Why can't I find good land/neighbours in SL?

I've only been is SL around 7 weeks now and this is my experience so far of owning land.

I bought my noob 512 after a week and enjoyed building on it.
I was quite selective and bought a plot on the edge of the sim - the sim next door wasnt used.
While there I met a few nice guys and it was a nice experience.
However It wasn't long until it became a lag festival of particals, poofers, scripts, S/M crap, XXX stuff etc.

An important thing I learned at that point was that there is nothing more I hate in SL than that bloody red/green security text that bounces you around. Whoever is responsible for that should be publicly hung.

Frustrated by this experience I spent 2 solid days looking at land sales. Wherever I seeemed to go it was the same problem. Ugly structures, oversized textures, no thought for design or consideration for neighbours.

I stumbled across a 1024 plot that wasn't listed in classifieds which was actually quite nice. Lots of protected land around, overlooking a river and a waterfall that someone had made. It was and is really nice - one of the best views i have seen in SL.
I wasn't particularly looking for a snow area but I bought it and built my small shop/home and all was well with the world.
I have been there ever since. Its a quiet sim with very little building going on.
This land is perfect except for one thing - there is no room to expand. I managed to secure 512 next door but other than that its either owned by governer linden, protected or people wont sell.

At this point I decided it might be good to rent in a private sim, so I spent a few days looking at what was on offer. What surprised me most was that it wasnt much different from mainland - red security text, freebie prefabs and oversized textures everywhere.

I found a sim that was really nice and fast but Residential only
I spoke to the owner and they were okay about my plans of a shop/home. The rules were to respect your neighbours, build what will fit into the look of the sim, dont build too close to the borders of your land etc etc.

Sounded perfect, so i started renting the 4k block of land. I have spent the past 4 days building what I think is a nice place. I've bought things like hedges, uploaded textures and left room around the edges of my plot. Its turned out quite a nice place - lots of work but worth it.
Of course I also had to spend a huge amount of time re-making all my boxes because of landmark cards and moving servers, as well as the various shopping websites. But happy days are here again.

Two days ago someone rented the plot right outside my entrance to the north and dropped enough prefabs to fill the prim allocation of their 8k plot. A mansion, pools, waterfalls, poseballs, 2D flowers with white edges etc etc.
When i face their plot my framerate drops from 18 to 5.
I spoke to the owner but they said their ping was okay and it looked pretty.

That day I spent re-arranging my shop to make the entrance at the opposite end, blacken windows for culling out their eyesore and updating landmarks in my boxes again. Its a pisser but I can live with it and my framerate is much better.

Next day the building east installs green security bouncing text

This morning I wake up and log in to find the plot to the west is now occupied and freebie prefab wood shed is placed right on the border of my land near the entrance to my shop. Their wooden mansion is placed on the edge of the sim facing outwards so they will never be bothered by bad views and they have dumped their crap at the back near my entrance. No thought at all has been put into either of these plots.

The whole point of being in a private sim for me was the control, that things would be ordered and people would put at least some thought into what they were doing. This has turned out to be not the case at all.

I am surrounded on 3 sides by this crap and I'm paying someone 7000L a month for the pleasure.

Are there ANY nice land areas in SL where people actually do put thought into what they are doing or care about others around them?

It is unfortunately a problem in SL that, because of the 'dream of a continuous world', you have to put up with, generally, living next door to assholes who build crap, are hardly ever there, and don't care that it's negatively impacting your experience.

There are only two ways that you can really protect yourself.

1) Buy a plot of land next door to protect your view and at least one access side.

2) Buy a plot of land that is 'protected' on one side by waterfront, Linden-owned land or similar.

Some landlords do provide areas where there is strict control over building - but these do not tend to be overly popular because people want to do whatever they like regardless.

I'll look for you in game and suggest a few places - but these will cost you more money. It's ultimately your choice.

Lewis

I have very !!! Positive feeling from where I live now.. in Dana Bergson - Otherland.

Fast sim - very nice landscaped - nice people around and she are easy to get in contact with.

Contact her in SL. She will show you the sims - I am sure!


/Tina

well.. one thing you can do is decrease your view range to 64..

Seriosly though.. flying over mainland second life I cant help but notice the poor level of building, it is ugly as hell.. and the worst thing is that even when you see a nice build it tends to be neighboured by pig ugle skybox wannabe builds..

I will say this though.. if the Sim owner says "dont build to close to your border".. wat the hell are you paying for? should he/she not set up small corridors between each plot and charge you less?... *shakes head*

Friends ! Gather them together, all go and buy land in the same area, you'll form a little community, in no time you'll have 1/2 a sim covered with people who all like each other !

You can't do this by yourself unless you're very lucky. That's how I started out in SL, within 6 months me and a bunch friends had a whole a sim between us.

Patience, the mainland is basically a landfill site, full of people who neither care nor want to care. Start small and build up. You need to spend considerable time flying around checking out all the land for sale if you want to find a really good area on the mainland.

I've always disliked the mainland from day one of joining SL. It's generally an absolute mess, an anthill full of non-cooperating ants, exceptions to this rule are rare and far between ( but truly great when you do find them ! ). What you consider "good" is obviously a matter of your opinion but if you can gather a group of like minded people together you're more than halfway to making a place for yourself.

good luck

oh and never let other people's ugly builds stress you out too much, if it gets bad, move on. Sometimes starting again is the best solution, when I finally realised that, my second life got a lot better! ( what's more important, a few small dollars worth of grid space or your well being ? )

Trouble with neighbours seems to be inevitable for residents in "First Land" sims. If you're stuck with up to 128 neighbours, chances are good that you'll encounter one or two unpleasant persons, and it doesn't take more than that to make the "First Land" experience an unpleasant one ("Impeach Bush!" ... Do I have to say more?). Additionally the small parcel sizes force the land owners to cope with an extremely low number of prims available for building, so you'll end up with a high number of relatively simplistic builds... the high number of neighbours also basically prevents the development of a harmonic appearance.

Well, my solution was pooling ressources with some of my friends and getting a well sized plot in a nice coastal sim.

shamless plug! www.azureislands.com

Yeah, Wanda, there's two beautiful waterfronts available next to me. Nice area. Plus it's fun to bug Nexus all the time.

Shush you!

Sorry about you luck this seems to be as bad as mine!

I have been driven from more Sims than protesters at a political speech!



I just got another 512 and refuse to expand upon it. My last one had the best view but soon all so soon a mafia family moved next door and started making a huge art gallery blocking my view. Then the role-playing with the rival gangs was getting on my nerves! Gunfire and explosions were disturbing my harmony .



My advice is for you to get tougher with a number of like minded residents and buy a sim. If you luck is as bad as mine you will be selling it at discount to Anshe Chung after a short time.



I am beginning to think that most of the residents are anti social. I found a rather large Penis on my group’s property. Resident probably thought our beach was a sandbox!



Good Luck! You are going to need it!!!!

Well, it is all a matter of luck. Being here for 2 years I had huge big walls bloking, awful poofs around and clubs that made my computer lag and crash a lot. I have moved a few times also avoiding stuff like that. But I usually buy a lot of land around me and put nice trees far away and dont use that land just to be sure I am very far away from neighbors.

But the worst I had was the other day, that even thou I am far from this person, I was flying to my area and guess what?

Have you ever seen HUGE HUGE BIG DILDOS rotating on the roof of a house?? What kind of decor is that???? Well this house had DILDOS, but nooo, not one dildo but like 10-15 of them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG OMG, I said what the hell!!!!!! This is unbelievable and offensive to me and others. And not only that but had a huge box degrating furries. In which that is so unrespecful even thou I am not a furry but I respect the way they enjoy playing the game.

I reported this immediatedly knowing that other neighbors reported too. But I thought.. gosh do we have to wait days for an answer in email? So I called a linden and he came quick (WOW!!!) and he deleted the darn dildos around!!

It was so funny, because that was so bad, and have never seen that ... I think I can deal with laggy clubs.. but HUGE ROTATING DILDOS all over?????????? NOT!!!

residential only it says on your website - so not an option.
I also just went flying around your sims (I assume "Antilla" is one of them) and obviously you don't care about red security text because i got bounced around like crazy - at one place its both sides of the road.

You know.... it's threads like this one that emphasise the need - again - for Linden Labs to provide building guidelines and zoning as part of the mainland.

It is clear that there is a business and profitability from it - otherwise there wouldn't be demand for it or people offering it - so why do they sit back and let someone else cream off the money that they so desperately need?

Lewis

And people keep asking why I don't go premium or buy my own land.
Gee.... I did own land at one point. It was okay, but I didn't own the entire sim, so shit happened. If I do own land again, I'll own the entire sim, and the sims next to it. And I'll have them all tied into the same servers.

The bad neighbors don't even have to be seen to be a nuisance, especially now with the way they've set scripts to share a little block of processor time.

I can barely even see my neighbors but they have the SIM running at around 22ms script time.. yes a few of my scripts are in there to. I think I have a total of 4 listeners on my plot. I'm hoping I"m not that cause of any major lag but without the Lindens putting in some of the island tools for us here on the mainland I can't tell how much time my scripted items are taking.

My worst neighbor was one that really junked up the place, moved away, then came back and junked up the place again in like 6 months. Including walls that completely surrounded our area except for one small bit. He even had half his crap hanging over onto our land by putting the parent prim on his and linked all the rest to it.

The biggest problem I've seen with strict build regulations.. People don't like it. They like the fast running SIM but they don't want to have to be the one changing their scripts and textures. I've had people complain to me about lag in an area and I go out and say well let's make sure it's not you and their like "WHAT it's obviously not me, it's the guy next door" So I humor them and go look next door and no real gigantic textures or heavy use of scripts so I come back and say "It's not him, shall we look at your area now." Usually they decided to live with a bit of the lag rather than have alot of their stuff re-scripted and re-textured.

Hey, look at it this way. At least we got inventory tabs now!

Everybody likes to think they could be an architect. Most people can't. Similarly everyone likes to think they could be a successful entrepreneur....but most people can't.

In the real world it is difficult to get a hold of the resources to create huge eyesores. And we thankfully don't have particles to manipulate. Here...well it's a lot easier.

Good advice.

My friends and I all started playing SL at a slightly different time and some of us started building in small 512sqm or 1Ksqm plots we had purchased. Most of us ended up being really unhappy with laggy neighbours, ugly builds, ...

So we started scouting the land until we found a newly established sim where we grabbed land together. At one point, we had half the sim supported by members of the group and everybody had a nice place to live amongst friends. We have now gone down a bit to 24Ksqm but we still all enjoy a nice place to live. It helps that the sim, Falcata, has remained a nice place to live in, mostly because it and adjacent sims are in the hands of a few.

Wendel

Seems that the decline of this "residential only", nice, fast sim began with the landlord(s) bending the rules for you in allowing a shop. Residential sims are a preference for many because shops tend to degrade performance, not because there are a massive amount of anticommerce types. Every subsequent rental to yours allowed the rules to be bent as well. Or not? About this "etc etc"... Does that include not using all the prims you pay for and security lines or are you figuring that comes under "respect your neighbor". Is this stuff written in a notecard or is it a just be cool, feel good kind of thing?

What is the landlord's reaction to your objections? I'm assuming that since you've itemized them here and have spoken to at least one of the neighbors that you have had communications with the landlord as well. Maybe there aren't enough renters to go around in spite of having developed a nice, fast sim and they've had to lower their standards in order to avoid tier payments for vacant land.


Excellent, excellent post.


Perhaps you could take note of the sim performance, remove your scripted items, and reevaluate. Do your neighbors know the effect they are having? Participation in SL is not restricted to professionals and I suspect many incidents are unintentional and can be attributed to lack of awareness of the effects one's actions has on sim performance. I can't imagine your neighbors like being in a poor performing sim any more than you do.

hehe, shameless plug followup . We're experimenting with prebuilt areas. They aren't ready yet, but you can check out the beginnings in Canopus. Essentially we're trying to combat the very problem you're having with neighbors. The first experiment is something along the lines of a medieval walled city, though if it's successful other themes will follow.

Oooh send me some info on that, it sound great

a) the nice mainland sims I have managed to discover, I've bought up as much as I could and love my neighbors to pieces. (Pando, Itame, Laothoe).

b) Moved my *home* to Caledon Highlands. Victorian era isn't for everyone, but it seems the leased/rental private sime thing is being done very well here. Just enough covenant to keep it nice and not so much as to make anyone feel terribly restricted.

The pervasive attitude in the greater pat of SL is every man/woman/being for his/her/itself. There is little regard by the masses, especially those still relatiely new to the game, to respect how what they do, own, etc impacts the sims they are in, scripting performance, frame rate, and the like. In the begininnig, this is due to sheer ignorance. The desired growth pattern would be for folks to grow into SL and begin to understand that focusing on how they themselves impact their little corner of SL is the fist step in everyone doing so with better results for everyone. This is, however, a rather utopian view of the world.

The single biggest element lacking in most areas is *community*. Caledon has that spirit as an underlying current always. How to develop that spirit in folks that do not care to be a part of it, is not something I can begin to address. Finding your own little slice of SL that has it already there, well, that's the grail, right? And then someone moves and who knows what comes in. Its a never ending battle.

If I had to make hard financial decisions, I'd dump mainland first and retreat to Caledon. In a heartbeat. The people are respectful, friendly and innovative and I have come home.

Char

Well, patience helps.

My shop is still where my very first piece of land was. Over time, the sim has been held by fewer and fewer people. Some terrible things have come and some have gone. There was a period of time where the fps was horrible due to a club or two.

But overall, if you take a long view, you may be much better off eventually. May even wind up owning half the sim yourself!

Shameless plug: My home is on Azure Islands, which is a wonderful place to live.

coco

P.S. Plus at least one sim in Azure Islands is devoted to shops, so you could maybe put your shop there.

Another shameless plug:

We thrive to develop the most beautiful land in SL and combine it with a sensible Covenant that does not try to take away all of our residents freedom. Just check out http://www.otherland-group.com/ and http://www.otherland-group.com/rules/olg_covenant.html

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it totally depends on your prefernces what is the best solution for you. If you like the Steampunk Theme, the Caledon sims certainly are very nice. And if you want a realistic infrastructure (roads, bridges etc.), the Azure Islands are probably best. Many offers are available, when all you want is your own little island in the sun. The neighborhood can be as chaotic as on the mainland with some of these projects, though.

On The OTHERLAND Archipelago we focus more on nature and realistic landscapes. There are only a few bridges and pathes. The following picture is represantative for some of our sims. (There are island sims and a high lake sim, too.)





All in all I would like to say that exactly for the reasons mentioned by you, resident developed sims are probably the best solution currently for anyone looking for a little more structure and order in the neighborhood.

While nearly total freedom might be one of the guiding principles, the results of that freedom (I only care about me) are not preferable to everyone.

It may be a plug, but I can tell you from experience, Nexus Nash has one of the best locations in SL. I own 9120 sqm on Draco which I pay tier to him. He is always prompt to work out problems, he keeps the bad guys away most the time, when he can. The tier is very reasonable. If you need a nice place to set up or live in SL Azure Islands is the best place to be.

George Flan