Another crazy idea for managing resources

Here's another idea that might help the prim shortage problem... people might hate this idea but it just popped into my head and I thought it was interesting.

What if ALL prims decay... not to public like they do on public land, but to nothingness. Let's say when you create a prim it will last in world for two weeks. Then the prim turns red (or some other visual indication) to show that it's about to expire in the next few days. At that point the owner can renew the prim (perhaps a pie menu option. You wouldn't have to pay for it again) and it will last another two weeks or so til it begins to expire again. What this would do is to introduce the concept of maintenance. If someone isn't dedicated to their build it won't last and those prims will became available to people faster. The more elaborate the build the more work it is to maintain because prims have to be renewed individualy. If someone knew they were going to take a month's vacation or be away for an extended time for some other reason, they could pay for a longer expiration period (preferably for everything on their land so you wouldn't have to go prim by prim), but it would be expensive. It seems to me that people who are really dedicated to SL deserve resources more than someone who pops in once a month. If you removed all the prims being used by people who aren't around the heat would be off the dedicated builders of elaborate structures who are actually around to enjoy them. Any thoughts?

Taxes are already supposed to be for maintenance.

Seems like a lot of extra hassle to me.

Interesting idea, but the actual renewal process would be a long and tedious beast - SL is supposed to be fun!

Add to which you get issues with some scripted objects, for example, where for whatever reason a prim is contained wholly within another. I don't want to pull apart my builds for a meaningless chore, thanks.

What about the last 5% of prims rezzed in a server having a lifetime of only 1 hour. A small warning message would pop up when such a prim was rezzed, so you'd know.

That way folk could still work, still rez a chair or a mug of beer when friends come over.. It wouldn't necessarily stop prim banking, but it would take away some of the urgency and perhaps stops the sudden banking that occurs once prim usage gets into the 90%+ bracket. If there were less fear that one wouldnt be able to rez anything, there would be less motivation to bank anyway.

I think that idea has a lot of merit, actually. You'd have to make sure nobody scripts an object to build a bunch of stuff every hour to consume all the 'transient' quota, though.

But, assuming it isn't abused, it would allow people to work on attachments, get clothes out of a container, put some drinks out for a party as you said. I think this would really help reduce the 'high capacity' anxiety. If we had 9900 permanent quota and 100 hourly quota, who'd really mind moreso than they already mind the cap? (or just raise it to 10100 total, but I don't know if the Lindens would like to do that)

..if it were a couple of hundred prims they would act almost as a working cache - such that so long as no prim was in-world for more than an hour at a time, we could probably continue to work on projects almost unhindered. Just have to be disciplined to store pieces away in the Inv regularly.

Even in the unlikely event that the cache was all used, you would know that given a small period of time you would be able to carry on - *and* whomever was also using them would actually be there nearby, so allowing some dialog if there are issues.

Blind speculation here, but inferring from "world" events:

1. Builds in LindenWorld that have sub-threshold dwell are torn down.
2. Dwell has been implemented world wide.
3. Builds that have no dwell could be considered uninteresting.
4. Your proposal is in fact in the works already, Chip.

This is just one AV's wild speculation with no basis in fact. Any relationship to Lindens living or non-living is completely coincidental.

It is a good idea chip, but I think there may be a few problems with this feature. One is the fact that we may not be able to reach all of our prims to renew them. I know in one of my past builds that I had a few "extra" prims that I didn't realize, probably because I had hit copy more than once, and it rezzed underneath my building. While this would be good because it would get rid of this prim for me, some builds are a little bit too detailed that you may end up missing a few prims here or there. Then you'd have to go around putting prims back onto your build every two weeks. If it would be possible to renew prims while linked, this would alleviate this problem some, but that's assuming that most people would be smart enough builders to use this feature. The second problem would be the idea of having, for every two weeks, to come back and renew your prims. If I can't log into Second Life for a few weeks, i don't wanna come back only to find that my build is gone. That's one thing I like, that I know if i'm gone for a little bit, I will come back and find my build still intact. I do like this idea for players who are less than a month old though. I think it will alleviate the people who come in, build for about a week, never to reappear. Then we have to wait a month or two before their prims disappear. Maybe have them renew their prims once a week or so, maybe by tax day, but allow them to renew it whenever during that week, but if they haven't by the tuesday tax day, then they lose their build. The last problem i'd have would simply be an asthetic one, and may not even be a problem depending on how they'd impliment this feature. I don't want to be flying around looking at a bunch of "red" builds, because the owner hasn't renewed yet. I think this would affect the scenery of some builds, and people may begin thinking their is something wrong with their computer. Maybe make it so only prim owners can see the red on their prims.

if you could pay a fee to extend the life of your prims, people would just pay it.

decay isn't a bad thing. renewal and change will keep the world interesting. but anything the lindens implement to solve the problem of excessive use or hording of prims will have to be strict. methods such as paying for more or selling rights will only nerf their original intention.

i appreciate the fact that they provide in world tests of these types of things e.g. olive. it gives them some realtime feedback and gives us the opportunity to talk here before they push something across the board.

This is actually a pretty interesting idea. One thought that I have is that if taxes were lowered - since they currently cover maintenance - and you had a "Maintenance Account" into which you directed funds, this might work out very well. In RL we have to paint and mow the lawn and change the oil on a periodic basis, so it's not anything that most of us arent used to as a concept. Those of us who dont like that life live in condos and apartments. The important thing is that no neglected or abandoned builds would exist for more than two weeks, rather than the 2 months were have to live with them now.

Nah, I wouldn't go for this except on a much longer time scale than two weeks. I view much of what's built as a hobby. Sometimes I'll dedicate every single evening for a week to getting something built, then not be around to look at it again for a month. Think of it like working on a model train set. You may lose interest for a while, but you come back eventually, and it would be a real shame not to be able to pick up where you left off.

That said, if you are planning to be away for a while, it's a friendly thing to do to pack up as much of your stuff as possible so your friends or groupmates have room to play in your abscence. And don't get overly attached to a particular spot in the world. Moving once in a while is good for peace of mind too.

it would probably help if, when new sims opened on the edge of the world, you rich people packed up all your stuff and moved outward where you could buy mature land and slap up 7000 prims in a day. it would leave the "middle" of the world available to the new characters close to the welcome stations and training grounds in predominately PG areas.

am i making sense here?

Or zone according to accumulated wealth. Increase prices accordingly, with the only 'breaks' being public projects that everyone benefits from. You would get some 'rich' sims and 'poor' ones, but at least when there is a landgrab in a sim, the richies would be beating each other up instead of buying up a couple of acres and locking out the little guy.

Zone a quadrant of a sim that can only be purchased by someone who has less than 10,000 L$ for example. It seems with the concentration of wealth it allows a minority to leverage a majority of resources, land-wise.

SL trailer park!

Since prim usage is allocated by sim, any other in-sim rules (allowed usage, taxes, land prices, etc.) needs to be by sim as well. We've seen what happens if it isn't -- someone comes in and puts up a high-prim shopping center.

Perhaps I should've elaborated.

I meant that the quarter-of-a-sim would be a free-for-all between those within a certain Lindendollar-band of income. This is to prevent those that have say, $L 100K from just snapping it up and not doing anything with it.

Also, I'm making this argument seperate from the experiment going on in Olive. This zoning would apply without really impacting the whole primitive usage thing, unless you would want to adjust the prices for creation as well.

I think that at times, the sim just needs to be reloaded. Some way of preventing stagnating pools of land/dollars/prims from just sitting. I don't know what that would be or the best way to make it happen, but it is a general thought that I've been working on for feature/policy suggestion. Consider it an extreme alpha idea.

mm.. mebbe if instead of destroyin prims ya would do somethin like after a set amount of bein out (unless ya like voluntarity paid triple taxes on it or somethin) stuff would return to yer inventory in a folder in such a way ya could drag the folder back onto yer land and re-rez it automatically in a manner of seconds... it'd help remove useless builds people may have forgotten about... and help get rid of 'artifacts' left behind by people *LONG* gone

(ya could do somethin similar with land.. if someone's unactive and/or hasn visited a piece of land they owned for like a MONTH or two ya could return it to the public, give them their items on it in a folder that they could re-create and return the land to the common stock... (that'd really help with newbies buyin one square in the middle of where other people wanna go their first day an never comin back again)