Point to Point Teleporting

Eggy, you're making good sense here. It's helpful for newer residents to hear the historical perspective while evaluating a major change like P2P. Our gut level reaction is likely to be: YAAAAAY, I'm not FORCED through bottlenecks of repetitive ugly blight -- score one for individual freedom!

But a newer resident is not likely to know much about the underlying economics of that blight, or the alternatives available to content creators. Great content creators like Francis Chung and the folks at MC don't need to have a retail presence in stall-malls at 30000 telehubs! Yes, I'm making up a silly number : ) Their sales are due to the quality of their products, not pushing their wares in the faces of people who are FORCED to journey through bottlenecks.

New designers just getting started might have looked at telehub malls as a first step in getting known, but felt overwhelmed by the crushing presence of those who pour in RL cash to rent a whole shedload of retail locations. I've seen a better idea tried out by one of the established designers: setting up a new designer showcase store, and letting new people display their work there in order to get a start. It's great community-building. It's not forced. It's real.

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Total agree with this idea. As a newbie, I have found the current system a big pain. This suggestion probably could lead to improvements in areas around the telehubs ... which seem like disorganized messes at the current time ( ones I've visited anyway).

My experience at looking for retail stores ... use find then teleport ... then try to find the damm store from telehub. Given up on a couple.

And maybe ... it will spread out prim loads somewhat make areas around telehubs a lot less laggy.

Gryff

Precisely because I'm "smarter than this" it means that I have some experience in foreseeing outcomes.

What is a tiniest change to some is a huge change to many others; remember chaos attractors!

There is really no "doomsaying" in my "predictions". SL is not "doomed"; not at all, and highly likely rather the contrary — it's just going the way of their direct competitors, and probably for the best (in terms of growth of the user base). Look at IMVU: they have almost the same user base as SL in half the time! I expect Habbo Hotel and other, similar "social MMOGs" are thriving as well. All of them started much later than SL. All have grown as fast (or faster) then SL. All of them failed to grab the attention of the incredibly creative people that currently live in SL — instead, they concentrated on other issues to attract users (ie. the ability to chat and create content). So, emulating them is probably a strategic move which makes a lot of sense. What this means is that perhaps at this stage some people at LL gave up their efforts in "building a country" and prefer to rely strategically on a better model.

From what I can see around here, that's what the current user base wants to happen: the glorified sandbox model with chat. And that's what LL is giving them. Future users — and I agree that there will be many more of those — will expect that glorified sandbox, and disdain on others that claim otherwise. More than that: they'll be able to look back and say "oh, 'virtual countries', pffft; they tried that in 2004 and 2005 and it didn't work, we just happen to prefer a better model, just like IMVU/Habbo Hotel/etc."

I'm not a "doomsayer" at all. I also think that if the decision was taken to slowly reduce the importance of the economy and slowly destroy the "virtual country" model, it was taken consciously, and for the overall improvement of the SL experience of the current and future users. Philip told us last year or so that he was "watching the competition carefully". Perhaps this is one of the several steps that they're taking to make sure they become more aligned to their competitors by discarding all those aspects of SL that are "bothersome" to many, and focus on those aspects that will make SL look more like the competition, in order to attract more users and increase LL's profitability that way.

You've easily won that bet already, Eggy. In about a year or so, 2/3 of the population will have experienced a quite different SL than we have right now. They couldn't care less about the past — they'll live in a different world and enjoy it fully. And as time goes on, the number of "people enjoying SL" will certainly outgrow the others.

That's a major prediction that will never fail — future users will always be happy ones, or they won't be in SL at all.

I definitely agree. This means that the current, "virtual country" model was not working, and emulating the competition was the way to go. SL will just become "yet another MMOG" and not the special and different place it is right now. So it is "good" in that sense — it'll be as familiar as other MMOGs.

Well, that rather says it all, doesn't it? If Philip believes in that, and wishes that to come true, the latest decisions seem definitely to contradict that idea.

You think it's "silly pep talks" and "marketing hype"? Well, here are some news for you — several thousands were actively working to make that come true. We stood by Linden Lab when they yelled to the four winds their, uh, "pep talk". We were their evangelisers, bringing their "hype" to the furthest reaches of the (real) world because we believed in what they were saying. Now what you're telling us is that it was just a "gimmick" to attract a certain kind of people to SL, and that these should now simply be discarded like old socks because LL is not following that route any more. *shrugs* What I fail to understand is why they took such pains and two years of hard work to promote an idea and now have knowledgeable people like you laughing in our faces. I mean, the SLCC was just a month ago, and that idea was definitely reinforced there, again, in public, in RL, and appealing to the audience to continue to promote it. Do you mean that you knew all along that it was a "marketing ploy"? I must say it's news to me; no Linden employee has ever defended publicly the contrary, not even in off-side remarks, neither on IRC...

Oh yes, changes are more than welcome, always. It's just the ones that aren't "tiniest" that worry me. This is rotating the direction of the future of SL about 180 degrees and it'll take some time for me to digest it. And while I agree that only a few thousands will be affected — having the remaining 84,000 happy and content, and appealing to the further millions that will join us — it doesn't mean it's not something to be offhandedly discarded like other "tiny" changes (like reducing inflation by eliminating stipends from changes, or getting rid of hover tips for some reason tied to performance issues).

LL asked us for "feedback" on this change, and that's what I gave. SL is changing towards a different goal than the one previously announced. If that's in the best interest of the majority of users — current ones and future ones — it probably has a reason. If so, I'd like to understand it.

What I can add is that apparently, from the comments here, most people aren't even aware of what the issues really are — they only see point-to-point teleporting as a "cute" feature that exists in other platforms and that would be "nice to have" in SL, since they eliminate the unnecessary bumping into other people's buildings. Not surprisingly, the few that are aware of the issues are tied to community building, urban planning, content creation, real estate mediation, economy agents, or similar, "country-like" functions that still exist in SL but that will slowly fade into the background. Is that the message LL wishes to convey — that we're not welcome any more?

Once someone told in an in-world discussion event that LL is often prone to get technical solutions for dealing with social issues. This looks like another of these examples. I'm not talking at all about the implications of the technical aspect of the change — why, I'll be happily using point-to-point teleport as often as the next resident, and quite content because I won't need to bump into buildings or look at ugly rotating signs. It's just the underlying social change behind it, and the need to adapt to a new concept of SL, that makes me raise my eyebrows and think about it.

Tiny changes? Technically, yes. Socially — not at all!
SL is doomed? Rather the contrary! It will just be quite different. But growing as ever with happy users!

I said that they could be educated, not that they need to be.

And the rest is rather the point I wished to make, isn't it? Either there is a Vision™ (and apparently it was just "a marketing ploy" and you'd expect people joining SL be informed of what that Vision is/was; or there isn't one, and there is nothing to "agree" upon.

What I've seen was a strong emphasis put by some of the Lindens on The Vision™ in the past couple of years, and doing their best to inform people about it. What looks like it's happening is that The Vision™ was updated to The Vision™ 2.0, and previous supporters of version 1.0 should stop talking about it as if it still applied. Well, I've learned my lesson! Even if, of course, I disagree fully with The Vision™ 2.0, but I'll respect the new Vision™ and abide by it. Maybe in time I'll be able to support it as well as I did the previous one.

Well, that's just because there are still a few options remaining to us — like private islands, for instance!

I fully agree with you, Forseti. No, the content creators are not going to leave. The new model will benefit the already established ones for the reasons you've mentioned; they will increase their sales much more, not diminish them. New content creators will get attracted to a different SL with more emphasis on selling content and less, uh, "disturbing" features like the "crazy" notion that not all places in the world are equal. People selling content in other MMOGs will find the New and Improved SL a much more friendlier place to start doing business immediately.


I won't repeat myself, but basically, it's just about moving from a non-uniform grid which encourages casual shopping, towards a different model where the casual shopper will need different tools to find what they're looking for.


That's a different issue — yes, we need better tools. I'd say that this will make people rush towards third-party external websites more; they'll be much more important in the current model (since they now will be able to point people directly towards where content is being offered for sale. Perhaps it's not unsusprising why things like ROAM and SLWebsearch "suddenly" came into being. Searching for available content off-world is going to become much more important, unless LL is finally able to put HTML in-world. After all, the new users, coming from other MMOGs (There and IMVU come to mind, as well as the Yahoo! and MSN Messenger avatars...) are used to shop for clothes/items on web sites.

What are we going to lose in the process? Not content creators; but a shopping experience which is more appropriate to a virtual world (ie. in-world casual shopping or in-world appreciation of the value of land depending on location). Of course you may argue that Web shopping is currently part of our RL society anyway, and that point-and-click shopping to SL naturally makes more sense. As one person who rarely sells anything in-world, but almost always through the SL web shops, I cannot disagree. However, I'm aware that the web-based merchants are a tiny minority right now; this may very well change quickly in the next few months.

Hi, Jonny.... Another lonely voice in the wilderness? (Emphasis on WILD-derness)

Gwyn, again I must disagree and repeat my disagreement.

People have spent considerable time and effort to NOT deal with telehubs. Be it manually flying straight up as soon as they teleport, using ROAM/HyperPorter, or having friends/event hosts teleport them. It is clear that telehubs and telehub malls are widely considered the local instance of "PUNCH THE MONKEY!" banner ads and email spam.

It isn't rotating the direction of SL 180 degrees - it's admitting we're standing where we already are.

I like the idea of a bank referenced in this thread to replace telehubs:

/108/84/73304/1.html

No more direct deposts

People that don't want to hang around will grab their cash and run. People that like to explore (wait for the area to rez) might be tempted to explore.

I was one that went to the telehub and immediately headed out of there as soon as possible. I decided to start placing ads at the telehub and on a number of occasions places rez'd that caught my attention. After I was done with my ad I would check out these places.

Maybe there is a good compromise that would require people to visit the telehubs without feeling they were required to. I guess I'm dreaming

I haven't had time to read all the posts as closely as I'd like, but I want to throw a few thoughts and ideas into the mix.

- telehub land will remain Linden owned land, with icons identifying it on the map. People won't be forced to land there and then fly to a red beacon, but they'll be able to easily find it. I'd love to see us - Lindens and residents - come up with some ideas to turn the telehub land into interesting and useful public spaces. Each public space can take on its own characteristics and purpose. Let's talk more about how to do that next Tuesday.

- two issues have been brought up which I agree are critical -- advertising and search.
- Advertising - we continue to look at ideas for improving Classifieds in SL, such as dynamic pricing (think Google Adwords). For physical, in-world advertising, the land formerly known as telehubs could be a good place for ads (think Times Square).
- Search - there's no question that search in SL needs improvement. The Find system is increasingly inadequate. You've given us some good things to think about and work into the dev schedule.

Thanks for all the feedback. I'm looking forward to talking to everyone next week.

lol i'm beating SUCH a dead horse i know but I counter again that it's because people want more than grey boxes, and designers will give them what they want. Why you see so many sunsets and castles-on-a-hillside sent to snapzilla? Why do people live in victorian houses and purchase prim food? Don't shop owners want to create an impressive and comfortable environment for customers? Yeah there will be some "grey boxes" but heck some already exist. SL architecture will remain diverse in a p2p world.

I bet that there are plenty of folks interested in SL's urban planning and the economy etc who are in favor of removing telehubs, just as there are those against. Actually I would think that an economist would be appalled at the waste of productivity caused by artificially forcing people to elongate travel. Hubs certainly do not increase the efficiency of our market information, IMO.

I just don't think hub/no-hub is a defining issue in the future of SL as a metaverse. More important are scalability and performance, overall technological progress, improved creation tools, improved group/land/business tools, and eventually the opening of some of the technology to create multiple, interlinked grids hosted by different people/organizations.

(edit addition after re-reading your post: it's funny that I seem to be coming down on the other side of the fence as you on everything here, but I also think that people really enjoy shopping in world, hub or no hub, and that won't change. They'll just shop on the web while they're at work ). Robin -- glad to hear you're working on better marketing and search functions.

Robin, please consider leveraging the talents of your community in a public contest to create interesting and diverse public spaces in the telehub parcels, like you did with the train stations. It would serve nobody's interest to fill them with a default linden item such as a copy of stage 4 or part of the welcome area

That's the plan Eggy!

Thank you! I loved the train station contest, people made really nice stations. And thanks for considering the reintroduction of P2P teleports

I have never appreciated the lag at hubs. I've always been frustrated at the travel time especially with the aforementioned lag.

Also, the price of land near a telehub is insane and really not something that should be a factor. How much better for a custoemr if they can teleport directly to your shop without any need?

I was looking to buy land last week and found two plots I wanted for my house, reasonably priced in a new sim. The very day I went to purchase, a telehub had been put down a few meters away (overnight, I'd been there only hours earlier) a shoip had popped up directly beside the plots I wanted, and the price of my two plots had both doubled. I mean, it's nice to have an economy, but as many of us aren't clothing designers and script writers, I think the real estate costs are a little extreme, and the factoring in of telehub locations shouldn't have any bearing on a store. The quality and popularity of good merchandise should draw in the customers.

Honestly, I spend so much time trying to get away from a slow rezzing and lagged telehub that I would never shop at one anyway.

It'd make things alot easier, especially in the area's where you want to go to a certain store and the telehub is 4 or 5 sims away. It'd also help with avoiding the sims where almost half the area has the no access barriers. And i've even seen some stores nearly barricaded by neighboring lots using such barriers, making it hard to reach intended destinations. I've even seen some of these near hubs. So being able to avoid these area's alone would be great for me since even accidently bumping these usually crashes SL for me.

Then as some others have said it'd help avoid area's with extremely high traffic lag intensive area's where movement drops down to a crawl.

I still think P2P should be a something you pay to have like the find places listings.

I've basically read through most of millions of posts on here and I kind of have mixed feelings and leaning toward the opposed side. If I were the Lindens I would definately do this carefully and consider everyones points. P2P seems it might work two different ways:

1) Pick a coordinate anywhere if allowed and teleport exactly there.
2) Pick a coordinate and be teleportered where the land owner wants you.

Problems with both scenarios:

1) Biggest is privacy and direction of traffic. Privacy is given, I'm not sure how many want to police their land tp box everytime a moment of privacy is required. Also there is a reason why many locations have doors, where do put signs to tell where items or events are? What if you tp in between two walls?

2) I think this would be a better solution but I see a problem with this too. Since the people will be directly tping to your set location I can just create a big box and decorate the inside. The customer doesn't really know much more than it's great on the inside. This could very well create uglier builds on the outside.

My Issues with p2p are:

ZONING: Most already heard the arguements on both sides. I agree zoning needs to be done right but it will never happen if people will have to move off their current land. I have land that is 1000m away from a telehub maybe one shop is in distance. With p2p that means the sim I live is just as prime real estate for a club, shop or a house.

RETAIL: How is the little guy going to get seen? With onslaught of retail establishments it will be even harder to be seen. Before you would go to a high traffic mall to diplay your products. Most malls will die out, a rare few will survive. We still don't have much advertising options, very few look at the classifieds. Forget Billboards now. P2P will destroy fly by traffic. All of us has flown to or hovered above a destination and ask ourselves "What is over there?".

BEARINGS: Without teleporting to the telehubs I know I will lose familiarity of a lot of locations. This is just my personal beef but it will make this big virtual world seem a lot bigger.

Having paid a more than rediculous amount for telehub land, and owning almost a sim's worth of land spread along the 18 sim road loop around that telehub (Mahulu), I made a spot in my place at the Mahulu Telehub my home, and I use a holo-vendor there to rez (free) cross sim teleporting chairs to take me (or anyone) to my various properties in the nearby sims.

Anyway, what I have done is make my place at the Mahulu Telehub, into what I consider a real telehub SHOULD be. (As well as I'm able to, anyway... (Edit: There was some breakage with 1.7 that I still have to repair... the TP chairs can't fly thru the volcano anymore...

Given the advent of Point to Point Teleporting, I'm in favor of making SL's existing telehubs into something more like mine.

You could use the existing public advertising signs, already at the telehubs and which anyone can already use, but cover the telehub walls with them. Add P2P teleporting to the sign's advertising function, and let people put in a notecard, a pic and a landmark. Make it so the landmark must be to land they own or are grouped with, and within the current coverage area of that telehub. Add some search and sort capability to the sign interface. Expire adds older than a month or two.

Put up posts at each telehub with P2P teleports to nearby (nearest 4?) telehubs. Add an "I feel lucky" button that will teleport you to some random telehub in SL.

Keep it free.

P.S. Consider that perhaps P2P should be pretty much limited to the above, with maybe a nice P2P map on a second floor and what we have now...

Just a couple things to say here, nothing huge.

"Gray Box Theory"
Those already exist, except they're usually black. I lived next to one, then moved, and someone promptly built a mansion atop the lake that I had faced my oceanic build to. The land is now up for sale while I try to find some protected coastline or something. People who want to build boxes will build boxes. Some of us want to build parks (Lusk), airports (Abbotts), pretty communities (Boardman), and else. The boxes upon boxes will be with PTP teleporting what they are now (clubs, bad stores/malls, and brothels). Personally I'm waiting until I can afford the tier for a whole sim because I'm going to buy one at auction and fill it with trees, or a lake, or something. I'll bet that the land surrounding my little spot will become more valuable because owners would be guaranteed to have at least one border not risked to be a mall or something. I also think PTP teleporting will bring down hub malls and I hope so, because it'll force folks to make better products instead of just shoving them in my face when I'm headed somewhere else.
(I tricked out a little X-flight with enough power that I can turn it up all the way and punch through objects that haven't completely rezzed. Great for escaping telemalls)

"My land will be worthless!"
That sucks, you took a gamble on some land, you lost. Happened to me too with my waterfront property. Deal with it.

"Privacy and Hub-centric estate design"
True privacy is nigh impossible to achieve, however we do get very close. However I fully agree with and support the ideas of landowners being able to set their land to TP-OK or !TP-OK (pardon the use of old languages. I speak in unicode when intoxicated) However for estates I think the idea of a "Community Landing Point" can be easily achieved by everyone setting their land !TP-OK and creating a spot within said estate that is TP-OK so anyone teleporting into the estate gets defaulted to the landing zone. Perhaps something along the lines of some radio buttons in the land options. "Allow Point Teleportation", "Force teleport to parcel landing spot", and "Block Point Teleportation". With a system default of an avatar arriving at the nearest allowed teleportation area when Point Teleportation is blocked.

These are the only real arguements I've seen so far, with people supporting and criticising them in between.

Also, just something I cannot help but say.

Anshe: You responded to a community forum post by advertising your services online for things not even related to Second Life. This forum and this thread are about the community and what is best for it. It is not about your bottom line, please either stick to the topic or refrain from posting. Or better yet, post up your opinion on the matter in some of your "high value" near-telehub land and see how many users actually stop their fleeing of the area to read it.

The economic discussion around PTP travel seem to have overlooked one noticeable distortion that was wrapped up with telehubs. In most property tax systems, the tax in based on the value of the land. Oddly, that wasn't the case in SL, where tier is the same regardless of what you paid for the land. This had some negative aspects: one time costs for buying land could escalate to an unreasonable degree, as there were no long term financial consequences.

More unfortunately, some "sharp dealers" found ways to talk new residents out of their First Land, particularly if the value was very high due to being close to a telehub. Now that land will be more uniform in value, that frenzied approach to nabbing the "best" land should diminish.

Another unfortunate aspect of telehubs was the race to slap together featureless malls to force people to see shops with nothing aesthetic to commend them. Having gone to the effort of getting an outstanding architectural design for my building, which was located next to a telehub, I was appalled when it quickly became surrounded with dreck. Perhaps now there will be more emphasis on creating attractive sites and buildings, so as to draw people to the location, rather than force them to run a gauntlet of mediocrity.

I agree with Robin that it will be necessary to look at alternative and improved methods of allowing business to advertise their wares. Word of mouth has always been the best advertisement, but people who are new to the game would need an easy way to find the best content. Perhaps it's time to revisit a "better business bureau" approach?

It could be useful to create an area (possibly the new north) where p2p can be experimented with to see just how things evolve. This can be done without throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. The rest of SL will carry on as usual until it can be shown that one system works better than the other.

Please keep telehubs. I don't want shops to start showing up in my nice residential SIM!

Telehubs are treh only kind of zoning we have!

Is there a way to vote against this?

I'm for this, but only if it's optional per-parcel - "Direct Teleport: No, Yes (Anywhere) , Yes (To Specified Point)", with the default being "No" in order to avoid forcing the change on landowners who don't want any part of it. I'm not sure it's worth reusing the "landing point" marker, as I don't believe that stores the Z co-ord (plus I might want to direct manual-flight visitors down to a landing pad on the roof but have Direct-TP guests pinged directly to a more central location).

I think any Direct-TP requests to land with DTP disabled should throw up a message, "Can't go directly - go to nearest Telehub (x metres away)?" with the ability to change your mind if you don't want to play Telehubs. I don't think it'd be a good idea to immediately direct people to the nearest DirectTP-able parcel, in case the spawn point there is inside a venue - it'd be a real pain to have to find the way out, when it may be quicker to go to Hub and then fly/Roam/Hyperport in the "current manner".

I don't think it should be a premium feature in terms of travellers paying per-use or not being available to Basic account holders, but I could handle it being a chargeable extra per-parcel like Find listing is - somewhere in the region of $L10 - $L20 a week perhaps? It might be rather controversial to just bump the Find fee up by that sort of amount and have Direct TP be provided as standard for Find -subscribed parcels, but I guess it's something worth considering.

I don't want telehubs to go away though - sometimes it's nice just to go for a random explore, see what kind of stuff's for sale, just randomly go for an explore. I also like the idea of using them more as social hubs - if we could get some sort of unofficial standard going where if you're bored or generally feel like meeting random people and doing whatever, head to your nearest Telehub and see who else is at a loose end.

Although I don't think it'd be sensible to abolish the WA and dump new people randomly at Telehubs, it might be handy to replicate some of the WA items (especially sources of "getting started" info, the Pathfinder Picks dispenser if that's still going, etc.) at Telehubs so you don't have to brave the hive of activity/lag that is the main WA just to find that stuff.

I wanted to offer a snippet of an author's point of view. (no, not mine)

Neal Stephenson's take on virtual worlds in his novel "Snow Crash" was based heavily on the strict management of metaphors. The idea being that in order for any world to feel "right" and hold the same value weights to actions, that world would have to maintain key metaphores from our meatspace world.

Put simply, there are some likenesses to the RL that cannot be completely abandoned. This is because we never disconnect from our meatavis.

Geography has a suprising value to us. It is vital to the feeling of "here" while we spend time in this program. The much mroe simple feeling of walking from room to room all day (p2p tping) would cheapen the "here" feeling and degrade the value of the world we are trying to represent

Having said that, Neal Stephenson's world did not suffer from current data limitations and did not have issues of rez time and we therefor asume that the avis in the Metaverse experienced no trouble walking and flying as they would in RL.

Understanding these limitations and being VERY dissapointed with the current ability of us to travel in the world, I am torn on the teleporting subject. I can only hope that it is a temporary workaround while we improve the transmission and stability of the world we work and play in.

After we are graced with a near perfect world rez as we travel, an astonishing public transit system could be put into place and then we would REALY start to see people jacking in for days at a time, feeding themselves introveinously ;P

~Lefty