Should the Vehicle Park be restored, or should the SL3B stuff stay there?

In 2003, LL gave us the gift of the vehicle park - the sims of Balance, Fame, Bethel, Fortuna, Brilliant, and Georgean. Its stated purpose was to give vehicle builders and enthusiasts a place that was large enough and had enough performance (due to an almost total lack of content) to let us properly build, test, and enjoy vehicles.

I posted a couple threads (such as this one) in SL Land Management about the vehicle park. Every now and then someone rents it, or LL allocates it for a giant event. Unfortunately, more often than not, they wind up leaving it re-terraformed and full of abandoned stuff for weeks after the event has concluded. Torley's response to my last inquiry was that it was being left up until mid-July. That will make nearly a month that 5 out of 6 vehicle sims have been sequestered for this event, which ran for a single week. (And in the middle of July, it will all get wiped and yet ANOTHER event will come in, and occupy the park for some unspecified amount of time.)

Does it serve the greater good to have four of the sims full of content that just about everyone who cares to has seen long ago, and a fifth (Balance) with a frankly ugly ground texture and litter strewn here and there?

The vehicle sims are about the only place where you can actually drive or fly around in SL so I think they should be restored immediately. Most sims are too laggy and there are too many ban lines preventing you from moving around.

Any clue what this "event" is that is coming up thats using the vehicle park? I couldn't see anything obvious.

Lewis

I would like to see the vehicle sims restored as soon as possible. However, I also wish that LL would dedicate 6 sims ONLY for special events. That way people could continue to visit the event locations even after the events are over.

Well it can't be that they need to use them because they are short of servers, can it?
I mean, go and look at the West, South and East edges of the main continent on the home page map - plenty of unused, unsold [left]sims[/left] there!

Hi Huns,

Any particular reason why you made a publicly viewable response poll?

Is LL going to leave all the builds put up when the place is rented out up till the next event? Has this been policy in the past or this an exception to policy?

Mmmmmmmmmrestore it.

I can't test my fearsome scary (rarr grr) sea monsters in the narrow little rivers they've left us there.

Was this event charged normal rental rates? Are they still being charged?

Can you rent these sims, put up vendors and stores and such, and then get them left out till they are erased for the the next event?

Give people back their vehicle and air space.

It's one of the very few open spaces in SL. One that everyone can use, at least.

I agree that the vehicle sims should be restored ASAP.

I posted a feature suggestion along these lines some months back, and it received an immense 33 views. /13/11/95907/1.html

I'd love to see a different set of sims used for private hire / functions.

Not to mention the Big Easy sims that are still up, and the land leftover (for critters) from the game dev competition. >_>

Type gam into the find region box in the big map.

It auto-completes to "games".

Backspace the s, then click the triangle for the dropdown list.

Five items appear in the list, then vanish, leaving only "game" in the dropdown list.

What is up with that?

The vehicles regions should be left alone for the purpose they were set up for. If they need to rent space for other uses why not rent out the empty Linden snow regions or set up some regions specifically for renting out.

I asked Torley about it in IM and was told that the next event (July 15) is something by Katt Kongo, and after that Relay for Life, although that may be put somewhere else as they seem to want more sims.

The Vehicle Park is being left as-is due to the wishes of the volunteers, and because Tateru Nino (who primarily organized it) ran out of bandwidth and was unable to visit it during the event (although I saw Tateru there quite frequently beforehand, so s/he was there to see it to completion.) I requested that at least Balance be restored, but the nasty ground texture and rusted junk are being left there because it's supposed to look post-apocalyptic.

The volunteers did indeed do a nice job, but I don't think that we should be without the full use of the park because some number of them want the SL3B stuff to stay out. Not this long, anyway. I am really trying to see the benefit of leaving it as-is until the 15th. For every day between now and the 15th, how many people are going to see it who haven't already, vs. how many vehicle park users would like to be able to use the park to its fullest, who have patiently gone without it for weeks? And then, of course, this next event will roll in, and we'll have to wait for that to finish.

How about LL simply creating a new vehicle park, one that is permanent and will not be used for anything unrelated to vehicles?

Don't know but caught the five items as:

I DEFINITELY think it needs to be restored. Personally, I don't use the sims as much as I used to anymore, but it's always great to have somewhere I can go to fly around and stuff with very little lag.

Plus, I know vehicle developers are CONSTANTLY using those sims and it must be a huge inconvenience to have them filled for absolutely no reason. Like Huns said. The event is over. Everyone who wanted to go has already went. Give us our vehicle sims back.

How in the world did you move fast enough to get that?

Hmm, I could have Frapped it - but that's too sharp for that.

And to think, someone took the time to private message me in response to another post of mine on this subject and explain to me how this is the way it is supposed to work.

Thanks for the shot.

How about putting the special events on in unsold sims (in the south of the Korean continent, for example) then giving the event holder "first refusal" on buying the sim still terraformed for their needs? That would be better than putting the sims somewhere else... it makes more sense for them to be next to Abbotts.

Speaking of Abbotts, how about putting a void sim south of it to fix the airstrip approach problem? Oh, and some terraformed voids along the world edge near Caldbeck would be great.

Simple solution: LL should make another area for either vehicles or events..

I would like to stay it there for now as I still would like to do some video in there and I cannot do it right now as I am at a conference. Besides it was a lot of work (volunteered work, no vendors etc.) and so it's always sad to see such things go away (when it's quickly even more so).

FWIW, I like to shoot videos in the Park as well sometimes, and that isn't feasible with all that stuff in the way. If it isn't restored, it will probably be August before I get another chance. So that'll be approximately 1/4 of a year we lose to events, and that's just this part of the year.

I decided by gum I was gonna do somethign about this and so drove my unnescessarily large vehicle over into the anniversary celebration area to protest. Unfortunately NO ONE WAS THERE. No one is even using the celebration area. There were however several people hanging around balance and fame wishing they could use the vehicle sims. So, I'd say go complain and protest but obviously no one else cares abotu the thing enough to be there in the first place. Can we please have our vehicle sims back?

The SL3B stuff mainly occupies four sims. Here is today's traffic for them:
Bethel - 858
Brilliant - 97
Georgean - 1322
Fortuna - 401
--------------------
Average - 669.5

The remaining two sims, which are mostly free of SL3B stuff, have the following traffic:
Fame - 1290
Balance - 1650
--------------------
Average - 1470

On top of that, we're now at 65 in favor of restoring it (the 1 "Other" response posted that he was in favor) to 11 who want to keep the SL3B stuff around. There seems to be some pretty good evidence here that the greater good would be served by restoring the Vehicle Park, and at least giving vehicle enthusiasts a good week to use it before it's taken over again by the next event.

Restore please.

Someone IM me if this actually happens.

Restore them.



That is all, goodbye!