Homeowner's Association? Say what?

I was the mayor (okay, my title was actually Pharaoh) of a member-built village in There that had a theme, building code, a common area, town hall meetings, and community events. We had a treasury -- including a hardship fund for when a villager might need help with rent. Our members worked together on several large projects, like a "community transit system" teleportation ring connecting our village and others, and a somewhat similar system of shopping kiosks for inworld shopping. We also had a tool for tracking when everyone's rent was due, as well as for tracking new arrivals to the neighborhood (hail village Grand Vizier iay, a brilliant coder), custom-built objects (like water and CAMELS!), a town radio station that also streamed ambient sounds and the bell of the town clock, etc. At Oasis Village's peak, we had about 25 or 30 villagers. At last report, the Oasis is still there on the Dune Valley canyon rim above Mirage after two whole years as of this month, even though some of the founders have moved on. And we did it with There group tools limited at the time to pretty much just money transfer and a messaging system & invitation system, with no group land management tools at all.

So yeah, it can be done.

Not *entirely* worthless. Forseti. Like Kim I built up a community in another virtual world, and had an interesting experience with would-be wreckers.

Since the TSO economy was a joke there were only two things for the creative/workaholic types to do in that game: architecture and starting your own neighborhood. Revolt Headquarters was started on carefully chosen real estate in Test Center (roughly analogous to a preview grid that never gets wiped). I would build for people who lived there, and encouraged talented newcomers to get involved in building there too. The place looked different and better on the map, and that attracted new residents. It's human nature -- people like to live in 'the best', 'most prestigous', *insert marketing slogan here*.

The metric for success of a hood in TSO was size. Eventually Revolt Headquarters was the biggest in Test Center, but that size came at a cost to competing neighborhoods, particularly the mafia ones, which I deliberately targetted because it was fun.

Of course taking aim at the mafias, particularly their so-called 'president' and 'government of Test Center', ensured that all Revolt Headquarters residents were considered prime targets for mafia intimidation. Their intimidation tool was the TSO equivalent of gang-bang neg rating. It's interesting to see how that aspect of game mechanics -- a persistent negative mark on the avatar profile -- can become such a vital concern to people in the community. Nice ladies would tell me they felt 'violated'. My straw man avatar Nobody, who served as a fake presidential candidate, received serious advice from a mafia guy to avoid acquiring those marks, because they make you look owned.

So we had a running war with mafias, and people bonded as a community, and felt caught up in the drama. I made an alt who resembled a distinguished businessman, and sent him on a berzerker rampage in a mafia hangout to see how many opponents I could tag. It was funny, and might have attracted more mafia attention to Revolt Headquarters when I said, 'hah -- that was me'. Hey -- drama sells. People like to be caught up in something, although most would prefer to be caught up in something marvelous.

Look at the threads that garner the most attention on these forums. It's not always the sunny ones! Sims are competing for attention and mind share too. Obviously a marvelous experience is the best thing to offer potential participants and customers and visitors, but motivated flaky opponents can be a nice additional counterpoint. One caveat: in TSO griefers used a symbolic mark as a weapon, but in SL some use unacceptable methods. So my experience is only applicable to private islands with the estate tools available to enforce a sim-wide permanent ban against opponents whose methods go over the line.

This is exactly how it was explained to me. Though I don't think the experiment provides the answer.

And I'm not sure if they were also trying to find out if new residents who wanted a place that looks good and is furnished for them would stay once they were abandoned by the sim overlords to live in a lawless, virtual slum.

The Blumfield Residents Association has formed. A meeting will be held soon. I certainly hope we all have some control over our neighborhood.

good luck! (and I mean that seriously lol)


traxx, that's a wild story