Has Teleporting killed the SL community?

Whilst wondering around the many deserted areas of SL, I was trying to work out what was wrong.

And there's definatly something wrong (or could be better) and I'm not sure what could change it.

Like in RL, we jump in our cars at home, and get out at work or the shopping mall and drive home again. Not engaging in the local surroundings or even speaking to neighbours a lot of the time.

SL seems to be like that, just on a grander scale.

Before joining SL, I kinda had an image that streets would be full of people (avatars) walking around, looking in shops, people would be driving cars, flying planes, boats etc etc.

And now and again, you do see someone "having a go"

Heck, I even WALKED along a road to get to a friends house over 2 sims away !!!!!

Sitting in your SL house, watching all this going out, outside your window would b fantastic, but we don't get it 99.999% of the time.

We sit at home, TP to a shop, TP back again.
A friend calls us, we TP to their home, or the TP to our place and then the TP back again.

It's all very sad an Un Community it seems, when it could be so much better than this.

Imagining a RL world with TP's the streets would be deserted, the local parks empty. Shopping malls would be almost empty also, you;d TP to the shop. but 1 item and TP back again.

Fantasticaly convinient I grant you but cold and total community break down.

I did try and think how it could be altered to bring back the human (avatar) life to areas.
But I can't come up with anything workable.

I don't think we'd be happy Walking, running catching bus's everwhere.

Yet it seems to sad, that you have an area full of houses, and yet barren of life.

It's not really what I expected SL to be like before I joined and I think it's a bit sad.

Last year, renting an island on a private estate I moved in and introduced myself (very friendly people) bought a boat to sail around the islands, kinda expecting others to do the same, but no. Even speaking to the Estate manager, she agreed, all most seem to do it TP home, do something and TP back out again.

Like a lived in and yet desserted area.

I wonder what could change this, to bring life back into SL ?

Any thoughts, and do you agree it would be nicer and more interesting if (somehow) things were different, or do you think the way it is, is the way it should be?

No, sorry- am having a Wonderful Life-
Try the showcase or a Hunt or two to see the world.. Good luck.

Think about how much fun you have commuting in RL. Now imagine you can enjoy that same fun and excitement in SL.

SL used to de-emphasise teleportation. You could only teleport to infohubs and you had to travel to your final destination in world. That didn't increase communications... people would arrive at telehubs and immediately fly up high enough to avoid buildings, then head straight to their final destination. The biggest complaint about particular infohubs was the existence of prims that kept you from doing this... roofs on infohubs, and spammy malls with scoop-shaped entrances to catch avatars trying to get away from the infohubs.

If you want to talk about what's been trashing community in SL, let's start with voice.

If you want to talk about what's hurt travel and vehicles, let's talk about sim crossing issues.

Yeah, I've seen a number of communities destroyed by voice, both by its misuse by feeble-minded idiots who liked to hear themselves speak, and by the tendency for it to be very exclusionary.

I think the OP DOES have a bit of a point, though. I think that the TP is actually the equivalent of the RL four-lane highway: it gets you from point A to point B fairly efficiently, but it leaves the smaller streets, where community SHOULD be happening, empty.

That said, of course, SL is not RL, and your point about infohubs is well-taken. I'm not sure I see a good solution to this.

Random uncontrollable teleports.

Convenience will always kill community. Malls and Wal-Marts killed main street. It is just too convenient to head towards the one-stop-shopping location. Internet shopping killed the malls - much more convenient to compare prices online and have stuff delivered.

Nobody wants to linger. They have places to go, things to do.

Those that do want to linger get labeled "loiterers" and told to get out of the way.

This is the modern world.

LOL

Yeah, like those times when a dozen sims crash simultaneously, and you are TPed involuntarily on to the heads of about 40 other displaced avs? Yeah, I make LOTS of friends then . . .

I didn't really expect much (any agreement) I mean who would want to give up something as wonderful as Teleporting everywhere

Yes, 100% (no make that 1000000000000%) agree with the rotten sim crossing issue. Last night was terrible and I tried to drive a 4x4 along the road (an interesting experience!)

But, you must (in some way) know what I mean.

You know those films on TV (after the Nuclear Holocaust) when 1 guy is walking around the deserted streets of new york.

That's what I often feel like in SL when just "looking about"

And I don't mean just TP'ing to a popular "showcase" area.

Perhaps SL it just too big and sprawling for it's own good?

Again, harking back to before I joined SL, I guess I had pictured in my mind, areas where people lived and areas where people shopped. Beach areas for games. Sports areas.

A bit like a mini real world I guess.

I suppose a bit more "structured" than it is.

Everything to one side, I think it would be great to sit on the balcony on my house and see other avatars walking around shops and driving/flying past.

There always seems to be way too much land to people ratio.

Apart from "Hot Spots" of course.

Perhaps I'm not making myself totally clear, And I'm not "moaning" as such, Just part of me feels it a shame there's not more life than 2 people wondeing a giant shopping mall.

I think they already implemented this.

SL used to be like that back in the early days. When the world joined SL in progress during mid-2006, everything changed. People randomly flying around and wanting to do something as simple as say hello and communicate with someone else were labeled griefers because it turned out that people didn't' really want a melting pot. They wanted ban lines to keep the undesirable off their property. They wanted security orbs to keep explorers and homeless lovers out of their sex beds. They took to the skies and hid in skyboxes, but then flight devices turned up in freebie boxes everywhere and there was no safety in the sky any longer.

People only want to be around other people who are mostly just like them. This is simply the way humans seem to be built, it is our tribal nature.

In a traditional MMORPG you expect to interact with other players, that's what the thing is. Multi-user. Because SL so much resembles RL in structure, people expected it to have RL components and rules such as privacy and "don't come on my land unless I invite you." Since people expect those RL rules to exist and they really don't, it becomes an outlaw wild West as people try to protect their 40 acres and a mule from random drifters. Explorers have not been welcome in SL for a long time and people tend to clump together now because that's the only way they know where they're allowed to go.

on a side note about this, i was walking down the road and a car drove right over me and i was so pleased to see someone else on the road, I tried to wave has they speed away but my arms were broken, and they were moving too fast for me to get their number plate…

Oh please let this not become another thread about banlines ...

I think that "banlines" should be added to the restricted AC list of words. And outlawed from the forum.

/me wraps Dekka's broken arms in duct tape.

I don't think the problem is teleporting. As others noted, it's one way to get around while avoiding the miserable sim crossing problems (which have gotten much worse lately).

Piggy's right about the empty spaces. That's largely driven by SL's technological and economic architecture. Specifically, 1) Only 40 avs per sim, and it takes far fewer to start lagging things badly...and 2) Only 16,000-some prims per sim, and 3) 30,000 sims and only about 60,000 people on line at any given time to fill them.

These things combine to create lots of vacant space. SL is designed for *small groups*, not large crowds.

The answer is: Be a part of several groups whose members assemble often. Whether those groups are clubs, or special interests, or just a bunch of your friends doesn't matter.

A possibly related problem is that of finding somewhere new to go. We (me, anyway) get stuck in a rut. I stay at home and build, or visit maybe three to six places regularly. What about the other 29,994 places in SL that I haven't seen?

The Emerald viewer has a feature that helps with that. You can choose to log in at the location shown in the splash screen of the login page. This is a GREAT feature, and it's tempted even a stay-at-home person like me to go explore some new places.

There is one community build around the Teleport itself. Hunters and Maniacs chasing goodies all over the Grid there are. Can meet all kinds of interesting people doing this.

There are many stay-at-home communities as well, mostly bonded by a shared activity like sailing, bloodsucking, combat, philosophy and others. Loitering and hanging out even.

usually when you're naked.

Ermmmm . . .

That's not happened to me. Although a naked man DID once try to dance on my head.

Sorry... I landed wrong.

Keep in mind, in RL, you don't buy your neighbors land and build a garden or exchange your 4 room home to a mansion in a day. in RL, people are always there, even if they are in their RL home. As opposed to SL, your not somewhere unless you log in to the game.

I remember having to use the red beam to get my avatar to places, and sometimes that would mean I would have to fly over several regions to arrive at my destination. My flight rod helped me get there in lightening speed until I smacked into banlines, then I would be thrown to the corner of the region.

OMG, that was YOU? I didn't recognize your . . . face.

I gave up on most vehicles in SL as actual transportation because roads more often than not went nowere, dead-ended unexpectedly, or trashed the vehicle at sim crossings. Trying to use the roads, or even an aircraft or water craft, to actually travel between two points was an excercise in frustration, and often flat out impossible, because the destination was on a private island sim or some other continent.

I remember having to teleport to info hubs, and fly from there to the red beacon. And I don't recall with any fondness the lag, or running into buildings that hadn't yet rezzed for me, or the difficulties of navigating that short distance.

I was extremely happy when they allowed us to teleport point to point at will. It saved so much time, and I *never* found it worthwhile to wade through the lag-pools of the info hubs, or to fight with the masses of griefers at the "Welcome Areas". Being able to search, TP, Shop, and TP right back home certainly increased my shopping and spending, though once in a well-designed and relatively non-laggy mall, especially if it was a themed mall, like all Japanese or all Furry stuff, I would tend to shop and browse the whole mall, if I had time to kill. But even then, being able to TP straight home was my "escape hatch" if griefers showed up or lag got to be too much.

In many areas, Lag is so horrible that even if I wanted to, I could not walk or even fly through the area to explore, meet people, and shop at random. I teleported to Zindra last week, and couldn't even adequately go from one sim to another. When lag is so bad that my high-end Mac staggers down to less than 5 FPS from my usual 30+ in a good area, there is something seriously wrong. A laggy area like Kama City in Zindra is a very strong disincentive to wandering and exploring. Without point to point teleports, I would not even go there.

Looking at the map again, and zooming in and out, I get the same picture as usual, for quite some time now, total uninhabitation. I'm sure that in some corners of the SL Grid there is small hives of activity, but not in my area of the map (and many others see the same).

Anyway, this has been flogged to death in umpteen threads already.

However, what I do not understand is this: are all those empty private islands actually being paid for by somebody? If a Private Island is abandoned, does SL delete it immediately, or do they keep it going, and if so, for how long, and for what reason? Is there any benefit to SL to inflate the amount of land in SL?

Rock