teleports and landmarks

Hi,
Ok, usually no one likes my suggestions, there's always someone who wants to say something negative. That's ok.

I get annoyed at the landmark / teleport stuff.

It would be nice if there was a "go back to previous location" For example lets say that I am with a friend at their house or island or whatever. Then, let's say that some one offers me a TP to a shopping place. Well, when I'm done, it would be nice to just go back to the exact place i just left from instead of having to go the the telehub everytime. If a person can TP me to thier location how come I can't just TP to that location?

Another scenario would be that I go to another landmark and it turns out that no one is there or it was picked by accident.

If the SL program can remember my exact position when I logged off. and I can log back in even several days later in the exact same spot, then why can't the SL remember the locations of the landmarks i create? Or, allow me to TP to that spot again while I am in world?

That's another pet peeve I have. I wish that when you created a landmark say at a museum, or library, or friends house that when you went to that landmark you went to that spot instead of the telehub. It gets old having to fly/navigate to the place.

OK, so now i'm going to get flamed by a bunch of people saying why that's not possible.

Have a great day
wizzie

It's possible. In fact, that's how it was in the old days. You could teleport anywhere you wished, but paid a L$ fee based on the distance.

Now, there was NO technical need to change money because you teleported farther. Your posision is just a set of numbers. Change the numbers and you are elsewhere. The reason they imposed the fee was to make the world a world.

You see, Linden Lab could easily have made Second Life a bunch of isolated chatrooms like an IRC server. Each one with it's own 3D space. You make a new room, give it some landscape and build in it. People can come and visit, following links from your friends' virtual spaces to yours, or jumping direct via teleportation.

But if you do that, you lose all the cohesiveness of having a virtual "world" in the first place. You just get a lot of loosely connected worldlets. By making the world on a grid, it gives every location a sense of "space". Each location has an extra dimention of identity based on it's distance to other places. Distance MEANS something.

Now, enter the telehubs. You can now teleport for free to a hub, then travel by other means to your destination. This gives each location another dimention of identity by fixing it's distance to the closest telehub. Locations close to a hub become "urban" and locations far away are "rural".

Now, convinience is important, yes, but not at the expense of locaitons losing identity by making it too easy to teleport there.

I DO think that land owners should be able to teleport to any of their plots through the My Land window. With only one "home" location, I have to fly to my other plots from the closest telehub, and I know the way so well I'm at my plot before anything can even rez. It's not adding anything to my play experience, so letting me go there direct makes sense.

I think the Offer TP should change to Request TP. I'm glad that group members can set their home to any land owned or tagged with their group.

Alternatively, a semi-philosophical explanation:

LL can't make their mind up whether they're providing infrastructure or a managed world.

Like Tiger has explained, currently we have a mixture of both things, and it's changing over time. It neither satisfies the need for top notch instant transport nor does it provide effective world management through transport planning (a euphemism for denial), because those two things are (obviously) at war with each other.

Given that satisfactory world transport management is nigh on impossible since LL doesn't control building nor events placement, whereas universal instant transport is trivial to implement, my approach would be to allow arbitrary teleports to anywhere at all, and to also provide a mechanism for teleport denial based on some sort of plot-based zone majority setting.

Let the people decide if they don't want teleporting into their residential zone by denying it through a majority setting, otherwise allow it by default.

OK, so the concept of universal teleports everywhere plus per-plot teleport denial blew the design fuses ...