a different kind of grid

I'm unsure why we can't have everything. Environmental templates for those who feel comfortable in them: sea, sand, hills and sky much as SL is now. And the tools to build separate but accessible environments for others - the degree of accessibility left up to the person who owns/builds. In the second instance, I'm not sure there's even a need for familiar "earthly" templates; see Khamon Fate's "Immersion" thread. Nieghborhoods and niches might take on different aspects, becoming more voluntary, and less compulsive.

I can see where it may be a matter of development and cost versus benefit, but beyond that very common business consideration is what?

It is a problem for some because there are no other options. A least not for those on basic accounts or premium accounts with little or no land tier responsibilities. For those not spending a lot of money to secure large tracts of land on the Main Grid or purchasing private islands, the only option is to work within the framework that the Lindens have laid out that make this world possible. I'm speaking of the financially viable aspect of this world.

The Lindens have worked very hard to build value into the world that they have made available to us. So they can keep it viable. There is value to having water front property. There is value being next to a telehub. There is value being next to a void sim open water area. As long as there is value, people will invest in this world and allow the Lindens (and the residents) to continue to evolve it.

There have been requests for offline personal building areas. Personal sandboxes. I can see the value in this for the individual, but i think a lot of people would not come inworld as often if it was implemented. And that could make being inworld, in Second Life, not as valuable.

I think that once a certain threshold is reached, when the overall technology is stable enough and the Lindens have fine-tuned a way to make it financially viable for them to do so, they will do as they have said and open the technology to the residents. Then I think you will see many more options for creating and being in a virtual space with oneself and others.

And other entities who have begun to implement some of the same aspects of virtual commerce/society, like World of Warcraft and Microsoft's xBox Live with the selling of land and goods within their services, may leapfrog Linden Lab's efforts and provide those options sooner. I have not been in the WoW world and have only used the xBox Live service sporadically so I don't know much about them. But they are obviously watching efforts such as Second Life which have been blazing trails into the new frontier.

Ultimately, I'd like to see options come along with regards to the Metaverse that allow for the expression and experience of all personality types and personal desires. If someone likes the familiar atmosphere and social interaction of places like Second Life, The Sims Online and There, they need to accept and live within the framework of those places. Treat others as they want to be treated, be aware of their affect on their neighbors and, generally, just be good citizens as they live in a shared environment that is open to all who desire to be there. Along with that sort of arrangement comes the possibility for conflict as anonymous strangers collide, each wiith their own vision of how their experience should be. Compromises have to be made to continue to co-exist in places like this. It's a lot of work, and sometimes heartache, to wrestle with challenges that arise when a lot of people are involved. The rewards can be very satisfying though, to see something created and enjoyed by a large number of residents. Many of whom never knew each other before meeting here.

For those just looking for a place for themselves, or to hang with friends and family, and not have to put up with what some see as the hassle of being in a big sandbox with total strangers, I'd like to eventually see more private places that don't cost as much as a private island. $900 to start and $200 a month is a lot of dough for the average person/family. Yet right now, that is exactly the amount that they have to spend to have that. I'm talking about people who have known each other for years and family members who want a place to gather, create and make a place that is theirs' to experience (and whomever they wish to invite in). Not anonymous avatars that hook up and decide to make a private enclave and then have internal disputes over where to put the telehub, whose scripts are provoking lag and whose been pixelating with whom, etc.

I don't see this happening with Linden Lab's technology until they go open source and allow individuals to run their own servers. I think that the world of Second Life will remain essentially what it is now and keep growing -- a flat virtual representation of sky, land and sea that is open to all who desire to experience it. A place with a lot of people, mostly anonymous, that are all contributing to the world that Second Life collectively is. Here you can be a content creator and be actively building part of the world or just explore and be a content/experience consumer and let everyone else do all the work. Each is path is rewarding to the person taking it.

When we have the ability to create places/spaces vastly different from Second Life's you will see more options like what was described at the beginning of this thread. No ties to a fixed land metaphor. More competition between entitites that provide those world building tools. Lower costs for creating your own virtual space.

When that day comes we will have the option to live virtually as a hermit, as part of a small enclave or amongst thousands of acquaintances and strangers, and the choice to move between those situations as we wish. Each option has it's upsides and downsides.

I pick all the above.

Highly flexible spatial connectivity doesn't necessarily mean instanced regions accessible only to one group of avatars for a session. Guild Wars uses instanced gameworld zones for quests/missions as a practical solution to the problems of spawn-point camping and kill stealing which apparently cause people great annoyance in traditional MMORPGs. We don't have those problems in SL, but we could really use configurable spatial connectivity as a bridge between interesting locations.

This is fair, particularly where privacy concerns come into play. However, you lose a little of the persistent feel to the world when you cordon off special "slices" to certain people. This is my point.

In looking at Second Life today, the grid could have been created in many different ways - including an instanced format (which I think will make up the long term). The reason it's not like that now is the fact that the Lindens are human beings, and cannot yet devote the time/energy/processing resources to such a system.

We can only manage 15,000 prims in a simulator. How about when we start breaking that simulator up into 15 separate instances? What now, Mr. Magic?

As such, I think it is how it is now simply for ease and to maintain a sense of "place" that is immediately familiar. What Guild Wars, or other software in the same vein, provides may work - but it's not necessarily what the Lindens are aiming for at the current time.

I agree. It's good to have the flexibility and moving between the interstices and developing inner space and all the rest, but there has to be some kind of common denominator, some landmarks. Otherwise there will be war. There already is war on a flat, dimensional, contiguous surface like SL tied to RL imagery -- wars that come about not only because of proximity but because of valuation.

If you have all those marvelous instancings and realignments of space and time, but all you do is the same old boring spawn camping, and questing to kill monsters after you've leveled up and suited up, what's the point?

If that seems thrilling, just because the scenery and the monsters change, I guess it's because it's basic human animal nature to spawn-camp and kill stuff.

Here's a proposal, when you make your land "private" then people who arent in the group/access list see only the terrain, and when you are within it, all you see outside of your boundaries is the terrain. None of those nasty people looking in, no ugly builds (although you may not like the landsacpe.

But best of all, people not on the access list, etc can pass through your land unhindered, without seeing you or you seeing them.

To me this kills two birds with one stone and solves much of the original intent of the thread (perhaps you would like to see ocean instead of terrain and I sez why not?)

This is an interesting idea, and sometimes is achieved more mechanically in game by making a scrim with one side on "clear tile" to give the impression of a see-through clear tile showing the terrain, and the other side having a photo or a design to block the view of that ugly build across the way.

I wonder what it means to fracture the world into a million private visions, with only my buddy list accessible to the literal viewing of my world.

I find it troublesome, the believe that multiplicites of niches and multiplicies of visions and viewings are not going to lead to more rootlessness, griefing, damaging, and war. What will begin in a quest for privacy and "my world" and "the hell with all those ugly people" will lead to its opposite.

I just think it's human nature for a certain portion of the griefing public to then go to greater lengths to grief.

More importantly, I wonder how you acquire a shared sense of community in such a space within a million hidey-holes.

Let's say I land in Dore. I either face the chaos and just randomly fly along until eventually I adhere to some other random sentient avatars and we niche up.

Or I am whisked away in a taxi cab loaded with URLs or grid coordinates that take me to a pre-set experience -- which some greeter pre-determines by eyeballing just how well I did with "appearance" mode on Orientation Island. Did I make the cute halter top and the bermuda shorts? Or did I leave that ugly blue spandex on "as is"?

How will we cohere in this world? How will we acquire a shared sense of purpose -- an agreed upon, not imposed-from-above sense?

To quote Dianne Mechanique:

"For instance in my sim there is one person that is making everything difficult for eveyone else, squatting on empty land and generaly being aggresive and divisive. Now everyone is moving out or thinking about it just to get away from the person."

Being the person who is referred to i would have to point out that the accusation is as bogus as the claim is disingeneous. For starters i own a tiny piece of land in the area and am using abandoned land for a sky-build project until it is reclaimed by its current owners and/or recycled by Linden Labs; something I have already discussed with Linden Labs. If using abandoned land is a violation of the TOS, i will quite happily vacate.

Secondly, it can hardly be said that I am divisive when all the other noobs have left. I have nearly quit SL on multiple occasions since joining. I too have tried to leave but am unable to sell my land. Instead I am faced with 2 large landowners: Dianne Mechanique and her buddy Garnet Psaltery who not only surround me but also own the best part of half a sim between them. The reality is that the area i'm in has been carved up to create large estates and that I, unwittingly, allowed myself to be used as a tool in that process. I have offered my land to both Dianne and Garnet so that i can escape their poisonous embrace but to no avail. They refuse to buy me out and insist on red-taping my land.

No..... I set up the local resident's association and did all the slog to get people involved. I did all the work while Dianne and Garnet bitched and whined and how am I repaid? She is annoyed that I have woken up to her plans to use me as a land-clearer in SL. And she is furious that i refuse to be her pet in SL. Dianne is angry because i actually have a mind of my own and refuse to be a receptacle for her pre-assembled rationales. I will have none of it. I have already made arrangements with the Lusk Estate to move there as soon as my land is sold and they are quite happy to have me.

Furthermore they are acting on behalf of Bob Bravo to victimise me. I was called to intervene in a dispute in Sabulella where Bob raised the sea bed against the wishes of the already existing population. I interviewed Bob agressively (yes... i'll admit that. But it's a fair technique in the news media when dealing with contentious issues) and recorded his replies. Within hours of this happenening both Garnet Psaltery and Dianne Mechanique began their victimisation campaign against me. It's not rocket science to figure out the causality here and it proves that the arguments against me are both bogus and manufactured.

Yes, I have my own plans and ambitions in SL, but they are modest and I'm in no hurry. But I will not be used, bullied or misrepresented.

What a pity you don't allow the same liberty to others.

That is my only comment on this matter here. Readers are free to discover the facts by visiting me in game.

All I can say is this post is *mostly* fantasy, and a lot of it seems to violate the TOS in that it is basically an unfounded personal attack.

- You also fail to point out who is using "push weapons" on who.
- You dont mention *which* person it is that puts up large signs saying...
"<insert name> is a Psycho-Bitch," overlooking that persons property.

None of this is cool or even adult behaviour in my book.

There are lots of other mis-representations in your post as well, but most likely no one cares about this situation but you, so I will refrain from commenting further.

The Lindens will deal with the abuse reports and whatever they decide is fine by me.
Unlike you, I don't file abuse reports hardly at all, maybe that will count in my favour.



PS - You are still on my friends list (believe it or not).
Apologies are not that hard.

like most of the lofty posts in this famous L+E forum, this one wasn't able to reach high enough to escape the flames.... interesting

there seems to be a human pattern here which rips at the very fabric of SL and causes us to feel cheated by this virtual world. We aren't able to leave our meat far enough behind while we exist in SL. Our meat habbits never seem to go away.

This is the true issue facing SL. 2003 to the present. People will be people. It doesn't matter if we only see what we want to, live where we want to, are granted with surpising tools and technologies or continue to abide by the current entrapments of SL mechanics... we'll still find a way to get in each other's way. We're just lonely intellects trying to make friends with something virtual message boards are more than 20 years old, all the while lacking in spatial and graphical entrapments and the flames were always there... it was always burning since the world's been turning

it won't matter if SL degenerates into a glom of milions of floating islands.. we'll still find a way to bump our islands into one another

"We didnt' start the fire!..." got that damn song in my head now!
~Lefty