Point to Point Teleporting

I love P2P travel when I'm in a hurry. But I wish there were an option whether I wanted to use it or not. Some of the nicest things and places in SL that I've found have been by sheer chance of flying over on my way somewhere else. That part I miss. And yes, Route 66 is an appropriate analogy.

LOL some places I have no clue exactly where they are because I'm horrible about LM'ing. But I do know they are halfway between the hub and place X.

You do have an option whether to use it or not: just teleport to the hub rather than your final destination.

Nothing lasts "forever", except (perhaps) for death

The point about Second Life is to deal with change, a change that might happen quickly, and be prepared to adapt as soon as you can — or fail trying to adapt.

Now there are two kinds of changes. One of them is a merely technical one: getting more framerates by dropping a feature (or changing the way it works), or some sort of similar trade-off. These are happening (and should hopefully continue to happen) all the time — we expect SL to improve its quality and performance to the biggest number of users possible. This is something to be encouraged.

Sometimes, however, introducing a new technical feature might "break" the client. It's part of the process — "growing pains". Some things that were good a year ago (for instance, having just a single asset server to mantain) are impossible nowadays (where we get new asset servers on a cluster, instead of a single, faster one). As SL grows, and demands from users increase (in technical terms), SL has to change.

Another kind of change is a socio-economic change. These are of a completely different kind. They don't affect the "platform" aspect of the game, but the social aspect of it. This means that if a change affects the way SL deals with its society and economy, it will be, simply staten, a different Second Life.

These are much, much harder to do in a complex environment with 100,000 users. May I gently remind you that the famous science-fiction author Isaac Asimov postulated the creation of a "future science" called "psychohistory" which would predict "the behaviour of the masses" scientifically (although never the behaviour of individual users). In a sense, while this "science" doesn't exist, we're expecting Linden Lab to be "psychohistorians" — and good ones as well! That is, we expect that when they introduce social-economic changes, they're able to predict accurately what will happen when that change is deployed.

Sadly, that's not the way it works I'd love if it would be like that!

In this issue of "point to point teleporting" most people (I dare not say all) are viewing it rather as a "technical change": a new feature that you're now getting and which was not available before. As a "technical change" I obviously like it very much — it's definitely more "convenient", more useful, and spares lots of time to almost everybody. So, there is no question that it is a strong point in favour of the "technical change".

I think that Robin's posts in last August (like many many others) show that LL was (and still is!) fully aware of the socio-economic aspects of this change. Technically speaking, it was easy to implement (compared to other things, say, like Havok 2, the new renderer, HTML-on-a-prim, inter-object communication...). But what would be the impact on Second Life, in terms of society & economy? Thus their very careful approach, even when finally they took the decision to go ahead.

I've not been around that long, but I'm a faithful reader of SL's History Wiki. You'll see there that drastic change that completely twist the whole society & economy of Second Life aren't attempted that often, but perhaps introduced, say, twice a year or so. There is a good reason for that — a technical feature can always be changed later, a socio-economic one may be irreversible. This means that the end result is a different Second Life, and there is no easy way (or even no way at all) to go back. It's a turning point, so to speak, and "moving ahead" with a new society and a new economy is not something that LL does attempt without lots and lots of discussion and planning ahead. Still, when the decision is to "go ahead", there might be no turning back.

In Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, psychohistorians were a tiny group, "deciding" (or rather predicting) the fate of untold trillions. They were often scorned and not understood, dismissed or, in certain cases, held with awe and reverence. SL's population is truly mostly a mix of technically-minded people and graphical designers — I'm not surprised that the vast majority of users either don't care, dismiss, or scorn upon the tiny group that envisions SL's society & economy as being the driving force behind SL's success. Most of SL's residents are used to 3D games and MMORPGs (I'm one of the few exceptions ), and they are very well aware that, technically speaking SL, may be awesome, but is slightly falling behind state-of-the-art technology. The whole appearance of SL is still slightly "cartoonesque", in spite of the latest and greatest computer games approaching convincing photorealism (especially on console games displayed on low-resolution TVs). SL's building tools are incredible for amateurs to develop things quickly, but they're seriously lacking when compared to professional 3D modelling packages. SL's scripting language is an astonishing accomplishment, but 90% of a scripter's work is put into "workarounds" to overcome its limitations — 10% is what you can expect to spend on developing your actual code. So why is SL growing its resident population 10 times every 18 months?

Well, it's the society & economy, folks. This might come as a shock to many of you. But it is the fundamental driving force behind SL... whether you agree or not And these two aspects are unfortunately not easily understood and/or simply dismissed by anyone with either a technical or artistic background. In other words, we need more "psychohistorians" in SL, in order to have a large group with "social awareness". This is starting to happen, but it's a long way before we're there yet — "there" meaning a significant proportion of people understanding the importance of the non-technical, non-artistic aspects of SL. A proportion similar to the one we have in RL is desirable, and, in the long term, necessary for SL's continued success.

Don't misunderstand me — like many of you, I also have a technical background, and quoting science fiction authors definitely doesn't make me an expert, lol What I rather like to have is an open mind — when the issue is between "technicalities" and "a socio-economic impact", I defer to the ones studying the latter than the former. Put into simpler words: if I have to chose between a cute new feature, but which will deeply affect the society of Second Life, and not having that feature, I'm all for the latter. I refer to the ones who are experts on SL's society & economics instead — they have the proper training to deal with those kinds of changes, and it's their opinion that I respect.

LL, fortunately, seems to have a very similar opinion. That's why these things take so long to be introduced (others, like world government or a different permission system to allow for Creative Commons license types, apparently will never be introduced), since they need a completely different impact evaluation. I'm really glad about LL's excellent sense in separating both issues. Sure, we got p2p teleporting after all, but there is no question that LL did it deliberately, fully knowing what kinds of changes they wanted to effect in SL's society & economy, and took pains to discuss it to the point of exhaustion with all of us during the past, oh, 6 months at the very least, using all available channels — forums, emails, many in-world meetings, and so on.

Still, it's hard to avoid unpleasant side-effects. One of them was pointed out by Hiro Pendragon — privacy issues. SL was never a place to be if you had serious privacy concerns, but I must admit that I never thought it was going to be this bad. Since p2p was (re)introduced, now I'm being the victim of "social stalking" (as opposed to the ToS-disallowed harmful stalking). People drop on my head all the time, interrupting meetings, discussions, or all sorts of private moments I would like to enjoy by myself (like doing some scripting in peace...). But these people are friends — they don't mean no harm, although they are often seriously offended if I dismiss them, since I never did that before, and I shouldn't be changing my attitude. So this means that I have to move more often between privately held (sometimes invisible) islands, to make sure the social stalkers don't follow me, if I wish to have a bit of time for myself. This is, unfortunately, contrary to what I believe that SL should be — a place of social interaction. "Hiding" from social stalkers is not a good thing. I wasn't prepared to deal with this and am a bit clueless on how I should proceed — I guess an alternative would be having an alt, but that displeases me, because it would be, to a degree, a rude way of saying "get lost, I need my peace". So this needs some more thinking. I guess that as the novelty of dropping on other people's heads wears off, this might not be a problem in the future.

Finally, on the issue of what to do with the infohubs to make them more attractive, I guess that Robin is right — LL should start a new "feature suggestion" thread to gather opinions. Frankly, they look bleak and unfriendly these days — mostly a couple of signs, a big hippo, and some badly-built round chairs (my apologies to the designer that created them). That's the kind of "meeting places" we get, right in the middle of quickly fading commercial zones, which leave empty stores behind, but more than often aren't "demolished" but remain with "Space to Rent" signs all over the place. It's sad to see. There is definitely a lot of improvements that could be made and I certainly look forward to discuss this a bit more...

x-x
I'll be honest here, I'm a man of few words, and being in a drunken state at work after end of year brunch doesn't make it easier to understand everything in my third language (haha), so I stopped around the half of your text. x_x

Just going to say my point of view in a few understandable words: in today's life, as well IRL as in SL, everything can change. If someone is not able to addapt fast and predict that there will be heavy changes from one day to another, then they're doomed to fail in every way possible, even more if they base all their income on one unstable and/or unpredictable thing.

Now to build up this opinion a bit:
Take land value IRL as an exemple, you have to predict that someday there will be a highway near your house, that there might be an airport opening or an old one closing, most of the time, you can't do anything about it because you'll be a minority. In SL, only a minority of early beta users opportunist that invested money in SL are pissed off (sorry about the language) from the changes, the majority of the SL community though gains from this change greatly (it's always the same anyway, most ones living in tons of money are always pissed for the slightest peanut they loose, greedy little bastards without humanity if you ask me).

Again for SL land value, now it will be readapted, where the big money was before now changes to another place, instead of just a telehub, now every common land will be about the same price, though high mountains, nice places near the water, lands that were before far away from telehubs will gain in value. All in all, everything P2P does is give the residents a nice feature and balance the land value a bit in the right way (and I bet LL knew that when they implemented P2P in SL again).

All in all, land barons played Poker, their bet went sky high and they loosed a good bunch. Cry me a river if you want, life goes on etc... have fun in SL and enjoy life

P.S. I will read the rest when I get home haha XP

So bring up the target on the map, but don't teleport there. Fly. You can always fly.

Round 2 on the data analysis, excluding land transactions and dwell, adding a longer evaluation period, and looking at those transactions that indicate money flow between residents. It also includes the median as well as the average transaction value per sim.

In another couple of weeks we'll take another look and post Round 3.

2 Weeks ending November 20 - Transactions
Island total L$ 49,210,857
Num Islands 345
avg/island L$ 142,640
med/island L$ 40,550

mainland TH total L$ 7,674,426
num sims 69
avg/sim L$ 111,224
med/sim L$ 36,463

mainland no TH total L$ 108,899,080
num sims 800
avg/sim L$ 136,124
med/sim L$ 28,508

Telehub economic factor based on average: .82
Telehub economic factor based on median: 1.28


2 Weeks ending December 11 - Transactions
Island total L$ 63,097,195
Num Islands 393
avg/island L$ 160,553
med/island L$ 37,430

mainland TH total L$ 10,719,105
num sims 73
avg/sim L$ 146,837
med/sim L$ 42,483

mainland no TH total L$ 111,660,944
num sims 866
avg/sim L$ 128,939
med/sim L$ 24,353

Telehub economic factor based on average: 1.14
Telehub economic factor based on median: 1.74

Robin, thank you so very much for these figures! I really would have liked to have had them when the discussion on p2p telehubs started. I think these are finally the real data that you used to make your decision, and, from what we can see, telehub land is not so different than non-telehub land.

So, a few questions to understand what you're presenting us:

1) I can see a surprising difference between the average and the median! What is your current working explanation for that? In my mind, the few reasons I can see for those is that older sims, with more established commerce, have been better developed around telehub land, while newer hubs did not have time enough to attract customers yet (they're still on the "first stage" of development...). This is certainly possible overall, but I have also been to two sets of "same age" sims and the traffic calculations were sometimes 10 times less in an area compared to another (although both were "developed". Speaking of traffic...

2) You have excluded "traffic" calculations from the data above. While traffic is also L$, and perhaps not so important in the overall calculations, traffic itself (ie. prior to its "conversion" to L$) is also very important to show how people travelled across SL (ie. radiating from former telehubs). Higher-traffic areas show more potential customers — it would be interesting to see a statistics showing a correlation between both. Note that I don't mean the "obvious one" — land with more traffic makes more L$ transactions — but the less obvious effect of landscape patterning due to telehubs: traffic radiating from telehubs in concentric circles, and transactions following the same pattern.

Example:
Telehub 1 is on a old, fully-developed area. Traffic on the telehub sim itself is on the average of 100 per 512 m2 plot. Transactions are on an average of L$100 per 512 m2 plot. On the 8 sims surrounding the telehub, traffic drops to an average of 10 per 512 m2 plot, and transactions to L$10. On the sims over 256 m away, traffic drops to 1 per 512 m2 and transactions to L$1.

Telehub 2 is on a new, still developing area. Here the rations show as follow: on the hub, 10/512m2; on the next 8 sims, 1/512 m2; further away, neglegible values.

This does not mean that telehubs are not pattern-generators because case #2 has such low values — it means, however, that telehubs shaped land in concentric circles around them, and, of course, that well-developed hubs are a bonus for the people owning land nearby, although they can expect similar results on newer hubs if they wait enough time until they get developed.

Also, many, many telehubs are surrounded by Linden land. The Welcome Area is the most notorious example (high traffic, but very low transactions, since it's forbidden to do them at the WA). Similar results are to be expected near the three mainland sandboxes and the 4 sims used for special events; and, on more recent land, at Waterhead. These obviously twist all calculations about averages, since all the hubs serving those areas have no "commercial zones" nearby. The only thing you can look at is traffic.

Age of sim should also be a factor for you to consider.

3) From #2 above, you can see that putting all telehub land in a lump and all non-telehub land in another lump is a simplification — it helps as a rough estimate, but what about "next-to-telehub" land? These would be the 8 sims surrounding a former telehub, and these also tended to accumulate much more traffic and sales. So, besides the 69 telehub sims, you'd have a "high-traffic" area around it with about 552 sims, and a remaining "low-traffic" area of only 248 sims (more in the second set of data).

4) Dealing with "spikes". Even on the mainland (I agree that islands are a special case always) there are examples of non-telehub concentration of both traffic and transactions. A good example is the fishing area in Alston, a very popular place, and which does also have a small commercial zone nearby (and at very high prices as well — meaning the only the best established content creators have rented shops there, a sign that the mall owner is well aware of the traffic generated there and the value it has). The fishing area, however, is very far away from the nearest telehub — a km or so, if I'm not mistaken. This would show an uncommonly large "spike" of activity in an area far away from a telehub. Many such areas exist. The point would be to find out, through traffic & transaction data, if these areas create the same "concentric circle" effect around the landscape or not. I suggest that they don't — you just get a "route" from the former telehub towards the spike with higher traffic, but no transactions around the "spike".

All in all, the best way to deal with such amounts of data would be to place that information on a map and visualizing it that way. Sadly, from a resident's point of view, you cannot script anything to get that data — the only way to look at traffic is to fly across the landscape continuously, and there is no way you can get the transactions on a parcel you don't own — so this is something that the residents cannot do on their own.

Getting all that data and putting it into "map" form is a tremendous amount of work. I think that as an exercize in data mining to help making decisions it's worth the effort, but I also never wish to have you guys at LL lose your time with those kinds of things instead of concentrating on more practical and useful tasks — ie. fixing bugs, developing new features, encouraging the community, dealing with abuse reports, etc. Perhaps I could suggest that you get one of the so many college teams doing semester courses in SL, have them sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and submit the data to them for analysis? Visualisation techniques are much easier these days when anyone knows to play a bit with Excel, but it still takes hours and hours of hard work — why not have "free labour" from students to do it for you?

The next set of data to analyse would be the land sales, also correlated to both traffic and transactions (modified by zoning and presence of water/roads/other Linden builds). I believe that this set would correlate rather well — land is more valuable on high-traffic, high-transaction areas. Of course, I'm not so sure if these kind of data could be publicly shown — it's an issue of data privacy, but at least you could use them internally to have an idea of the way the landscape develops, and eventually do a low-rez picture of it for us to see — big enough to see the smooth patterns created by the urban development (before and after telehub introduction) with subtle colouring, but not detailed enough to see individual parcels.

Whew. That would be amazing for us to see

In any case, I'm very glad you took the time to show us at least some figures, and I welcome and look forward to further sets of data. Thanks very much for your time in collecting this data and share it with us! Round 3 data will be very, very interesting — I expect that the difference between land around former landhubs and land further away will not be statistically significant any more, and that there will be a slight increase on the values for the island. We'll see!

We definitely live in interesting times

If you would really like to see the impact p2p had on the hub sims, you would have to see the transaction data prior to the 1.7 release. The drop in performance and ability to shop in the marginal performance areas such as hub sims, and therefore the number of transactions taking place there, had to be greatly reduced after the 1.7 release. November and the first week of December, during 1.7, is just not indicative of what had become "typical" business patterns during 1.6 and its patches.

Of course when comparing data over periods of time in a growing community, one has to also take into account the population growth. Transactions may have increased, even during the poor performance periods, but transactions/avie will have most likely decreased.

As always, Gwyneth's thoughts and comments are well thought out and compelling, and I would have to agree with her ideas. In particular, #2 and #3 have to be taken into account if an accurate understanding of the data is the goal.

That said, I too would like to thank you for sharing this information with us.

Yep, that's what I've come to realize as late. I was investing 6-12 hours a day in SL and suddenly realized that with the instability of the L$, the lack of contracts or guarantees, changing gamecode, bugs, wiped-out inventories, perm-changing objects and self-destructive prims... SL is in general a bad investment. A lot of L$ seem to change hands every day, but I have yet to see a true profitability report. I'd guess there are a mere handful of truly successful businesses here on SL (ie, those who make their owners a full-time, reliable wage).

Even in RL, business can go bad and even extremely unjust things can happen (corrupt government, crime, etc). However, I don't think most people come to SL to mimic RL. Like you, I came to realize that investing hours of my time in SL was not the best way to use that time. So I've dropped down to minimal "investment" and am pursuing RL goals that have quite a bit more solid foundation than the TOS and tomorrow's LL whims.

Dunno as I agree with this Lewis. Anshe and I haven't always seen eye-to-eye, but I respect her business acuity. Is she a monopoly? Hardly. I and anyone else can become a "land-baron" any time we so choose and go head-to-head with Anshe... and she probably won't even cause us much trouble over it. (She might compete, but I doubt she'd go "mafia" on us. ).

A monopoly is when newcomers can't possible get a toe-hold in the market because one business has unfair advantage over everyone else and is intentionally keeping them out of the field. That certainly doesn't apply to Anshe. My landgroup has been quite successful in renting land... and hasn't had a single problem with Anshe trying to stop us. In fact, from time to time we have a friendly thought exchange here on the forums.

Anshe is very successful and that often breeds jealousy... but I don't know as I'd call her a monopoly.

General thoughts on P2P vs telehubs:

Personally, I have always hated telehubs. How many times have I wanted to go to an event and had to travel 300m, 700m, 900m to get there? How many buildings have I slammed into while they were rezzing, how many get-in-your-way air-signs put there intentionally to stop my progress and advertise yet another stupid skin or air vehicle? How many malls have I rezzed into the middle of and had to worm my way through just to go where I wanted to go?

Frankly, telehubs were a pain in the tuchus. Now, I do think they have their place. If someone is just visiting a sim to see what's there, it makes sense to have a telehub landing point (of course, Linden Lab has made finding a new sim nigh impossible by installing that new 3-character-required region search "feature". Sometimes I think someone over there is a brick or two shy of a stable foundation). So telehubs can be valuable and on busy sims... can still be a center of commerce.

But I do love being able to post an event and having people teleport RIGHT TO THE EVENT, without them having to IM the event host and say, "Please port me?"

So we have to face it... P2P is here to stay. (At least we hope it's here to stay. Never can tell).

Yes, this does cause problems for folks like Anshe who invested highly in telehub land only to have that investment crash. My sympathies. Unlike a lot of folks, I've admired Anshe for her ability to start with next to nothing and put together a land empire. I think a lot of her detractors are just upset they didn't think of it.

Nevertheless, land investment anywhere (even in RL) has always been a risk. Any business investment is a risk. You buy a piece of land next to a busy street... and they put in an overpass. You by a nice rural area to get away from traffic and someone decides to put a Wal-Mart next door. Such is life. So what do you do?

If a Wal-Mart goes in next door, sell your land for high-dollar to another mall-investor and laugh all the way to the bank. If an overpass goes in and bypasses your land, sell it to residents as a nice, quiet non-business area. It's all in perception and chutzpah.

If one business proves to be a headache, you sell your assets and go open something else (or retire, whichever is possible).

Question now is... what can be done with all that telehub land to make it pay off? Because frankly, complaining about it isn't going to do any good. If one feels one has been defrauded by Linden Lab, some may cry heresy, but real life case law might win out over LL TOS. There's always that option. If there is no contract, no agreement, nothing for case law to handle (or if it's simply not worth it), then continue on. LL has pretty much established that they are not accountable for anything that happens on SL (that brings us back to "bad investment" again). If one is going to invest in SL, that person must realize that there is no accountability. Do we want to invest in a business like that? Our choice, yes or no.

When SL bugs recently major-messed-up my merchant inventory, I ranted at LL for being sloppy, rebuilt a small portion of my wares and set them back out, cut WAY back on the time investment I spend on SL and moved on. "Find another investment than SL" is a choice each of us can make at any time. Since LL has made it very clear they're really not accountable for anything that happens to any client at any time, we do know who/what we're dealing with.

But regarding this issue:
Telehubs= a pain. P2P=good. It's one of those live with it and figure out what to do next scenarios.

P2P just rocks. No more getting stuck in buildings waiting for them to rez so you can see the way out. As for the effect on Telehubs on social life... never made a friend in the 2 or 3 seconds I was at a hub (typical hub conversation: "Hi .. hi". I have however, made lots of friends participating in more meaningful activities, like building at Mauve!
And I think you will find all shops etc (or at least good ones), will actually increase their sales. The other day, I visited about 10 shops in half an hour, and spent at a faster rate than ever before! And now that you can just duck out to buy something, and then TP straight back to where you want to be, during a build I often TP straight to my favourite texture store for that texture I suddenly find I need...
And I don't think it's true that the content near hubs was better... some of the best places are nowhere near a hub... all I ever saw at hubs was those same handful of stores you see at every telehub...
And destroying neighbourhoods...
Rot! Just this week a likeminded friend bought the lot next door... and the most beautiful build just sprung up next to me, which I believe will be a store... Nephilaine Protagonist that build at Monti rocks so much I built a new house so I could have a view of it! Sure beats the Holly Hobby houses I was looking at before! (Why are people so intent on cloning RL?) A diverse neighbourhood is a vibrant, interesting neighbourhood!

What a nice Christmas gift P2P teleporting is! Can't thank you enough, Linden Labs...
And a nice bonus is the ripple water

I'm so thrilled we now have Point to Point TPing, no more slamming into Teleport Hub Mall buildings. No more running into someone building in the sky or non phantom sign or other objects. I have several stores and it nice to just TP to the front door. Bless you Lindens you've made my Christmas the best ever.

I'm stumped!

If I could think of words that were 100 times better than:
FANTASTIC,
IT'S ABOUT TIME,
HOORAY!
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT,
I LOVE IT,
IT MADE MY DAY, MY WEEK, MY YEAR...,
GREAT THANKS AND A GIANT PAT ON THE BACK TO THE LINENS

I would use them instead

wizzie

Chances are yoo would TP to a Sims telehub and have to fly so many meters, Or TRY to avoid traps such as tall buildings, U shaped structures that took minutes to get aorund or through, and other 'Architecture designed to keep u on some knuckleheads land. Most content at telehubs wasnt worth seeing in any case, as the best merchants developed on their own islands or places where it wasnt so chaotic. I personally didnt shop near telehubs just to make my point and if u know me, I Shop. LOL in any case:

As for commecial value of property, things change, did anyone get rewarded when the valuable railroad land and towns got replaced with modern highways? No they adapted or they died.
Did the people that REAPED the rewards of their telehub loactions plan for change or did they just suck their dollars out of their property. Expecting Lindens to develop complex schemes for the rewarding of Lindens isnt their job. People who want 'PAID' should earn it by truly offering a service or object for the community not expect to make money from someone 'passing through'

Ok thats my two cents anyway

Sara

Why can't this be done when a sim goes down instead of mindlessly logging off the user? In such a case, where the sim is hung/crashed, the grid server (whatever it's called) should teleport the user to the closest parcel/sim/telehub/infohub or even the user's home location. It gets VERY annoying having to relog every time I sim crashes!