection, so maybe that was part of it.

Yes, I agree, both are valid. And the immersive factor of both your view and mine should be preserved.



For that matter, it could be so many things in place of SL - television, a video game, a movie, sports, a beautiful beach ... anything that captures your attention so wholly.


Sure, because it's the only option right now.

As SL progresses, I think we'll see a seperation of different "feels" of SL.

Thanks so much, Nolan! That was VERY interesting, especially the part about Linden finances! From what I read, I think they are handling their finances and their hiring just great! And not making the mistake EA did, apparently pulling the a huge chunk of the financial rug out from under TSO in the first few months. Impatient b******ds.

However, you will note that he said the problem was more of rezzing and lag and getting trapped than it was of figuring out the system. "I'm smart enough to know what the beam is for," or something like that.

You yourself said that you thought the problem was more of rezzing and lag and being trapped and just not moving.

Which is - what I am saying. I don't believe that new residents "couldn't figure out" how to get to a destination from their telehub.

coco

Yes, in retrospect, we are saying the same thing. I never thought it was that they couldn't figure it out either - my beef was always that if established players get frustrated with hubs, I can just imagine what new players must think. Which is why I believe LL when they say that they have had many a new player state that they were less than impressed with the situation at the hubs.

I believe this thread and others like it are more than enought proof.

i think you are overreacting magnum.

SL should be about choice. This is a good choice. If a group of people want to get together and turn on P2P and make you fly, so be it. If they want to turn off fly and make you walk, so be it. Give them the freedom to make a choice. You don't have to go there, you know.

personally I like hiro's idea that if you try to TP somewhere with P2P turned off it brings you to the telehub aka infohub aka freebiehub

This is great news! Landowners should have the tools to control how their parcel is used without having to own an estate sim. Realistically, p2p is a tool for commerce and public builds, not residential areas where people have gone to efforts to mimize traffic and those are the people who will be turning off p2p on their land.

It is entirely likely that groups of parcel owners might band together to turn off p2p or one of them might subdivide a 16x16 plot that is a designated landing location for the sim. The approriate dialog when attempting to teleport to a location that does not allow p2p is a pop up window that says "The parcel you are attempting to reach does not allow direct teleports, would you like to go to the nearest telehub?" and buttons to cancel or to continue.

Why do you think you have to right to teleport directly to the middle of my land when I may be having a private conversation? That ain't your right - you don't pay for my sim. I pay for my sim. I'm a social guy, I don't mind visitors, but I'd also like to be able to get some work done every now and then. This is a good first step, but we still need more.

I have the same concerns as Sera above, and would suggest a different alternative... anyone with say, more than half a sim's worth of land in a single sim, can declare the a single landing point in that server as their telehub location (a simple check box in about land would do). Is flying half a sim to get somewhere REALLY going to kill ya? At the same time, it will allow for privacy.

The non-existance of privacy controls in SL are starting to get me kind of angry. What about the rights of people who want to be able to get some work done unimpeded, Magnum? Should I be able to get some work done without constant distractions?

Please cut the "Us vs Them" crap too, its getting REALLY old, hehehe.

Regards,

-Flip

I do.

Mainly because it got ME as a newb.

You click on a map and choose "teleport", you naturally expect to GO RIGHT THERE.

I got used to the SL Telehub way, but it seems perfectly within reason that someone might find telehubs confusing... because at least one person did.

P2P will be awesome for folks porting to the Shelter. No more wading thru the stuff at the hub, trying to figure out how to get inside. Just click, and you're there. I think that's excellent.

But if you just lit off a C4 bomb, or are incessantly shouting obsenities and we have to Ban you, you damn well better not be able to click on the Shelter on the map, and be simply teleported to the parcel next door - where you can continue to grief, and I can't do anything to stop it.

If an avatar is specifically banned from a parcel, and they try to TP back to that parcel, the TP should fail, end of story. TPing a griefer to the closest available TP spot under those conditions is like making their job even easier.

Magnum, I am curious as to why if "teleport to any spot on the map" is so important to you as a concept, you are not campaigning just as furiously against security scripts and ability to ban all avatars except ____. Do these not also completely defeat your purpose a wide-open and available grid? Why are they not included in your proposal? Because if you are saying people should not be allowed to restrict access to their land, these things are major impediments to your stated goal....

Why not just pop up a message saying that the owner of the property has P2P teleport turned off and cancel the teleport? No server time spent aiming them at the nearest property open, or the nearest telehub.

Plus, the nearest property open could sure get tired of getting all the people who were wanting to go to that next place, that's got the P2P off!

Does anyone know how this actually works?

coco

I'm confused. You claim to represent the "rights of the people", but you practice a form of slavery designed to inhibit rights. You get offended over someone placing signs around your sim advocating freedom, then espouse a view against property rights? *blink blink*

I fail to see the problem here. P2P teleport will be available to those who want to take advantage of it. To those who don't want it, they can block it. I don't think they should have the right to extend a P2P block beyond their owned property, and certainly not to any public or common land. I would want to be able to block P2P from certain areas of my lands, such as my bedroom, on the hopes that I could have perhaps just a little bit of privacy. Not much considering the infamous sit and slide box, or mobile camera angles, but at least a chance at not being caught <i>in flagrente delecto</i>.

2 things Shadow: 1, good luck with arguing logic here. I've given up. 2, I love that quote from Londo in "In the Beginning" - along with, "Let's just hope in your stumbling around, you do not wake the dragon."

hehehe,

-Flip

Since the "Show Telehub Coverage" option has been removed in the latest version, I suggest a "Show Teleport Availability" option be added in its place. Similar to the Land For Sale overlay, this will indicate which areas accept teleports and which don't. Ideally this would include a dot showing the landing point, but a simple difference in color (e.g. green for allowed, red for denied) would suffice. I would much prefer this to a warning afterward that teleporting was blocked.

That would absolutely destroy map performance. The telehub coverage map is easy because it doesn't change and is just a static layer. When you can literally toggle on and off the ability to teleport to your land on a whim, and set it for each individual parcel you create you would end up having to get a list of all the parcels on the entire grid, and their status and their exact position and size. It's hard to explain eloquently, however it would be an extremely slow process that would really tax the servers whenever you tried to bring up the map.

Also these options gives added options for the landowners, as the land owner whatever you set in the teleport routing box, your own av will bypass that and be allowed anywhere access, this also works for group owned land as long as your an officer and wearing the group title

Yeah, I hotline'd LL to see what they want to do in that case.
/invalid_link.html

Just loaded up the test server to try to see how the teleport system acts if you have teleport disabled. Of course I then realized that I need to find a slice of land that has teleport disabled....

What I did notice is that the second you hit teleport it teleports you, it doesn't immediatly check to see if you can teleport there because it can't contact the region. What I'm assuming happens, is that you go through the whole "saving attachments" thing, then it does the contacting region, at that point i'm assuming it will check with the plot to see if it's a valid teleport spot, and then problary kick you out of the teleport black screen saying you can't teleport to that spot.

If this is the case I really hope Linden changes this. I have a small 512m parcel. It's a very thin parcel and is almost impossible to select it on the map. If I want people to teleport to me, and the people around me are set to not allow teleports, people that try to visit me are going to be clicking around on the map in a small area and each time they hit teleport they will wait up to 30 seconds (depending on lag) before being told that they can't teleport to their selected location.

I'm assuming that every linden owned sim has atleast some linden land on it. If the way I described above is actually what happens (As I said it's kinda hard to test i'm just assuming from the way p2p worked when I tried it out) there should be in each sim a public teleport landing zone on linden land (like the street) so if they do click on protected land by mistake, they still atleast get into the same sim. And it's public linden land so people don't end up teleporting into the nextdoor neighbor's house.

The idea of default teleporting people to telehubs is not a good idea at all. I'm assuming that the vast majority of land will allow teleports because sl is a public place and most people realize that. If you default teleport people to telehubs it will falsely add extra value to the telehub land even though traffic to the telehub areas will be extremely minor. It will just end up in more cases like the ones we are seeing recently, with people paying premiums for telehub land, not realizing the drastic changes that are taking place.