Zoned Sims and Residents Associations

Do we want to see changes universe-wide? or do we want to see different policy effecting different sims?

Do we predict problems with diversifying policies on different simscapes? Do we feel universe-wide changes are the only answer? I'm seeing more posts about specific policy ideas rather than ideas for implementing them.

Would any of you move to a new sim that had exceptionally configured plots, planned zones, guaranteed views and protected tree buffers in between you and your neighbors?
Would you pay a small fee for this as a service?

Keep in mind it would all be an option available to you. Evaluate it as such

~Lefty

I insist on being a legitimate participant in this discussion, even if some interlocutors prefer to ignore me, or use psy-war on me to undermine me through ignoring me, not replying to my direct comments, and attempting to portray me as the "negative" that you can eliminate from a discussion by ignoring it as the "best method" to prevent them from "derailing" a thread so that the "intelligent decent people" can go ahead with the discussion. Not so, G.I.

Here is why you cannot borrow RL dramas with bosses from hell and react to them in SL by refusing to change pernicious elements of the existing tools.

Currently, the desire of many people -- many people who work in the IT world who tend to be the kind of people attracted to this game?? -- was to put into the group tools a feature called "officer recall" which enables any rank-and-file member to initiate a voting procedure to gather 2/3 of the vote to remove that officer. During this period, new group membership is paralyzed, so the officer targeted and the targeting party cannot gather new votes for their side. Operations of the group also become paralyzed because land is involved.

The original idea of this pernicious function was to have some mimicry of a RL-capacity for anyone, even a lowly clerk in a company post office, i.e. a 512 owner who put 512 in a group or something, to have the capacity to blow the whistle on a boss from hell, i.e. an abusive officer. It was seen as some kind of "people's democracy" sort of thing, but that's why I denigrate it as hippie dope-smoking utopioan commune stuff because it implies that it is ok to paralyze group activity with endless wrangles over who is not being equal or whether some animals are more equal than others. The Lindens admit that this tool was designed in another version of the game before land groups became more widely used and its consequences were not envisioned.

The reality of this function is that very often, certain large owners who have their malls or other large properties in land groups, with many merchants having membership status in the group merely to have their prims stay on the land during prim sweeps, become targeted by rogue members and malicious operatives who join the open-enrollment groups to trigger officer-recall and try to disrupt the group and the officer for whatever reason. The only workaround, since the votes can happen to go 2/3 for various stupid reasons (some people clicking "yes" just to get rid of the spam), is to quit the group and form a new one and put all the land in the new one.

A more serious problem is when you get a treacherous officer. The treacherous officer has land-sale privileges and can set group land to sale at any time, including land he personally didn't pay for. A treacherous officer can also decide to delete all the buildings on group land on a whim, even if they were jointly used and labour of various kinds was jointly applied to them, and the creator of the builder got various benefits from having his solely-owned building on group land, i.e. dwell, traffic, visiblity, etc. Now, who should care about this? Not anybody really. It's a game, get a new building a new land, whatever. Creators can do what they want.

But it is a pernicious function that leads to havoc of all kinds on a large scale, mainly because the Lindens did not really think through who people could buy land together, pool tier together, and share objects together, and frankly, I guess they have no motivation whatsoever to do this except to turn over zoned sims to social democracy project or turn over large sims to oligarchs who zone them. *Shrugs*.

Have you thought about what it means to have all the buildings on your group land now be welded to the group land? The new 1.6 version is supposed to have that function. Architects and landowners everywhere are celebrating because at long last, they can sell land with the buildings on it as a complete package, without these cumbersom $0 sales that are so risky because anyone could then grab the building during the transaction (or pieces of it). But...has anyone *really* thought about this for group land?

Currently -- and I've been bugging the Lindens for weeks about this -- there is a serious bug on the group land functions. Objects put into "share with group" and then put into "deeded to group", when set to that land's group owner, and returned from the lot, i.e. when a lot cleaning is done to get rid of all prims on the lot to start over, will *disappear*. That's right, *disappear*. Now, what happens when I explain this reality, which happens with radios deeded to group in shared rented land (tenants want to hear their radios and the only way to do this is to deed it to the group because only the group owner can configure the cards in it) -- is that people tend not to believe me and start a tekki snarl about it. They say I don't know how to look in folders where returned objects come back, etc. etc. But trust me, I have gotten the repeated tests, I have gotten the screen shots, and this is a serious problem seriously going to create havoc in group land with large group buildings on it. Take a prim, rez it, share it with group, deed it with group, create a little 16m square around it, blow the set-to-group-deeded-prim off your land...and you'll see I'm right about this. Indeed, it is a reason why, when you blow shared-deeded prims off land, the message comes up: "Remove/delete deeded objects?" Because evidently the system can only grapple with a deeded set object return by putting it in the noosophere because it can't understand TO WHOM it should return a deeded group object.

Now anybody happily making a group now and welding a building to their group to accept money, for example, i.e. a job object or vendor objects, or some other kind of collective building, have to ask: TO WHOM will it return from the group? Nobody likes to think of what happens after the happy group breaks up, but better to build in the protections and procedures now when you can agree on them then later, when they are the subject of wars.

Now, I know I'm very boring and longwinded here. But try to think this through. WHO OWNS the group-owned building welded to a lot and now in the group, assuming we fix the bug problem? The person who paid for the build? Its creator? The people who maybe knocked themselves out doing events in it? The people who put dwell on the land due to that building? These are not empty questions. They are like the questions reviewed in the courts of the land over divorce cases.

You're making the assumption that right-thinking, nice, good-willed people "the intelligent ones we are and we are surrounded by idiots" -- will simply sort these things out. Well, guess, what, they don't. You can be as intelligent as all get-out and have the best will in the world and guess what, these issues do NOT sort out nicely.

The "boss from hell" is the person who pays for the purchase price and the tier on the land and the "boss from hell" is the person who creates and builds the buildings and objects on the land. Why shouldn't these people have rights, and equal rights, and privileges indeed, compared to other rank-and-file members who don't contribute money or creation to a group, but perhaps only tier or dwell?

There is a reason why the game currently protects these bosses from hell -- their hard-earned labor and hard-earned money is giving them that status. You're talking about "bosses from hell" in management terms, busy-bodies who want to set rules for everybody and make them jump through hoops. I'm talking about a very serious group situation where not only are there serious conflicts between "two bosses from hell," there are the rights of the ordinary members to consider.

SO I can only conceive of a status called "investment officer" which makes it possible for people who put money into the land in the game not to be ripped off by griefing idiots and treacherous officers. I can only conceive of a status called "content officer" for someone creating a building and placing it out to keep it in a group but retain the right to withdraw it. But obviously there isn't a solution for what happens when the group breaks up, and the investments that the land-owner put into the group and the land and the buildings, are not recoverable. And this creates serious obstacles, because it means that everyone in the group has to go to the investment officer to sell even a tiny square, and everyone who wants to even add a prim to some grand structure has to get the content officer to toggle stuff. The whole point of a group is to work happily in a group.

These tools much be changed. They don't work. To invoke concerns about "bosses from hell" to shut off discussion and rally the masses is not helpful, because on the one hand, bosses from hell -- if they are people who paid for land or created something -- must retain some kind of privilege in a higher tier in the group even if it means creating a hierarchy because people who pay more money, create more, and pay more tier simply must have what they do valued, and not stolen from others who did not contribute. On the other hand, other officers and members need some protection from their overreach. This is a balance, and one found only by democratic discussion that doesn't seek to delegitimize any partner in that discussion.

No change, even seeming improvements, to the group tools, should be instituted universally until they are really rigorously tested in beta-tests and limited-market tests, and I favor the latter rather than the beta-test-love-fest approach that induces symbiosis between the game manufacturers and the beta-testers that is hard to undo when criticism is needed.

I have ideas for implementing these changes. I have posted them copiously. I *do them* intensively in the game. I know that people find it hard to listen to me. But it is pretty simple:

1. Buy a sim
2. Name the sim's zone yourself without Lindens or oligarchs -- merely putting a label, a name, not a zone, goes very far toward you goal!
3. Put good buildings on the lots to stimulate an admiration of good architecture--doing by example is the best way without having the vexation of zones and laws
4. Put notecards on the open-market lots asking people to hope for the best--just asking is all that is often needed
5. Form a community association (non-landowning) that works to resolves disputes and decides more serious matters about the long-term zoning of their sim -- should small businesses be alowed? Should land be sold? Should the group acquire some land defensively in its view corridors? etc.
6. Or alternatively, for a community association to jointly hold a sims commons and keep that commons beautiful, and share the prims from it equitably or rent it to cover tier, etc.

You might ask the Lindens to put corridors of park land between lots to make it less hard on people to suffer neighbours. But the Lindens cannot micromanage on sims like that when they sell so much wholesale. Land barons could chop better but they have no incentive to because they can't get paid for park land. Therefore what I tried to do was make a commons that went between the lots to divide them up, creating some natural meeting areas, and made access to the waterfront. I'm not an urban or country planner in RL or SL, but just trying an experiment. Someone else is welcome to do better. I'm just saying that a solution can be found without Lindens -- I did it. Then I had to think of how to pay for all that corridor-like land that wound through the entire development. What, I'm supposed to pay 5516 m2 for the rest of my life just because I made a community.

Now people want to knock my market-based solution by saying it leads to "clutter" or "not good looking buildings" or "it can't last" or whatever. But unless we find ways to do this without Lindens and without oligarchs, we do not have a world. Not a world that a million other people will come in to for the fun NOT of scripting and building on a really hard learning curve but for the fun of making little villages and cities, solving their problems live, and living in them.

So my solution was to have a combination of residential rentals on part of the commons land, to sell parts of it judiciously only to existing owners with the understanding they would sell back to me to make a commons, and to have some businesses rent on it. I had other ideas like having the players all fork over 512 to keep it, but no one values commons land enough to fork over 512 or even 256 for it. That's the reality. Everyone values commons lands enough to ask the Lindens to practice loads more socialism and put it out everywhere without selling it or getting tier paid on it. But no one values it enough to put their own 512 in it. That is the reality of this world.

I've really done these things in a number of communities and seen the real consequences of them. I'm constantly dismissed and blown off not only because of forum wars, but because quite a few people think that a) they will filter the architecture and sales better to make sure their feted friends get in and keep it "looking good" by their lights and b) they think they are the intelligent ones who know better and will sort it out where others are just belligerent fools.

But having been to the mat on these issues I can tell you there are really real problems that occur because of the persistenti view and fly corridors issues. One sim is never enough. Four is not enough, and those at the outer reaches of those four will still complain.
I've indicated the kind of severe problems that crop up -- the use of bounce scripts that interfere with flight patterns, the use of laggy scripts, the construction of giant towers in the view space, etc. etc. etc.

Group zoned land or group land with giant projects on it like malls only succeed today because one or two strong-willed and strong-minded individuals put in all the purchase money, tier, and work. And that makes them resented, and makes them hated in the game (except by grateful groupies in the community lol), and makes them constantly targeted. They don't have enough tools to protect their land investment in particular. The tools must be changed to do that.

I say this with all due respect to the participants of this forum and the ideals we herald as worth our time:

I recommend Professor Prokofy start a web domain in order to post manifestos (manifesti?) The length and sheer density of the paragraphs can be very intimidating to those who might be interested in voicing an oppinion but simply cannot skim the fat as it were in order to chew back. He has very interesting ideas and is a value to the cause for good change. But I assume simply from the sheer volumes of text, some of it has to be redundant from post to post and topic to topic. I can offer web space if needed.

There are people listening. Trust me. Even if responses are not hastely put together for timely responses. The endgame here is eventual progress in an agreeable direction. It takes time and social engineering.

~Lefty

Lefty Belvedere:

Damned right I'd move to a great sim like that if I got to do the configuration work! YES -- I'd pay a small fee for being able to do all that layout and planning and landscaping. It would be fun and interesting and a great learning experience. When can we start? : D

But most likely you're actually suggesting that you get the fun part, right? How bout a compromise? I'd ask you to IM me in-game, Lefty, but SL isn't up yet (which explains why I'm looking at the forums). Could you specify some of the characteristics you'd aim for in configuring exceptional sims?

Just kicking around ideas is productive too. When Pimushe was being settled I did a case study of the terrain there to determine how to organize the sim so that view corridors could be preserved. Sutherland got the same hypothetical treatment. That cauldron topography could have served as the basis for a phenomenally interesting build, but at the time I was content with my ocean/wilderness sandbox, and not serious about buying land.

Now things have changed. I'm on the board of directors of Nexcom, and Chad is interested in planning where to locate our headquarters building. We're thinking business park, but more high-end than a slavishly realistic one. Think of landmark towers rising from the foliage of unspoiled terrain. Miramar with the shining buildings rising above the trees, and minimal disturbance of the terrain.

A sim like that could include fine residential dwellings as well, or it could lean toward the sandbox idea...I think Waves Lightcloud suggested a sandbox category of land use? But instead of the auto-wipe it could be here's my experimental build...and over there is yours...totally different, but both really interesting. Each of us wipes and rebuilds according to our own requirements. I used to live on a sim where I did small scale experiments and Barnesworth Anubis was always building something new and different. The activity and changing display made a lively environment -- the exact opposite of sims full of buildings that never seem to get used.

hell yeah it's fun creating worlds, hehe.

Depending on the scale of the project we feel can get off the ground, other landscape architects are certianly needed. I think ultimately a 4 sim island near the mainland is the best test for this idea. However I still do not understand how land ownership works on private sims. If anyone can beat the Lindens at clarifying this for me it would be very helpful.

My current impressions of owning simulators and maintaining control is that land would have to be rented out and residents would have to manually pay the sim owner. I see that as very workable but ultimately an issue that will need planning and some minimal scripting. Paypal and L should be easily scripted through the new linking functions and a small script that keeps current with the GOM rate.

Even though the land would be rented and not truely "owned" in the SL sense of the word, this would hopefully be seen as a bonus and not a hinderance. Guaranteed money back for moving away and, of course, the promise of supurb living conditions would make the small change a good thing.

I dont' want to ramble on in this forum about specifics to the project becasuse this is a general forum for ideas and policy type chat. look for www.infinite-island.com to contain the ideas i have for a new 4 sim island starting Fri evening. (04.01.2005)

~Lefty

The problem with the idea of scoping out view corridors is that it is too scientific and mathematical for the way most game play happens and the way most sims develop in the wild and even in managed situations which are usually managed by people also running huge land and mall businesses with loads of administrative detail. And mathematical view corridors won't solve even the problems they can solve.

If one person is given the status of Lord Architect of the sim and can ruthlessly control ever single thing about it, from its choice of building textures to the squares of turf between houses to the view corridors, sure, all these things are possible of the "great experience" of the sim -- as long as they find enthusiastic supporters to bow to this vision and never change it. And Lord Architects with these visions and these control needs can take over sims, if they want to pay for them, and then try to get others to enlist in their vision, if they can do so.

Some who have done this, like Nexus Nash and Adam Zaius, have a pretty good looking sim that is making residents pretty happy. The little complaints people might have, do they like a spinning sculpture or they don't, do they really own their land or not, are offset by the freedoms they have obtained from uncertainty and griefing.

In Pimushe, even attention to view corridor issues could not stop the dispute over the choice of one neighbour to go modern/tekii/square and another to go Victorian/landscaping/old brick. They aren't really in each other's view corridors as such, i.e. protruding up over the land elevation or ruining any scientifically divvied-up elevation corridor down to the sea. But they still can't get along because of jealously-held matters of taste.

In Sullivan, I can't say anyone blocked the view corridors either, but the problem becomes what you might put in a view, which someone hasn't bought, after all. When it is a stupid club with ugly textures or a store with a spinning sign, everyone around with any higher taste in builds is going to be dismayed. But who are they to dictate? They aren't lords of the sims, but just neighbours, and sometimes neighbours with less land than the people with the "questionable" builds. It is possible to organize some peaceful co-existence or detente on some sims "in the world" but the only way

I personally wouldn't want to go and live in such a heavily managed sim, where I might have to get a permit to put out a bush. I've been in situations where I couldn't lay out a prim because it was considered "unaesthetic" and that is a truly great hobble in a creative space like SL. If a new person especially can't hack around in their back yard with different builds without neighbours in a managed sim screeching, where are we?

Lefty,

You can use rental boxes on land, which currently are monopolized by scripters who charge anywhere from 1-5 percent. I'm interested to see whether welding buildings to land on 1.6 will now make it possible to make a house an object that a group or individual can accept money into or not. If it is deeded to group, it means the money distributes equally to every individual in the group. This will have to be played with.

The private islands you just buy from the Lindens for $995 and then pay $195 maintenance on them. But people find them uneven in service and some prefer to be on the grid because you get flybys you don't on an island.

Four sims are what you must have to control a vision of a zoned community that has the detail and restraints that you seem to want to have.

I have a web site but I don't want to be alone on my website with 20 readers. I'd like to post here and if my posts are too long, well, I can try to shorten them but no one is required to read them. I have a lot to say on these subjects and I am not redundant, but often reiterating a set of theories in each new application of them to specific circumstances which the game has to shortage of supply.

An important feature of a residential group is that it should be open to membership to those who have purchased land on the sim where they are located, or even possibly open to the public. I believe it is important to keep residential/community organizations open in this fashion, despite the inherent difficulties.

This opens up issues of how you keep out griefers, of course, and some people just want to make their own private club with their friends, and that's fine.

But when a group creates a closed residential group, not open to others, even owners on a sim, and doesn't publicize their membership list in FIND GROUPS (which is their right, of course), it begins to beg the question as to why Linden Labs should start accommodating their wishess to change features about residential zoning and groups.

Why should LL cater to closed, exclusive groups?

When such closed, gated communities are formed, even if the gate is very pretty, there are troubling questions raised about the formation of closed societies of unaccountable people who draw on resources and get the ear of LL if they are "special," but which have nothing really to justify their claims other than that they happened to buy some land somewhere first or last, and then begin to make demands, while shuttering themselves off from any legitimate scrutiny.

It's sad to me that SL will fill up with such gated communities, and it already filling up with them, because there are people who are so arrogant as to think they have "innovative solutions" that only the "special" can access LOL.

Do you have any examples of said communities?

Yes.

Realleh. Well I think you should enlighten everyone. Don't you?

A couple of things about some of the stuff I've done in SL the past few months:

1. I bought land in Boardman and decorated it because I like decorating.

2. Other people bought land and decorated.

3. Maxx bought land in Boardman through the auctions

4. I have alot of land, so I sold some to good friends.


This is not a residential "project" of MINE, the sim is already zoned by the Lindens. The sim belongs equally to everyone who owns land there, market stall owners and home owners. I am not in charge, the Lindens are, as they are for DeHaro, Brown and Green.

Heh heh. Who put all the trees in Boardman?

I put trees where I could and Jack Linden (who is the zoned sim guy) put up a bunch of new ones to replace the cruddy looking palms that were there before on Linden land. He did the same in Brown. HUGE improvement!

we just mutually agreed to form and be nice, it was very much like the Null-A Venus as envisioned by A.E. Van Vogt where General Semantics makes men have no need for rules because they all know what is good for the community and beat the evil alien inavaders...

I can't say too much...because...they're secret.

Well if they're secret, its probably a bunch of buddies who want to surround themselves with people they like. So what if it's not open to everyone? It's their land. They can do whatever they want with it. There's plenty of other sims.

Yep, there's a lot of that in SL, it's the perfect place to hang with your buds in your cave. That's fun, let them do it, who could care?

But then don't start clamoring for LL to make changes and adaptations for you to merely go on doing your thing, when it has no evident public advantage and is not going to be made publicly available to all, but is just going to benefit your little group in your little closed society.

If people are entering a discussion about how to make groups, how to make zoned sims, what works, etc., if they have secretative groups with closed memberships and gated communities not open to the general public but filtered through screens, well, then I raise questions as to why LL should be responding to them and feting them. They could always go on a private island for one. But taking up a space on the grid to make a closed secret society makes a statement, doesn't it? And there are already so many hierarchies, controlled situations, monopolized situations, etc. in SL that it's important to question them for the sake of a liberal, open society overall.

Can someone really tell me anything about the value of their experience in trying to manage sims openly available on the grid when they set up closed, filtered, communities based on their own oppressive ideologies? I don't think so.

Cause they're paying customers? And they'd like to keep players who pay tier fees happy.

If I owned a bunch of land, I wouldn't want to feel that it HAD to be open to the general public, not when I'm the one footing the bill. If the community is advertised as one thats open for anyone to rent or buy land then probably, yeah it should be fair game for anyone. But really, its up to the person who pays the bills.

Read what I wrote Ingrid.

Nobody is required to make their land public.

Nobody has to open up a zoned community to all comers.

My point is different.

My point is that people who set themselves up as arbiters of a discussion of how to zone communities, of how to organize the group fuctions, and demand that LL makes changes to these tools *SHOULD* have some public accountability.

If they are demanding changes from SL, if they are setting themselves up as the arbiters of the zoning discussion, if they are trying to insist that their experience is superior and they are the good guys, then I do have some questions for them: why are you secret, why are you closed, and what gives you the right to occupy public areas and demand changes from the Lindens?

See the difference now? I knew you would.

Nah, people make requests from LL all the time for purely selfish reasons.



No actually I don't. Ultimately, if LL listens to their requests and makes changes for the good, the changes will benefit everyone, not just the group who requested it to begin with.

I'll answer those in order (Being a part of some "secret" and "closed" communities, both now and in the past, in SL. Just so it's clear up front)

Because we want to be.

Because we want to be.

Because we pay LL the same as anyone else.

Okay. So you nutshelled it way better than I did.
So do you guys have a secret handshake? Do you wear special hats and stuff?

The Witchhunter hat is a long and proud tradition. Unfortunatly, there aren't enough of us to have a secret lair at this time.

Maybe someday...


Rei sighs longingly, thinking of all the burning yet to be done...