Themed Mainland *Coming Soon*

So I was rumaging around the buy land section of secondlife.com and in addition to the prebuilt private islands I notice two sections concerning buying and selling themed mainland. I myself am greatly for this but wondered what the rest of you all thought seeing how zoning and estate planning has started to become LL's new thing detracting away the old "your world....." tagline. Does this mean we'll see more bay city type builds? How will this effect land prices? Is this phase two on how to make more things predictable for corperations etc? Or could this be in response to blue mars' urban planning? What are the chances eventually we will see a mainland furry continent or a gorean one (which while not a gor fan I would find really cool especially with all the fighting and map making that seems to happen there)? Or perhaps a modern warfare continent were your group could lose or gain controll of land based on wars? I know I'm rambling.........

You've always been able to buy themed mainland, just not many people do it. Now they seem to be setting up a special section for those who choose to sell objects with the land.

As I understand it, certain existing Mainland Land Barons with themed mainland sites have been invited to participate in a pilot program where the LL website would direct potential land buyers to those landlord's themed Mainland communities. This could make it easier for people to find communities of similar interest on the Mainland, like Japanese townships, Victorian builds, or whatever - especially if LL allows those developers to establish an enforceable covenant for those areas. Imagine a Japanese development where there was a requirement to build so that all visible structures below 512 Meters fit a Japanese theme, for example. This might also encourage the large-scale landlords to do more actual land development, and less mere profit-oriented land flipping on the Mainland.

On the flip side of the coin, it will mean that a very small subset of land developers will get a very unfair advantage in LL directing traffic to their land sales, while equally viable land offerings may not even be seen my new customers who check the "Official site" first, and go with what they see readily presented.

Blue Mars is a platform, provided by Avatar Reality, for third party developers. Developers may, or may not, have a theme at the city/island level. No response needed from LL.

I'm aware of say five themed mainland areas....
1. Bay city
2. Naut.
3. The brown, Boardman, and other sim
4 nova abilon
5. Shermerville

Is there something I'm missing?

With their current talk of attracting buissnes' ,Goverment, and other things along with this new addition under land sales hints to me there would be more. Also there was a mention by jack about 2 or 3 weeks ago to keep a look for magellean linden. Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions about more themed areas

And just because I build a parcel up and sell it off with objects included (unless you are developing whole sims) doesn't exactly make it themed mainland.

Didn't they once have a pilot program where they let ashe chung and a few other develop sims and sell the plots off? I don't remember this working out spectacular.

I'd be interested in the reaction of themed Estate owners.

If that reaction is to dump US$295/mo island sims in exchange for US$195/mo themed Mainland sims at auction, then I wonder how long before LL "discovers" that tier on Mainland is too low for their resource demands, as they did with pre-Homestead OpenSpaces.

I love themed builds.

Hi Gummo! *waves*

Yes but themed builds without a enforcable covenant are kinda like money, they only work as long as people think they do. I quick flight arounf bay city and you will find several builds out of theme or the generalized interpritaion of what the theme is. And I haven't exactly seen a lot of builds in zindra following the futuristic neon green living theme and it seems discouraged by your nieghbors to do so.

Well, Duh. I've been suggesting this for 3 years now. New residents need to either find friends FAST or find places where they feel welcome and a sense of affinity for FAST. What keeps people in SL and engaged is mostly interaction with other people - referred to frequently as friends. Bonding with others who share similar interests is critical to getting new sign-ups through the first hour and beyond.

I agree with the concept of it and greatly see the benifits of it, if this was a new world or grid doing this i'd be all for it but seeing this would be a change to the already statis quo of mainland I have questions.

1. Would you be received in say a japanesse style community if your build matched but nothing else did including say a furry avatar?

2. Where would land for this program come from? New sims meaning more land and lower prices? Or redevelop existing peices of mainland?

3. Who enforces the keeping of the theme and defines what makes the cut and what doesn't? (- already hate my homeowner's assoc.)

4. What keeps you from being in the corner of a themed sim and the two neighboring sims are not themed and littered with things called 'ugly'

Zindra.

De Haro (Camp Linden)
Green (Also a "Camp"
Lusk Estates (Residential)
Kama City (in Zindra, based around the "Green Living" concept)

...and for the record, theme-wise:

Bay City - "American Urban Experience" of the 1930s-60s
Nautilus City - Classical "atlantean" style
Brown (Residential)
Boardman (Residential)
Nova Albion (City/Urban)
Shermerville/Blumfield/West Haveb (Suburban Residential)

The land store has released four "themed sims" for sale, with pre-built structures. These include Baronial Castle, Moonbase, The Theater, and The Conference Center. These are not mainland, however.

There has been some talk at Jack Linden's office hour about future themed or even zoned mainland, including eventual expansion of Bay City.

The others I'm checking out first thing once in world but kama city and in effect zindra if one calls it themed is a shining example of possible failure or themed content. But then again I feel that zindra's theme has been replaced with some new one being created by the residents and therefore it's LL that is outta theme.

You won't find much disagreement from me. I've not seen Kama City since the preview, but I can't imagine that the initial "green living" theme that the Moles were instructed to build has been entirely embraced by the residents of the area.

Clearly there are some complex issues here.

On the one hand, there's a sense of Linden Research going into competition with us. On the other: thousands of themed regions *already are* in competition with us: the other private estate barons. Another few hundred regions won't make too much difference. But a few thousand would probably do some substantial economic damage.

The following is pure speculation, but I see this:

The big barons that produced largely undeveloped private rental regions during the boom aren't really getting too far with them lately. The bar has been raised, substantially.

Residents are looking for a lot more than say, 10000 square meters of waterfront sand next to neighbours who might do *anything*.

As such this may be more about recycling old regions, than rolling out new. Even if they look new with a shiny new location and name. It takes an active community to make an older region 'sticky' ~ to make people love it and keep returning to it across years. Bulk land sales didn't always accomplish that, though a few areas did have communities spring up due to phenomenally socially involved barons.

Thus what I see are the great undeveloped expanses of sand owned by some of the major private barons being converted into themes, rather than abandoned, if the market for undeveloped sand declines. Will this transition make the jump from "themed area" to community? That remains to be seen.

* * * * *

Ironically the land barons won't ever get hurt too bad, if they simply return unprofitable regions should the need arise.

But obviously the group with about 65 or 70% stake in all private region income is not the land baron, but Linden Research. They have a primary, unwavering interest in keeping lots and lots of grid squares filled. So this is one strategy to do that, I guess.

Any truth to all this?
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/08/lindens-secretly-planning-zoning-with-big-sl-land-barons.html#more

It's teeming mainland they need.

We'll see, there is a mailing list, someone did reveal some of the minutes which suggested it is indeed true but Jack has gone silent on the issue.

I never know with prok's stuff, she strikes me as boderline

If true I say Yayyyyy.

I've been talking about zoning here for ages and so have so many others. We can't be the only ones who want it.