Feedback on the Mainland

There are plenty of legitimate uses for 16m parcels, such as home points and rez points and quarantine zones.
Until there's a way to handle access controls on skyboxes, the use of a small access-controlled parcel is required for quarantine zones... you put the teleporter for the skybox in a quarantine zone and then expel people who didn't originally arrive via the teleporter.

I can see placing limits on what small parcels can be sold for, perhaps, but not restricting the creation of small parcels at all.

Also... a better solution to access controls is really needed:


I don't quite understand why people build boundary screened boxes at ground level instead of in skyboxes. Perhaps if you could "flip" the ban lines to operate just below the building limit near 4096 meters instead of ground level (opt-in only, please... make it a checkbox on the access tab) then people would be encouraged to put their private areas where they can actually be private.

See SVC-2390.

Regarding the comments by Michi Lumin about people extorting money from Lusk, and Weedy Herbst about automated land recycling, and FlipperPA Peregrine's comments:

There was talk by Lindens in these forums a couple of years ago about using smart scripts to automatically give existing landowners "first refusal" for land adjacent to theirs, at some token price. This would over time reverse the fragmentation of mainland and would also keep that land "in Tier" so it would remain part of Linden's bottom line rather than an ongoing cost center.

Could this be considered?


Another suggestion that has been discussed to death! We could call this parcel muting. If a parcel owner (or someone with the right group abilities in a group-owned parcel) could right-click on the ad-plot's land and select "hide this parcel"... so that people in their parcel couldn't see any objects in the hidden parcel... that would remove most of the ability for extortionists to... well... perform extortion.

See VWR-1017.

Meade Paravane: Voted for SVC-1224. Thanks, I was thinking of proposing that. Good to see it's already there.

Please, no. Security orbs are no better than ban lines... worse, in many ways, because since people can set them up "hair trigger" with no indication when flying past one until you're suddenly unseated, your plane is lost, and you're a sim and a half away from where you thought you were... usually with an insulting message to boot.

Eliminate ground level ban lines AND security orbs with a skybox zone... which would actually provide better privacy than either. See SVC-2390.

That's not the worst part; they then take that money and repeat the entire process 10 times over in other (or sometimes even the SAME) regions. Basically, they are female mosquitos. Let them bite you, suck a little blood, then shortly, you have about 1,000 mosquitos biting everyone else around.

DO NOT BUY EXTORTIONIST PLOTS! Please! I have enough of them in my backyard; and my frontyard; and my sideyard; and down the street.

If someone owns a parcel, and is paying the tier on it, unless the objects violate the TOS, no one has any right to return objects owned by the parcel owner, no matter how ugly they be, or unfinished, etc etc. Turning on autoreturn would be an acceptable to solution to junk not owned by them, but again, if the owner has given permission for someone to use their land, and those objects get returned, that is really not okay either.

While this may be a problem in some areas, the majority of junk yards and trash piles I have seen all belong to Gov Linden. They are parcels that were abandoned for one reason or another, and LL has not dealt with them. This needs to be changed. I would suggest that when any parcel is abandoned to LL or taken by LL, the default is autoreturn 5 min, no rez, all objects currently on the parcel get returned immediately on abandonment.

As to actual LL owned community lands, rez should be on, autoreturn at 5 min, and someone should maintain them so that builds do not extend into them in a way that compromises their intended purpose. I see no issue with a bridge across a waterway that is high enough so as not to impead traffic, a skybox that extends .5 meters over a road, or driveway prims. The current methods of using AR to handle situations that are detrimental seems to work in most cases, but in Clunn there is a spinning sign over the road I have AR'd many many times in the year + I have been across from it, and it is still there.

Looks to me like any solution is going to require lots of manpower. I would be happy to volunteer to help in any sim I have parcels in. I don't want any powers, just a good ear so solutions would be forethcoming when brought up.

DRD

I am for eminent domain under certain conditions. However, this case isn't one of them. When people own land, and they are in good standing with LL, and have not and are not violating rules with their land, I think they just need to be left alone. That particular area is a slippery slope, where it becomes a subjective call to determine whether or not a plot is "active" or not. 256sqm+ plots should be exempt from almost any kind of "abandonment" reclamation until their accounts expire.

I understand your situation; there are 3 parcels in my region I would dearly love to have, all 400-512sqm in size. Two of the owners haven't been seen in nearly a year, the other rarely logs in, and when he does, he almost is never at his "home". Still, it is his home and neither I, nor anyone else, has the right to take it away from him. If his land can be repossessed for nothing more than inactivity, then so can mine, or yours, or anyone else's. Say you get into a car accident and can't get online for 6 months. Should LL reclaim your holdings, even though you are paid up through that time?



I can agree with this, at least the case-by-case basis. If the person hasn't been on in many months, and there is no reason to have banlines on, then a policy of turning them off via neighbor request is a fair one.

If you take this group seriously I have a bridge you need to buy.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, first off. I actually have it built into the game that billboards check in with my servers every 24 hours, and I can ban by region or avatar. So, when I get complaint about someone abusing them, I simply make that person's boards automatically disappear. Every time they rez a new one, it instantly poofs during the initialization.

I still think my original post is on target. What about open air flea markets? Some of the oldest shopping areas in SL are open air (Boardman, for example, and they used to have events in Lime and Plum). I don't see a problem with that. I think advertising is fine as long as it is in context and not being used to extort. I have no problems with creative billboards on road sides. As long as the land owner opts in, and doesn't create disputes with their neighbors, I think we have a pretty close paradigm to RL there. Do RL billboards force everyone who sees them to opt in? Of course not. There are regulations on where they can be placed, and only the land owner has to agree to have the actual billboard on their land.

I think you're painting with too broad a brush, but you have some good points, for sure. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on the specifics.

Regards,

-Flip

Absolutely not, except in the case of my jerk neighbor that won't sell me the 512 I want.

I need a clear definition from LL/Jack Linden here:

What is considered residential?

What is considered commercial?

Will there be other zones besides residential and commercial?

Let's start with a basic understanding and go from there.

*Trin

If you want to believe that the current strategy is based on someones desire to improve the quality of living and doing business on the "mainland" well thats your perogative. My belief is this is solely a result of "Greed".

Why now? First they lower the prices of private island sims by 40% over night and do everything they can to break the backs of private island owners. Well they succeeded in a lot of cases but they also succeeded in driving the price of land to such a level that there are record vacancies on both private islands and the mainland.

Lets face the fact that living and doing business on the mainland has long been at best a low quality lifestyle with the lag, red ban lines, ad farms, etc, etc. When the price of land dropped dramatically on private islands why would anyone pay the same price for a piece of laggy mainland!

Thus you have this great "high road" strategy to clean up the mainland. We are supposed to believe that this is a result of some magnanimous effort based on some idealistic push for a quality environment.

What it's based on is the fact that the mainland has lost it's competitive pricing edge for the end purchaser and they are "forced" to clean it up to sell all the vacant land.

My suggestion is that Governor Linden should be eliminated and all Sims should be privately owned and operated. The price should be level between mainland and private islands.

Linden labs would still get their purchase prices and still get their tiers and the private professional estate managers will insure that the quality of living over all will be much improved.

Capitalism and the free market works! Stop messing around with it!

Duke

Yes. The uproar on that move was almost as loud as the time that LL raised island prices which, IIRC, was also decried as an attempt to kill off island owners.

In RL, I work midnight to 8 am. It takes me a long time to relax from a high stress job. When I just can't get to sleep, I go and walk around a sim like Brown that is supposed to be zoned. It is about as interesting as the 4 walls of a padded cell.

It makes me suspect that any further zoning attempts will sooner or later be just as forgotten about as Brown seems to be.

My B.S. meter is also going into melt down when TAG claims to be legitimate, yet one of their members has a 16m plot in Brown for 30,000L! Can somebody please please explain that to me? Apparently they cannot put their phallic bohemoths there, but you still can't escape extortionists in supposed zoned residential areas.

Jack, this gives me very little faith that any attempts at zoning will last. Please fix what you already have before churning out more mainland at crazy prices.

Also, as far as parcels belonging to owners who are absent; I have 2 billboards and 2 rotating towers in the middle of my home. I have tried numerous attempts to contact these owners and offer them switches to the center of the sim or even roadside instead with no answer. At least one has not logged in in nearly 6 months. I have no recourse except to panel them.

I am also next to a seeming abandoned sandbox on the next sim that is very large and completely full of litter. Some of this overhangs into my land. It also has fake water and flames in the air that are just awful. Please, let us have some additional recourse to contact these owners beyond "well, they are still paying".

Those of us who are active would be happy to care for their land and clean it up at least.

Melodie Darwin pokes the melted pile of goo that was her B.S. meter (anyone know where I can get a new one?)

Along with everyone else I dislike the ads and ad farms in SL. I spent a lot of time exploring and searching for land that was not near ads.

So I don't have ads near me however I do have some neighbors who have ban lines. They say it's only temporary but who knows? The ban lines are ugly to look at and annoy me almost as much as ads.

Could LL please do something to remove Ban Lines from SL?

THEY ARE NOT GOING TO CHANGE EXISTING MIXED SIMS TO ONLY COMMERCIAL OR RESIDENTIAL. ZONING DESIGNATIONS OF THIS TYPE WILL APPLY TO FUTURE SIMS ONLY.

Jack can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm 99.9% sure the only thing they will do to existing sims is clean them up and perhaps remove ad farms. But they won't retroactively go back and make an existing Mainland sim fully residential or commercial. Stop worrying about this ever happening.

And while you're at it, stop worrying that they will raise Mainland tier.

Yup, that's how I am designing my affiliate ad network, myself. People violate the rules, they can't rez or display anything anymore, essentially booted off the network.



Again, you are not reading what I am saying. I think my position is a lot more palatable and complementary to yours than you are seeing.

I don't have a problem with open-air flea markets. If I am in my home, or my mall, and there is an open-air flea market across the street or down the road, most 'normal' advertising for those places is meant to be signage for the the vendors (not a problem), or targeted towards the patrons of the market (again, not a problem). If the flea market owner puts up a big sign advertising the market itself, that's not a problem either. If he then puts up a big billboard advertising crap that has nothing to do with the flea market, its vendors, or the patrons, and is intended for people NOT on the premises to view it, then that's where I draw the line. At that point, it has crossed over into spam, and is, by definition, harassment.



*I* DO. Yes, RL billboards force everyone who sees them to "opt-in", meaning that they are "opt-out", but only if you close your eyes. Take a look at some strips sometime, where there are literally hundreds of billboards in a few short mile stretch. They have nothing on SL, though.

In RL, most places only allow billboards within a "buffer zone" where no residences can see them, like along interstate right-of-ways, which usually have buffer zones of several hundred feet. However, in densely-populated areas, that zone doesn't always exist, and consequently, you see fewer billboards. That's not the case in SL. There is NO "buffer zone". If someone puts up a billboard or ad tower, even next to a road, there's a good chance it is right over someone's house or place of business; often so close that it looks like part of said property, as if it belongs to the owner of the house or office. Then there are the idiots who place massive adtowers in the ASS END OF NOWHERE, right next to others' homes, because it so happens to be "in a sim corner". I have one of those in my home region, too.

I don't have problems with the occasional billboard advertising food, gas, lodging, attractions, etc, as you are going down the highway. I consider that a specific exception to the rule. They serve an important function, because they are in context. Plus, it is likely no one's residence or place of business is nearby and will be disturbed by their presence.



Actually, I'm not, just that my brush looks bigger to you than it really is. Then again, I AM a Dragon, so everything tends to be bigger anyway.

I have a 4600 sq mt piece of land at Olberlos. When I first moved there it was lovely but now it is a nightmare. It has become so bad in the last six weeks that I have considered abandoning it.

Why? Well because of LAG

Also a neighbour has opened a nightclub at approx 400m agl. When his club is full I cannot move, I cannot rezz myself and I cannot invite my friends.
Yet I am paying exactly the same Tier as he is. But he is hogging the avatar resource.

Also I am surrounded by Red Fences, security barriers. I can understand peopes concerns for privacy. But do they realise there privacy is wrecking the fun of fellow residents who like to play with flying machines. I own three aircraft but constantly crash because I fly into a Red Fence. I try speaking nicely to my neighbours to add me to their access list. Why cant the security be more restricted in height. There is protected waters why not protected airspace?

One more thing. Trees. Why is it when people plant trees that the barnches have to overhang my property. I had to move my entire house the other week because a neighbours trees were poking through my walls and furniture. If I was in RL I would ciut off all the overhanging branches and hand them back. But not here, even as I detest the trees I still have to suffer the loss of a percentage of my plot due to soemone elses trees.

I have one question. Does SL plan to compulsory purchase mainland? Parts of my land keeps changing colour, it resembles a straw coloured stripe which disects my plot. Is this the forerunner of a road? I hope not.

Since you have said about the plans to make improvements I will stay put and wait the outcome. I dont mind if the land is zoned into residential, commercial and entertainment. It can only improve the SL experience for me.

I have always thought that no entry ban lines should also be visable by the parcel owner who has restricted acesse aswell I have seen so many poor sods get totally penned in on a 512 also these lines bleed though windows ect while the person who wants restricted acesse has a totally free veiw and movement across the lines.... Can these barriers be graphicly removed and replaced by a popup notice instead I understand that noobs need to know why they carnt move when they hit a restricted parcel but a simple popup should do it or a diffrent graphic line to indicate the parcel ban line not texted.....

i read through these posts, and am happy to see quite a few things going on....

.... but theres a good amount that scares me into thinking that a lot of it is leaning towards communism as well.. a practice i see as taking the majority ideals and enforcing them upon everyone (you know.. like the US has been doing for oh.. about the last 20 years or so...)

first of all .. i must say... thank you LL for finally taking a stand against ad farms and mainland lag, and i hope you can work out a way to clean the grid up and make people happy on all sides.. it will be a monumentous job... but if you can pull it off... it might put the faith back into your customers you once had. far too many of your customers anymore think you have just let the anarchy slip on by while you just sit back and collect money, which, anyone who understands how much it takes to run something ~half this size~ like this also understands it is FAR from an ~easy~ task. yet at the same time... waaaaaay too much has been taken advantage of for far too long. it is damn near impossible to buy a good sized mainland plot anymore without having a few jokers around who ruin it for everyone else and cause WAY more than their fair share of lag. all of this put together... it adds up to an experience that becomes not too fun for someone paying over $100 a month to play a "game"

and yet.. its already been said... i avoid "buying" lots on ANY estate land... because if i am paying a monthly tier... i would like to do what I would like to do... not someone else.. joe schmo and i dont always have the same ideas..
while at the same time.. the last land i owned was filled with LOADS of variety... and we all worked it out.. even though the 70m club someone built behind me blocked someone elses view of the water... and my huge prim kept getting in the way of the yacht dealers next to me, and someone elses giant lighthouse on a 16384 lot blocked another guys view that owned a 1024... the list went on and on... but quite simply put.. i eventually sold and have stayed land-less because the sim next to us was owned by a land baron who cut it up into tiny little 512 - 4096 lots.. and all these people moved in.. wanting to fill those tiny little lots with as much as they could (just getting their moneys worth.. cant really blame them) .. weather they be glowing, spinning, moving, script laggy things or not... on my half a sim.. what used to be a wonderful lag-free place became just as bad and laggy as the land i sold previous to owning it because of 16sqm ad farms. but who was right?

that said... it brings me to my most important point...

the task of "cleaning up"
and when it comes to "themes" and "what you can and cant do"
and what looks "good"
zoning
splitting the grid up into "areas"

an example;
my best friend and i on second life....
we get along as if we have been friends our whole lives.
we can talk for hours on end.. all day..
im male, shes female... yet weve always been no more than just really good friends.

it would make sense for the two of us to get together and buy an estate. we both trust each other more than well enough to do it... we know from experience that both of us would pay the tier and take care of things the way they should go ...

BUT...............

weve both owned malls and clubs, group areas as well as areas of our own that we use for personal space........ have both created places where people come to rent out areas like living spaces as well as stores.... and have both done quite well in our respective sides of it.......


she is a fan of the "prettier side of life" with her, its all about easter pastels, and simple things, earthen tones, and "everything in its place".. simple designs.. what the general population would call "nice looking", skin tones and clothing for the rich and famous.. prada.. gucci, etc., nicely tanned, perfect shapes, nice "pretty hair" and the latest in fashion... things you would expect to see in the hamptons.

I, on the other hand am all about how far can i tweak something.. what extent can i take it to ... oh, hey.. theres a hill of a mountain here.. i could build an underground cave network to explore... i look at a new sim and think of an MC Escher or Salvador Dali painting i have, and how cool it would look to do it in 3D (ever seen a half sim mall built to the theme of "relativity" .....something to behold) i make builds that are "area efficient" for the space theyre in.. even though theyre what she sometimes calls "monstrosities" because they can tend to get over 200m tall. i make skins and AV's that resemble my favorite Stephen King books and other horror movies.. or maybe just a grumpy old drunken midget with a fishbone necklace and a stiff dead cat for a walking stick.

a gothic mansion looks all the better on a flowered and tree-lush hillside overlooking a lake or an ocean.

a gingerbread house with all kinds of cute pastel cookie ornaments and frosted trees beautifies an area that is surrounded with huge gothic monstrosity industrial buildings.

without steam punk, nekko, goth, rock stars, and huge dragons (just to cite a few) ... all the people in SL would look like barbie and ken.

... and yet... for some reason... every now and then .. youll be at a wedding event or a live music show attended by a nicely tanned girl in a beautiful summer gown.. hair looking like someone spent a day doing it, radiantly sparkling jewels, shoes cinderella would be jealous of, an AO walk that looks like someone digitized sharon stone..... and on her arm is a 10 foot tall demon with escorche skin and metal spikes instead of hair.. flaming horns and wings from the ever famous material squirrel, and blood tears dripping onto his lestat-ish suit laden with cameo buttons.
beauty.. and myself.. the beast...
and yet we'll both get comments from the attendees while we dance TOGETHER after dinner.

why??
because we like the individuallity of it all.

I agree and please add this to your new policy:

ANY OBJECT WILL BE RETURNED IF ONLY A MOLECULE OF IT STANDS OVER THE LAND OF SOME OTHER, STARTING FROM CENTER OF INWORLD TO THE MOON !!!!!!!!!!

To avoid the actual situation where I can return only if barycenter of it is on my land. thanks

This is really good news! Long overdue, and I hope it works.

You are off to a good start with the Public Works department, they have done really beautiful road work around my area and things are much better as a result. Congratulations to the Moles!

I am afraid zoning is the only solution to the major problems, and I hope there will be a way to make it retroactive at least as it applies to the worst abuses. Otherwise we might as well write off huge chunks of mainland forever.

I really like my mainland place, it is perfect for me in ways that would be hard to duplicate somewhere else. I don't want to move, but I have thought seriously—and sadly—about it many times. I really, really hope things are going to change and I´ll be able to take full advantage of what should by rights be a beautiful and convenient place.

But thanks for good work and the great-sounding beginning, and I am looking forward to further developments!

want to know what will happen there, I see Jack has answered every other major point, and ignored private owners completely again.
Is SL trying to kill off private estates or not, and if not, then how does he propose that we exist when we have to pay $100 a month more PLUS VAT.

ah yes , the VAT blog, hmmm, there never were any answers from that one.

Mainland sim to non european = $195
Private sime to european owner $368.75

Now just how do we have a level playing field??

Having just discovered this thread and not having read all 395 responses so far, I'll just put in my L$2 to suggest slowly buying back wasteland sims (e.g. sims that have had no activity, no land sales, etc for a long time due to their extreme hideousness) much as ExxonMobil is buying back its own stock, cleaning them up, rezoning them, and then releasing them back into the world. I'd even suggest that LL offer to relocate existing businesses.. for example if Merchant A lives on Ugly Sim A, and there is lots of land for sale on Pretty Sim B, LL offers to literally move the entire store, LMs and all, to Pretty Sim B. Ugly Sim A is now empty and ready for renovation, and Merchants A and B both profit from increased visibility and foot traffic from both businesses.

I agree that there are issues with people leaving SL, or at least the "tier" (whether real or rental) game in droves, but it is also just as much because of the blight as any price change issues, maybe even moreso.

I have to make a little side rant here, it's not meant to be directed at you, specifically, just at the notion in general:

I also have become fatigued over the "I lost X thousand US$ because they lowered prices!" argument. It just doesn't hold water at all to me. It's a SERVICE, not PROPERTY. It has NO INTRINSIC VALUE. Tomorrow, if LL closed up shop, or decided to give away land, it would be WORTHLESS. Why? Because it started out WORTHLESS. It's like paper currency. It has NO INTRINSIC VALUE. If the dollar suddenly was replaced by the Euro in the US, the paper "dollar" notes will be worthless. That's the problem with the silly argument about losing value because the service provider lowered their prices. "I can't get out of it what I paid for it!" well, sorry, LL (nor anyone) never gave you a guarantee that could or would ever happen. In short, STOP VIEWING IT AS AN ENTITLEMENT! Thanks.

I blame LL as much as anyone; their marketing hype lulled people into the belief that they were buying something with intrinsic value, just as much as GinkoGuy lulled people into giving him money, believing he was a bank. So, rant at them for deceiving you all you want, but don't keep telling the rest of us that it was wrong for them to drop prices. EVERYONE benefited by the price drop. Even existing landowners, because now they can expand for less money. They can make up their losses via NOT PAYING AS MUCH for new sims.



I would and did.

First, my mainland is NOT laggy. It is on a class 5 server, and I have little to no visual or network lag, which is something I CAN'T say for many private estates I have been to.

Second, I am (for the most part) in control of my own future, not depending on some yahoo who may not be around tomorrow to pay for his sim tier, or who may decide tomorrow to wipe all existing tenants off his sim and start over doing something else with it. Yeah, you can say LL could go belly up and I would be just as SoL then, but that wouldn't be any different with me renting on an estate, so that point is irrelevant.



Perhaps, but I think it is more based on the fact that the residents of the mainland are fed up with it, and are banding together to get them to fix it, before there really WILL be a "loss in competitive pricing edge" via the fact that hundreds to thousands more people will be tiering down and saying "screw it".



I've often mused at the differences between mainland and private estate pricing. Personally, I see no reason why there should be a price disparity, or, if there is, it should have gone the other way. IE, mainland at $295 and estates at $195. Estates are definitely a LOT less maintenance, since the EMs and EOs take care of their own messes. In general, in the rest of the internet, managed services cost more than unmanaged or self-managed ones.



Yes, that's why Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and Enron and WorldCom executives are in jail.

Capitalism is no different than any other paradigm; when unregulated and taken to excess, it becomes twisted and evil. It is an ideal; how we approach and implement that ideal makes all the difference in the world.

btw, i love how every time LL tries to help someone, someone else will jump out and say 'YOU CANNOT DO THAT! IT DEVALUES ME!!!1!!!1!!!1'

Really, get a grip... the islands are not devalued by the mainland being less of a dumping ground... unless you assume the crappiness of mainland SL *IS* the value of an island.. and not anything that the island builder does with his land, business, community...

And if thats yer proposition, maybe its time you actually look at doing something with your land, business, and/or community to bring actual value to it, intrinsically not externally, and stop worrying, really.

Thank you. That is close to the assurance I asked for.

Adding a little parcel map to the purchase dialog could help against the doughnut scam.

Presumably Linden Lab has the email contact for the resident concerned. So they can make all reasonable efforts to contact the resident before taking action. If necessary add to the ToS to cover the conditions and the actions. Use only autoreturn unless owners permission obtained (as per Weedy and Elanthius). Backup contents to allow rollback in case of objection. Then have a few alternatives available to fit with various environments. Personally, I would like to see a Linden undergrowth sculpty, in the library, with changeable texture. Carefully designed and used widely, this would avoid the sculptmap download delay and be useful for active residents too. (If it was in small megaprim sizes, all the better!).

Indeed, I have seen such plots that officially not for sale, but have the silly price listed in the parcel name.

Sorry, I can't help it. Eeyore is my middle name

Yes, yes, yes, please. These tools could be a hugely beneficial. Think of it as an extrapolation of Avatar Rendering Cost. (Sindy, I voted).

Finally, there have been many pleas to retain freedoms on existing mainland. I am among those who chose mainland to the freedom implied. We know there is a price to be paid. Only a very limited scope of zoning could possibly be accepted, but does that mean no zoning rules at all? The damage done by extortionists is too high a price for the freedom of those who have been affected. I would support the zonal application of specific rules that exclude extortion while retaining the other freedoms we all enjoy. (But then perhaps this should not be zonal, but rather be applied to the whole?). Alas I cannot say what rules these might be.