The Infinite Island Project

The idea of fine-tuning on the simulator level has been kicking around the forums since i can remember. A few test bed sims have been making progress and have been experimenting in various areas of management, zoning and renting. There seems to be a consensus starting that the managed sim might be a very enjoyable way to settle down here in SL.

I would like to begin putting together a project that will eventually lead to the creation and management of a new group of simulators. The working title for this vision is the Infinite Island project (really just a left-over domain of mine.) I just opened the project's website for discussion and idea generation which can be found at www.infinite-island.com

I would very much like to hear from everyone who is interested in contributing to the project. We have a working forum, FAQ, project proposal and a growing list of ideas.

I have a strong background in GIS, Land design and management in RL and this project will need the talents of many people from many walks of life. I think we can put some good first life experience and practice into the second.

Visit the site, IM me in-world or email me at [email]jared@infinite-island.com[/email] if you would like to be a part of this project. We will be the architects of the best sim experience on the grid with the happiest citizens, tenants and developers because we will use the land as our most precious resource. Our zoning and plot planning will be the special sauce that will ensure our success.

~Lefty Belvedere
Infinite Island Coordinator and Co-Creator

Have other island sim communities failed? If they have, I missed it. I can certainly speak for the ones I have as being a complete success. I'm sure that Anshe and others will tell you the same about their very own communities.

Lefty, good luck for your project! I'm really glad that more people are starting to work on "planned communities". We certainly need more of them!

Of course, as both a co-coordinator of an 8-month-old "community project" (pretty long in terms of "SL time" and as a rentee on one of several planned communities on the mainland, who employs good architects to build aesthetically pleasing environments (yes, I'm talking abour RL architects...), I would also disagree with your claim that "other island sims have failed"

Unfortunately, my own building skills are virtually inexistent, so I can only give you "moral support", and eventually some tips on "rules" to apply to an "organized community", if you care to exchange ideas.

Sounds cool, but sounds like Anshe's planned community projects. I might be willing to help. I have a background in HOA management, but, I tell you, that's an industry that will never ever figure out a perfect system.

As an urban planning undergrad (and a decent builder in-world), I'm quite interested in this. Count me in if I can help any.

LF

I certainly did not mean to say that any currently managed sim was failing. Not at all. I was referring to the projects iv'e heard that never got off the ground because of lack of support, architect gave up, etc. If it's currently an up and running sim I consider it a success

I do think that this project, pending the right funding, will garnish support because our sims will look very inviting for all sorts of people. We'll have a few sim design ideas going up next week. I'm currently building plans in CAD.

~lefty

Well, many of us have spent a lot of attention to land detail LOL and haven't failed but it does take an awful lot of work.

In Ravenglass Rentals, we remain committed to open communities on the grid, open to the public at large, and voluntary, not enforced zoning, in both rental and purchase communities.

It's important not to step on everyone else as you go up the stairs to possibly a "better managed sim". There's a bit of a hard sell in your ad that may be off-putting to some.

What's important is that LOTS of experiments get started all over, with all different kinds of people, ideas, plans -- there should be hundreds of them. In fact, it's a meta-layer of the game that will be loads of fun for many to play, town planning, building societies, managing conflicts, sharing resources, etc.

Some object to having these matters mingled with commerce and profit motive. But that's how people pay the bills. I recall what a firestorm occurred just over having some cheap land available in FREE TIBET. The point is, some enterprising business people have great ideas of how they can make a profit of managed sims, given the hunger for them, but they have less of an idea of the drudgery of customer service and group dynamics.

It does take a lot of work and investment but that is the service offered... It has been a lot of work simply getting a game plan straight and beginning to plan plots but the end result is a better layout for better land. Land is the only thing we pay real dollars for in this game. I think it should be of the highest quality. No more step hills next to edgeofsim for me and anyone else who would like to join me


Open to communities, open to public, yes of course. Who said anything different? The only thing my project proposes citizens be responsible for is to restrict building heights for reasonable sight lines. The rest is brought from good layout.



I'm not sure what ad you mean. The only thing I've managed to do so far was to open a website for the project. I'm certainly not advertising anything currently. If I'm stepping on anyone metaphorically, please excuse. I wasn't aware that my website or ideas could step on things::::



Wow, did I make it sound like experiments were a bad thing? Why am I being lectured on the importance of the "meta-layer" of Second Life? The only thing I said was this --> "The idea of fine-tuning on the simulator level has been kicking around the forums since i can remember. A few test bed sims have been making progress and have been experimenting in various areas of management, zoning and renting. There seems to be a consensus starting that the managed sim might be a very enjoyable way to settle down here in SL."
Which is to say that my project is inspired by the wondeful ideas and experiments that have come before this....

I'm not clear on what you mean by these things and what is being mingled with commerce? What profit motive to you speak of?

Why the concerns over land and the economy? The land you own is driving your tier fees and generating profit for Linden Lab. Your land is "mingled" man. My project seeks to break even.



Eh, my fingers are tired... what are you speaking of here? My project is about getting funding for a group of sims. What is this about enterprising business? Something must be broken with my hoobajoob because i read: My god, man!! What are you getting at!!! Who mentioned profit!!!! I'm talking about neighborhoods and parks all this time and somebody read profit? Who is they and why do they have "less of an idea of the drudgery of customer service and group dynamics"...? If you refer to me in the they form, i suppose you could be telling me i dont' know what customer service is. But that would just be rude.... right?

And group dynamics?? who said anything about groups? The fourth line of my project's ideas page reads"Simple groups of organized citizens will not suffice for the main decision-making powers of a finely-tuned world such as this project. Endless debate without a single entity holding veto power will only result in gross inaction." These words are the beginnings of an idea that nobody will be subjected to a vote or a flame war or have any say in their neighbor's build at all! Their matters will never spill onto your land because of the way the sim is parceled and buffered and elevated. No group dynamics, just friends

Thanx for reading my website before commenting on my ideas

~Lefty

The ideas on your website look solid and reasonable, Lefty. Some need expansion, but that's all part of the process. I smiled when I read your comment about how little land there actually is in a sim. Factor in computational resource limitations for scripting etc, and you're talking severe constraints. But it's still worth doing.

As mentioned in a previous thread, I'm interested in this project for the same reasons you are: the attraction of configuring a sim to be outstandingly beautiful as it meets the requirements of the residents. You'll probably recall my notion of Miramar in the wilderness -- picture landmark buildings rising from unspoiled wilderness instead of from the lowrise built environment. It's never been done before in SL that I know, and would be intensely interesting.

Integrating the architecture and the site development is an intriguing challenge. In SL I'm a professional architect (see the pics in my profile), and my specialty is large scale high-end builds. The pic here is kind of foggy but it captures the ambience of my current construction site. This massive masonry portal residence is like an arch built on parkland, leading from the Brownlee telehub to the residential sim of Nestor. It was coordinated with the neighbors of Nestor with whom my client started Nestor Residents Association. Some residents didn't like my original light limestone texture, so I substituted the weathered stone (Tempest Veil's textures). Arrekusu Muromachi was particularly helpful in influencing that design choice so that it blended with the lush green grassland.

Sounds like you have some pretty good architects on board if you need them. I can help out in that area too but lately I've really liked making public parks, squares, stuff like that. Let me know if you need help in that area.

Lefty,

I responded to your post as your post. I'd be happy to go take a look at your website, but when you post and make comments, you have to expect people respond to you within the universe of the forum and the game, and not to go out looking for a lot of extra reading.

Your original ad had a slick, hard-sell feel to it -- that may have made me mistakenly assume it was a commercial enterprise like -- "let me show you how I will do it better where others have failed."

It seems to me that you have to have proven that your methods worked FIRST before you blast others as failures, especially when you may not have studied those others at all, or even be aware of their existence.

And it is important to come up with solutions that everyone can access as methods, not to just have your little enclave, surely you get that.

Nowhere in your first post did you say the word "non-profit" or "break even". And I wasn't the only one who found the first post rather slick-sounding, as if it was the latest in a string of efforts to profit off the hunger of SL citizens to be free of ugly builds. And I actually wouldn't find anything wrong with such profiting, since it is work, and expenses.

Let me take this opportunity to post a more accurate screenshot of the Brownlee telehub, and to direct readers who are interested in these issues to read the Purple Cube of Death in the New World thread.

The problem is that some players get annoyed when they build high art, and want to have sequested residential sims in pristine wilderness with only the perfect roomies who meet their aesthetic standards. In a game that is free, they find themselves building around brightly-coloured boxes that are the kind that many people try to move away from. They think the solution is to just go on a quest to build bigger, more exclusively, and to seek more pristine sims, and more high-minded people, to make more exclusive, high-minded sims. But it's a game with a great deal of confusion, conflict, clashes of civilizations, and legitimate differences, and the goal should be to increase tolerance and space for freedom, to sort out some areas of zoning, and not have more and more closed enclaves for arrogant uber-architects.

The answer to this problem is not to bludgeon others at telehubs with big buildings and try to turn what is rightly intended as a commercial space into a high-falutin' residential space, but just to go buy a private island sim. Then do what you want with builds, and textures, and terraforming, off in your own little world. I suspect, however, that the people who start residential communities right on telehubs, and make big buildings blending into residential/wilderness in the face of gawdy commercial buildings at a telehub, don't want to go off in their own little world because then they wouldn't have a visible stage for their ideas. What they want to do is displace by example and turn the game around and prevail. To which I can only say: non pasarant!

I know that to be the case because I don't buy private island sims myself. I think a sim on the grid on the open market is the greater challenge and that your experiments and failures should stand up to public scrutiny, and those who joined you in those experiments should also have that opportunity to shine. I think you do that by making a sim association group after everyone has already bought/joined/rented on that sim.

IF you start out with a predefined membership filter of just good builders with high ideals, well, your experiment is less interesting to me, you just made a closed, gated community and didn't prove anything about your superiority. Anybody can be a superior frog in their own little pond, croak croak.

Creating a managed sim without blight is a great idea, and just breaking even, having parkland, etc. is a perfectly legitimate exercise. I know, because I've done that myself. However, I continue to maintain that you can do it without all this exclusionism, and you can allow freedom. And you can even make it do more than break even, and you shouldn't have to bow to the anti-commerce goons in this game to do so.

You're saying that your sim and group is open to the public, to anyone who "shares our ideals". Nestor is not open to the public and the ideals are obscured, and possibly deliberately so, it's a closed group whose members cannot even be seen in FIND GROUPS. So it's hard to know what to expect when they clamor for changes from the Lindens.

I think it's important to have open groups, with openly-arrived at agreements about their ideals that can stand the test of public scrutiny.

OK, I've read through your literature now, and I see some of the main problems, and also see that you're doing absolutely nothing different in essence than Anshe Chung or Nexus Nash -- I don't even know if you have even met or talked to these people who already provide managed sim space at very reasonable prices, but who still turn a profit (or try to).

I know that the culture of the architectural world is supposed to be "oh let's all be positive and supportive and let's all make a wiki and donate our services with an end to later getting our high-end services paid for because investors will like us and replicate us".

I don't approach residential/land/sim issues in this spirit and tend to be more adversarial, given the very, very, very real obstacles you experience in this game, which I have experienced in virtual real-time reality, as distinct from theorizing on CAD.

You've got a group that is going to have one person (or a group of undefined managers) keep a veto. I've written about the need to do that, too, to avoid one person from grabbing all the prims. But it is a troubling aspect to your ideas which need further airing.

It is is already demeaning legitimate, normal, simple democracy on a sim by 8-10 people interested merely in avoiding lag, ugly builds, etc. by characterizing what they do as some "endless debate" like all those dumb faction-fights among sectarians like the Trotskyists.

Saying that democracy only results in "gross inaction" is just a finer-tuned, prettier, New Age cyber way of reintroducing the old fascistic ideals of making the trains run on time. But there's no need to do that in our world.

You can reach a few shared values relatively easily and simply by putting out a few signs, having a few round-robin kind of group IM sessions on prims or conflicts on builds, and live happily ever after. We've done it! Many times over! Successfully! With simple, good solutions! That didn't require one prim hog to keep a veto!

The first problem I see is that you are yet another bright-idea person coming along looking for investors. Your own stake/investment in this project simply isn't visible.

First of all, it actually isn't that expensive to get a sim and sell it. I got a sim called Ravenglass for $1500 on the auction. I got some people to help me with it. We sold most if it, and rented some of it. Some builders built custom houses and we went 50/50 on the land sales, some owners just put up their own homes, we had a mixture of residential and commercial and parkland space. So come and talk to me in the game if you are actually serious about seeing something practically already done and already paid for, and not something that puts up a big notice, and clamours for investors. It doesn't have the glamour of the high-end, but it works and makes people happy.

The clamour for investors -- when the undelineated "management" is going to hold the veto power -- gives me pause. How much will management invest, then? Or is the idea to be management, get a chunk of investment, and then get everybody else to buy in? Well, good luck on that!

Four sims, even given some lucky breaks on the auction (if they are open grid) are going to be at least $5000 on the open market, but 4 private island sims are going to cost a more fixed-rate of about $4000. Then there's the $195/month/per sim in tier of course. It's a lot to handle, but not impossible if you have likeminded people willing to donate their paid tier. But if you ask them to do that, they have to have rights and access and control over their plots. If you just hope to sell off plots to break even, you can undercut Anshe or Adam, who are trying to at least get a little bit of profit to make it worth their while. But...you will still have the same administrative headaches they have!

With great power comes....great customer service response time and effectiveness!

Strips of land between houses seem like a good idea, and planners coming to this process often act like they've thought of this great idea all by themselves. But there is a reason why both Lindens, and the residential sim planners who have gone before you, have had to be less generous in their giving away of strips of parkland -- because there's nobody to pay for it.

Lordfly has suggested having sim planners draw up the parkland, then convince the Lindens to buy it back as maintained Governor Linden land -- this way players could get access to waterways and terraforming of land and geographical features they want, instead of being at the mercy of Governor Linden. But Governor Linden is not going to do this, so dream on. It is too much work, and the Lindens don't show any sign of taking on these kinds of customized requests to let players on a sim reconfigure essentially what is their non-profit public-interest land.

The way we deal with this strip parkland problem was to have it in a group where 1) some low-impact businesses near the Linden road could pay rent, and help cover the tier for the whole public commons, which included parkland 2) some established residents could buy the commons for only prims, with the agreement they would leave the trees/waterfalls, etc. on it. Towards the end of a sim's filling up, people begin to hungrily eye it for primland, and its hard to keep a pretty commons as nice as you like then. Everybody loves strips of parkland when somebody else pays for it. They love them less when the strips of parkland contain the prims they are hungry for to add on to their own parcel's buildings and decorations.

The game is about change, and residents come and go, and this is particularly true about businesses, groups, and relationships. A couple might build a huge house and buy lots of land, but then break up, so then you're left with a whole in your managed sim. You have to think of how to make a sim flexible enough to live through the first, second, third, etc. generations of land purchases. This static notion that you can lay down roads, mixed-use, parkland in a rigid fashion to stick like a RL village in suburbia just cannot work in SL. There is too much volatility and change. One person has a home they can locate near a roadside and a small business, but then they chop that land up when they leave, and the next people use it for prim land, and prime commercial space is lost. Some people quit for the simple reason that the latest Linden patch has ruined their scripts in their business, or their textures in their business, or their game-within-a-game, or their simple ability to log on! So they leave a hole in your community.

I don't know why I'm just not as enthusiastic about other people coming on here and saying "I have great ideas slickly presented but...I need investors...and architects to pitch in...and to assume it will break even."

I guess it's because while I found my own investment in my own bank account, I sold the land to others and gave them their freedom, while still trying to work out some of these problems of communal living which you rightly flag as deserving a variety of creative solutions.

Good luck on the island project - great idea.
Be glad to help on a build as well.
Also, welcome to the world of long lengthy lectures on the forums from those who are always going to tell you how much more they know than you. Yawn

Could it be because we have actually done the things others merely talk about, and because we already paid for these things, and aren't still looking for investors?

Watch out!!! This almost looks like a FIC written reply.

Watch out!!! This almost looks like a FIC written reply.


Definitely NOT FIC because:

1. No Lindens were ever consulted, contacted, or even exposed to any harmful toxic chemicals for this project.

2. After 60 days when the project was already sold and functioning, a Linden was once contacted over griefer/sim-lag-down-to-37/weapons-type issues in the next sim, impacting our sim, but since the Lindens did nothing, the griefer got banned but came back on alts, we just took matters into our own hands and bought out some of the griefer clubs at extortionist prices. The cost of doing business on the open grid.

3. The communities are open to the general public and you don't have to be an excellent builder or architect to join.

4. No subsidies were ever received in the form of developer incentives, educational grants, or waiver of the initial cost of the sim (like the Neualtenberg sole-contest-winner experience).

5. Only one resident makes use of that 4096-for-life goldmine to hold his property tier, part of which is commons, but his property could be chopped and sold within the next week to many willing buyers, it's not vital to have that Linden-subsidized-for-life stuff in a community.

6. Not a single event ever held here has ever applied for and gotten a grant.

7. Not a single one of the businesses here are developer incentive winners, in the RL news, feted, or cossetted. They just run businesses and make money and live their lives.

No, definitely not FIC. It's just a little experiment on a nice sim 1000 meters from the telehub. It was replicated on a few more sims, with a mixture of sales and rentals. My point is there could be a hundred such experiments, and we could have a blog now with really useful helpful information for pioneers in this uncharted territory, but some important things would have to happen:

a) people would have to get over themselves as ambitiously aspiring to be the leaders in the pioneer movement and try to impose and replicate their vision, they need to have tolerance and study others, and not declare others as "failed"

b) people would have to get over their Linden dependency and stop looking for Lindens to help, waive fees, take over public land blah blah. Just leave the Lindens out, follow the TOS, and just ask them to not change the servers on you and keep your FPS up, full stop.

c) people would have to have better group tools to donate tier more safely.

You can put me on the list under "landscaping"......

Oh I didnt know we had switched topic from about Leftys Island to again. . . . all about you. My My My

(people would have to get over themselves as ambitiously aspiring to be the leaders in the pioneer movement and try to impose and replicate their vision, they need to have tolerance and study others, and not declare others as "failed" )

Talk about yourself much?

Iam dieing here................ But Dude you HighJacked his Thread like it was a runaway Jetliner. I've seen you do this in a few Theads, Like folks are starting them for your personal random HighJacks. He was telling us about his new Island project. And you Sir and your 4,000 word milti post Highjack did what you intended to do, Devert his excitment of posting and telling the SL community about his project.

Good Luck Lefty...... if Tang and I can help let us know as she siad.

-Waves

I wouldn't feel so hijacked if Random's posts weren't so looooong and weren't so egotistical. I'm sure he's a nice person in SL but seems a bit eager to throw his $2.00 in the chat pot.

My ORIGINAL POST was about STARTING a PROCESS of DIALOGUE based on ideas and oppinions that i've collected from the forums these past weeks about how land doesn't seem to be working as well as we think it could. But since this projct of mine is now on the FOURTH DAY of existance, who says we shouldn't be criticized for not already having all our dicks in a row?

There are just SO many conclusions being drawn based on the few paragraphs of actual ideas i've posted in threads and on the site. The idea was to add ideas to the pot, not make assumptions based on the few existing ones. I've actually thought about a good portion of the assumptions you offered and I'm proud to say i think i hae a viable solution yet i'm waiting to hear from other people and haven't found the precise wording in order to add them to the growing ideas page.

If there are a few people out there willing to organize some of the great ideas in these forums and try to stitch them together in some better way than we have now, please, please, please, don't give up hope because my project is now begging for people to offer ideas and oppinions on land use.

RANDOM::: Instead of making assumptions about all my ideas, add your own, man.... whoever you are! I'm tired of all this masturbation in the coldness of space. I want to make real progress in an organised fashion that moves forward. You seem like guys who are bursting at the seams with oppinions and ideas and such and I invite you to turn that machine gun brain of yours away from the crowd and onto the firing range, bro. We need more people like you adding not subtracting.

~Lefty

for the sake of moving forward....

This project will not be exclusive, will not involve anything private at all.

Land is available to anyone.

It will be attatched to the mainland by two public water/small island sims

It will be managd simply by the lay of the land and a small list of publicly posted and discussed height and zone restrictions. Nothing more. There is no "prim-snatcher"

Citizens will be free to build whatever they want, however they want in whatever style they want... It won't matter to the rest of the citizens because height will be a factor, public green zones will GUARANTEE their build will not effect their pot and you won't be able to put a retail joint in the neighborhood sections.

beyond this tiny list of regs, all SL rules still apply. You can still call on a bug chaser to evaluate a person's lag scripts you can still call the L's for griefing and you can still sell your land and move away! Iv'e even tossed around the idea of citizens being guaranteed 33% of their original purchase price if they would like to get out quick by not waiting for a person to come along and buy it from them.

~lefty.
P.S. If you would like to add constructive comments to the ideas above, try to add your own as well

It's not subtracting, when someone puts down their practical experience gained from real experience they paid for and asks hard questions of those who have not done that, it's adding.

Many people have all kinds of big real estate ideas and big sim ideas and big zoned residential sim ideas, but they have never flown in the dead of night over a big black void called their sim, on which tier is due in 29 days.

Excuse me, but for someone who is only kicking a few ideas around, and who is only in the 4th day of existence, your initial ad sure came on strong. And I reacted to it, as did others.

I do not "masturbate in cold space" -- and yuck, why put in sexual metaphors that are merely distasteful and don't shed light on the debate?

As I explained I really did the things you are talking about, I did them on lots of sims, I tried different things, and I spelled out a lot of ideas and issues.

So instead of commenting on my persona, delivery style, your reaction, your efforts to one-up, etc. etc. why not actually grapple with the ideas?

I've confronted you about this idea of retaining the sole veto. Could you comment?
You get the sole veto, though you might not be the one putting in the investment?

I've asked you how much investment you are willing to put in this project yourself (rather than just getting others to donate 4 sims). Could you answer that question?

I've asked you to respond about the strips-of-land concept. Are you going to have a model with tier-donation, prims-sale, or low-impact business? Have you thought about any of this?

Or are you just getting together the usual wiki? Everybody pitch in, help me put over my idea, that I haven't done a stick of work on, or paid a cent on yet? Huh? Why?

Excuse me for being "negative," but these are just basic questions.

At what point does your project cease being "me and my veto and my vague plans of financing and my kewl website with groovacy modernistic fonts and white/gray shadings of colour" and become a real, viable project?

When maybe you stop talking about it and buy the sim and get started? What is your plan for that? How will you finance the purchase? Will you have a tier donation scheme? How will you filter for like-minded? Will it be on the open market?

Honestly, you really ought to fly over and see Anshe Chung's sims, and Adam Zaius' sims, and my sims. I just don't know how to put it gently: stop jerking off, and see what people really do when they spend their own money and try to recoup their expenses, instead of spending other people's money and time.

Please don't try to subdue legitimate debate by characterizing some participants as "not contstructive."

And please don't characterize yourself as "moving forward" because you've kept the sole veto power on a sim, found a couple suck-ups, and never had to answer a question why you get to do that, especially if you aren't paying all the purchase price and tier?

I've got a very constructive question here, Lefty: who will pay, and how? That's about as constructive as I can get for the very issue of how you will literally construct.

Next, I have to point out the salient fact that Anshe sells parcels in her zoned communities and gives a sell-back price significantly better than your 33 percent, yet she is running at a profit, not a "break-even" as you said you would run earlier.

Let's say you buy 1024 for $5999 in her sim, you get $5000 back if you want to sell out, I've done that. Or you also have the choice of opening it for sale on the open market, if you can find a buyer, but that buyer has to agree to abide by her TOS and ROC.

We've already been over this issue of "no retail joints ever yucky commerce ooh cooties". You're forgetting that people sometimes want to sell objects in their home, or test vendors for their stores elsewhere. Some people can have little businesses in a corner of their home, it's a good thing to have. Don't be so quick to bar commerce of any form from your controlled world because then you deprive people of their God-given ability to sell stuff to pay their bills, and they need to do that.

Now...you're saying WAY too lightly that people can "build what they want."

Could I direct you to all the threads about neighbours and purple/white/black cubes/towers/boxes? I think you need to bone up on those.

Excuse me for interrupting your regularly-scheduled wiki.

yuck...

who keeps suggesting control? who keeps bringing up funding? why can't we work out a plan, work out a design and then worry about getting it funded? We havne't even begun yet, how is it that I've already crashed and burned in your oppinion?

furthermore, how dare you say i'm avoiding your hardline questions? I'm expecting input from dozens of peple over dozens of topics and conversations. How is it you can demand responses from me? Why do we have to keep hearing about YOUR ways and thoughts about doing things? I think you've officially killed my post because i just scrolled up to the top and realized how long this thing has gotten. Anything we add to this point will not be read by the majority of casual browsers. It's burried. My visibilty just went poof.

Put your virtual rep in your pocket, put own your sim shovel and let somebody else put something in the hole. I understand you seem to have had some struggles with your projects and Anshee seems to be doing things a cetain way. But this project of mine will only be helped so much by that sort of input. Tell me how to do things, not how not to do things.


~Lefty
P.S. What on this virtual earth made you bring up the free web template i used for my webste!!! Are you so desperate?

to start addresing the ideas of control:

This is a HUGE part of the project. It's not to b taken lightly and not to be tossed into a forum for a day and then set into stone. i've tried to start a framwork for thinking by saying that the wishes of the citizens will only be constructive if they will have to apeal to a moderator who holds veto power.

Because there will probably be a group of six sim owners who seek to maintain renting levels, their veto powers will be used to keep the best experience on track for the citizens. If your land quality and immediate neighborhood will be protected from day one (saying that it will not have changed from the first day to the sixth month) what do you see being a pressing community isue? The only real need for public concenus that I can think of right now will be exceptions to the height standards on specific plots with specific building ideas. I can only come up with one ideas at this time because I am only one person. I'd like people to start offering input on what they forsee becomming a community issue.

one thing I am thinking about is that if land rental fees are going to be flat-rate based on parcel size, flexibility will be introduced in the idea of a sim management fee. A small addition to the rental fee that assures the citizens that things will be enforced, clutter will be removed and events always well funded and promoted. This could possibly be subject to community discusion. what are your thoughts?

~Lefty