Betting time on Zindra

How many times have you TP'd to a store or club and did not pay attention as to where you are going. POOF there you are at the place you want to be. I know I don't run to the edges of the land to see.

People here in RA might check, but the vast majority wont pay much attention. They just want to shop.

"Quite some time ago the content issue had been settled: tits, tires, and explosions were the only things that seemed to draw the notice of their supremely jaded focus groups, though from time to time they would play the juxtaposition card and throw in something incongruous, like a nature scene or a man in a black turtleneck reading poetry." - Neal Stephenson, "The Diamond Age", on advertising in the Leased Territories.

Go North one region..

As a Bay Citizen, I've noted that there are a *lot* of people who want failure. They want to be able to say "See? We told you so!" It's like folks crave being able to tear it down or something.

for me personally, Zindra is not something I'm particularly keen on, but if those who are there succeed, that's fine and well. I'm not going to wish all the landowners who have had to move (and those who will come in later) harm for making the best of the situation.

Besides, if they do well, we all do well. The economy continues, LL gets to keep the servers running, etc.

There are tasteful builds on Zindra, but there are also candyland-penis builds...

Sometimes the two come in clusters - so you can come away thinking the place isn't that garish or is an amazing eyesore. Sometimes its just randomly intermixed.

I could easily take anyone to a tour of Zindra and drop them where I know they will feel the builds are very tasteful. And just as easily take a tour into giant-neon-vagina land...

Zindra is a build that's happened overnight, with no real communication between neighbors - most of whom were established businesses trying to keep to what, for them, works...

So there's inertia there against them all getting together and decide to cooperate on theming. But I've seen at least one group that is trying.

I have faith in the community of people forced onto Zindra, but not in what they've been handed. I think LL's has failed in its duty and shoved all those people, who make SL a -lot- of money, onto second rate servers, second rate zone layouts, with second rate trees and graphics...

It looks like they are trying to shove them aside and hope they will give up -by throwing them into a techno-purgatory. When business wise, that's a dreadful mistake. XXX-content is the money maker in SL, either directly or indirectly...

Says she who has done her best to drive people not to her liking out of Bay City. If I was you Marianne McCann, I would keep my mouth very tightly shut about failures in Bay City, as you have been one of the biggest contributors to them.

In the long run - Zindra will do more harm to mainland than anything else. (Raymond pointed this out on page one - I didn't see anyone else even get really close to this point... but...) Here's the deal...

True - Zindra is Porn Disney right now - because the vast majority of the people who got the free move were the "obvious" Adult Content creators and providers. As it opens up and the "borderline" people start to move in over the next year or so, it'll balance out and look a lot more like the mainland used to look - cheesy and slapped together like Frankenstein - but not the Porn Vegas we're seeing now.

As more time goes on - the classier establishments will get set up.

As more time goes on there will be people saying, "Hmm, do I get this mature post and be locked into doing things that might be censored? Or do I get this spot on Zindra where I'm free to do as I wish?"

And that there - that is the answer. Why get a place on the mainland where you are restricted as to what you can do? Where you have to watch your place all the time because anyone can just come there, start doing porny stuff and get your location shut down because it is allowing adult things to happen? Or because you didn't ban a guy for dropping the F-Bomb when someone beamed in.

End of the day - the New Zindra is going to be the Old Mainland as far as what is there and what it looks like. The regular mainland will be SL Light - less calories and a bunch of rules you need to follow, things you can't say or do, and all of that. No one likes to be censored. Everyone will be in Zindra (or on Adult sims owned by estates).

So, what about the people who don't get age verified or get payment info? There won't be any of those. It'll just become part of the standard startup procedure. The saying will be, "Make sure when you sign up for SL, you do the age verify thing or buy some lindens right away so you can see all the cool stuff it has to offer and not be restricted to Plain Vanilla Land." People will say, "Hey come with me!" "I can't, I'm not age verified." "Fill out the form and meet us there, then!" "Okay! See you in a minute!"

People like freedom. And Zindra (and adult parcels) is where the freedom in SL is. I have already seen many sims (mine included) that could probably get away with still having the "Mature" tag on. BUt I don't want my sim to be a police state. And we do have stuff that kids probably shouldn't mess with. So why bother? And that'll be what happens with a lot of places once the frenzy wears off.

Zindra sims are not being hosted on some special class of "substandard servers", they are sharing the same hosts that older mainland and estates use.

Many of the LDPW structures are baffling, it's as though someone made a list of all the things that can slow down a viewer and made sure to incorporate every single one. That's why Kama City in particular seems laggy. Some of the most baffling features were the work of former moles (some were the work of current moles but oh well), so at least that reduces the potential for internal friction as LDPW gradually goes in to clean up the mess.

A lot of that junk was also put on land that is being handed over to residents, so that will reduce some of it over time too.

I keep hearing, like a whole bunch of times, that they are indeed setup differently than other mainland or other class-5 private islands. Have you seen a source for why people keep saying this?

/me thinks it's BS.

I think it's BS too. Where I _think_ this story came from was FJ Linden's blog about the new Virginia data center that will be opening around the end of this year. The new servers (we're not on them yet) will be breaking away from the old "class X" nomenclature, and the current assumption of 4 full or 16 openspace/homestead regions per host will no longer be valid on the next generation hardware.

For reference, that intro to the new data center is https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2009/05/14/the-greening-of-second-life

The "yay green rah rah" stuff in that blog is where I suspect the confusion set in. That was published right in the middle of the adult news, and Zindra has prim solar and wind and hydro power in it, so it must be running on the new hardware that won't even be up for a few more months!!1!!two!

for me it stemmed from a comment made during the openspace fiasco about the LL looking at various ways of stacking the regions on the host. When I got my place at zindra, despite open spaces and sharing a sim with a (what looks like) private estate and not putting out everything on my plot that i had on the old mainland it still performed worse than my old sim which I've shared with a prim stealer, virtually everything collision based apartment renting complex for the best part of 6 months.. Everywhere I went on zindra before the building started, even out to the far reaches of the place where there were no roads was just incredibly laggy.

Now it could have been those forests of trees or it could have been something else. But knowing how forthcoming LL isn't over anything I thought it was a question worth asking - if only to eliminate it. I never did get a response from Blondin come to think of it.

Marianne's been a major contributor of maintaining the spirit of Bay City and has helped coordinate memorable events which bring no profit to her other than the satisfaction that many people have had a great time.

YOU left because you got some free land in Zindra and couldn't handle the lag from Hau Koda's spilloff in Docklands. Don't go revisionist just to get on someone you dont like.

I've known and worked with RL police in my time, and their main goal was to protect the residents and businesses under their patrol and develop a rapport with them as part of that objective. Bullying and cursing them - or judging anyone different from oneself - were nonexistent.

I dont see where you're getting on someone who recently set their land to all permissions and advertised it as such in the properties, knowing full well the burden of griefing and population the area has experienced. Funny that...

Back to topic: Zindra has some great potential. I see it this way as far as analogies go:

Straight guys: their attraction to women are their maleness, so there's not so much demand on their fitness or physique (so they think)

Gay guys: they're all already male, so the demand is GENERALLY to be a better male than the next guy. This isnt absolute but that's the psychology of a great many.

Porn shops - let's face it - are really common in their ways. The big scare on Zindra is looking like the next guy. They have to now shrug off their laziness being in proximity of same genre and improve product or do something different to get attention. Sure we all now know where we can find stuff, but when there's a row of skins and attachments and campers and disco lights and lucky chairs? No, they're gonna have to work a little harder for it If they do, then it can be a really interesting place.

Non sequitur based on this...

If in my skybox I have a sofa and a wall, and the sofa is partway stuck inside the wall because I failed to line them up exactly right - is that creating collision lag?

Only if the couch or wall is set to physical. You would know if they were, either the wall or couch would try to fly away from it.

Zindra is going to be painful and I don't see the land having high value for commercial usage, residents might like it.

People will simply buy their adult content on Xstreet.

This. I made the same observation recently. Evertrhing is out in the open, no holds barred, and yes, garish and tacky, in many places. Where I live in RL, adult businesses don't reside in any red light district, they are mixed in with the mainstreams, tastefully and discreetely presented usually. And I always liked mainland sims where the same was done.

This is not meant to be a slam on any of the business owners there, they have a difficult time, but so far Zindra has become less naughty and more sleazy.

So you think instead of a Dean Paul Martin headfirst crash into a mountain, it will be more like when Chuck Yeafger took the Starfighter up to wring it out, and put it into that awesome flat spin that he had to bail out from?

"Hey Ridley, you got any Beeman's?"

Crash and burn and fail completely, just like Bay City & Nautilaus I suppose, you reckon in 6 months they will delete the whole continent of Zindra?
It will be a dogs breakfast for 6 months, then it will begin to shine.
And with mainland cleaned up so will the PG / M mainland too as more Corps feel happier about joining a grid that is family friendly.

Corps buy estates, they don't give a flying fig about mainland.

If you are a business, the reason to stay on your original mature plot is because your customers may not follow you to Zindra, judging by my own behavior. The way I know if a business moved to Zindra is the same way I know if they left SL - their landmark goes stale. And, I've been watching what I normally do in that case - I'll search for the place in an easy way - either going to the creator's profile or using search. If I encounter any barrier in getting there - say, the place moved to Zindra and I am on an unverified alt, or search comes up empty (which it would if I'm on an unverified alt), I just go somewhere else or give up, unless what I'm looking for is terribly special.

If I owned a business that had to go to Zindra, I'd make damn sure I kept a 16m2 plot for the teleport point on my original store, just to put a kiosk there pointing people to the Zindra location!
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If we had gambling I'd love to take a lot of these bets. As someone mentioned earlier 'sex sells'

ok I went to the sim north of mosh and it looked empty.. although that glow was terrible and so was the road.. kept falling into it from the burnt out retinas

I don't think Zindra will "fail" - porn is too big and certain a business. But I would be VERY cautious about moving there unless I were running a business that was truly sex-or-violence centric. I would never consider moving to a residential community in Zindra - too restrictive for visitors to my home.

Here's one way it could shake down:

Zindra auctions start, big rush. But most of the grid ignores this, becaues 80% of the grid is islands. Some of those go Adult. Most "wait and see".

Residents for whom extreme sex is central to their lives move to Zindra. But most of the residents continue their normal shopping/dancing/roleplaying/building behavior, hoping they don't have to do anything, rarely encountering anything that requires them to go to Zindra.

The Lindens begin enforcing Adult rankings. A bunch more businesses are forced to move; ARs on individual mainland plots begin to flood in, ARs on individuals for behavior in public areas begin to pile up. Meanwhile, all sorts of Adult activity takes place on private residential islands, or in the sky on commercial islands, unnoticed and un-AR'd.

The Lindens see something shiny, and enforcement of Adult ratings becomes less critical.

In this scenario, Zindra is successful as a porn-centric part of the grid. The rest of the grid continues on its merry way. Some businesses that moved prematurely to Zindra lose a lot of their customer base, who can't be bothered. Some folks who didn't move are subjected to harassing ARs. Life goes on.
.

and your attitude and description pretty well reflect the community view.. porn and extreme sex.. which is a turn off for most people.

The kinds of people I used to sell to I'm quite sure never ever thought of themselves as falling into either of those two categories. So where does that leave shops like mine or the clothing or animation shops??

I truly don't believe there's going to be any kind of real land rush - certainly not by residents and doubtful for anyone who has a business that can currently stay on mainland.

If LL doesn't allow land sales before the auctions start they may be able to extort a bit more cash out of people than they should but I doubt that will last past the first actual sales.

At the moment I am seeing this as the equivalent of "out of sight out of mind, wither away" and tbh if that's what they intend then I wish they'd just given me the closedown notice 5 months ago and been done with it.

No matter what spin LL put on this they're not going out of their way to make sure we're successful.

LOL WUT? From what I see, Mari has made a great and wonderful contribution to Bay City. (^_^)

What people have left, in my point of view, were either griefers with enough extra allowance to pay for tier so they can ruin the place or the same old - same old mainland blight which detracted from the urban theme set by DPW. (^_^)

Gradually, Bay City is becoming a nicer and nicer themed continent to visit. Good riddance to anyone who has left, quite frankly. (^_^)y