Themed Regions on Mainland

I would like to suggest that all regions could be themed from now on. It prevents building incompabilities between neighbours, so it also promotes peace besides bringing a more pleasent visual landscape avoiding visual polution, like the famous ad farms no one likes.

Blessed Be All

I think the vast majority of us would rather see the Lindens spending their time investigating and resolving griefing, bug reports, and TOS violations than getting involved in petty neighbor disputes over whether someone's fence is appropriate for the theme of the sim.

We already have sims with landscapes that are flat green, hilly green, water, sandy beach, atoll, snow, mountain, and flat rock. There are Linden oceans, rivers, lakes, canals, cliffs, waterfalls, roads, the Great Wall, the Boardwalk, the Railroad, and bunches of other places we can choose from when deciding where to make our homes.

If you don't like any of that, you can lease an island estate property. There are oodles of themes on the various estates, and they are enforced by the estate owners and their staff. I prefer the variety of the mainland and all it has to offer, and I love to explore and find new and odd places that may not fit in anyone's idea of a conventional theme. Yes, the freedom brings some bad things along with the good. But it's a small price to pay when you have the freedom to use your imagination.

Now that LL is (from time to time, though not much of late) occasionally releasing full mainland sims to auction, you could get one of those, often at about the same buy-in rate as private estates. Your tier will be US$100 per month less than for private estates (US$195 for 65,536sqm instead of US$295), and you can terraform it as you please (within +/- 4 meters), develop it as you please, subdivide it as you please, and rent the lots out...

It's not pefect, it's less *power* than you have as a private estate owner (given that you can't "lord your power" over your residents, since the LL TOS IS the the rules)...but by making it rentals only, you do still retain certain rights in terms of being able to select your neighbors, have rules for atmosphere, and most importantly, you can evict those who don't comply with *your rental rules.*

I don't like the mish-mash chaos that exists on the mainland, but others prefer the wild west appeal it has.

Estates exist for those of us that prefer a more orderly look, mainland exists for those who want as many freedoms as possible despite the chaotic look. I think the current system keeps both parties happy.

I posted a JIRA issue which seems to have gotten a lot of flak for no real reason =/
Basically what it does is allows parcel owners to designate their land as commercial, or residential, and then classifies the entire simulator based on the majority. So a simulator would either be commercial (mostly businesses), residential (mostly houses) and mixed (no majority of either).

It could be used as the basis for future features, as in itself it isn't especially powerful, however combined with changes in ToS or features specific to commercial/residential simulators, it could form the basis of encouraging more co-ordinated builds. I'm all for variety, but in most cases "variety" on the mainland means a crush of people building whatever the hell they want with no thought about theme or aesthetics or fitting in with the surrounding area or even just doing whatever they want despite complaints from neighbours.
Sure it's their land, but the rest of the simulator isn't, things you do affect your neighbours. It would be nice if further down the line we could have incentives or something. For example (not proposing) rating your neighbour's parcel; in commercial sims this could have some effect on search listings and encourage mutual building of commerce areas within such simulators.

The JIRA issue is here:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-603

The build asteics don't bother me at all, you can buld Egyptian next dore to Cyberpunk, it's the Metaverse. But the lack of order caused by no roads, paths between parcells, who know which way is front or back of a property, with much mainland inaccessable without trucging through 3 other neighbours yards (iff they don't have banlines up) or TP, houses might as well be concrete blocks built to the edge of the block with no windows and a hatch in the roof as a main entry.

Why bother with the hatch?

Fire escape regulations
And if TP is down................

and who decides how tight the interpretation should be and whether the build is of suitable quality for this conservative little world? Mainland has always been a riot of colour and styles some good some bad where people learn the skills for building, I think there are plenty of private sims with this kind of restriction in place without importing it to the mainland so I'd agree with other posters n say no ty

I've seen a few posts in other threads with similar topics (gripes, in some cases), and I also recall seeing something...somewhere...talking about zoning for either residential or commercial.

I have to admit that the hodge-podge confusion in the types of construction is without rhyme or reason. I might find a region where you have a row of small houses on one side of the street and skyscrapers and super malls on the other side. But I don't expect people to push new owners into some kind of conformity.

What I would like to see, however, and I actually doubt this will happen, is that when buying land, they try to think about other people who might want to come in to buy something. I'm seeing odd bits and pieces, many of which are those stupid ad farms on single tiles of 16 sq. m. or so, and priced as much as a 6000 sq. m. resort lot.

It makes it very tough for a guy to piece togethere anything good if he wants to build a mall or something. I have to look at about a dozen tiles of land and whether or not I can piece the whole collection into a single parcel I can use to build anything at all.

If they could place some form of zoning onto the land, specifying one type or another (I don't know how you'd police the building, though, since there is nothing to specify "this is a house" vs "this is a shop", it might help. At the very least, place size limits of how small a single piece of land can be divided into, to block these single-tile ad farms.

I've also seen land that was divided up and has pieces in non-contiguous sections (i.e. pieces joined only at corners, not on edges). This is almost useless for building and they should be broken up into two or more distinct parcels.

I think also a price limit for selling would be nice, keeping within a "market average" price range so you don't see any more 32 sq. m. tiles going for L$50K.

Zoning doesn't have to be rigourously enforced though, it needn't be a bad thing. If it was implemented with community tools (ie anyone in the sim can use them) then it can be used to activate incentives of some form encouraging co-operation. Not necessarily conformance, but if (for example) your neighbours in a commercial sim could rate a laggy club down and damage its search listing, then it would hopefully encourage the owner to reduce lag and work with their neighbours.
Obviously such systems need to be done carefully to avoid abuse. But if it is up to the residents of a mainland region how it is classified, then it provides the foundation for such features later on.