Point to Point Teleporting

I suggested on the first page of this thread, what I thought to be a possible way to implement p2p without totally disrupting the hub concept with all its pluses an minuses. Many ppl here are complaining that telehubs are too laggy and indeed they are. However, the issue of lag and this problem with textures is not the fault of telehubs. Yes, telehubs are the main reason lag is so bad in hub sims, but the fault/responsibility belongs to LL. If LL were to fix the lag and texture issues around telehubs, travel through telehubs would not be a problem,... it may even be a pleasure at times.

I don't believe LL would give up on such a large source of $$ by completely doing away with telehubs and the commerce they generate in both land speculation and content creation/sales. They do however, need to fix the lag problem

In re-reading Robin's original post, she in particular is inviting feedback on the conversion of telehubs into public gathering spots.

I find it highly unlikely that folks will gather at potential 'public' areas that were former Telehubs. Just because a space is public, doesn't mean that folks will want to hang out there.

You could commission the most fantastic build to be placed on each of the telehub spots. I'm certain folks would come and visit...... once or twice.

You could turn the telehubs into mini-sandboxes. But that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense - the telehub areas are quite built up and lower performance from years of being commercial zones. Not an ideal spot to work on your latest project.

You could turn the telehubs into instructor/Stage 4 type areas. Unfortunately, the existing Stage 4 does not get around the clock usage. Imagine if there was a Stage 4 for every Telehub. I think they'd end up being quite lonely places most of the time.

As noble of an idea as I think it is, I think it is utterly unrealistic to expect to turn Telehubs into viable public gathering spots. Instead, they will likely become relics of an era passed.

So then leave them there as a monument to themselves

And when they decide P2P was a big mistake they can just turn them back on

Im glad to see this is coming

I'd like to see the options back on the profile/find for taking a landmark of a place you have looked up

Also in your land alongside Allow Landmark there could be Allow P2P Teleport with a set landing point, this option could be combined with the already used option that is used for event location of there be a seperate landing spot

As far as what we do with the old hubs, i woould still like icons left on the map for these although changed to fit the new gathering place, the welcome areas could also be given an icon so you could click on these icons and goto these landing points.

In these places, could be the vendors that usually fill telehubs as well as the advertisers, some kind of gathering area, as well as the newpaper type vendors and infonet terminals

Cross-post so this is in the Linden-Read-For-Sure thread.



The various hindrances of travel have always been a bane to our three dimensional existence. I always wondered why, in a virtual world where travel really means nothing, the idea that travel should be hard was stuck so tightly in the Linden collective mind.

My only answer was that someone high up (Philip? Cory?) was utterly convinced that "Travel MUST Be Hard" and no amount of opinion otherwise would sway them.

In game design, adding an annoying difficulty purely as an attempt at game balance is always a bad idea. Sure, you may focus the gameplay more towards your ideal as the designer, but you are pissing off the people you are trying to entertain.

Better to design something that works RIGHT.

This becomes all the more important as so many people feel that Second Life isn't a game, but a service. However that argument swings, there should be even LESS drive to "balance" activities here, since there is less structure imposed by the developers.

Social engineering through annoyance is BAD.

If you want to do social engineering, don't force us to funnel through spot Q when we're just trying to get from A to B... Instead give us TOOLS to do the social engineering ourselves, not limitations.

First we have to ask ourselves, what was the previous moratorium on direct travel supposed to do? Then not "did it work", which is unimportant, but "do we even WANT to do that?"

The biggest "why" I've seen mentioned was zoning. The attempt to draw businesses together, geographically. The way, I think, to best do THAT is to massively expand the group tools. With the right slant to such new features, business owners may find it to their advantage to group together... Not because it's hard to get from place to place, but because "Geographical Business Collective X" has more and better known stores than "Geographical Business Collective Y", so will get more visitors and that benefits all the shops at that location because of line-of-sight.


Do social engineering through empowerment, not through restrictions and regulations.

I agree with the above passage strongly. I just wish that this was done first, and then start making the moves to depreciate telehubs.

Oh please, "It was done in beta" Eggy

Of course you disagree with me — it's only natural. For you, SL is about 5 or 6 different places and the 500-600 people that you have on your IM list. It's only natural you'll wish for P2P teleport between those and not crash into laggy builds, too-high towers, and ugly ads.

For me, SL is about a society and economy in a virtual country that severely needs some "order", which takes pains to emerge from the primeval soup of the sandbox. I was betting on the economy to at least get some order (ie. zoning, albeit done because of commercial interests). For others, it's just a glorified chatroom, a public sandbox that extends for dozens of kms in every direction, and that you should be able to put up all your content inside that chatroom cum sandbox. Well, that's perhaps the way to go on things like IMVU, but I'm quite ambitious on what I think SL should become. Yes, I'm still keeping my favourite quote from Philip in my signature: I still believe SL should become a country, not a chatroom with scripting abilities and nice textures.

When I first read about P2P teleport, my reaction was the same: "hooray, no more getting stuck into towers and half-rezzed ugly buildings". The second thought was: "wow, this will also mean I won't be bothered with things I don't wish to see/watch". So I was naturally happy — here comes a technical solution that gets rid of so many problems due to lag and unplanned building. More than that, it was an often-demanded issue, and people have voted on it a lot. What else should we ask?

Then a few of my usually unused neurons fired up. Yes, but at what cost? Do I really wish to go back to Beta and a glorified sandbox? Do I wish to have a wonderful renderer showing big blobs of plywood cubes where all content is inside, since it's pointless to landscape terrain to add value to land?

So, in one shot, what will happen is:

1. real estate agents, as promoters of communities and adding value to their services by picking good spots for your type of business/home, will be pointless as a "service provider" (or simply move into private islands);
   
2. land will be priced everywhere at the same value (there will be just a bit of differentiation between PG and Mature). Note that under the new model it's impossible to predict where the next mega-cube with a shop will sit — it can be in far-away residential communities in front of your wonderful view to a lake or river or the sea, just because people will always teleport inside;
   
3. there will be no point in releasing more land (on auctions); people will not buy land for its intrinsic value, since any spot will be as good as any other;
   
4. people investing in several shops around SL will concentrate on a single one — it will be pointless to scatter your shops around the world, people either find you from a landmark or they simple won't care to buy your items; in either case, this will mean less land sales or rentals;
   
5. no more casual shopping — people will either know where to get their items (ie. assuming they have a landmark for it) or never browse around. The whole "mall for the impulse shopper" concept will not be interesting;
   
6. people will shop more from external, third-party sites like SL Exchange, SL Boutique and SecondServer and use tools like ROAM and SLWebsearch much more (since all you need is to click on a link there and get immediately teleported to the destination). So, once more, content moves from in-world to off-world, third-party sites (note that I'll be personally benefiting from that — I only do sales from the e-Commerce sites — but what about the other dozens of thousands of creative content developers, struggling to make a sale by impulse users wading though malls?);
   
7. MetaAdverse will not be able to offer their services. It'll be pointless, since nobody will ever take a look at their strategically positioned outdoors (near telehubs and malls). I'd advise them to do web banner ads instead...
   

Is that "alarmist" or "drastic"? Well, of course, if you tend to agree with

... there is no point to discuss this issue much further, is it?

I remember that about 18 months ago or so I posted a reply here which was rather elucidating (sorry, with the lousy search tools of vBulletin I'm not in the mood for searching it):

If what you really want from SL is a place to do your virtual building without anyone around to bother you, why don't you stick with Lightwave/3DS/Maya/Blender/[Insert Favourite 3D Modeller Here]?

Because that's really the issue, isn't it? Why does SL need an economy or a society? Why can't we build our things in peace? Why should other people be around? Why should we care about others? In short, why should be bother to "build virtual countries"?

I'll stick with Philip on that: because "I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country." Well, it surely looks like SL won't be a "country" after all, but a glorified sandbox. This is another nail on the coffin of the ones promoting "countries", another victory for the sandbox users.

*sighs*

The only thing that satisfies me is that at least LL will be keeping the private islands with the whole functionality that is required for a "virtual country" to work. With a big disadvantage — private islands are small ghettos, isolated communities, disconnected from the grid. Until they grow to form new continents, we'll have to wait a few years. So, for me, it looks like the clock has been set back 2 years in terms of "country building". The difference, of course, is that now we have ten times as many residents, who will now look upon SL in quite a different light. Starting from this new handicap it'll take much longer this time.

I 100% agree with what Logan posted! Plus extra controlls for estate owners, not that I'll ever own one

This all seems like a real test of the Lindens intentions.

If they really do destroy the value of lots of people's land then that tells residents that investing US$ in SL is a very chancy thing because the basic rules can change arbitrarily. For me personally, it makes no difference at all, but it's put up a big caution sign on anything I might want to do in SL in the future.

It's like living in a country where your property could be arbitrarily seized at any time. That actually was the case in post WWI Germany when people wouldn't invest in anything big because it was subject to reparations seizure. It's also true in areas of strong Mafia-like presence and countries with strong-man rulers and no real property laws. The result is total stagnation.

I really like the SL world and was thinking about more US$ investments, but now I'm going to lie low for awhile and see how stable the ground rules are. If SL is going to be a world and not just a chat room, people have to be willing to invest time and money, and to do that, there has to be some stability.

One thing does not "automatically" follow from "removing the telehubs". If you see it in the context of "removing telehubs will remove the need for malls for impulse shoppers", what this will mean is:

1. like you said, the quality creators will move to their own sims (if they're not already there) — they won't be much affected. As a matter of fact, they'll be able to drop all their shops elsewhere on the grid (they simply don't make sense under a model of casual shoppers), and, since they'll have more money to spend that way, they'll definitely enhance their presence on their own sims instead (ie. if they needed an "excuse" to do so, and cut the costs in order to invest in their own sims, this is the opportunity for doing so!)
   
2. the "small fry" will be unable to attract the casual shopper. There are dozens of thousands who are struggling to offer wares to the casual, impulse shopper, and this happens right now on malls/bazaars. This market will simply not exist any more.
   

What this means is that good content creators will now have to change their modus operandi. Since "starting small and slowly upgrading your status from 'unknown' to 'fame'" won't work under the new model, what this means is that to enter the market of content creation you'll have to overcome a big hurdle — there is simply no place for regular advertising that works. This means investing a lot of money to get your own sims and attracting people from all over the world to come to your shop instead of sticking to their favourite designer.

Don't minimize the importance of the small, struggling content creator. Remember, that's how Anshe Chung started her work in SL. We all know how the story went from there. This is something that an unzoned SL will bring to us — a place where only established content creators will succeed, and strugglers will be kept at bay.

Now many would argue "who cares about the economy? It's only a game" or any other dismissive argument like that. Have you been around the sandboxes lately? I can only say, there are hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people working there who sadly won't be able to buy shops on malls in the near future, to be active participants in the virtual economy. Since they're unable to make sales in the sandboxes, and while land is probably going to be dirt cheap from now on, one shop in the middle of the continent will have about zero chances to attract customers.

What had encouraged me in the last year or so is that the Big Sandbox mentality was slowly getting eroded by the overwhelming masses of new users, who come with a completely different mind baggage. They came here to expect at least an order or degree of organisation, and getting the same opportunities as others to struggle in this virtual world. This is what they got: learn to build/design, rent a shop in a mall, get some passing customers, do cheap advertising. Of course they complained about the lack of "facilities" that this world should have — like better ways to get prospective customers to find what they wished for. But at least there was something. Unorganised, chaotic, in the hands of mall owners and estate agents — but something. At least, something to start from!

This is the little that has now be removed from them — or, if you wish, that was removed from the main grid, since I expect the private islands to offer what the mainland can't: planning, organisation, a community, an opportunity. But the sad part of it is that they'll be starting in a tiny place. Yes, there are quite a few islands with a good reputation, lots of activity to attract customers, and which are examples to follow — Midnight City, TeaZer's Island, Ansheland, a few others. But compare the impact of those when you look at the mainland! How long will it take for them to make a difference again? Another two years? Two years ago, the private islands on the map were isolated dots. Now you see a whole constellation which seems to compete with the mainland in terms of attractions (they're overall much nicer-looking already). So should we drop the mainland altogether?

I feel like the Numenoreans looking towards Middle Earth and scorning them for their "uncivilized" behaviour. Well, we all know what happened to Numenor (or Atlantis, if you're not a Tolkien fan). The myth that the islands are going to save the mainland, and the decline and downfall of the islands, is quite old in human history. We can only hope that the descendants of the island owners are able to come over to the mainland and try to "colonize" it again.

I definitely agree. Change is good — change promotes creativity in order to ensure survival through adaptation. However, there is no such thing as "too much good". Make too many changes, and the degree of needed adaptation is so high, that it may well not be worth the effort. We need a little stability.

Or else, well... we can start looking at SL as an IMVU competitor, and forget about the rest

These are laughable threats.

A) Most of us who have tried IMVU have thought, oh cute, and then came back to a real virtual world

B) Where will you run when IMVU "Gom's" you?

C) Comparing SL to WoW is just laughable

D) Traditional MMORPG's nerf people too. Just ask anyone who spent a lot of time, effort and money created a Jedi in SWG

If LL is serious about SL augmenting or replacing the world-wide-web as we know it, one of those things will have to be duplicating the underlying behavior. Throwing out the 'hard travel' component, like Tiger says, would be the first.

The next convention that needs to be tossed is the geography metaphor, but I'm sure we aren't ready for that. This wouldn't mean ditching sq/m or paying for space on their servers, just making plots more flexible than they are now - again, mimicing web pages.

If I have a website and I want to partner with someone, I let them link me and vice-versa. I don't call their colocation center, arrange my server to talk to their server directly, then ask them to copy my page so its on the same physical asset as theirs. We really need to get beyond the 'bought a plot, now you're stuck' kind of design.

People should be able to define their boundaries, move as seamlessly as people now edit webpages and links.

We'll get there, but we aren't quite yet.

I fear this is "goodbye virtual world - new metaphor for the information age"
and "Hello fancy trading-game version of habbo hotel, with self-build 3-d rooms".

I am astonished Philip seems to be sacrificing his vision to the vote of the masses, based I think not on vision, but on immediate convenience. Ignoring, as the masses always do, the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The Lindens may surprise us yet. It may not be quite the way we are assuming.
Or is Philip thinking of giving in, selling it all to Sony as a game, and starting the metaverse with a clean sheet elsewhere ?

Nevertheless I do think this a superb opportunity to motivate people to go premium, without taking away anything they now have from those who prefer to stay basic.

Lets hope this rare opportunity is not missed. Give p2p to premium only. Or free to premium, others pay. Anyone have a rational argument against ?

I own land near a teleport. I aquired it bit by bit, mostly when it was overpriced.

I love the idea of P2P teleporting. Now I can quit worrying about trying to get land near a telehub, where it is too expensive, and expand out in the boonies where I can have grass and water and a big square lot, instead of the salamander that I have now.

In my experience being close to the telehub does very little for dwell; it is what you do with the land that counts, not where it is.

I can't see that this proposal hurts anyone except those who bought auctioned land in order to sell it at prohibitive prices to people desperate to be near a telehub. I don't think that practice adds much to the SL experience, so I'll be glad to see it go.

OR their service will have even more value now because it's not as obvious where would be a good place to set up a shop. Currently it's simple: as close to a telehub as possible -- and you don't need someone to tell you that.
OR land will be priced according to it's actual value as a function of the environment it is in (flatness, proximity to water, clubs, etc) rather than arbitrary points, graced by LL, sprinkled across the grid.
OR people will have more incentive to buy land and open a store or build an attraction because they now have access equal to everybody else.
OR ... wait how is this a bad thing? I'd rather a content seller put all their stuff into one nice store than having my time wasted seeing the same stores everywhere I shop.
OR there will be *more* casual shopping, since people can search classifieds and visit each store in their matches much more quickly, instead of having to look through a lot of stores that don't even have what they're looking for.
OR people will visit the shops directly in-world more often than they do now since they can get right to them instead of lagging through the telehub blight.
OR they can host their signs in the places where people tend to gather instead of inducing more load time every time you want to teleport somewhere.

Prognostication is fun -- and it's so arbitrary, any outcome is possible!

That was actually one of the only arguments for something other than unrestricted P2P that I've seen that I have no problem supporting.

Though I would suggest that all your Alt accounts get P2P if you have an active premium account (it's obvious that LL can tell to some degree, otherwise they'd be unable to charge for additional basic accounts).

I think Second Life in it's current format is likely NOTHING like Philips vision. Because he has little choice but to listen to the wants of his customers.

If it were me, I'd have dismissed every stoopid idea the lot of you had had and made MY Second Life. But then I'd have no customers

It's usually a tradeoff. Your dream or vision versus what you actually have to do to sell it to the masses.

This moots one of the underlying gains of the P2P system -- reducing load on the servers.

I think this new move will result in exactly that - the eventual ditching of the geography metaphor.

Maybe it would be best to bite the bullet, go for broke and do it completely, sooner rather than later. Rather than let a crippled, degrading geography drag on for a while.

Everybody's plot dynamically relocatable via a portal through to anyone else they fancy. And hosted on any computer they like. Any local bits of "external world" with "adjacent plot vistas" would only exist on one host, as a joint project between plot owners colocated on that host.

No coherent unambiguous grid-wide external world. Nothing but limited-size individual or group-owned subspaces with 3-d portals to walk through into neighboring spaces without any geography but the topology of the links, not representable in 3-d at all. Just an abstract network of connected walkable doorways or jumpable node linkages.

A doorway into room A comes from all of 100 different other rooms, and returning through may or may not take you back where you came from. So no distant prospects through doors and windows could show you what was next door. 100 different places could be simultaneously next door from the incoming point of view.

I suppose it is the ultimate destination, so why let a half-way thing drag itself on its crippled way ? The grid has been got working. Since its destination is to be a lot of linked smaller grids, each probably of such a smaller size that geography will be locally cherished and some travel enforced, perhaps we should push for that soon.

Surely in the end jumping will be for between grids? Travel for within one grid? Except for a bit of limited jumping within an unusually large grid. As currently with this - our testbed/prototype.

Haven't read the entire thread yet, but at the moment I support the idea. I like the idea of changing the telehubs into public gathering spaces too.

Something I'd really like is some way to teleport completely randomly.

Will probably post more when I get 'round to reading everything here.

I feel making it possible to teleport where u want may end up being good for travel but in turn will decrease land value around telehubs and thus cause a downfall of land prices all together in the long run doing so will end up hurting the economy and will also increase linden fluxating around thus decreasing its value. in retrospect it will lead to a less worthwhile economy and actually end up causing more problems then it will help. ease of use is important but what will end up being the final cost of it as a whole. if you look at the picture as a whole you will see land around telehubs is higher set in price and land further out gets cheaper as such you are hurting an economical boundry that has existed in the form of real estate values. this would cause an influx or spread of land value's being the same as a whole across most of Second Life minus islands of course and auctions but will end up decreasing over all value of things people use to make money in the game thru land. the real estate business in SL would be hurt as a whole in this aspect and would cause an outrage among several people. please take careful consideration implementing this system...

Yes!

This needs to happen ASAP. And it needs to be free (no fee). A proper metaverse demands it.

Also, land owners need to be given some options about controlling how people teleport on their property:

* Anywhere - Some land owners may want to allow people to teleport directly to where they picked.

* Set Location - Some land owners may want specify exactly where people teleporting land regardless of what location they actually picked.

* Disabled - Some land owners may not want anyone teleporting to their land at all

Point to point is not going to be the end of the world.

It shouldn't affect telehub land owners much (the smart ones at least). The writing has been on the wall for a while now and they should have a contingency plan.

It's not going to ruin the map and make it pointless. It may actually make it more valuable.

People are going to have to build or sell something of good quality instead of relying on artificially generated traffic. This is a good thing.

The artificial zoning isn't going to be destroyed. Things may spread out but stores are still going to pop near other stores.

Do this.

Thank you,

HP

I'm used to 'point to point' travelling from Sims Online. Bringing it (back) to SL would be a great benefit to pretty much everyone except those who paid ridiculous amounts for land near hubs (which rarely change hands anyway) and Land Barons (who have too much control already). The majority of us will win.

Why can I be confident about that? Well... for a start, there won't be the constant battle between adjacent properties building higher and higher to try and get their name 'seen' above those around them (that, as a griefing tactic, is why I had to move from my First Land to my current location). So those who truly like to design - like me - don't have to worry about our creations being spoilt by some group of morons building a huge box right on your doorstep on three sides of your land so you can't be seen.

So you'll see more quality builds, spaced out perhaps, where the beauty that can be created by a skilled builder can be seen to its full advantage.

There will still be natural graviations towards popular places - for example, about 3 plots from me a huge nightclub appeared recently. My traffic has rocketed as curious clubgoers wander round to see what's nearby.

The fact that the 'for' vote is majorly in favour goes to show that most people want this. Before those who complain about owning vast quantities of land don't get more votes, well tough.

Lewis

*DELETED* due to complains.