Zoned Sims and Residents Associations

Thank you for the opportunity to have a moderated discussion on this important issue. I volunteer to start the proposed thread since I started the Nestor Residents Association when I bought my land there directly beside my Brownlee lot. Nestor Residents Association is growing steadily. A new member joined today.


Nestor Residents Association works because of a few lessons I've learned during my RL career.

1. First and formost, people value their personal freedom. In RL none of us has enough personal freedom. We are hemmed in by rules, regulations, constraints and bureaucracy. Many of us would do better work if the stranglehold of bureaucratic rules were lifted. In SL, people value their creative freedom. The freedom to build enchanting and inspiring structures.

2. In general, nobody wants to be a minion in yet another hierarchy with yet another boss issuing commands. We get too much of that in RL. So people are justified in being suspicious when Ferren Xia or anyone else proposes a residents association.

3. Time is precious. Few of us will willingly sign up for an organization that features meetings for the sake of having a meeting, group spam and and time-wasting on personal agendas.


So far the Nestor Residents Association has managed to avoid these pitfalls. The association has served as a conduit for friendly cooperation, and we expect new people to join as time goes on. There is no financial benefit that accrues to me as founder of this group. All members including me have the same title: Resident.

I would like to hear from Juro and others with constructive ideas for different flavors of community associations or warnings about the potential pitfalls.

RL lessons don't always carry over into SL just because there are so many wildly different variables in SL, but human nature is human nature, and your insights might apply.

1. People hate the idea of groups that have meetings, you're absolutely right, and yet when necessary, they will spend hours on meetings when they are like-minded, and have agreed upon a shared goal about which they have a shared perception.

2. Planned residential communities need a) a plan b) residents in a residential space c) a community. As obvious as that may seem, it is difficult to achieve in SL. Sometimes 6-8 friends go off and form a commune. As in RL history, they often fight or things happen and they break off. In SL, strangers might join around a common theme, that they all just happened to come and buy in a sim, but it can be a very mixed bag. So the simplest plan, I think, is to come up with even a vague general direction of the sim: a) residential b) club; c)mall d) experimental. We've already dispensed with b) and c) as you describe your area (although being right on a telehub you might have difficulties hanging on to that but a) and d) are where the friction can happen. One person wants quaint, cosy, Victorian, farmhouse, Alpine lodge, Colorado. Another wants Jai Nomad, crashed space ships, skyboxes, weirdness, spooky trees. There really has to be likemindedness on nature of builds and how the sim might go. In Pimushe and Sutherland we talked about "natural" or "woodsy". It didn't work for a variety of reasons, partly because people are free to do what they want on their property! You can't first make a community association, never have a meeting, and make a vague charter that promises to change "after the sim settles down" and then confront somebody who already signed on. You have to decide collectively as a group before the builds begin. If you can't do that, expect to be highly flexible and tolerant.

3. People fight over scarce things. The first scarce thing is nice view. You didn't buy the view, but I happened to on one side and sold it in part to one player who will be fine to look at, but you have gambles and risks on every side of you where land changes hand and anything under the sun, from a griefer tower to a bush with a waterfall can and does occur. So the first thing to do is decide how to handle viewblockers and ugly. One way is with scrim, which I see you have out already, though some might argue that it is needless and eats prims. Another is to decide if you and your members are going to go around and try to buy up you view corridors. This can get tense and expensive. Decide early on if you can just put your draw distance to 96 or lower and be happy with the nice area you already have, or whether securing your view around the sim out beyond your property is a priority.

4. The other scarce thing is prims. At some stage, they become scarce. You dont' have to have contiguous land to draw the prims, but it helps. You can make a commons that is pretty (it doesn't have to be a New England Town Square but can wind around) and have nothing on it but a few trees, and draw prims for everyone when they get scarce. You can figure out allocations and try to get people not to be prim hogs. Prims cause a lot of friction in groups when one person draws them down, then goes off line and all that can happen is that an officer can delete or return them. Better to decide that before than after how it will be handled.

5. Another major, major source of friction is griefing and how to handle it. Griefing is routine in SL, and sometimes systematic. Some people reach for aggressive bouncer scripts in these situations. Those cause more problems with neighbours and fly-bys than they solve. So do the red lines of just ordinary av bans. Usually griefers give up after 24 hours when they are random, and even 7 days when they are systematic and targeted. So weigh that inconvenience with the issue of what a nuisance it is to be knocked around sims by bouncer scripts. I personally ban bouncer scripts in my communities and I fight them when they appear in neighbours because I believe they are a severe form of griefing and violation of the TOS. The Lindens are ambivalent about bounce scripts.

These are experiences I draw from rental and sales communities, and they aren't just my experiences, but those of dozens of people grappling with these issues. You don't need a planned, zoned sim to have a better residential experience. It can be very loosely guided by just good will, a sign out that says buyers should try to be residentail, and some very, very basic ground rules like no builds over two storeys, let's say, or no bounce scripts. If you can decide policies on how high, whether to bounce, and how to allocate prims, plus figure out how to protect the view you didn't really buy, you will be well on your way to removing some major causes of conflict.

We have a Volunteer Zoning Board in Louise. We've had approximately two meetings in three months, on no schedule. We have no dues or fees, no bylaws and we don't ask anything of anyone. We talk amongst ourselves about what we like and don't like and trade ideas and then go off and build what we want. It works great.

Plus, I love Louise. I love to spend time with her. And she, in turn, seems to care about me. If you can have a deep romantic attachment to an anthropomorphized virtual plot of land, I've got one.

Walker, I respect people who take this approach. You have equal partners getting together for the common good, and nobody is trying to set themselves up as a boss. We get enough of that at work. Could you send me an invitation to your next meeting?

My original list was short because I prefer to offer a few ideas, then let other participants speak up. There is much more I can say, but we enter perilous territory here. It concerns problems the residents association might legitimately be expected to resolve. Here is a short list of obvious problems:

1. Griefers build something intended to annoy one or more residents.

2. Sim performance degradation due to overuse of particles or other scripts. This assumes no intent to annoy.

3. Client performance degradation due to having to load many different textures. This assumes no intent to annoy.

Walker, has your Volunteer Zoning Board encountered any of these serious problems yet? Nestor Residents Association has not. I would like to hear from anyone with experience in this area. Specifically I would like to know what works.

In my experience, because the communities are on the open market, and not pre-set with like-minded who all join them at once, or join them gradually through someone acting as a filter or gatekeeper, the frictions arise within the community, not between the community necessarily and the rest of the residents of the sim, though that often happens too, especially if some members of a residential community then put stores in the next sim over.

Usually the griefers deliberately annoying to annoy just anybody they can get attention from, or specifically one resident they are stalking, do not last long. Indeed, the length of their duration can be directly tied to how much attention they get.

Sometimes what appears as griefing is just idiocy, somebody building a giant skyscraper with flashing lights called "Luv Hotel" and a sign that says "GIRLZ" far from the telehub because they haven't realized yet that won't sell. Or they built high and flashy to compete with some friend or ex-friend next door who built tacky but not high, etc, etc. Usually players this aggressive are banned eventually, or get tired of a game where the building and scripting requirements are so difficult for the average person without special computer skills to learn, that it does not create an avenue for easy formation of mafia-like networks and griefing. So ignoring them is the best policy.

The biggest issue any community will face is whether there should be a strategic buy-out. For example, an annoying neighbour or an ugly griefer may put their lot to sale next to you, but at a very high price. The most common form of harassment I see is people setting lots way to high as an invitation to have you buy them so that they will get gone. I have had a variety of experiences here, and embarked on some deliberately to see what happens and what works. There is a school of thought that if you pay an extortionist or someone demanding a huge bribe to get gone from your life, you will only encourage them and facilitate their griefing of the next sim where they materialize and fester. But in fact I've found sometimes paying for some kid's overpriced 2048 club lot for not a lot more than what I might pay for scarce telehub space, say, gives him a feeling that the game has finally given something back to him, after his days or weeks of frustration, it doesn't really cost me that much given the server resources I gain back for the entire community of tenants, and is well worth the investment. This can backfire, he can and does go and grief others, or he sometimes just disappears, realizing this isn't the game for him, or he can move up to a higher plane of civilized existence.

I have found always that the best recourse is to do absolutely nothing about any situation for at least 24 hours if not longer, because most situations change one way or another in SL or become clear. Next, I IM the person or go to talk to them and try as politely as possible to ask what's up with their build. Sometimes you discover that some monster build is in fact merely being rezzed and practiced on and will be moved somewhere else. Sometimes you find people have no idea they were causing problems and they fix them. Most of the time, however, people really get their backs up if you even ask them the slightest thing about their property and builds, because they are conditioned to be in a culture here in SL where their ownership property and build rights are paramount uber alles and neighborly consideration is not promoted or rewarded. This is when you turn down your draw distance, wait, or move. I advocate waiting.

On textures, I find that most cases, people had no idea about their texture load on the sim. Once you explain that a 1024 size or higher texture already overloads the server to make it load 16 times slower than a 512, they instantly get it because it's not a problem for them to go back to the desktop and make a 512 version and upload it and redo the textures. Usually they want their guests or roomies to have the same faster-loading texture experience that you do.

I find another useful thing to do is to explain the use of alt-1, alt-shift-u, the object called "Scrubbie" or Braniac's script-finder, etc. so that people can begin to see into the workings of the game and see the place of their lot and objects in it. It can be an eye-opening experience.

I distribute cards that say "Lag Begins at Home". Most people hate the lag around them but have no clue that they have contributed significantly to it by putting in a bouncer script, spinning turntables in a store, spewing particles, various on-line indicators, etc. that need to talk to each other or you or the server all the time, strobe lights, blinking signs, etc. I have had the experience of gently talking to a club and asking them to change a texture or remove just a couple of their strobe lights and the FPS shoots up for everybody.

But...the biggest source of lag is avatars. Group events, nearby shopping malls, a telehub, a club, these all lag because they have avatars in them, and often avatars with lots of attachments like prim high heels and hoochie hair and weapons and bling. So...there is little you can do about that except to try to talk to some owners. Could they have one of their 4 tringo games a day maybe at the other side of their enormous mall so that it doesn't lag you on the edge so much in the next sim, etc.?

One important thing to know is that activities in one sim do lag the neighbouring sim because of the functions that enable sims to stream content to each other and enable the avs to look over into the next sim and see it.

A simple, four-line notecard that explains a community policy of no textures above 512, no bouncer scripts or turntables or spewing particles,i.e. no excessive scripts or use of particles, advocacy of the use of the "light-kill" script to reduce light shed around light objects, a clear-cut group prim policy -- these should pre-empt many future disputes.

If I got a 4 line notecard from you, I would return a 4 word notecatd.

"Go fuck yourself, asshole"

Weedy Herbst says:

Not very constructive...but perhaps I missed something? Assuming I didn't...its this sort of thing that reduces SL far below what it could be.

(EDITED: I've already deleted that personal attack. No worries. -Pathfinder)

one thing i've noticed about slate and taber is that the group members are flexible.

the slate land is all group owned and subject to the whims of any officer. but rather than being ZONED AS THIS OR THAT WITHOUT ANY POSSIBLE CONSIDERATION FOR CHANGE OR EXCEPTION, the sim has been through several iterations of differing themes and is about to embark on a new one. occassionally someone doesn't want to play and takes their allocation and drops the group. occassionally someone wants to join and add allocation. it all comes out in the wash because the people involved are flexible and more interested in getting along and providing a good common environment than they are pushing rules and rights on each other.

in taber, everybody owns their own land. but still the group manages to maintain a semblemce of order, theme, and laglessness because that same attitude of building a nice, useful sim overrides the occassional tantrum some of us are inclined to throw when we don't get our way. is everything in taber absolutely 100% tudor, to scale and within the stated guidelines? well no, we don't even have guidelines. we have each other.

it seems to me that most people want zoning for the express purpose of knowing what is and isn't allowed in the sim. they believe that constraining rules will protect them from lag and unsightly textures while allowing them the freedom to enjoy their own building projects. this fantasy ranks on my list with "telehubs will focus commercialism and leave further sims to quiet, pretty residential types."

it's this simple: if you want to live and work in an attractive, lagless environment, you have to own an entire sim. if you want to group with people to own the sim, that's okay; but they have to be people you already trust and get along with that share the same vision.

Neal, I warmly appreciate what you and your fellow residents are doing in Rose. Your own meticulously researched Japanese style build fits in well with your philosophical outlook on SL. Any advice you might have for us would be appreciated.

That said, I seemed to have missed something by not being at my desk continuously. If Weedy made a comment I thank her. She is well known for her beautiful build in Tharu, and SL is lucky to have her still with us despite harassment by a stalker.

Just a reminder...if I see any more personal attacks spilling over from the previous conflict, I will not be warning anyone any more. I will simply delete the message and begin suspending accounts.

Thank you.

Please carry on. This is a VERY interesting topic, and one that could ultimately solve some of the building issues that you all have been struggling with.

Wow, Prok, thanks for that information! I have one of those Scrubbie things but I have so many mysterious things in my inventory that I never thought it might actually be useful.

I'd love it if you would drop me a copy of your Lag notecard.

Ferren, I'll contact you in-world about the LVZB, but god knows when our next meeting will be. We don't seem to have the power to resolve anything, but we do try to pay attention to the issues you cited. Our membership doesn't really take in the whole sim either.

I find that most of these communities that say they are communities, and zoned communities, and have officers in them even, in fact involve one strong-minded individual, and one individual who pays all the tier, or most of the tier, and has gotten some of his friends involved in his scheme, usually by giving them land for less, or even for free. I found this out when I went to research all of them before I started mine. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, because it often takes one strong dedicated person to set up a community and run it through its complexities.

I think everything depends on whether or not you first make the community and then search for the land, or you first conceive of a community theme and feel, and get a few like-minded people, and then hope you can find the rest to fill up the plots and take on the tier burden. You can induce a lot of stress for yourself when you anxiously hope that you and your 3 friends will get the rest of the sim to follow your brilliance (they usually won't). And Khamon once again, one sim is never enough. Try four sims. Trust me, I've worked on this assiduously. And even four sims is never enough.

But I find it's like the idea of how you encourage genius. You can't just take one child and pour all the resources into that one child. You have to create a good class of 40, give all of them equal opportunities, and hope that these conditions create the possibility for that one genius to appear, and that recognition will appear of different kinds of geniuses. Different cultures and societies have different ideas about how you foster this excellence, which in our world, is the genius of a good build. Some think you pour all the resources and all the honour and glory on to that one genius, and replicate him slowly through apprenticeship and careful filtering and leveling. Some people think you encourage freedom and experimentation to create conditions for good building by creativity and example in a very free space. Others think that by mounting an operation with one strong-minded person, or just a few, that they can between them decide what is a "good build" and then roll over the rest of the sim to impose it.

Taber just happens to be one of those sims, it appears from the outside, where a few of these very talented players found each other, grabbed on to each other (hence the "well no, we don't even have guidelines. we have each other" philosophy Khamon mentions which is a special kind of high-level likemindedness not easily achieved) and then got that filter to work very well in filtering out all the stuff and people in the game to draw the rest. It would be helpful if those on Taber explained how Taber came into being and filled up, because I find that that critical mass on a sim of a very good builder or two, and a few very appreciative neigbhours, can be all it takes to make a sim good. But if those even every-good builders get an attitude issue that their notion of good is the ne-plus-ultra, then friction will begin. Those with very good taste in very good architecture often assume that this is self-evident, replicatable, and right. The notions of what is "good architecture," however, spanning cultural/age/education etc. divides is actually quite a range, however. What has to be avoided is a small group of people finding each other with great relief in the morass of the game, but then smiling and nodding to one another and saying "we're the smart ones, gah, thank God we can now wall the other idiots out". This is a recipe for death. You will never find the other new geniuses that way.

What happens when one lynch-pin fabulous builder or tier-holder pulls out of a Taber or a Slate? Does the entire thing unravel unless it has built in mechanisms for refreshment and finding new genius? And I'm afraid the only way to find the genius is to permit the class of 40, and that means not only suffering some clumsy newbie builds for a time, but being willing to lower ones standards of perfect architecture just a tad to allow for good and decent builds that don't grief to have a right to exist and push out the available space of civilized living in this game.

Lets try walking before we run
I have read tons on this from a controlled community too we have meeting and it doesn’t work

Lots of folks writing novels about this. Here is my suggestion

Make an area beside the buy button on the land sale menu,
it has 3 boxes , you must check one box to complete the sale.

1. First box reads : Residence only
2. Second box reads: Commercial only
3. Third box reads and Box (i.e. creativity area)

Now the fun part
what defines residence,commercial,sandbox ???
I smell a great poll or vote on a list of choices for each zone.
But IAM writing this so throwing in my 2 cents now, and we haven’t heard from Tang yet , hahaha

Residence simply means: No Commercial sales( no scripts that can exchange Lindens of any kind)
all disabled ( vendor,gambling,object buying etc..)

Commercial simply means: No permanent home dwellings and all forms of Lindens exchange permitted.

Sandbox simply means: all objects will be auto-returned at a preset time daily that the owner must
fill in this type of land purchase.

Before you are able to buy this land it does a area sweep, you can not place a residence check box
if the land boarders any commercial lands, and vis versa

WOW !!!!

Only a resale of the land can change its statics the next owner can pick how they want to setup
there new land

anyway a small land check box added to this menu with preset options.
Might be a walk in the right direction

It's very clear that LL wants to see what we can do given the limited tools and resources at our disposal whether it be for zoning, events, commerce, whatever. In regards to zoning, the main resource is land which players purchase in order to facilitate how they want to spend their Second Life. Some players want to do events and build a club, others want to nest in a tropica paradise, still others want to make money so up goes a mall. With all of these diverse uses of the land, it goes without saying that there will be disputes and unhappiness as one use conflicts with another. And the cycle of discontent goes on ad nauseum and is renewed by every subsequent exchange of land.

Can anything be done? Sure, buy up all the land to protect your vista, or your dwell, or your prims. Not too realistic for most casual players, though. If a neighborhood sprouts in the midst of chaos, more power to its members. Getting a group together with a similar vision is nice. You can all spread out the tier so it's not so burdensome. But that only really works if you trust each other. And sometimes that isn't really enough. Conflicts arise, people leave, and then what? Back to chaos because the tools aren't sophisticated enough to prevent it. Nothing programatic or contractual to provide a safety net exists.

I think the solutions for the common folk are out of our hands. We need green space, we need more robust tools, we need places where people can go and do what they like without having to worry that their vision of what SL should be is destroyed - deliberately or not - by someone who may not share it.

This is essentially what I have been talking for months, but I have some different notions based on actual experience, so let me explain:

1. Residential should not block any kind of sales transaction script. So often, people use their homes to work on their vendors, and have their friends over maybe to beta test a few items, and they need that flexibilty. People sometimes just have a piece of furniture for sale in their homes, or an invention, let them.

2. You can have an overall residential sim, but have low-impact stores, i.e. small stores in tasteful buildings with a few vendors or give-all objects or even just notecard- or land-mark givers to main stores. That way a person can have a home and a store within reach to immediately put his creations in. A sim where there is rolling hillside for homes down to the waterfront, and roadside up at the top for residents to put some stores, such as we had in Ravenglass and Maryport, is really a great thing. The stores do start to lag the sim though, even if they are in the next sim, if they have spinning turntables, bouncer scripts, things that talk to you and the server, etc. So winnow those down.

3. The reason why you can't be horribly rigid about "residential only" is because you have to think about how the tier gets paid. Not all people on that sim can reach into their pockets and just endlessly pay tier on a prairie for everyone to enjoy. Maybe people can pool tier, maybe just a few low-impact businesses such as recreational businesses like fishing games or boats for sale or vehicles for the road will work to get some income for some residents or outside players who help keep a communities commons then paid up. This was the idea of Shack Dougall for Ravenglass which I implemented and try to use elsewhere, and I think it is a brilliant one for managing sims, it isn't so easy always, but it does help to cover commons tier and manage the balance between residence and business.

4. The "sandbox" idea is troublesome to me. So often, sandboxes get really chaotic, with people shooting, even in non-shooting zones, testing weapons and big vehicles, rezzing giant stuff. I think there should just be the sandboxes we have that the Lindens or perhaps a few residents run, without extra new zoned sandboxes. I think a more workable idea is "Experimental" as a zoning name for a sim to signal that wild, odd, big, weird builds are welcome there, so they have a home, and don't harry and harrass individual home-owners who just want RL-replication. But don't press return on their creations daily, let them have such zones.

5. Indeed, we might have started this convo by saying: the decision to have RL replication versus SL type appropriate builds is the first decision any community should agree on. There is a range here. But a common cause of friction is when one person puts up a RL suburban type replication and the one next to them trying to make a wacky build for our actual avian world, becomes furious.

Waves, you sound like a realistic person. I am in favor of the practical small-scale start as well. Your checkbox idea strikes me as a good start, although I might want to change some of the definitions. If your checkboxes found their way into some future version of SL we might see people buying adjacent lots in sims with different zoning. That is similar to what I have right now. One side of my building is in Brownlee, facing a busy telehub. The other side is in Nestor, facing a pleasant residential area. Although my building is residential right now, I intend to play with a commercial use in the future. Your checkbox idea would work for me.

What I like best about your suggestion is the underlying philosophy of enhancing freedom. Your checkboxes are a tool available to all individuals, and are not set up to facilitate special 'boss' powers or status for one person in a group. This point is very important to those of us who see SL as a welcome escape from the heirarchical restrictions we face in our RL workplace.

Just a few comments that aren't really solutions but... in my experience, if you build it, they will come. Since Boardman has become more residential looking, it has attracted great neighbours who want to live in a residential sim. If I sold alot of the land there, i THINK it might stay that way for a while. Not sure though. Also, at the moment a good chunk of it is owned by me and Juliah. But a few others have smaller amounts of land there. We don't have any formal groups, or meetings.

Edit to add: the reason I think people weren't initially attracted to Boardman was the brown land and the sad looking brown palms. People like bright green, fluffy trees and communal areas like parks.

I said all this to Khamon in real life, and he asked me to post it here: new communities in Second Life are doomed to failure.

Communities like Taber, Slate, Zoe, and a few others work because they were formed before land barons. The members, and specifically the officers, were able to grab land or earn their vast fortunes or make important social connections before land barons pock marked te landscape. They were able to establish their communities and back up plans -- if someone, say, leaves Taber, the members can grab that land and tier up long enough to find someone they trust to own the land.

New communities don't have this support mechanism in place. They're lucky to get 512M in the same sim with Land For The Landless, and often that's in a sim where land barons are already chopping up plots or buying up 512M plots. The feted innercore, as it were, Oldbies as I call them, had time to flourish and grow in a rich, fertile land devoid of predators. Newbies don't have that luxury, and newbies who come to Second Life to build-not-socialize may not have the patience to hang around and adapt.

The only way to fix this, to cut through the Gordian Knot of land barons, would be for Linden Lab to allow people to split the land tier of an estate sim. Let one person pay the $900 down payment, but divide the cost up. It won't work on the mainland, because any whole sim put up for auction will be bought by land barons for more money than one sim is worth -- $1200 is the last price I remember for a mainland sim.

Please don't take ANY of this as land baron bashing. They're well within the terms of service to buy and sell land. This post is simply my view of Second Life communities from an evolutionary standpoint.

Okay, Khamon, how's that?

Even simpler than a checkbox or any new technology or features from the Lindens is just a sign or a notecard giver. It's interesting to me that what helps make Brown or Boardman work (Linden controlled) and then later Miens (player controlled by two people in the company GIGAS) is that a few park benches, a bit of sidewalk, and a sign explaining about building codes are all that you need to make a sim better. To be sure, griefers struck even the Linden sims because they had marketplace stall spaces for sale, some apparently got publicked, and griefers bought 16M squares for extortion sales. But everyone ignores them.

I just put out a notecard giver on each plot for sale on the open market -- parceled to try to prevent large buy-ups, griefing etc. by putting them in easy-to-take-on 1024, 2048, etc. The notecard giver said simply "This is a residential sim". That's it. And I never had a single problem with a club or a mall buying these lots. Most clubs or malls actually are run by decent people wanting to have fun or make sales, who, upon reading a sign that says on a lot: "This sim is residential" will say "Oh, ok." I know that sounds astounding in this game space that is filled with so much chaos and griefing, but I am telling you my experience. Write "residential" on a simple notecard you can make today and distribute without any game changes or Lindens. People will listen to you.

Ferren, you are a brave man to open up a residence and a zoned-attempt community next to a telehub. It will provide some great opportunities in terms of ease of visiting for events, education, etc. It will also create some great problems if any of the malls have tringo or bingo or get laggy. You are right next to Anshe's Wild West, which lagged Wixom down to a stall and spilled over to Cub and Wakeley where we had some managed rental communities. We worked hard to get rid of all our laggy items not to make it worse, but being even 250 or 350 meters from a telehub is an invitation to have a non-residential experience. Maybe this telehub could go differently with a little effort, such as yours and other neighbours. In Cayuga, the persistence of the cliff-dwellers finally paid off to stabilize an area near a mall, but still acceptable to residents looking for a beautiful view.

Trying to get the game to offset the experiences of RL that are negative like hierarchies is an admirable pursuit, but one also fraught with some difficulties, it seems to me. Self-employment has much to be recommended. Hierarchies emerge because sometimes a strong individual who pays for everything and gets things done while others are talking is needed.

i'll oversimplify my point: sim-wide communities live and die by the attitude of the people involved (landowners).

people who approach the problems of lag and ugliness by imposing rules on their neighbors are dooming their groups to failure. people who have attitude of considering the welfare of the sim its residents are supporting a working community.

to blame our lack of ability to act like adults, debate our group's welfare, and cooperate with each other on the lindens, the land barons, or people who happen to've been residents for a couple of years, is a cop out. are you guys seriously telling me that it's impossible for group-oriented, sim-wide communities like abbotts, boardman, indigo, lane, lusk/perry, seacliff, and taber to form today without preimposing strict regulations or dictating the construct of a private estate?

if that's true, it has far less to do with external support than it does people's unwillingness to participate in a viable community. my list is mostly composed of older sims populated by older players. are there no groups of newer people that maintain newer mainland sims by working out their differences and getting along? is the world really that sad?

edited to add: maybe i should say this. it's not all honkydorey happyville in slate, taber or zoe all the time. we have our difference. people, including the khamon, storm off and say things they regret on occassion. but our ultimate goal, as individuals, is not to maintain our own rights and purposes, rather to support the success of the group and good maintenance of the sim. if that's what you call fetied, i'd rather be fetied than relying soley on myself and a few strigent zoning rules.

All of this is true, but it does leave out the realities of why land barons exist, managing, parceling, selling -- all the hard, hard work of land sales that Lindens are not willing to undertake because it doesn't scale up in a growing game. So land barons perform a very necessary and vital service.

I have done what you are suggesting, so I speak from experience, whereas so often people get on here and tell each other "go buy a sim" or "why don't you go on a private island" etc. when they are speaking from their free paid-up 4096-for-life or not even from a 512 LOL.

I bought a sim. I made it residential. I sold it. I went over to the next sim. Bought half that sim. Made it residential. Went over to the next sim in the view corridor, bought it, made it residential, etc. lather, rinse, repeat. And I will say once again that buying one sim is never enough, and buying 4 sims is never enough because all it takes is one idiot on one tiny 512 or 2048 who griefs, lags, harasses, and ruines the experience for adults owning hundreds of thousands of meters of land on 4 sims. All it takes is for one land to go public and get grabbed while you are sleeping, and you are done for. So... the answer is either be content on one sim, or figure out a plan for strategic and defense view-line purchases in 4 sims, using the power of a group and its shared tier.

You are absolutely right that certain talented oldbies formed trusted networks back when land was cheaper, there were no barons, and they each had 4096 of paid-up lifetime tier, free of land worries and free most important of the need for defensive and aggressive view-salvation purchases -- they were stress-free! Each and every day I log on I am faced with yet another emergency view-salvation opportunity or threat. 4 sims are never enough, any part of any one of them can go wrong on you at any second.

And their experience making a Slate or a Taber or even a Boardman, or even a recycled Boardman, is simply not relevant to the large majority of other sims. We need recipes not just for making a few more Boardmans or Tabers, but for creating rules that will lesson the chaos or griefing on a lot more sims, especially open-market sims, not just sims created as residential by one strong-minded, efficient, and wealthy individual who buys up a sim.

So once again, I can say what I've been saying for six months, which has been obvious from day one: form a group, pool tier, pool dollars on PayPal if you have to, then buy a sim or half sim, make a community. It is hella, hella, hard work to do that. But do it without the Lindens. You don't need them. You don't need them to get to do much of anything except keep their servers running, keep from switching the servers on you after you buy, and have them fix the group tools to eliminate officer recall and treacherous officer sell-outs by those who didn't pay for land or tier.

You don't need Linden Labs to do anything or "let you do anything". You just get a sim, doesn't have to be a private island you wait for. Go on the auction, bid for it efficiently after studying the market. Get it, pool your tier, have one officer buy it. But....this is the kicker. Finding people to trust each other in a game involving land that cashes out to real-life money can be very, very hard! But please try it! People can try smaller projects first --just try to run an 8192 well. The tier has to get paid. And there has to be an income generation in some cases to make back the purchase price. So few people are really needed to pay $195 in tier! So few! so why aren't there hundreds of sims of people doing this? This has been the mystery to me since I came in the game.

To be sure, whole sims don't come up on the auction that much, but all you have to do is tell Phil Linden to put whole sims out more because you will buy them for sure, and he will. He has grasped the idea of the need to put out more big whole sims and half sims (he said it in his town meeting of some months ago, and said it in the Oil Rig conversation as you can see). The problem is that entire sims get bought by barons who either turn them into their own personal zoned fiefdoms, or else chop them for quick sale. Don't blame them for doing that until you have walked a mile in their shoes. Instead, see if you can really really go through the hella hard thing of getting even 2 people to more less coordinate their purchase and running of a sim. We have this on Cub, very informal, no meetings, no assocations, no nothing but just a couple of people trying to make sure it doesn't go to the dogs.

Before anyone here asks the Lindens to do or change a thing, they must try the existing game tools. Form a group. Pay your tier. Pool your tier. Pool your Lindens (easier done than pooling real-life US dollars). Elect one purchasing officer, and ensure that other officers are not treacherous by having them not just put their word as a bond, but their money and their tier. Buy a Linden-priced land on the auction. Move to it. And work your community rules and you will have a Second Life worth living.

I am interested to discuss the issue of defensive purchases. I deal with this constantly. I sometimes get contacted by people very worried about what I might do around them, especially on a chopped-up water parcel, and they worriedly want to make a purchase they can't really afford in order to keep their view beause they know you have to buy the view in SL, hell, essentially you have to buy the servers' parent agents and the child agents on 4 sims to keep your view!!!

Or sometimes I log on and to my horror I suddenly see some new purple land where I had thought the red land in my peripheral vision was permanent Linden land. Or I see some land that seemed like it had a no-show owner with pretty builds on it for ages who I began to take for granted suddenly liquidated to a land baron who then chopped up the sim into bite-size pieces.

I sometimes fly around for an hour studying these chopped-liver situations, thinking if I buy a chop here, a chop there at a strategic 4 corners or within a pattern, that I might prevent it from going horrid.

Or I make an offer and sometimes get very lucky with someone who has something for sale next to me in a very risky area. Or sometimes I pay a fortune if it is really some piece I really think will become a huge nuisance if someone of a non-residential sort gets it, and I weigh whether I saved enough already on that sim to swallow the costs.

I've flown around and talked to friends and neighbours and have been amazed to discover that everyone has some private horror story, the tiny piece they bought on their sim for $20LL/meter on their sim to keep a land they liked group together.

So I wonder if people could come out of the closet on this experience. Did you ever make a defensive land purchase, unplanned, too expensive? Did you ever inquire from a neighbor whether they would sell to forestall a future griefing?

The idea of pooling together a group is a great one. Obviously the real world has grown like it has today due to the many great minds and resources coming together. It appears that Lindens put in some tools into the game that encourages us to group together and that maybe more tools are needed.

There are also tools in the game that allow us to be individuals and play as individuals.
Many great inventions and creations are born from a single person tinkering in their laboratory or garage. Many individual players can only log on for a few hours a day and who do not have all the time, effort, or skill to be group officer, land baron, or club manager. They come on to dabble in creativity, socializing, and maybe invest some RL money in some land and objects in order to see their idea come to fruition.

So the tools we need in the game to manage or help facilitate zoned land should satisfy both the "groups" and the "individuals". In a group you are trusting each other to abide by the rules you establish by what ever mechanism you determine - thats great, but not everyone can play solely by those parameters. The individual player likes their rules and parameters established for them by Linden Labs, albeit in the form of a pull down menu or a checkbox.

I think we really need to attack this from the ground up. I like the lengthly ideas presented in these forums but I think we've stumbled into another blind alley.

No matter what the intended use is, I believe that 90% of the issues people have with their current plot, neighbors, view and builds are due to poor landscape architecture.

The majority of current sims are arranged and terraformed into a wilderness configuration with little regard for landuse. This is primarily because the land in its original form is not zoned for a specific landuse catagory. Your RL hometown would be an awful place to live if you didn't pay taxes into a zoning commission.

The other 10% comes from the fact that parcels share borders with either privately owned parcels or barren, under-developed linden-owned land. This literally puts a new landowner against the odds from the get-go because he's already dealing with surroundings that are poorly adapted for the feeling of good, private space. The "protected" Linden land that is scattered around the place could go to better use creating strips of wooded areas in between small homestead plots and creating circular sitting and greeting areas at the heart of dense commercial areas.

CURRENT SIMS:
The area added to the East a few months ago: Sawrey, etc. Views and builds are literally being compromised because of the Sims original terraforming. The shorelines were too steep in Sawrey. Some shorelines in other sims were hills that dropped off sharply into a narrow river. Other hills were simply too round or too steep to be pretty. Landforms such as this are merely iconic in a virtual environment. Why subject ourselves to the same unuseable landforms found in RL environments? Virtual environments should give us the ideal circumstances we cannot find in RL.

I assume that one of the underlying ideals the LL team had was to lay out a virtual untamed wilderness and watch people tame it like the wild west. But in reality, this is less than ideal. Why settle?

IDEAL FUTURE SIMS:
It might take a week's worth of planning, but a sim can be terraformed in such a way that it assures great views to everyone and simple zoning methods can assure that the space we put money into is the most ideal situation for our projects.

The general theme here is that we, the masses, are seldom left to our own ideas of community, space and flow because we are all individuls acting within an ego (not to mention mediated by computer terminals) Community terraforming with buffers and simple height zoning is an inevitable part of building strong communities.

Strong communities and planned zones are not for everyone and certianly clash with others like myself with comparable grand schemes. The best part of a strong SL is that we can have different sims and different spaces. Planned communities and zones don't currently clash with any other sim, nor would they in the future.

We must remember that we continue to be human while inside of this computer world. Taming the wild west is a great part of our humanity. But it is simply a facet of what makes this virtual world fun and exciting for us which is dependant on other areas of SL offering different persuits of happiness.

~Lefty

This is serious advice, Khamon, and the realistic description in the rest of your post makes your advice credible. It strikes a chord with me because it is very similar to the project management maxim that quality of personnel is everything. In this particular case quality means the good will, common sense and communications skills of participants.

One shortcoming of the rules approach is unforseen problems the rules were not designed to handle. My personal take on the rules approach is colored by an aversion to bureaucracy. If others are willing to give up some of their freedoms in SL they may form their own organization, but I would never support the institution of rules that we had to opt out of.

This philosophical point about opt-in versus opt-out has been mentioned several times in different threads. If changes are to be made we need to express an opinion on this point now. My instincts are to preserve freedom, so I want opt-in rules only. I also veto any changes that make it easy for the 'boss from hell' types to game the rules at our expense.