Hoist the Mainsail and head for the high seas

Shiver me timbers me hearties! If you’re a fan of all things nautical then we have exciting news! A new Mainland sailing area will soon appear off the coast of Nautilus in a joint community project between Linden Lab and the estate owners of the United Sailing Sims (USS) group.

For those that don’t know, the USS is made up of 9 private estates with 130+ regions between them, themed around sailing, yacht racing and similar sports.

Blake Sea, named after the legendary sailor Sir Peter Blake, will be to the east of the Nautilus City landmass and will cover over 40 regions in size, and almost all of them will be Homesteads. Around the eastern edge of Blake Sea will be the estates of the USS.

This is the first time that we’ve allowed estates to connect to the Mainland in this way, and it is testimony to both the great community the USS has built up, and our desire to work with Resident groups to improve the Mainland experience in different and innovative ways.

Whilst the Sea will be Linden Land, we will be working closely with the USS to provide Sailing and other water activities, games and fun things to discover.

For all Residents, as well as the USS, this offers unprecedented open water to sail through, hang out in or just explore. There will be islands for viewing the regular USS race events and scripted boats or planes to ferry our intrepid residents safely across the Sea from Nautilus. If you haven’t tried sailing inworld, it might soon be time to give it a whirl!

As this project moves along, expect to see updates either here on the Blog or on the DPW wiki page: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Department_of_Public_Works

Please also visit the USS website: http://unitedsailingsims.com/
USS website Event times: http://unitedsailingsims.com/events/


[ See the blog for the original post including an image of the map of Blake Sea http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/12/19/hoist-the-mainsail-and-head-for-the-high-seas/ ]

Jack Linden

Oh, wonderful!

I've had a yacht in Second Life for a long time now (though I haven't personally visited the USS sims ) - it's so much fun to sail inworld.

What about you, what will you be interested in visiting Blake Sea to do?

I used to sail a lot but haven't much recently - it must be time to dig out the Tako, though

I'd say yes!

Boating is a blast till you hit a ban line or sim crossing...then it is all over with..why cant LL just make one huge boating sim???

finally something positive!!! I love sailing. Good to see something that isnt greed driven !

The timing couldn''t be better! I've been eyeing the Linden seas for some time and just got myself a free dinghy. Haven't drowned yet, so it sounds good

Lots of really good sailboats in SL now... MUCH more realistic than the free boats. You will be amazed at how realistic sailing can be.

Come to Starboards Yacht Club at noon on Sunday for our free Learn to Sail Class. You can get a free rental of the Tako Sailboat (a classic boat). I guarantee that you will enjoy it.

Ban lines are not allowed on both Sailor's cove and USS

I hope the new infrastructure pipes will help fix sim border crossings. They are quite treacherous without a vehicle and worse with one. I have a small sailing area in my estate and i find lots of lost boats at the crossings because the driver crashed. It's even more fun with passengers as it is even more likely on each crossing that you will loose someone.

Gripes aside I love the sailboats in SL my personal fav is a tiny flying tako

YAY sailing!

Oh, that's *wonderful* news! My home sim is within sailing distance from Nautilus City, and I adore sailing around the coastline and seeing what folk have been building. If I'm now going to be within sailing distance of the USS as well - well, what a wonderful christmas present! Thank you so much, LL and the USS! It's so nice to have a bit of unalloyed *good* news!

I am very glad for USS but the fact that most of these sailing SIMs will be "homesteads" says a lot about the actual usefullness of the new "Open Space" definition and ofcourse the previous claims of unexpected usage. >.>

If this doesn't show conflict of interest and favoritism, what does?
If Linden Lab shows such favoritism towards some resident groups, it will doubtlessly be at the expense of others; if some get an artificial advantage via Linden Lab's actions, it puts others at a disadvantage. The conflict of interest comes in because Linden Lab is supposed to be a service provider, yet through this shows that they desire to do more than that and actively _select_ certain communities and businesses to benefit more than others.

One fitting similar situation would be if Google ranked certain websites higher than others based on arbitrary factors, such as if they liked certain websites more than others.

Combined with the Openspace fiasco, this will only further destroy confidence in Linden Lab to provide a _reliable_ (in performance and cost wise) product given without bias and favoritism. This comes as a further slap in the face to openspace owners who were denied the obvious solution of grandfathering because Robin Linden said that to do so would be to introduce "something like a class system." This statement is turned into outright hypocrisy by this action.

One unknown question is whether or not the USS sims have some sort of discount as well. I would bet that they do, but even if they don't, they have a huge advantage via direct access to Linden-owned waterways and premium mainland sims (Nautilus.)

Thank you, Linden Lab, for honestly showing how a culture of favoritism exists in your business.

Right, some estates will benefit because now their sims have the Linden seal of approval as being "worthy" therefore they have the privilege of connecting to the Mainland. All residents are not created equal, I suppose... but our tier is the same across the board. Interesting..

@Aminom and Juicy:

You've both raised favouritism as an issue which is something that often gets brought up whenever Linden Lab does something involving a subsection of the community rather than everyone all at once. Let me address that straight away because there is no favouritism at play here.

First of all, this isn't something exclusive and it will not be the only such project of its type. In deciding that we wanted to look for ways to involve estates to the benefit of both themselves and the Mainland, someone has to go first. In this case that someone is the USS group. The USS happen to be ideally suited to being part of the first project of this kind but had another group approached us it could have been someone else.

The USS are a particularly good fit because they are large, well established and have a strong theme that is PG in nature and appeals to a wide range of residents. They also happen to be extremely well organised. If you have a similarly sized group and want to propose a project that would benefit everyone, please get in touch with me so that we can talk it through; there is no closed door here.

Lastly, the USS have received no special pricing on their regions, no discounts, and no free land whatsoever. The Sea regions we're adding belong to Linden Lab, just as we own all those that circle the large continents. The only thing we have done is to agree to relocate their estates for free, which considering the size and complexity of the move is clearly the fair thing to do. If and when we run similar projects, that same courtesy will more than likely be extended to others.

Recently I haven't been happy with some decisions made by Linden Lab, but this is one I think directly helps the community spirit of SL. Nice move.

Wasn't one of the reasons stated for open space sims was for sailing?

Then why are these homesteads. Has void sims been so hamstrung that you can't even properly sail a single vehicle on them?

Uh, there's nothing special about USS it's just a themed rental estate that over expanded due to the openspace bubble. They spent enough time whining and crying about how unfair it all was that I was hoping they'd learned their lesson about what makes good business sense.

It turns out they totally did learn that lesson. I guess they used some connections at high levels of LL in order to save their business and leech money off the mainland, good for them. Sucks for absolutely every other business owner in SL.

So you are favoring large, well organized, PG groups with wide appeal. How is that not favoritism?

Who is paying for this? Being a joint venture, are USS getting a break on tier? I mean it reads like a partnership and I'd expect such a partnership to involve contributions from both sides or is Linden Lab's contribution just limited to allowing the USS sims to cpnnect to mainland?

Why are they homesteads by the way? Isn't sailing exactly the reason for openspaces in the first place?

Everyone who bought openspace regions, then had to abandon them due to the price hikes paid for it. Where do you think they got the hardware for this venture?

That aside, I'm watching this with interest. This seems like an interesting precedent, and I'll be curious to see what other land masses eventually connect to the mainland.

I really find this unbelievable. The Lindens do something really cool, opening up a huge area for sailing, boating, and other watersports, and all people can do is complain and look for ways this is screwing people over.

Really people, grow up a bit. I'm not saying that every decision by LL has been or will be on the mark (and in some cases far off), but here, where they are just trying to improve the user experience, in a very positive way, just lighten up, and dust off your Tako.

Elanthius you should get all your facts straight before you put your foot in your mouth. I own 19 sims in the USS. 16 of the openspace sims were purchased before the price reduction and most of them are open water with no land and almost no prims or scripts. All 19 sims are a private estate with 18 of them open to the public. These sims were used exactly as LL intended when they purchased and are still today. It sure isn't my open space sims that caused the recent price increase and I have been hurt as much or more as any other open space sim owner. I derive zero income from my sims, they are for my personal enjoyment and the enjoyment of the people who use them. If you are a business owner who abused the open space sims thanks a lot for causing me a huge cost increase starting in January.

Wait, you own them? Or you rent them from USS?

*edit: Either way the point remains that the business was not viable in SL and only through a "bailout" like this could it continue. I don't think that's a very controversial point and not really even that relevant to the whole discussion.