Raise the price of private sims

I reckon LL should put the price of private sims up considerably before SL turns into little more than a disjointed collection of islands and the mainland becomes nothing but a repository of dross. All the decent shops, medium-to-large businesses and even some individual residents going out and buying their own sims is ruining SL.

Please do explain just how such is ruining SL. I have been here for 2 years and I havne't noticed it ruin anything myself. Explain your reasoning?

<Thinks on it>

Since the private sims are in SL, and they look good in most cases, how can they be ruining SL?

I've seen about the same building quality issues in SL as I always have. People have to learn somewhere, and mainland is the place.

And for the record, My only shop is on the mainland. Mind you, I get nearly zero sales from it, but I have one there.

Nah - I personally prefer the world to be a coherent grid of sims that I can navigate if I want to. These islands were fine when there were just a few of them, but now there's actually more of them than there are mainland sims! Every Tom, Dick and Furry is getting their hands on the things and the map is becoming just useless clutter.

with P2P teleportation thE map means nothing anyway.

I was pissed off when they ditched the telehubs too.

Then I would think the logical conclusion would be to make them navigatable rather than raise the price of them in an attempt to eliminate them. What's with the sledge hammer to kill a fly approaches these days?

If your issue is that you can't navigate these sims without teleporting, simply make a proposal to link them all with void sims allowing access. I admit the likelyhood of this is slim, but that would be the logical conclusion to your complaint.

The other option is to allow people to purchase sims on the mainland and have the same level of control over them as the estate sims. In many if not all cases private island owners buy their sim 1. Because they need the space and that level of space can not be found in a conjoined manner on the mainland, 2. They need and desire the control over the land that can currently only be had through estate ownership, 3. They wish to do something creatively with the land that can not be done in a landlocked mainland sim.

Considering that I have yet to see the mainland shrinking in the past few years, I fail to see why you wish to complain about something extra. Don't like private sims? Don't visit them. The mainland hasn't changed except to grow. You have hlaf of SL and more mainland than in years past to navigate as you wish, why complain about additional land just because it doesn't conform to your personal idea of what is correct usage when you still have the mainland? I could understand your complaint if every time a new estate sim was created the took away a mainland sim. As is, I fail to see the validity of your proposal.

I vote No to this proposition.

I think what would be great is if they brought back the whole idea of being able to get to islands from the mainland using boats (or planes, or flying, or walking underwater... maybe introduce a breathing limit so ppl can drown ;3 ?), the sims that are nothing now would be just ocean auto-return by the hour sorta things!



damn.... you beat me to the submit button... AGAIN!

It'd be nice to see void sims all across the empty spaces between the private islands. Perhaps there could be an option for private sim owners to connect or disconnect from the void: becoming an island in an endless sea, that players could fly/sail across to reach other private island sims, or disconnect from it, with a ring of non-void sims around their sim, like we have now.

Musuko.

*sings the advert jingle* "That's a bright idea!"

Bring able to explore the private islands by boat would be fantastic, just sailing round aimlessly to see what I found.

Interesting view for a one week old player.

Personally I would rather they reduced the price considerably. Then you'd find that people would buy them and set up non-commercial things on them instead.

The reason most people end up just turning their island into either a casino/gaming place or a mall is simply because that's what brings in the cash which they can then put towards running it - not necessarily because they have great ambitions to build another mall when half of the malls in game are 3/4 empty already.

I have great plans for builds in SL - but am unable to pursue them simply because I lack $1200 and $195 a month disposable income, and do not wish to simply turn my land into a clone of the vast majority of what SL already is.

Lower price = easier land ownership = more diverse non-commercial build opportunity.

Lewis

Which is why they should put the prices UP on the private islands and DOWN on the mainland - wouldn't it be great to be able to afford quarter-sims, half-sims of mainland land for major projects?

No, because I don't have the same control and tools on the mainland I have in an estate. I simply can not make the things I can make in an estate on the mainland. Nor can I find an entire mainland sim for sale anywhere...can you?

Now this thread makes me wanna buy an island and make a casino....

Too bad they're so expensive.

they should be made cheaper so people can afford to make things look better.

Be nice. That's not 'afford', that's 'experience'.

We ALL started with the plywood cube. Let's not forget that.

Most of the unresolved griefing in SL occurs on the mainland because estate owners have better control over their sim. Also all of the complaints about ugly builds, tall ban lines that block business entrances etc are aslo connected to the mainland and not estate sims.

Private island sims have been a great contribution to SL. If anything, we need a better centralized Linden supported classified/directory system so we can locate all the massive amount of new in world content that has resulted.

Aye, I don't have any problem navigating via the map to islands nor the mainland. Click to where you want to go and go! Now if you want to fly/walk there, that's a different issue. However, the vast benefits to the private island system far outweigh that small negative. Plus, someday the land will be filled in as OpenSpaces and additional sims are purchased.

I also think the prices are fairly reasonable and in-line with other kinds of managed hosting.

(snipped and paraphrased to the OP's main point)



Nah.

Cheetham Hill, you're NUTS thinking that raising the price is a good idea!!! It's bad enough people get banned from places for not spending enough money AS IT IS, this would make it worse! Your idea would eventually force everyone to spend more money in SL, and I guess that would be good for the Lindens, but you know, if I have to spend a bunch more than the subscription fee a month to play SL without getting banned from establishments for not giving them enough money, I won't play it anymore.

I believe Cheetham Hill was reffering to how so many of the islands are private. Meaning only people in the group or on the access list can enter.

I've seen alot of it. I happen to live in a island like that lol

I have owned an entire mainland sim at one time before with one partner. The inability to fully terraform the land to the extent that a private sim estate owner is able, is a huge detriment to developing a mainland sim the way you can a private one. That said, I also acknowledge that if *every* mainland owner had full control there would be some seriously bad changes to the face of the mainland.

Consider First Land in this scenario. Every 512 plot could be take down to make water or all the way up to make a 100m high mountain. you'd have a little flat ground level plot, at whatever height was preset, then bam, a 100m high mountain, perfectly straight up and perfectly flat on top, filling the 512 next door. If you think First Land chaos is bad now, try that one on for size. And, unless mainland sims got bought up into large enough chunks (1/4 of a sim or larger) to make the conflicting approaches to the land builds more tolerable to move between, it wouldn't get any better, either.

There are solid reasons why we can't just willy nilly give out estate tools to the mainland. As an owner of a full mainland sim, I would very much have liked the instant power of an estate manager for everything but the bit of Linden road that passed through it. There were some nice things I could have done to it to make it even more marketable without destroying the beauty of the sim as originally created by the Lindens. But the sim was mostly lake and I'd imagine that it would have been very tempting by many to make more usable land around it, destroying the size and beauty of the lake, to make it more 'marketable', so again, I repeat that there is solid reason not to provide the access on the mainland, however frustratring it is to those who have enough vision not to 'ruin' it but to make it better.

As for the Private Islands. I live on one, have one of my stores on one, and should my work here prove profitable enough, eventually I will own one. It is the way things are moving. Once you get past the 'I want to be able to do anything I want on my land in terms of build' phase and are able to look at the bigger picture of 'I want to live someplace beautiful and am willing to adjust to a few charter principals to do it so I don't have a casino or ugly advertising show up alongside my house', the concept of renting on a private sim becomes attractive. And for those who rebel against having to 'buy in' and then pay rent on top of that when they can just 'own' their land, I suggest politely that they remember that they pay continued 'rent' to the Lindens too, on the mainland. Its called 'tier'. If you are premium and only ever live on a 512, that 'tier' is your monthly premium fee. If you exceed 512, well, we all now how tier escalates. Its the same thing, its just a question of who you pay your tier to... LL or a private sim owner who in turn is paying LL.

Back to the original Navigation question. I don't tend to just fly about looking around. I'm usually too busy either building or gabbing with friends. I know I'm missing a lot out there and I think I need to set a day a week aside just to go exploring. Establishing flight and boating lanes for island exploration is a great idea, however, we have to consider two things in this. The first is that islands should be able to opt in or out of being connected this way. Places like Caledon would most likely opt in, but a private island retreat for someone wealthy who doesn't want to be disturbed and isn't designed for public consumption, would probably opt out.

The second thing to consider is totally financial on the part of LL. To support the void sims to do this they would have to instally many more servers. It is likely they could put more void sims on a server than, say, mainland sims, however, it would still be a significant investment on their part and I'm not exactly certain they will feel there is enough demand for this. Have you started a proposal on the feature voting page to see how others feel about this idea?

Char

Bah. Bring the price of void sims down and more full sim owners will buy them and hook up.

The contiguous mainland, although a nice idea, is as much a mess because of the land owners as because of land controls. And don't forget the checkerboard of ban lines.

Wow! That's an amazing memory for someone who's been around for about a week!

Private islands are clearly better than living on the mainland. Part of that comes from their being seperate by design - if you live on a sim that's next to another sim, you get 'child' clients on your sim which lag it down. If you have a popular sim next to your sim that can actually lag your sim down a fair bit. Mainland sims tend to be connected to 4 other sims - many islands are not connected to any other sims, and thus have lower lag.

Then of course there is the estate tools themselves... ability to ban people from the sim, ability to change the terrain texture, terraform limits, water level, ability to have some sim-wide estate managers who can deal with griefing...etc. They *really* help in terms of being able to deal with griefing and bad neighbours. They also make a big difference in terms of having good people who share your vision living next door - rather then whoever happens to buy the parcel.

I agree that we should *encourage* private sims, rather then discouraging them by raising prices.
With regard to linking up private estates... why not just make the world map load faster? Then people could use p2p and the whole "flying around looking" thing would be no problem.