I'm sick of building a nice house, then ...

... a shit build appearing two days later right next to it.

It's happened to me four - count 'em - times since I came to SL. All four times that I've wanted to build a house here. All I want to do is have a nice place to retreat to, to see my friends in, to relax in this virtual world. I spend good money getting a decent-size plot, and all I get is rubbish appearing next to me. This time, I got a nice piece of flat waterfront, built a small house, started to furnish it and put up a garden, then today - BANG! A terraformed-up, plywood monster right in my face.

Politely talking to them about their building, reasonably asking them to make small changes yields nothing but negative rates, insults and racist (anti-British) abuse. That's happened twice now. I don't come here and pay money for this kind of shit.

You can all keep your shite virtual estate agent simulator. I mean, who wants to see estate agents shagging anyway?

Have you considered erecting a tasteful privacy wall or mural?

I don't want a wall. I want my garden. And I don't want fucking ban lines and triple-negs if I so much as ask what the members' plans are for the building, either.

I could offer you some land to build on in boardman, if the feted inner core of boardman approves

Just IM me or something, I know how it is to put up with crap builds.

Thanks for the offer, mate, I really appreciate it

The problem is, I'm left with about £50 worth of unsaleable land with a really crap plywood thang next to it, and I can't really justify buying yet more. I mean, I take precautions, such as always going for PG land so peoples' shag palaces don't appear next to me and the like - I just always seem to have my house dwarfed by some idiot with delusions of grandeur.

I think they made a mistake when they decided to make a rigid simple minded flatworld geography.

We should pay for our use of 3d simulator resources and get in return volume in 3d space that we have complete control of, not area on a fixed 2d grid that we have only partial control of, and contiguity should be by choice, that is, volume owners should be able to chose what other volume parcels should be next to. The volumes would be assigned a location in a 3D grid, not confined to single plane grid like at present.

They you could put your house in your volume next to other people of similar tastes, and the people who like ugly stuff or silly stuff could position their volumes into clumps of folks with compatible tastes.

Barring that sort of development, various options for dealing with this sort of problem, such as being able to make objects invisible to you based on what parcel they are on, have been discussed more than amply elsewhere.

I think buying in established sims is part of the answer here. The new sims are a real gamble, you never know whats going to pop up beside you. And yeah, if you don't mind living in suburbia, Boardman is pretty nice.

The thing is, I really like the idea of keeping the real-world principles of geography, with mountains and islands - but the ways in which people use it are wrong. Houses don't float in mid-air, and these plywood structures are implausible.

I think that the way SL is almost completely based on the buying, selling and trading of land is completely broken. Land values are far too high for what you actually buy, which is scotch mist: I mean, the way SL works, you're buying something then carrying on paying to use it!

Charlotte,

Besides buying land in a zone controlled sim - there are a few things that you can do.

You might try building your house on a platform above the land and make the underside of the platform look like sky.

On the actual land, you can then terraform with hills to partially obscure the offending build, adding to that a phantom wall transparent on their side but with landscaping features on your side that enhance your garden. You could even terraform to build a water fall, making the lanscaped build obscure their build from your view.

There are generally three reasons that people will put ugly box builds on their land:

1) They are new and it's their first build - if this is the case, they will gradually begin to see other builds and want to do better with their own.

2) They want to sell their land for an outrageous price to their exasperated neighbors.

(This happened to me with one of my first land purchases). I have found from experience that complementing them on the build and then giving a pos rating really frustrated them. Their intention was to offend and all I did was say "Hey - that looks great". This was unintentional on my part at first because I really thought they were a newbie and I wanted to offer them encouragement. But oddly enough, it worked to my advantage and eventually everything came down and they sold the land.

3) They just want to grief you because they are griefers.

I have discovered that griefers get really bored with griefing when they don't get a reaction to their griefing. I found that when I was being seriously annoyed by a particular griefer that if I just did not log in as myself (I do have an alt) for a couple of days, they got bored and went on to grief another person.

I don't know if any of this will work for you but it may be worth a try.

But why should people be limited by real world contraints? Why should houses have roofs - we don't need them after all. Surely flying people is implausible as well?

I prefer the idea of people only being limited by their imagination. I'm sure your first build was plywood as well.

Some people do want to recreate suburbia. I could think of nothing worse - but each to their own.

Think of SL like a Parking Lot..if you park your Mercedes 350SL out in the back 40 to keep it from getting Dinged.

Wittle Johnny Redneck will definately pull his vintage 1974 Grimlin up next to you and ding your door its Karmic Nature of Stupidity..

Shadow

I don't really want to recreate suburbia. But you know where I'm from - there's not much of a country view! I need somewhere relaxing, and away from idiots in the virtual world. I've had four plots now, and if none of them can offer it, I don't know what can.

rose gave some great suggestions on dealing with a bad situation... If you're up for moving again (5th time's the charm!), you may want to consider selling and then scoping out neighborhoods that have fairly established residents that share your esthetic. Or perhaps renting from friends in those kinds of neighborhoods/ buying into group land, etc. Not an ideal solution by any means, but a possibility.

So much for the wonderfull view of my "place" on the water front. It was bad enough having the big blue "ball of wonder" pop up...but now the wonderfull declaration of Love that I have to look at everytime I come out on my porch.....

Oh man, this is probably our group's single biggest gripe at the moment. So far our solution has been to buy up as much contiguous adjacent land as we can get our hands on. This gives us plenty of available primmage and some buffer room against griefer builders. We're up to over 1/4 of a sim, although I don't know how long we're going to want to maintain that, it gets expensive quick.

We don't have a big established build yet, but having aesthetically impaired people move in right next door and construct solid featureless 30m high flat green and white box structures with another 20m of ugly hamster cages on top (you know who you are) is about the height of irritation.

I suppose the only true resolution to this is buying your own island, if only we could afford that.

I think the best way to deal with such things is simply to have patience. Most people move around a lot so staying put gives the advantage. No matter how much you hate your neighbor's build, be nice and welcoming to them. Chances are when they move on they'll offer you their land. Even if you don't want it, buy it anyway and pass it along to someone you know shares your tastes. Rome wasn't built in a day (and assorted other cliches)

chip is right. the best practice seems to be settling somewhere and waiting people out. BUT, you still have to buy the land when they move or some new goober comes along and starts slapping you all over again.

the only way to avoid it is to own the land as far as you can see.

I actually had this exact conversation with a couple of the Lindens. I told them that my ideal SL would be basically what you've described here: paying for a certain percentage of a server wouldn't get you land, but rather a kind of pocket universe where the only limits were prim space and server resources.

After much effort spent trying to just get them to see what they're doing, and how awesome my way would be, I came away with this explanation for why they've gone with the "land" metaphor rather than a "hyperspace" metaphor: it's a social thing.

They feel that being able to selectively pool resources and arbitrarily create spaces, to choose who your neighbours would be, and what you'd see when you looked off your property --if you saw anything when you looked off your property!-- that to do all this would vastly reduce the amount of exploring people did, both in the "exploring" sense, and the "meeting new people" sense.

I have to grudgingly concede that they may have a (limited) point when it comes to the meeting new people part. We all know people in SL who we met just because they were wandering by, or because we saw green dots and decided to go say hello. However, I'm still not convinced that this would be the end of the world as we know it. In fact, I think you'd see even MORE people signing up as a direct result.`

Catherine, do you mean a TSO like system where you need to teleport in to each owners lot?

Some just suck at building things...and some just do it to annoy you.

Could be worse...
Like your land baron has to sell the land you're renting unexpected within the next 2 weeks to drop the tier.

I'm homeless now

4: They have really bad taste....

no they don't. jarod always says to me that if you give communities the crudest of tools, they'll use them to form stronger communities. he also notes that tools designed to force community growth are ultimately destructive because they limit the abilities of the group to incorporate new features so that they're more attractive to potential members.

ll have this same view of content. by not providing us with the tools to import/export content and develop features (client plugins), they make themselves the only source of updates to the environment which greatly stifles our ability to "create the world" as they say.

it seems silly to volley rhetorical examples such as search engines, web rings, chat rooms, mailing lists, wikis, blogging groups, forums et cetera which overflow with ever growing, evolving communities. maybe it suffices to say ilovebees.com

i just don't get why they don't get it. i suppose i never will and neither will they. oh well

Patience is super good because sometimes people take a bit of time and change an ugly build to a better one or use building strategies that first look like ugly builds. To illustrate: I hired a builder to build on some hilltop property just so that I wouldn't offend neighbours with a lengthy build process (the kind I have to employ as an inexperienced builder). The builder I hired uses red prims in the initial design so that she can more easily see when items are misaligned and see prims when they go someplace they shouldn't (Kathryn Jackson is she, and she did a marvellous job!) and the red prims and deep blue water alarmed my some of my neighbours (the property was group owned). The response of one of the neighbours in the group was to put up a large wall, blocking the very view that the builder was working hard to preserve. This naturally worried the builder who called me. When we talked about what was happening everything was smoothed over, and the wall taken down, but sometimes patience (waiting for the build to be finished or the builder to learn better skills) is everything. Or, as Chip suggested, wait until they move on and *plant* likeminded folks next door. Have an Ubergarden! Invite me!! (loves gardens)

~ Perse

The way the SL world is defined and the way that it is produced reminds me of old flat file database programs that were patterned on a metaphorical set of index cards, with each card corresponding directly to a physical position on the storage media. The index card metaphor made it easy to understand, since everyone had used index cards. However there were problems, if you wanted to have one set of cards for customers and one for accounts, in real index cards you either have to allow for the possiblity of having accounts cards for customers who have been deleted, or you have to have a rigorous policy of updating the account cards whenever you delect a customer. In the computerized version there is no reason to leave it to chance, you can automate the process so that deleting a customer record that has accounts produces a message advising you of the problem and offering a choice of what to do. It's convenient and useful but it breaks the metaphor. You no longer have a simple set of virtual index cards, you have magic index cards with etherial links to other sets of cards. Extend this process of anylyzing the linkages and relationships between clumps of data and removing redundancies and inconsistencies and you end up with a relational database, a complex thing which many folks who can handle index cards can't quite deal with mentally.

As there used to be systems in which there was a direct linkage between logical records and physical positions , and there were problems that ensued as a result, such as the common problem of deleting a large number of records from a database and having to wait while data was rewritten to pack the data into a physically efficient set of postions, so too does SL maintain a linkage between a rectangular area in the flatworld and separate computers systems. The problem created by such a simpleminded linkage between the virtual geography and the physical computing system manifests itself here in a number of different ways, people getting thrown off vehicles, information being availlable within a region but not from without, or if available from without at a much greater cost in time. In my eyes, there is a similarity between sim region computers sitting relatively idle when no avatars are present and empty space on a hard drive in a sequential database from which records have been deleted. It's evidence of a primitive model having been used in the design of the system, and it's bound to be replaced by one that makes a vastly more efficient use of computing machinery by using a more complex model with layers of indirection that decouples the hardware as much as possible from that which is being simulated.

There is nothing about a system that breaks free from the flatland scheme that prevents people from moving their volumes adjacent to others with whom they are compatible and allowing free travel from one to the other, so there's no reason to think of everyone being isolated in little discrete spaces that have no open vistas. You'd just have the option, if your surroudings bothered you enough, if being able to hide your neighbors build and your neighbors themselves, and blocking the sound and chat of your neighbors didn't make living next to them tolerable, of having the location of your builds and terrain and volume redefined to a place you found more suitable.

You might find yourself going to explore more, since you would have regions formed by people with compatible tastes adjacent to each other, you would be able to walk from one English countryside lot to another, or if you wanted to see a light show you'd go to the place where all the particle fanatics lived next to each other and maybe put on their community wide weekend laser and fireworks festival, each of them striving to produce as many particles as possible so that they would get praise from their like minded neighbors instead of having their neighbors start campaigns for zoning ordinances and restrictions on particle use.

Catherine Omega: I can verify what you've said, a Linden told me the same thing.

SuezanneC Baskerville: I like your idea, I've thought about something similar, but you put it into a detailed perspective, thank you. I agree, it's probably possible to build Linden concerns about community, curiousity, and perspective into such a structure, with results that might be much more interesting than the conventional approach right now. I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's commentaries, nonfiction and fiction, on contiguous, autonomous lives protected and freed by personal technologies. (I'm also reminded of Vinge's and Samuel Delaney's "cultural fugue", where society disappears up it's own, separated and autonomous orifice, but that's another story.)

Charlotte Gillespie: For now, maybe try building very well and overwhelmingly. Maybe dominate the wreckscape through quality, placement, and statement. Here's an example that's also a shameless plug.