Campaign for Open Water

Time to mobilise our efforts.

Next week Philip Linden is hosting a Town Hall Meeting, and Robin Linden has started a thread soliciting questions for discussion. Guidelines request a single non-tech-support question per resident, and suggest that addional residents 'second' any question they'd really like to see addressed.

As the commodores at Starboards Yacht Club have already discovered, Linden Lab presently offers reduced-load open water 'void' sims for sale at one-quarter the normal cost, but only in four-packs and thus only economically viable to large-scale private developers. Privately supported sims can be located anywhere on the grid, within certain reasonable compatibility to Linden Lab's long-term development plans, so other than the crippling expense of having to buy four at a time they would be an excellent means to add open water wherever we need it, private island or mainland bottleneck.

I have submitted a question/request for Linden Lab to offer these 'void' sims for sale singly, on an a-la-carte basis. Please, everyone reply to the Questions for Philip Linden thread with a 'second' that he address individual 'void' sim sales at the Town Hall Meeting.

This will be a great first step toward raising the visibility of our Open Water Campaign.

see /108/50/92790/3.html#post930840

This is different from asking for individual void sims to purchase... this is asking Lindens to provide some basic infrastructure to the mainland. I think there are actually related water questions that ought to be addressed. Myrrh asked one, and I asked the one that landowners in the southeast and other mainland continents want answered.

I suspect that they cannot sell individual void sims because it looks like they stack 4 sims onto one processor (instead of one sim perprocessor for regular sims). At least that is what I conclude from looking at void sims using this tool: http://neighbours.maxcase.info/index.php

I have followed up Myrrh's posting with this one:
/108/50/92790/5.html#post934405

Note: I mentioned at the recent SLSF meeting that there was a vote function and that we could use it to let LL know of our interest in this situation. Now that I am back from my trip I looked around to see where that function was, without much success. However with Myrrh's message and the subsequent follow up that a number of you have done, AND the negotiations that Nber and I have had with LL has surely put this topic right before them. Let's see what happens. Dang 2:30PM meeting time. That sucks for us west coasters. What do they think? Do they think we play SL for a living? HEHEHHEE. No need to reply to this particular point, i am just venting. Grin.

Go to the Second Life homepage (secondlife.com), click on Community, then click on the Feature Voting link. This takes you to the "Feature Voting Tool." Or just go here: http://secondlife.com/vote/

I have two votes applied toward this proposal:
http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=979 (58 votes total)

This one is probably better for SLSF (if only it were more articulate):
http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=511 (69 votes total)

Maybe we should make a new proposal that precisely states our demands, then try to get all of SLSF, SYC, VYC, Pirates of SL, etc, to throw their spare votes at it.

I was wondering why this hadn't gained much traction after all the race promotion. I see Takoes everywhere and surely they aren't all just for decoration and racing. Simply outlawing ban or eject scripts on Linden waterways would be a big help. I hate getting knocked out of the sim when all I want to do is sail by.

Voted features are sorely neglected by LL for the most part, but a bit of perusal shows that most feature requests which garner more than 1000 votes do get acknowledged by LL at the very least.

For this reason I've dumped all ten of my own votes into the second proposal, but it's clear that we need to consolidate the two proposals into a single, concise, well-articulated, and readily-implemented feature request. That means it should be generalist, devoid of special interest, not imposing upon existing residents or communities, and a good fit for LL's current operating model, both technically and financially. Letters to Santa are less likely to be taken seriously.

Please follow up with drafts to this thread.

Once we develop something agreeable to our community as a whole, it should be posted and we should transfer all our votes from these two existing proposals, and ask their authors to do likewise. If the sailing community bands together to dump all our available votes into a single consolidated feature proposal, and simultanously campaigns hard amongst SL's general population, we should have LL sitting up and taking notice in no time at all.

Proposal:
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We propose that all mainland costal regions either have adjacent protected water regions, or that protected water ways be placed in all new coastal regions that go to auction. This will guarentee public protected water ways for the enjoyment of all Second Life account holders.


Background:
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Linden Labs has on many of the mainland regions placed protected land with public access roads to facilitate the free movement of vehicles. This helps bind the community together and fosters the continued creation of new vehicles to take advantage of these protected lands.

In some areas Linden Labs has provided protected rivers and entire water regions to help facilitate similiar access and community growth in regards to open navigable water ways. However in many cases Linden Labs has provided a commercially auctioned coastal region that has a large quantity of water which is bordered by two adjacent water regions. The assumption is that the owners of the coastal region will leave some or all of the water on their sims as open and navigable for water way traffic.

However it has become increasely common for the various land developers to sell off the navigable water w/o any attached land, thus forcing the buyers to build on the water. It is also often common for people who simply want an unobstructed view of the ocean rendered on the edge of the grid, to purchase and build on the water.

What this has resulted in is a very large number of blockages from privately owned builds on the open water, thus making it impossible to sail through these regions.



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Thoughts:

1. This does not directly address making available water (void) sims for purchase at a reduced price and would not help the private island sailors. Additionally if they place four water regions on the same hardware that they place a single private island, then make water regions available for a quarter of the price, or roughly $350 each (I rounded in LL favor.)

2. I thought about including #1 and then having the option for SecondLife account holders to sponsor protected water regions both in mainland areas and for private islands. Essentially, if we wanted a water region next to Danbi in the south, to connect the two existing water regions -- then we the sailing community would raise $350, pay it to linden, and they would add a protected water region there. Perhaps with a small island with a "Sponsored by:" kiosk or something on it, to thank those that contributed to it's purchase.

3. The proposal itself is short, but making linden labs understand why we want it is a bit harder. Thus the long background section. I'd like to continue to keep the proposal very short, and I would also like to keep background info. But I think it can probably be shortenned -- any suggestions to shortenning the background info?

4. I just threw this together this morning, after being somewhat annoyed after reading the Town Hall transcript yesterday. I know that I am relatively new to the sailing community, so if this proposal is not quite what the community would like as a whole -- please shout out.


Thanks!!!

See /145/c6/94496/1.html

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Please add the missing void/water sims in the Southeast continent

I don't think that SLLM crew can directly fix this problem, but can you please send it up the chain of command so that it gets fixed soon? Since Governor Linden is my landlord, I don't have any other way to raise this issue, except at the town hall meeting where answering this question was deftly avoided.

The Southeast continent does not have roads, and the only protected land is on the outside edges of the continent... but this is not contiguos so we do not have a coherent right of way for travel around the region. I am led to believe that free travel right of way ought to exist from a number of posts by Guy Linden, and Philip Linden seems to say that contiguous regions are a good thing, and the mainland is going to grow a lot. Where is the transportation infrastructre in the SouthEast continent? When will you add the missing void/water sims around the outside edge of the continent?

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/145/58/94191/1.html#post941919
Guy Linden: Protected land is not for sale. It serves to either protect a landscape or provide a right of way though a region. Protected land may or may not have an actual road, but it is always available to all SL residents to use as an unrestricted travel lane.
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The question that was not addressed in thursday's town hall meeting:

In the far southeast continent, you have created a series of islands surrounded by water. However, there is not a continuous ring of protected not-for-sale water sims around this continent, so people boating or flying aircraft contend with security scripts, ban lines and obstructive builds. When will you connect the protected water sims you already have in place, so that we have the infrastructure to use our boats and planes properly? If you want resident-created content and events, you need to provide at least some infrastructure to support us. Give us navigable water, please.

We know that void sims are much much less expensive to provide than regular sims. Linden Labs left out the roads and other transportation infrastructure in the southeast continent. Can you provide at least a ring of navigable water to an area with land designed specifically to appeal to a marine/boating community? This issue applies to the other mainland continents as well, but the need is acute in the southeast continent, as the formerly open water gets clogged with builds, ban lines, and security scripts...and we don't have any roads. The payoff is the greatest here too, since a few more void sims will make it possible to navigate around the continent independent of the whims of specific landowners.

Specifics:
1.) Link protected water Daebeom-Pulsori with Byeolgwadal-Garam-Nana by putting one sim east of Danbi

2.) link the existing protected water sims Daebeom-Pulsori to Haneulgil, with a one sim east of Haneulgil

3.) Link protected water in Cheongdam-Jilseo-Sandeulbaram-Banpo-Tal-Jinju-Dongbaekmaeul-Neulchan-Daseuri with Haengbok by putting one sim west of Haengbok and one north of Cheongdam

Steps 1-3 use 4 void sims to consolidate the existing navigable water on the east and west side of the continent. These two areas can be links by adding 7 protected water sims: north of Haengbok, west of Sanchon, north of Haneulgil, north and northeast of Yongchon, north and northwest of Sanchon.

I posted this
/139/bc/94640/1.html
in the hopes that keeping these questions in front of the Lindens will perhaps motivate them to answer.

Myrrh, you ought to post there as well, since Robin Linden is presumably going to try to round up answers. I do not believe that being invited to e-mail King Philiip constitutes an answer to the questions... and that was all we got at that town hall, a transparent evasion from someone who had not done the homework of reading the prepared questions in advance.

We can try the vote-for-this-feature thing, but I am not sure that those have much of a history of producing results, especially if the Lindens cannot even provide answers to questions that were prepared days in advance. I worry that vote-for-features is just a way to keep the residents busy but the results do not influence the Lindens much.

In any case, keeping the issue visible in the Second Life Answers forum is probably a good thing. Getting coverage of these issues in the Herald/Metaverse Messenger would be a good thing too.

To gain traction, we need to gain votes and that won't happen unless sailing mania hits SL (well, for more than a few of us, anyhow) I suggest we get in touch with the aviation/flying folks who have a similar problem with open airways, ban scripts, etc when they try to fly at an altitude where you can see interesting stuff. Perhaps the combined forces of both might gain us sufficient votes to get noticed.

I have to admit that I'm not gearing up for any feature vote on open water as I think the feature vote is a bit neglected by Linden Lab unless the votes are overwhelming. And I don't see a vote like it reaching over a thousand very easily unless we actually go petitioning people in world for our cause.... Which could potentially make us very annoying depending on how pushy a person is about it.

The best way for a small group of people to get heard by a business is either 1) being very loud or 2) making a solid economical argument for what we want.

I'd love for Linden Lab to put several water sims at strategic locations across the grid because it makes geographic sense. But void sims take up servers, servers that no one is paying for. Of course, a business would rather sell this server to a paying customer than to use it for a public service. Even though public services have a positive impact on the overall customer base, it's an impact that is so subtle to practically be subconscious for most people.

It also seems that Linden Lab is a bit sour on the whole protected passage routes anyway. Considering I read this other post with a different take at about the same time, Robin Linden has a point. In that thread, she asks whose responsibility it is to create infrastructure. I think the idea a landowner doing this on a grand scale from their own benevolent heart is pretty laughable, especially if they have to pay full price to give the world open passage through their land.

Static Sprocket had an interesting suggestion of resident-sponsored protected passageways, but all it did was pique my interest. I don't have any grand plan expanding on the idea.

Just wanted to bring this podcast to the attention of the sailing community. It may be another opportunity to reinforce our demands for open sailing lanes.

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