Zoning

- Should LL implement "zoned" areas of the main grid ?

- or should it be left to 3rd parties ? ( as it is currently )

- Would the mainland benefit ? ( a no-brainer imho )

- The difficult bit: How in the world could it be implemented given the current layout ?

- What would be your "zone" ?



I've no solution, just interested to see if this is something others are for or against.
I do think one zone category has to be "no limits", and personally I'd like to see large swathes set aside for natural building and others for cities, water and sci-fi etc. I do believe this would greatly encourage people of similar idealogy to congregate in tighter knit communities and would reduce if not eliminate the current problems that scar the grid.

I think it would be great for the maingrid, tho not too good for my biz If zoning was implemented, I would hope it wasn't the whole grid. I would be very surprised if it happened tho, simply because LL would have to hire more staff to enforce the zoning (if it was on a large scale).

This debate has gone around a couple of times.

I think the main points were that most people would like to see zoning. It would be difficult to retroactively zone land people already own. And the Lindens seem unlikely to do anything that requires them to designate an employee to enforce it.

Unfortunate because the main grid could be very cool instead of a patchwork of blight and very cool.

Zoning can't be imposed on people who didn't make a conscious choice to live in a zoned community. When people make that choice, you end up with communities where everyone agrees and shares a common desire. When those rules are forced on people retroactively you end up with one group of people forcing another group of people to conform to their subjective tastes and expectations. That's not my idea of fun. I try to be a good neighbor, but the moment someone tries to impose zoning rules on me I'll go out of my way to break them.

The 'Blue Note' thread convinced me that, even if we had Residential vs. Commercial zoning, folks still won't be satisfied.

There you had two decidedly non-residential parcels that were conflicting with each other, and zoning wouldn't have made much of a difference. Unless you had a zoning type for every possible iteration of usage, which is somewhat unrealistic.

The only way to make zoning work is to have folks sign up for specific rules ahead of time. Even then, however - where would the 'Blue Note' have fit?

I tend to agree with Chip & Surreal as well.

Oh yeh totally agree also. If zoning was on the cards, it should only be apllied to new sims that are released.

Also to add: and if zoning was applied, I would hope there would still be sims released with out it.

It's too bad space is so expensive in virtual reality for some reason. I believe more space between builds would go a long way towards relieving the visual cacaphony of the mainland. I like the idea of residential sims without the ability to set objects for sale. In general I think zoning in terms of taste or style takes a landlord, and LL doesn't seem to want that role.

I agree also. But as Surreal and Chip said, it would be difficult to do retroactively.

They could have at least zoned Blumfield, particularly after the new residents requested it, but no, they wouldn't.

coco

I've always thought that the real problem lies not with commercial vs. residential but with architectural style clashes and "problem neighbors." You could have a "no sales sim" that still has a eyesore of a club, as long as they aren't selling anything. Better land tools from prop 244 will help with things like blocking shouts from the Tringo parlor two parcels over, but there really isn't anything that can be done about the learning curve to good building or the subjective point of view of what is "cool" or in "good taste."

I also think there is a learning curve with land ownership. It may take someone 3 or more moves before they grasp the concept of looking not just at the parcel for sale, but at the neighboring builds. Newbie first land sims are always going to be a mess, that's just a given and there really isn't anything that can be done about it. You have to let people go wild on their first land, it's part of the SL experience. Those that figure out quickly that they want a more stable environment will sell and move on.

In the long run, there is nothing except time standing in the way of residents grouping together to buy contiguous land and create their own zoning. My dream would be to share a sim with Lauk, Higbee, Khamon and a few others. I would love to have the Ivory Tower and the History Museum nearby and create a cultural/artistic colony in the core sims.

I personally find that abandoned land is a bigger problem. Neighbors move on but the half-constructed house that has been there for a year is a far greater eyesore.

The challenge may lie in the fact that zoning for any choice of land use requires securing control of a sufficiently large parcel. After a few months of exploration, I've seen few coordinated builds of any style that occupy less than one full sim. The more successful cultures (e.g. the Elven lands and the Gorean lands) occupy multiple sims with common architectural and cultural themes.

By drawing together a "critical mass" of people with common interests and excluding griefers and those uninterested in playing by their standards, they make a successful culture that also supports a good flow of rental and retail income.

I suspect that the fallacy is trying to achieve integrated land use "on the cheap." We repeatedly see folks that say "We need this! We need that! And we need it paid for by LL!"

First life is not that way. Neither is SL. You need something, you need to pay for it yourself. If you can't afford it alone, you pool resources or you go without.

Until residents are prepared to surrender some autonomy and pool their resources under a coordinated management scheme with an agreed goal, or buy into the vision of another who has invested the $1000 down and $2400 per year (that's US dollars) to operate a whole sim, they will have to suck up to the possibility of living next door to a randomly chosen neighbor who could change tomorrow.

What Isablan said; and Frank is very close to the simple truth that zoning on the mainland requires little more than patience. Prok and I have gone round and round over his concept of an instant community. It seems that most people join Second Life and 1) instantly make money and 2) instantly belong to a strong community of like minded virtual livers. Our diagreement centers around his notion that such a thing can be provided and my notion that the best advice to give a newbie is pick a spot, buy land, start socializing and WAIT.

Things change in SL very quickly compared to real life, most things, not real trusting friendship. That still takes time. You'll generally find the land in your sim selling before you're entirely sure who you want to buy it. Never fear, it'll be for sale again a couple of months from now. Eventually, we naturally buy land around our friends, and vice versa, to build cohesive, dare I say thematic, neighborhoods.

Time heals the lack of zoning.

This is a virtual world, we don't need to be constrained by the lay of the land and who is adjacent to whom. Especially now that we have P2P teleports again.

The way I see it, this is a giant sorting problem, where the bubblesort algorithm would be particularly adequate. BBsort is very dependent on how fast you can search your dataspace and how fast you can perform that swapping operation.

In the old pre-1.2 days, the world was covered in public land, and selling it was nearly unheard of. We used to claim public land, and we could get all our money back by releasing it.

We need to figure out a way to restore that lost mobility. LL needs to make it easier for people to move somewhere without waiting for their land to sell. Something needs to be done that would enable instant parcel swapping without financial loss to the user.

Also, we need to be able to store "parcel states" and easily transfer them to another region. This is non-trivial for very large parcels, or parcels with very large and complex objects.

Additionally, LL needs to let people mark their land as belonging to a particular theme or serving a particular purpose, so we can make informed decisions and coalesce into our little sub-communities.

I think this is brilliant.
This, and what Frank said are the first new perspectives on the zoning thing I have seen for ages.

I'd like to see some zoning as it would solve alot of issues. However, my home is above my business so I guess it would be nice to see enforced Residential Zones and "Free" Zones where you can build a business, home, or both (some like myself buy enough land in one sim to both live there and run a business).

I'd like to quote a bit from everyone so far, but it would just take too long I'm with Eggy too, I've never understood why we have to be so tightly packed into a grid, it's always struck me as a bit crazy. I've always fancied the idea of "portals", a bit like a favourite links thing. Where, on your land, you'd be able to set up portals to and from places you thought were cool and just be able to step/fly through them into the next place. It could even allow views through to the portals maybe. There's an open source 3D environment that uses an idea like that, I forget it's name, I looked at it a while back it was very early in development and wasn't working well. If it ever takes off I'm there ! Until then, I'm here as long as I can stand it.

The way it's going atm I just can't see SL working out in the long run except as a glorified shopping mall and a cattle market, especially once RL business gets a hold in here. $1200 + $200 p/m is just a bit too much to ask at the current tech level imo, and paying even more to and being beholden to another 3rd party is not my way either. As Frank states ( if I get the jist ) you either need to be wealthy in RL or work like **** in SL to make it pay which is pointless if you're doing it more for fun than profit. Or maybe not pointless, but I'm a person who needs much more than just 512sq.m ! ( I currently own 1/2 sim and will soon be tiering up purely to keep my space as I want it to be )

If I could run my own server, put my own rules and world in it, connect it to another one via a portal or ten, that would be my ideal and one day in the not so far future I can see it arriving. It won't be SL though. But until then I'll be here.

My pessimism for SL stems from the fact that I believe that like me, as unbelievable as it may seem, many content makers are not here to make money. We make money only because we have to in order to maintain tier. In order to make a real living in SL you have to work full time at it. So it becomes a job. I'm here to relax not work my guts out. There are no real money making opportunities available in providing naturalistic/"arty farty" environments which are built to satisfy the selfish whims of the creators ( ie people like me ). One day fairly soon a system will arrive on the scene that'll allow us to host our own servers and those environments that I mention will no longer be provided in SL. ( Except as tokens provided to advertise corporate entities and I don't want to get into those politics here ). OK it's the future, not the now and I'm speculating but nonetheless unless SL changes somehow to accomodate non-profit making content providers those providers will leave at the first opportunity and SL will lose out in the long run.


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and I do not mean I want anything for free by this, after all, hosting a server would not be free for anyone!

I know exactly what you mean, Lauk. I frequently wonder how much longer SL can really be a huge part of my life. For those of us who like creating immersive environments, this gets to be an expensive hobby that needs to be supported though selling stuff. Granted, I consider money spent on tier to be a much greater "bang for the buck" than the similar amount I spend for satellite service programming that rarely gets watched. But for how long?

Immersive environment builds take lots of land and lots of prim allowance, I'm up to owning a 1/4 of Federal now and have said "no more." Which leaves SL becoming a dull place on a regular basis, only fun when I have landscaping to do somewhere. How many times can you tear down and reconfigure your land so you can do something new?

It does get depressing at times. Makes one wish for enough capital to be able to just fill entire sims with whimsy and bring a new one online anytime you run out of land/prims to turn the inspiration of the moment into pixel reality.

Here's a similar discussion that might interest you.

Sorry I have to disagree with you there. LL is offering Private Sims right now and for a very big price. LL is a corprate entity, they're here to make money. They're not gonna hand out server code to customers (even for a price) for any reason (private sim or private sandbox) because that would infringe on their profit margin. Why would someone pay $1200 to setup a sim and $200 bucks a month after that if they can run one on their home computer for less? Not only will it not happen because it'd affect profit margines, but the possible security issues that would allow underground servers to exist would also be greatly increased. If I was in LL's shoes I'd probly do the same thing as them and laugh at you just for thinking that they would hand out personal sims cheap. No offence, but this is LL we're talking about here.

Um, actually it wasn't LL I was talking about and we'll see who laughs last.

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To clarify the point I think you missed. I expect to see serious competition to LL arrive fairly shortly, within the next couple of years at the very most. Some of that will enable those of us that want to, to host our own worlds. When that happens I'm out of here because I'm not interested in having a full time job working in SL to keep my tier in a misconceived grid layout that heaps us together like an ant nest. I'm not interested in the commercial aspect of SL, I don't need it so hosting my own server would'nt require that much security. That's all.

Thanks for pointing me there Khamon. Glad to see other people see it too but of course I already knew they did 'cos it's an idea I saw in the other place I mentioned

It's nail on the head to say that the issue isn't one of commercial vs. residential. It's more a matter of similar, or tolerable, building styles and, more importantly, l-e-i-u-h-a-o-u-e-h-g.

The most effective sort of "zoning" Linden Lab can provide us is to limit our script cycles and total texture load, considering number and sizes, per square meter the way they do prims.

This is also the most effective "zoning" a community can provide for itself. If people get along well enough to sacrifice a bit for each other's gaming comfort or business needs, and trust each other enough to trade land around accordingly, they can, well, call themselves a community and strictly enforced LL zoning is no longer required for them.

Therein lies another problem, which mirrors RL. All it takes is one asshat neighbor to ruin things for everybody. And there is always one there somewhere; the one apartment renter who just has to be a jerk, the one homeowner who cops an attitude of "it's my land, I'll turn it into a junkyard if I damn well please." Jerk neighbors are precisely what has given birth to RL communities with anal retentive restrictions. I used to be violently opposed to things like restrictive CCR's, but having been a homeowner for the past 3 years, I finally appreciate why they exist even if I still think most go too far. The frustration of SL is that you can't really band together as neighbors to wage war on a problem property. In RL you can go after things like city code violations, but there is no recourse in SL against someone like the Impeach Bush guy.

It seems to me that almost every call for zoning has, at the root of it, a problem neighbor that the complainant thinks will be resolved with zoning. Zoning will not solve the asshat neighbor problem. Khamon is right in that time heals most issues. People improve their building skills and put up better buildings, jerk neighbors tend to move on eventually and usually you will find yourself ignoring your neighbor's new prefab that you consider hideous.

Just before I joined SL, they got rid of the event stipends. Then the bonuses for ratings. Now the DI is going. Next up on the chopping block, says Robin, is traffic.

After that, I figure is weekly stipends.

Far from supporting entertainment and - well, supporting anything besides making and selling content - the Lindens are going in the opposite direction and extricating themselves as much as possible from any game-like aspects or support, or any responsibilities for running the world they created. Without, however, giving us the tools to help ourselves.

It looks like eventually they hope to have as little to do with SL as they have to do with my neighborhood irl. But since this isn't real life, where movies and popcorn and heating bills and medical requirements and policemen and legislatures and zoning exist, all that will leave to do is - make content and sell content to an ever-revolving door of free players who come, play a bit, and go.

At the same time, they leave us to our own devices dealing with the chaos of a society where we are helpless, having no government, no representation, no zoning beyond mature vs pg, and no rule of law. (Aside from a couple of laws about not pushing people about and not calling them ethnic slurs.)

There is no zoning, except in the old and already purchased land in Brown and Boardman, and there will never be any zoning, though that is an obvious need. The residents of Blumfield - who asked for zoning and were told no - realize they have an uphill battle to keep for themselves the very sort of nice place that Blumfield offered them in the first place.

I think they can win that battle, despite the inevitable one or several people who will buy land there and work against them to be mean just because they can. I think that with hard work and strategy, they can keep MOST of Blumfield and its neighboring sim the way it was when they moved there.

We are indeed ants in an ant farm - or, more accurately, lab rats in an experimental psychology laboratory - when the Lindens go to all the trouble to provide something nice like Blumfield, yet refuse to equip it with zoning, knowing full well that its residents will be absolutely helpless to stop anyone who buys in there with the express purpose of griefing.

There is also no way for the Blumfield residents or any of us to take control of the lab we are rats in, and provide our own zoning or anything else.

Why do the Lindens do that? One reason I can think of is it's fun for them to watch the chaos unfold, sort of like a scientist setting up an elaborate scene then dropping combatants into it, and maintaining a rigorous hands-off stance while they watch the inevitable battle.

As soon as a game comes along that offers the same custom content free building abilities (SL's only draw, really) but within a structure that supports something besides building, and allows for resident control over chaos, there will be mass defection from SL.

I don't think that will matter to the Lindens though; they will just consider this particular "research" experiment over at that point, and move on to manipulate new customers in a different experiment.

Much as I like most of the Lindens, as people, I sort of wish they WOULD sell out to Sony or somebody who would actually meet the needs of the residents of this online society.

Any society whose rulers maintain a hands-off policy, while at the same time preventing those who live in it from having any control over it, is doomed to chaos.

coco

That is a nice post, Coco.

I'm not sure the idea they are enjoying looking at the chaos is true.

I think it might be more a matter that Linden Research is really more into developing a protocol and networking system for the interchange of interactive 3D information displayed in the form of a virtual environment. They might want to be more like the DNS root servers, outfits like VeriSign,USC-ISI, Cogent, ICANN, and that sort, while the user base thinks they are supposed to be the 3D version of Geocities.