Betting time on Zindra

In how many months will Zindra crash and burn like a Lockheed Starfighter piloted by a syphilis-crazed drunk, blind monkey?

Don't by shy, spin the wheel......

(I give it six months)

This is the end of July...so...um...

-2 Months. I thought it crashed in May.

Why would it? And what do you mean "crash and burn"?

(Nicely vivid simile, btw )

Linden Labs makes most of its money selling tier to estates.

Estates make most of their money renting plots to residents and merchants.

Merchants make their money selling things to residents.

Residents log in mostly to go check out the porn on Zindra, or to buy things to look cool while checking out the porn on Zindra.

Zindra cannot afford to fail...


But... Zindra lacks the technology to succeed...

Thanks

Common Pattern:

LL sets up a new piece of land and heavily promotes it

Expansion of land takes a dump on mainland values. People lose money.

New land sells high at auction to those who wish to flip it.

LL gets bored and forgets about new project, land values drop. Residents forget about it, too, and flippers cannot sell their expensive land.

Add to this with age verfication issues and ZOMG! THE SEXXORS panics and you see happy happy joy joy in the near future.

My prediction:

Zindra will fail in a very massive way five minutes after Linden Lab allows people owning land on Zindra to start selling it to other avatars, from the sheer weight of land bots flooding in to look for properties for sale.

Not sure how you figure that Zindra lacks the technology to succeed, but last i looked, we all were running reasonably successful businesses in SL, on mainland, under the then rules of the TOS. How do you know this? Cause we all got shipped off to Zindra. For following the rules, we got moved. To say that we lack the technology to succeed is invalid.

Just cause we peddle smut doesn't mean we lack in intelligence... after all, some of the best scripts/products on the grid came from said smut peddlers.

IF LL will get off their collective ass and instate the TOS they have given us, and force all Private Islands to flag adult the same way we, as mainland got moved from Mature to Adult, Zindra will do just fine. Its a huge PITA, and a HUGE inconvenience, but we made it this far... As it was on the old mainland, the weak will fall, the strong will survive, and life will go on.

~brie
*smut peddler*

No bots will show up. They search by price and Zindra land won't be set for sale for L$1 a meter.

Zindra actually has less of a chance of failing than any other region of Mainland. As the saying still goes, "Sex sells".

To crash, don't you generally have to take off first?

From LL's standpoint, as long as _someone_ buys the new sims and pays tier on it, they win.

They will force a certain number of Adult Content users to own land there, which will give the land flippers at least some desperate people to sell to - people who have no other valid choice for their business or activity.

The Mainland parcels that those Adult users abandon (Because no one wants to buy it even ay L$1 per M2, or trade back to LL for free swaps is land, LL will in turn auction off, for more direct sales profits, to more tier-paying residents (They hope).

Land flippers will rapidly buy the rest of Zindra, bidding the auction prices to insane levels, along with a few normal residents who manage to get land in spite of the inflated prices that the land flippers will bring. LL laughs all the way to the bank as auction prices become insane, and LL just rakes in higher initial profits.

Eventually, the Land Flippers will be unable to find suckers for the inflated prices. Land prices in Zindra will slowly collapse to match the rest of the grid. No one will abandon the land, because they paid too much to get it. LL happily rakes in monthly tier on a lot of new sims.

LL wins. Residents lose. Business as usual.

I didn't say you lack it. Don't imply.

I said Zindra lacks the technology.

Look at how horrid the servers are, look at the way they placed the roads - its too laggy and poorly shaped and too late to fix.

Further, your skills in your lot in Zindra have nothing to do with technology - but with human skills, communication, marketing, design, and so on. Unless you paid LL's for a special hardware server for your Zindra Sim - technology is one factor 100% out of your control.

In reading a forum post it is unwise to draw out an incorrect and unwarranted implication. Best to just go with what is literally said.

Now you can agree or disagree with me on Zindra, but do so on Zindra - what I spoke about, not on yourself, which I never referenced.

Maybe you aren't being entirely serious here, but this is an assumption that I've heard, spoke or unspoken, an awful lot on this forum. Honestly, I think it's a distortion.

I'm not for a moment questioning that porn IS big, and represents big money, in SL, but the crowd I have hung out with mostly in my now exactly one year in SL (yay!) really isn't that big on porn, per se.

I am speaking of the milieu at places like the late, much lamented Open Latte or the Junco in Hallelujah. Sex is certainly big, and people use pose balls, but mostly they buy these from Bits and Bobs and install them in their own houses. It's a social milieu that does include a few sex club owners, and a few sex workers, but they tend to be very much the exception, and are often viewed as slightly "odd" by the people in such places. And the appearance of a D/s couple, while not unheard of, is infrequent enough to cause comment (and sometimes, frankly and unfortunately, harassment).

Frankly, few of my non-feminist friends (who are the bulk of my acquaintance) were even aware of Zindra until literally days before its opening; often I was their first and only source of information on the subject.

I think the point I'm really making is that the different social milieus and communities of SL are enormously diverse, and that it is very easy to come to believe, erroneously, that one's own corner of it is representative of the whole.

To turn this around for a moment, I was completely oblivious of the extent and variety of adult content in SL until I became active in-world through my feminism. And no, that is NOT because I am chaste and uptight.

To be fair - our new sim on Zindra (South West of the continent) is a LOT less laggy than our old mainland and the road runs through the sim so it can actually be used...

I do agree with some of the other roads though - who thought it was a good idea to use the sim borders for roads> They CANT have used SL for very long...

Gomez

Zindra is actually a new pattern.. Instead of coming up with new theme, building it and hoping people buy it (which they do), they've instead taken an existing theme (pornz!), built it an area then forced people to go there.

That sounds bad.

I think it depends on whether or not Linden Lab decides to give private estates a huge competitive advantage by not requiring them to follow the Adult Content rules, and how far up land prices are driven. If speculators buy land at prices that effectively block new businesses from starting up, that won't be good, either.

The thing is, if I had a Mole account and the right permissions to modify or delete/replace what is there, I could fix all the Zindra sim-border roads in just a day or two, so you would have virtually ZERO problems with falling through the roads when you cross the sim borders. So could any Builder who bothers to spend 5 minute searching the forums for "Sim border crossing". They would still be on the sim edges, but would not need any silly pop-up fences or other barriers. They would simply work..

I gotta wonder how anyone who thought the road design in Zindra was a good idea got hired to build them in the first place.

There is no proof that G.W actually crashed a plane a few really hard landings maybe but no outright crashing i don't think.

I don't understand the criteria here for failing or succeeding. It is not going to fail or succeed more then any other part of mainland. So, I guess the actual topic would be is mainland a failure or success?

The only real difference I can see specific to Zindra is that is has been seeded (through the forced move) with a heavy concentration of businesses, and it has had no ad farmers right from the beggining. *shrugs*

What is meant by an ad farmer?

Just to get clarity here.

One many Zindra parcels that I've visited, there are advert boards all over the build - but they mostly belong to the builder who also has other interactive content. That said, there is that one building right next to where the mosh stations was/is that is just advert boards for rent.

Or is an ad farmer something else - like all those 4m parcels I see on mainland that I can only guess at one point in time held something spammy and annoying on them.

Or am I still missing the mark on the definition? The above have been the things I assumed was meant by ad farmer when I've heard it referenced in past, but I've never actually looked this up or had it spelled out before.

I believe the success or failure of Zindra depends on how it does as a home for adult businesses. If those businesses thrive Zindra grows, it's a success. If they don't, and end up failing or moving to private estates, it's a failure.

The only way I see Zindra "failing" at the moment is if there is not enough residents willing to become age verified. No age verified residents = no business on Zindra.

Residents come and go, so LL need to ensure there is enough "new blood" becoming age verified - one way to do this would be to ensure it's part of the signup process, with an "opt out" for people who do not want to.

SL is an over 18's playground, so there is no reason for "adult" status not to be the default. Will LL make this happen? I doubt it - I fear we will always be the "optional extra" of SL now.

Gomez

This.

I consistently see a heavy green dot concentration when I map over Zindra, more-so than anywhere else I try, so resident wise I think its a success.

But I have my doubts about whether or not it can handle the traffic its generating.

And I'd wager that as soon as land there goes up for auction, we're going to see some 4m parcels getting made and a whole pack of flying penises popping up trying to sell you or script you...

Porn and spam and hacking just all three really go well together.

I went to Zindra, to test out my new video card, and I was struck by something..

All these adult content providers in one place.. there's an unintended consequence. There's a "Disneyland Effect".. every shop seems to have a giant pink penis, or a sculpture of some woman being sexually ravaged by something.. each shop trying to outdo it's neighbors.

It's like Christmas lighting in parts of the USA. They're going crazy trying to "win" the 2009 Second Life Adult Eyesore Of The Year. (since I'm inventing this award, the awards should be referred to as "Pen0rz".)

Adult content before was refined.. it was polished. You'd go to xcite, or whatever.. and the place would be clean, like a nordstroms or macy's. And while yes, you'd be confronted by people walking around hitting you up for sexxorz, it wasn't the shopkeeper's fault.

Shiny floors, polished displays, clean vendors.

Touring around Zindra.. everything seems to be dayglow pink, and reflective and.. tacky.

That's the word.. tacky.

are you sure you went to the right place?? I know around the info hub it's not what I'd call inviting because of those terrible green builds but tbh I don't recognise your description of it at all.. but I suppose I don't really hang around that part.