Lusk Estates - What went wrong?

Spurned into action by a recent thread by someone seeking an urban development sim, I felt I must write about Lusk Estates.

Located in Lusk, bordering Ahern, you will find Lusk esates. On the note card that is given out by dispensers around the estate, the rules of building and zones are explained.

The Basic Rules are as follows:

* you may only buy one plot, and purchase the entire plot
* You must be at least 3 SL days old.
* You must build a convential home ONLY. no shops, dance clubs etc.
* You must build within Guidelines
* No Objects for sale except for stalls in the centre of the land.
* No Signs
* No Disruptive textures, particles, sounds, or scripts.

All Parcels of land started out at 288 or 384m, and you were supposed to release (yes release) them should you wish to give them up.

So what went wrong?

Standing in the estate I see the following:

* 16m Plots for sale at $200 each for "prim use" - breaks a heap of rules - land barony at its finest. Well done to the fool who felt it necessary to destroy a useable parcel into useless bits.
* 384m plot on sale for $12k - GREED. 'nuff said.
*stalls outside homes selling objects
* Various non-house builds
* builds over the 15m height limit
* Signage

And what is LL doing about this? Nothing. zip. squat. Should they be? I think so - you advertise something, then you should maintain it. this has not been happening for months now. I do acknowledge however SL has changed substantially from when LL created the estate, so there may be reasons that remain unknown to me.

What should happen? heres my grandiose plan:

* restore the land parcels to their original size - LL buys back non-orginal sized plots and rejoins them. Pay the market rate. Some people may scream this isnt commercially viable - my personal opinion is if you print the money, you make the rules. I dont believe the economy will crash as a result of a buyback of this scale.

* For those not wishing to sell up, perhaps offer free relocation to an equivelent sized plot.

*Active maintenence of the zoning rules. Lets be serious here. given the size of the estate, It should take less than 5 minutes a day to maintain for a linden. Perhaps this could be done by an on duty liason?

* Establishment of a residents association for the luskwood estate. This would assist in the daily maintenence of the estate, as well as help build a community spirit.

*Land must be purchased from a linden, and sold back to a linden when you have finished with it. This would ensure that you are not out of pocket from purchasing the land, when it comes time to sell it. This would also stop all the land barony, and subdivision issues.

I think I have reached the end of my story. I would welcome a Linden Lab Employee to comment on this matter, as well as all you other second lifers

Another example of how the whole thing is pretty much going to hell.

SL is probably growing too quickly for LL to keep up. They need to develop tools to get things organized and automate these kinds of things.

In this situation, they need to change the land sales algorithm to allow certian parcels to be permanently unsellable, unsplittable, and unjoinable, so that the owner can only release the land to public if it's no longer wanted.

They could also implement an algorithm at land purchase time to check if the buyer already owns land, and deny them the ability to purchase specially-flagged plots if they do own land already. This would also allow them to automate land for the landless.

These two parcel attributes should only be settable by LL of course.

see this thread
Themed Communities and the end of phase one of special support -

I thought the special restrictions had been lifted with the coming of 1.2
It used to be that in those sims like De Haro, Lusk, etc, you could only buy one pre-sized plot of land and were surrounded by lots of linden land.
Then they released it all with 1.2 and people started claiming it.
Anything that requires Linden supervision will inevitably fail since they have more important things to do.

When I stsrted SL last June, Lusk was a pretty nice neighborhood. Many of the most influential residents had lovely homes there since it was really close to Stage 4 and Welcome. It really wouldn't be possible to have detailed homes like that on those small lots now.

My understanding is that the Lindens intend for Groups to manage themed communities like this, with the land being owned by the group.

However, with the current state of group management capabilities, it makes it very difficult to manage land. It's possible, but difficult to manage. Hopefully more intricate and feature-rich group management features will be forthcoming.

grumble....put forward what was supposed to be a constructive thread, and get shot down in flames

ok, all reasonable responses. what frustrates me so much is there are people wanting these themed areas, but they are right here already, just waiting to be used/restored.

One of the problems is that there are still a lot of old and terribly out-of-date landmarks, notecards and signs (like the ones in Lusk) still floating around, and it is confusing to everybody. Just the other day there was a very new resident at Welcome trying to get directions to Avatar Central - which has been gone completely for at LEAST 8 months now.

not true. jarod bought his entire life allocation in boardman when the linden land was released, set aside a newbie sandbox area, set up free apts and started building a newbie club complete with information dispensers.

he got an im from haney on day four telling him that the club didn't meet the boardman specs and he would have to take it down. a few days later, new rules were posted for boardman brown and deharo. they weren't too much different from the old ones. green was left out because it was being sold off. they should've done that with all of them.

to answer the question, i have no idea what happened to lusk. the east side is a very pleasant place.

Anything that requires Linden supervision will inevitably fail since they have more important things to do. [/QUOTE]

true. and those ARE more important things. meddling in themes, building codes and prices is silly and wasteful. such things create a lot of bad will and never accomplishe the stated goals.

Lusk Estates has been tough.

The signs are still up.

The responses we've gotten from the Lindens, as to whether or not the rules are still in force are,

"Well, I don't know."
"The Lusk Estates charter is a funny thing..."
"I don't think the Lusk Estates charter is enforceable."
"The Lusk Estates charter is still in effect."
"The Lusk Estates charter is not enforceable by CS"

... So, basically, what happens are, there are a bunch of newbies/land grabbers/scanners/casino owners, who buy up the land, split it up, put crap on it that NEVER goes away, particle spewing signs, you name it... and the Lindens don't do anything about it.

But, when I -asked- to own more than one plot there, I was originally shut down.

The Luskwood folks would probably buy all those plots if we could, and maintain them and clean up the whole place, and sell to people who agree to put in responsible builds (probably dirt cheap, since we dont care a damn about profit) but that'd be against the charter.

However, the PROBLEM is that nobody regards the charter, thats why it needs cleaning up in the first place.

So it seems to be a case of "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission", or maybe just "some people know they won't get caught."


If the land IS a free for all, fine, then yeah, let them build their 256m2 casinos and sell 16m2 "prim plots". Fine. But if that's the case, I would have bought up the plots BEFORE they were subdivided into 16m2 cubes. I figured I was -playing by the rules- and -doing the right thing-.

If the land is NOT a free for all, then the Lindens should fricking enforce the damn thing and get rid of the casinos/particle emitters/giant vendors, etc.

It's been almost half a year now since I had Lee and Michael say "Huh. We don't know." And the area has been decaying ever since, because:

-- the people who want to build responsibly, want to ACT responsibly, and are afraid to run afoul of the rules in case they ARE still in effect,

-- the people who don't give a damn about what happens in the sim, are the same folks who don't give a damn about the charter, so they just ignore it and do whatever they want.

Because of the physical makeup of the land, and the Linden dividers in there, AND the rule markers every few feet, AND the nature of the rules, the Estates are unappealing to normal legitimate people who wish to own and use land in 1.2. The concept is a very 1.0 concept. Until a few months ago the charter still talked about tax benefits.

You also get the catch-22 that the Lusk Estates charter was supposed to make it a nice place to have a little house. Because the charter is ignored it isn't a nice place to have a little house, which makes the rules moot to begin with, which makes it appealing only to folks who dont care about the charter, which makes it not a nice place to have a little house, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Keep in mind this is not a "themed sim" thing, the Estates are not even quite 1/2 of Lusk, more like 1/4. It's more of a regulated area which was supposed to be appealing to newbies or folks who just wanted to hold a little bit of land to call their own. Lusk itself is not themed.

Also, a REAL improvement would be if the Lindens would just set Linden land in the estates to auto-return. Because now, the linden plots are nothing but permanent physics object collectors. Generally, we let things accumulate on the Linden plots and call a Linden in once a month to get rid of them. That's stupid. They should just be autoreturn.

I wish LL would realize that we want them to act as providers of hosting services instead of "gods". There shouldn't be any special theme in any sim. If you want a themed sim, buy a server and set up a group. People are doing this already. It's not hard. It will save you a lot of money compared to buying large plots of land in a Linden-owned sim.

Really eggy?

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Every person has a different P.O.V. Your argument is no more valid than mine. You're coming across as if you speak for the whole SL community

That said, I understand where you are coming from, but there is definite interest in this area (urban development), and perhaps LL should investigate this suggestion the same way as that frivilous government idea that started out as a joke? remember? the one that had a lot of people talking, so LL took action?

Chage, don't sweat it, he's probably using the royal 'we', because nobody would be so presumptuous as to speak for all of Secondlife.

Anyway, 'Buy a Sim' is the kind of quick-fix answer I expect out of someone in marketing, not someone who codes. (no offense to those in marketing that disagree.)

I for one am for themed communities, I joined just before this land barrony BS, and honestly, I wish Lindens would add /MORE/ themed areas and police the ones they actually run, care more about what's built in the community, and what people think, instead of letting all of SL die for the sake of the all mighty USD, as they're doing with barron favoring auction plans.
What do auctions do, just moves the land barrony off grabbing public released land and into an auction site where they pirannah it.
A common user like me has given up buying and owning land because there's no linden guarantee that I won't end up in the same sim as a Club Elite (Club Delite) in a month.
The only asurance I've had is Perry, which is mostly owned by the Luskwood group, groups like this have become a rarity in SL, they care about the area, they are making the Perry side (dubbed Luskwood East) into a forest area, as fast as Michi can put up trees, I stare from a small plot I've been allowed to turn into a workshop for my experiments at an antient build that hasn't been touched since 1.2, and even as poor as it is, it still makes me miss the times I never got to see, the days when a prim cost lindens... a day when SL was spartain, and people thought before they did a stupid ugly build, before SL became this ugly cash cow with flashing neon particle effects, the casinos, the land barrons with their 5000 m^2 meters of land at 10 lindens a meter in pg land, 30 lindens a meter in adult.
I came at a time just before SL became ugly, and it pains me that I stare at a themed community that is no longer used to the north, a themed community to the east of me that is threatened, the death of themed communities is SL saying, "we're just in it for the money."

I do not agree that isolated islands are the best way to build a community, themed or not.

SL is losing cohesion, and fast. The 200th sim looks just like the 100th sim, which looks just like the 50th sim -- collections of random builds with no common theme or spirit.

It's a very difficult uphill battle to try to establish a theme in SL. Why don't we encourage those who attempt it, instead of just telling them to just deal with it or ship off.

SL is turning into the same social structure as the RL suburbs. People run away from the mainland and hide in their own little gated communities. Those who stay behind have to work hard to maintain an oasis of elegance in the endless wasteland of particles and plywood.

I speak for the people I know.
The crowd I hang out with agrees on a few basic premises:
- SL is not a "game", since it lacks a predetermined goal
- SL isnt even a "world", since it has no predetermined structure, no background, does not aim for any coherent setting, culture, or theme.
- SL is like the web, but in 3D. They provide us with hosting and we put our content up, whether it be our personal home, or a commercial site.
- Anything LL touches, LL fucks up. They readily admit this, and also acknowledge that their place is as enablers, not creators.

There is very good reason why LL should not start anything. They can't follow up on it, they have no time or interest.
Even if LL has an uber cool idea, and puts it up on a sim, soon there will be people in SL who take that idea and extend it. After all, it is their source of income and their pet project.
You cant start a project, put up a sim with rules, and then expect people to care about it and comply with it. A successful project is more about maintenance and motivation. It arises from the people, who band together and agree to follow a certain set of rules.
You already have an urban area, the 4-sim city. An unmitigated failure. Nobody's ever there. There is no sense of community. No atmosphere to the place.
This thread has demonstrated that pretty much all Linden-sponsored "suburban" areas suffer from lack of maintenance and confusion from both LL and its customers over what exactly they are for and whether or not those rules are still in effect.

That's what SL is all about. That's the way the world has been since I joined the game. It's actually better these days, since beta was free and people came and went before ever learning how to build, so there were A LOT more spinning particle emitting towers.

Eggy, your experience isn't the same as the one I've gotten, I have seen the good side of SL, I miss it, and themed areas are something I like, and now miss.
I'm too young a player here to miss stuff like I do.

Honestly, upon re-reading Eggy's first post, he's basically right, LL doesn't follow up very well. -.-
Eggy, just... how o.O