Zoning in exchange for Point-to-Point teleporting

I'm not sure if I'm opening up an old can of worms here. My guess is I am, but other things I've discussed have probably been old topics as well.

I've been giving alot of thought about telehubs. I realize that telehubs give value to land, and that they tend to act as an indirect means of seperating commercial areas from residential areas. The problem I have is that, they seem like the incorrect tool for the job. There will be tons of people upset about their land loosing value, and their market edge if telehubs are eliminated, but can another tool be used to do the things telehubs now do without taking away point to point teleporting that could benefit everyone?

There are two problems to address here. One problem is in minimizing the negative effects telehub land owners will experience in a point to point teleporting implementation. The other problem is the protection of those who have chosen far locations to avoid commercial projects moving to their area. Can both of these groups be protected and still implement the point to point teleportation?

Some people are going to hate me for saying this, but wouldn't a form of zoning take care of the current benefits of telehubs in a more direct fashion? I have thought about the zoning issue, and I think there is a way it could be implemented in a beneficial way to as many people as possible.

It is already known that businesses try to cluster around telehubs, mid-ranged areas tend to be mixed, and far areas tend to normally be claimed by residential areas or areas that do not wish large amounts of traffic. There is still the problem that this is not the case for all areas at these ranges, but the biggest argument I can come up with against point to point teleportation is the change of situation for these areas.

Now to keep the commercial area happy, you could make a Commercial zone that gives extra benefit to the commercial owner. You could perhaps lower their event listing fees and find listing fees. You could provide more tools for tracking transactions, visitors, and more features for tracking and changing prices of objects sold on the land. You could make renting a built in feature to make malls rent their store spots easier. I'm sure there are other advantages you could give to Commercial areas as well to promote commerce and retain land value.

The mixed areas you could keep happy, by not changing at all.

The areas trying to avoid traffic could be kept happy by making a peice of land that restricted residents from listing events, or listing in find. Pay and buy could also be disabled for these areas to try to promote a lack of commerce and traffic.

People would most likely be up in arms if you forced them to change to these zones based on their distance away from the telehubs, but the process could instead be implemented with some form of voting system of the existing residents to decide which zone they would like their sim to be. It would be a good idea if an extreme majority such as 2/3 would be needed to make a change from the current way things already are. This way the residents at least have a choice of what will happen to their land. If you do this, however, the telehub lands would have the chance to chose to remain commercial with extra features to lessen their loss in value, and the residential areas far from the hubs would have the chance to chose protection from having to move every time commerce moves next door.

If zones took the place of what telehubs do, do you think it would be more likely to implement the point to point telporting after the groups benefiting from telehubs are protected?

I may be wrong but I've yet to have anyone point out an example of where the land around a telehub is acutally made more valuable simply because it is near a telehub

Not that this is an accurate picture of the entire population of SL, but it is pretty telling.

/120/79/61708/1.html

I have recently begun to wonder why land near a telehub is deemed as more valuable seeing as how I TP to a hub, take off and fly away to my destination. I pretty much see NOTHING at a hub because it takes too long to rez. I never questioned the telehubs until someone started requestiong point to point teleporting. I figured they were just a way of life. Well, I ran this poll, and it seems to indicate that the majority of players do what I do...so if that is the case, what would make Telehub land so valuable? People in the thread posted above indicate that they do more exploring near their destination than they do near the telehubs because, generally speaking, the hubs are too laggy and take too long to rez.
Someone argued that the plots near a telehub get more traffic (dwell)...however, to get any $$ from traffic someone must stay on the land parcel for at least 5 minutes, how does that happend when almost 75 percent of the players fly right over immediately?

Now I understand there are certain activity sims, games, etc. that require a common TP point and those have value. My question is wouldn't it be more beneficial to offer a new $L sink by allowing people to pay $10L - $25L for point to point TP-ing than to continue protecting the seemingly imagined value of telehub land? It could be turned off in areas where the TP point is absolutely necessary to the function of the sim. Not even 10 % spend enough time to affect the dwell in a telehub area or to provide those places with any type of business unless that business was their desired destination. People who are really annoyed by telehubs have already found a way around them...they use ROAM.

I'd really like to know what businesses would be hurt, and how exactly they would be hurt, if point to point TP-ing was implemented! Just to understand the importance of protecting the supposed value of the land.

Well from personal experience, I have found that the closer a piece of land is to a telehub, the more I can sell the piece of land for. I have heard of others with the same experience. If people pay more for a piece of land, then it is worth more. To know why it is worth more, you would have to ask the people who bought the teleport plots how much more money they made near a telehub compared with other land.

I have also been negotiating prices lately, something I used to not do. In negotiating prices on the truly far pieces of land I own, I have heard the repeated comment that at least no clubs or malls would move next door.

I have also read this post in the hotline:
/invalid_link.html

This is what I'm basing my guess of the benefit of telehubs on. I have asked the currently unanswered question of why telehubs exists in the hotline forum here:
/invalid_link.html

The idea of using point to point teleporting as a new sink is an excellent idea. Every feature that costs $L can help balance out the current imbalance of the market. If the effect on the residents turns out to be the reason they haven't implemented this feature, then some form of compromise needs to be found.

I just want to make sure I understand so far...you can sell land for more, which means people are willing to pay more for telehub land to start businesses...I wonder if they have seen the success they hope for.

As for the 2nd thread you posted...I think any land-dealer is in favor of keeping up the seeming illusion of increased value(usefulness) of telehub land...I think I'm going to investigate this more. If it really is an illusion that land near telehubs do better business and get more traffic(dwell) then people are being duped out of a lot of money for those plots. It'd be a shame to see the whole of SL miss out on an opportunity to improve the experience by being able to TP point to point and for the "economy" to share in the benefit by people having to pay to use it. Those who are low in $L or who don't want to spend it will still use the telehubs anyway. Seems like businesses that are far from telehubs would benefit from point to point since maybe people would shop there more if they didn't have to fly for 2 minutes first.

That is the problem. No matter what you do, you are giving a new advantage to some, and taking an old avantage away from others. I personally don't know if telehub value is an illusion or not. You could be right, I would be interested in what you find out. If you take away what causes people to pay more for telehub land, then you make everyone that bought telehub land for a business unable to regain the money they spent. I normally own very little telehub land myself. I prefer playing on the cheap side of the market. Even on differences of 300 meters and 800 I see a difference in price, however. I am sure some land sellers that work the more valuable side of the market will be hurt greatly by telehub land losing its value. The business owner that bought the telehub land would be hurt as well though.

Simple. Allow players to tp directly to any sim. Refrain from implementing zoning. I do not see how this would be an issue. Players could benefit tremendously if they could teleport anywhere. Players would have limited freedom if zoming was in place.

Therefore, allow for teleporting, and refrain from zoning. What is the issue?

The issue is getting Linden Labs to actually do it. Linden Labs has made statements that they try to examine the effects a change will have on all residents. From the old hotline post I found, I assume the reason they don't do point to point teleporting, is because of the negative effects large amount of residents would suffer from its implementation.

I agree that players would benefit tremendously, but large amount of people would be upset. I would actually profit more if point to point teleporting was implemented with no regard to current telehub land owners. I own more land far from a telehub than near. I will take you to my land pieces one by one if you want to test me.

Now zoning takes away freedom, but sometimes freedom does not always lead to the best situation. Anarchy is utter freedom, but most people do not want to live in an anarchy. There are some people that want to be in high traffic areas, there are some that don't want to be in high traffic areas. If you are in a current low traffic area that becomes high traffic, you have to sell your land most likely to someone like me that will only be willing to buy at a price that will allow me to profit. You then have to buy land from the rest of the market for most likely more than what you sold for. Why should people have to constantly move to constantly find new land the way they want it? If you want unregulated land, part of my suggestion is that unregulated land remain available. I'm not saying all land should be regulated.

If you have a desirable, popular club or mall or attraction of any sort, people *will* fly to it regardless of distance from a telehub.

The minute some person starts shifting out of newbie status and gets savvy to the myriad flight speed products or ROAM or the like, "telehub land" and distance from a telehub becomes completely irrelevant. New players don't really have the the money to spend anyway.

The biggest factor to improving traffic is whether or not you have a popular attraction of some sort near your property (or whether your property itself is a popular attraction)--not how close you are to a telehub.

As regards zoning, I agree that might be a useful thing for LL to implement, but only moving forward. Not retroactively. It can be distressing for a person looking for a quiet, mostly residential sim to have a club move into the still unsold plots on the sim. Conversely, it's a pain for club owners to deal with upset residents in neighboring plots who feel that they have some right to a sim with no clubs in it.

On the other hand, though, the current non-zoned system keeps the laggier builds from becoming too densely crowded into one sim, thereby rendering the entire sim effectively unusable.

It's a tough call.

If people really want zoned land, Anshe Chung is providing plenty of it. Alternatively, smart buying habits can protect you somewhat. If you buy a plot in a newly opened sim that has tons of available plots on it, you are taking your chances. If you scout around and buy the last few plots in an already populated sim, you have a better idea of what you're getting into.

The illusion of telehub land lending success to your business is very real. Savvy telehub land owners market that illusion for months at a time. Poor souls pay them reasonable rents for weeks before realizing that they need to actually work rather than relying on hubs to magically produce willing patrons with pockets full of Lindens. The newly reformed business owners then buy their own land, centralize their shops, advertise, and start making enough sales to support their account and tier payments.

There are, of course, a steady stream of new residents to replace them at the malls. Eventually, the land owners begins to realize that the hub area is dying. They call it "dying" because the only people who use the hub are ones headed for established areas. Those are the ones who hit the hub and fly straight up to reach their destination. Traffic at the hub dies; traffic in the stores dies; the land owner executes one final scam by selling the land itself to a hopeful person that believes they will just sit back and watch the rents roll in.

A really good land owner, will watch the surrounding sims. After a few months, when the people are moving on and lots of land in the surrounding sims is for sale, they'll repurchase the telehub land from the broke, dejected sucker they sold it to, for a minimal amount of money and rebuild the mall. With new blood in the surrounding sims, traffic will be high for several weeks and the land owner will collect vast amounts of rent as the cycle runs again.

To answer your primary question, there is no reasonable argument for retaining telehubs. They severly damage account retention by causing vast amounts of useless download lag and by granting LL the appearance of being silly and unprofessional. It does no good to talk to them about it though because the same Linden will agree that hubs are useless and anticommunity one day, then agree with another group that they're paramount to the proper functioning of the world the next.

It pretty much boils down to the fact that if we want a virtual world with p2p teleportation, we'll have to build it ourselves. We can bill it as "a world that the residents build themselves" and sleep nights knowing that it's true.

I find Dark's initial analysis of the telehub situation quite persuasive. I also find his suggestion of "zoning" to placate the various interest groups to be logical too. I might support it but for one thing. You have only to read it through to see that the manhours Linden would have to put in would be very large, and would push to the back burner all sorts of things we need much more. So, for me, its a case of "good idea, but forget it"

When resources are limited, priorities have to be followed, and much good stuff must be abandoned or extensively postponed.

We could all volunteer to double our subscription entirely to fund a big increase in the developement team - but I don't see it happening.

My suggestion is to leave well alone, or introduce p2ptp, but make it pretty expensive, like L$30-40.

I have posted my reasoning for this separately, here:

/130/d6/62069/1.html#post647466

So if I understand that correctly you believe that the only real value in the telehub land is through the exploitation new members ignorance? That's what I thought it was. *shakes head*

I'm not even propsing taking away the telehubs...I'm just proposing allowing p2p TP as a new sink to remove $L from the economy and hopefully help to balance it. I know this was someone else's idea but it just makes so much sense. Those who are new, don't have much $L or want to explore will still do so, those who find it annoying and fly straight out will be able to get to their destinations faster without as much hassle. And of course I realize there are sims that are meant to have a "starting point" and p2p could be disabled for those sims.

What am I missing? This seems so simple and obvious....

The issue is preventing two clubs from opening up on either side of your 1024 lot, lagging you out of the land you paid for.

The only way to prevent this is to either coerce (or force) folks with commercial ambitions to group together, leaving some areas of SL safe for more "Residential" pursuits.

It's a win/win situatino, really... the commercial areas get a ton of traffic (more traffic = more sales = more money), and the residential areas get some peace and quiet for once.

This is why we have zoning rules in the real world too.

LF

I agree that zoning would help alleviate the lag issue when multiple clubs/tringo, etc...open up near your once peaceful and beautiful home...I have a wharehouse right on my property line that doesn't even cause lag but is horrendous to look at and which has a texture on the sign that shows through any wall I try to put up to block the view...weird.

I think that perhaps the different zones would end up with different land prices though. Someone who bought a plot initially to build a home would later want to set up a store and would then have to move? what about a case like me....I have a plot that is mostly just for a home, my hubby built a club that's never really been used for inviting friends over to party, and I built a couple of pre-fab houses that I put boxes out on my deck in-case someone wants to buy them. Would this be acceptable in a residential zone? It could get very confusing and people would be constantly moving around SL trying to make sure they stayed within the proper type of zone.

+ and - 's to everything I suppose.

The point to point teleporting at a high cost that is being mentioned does sound like a very reasonable idea to me. It would keep the telehubs without completely devaluing the telehub land.

As for the value of telehub land being exploitation, I have a different opinion. The value of something is based on what someone else will pay you for it, period. You can have the most useful gadget in the world, but if no one wants to pay you for it, it has no value to anyone but you. The question of telehub land value being an illusion is not a question of exploitation. It is a question of the education of the general population into how much something will be worth to them. When I see or sell land near a telehub, I see phrases like, "near telehub." I don't see phrases saying that you will be an overnight success if you buy this land. These people are being sold land near a telehub, they are not being sold success by a telehub. They get what they were told they would get. Whether their opinions are correct about the usefulness of the telehub is their responsibility.

I currently have about six factors that I plug into a scripted object that I use to estimate land prices. Closeness to the telehub is one of them. The reason, is because whether I or someone else owns that land, the closeness to the telehub effects people's willingness to buy at higher prices. I sometime sell at bad prices to test times it takes to sell at high or low prices, and I am getting a better and better idea of what people are willing to pay for different things. If people learn that telehubs are an illusion, the prices will change in value naturally, and i will have to change my equation. Should a land seller sell cheaper than the value people are willing to sell, because others have made mistakes in their reasoning?

As long as telehubs exist, people will use them as a factor to value land. The only reason there should be any consideration at all for these folks, is that all people near a telehub will lose value to their land. This includes people with distances as far as 300 meters. They are beyond the midpoint of land close and far. Alot of residents will be effected, business and non-business alike. Business will be likely hit more, since they tend to cluster near the telehub, but they still will not be the only ones.

Now if zones are ever adopted, then as musicteacher pointed out, they will have different values. The more restrictions land has, the cheaper it becomes, the more benefits a land has, the more expensive it becomes. The zones I have suggested would have residential lands cheap, mixed unrestricted lands in the middle, and commercial lands as the most expensive. If zones exist, you would still freely be able to chose what type of land you wanted. If you wanted no restrictions, then you should buy in a place with no restrictions. My suggestion is to add restrictions to some areas and benefits to other areas, but I have not suggested that anyone be forced to chose one area rather than the other. People still always have the choice of what they want to buy, and what they don't want to buy.

Everyone still has the choice to buy PG land if they want PG material around them. Those that want Mature material have the choice to buy Mature land. No one is forcing you to buy the restricted PG land if you don't want to.

The semantics of "exploitation" are beside the point. So is the farcicle premise that properties a few sims away from the nearest telehub are not burdened with lagging scripts and ugly textures. In fact, the notion that telehub challenged sims aren't littered with clubs and shops is wholly false. Not that clubs and shops necessarily cause lag et cetera et cetera.

The antip2ps have an arsenal of untrue, unrelated assertions to detract from the point that the SL population needs p2p capability. It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with telehubs. But even the Lindens believe that it does leaving us with no hope. The anitip2ps win. Everybody loses.

It is not true in every case, but I myself have purposely moved my house to an area far from the teleports to avoid commercial areas moving nearby. I have also left my script headquarters in an area that is far from telehubs, because it continues to have less lag then my other land. It is not always true that far land is less laggy and less commercial, but it is true much of the time.

I wonder how much is much? I know a good number of people who originally bought land far away from hubs to be isolated from ugliness and lag. I know none, wait I take that back, no it is none that enjoy such freedom. Maybe it's more fair to say that commercialism has nothing to do with ugliness and lag. I often help lagbust far away "residential" sims. Most of them, well that's an exageration, I really only mean to say that most of them have just as many scripts running and textures downloading as the far away telehub sim, and every intervening sim, that I had to wade through to get there in the first place.

P2P would at least let me download and deal with one sim's worth of massive data at a time rather than several. I suppose it's also fair to say that I care about p2p ruining the value of hub land as much as those land owners care about forced telehub travel ruining my enjoyment of inworld travel.

It's all academic anyway. P2P is dead to LL. Ha Ha that's not true. Lindens use it all the time. Residential p2p is dead to LL.

If telehubs truly have no benefit, then find a way to convince Linden Labs of this. I started out not being able to come up with any benefits for telehubs at all. I still would love to see point to point teleporting. I'm just trying to find a way that would eliminate the blocks that are keeping Linden Labs from doing this. Others have ideas that may work better than mine, such as musicteacher's. If so, great.

I used the idea of zoning, because I thought it could kill two birds with one stone of protecting the interest of commercial areas and protecting the little guy fleeing high traffic areas. High traffic is the thing that commercial areas seek. It is this that can be protected against. I'm not trying to protect people from ugly and scripts.

No one can force an area to be low traffic, why not let people have areas that can't be forced into becoming high traffic.

This is the misconception that casts reason to the wind. High traffic is what good commercial areas PRODUCE.

I've seen countless shops fail in existing high traffic areas and, conversely, too many well tended and out-of-the-way places become overwhelmingly popular, to believe that telehubs = successful commerce just because they funnel people who are traveling from one place to another.

I have no problem with realistic zoning. But it's not necessary to argue the virtues of telehubs, or compensating programs, in order to support p2p. It's also not necessary to isolate and tear down LL roadblocks. The need for p2p is blatently obvious. The fact that talk of telehubs is consistently thrown into the discussions clearly indicates that they see the need and have no reasonable argument against it.

LL have simply lost their nerve on this one. There's no way to work around it. It's their world.

Azure Islands.... zoned.

My classes are never lagged by clubs, 100's or vendors, or even huge events.

What....if......

What if the SL grid map had an extra tab showing TRAFFIC? So we could see hotspots, patches, dwell from flashcrowds and events, and flow-on in surrounding parcels.

Now, wouldn't that be an interesting thing? I know I would spend a lot of time studying it. A wonderful resource for looking at the behaviours of our little society and economy.

Just thinking out loud.

Looking at the issue of zoning alone.

What are people upset about when neighbors are successful at a commercial pursuit is the traffic they PRODUCE. They are upset about large amounts of people coming to the sim. Large amounts of people in the sim means that the sim will crawl to a halt in speed compared to a relatively empty sim people wise.

A commercial area wants people to come in droves. They want people at their events. They want people looking at and buying their products. They want people to come dance in their clubs. There is no way for people to stop second lifers from coming in droves around a successful area. There is a way to stop an area from having few people in the sim. Unfortunately, there is a very real conflict between the two.

You have one group of people with their interests protected, you have another group with thier interests not protected. If good commercial areas producing traffic is a myth, then there would be no conflict between those that have residential pursuits and those that have commercial pursuits. Have you really seen no conflict between the two?

As for there being no need to talk about the issues together. This is just one attempt to find a work around. Others have the idea of peer to peer being a sink as a work around. Your solution is that there is no solution. Your idea is that Linden Labs is gutless and will never change anyway. Do you have more to offer than it is hopeless?

That sir, was likely your fatal mistake as it is sorta like trying to wrap your head around the famed Chewbacca Defense, oh and what Kharmon said.

Yes and I readily agree with all of this. But maintaining that telehubs help solve the problem is foolish. They haven't, don't and never will.



After working on this for nearly two years, having the discussions derailed by the same senseless arguments dozens of times, being led down the primrose path by Lindens' clever market speak, and considering the most recent official statement, no. I'm fresh out of anything but hopelessness.

I'll go do something else now and let y'all beat your heads against a wall for no apparent reason. Mine's bloody enough.

I like it. But of course, it's development effort, perhaps quite considerable. Scarce resource = rationing= priorities rule. Not much chance I'm afraid. Much more important things are waiting.