Huge Chunk Of More Mainland Coming?

I was just browing the Land Store and noticed that the southern continent of the mainland suddenly has lots of little squares added to it that say "No Region Image". I've attached a screenshot below. I presume this is a huge new chunk of mainland that's coming soon? It totals 170 sims!

Actually there's a ton of islands around the mainland that are suddenly visible but that I can't see on the in-world map as well. Here's part of them, there's more to the north.

I think the Lindens have messed up here and made invisible islands visible. There's a group of private island up the top (west of Dreamland). In world only one of those is visible, on the land store map all the rest can be seen (the one in yellow is the visible one in-world:




Looks like Dreamland will be expanding soon then

The latter, that they've accidentally made private regions viewable, seems a reasonable assumption.

There is no reasonable explanation for LL adding sims to their estate. They can't possibly hope to reach profitability if they continue adding to their own estate rather than focusing on the growth of others, managed by people who can handle the job, and the migration of as many residents as possible.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention! Our web team is currently looking into it.

As far as I'm concerned, private islands, visible or otherwise, don't exist. I don't visit them now unless specifically invited (with a good reason), and I see no reason to change that policy.

lol that's a rather blinkered attitude isn't it? Each to their own I guess!

Not at all, private islands have ruined the sense of community that SL once had. People still living on the mainland are considered "2nd Class" or worse... When I came to SL, everyone was equal, and if you had talent, you could advance... now, all you need is anough rl cash for a private island and suddenly you're SL aristocracy...

Hi, thanks for adding your totally unrelated comment on this thread! What I noticed about private islands was incidental as to my main post, about what appears to be a huge new chunk of mainland.

But what either of those have to do with your view that private islands don't exist in "your" world, is beyond me!

Good grief, you appear awfully bitter about something I'm not even sure exists. Sure some people who own private islands wouldn't trade them in to go back to the mainland, but I did and so have plenty of others. And lots of people on the mainland think that spending the money on a private sim makes you a blithering idiot.

Not all private sim owners wish to be painted in the way you would like to do, in much the same way that you as a mainlander, would not like to be painted as a 2nd class citizen, eh?

Sorry Moopf, didn't mean to derail the thread, but it's something I feel strongly about...

That's because those private regions and estates are profitable for Linden Lab. They charge the fees, setup the hardware & software and provide support to the direct customer, then are able to use their time wisely to improve the product while the estate owners, and their employees, manage the day-to-day operations.

The Linden Estate costs them a fortune to maintain because they have to work with every single one of us as individual customers handling all the parcel-related problems and abuse reports and event disputes and billing problems et cetera for thousands of customers every day.

With a viable alternative in their collective lap, they'll be grossly irresponsible to not promote that option and back away from community management as quickly as possible. Now, Philip might choose to commit corporate suicide, prop the mainland community up with his own money for the next several years, and continue to play the happy game. That's the other option. I give either a 50/50 chance at this point in time.

And some of us started out on the mainland, trying to buy land in a large enough block to do what we wanted, and when it just became too much to handle, gave in and bought an island so we could do what we want. Our island is public access, and we welcome everyone to it. I know I don't consider mainlanders to be anything other than peers in the world. Just like in RL, some people have bigger houses and more property, but that doesn't grant them automatic privileges to behave like snooty elitists.

*shrug* I'm involved with two private sims now. In both cases, it was strictly a matter of needing total control over the sim, no "snooty elitism" at all. (Indeed, if we had mainland tools as good as estates I suspect Neualtenburg would have remained on the mainland.)

So, basically, You're saying Phillip Linden's using the mainland as a big vanity estate?

Well, that's possible, but if so I wish he'd get someone to metaphorically clean out the weeds and tidy up the edges of the older parts...

Only if he continues to expand it. LL need their own estate to transition Basics to Premiums to promote eventual private region ownership. They need somewhere to host their virtual community experiments and demonstrate their own uses of the software and for residents with life accounts to own land.

They have uses for it; but permanent parcel rental directly to an ever growing customer base is clearly not a productive business for them. It requires too many people and too much time. While they have people eager to perform these functions to expand the woarhald, the best solution is to cap their own estate and work toward dealing mostly with continental managers as their direct customer group.

I know we've already discussed this, but I'd like to make the point again...

The best way to do this would be to let people who own entire sims take them over as non-Linden mainland estates, and when someone buys a whole sim at auction they can get it as an estate from the get-go.

Just how are mainland land owners treated as second class? How can you even know who owns mainland land and who owns islands? When you bring up somebody's profile it doesn't list any land holdings? How could you know? If I'm expected to classify people, I need the tools to do it!

I really wish somebody would put out a rough map of the world with the major landmasses labelled (like "this is dreamland" and "this is the atoll, otherwise known as ____" ... I've lived on the bloody continent for almost six months and still don't know a name for it other than "the atoll" or "the northern continent of the mainland".

I've considered doing the map part myself.

I agree... That hard edge to the east needs to be softened a bit. It does look very odd. They finished off the attoll continent nicely though.

The mainland isn't rubbish, especially if you're surrounded by friends and people you know. It's still a great spot and you don't have to stress out about a ridiculously high tier bill. I would imagine SL would become very stressful when you're paying the equivalent of a car payment every month for it.

Hang on to your old land Siobhan, and enjoy it. Just because it's not a cookie-cutter tropical island in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean it's not valuable.