Point to Point Teleporting

I am fairly new to SL, but in my explorations I find that the land scape is horrendously fragmented... it is quite non-sensical to be honest. So I don't think this will do much to add further fragmentation.

I agree with one of the posters above that private sim owners should have the ability to switch this off, I also am of the mind that a short term reimbursment for telehub land owners is fine, as an above poster pointed out... the market changes.

The key reason I think P2P teleportation is need though is that in most areas the properties of smaller land owners are hard to get to because the SL mega-corps buy up huge amounts of land (which they are entitled to do, I got no probs with that) and build big multi story shops boxing in areas.

P2P is the only way around this, short of zoning... but for zoning to work you would effectively need to 'start from scratch' or atleast create a new huge Linden Sim that people could migrate too.

Don't worry, you will get zoning too, once Linden Lab figure out it may be profitable.

P2P can be a good idea. How much is P2P worth to someone?
I think that P2P should be allowed but only for a fee.
If LL were to allow P2P for everyone all the sudden there would be drastic affects on the Land Market, and would trickle down the chain.


P2P = yes, for a fee (i think at least 2000L/wk)


LL please concider this idea before you make such a big change like this.

The more I think about this the more I think it could work and solve everybody's problems.

The single busiest traffic in SL is through the WA, which has been pithily described as a "wretched hive of scum and villany." Instead of flowing all that traffic through the WA, send it to the telehubs and turn them into "home" for residents who do not own land. When new residents join SL, there first rez in-world is into a random telehub that becomes their "home" and any telehub can be set as a home location.

This lower floor of the telehub would equipped with the normal WA kiosks as well as an additional kiosk for "Learn to Build" which dispenses a notecard with landmarks to the Ivory Tower and the sandboxes. The second floor has some seating and the games tables so there is a place to hang out and socialize. Every telehub (other than estate sims) would be set up like this.

This keeps the value of the land surrounding the telehubs and allows p2p for everyone. The people that hate telehubs and wouldn't shop at one if their lives depended upon it, never have to see another telehub ever again. Those that like them still have access to them and businesses still have reason to congregate in zones.

If telehub land owners are getting compensation, why not the vehicle makers too?

Because they did not pay thousands of US$ to buy, say, vehicle factories from Linden Lab.

How about keeping the Telehubs, but adding P2P only for destinations that you have permisions for, say land you own, or land owned by a group you are a member of.

As for islands, how about having an option to set permissions so that if someone P2P teleports to your island, they are "pulled" into your island's telehub if you have one? Perhaps this could also be set for any sim or land parcel... Would be nice to have a mini telehub or something that any land owner could setup so as to designate the arrival point for P2P teleporters.

*Smiles*Forseti, of course "you could argue" We both don't know what will happen, when the TP system is changed. And I would not take any bets. I took to many in the past and realized how naive I was. People are just to unpredictable. But I don't believe the clustering effects around telehubs or the relative) serenity of sims far away from any telehub was a "self fullfilling prophesy".

A world and a society is shaped by (physical and non-physical) laws and rules; sometimes in a subtle and non-intuitive way. So, when you change an important physical law like this, the world will change. Thats for sure! Look at the real world and the changes motor traffic (which was not even a change of a physical law) brought to the world ...

You are of the opinion that not much will change in our already chaotic world. I am more the pessimistic type. Lets see, what happens. (Robins post invites discussion, but past experience tells me that a post like this is an announcement of a decision not really a "call for ideas".)

Btw: That most residents are in favour of this idea does not necessarily mean its a good one or that the same residents will like its effects. A proposal, to raise all stipends by a factor of 10 would easily find a majority, too, but would have interesting effects on the inworld economy - which might not be what those residents expect, for example

Seconded! Emphatically so!
You are right of course. And - by the way - I dont consider telehub areas "ugly" per se. (At some you see some very interesting solutions for the challenge to "grab as much attention as you can get".) I just think the segregation between commercial and residential areas - which does exist; there are not many larger stores 800m away from a telehub - is a good one.

But weren't telehubs profitable for Linden Lab, too? Or would you think telehub sims would fetch 2,000 US$ at the auctions (money going directly to Linden Labs account) if we had P2P TP?

I don't think this change it motivated by the urge to maximise short term profits for Linden Lab.

This is great news! Hooray for P2P! This will make SL even more enjoyable and reduce frustration. Thank you Linden Labs again!

They invested a lot of time to make them. Time = Money

Personally i think P2P unregulated is a bad idea for a number of reasons:
1. Privacy - You might not want flash mobs showing up next door.
2. No backwaters - With nothing holding the business to the telehubs they will spread out. Under-developed areas will cease to exist.

Backwaters are great for communities and homes. Historically they have been low traffic because of their inaccessibility. Telehubs attract business because they guaranty a captive audience (that might stop and buy something). You might go out looking for shoes but buy a dress while at the telehub mall. If the stores were spread out over the world impulse buying would reduce and we would see an economic recession. Any smart vendor wouldn't want to move their store except to a bigger mall; big malls thrive because of diversity. Smaller telehub malls on the mainland would shrivel up as vendors looked for more commercially viable locations. In the mega malls texture density would be so high that it would actually cause crippling lag.

Solution:
On the main land only enable P2P with in 300m of a telehub. It preservers the current balance with almost no ill effects. This would be a setting in the estate tools. It creates backwaters which would be not as attractive commercially.

Telehubs can never be erradicated, as they are needed as a backup for a lack of user P2P landing spots.

PS:
I didn't actualy expect this to be read, this late in a thread i'm lucky.

*nods*, sadly so
Now, I call that an interesting idea!

Dearest Robin, you are a goddess. I love, adore and worship you. Thank you for listening to our concerns

Then why are you complaining about your US$20,000 investment and encouraging people to join you in other on-line arenas?

I will agree with that. I've used IGE in the past, and it seems that Lindex is not as interesting as IGE was.

It seems to me that LL, if they are in the platform market, should keep their fingers out of the content market. It's a little unsettling to think that if I came up with The Next Great Thing, LL could usurp me and put me right out of business.

I've been waiting for this announcement FOREVER! Okay... maybe just 5 months or so. But the point is, it makes me, as the owner of a shop 1000M or so away from a telehub, very very happy. I'm sure this might not make the owners of land near telehubs very excited right now, but then again - this was bound to come sooner or later.

The idea of paying for teleportation makes my stomach turn. Point to point was something that should have been in from the beginning. Once the systems are in place there is no logical reason at all to expect for someone to pay for that, it's not attached to any value. At least with the 10L uploads, that fee is attached to the bandwidth and storage space required to host it (even though it seems more a token fee, and a money sink). There is no value attached to point to point teleporting - in fact, it seems like it would make it easier on LL's systems.

If you really wanted to take this route, why not have telehubs that could be installed for a fee on your land? People wouldn't be COMPLETELY free to teleport, but it would still be enough to make people happier, expecially shop owners. And it would be voluntary for the land owner.

I have but one thing to say:

Torley and I were discussing this and we agreed....

P@P ROX!!

P@P ROX!

(hehehe Pop Rocks!)

Well, it's clear that SL's residents are split according to their use of the world in two groups:

1) The group that depends on land value to create profit, or telehubs to create artificial zoning — P2P teleport will destroy their business models, and of course they're unhappy;
2) The group that isn't affected by land value (ie. the ones not involved in the land & shop/mall economics, or that have their own business set up too far from a telehub); this group are enthusiastic about this change.

Like others, I don't really think this is a "request for a feature feedback", but a "comments after the decision was taken". This means that people in group 1 should start to replan their participation in SL's economy. Many have commented (and I'm certainly of that opinion as well!) that adaptation to change is a trait of survival. However, if the rate of change is too big, some people will simply abandon SL and go elsewhere. Sadly this means that the largest investors in SL's economy (land owners and major content creators) are in this group as well. With things like IMVU (totally focused on content creation for sale) around, it's not unexpected to me to see Anshe promptly announcing her intent to "move over" there.

The older residents that remember a P2P pre-telehub SL also remember that there wasn't a developed economy at those times, and a time of utopian anarchy. Telehubs — some sort of "underground railway stations" for all purposes — created value by ordering the territory. I won't comment if they were a "good" idea or not at the time; also, I can't be sure if some crude attempts at urban planning wouldn't have happened anyway without telehubs. What I can say is that they happened due to telehubs, and removing them from one day to the next will simply be too big a change.

Why is "urban planning" important in an anarchic world? Think about the US "expansion to the west" in the mid-19th century. There was little law or order those days beyond some "guidelines" and mostly common sense. People grouped in communities; the railroad brought the desired communication facilities; communities grew by the railroad and planned their towns (and later cities) accordingly. This is only to be expected — it was the waterways some centuries earlier, or seaports. It's a natural human trend to congregate around the communication routes (either natural or artificial), and even today, governments will invest in infrastructure to give people in remote areas the possibility to develop.

What Linden Lab is going to do — due to popular demand (there is no way we can avoid the "public vote"!) — is to drop an atom bomb on top of the world (at least the mainland) that will utterly destroyed all the urban planning done so far and tell everybody to start again from scratch.

As said before so often, not all will be willing to adapt. Imagine that in the 19th-century US the government would have blown up all roads and railroads leading west and tell people "to start it all over again; this time, try not to band together". I can imagine that some would do that; most, however, would return to their ships and go to other countries that offered alternatives. That, unfortunately, is what I fear. Not the destruction of the "status quo" — it's never too bad to shake things up for a change — but that the top content creators (the ones who afforded to set up shop in the highest-valued land) and the real estate agents and mall owners (the ones that support LL financially) will simply evaluate their choices, see that the effort of staying in SL and adapting to change far exceeds the revenue they currently have, and simply move away. They won't stop becoming content creators or players in the economy; they will simply not participate in our economy.

This argument is sadly lost on all those (and it's quite a large group!) that never wished SL to have an economy anyway. The point is, if the economy is too badly shaken, these people will go away from it (like any good capitalist will leave their country in search for profit elsewhere). SL will have a minimalist economy and lose all the major content producers; we'll go back to be a happy place of friendly people, around 5 or 6 thousand or so, living in the unzoned mainland, with scarce content around. Some might argue that this is precisely what SL should be. No wonder they have aggressively voted for that to happen.

Yes, shops will still pop up elsewhere, and "ugly malls" will disappear to be replaced by isolated shops scattered around the world. That's quite true. However, I would think that these shops will be offering products of inferior quality by not-so-talented artists. This is certainly more "fair" — I, for one, will be raising prices on my freebie clothes as soon as I see the big content creators leaving — but I'm also sorry for this to happen.

That said and done, keeping the telehubs as "gathering places" is absolutely uninteresting. Who will gather there? What will be the point? I have visited several cities in RL where the railroad was abandoned. The rail station there was sometimes used as a museum or some other kind of public building; but the truth is, the neighbourhood around the former rail stations simply degradated, and there was no point in creating a "gathering place" at a spot that nobody visited. We already have several "gathering places", like clubs or casinos or malls (while they last).

Since zoning sims (ie. commercial, residential) does not seem to be in LL's plans, I'd like to have na discussion on how the mainland can be rezoned, based on communication/travel channels. Unless, of course, LL's purpose is to make the mainland a big sandbox, and have everybody move to private islands where you can set up telehubs and thus provide a way to do urban planning accordingly. If that's the plan, P2P teleport will certainly accomplish its purpose in next to no time — perhaps just a few weeks.

Like many, I never thought the telehubs were a good idea, and I also am not much of the "exploring" type. Whenever possible, I also go up to 300 m or so and get a jetpack. While I have certainly talked to lots of people near telehubs, this doesn't mean I haven't talked to a lot of more people elsewhere! But the point remains — telehubs, good or bad, provided a sense of planning. I knew where people would come from (and in some places even predict where they would go to) and arrange things accordingly. That's the most primitive sort of "planning" you could have in SL. On a telehubless mainland, all these issues will be moot.

I subscribe to the idea that at the very least we could set up the "landing point" for people to teleport in, or close teleporting towards our parcels completely. Even better, make it a avatar/group based options like we have for banning. That might at least control privacy issues, and even encourage people to join forces to discourage random teleporting in their land (group-based or whatever).

Big changes will come to SL's landscape. I hope that there will be enough people to fully appreciate it — and that those people are actually benefitting the economy and the content of SL.

We can only hope

Excellent post, Gwyneth, as usual summing it up rather nicely. I take exception with some smaller points Ehemmm, this seems to me like a little simplification: I don't own any telehub land. I don't participate in the economy around telehubs - and still don't think this is a really good idea.

Yep!

I am not sure if it will be as dramatic as you describe it - you'll never know how people will adept - but it seems rather funny to me, that most participants in this discussion just rejoice in a new feature thats give them a little convenience when moving around in SL and not take into account that it changes one of the basic structuring "laws" in SL. It will bring changes, big time - and I wonder if all of those who are so happy about P2P now will be happy with some of the consequences... but that is a "natural human trend" too

I guess this is just a PR ploy to dampen the inevitable wave a little.

Have a look at Strife's suggestion. I think it's at least one to ponder.

Another Suggestion:
Make the ability of an inbound P2P teleport an attribute of the sim (like the rating or the terraforming limits). So some sims could be arbitrarily flagged as residential areas. Not a real substitution for better zoning and group management tools but at least one small step in that direction.

Speculation and doom prediction seem to be a national sport on this forum, and any topic is fair game.

I still can't understand why in a virtual world where people can fly at will, people still voluntarily assign different value to land according to distance to focus points of traffic (i.e.: telehubs).

Telehubs are a hindrance to exploration. Lag is a problem in most telehub sites because they are surrounded with malls, casinos and tons of prims.

If P2P will cause a spreading out of the population, it will be a good thing, for a while....

Because inevitably, malls and clubs and casinos will group together, if only for the reason that people are lazy. They don't want to spend any amount of time traveling, so they will P2P every time they want to go somewhere... Will the system be able to handle 1000s of simultaneous P2P??? I doubt it. If we are lucky, it will be so slow that people will still fly to travel to malls, and will now want to live near their favorite spending place, creating a new demand, thus raising the price of land....

that was my piece of speculation.

BTW, I'm all in favor for the P2P system... telehubs are a pain, I prefer to fly because I'm rarely in a hurry to get anywhere...