P2P - How to make it work?

Except he hasnt' said exactly WHAT his concern is.

One of my ideas was to have dwell increase in proximity to other high dwell areas.
So for example, if my land gets a traffic of 300 a day, and another store opens beside me and gets 200 traffic per day, we both get a bonus so we'd end up with the equivalent of 320 and 230 traffic respectively (ie 10% of theirs is added to mine and vice versa, just for example's sake).

This would of course work for all neighbouring plots, the end result is that high traffic areas generate income for surrounding plots via dwell, encouraging shopping areas to cluster together to maximise this income, it also makes the land itself more valuable as it has a higher base income than a similar undeveloped plot of land.
So a nice shopping area with well designed shops and good products could very quickly gain a ton of cash without actually selling anything! While poorly designed stores will gain little (ie stores that make up 90% of the monstrosities you see at telehubs).

The only disadvantages of this are:
- Where does the extra money come from?
- Land barons need to work harder to keep track of the popular areas as they will keep moving/appearing.

The first could be solved with teleport costs, perhaps a user can have say 1 direct landmark, this is their home (via the world menu). Any more direct landmarks they wish to save cost X amount of money a go but cost nothing after that.
Beyond that, direct teleporting would be an option that has to be ENABLED on a per parcel basis, and it costs money per week, just like listing your parcel in find places. If you don't want direct teleports to your land other than those using home/landmarks, then you leave it disabled and it doesn't cost a penny.
The second disadvantage isn't really a problem for the community as a whole, and might be a good thing =)

This is an interesting idea. It is, however, not necessary as shopping areas are already encouraged to group together to increase sales. Is the point of a shop to make money through sales or dwell?

This might be an interesting concept to foster groupings of other types of areas that do rely primarily on dwell, as opposed to sales. Clubs, Museums, Park areas, for instance.

>> I. How can we maintain traffic at telehubs?

I don't see this as something that should be a "governmental" goal. The telehub lots are already commercial centers ... let them maintain that status or lose it based on the quality of their content and presentation.

>> II. How can land owners get value that reflect the higher auction prices for telehub land?

IMO, this is only applicable to those very few people who did not have a chance to develop recently-purchased telehub sims prior to the LL announcement. If someone had a chance to develop and use the land prior, then they've had a fair chance to recoup costs. No harm, no foul. For those few that did take an unfair hit, any recompense should be NEEDS based. Those who have made plenty in the market should accept this as an unexpected set-back and devise their own methods for coping.

>> III. How to encourage commercial zoning / urban development near those centers?

I would personally LOVE to see a system of zoning instituted at the sim/region level. Here's one idea: for all newly-purchased sims, the buyer must declare a zoning for the entire sim: commercial or residential or whatever. The market will control the distribution of land among the use classes. Too much commercial? Price will go down. But I don't see the current telehub sims as a special case. For existing sims, perhaps a vote of land-owners of the sim with each sq meter owned counting as one vote?

>> IV. How to discourage malls/clubs/stores spread into remote areas?

Same answer as III, except there will be no such thing as a "remote area" any longer.

V. How to maintain privacy?

Land owner allows/disallows direct teleporting to the property, and teleporting agents always arrive at the landing point.

VI. How to prevent lag from P2P-zappers (=people teleporting every 30 seconds)?

I'm not convinced that this will be a problem, but one idea: build lag into repeated teleporting for the individual so that lag doesn't affect the rest of us. For example, if an agent has teleported in the last 60 seconds, delay the teleport request until 60 seconds has elapsed. Or only allow a teleport if the agent has moved X meters from his arrival point.

VII. How to still give people sense for geography/space?

This is one of the important things to me. I am against P2P teleporting, because it will eliminate much of the "sense of place" ... removing much of the "world" from our virtual world.

When I fly, I fly high enough that the ground does not get drawn on my client. One, it (hopefully) eliminates lag and two, it eliminates the pain of bumping off partially-rezzed buildings.

A sense of geography and space for me is created not the journey, but the destination.

I think the main thing to consider is what is best encouraged. While I'm all for freedom, I think that for the benefit of the economy and the world in general we still need encourage clustering. But I think that the less uniform (ie like telehubs) it is, the better! As telehubs are to much of a rare commodity, it is far too difficult for a small business to get a good foothold if it can't get land near a hub, and it has to rely on advertising instead, which can be a negative investment (and just as difficult to get cheaply and in good places!).

Anything that encourages clusters of stores is good, and unrestricted direct teleporting definitely does not do this.

I think that the ability to teleport to more than one place directly is the first step, being able to get quickly to your frequent haunts like clubs, games etc is the main gripe that people have. Exploring is IMO more fun if you have to fly from a hub to a place you want to visit, once you're past the hub's catastrophe of a shopping area, you can whizz past all sorts of interesting things on the way to where you decided to go.
Once you're there you can set a direct landmark if you wish to come back again and again, alternatively you could get one of these to begin with (traded from a friend) but when exploring for yourself, the journey is part of the fun in SL. Mainly because you're flying which rocks, wheras being cooped up in a tiny car/train/aeroplane for 9 or more hours certainly does not =)

Capitalism.

You bought Apple stock.
You should have bought Microsoft stock.

On to the next play!

You get it.

You deserve the Bergman capitalism award.

In the interest of helping out the SL community, I have begun a blog that will focus on economic issues.

http://sleconomyblog.blogspot.com/

Oh.. My... God...

I guess I am just an old mean man but....

I honestly don't see how any business be it at a telehub or next to a high dwell or what have you should be ENTITLED to any sort of compensation. Being in Business is a risk. Yes business owners do risk assements. Sometimes those risk assesments miss something. Failure of vision in a risk assment does not equal entitlement to compensation. It is mearly another risk of doing business.

Regardless of telehubs or P2P. A business that provides a good product, excellent service and a rational price will do reasonably well wherever it is located. This may be an old formula but it does work.

The debate should not be how to restrict, charge for or otherwise stymie P2P. It should be ok it is coming how do we a businesspersons change what WE do to make the advent of P2P a positive thing for our businesses.

just my L$0.02

Agreed!

It's their world, they OWN all of us and it!!

Bingo!

Excellent!

Seven words before your highlighted text.

I was discussing this with Ron Overdrive yesterday and I liked one of his ideas, but with some adjustments.

Basically giving users the ability to create their own hubs.

I'm thinking, best way to do this would be to have a special type of group which owners of adjacent land parcels (or of parcels in the same sim) can create, like a "land developer group" for that sim.
This group, if it owns a plot of land (e.g a small plot in most cases) then it may make this a telehub. It would require some initial investment, say L$1000 to make it a telehub, and the groups members would be charged equally to keep it running (perhaps a flat-fee per member rather than dividing it).
This hub is then used by SL when determining where to put someone.

Extra rules for the hub are:
In addition to the prims used by the hub targets (a default object which is rezzed after you pay for the hub ability, is not modifyable and de-rezzes if the hub is switched off. Can be re-positioned within the land though), each group-member can place a small number of prims (lets say just the land's allowance divided evenly). These can be used for adverts, vendors, taxi objects etc.

This allows for players to gather their stores collaboratively together BEFORE making the hub. Meaning they can actually put some thought into it, rather than scrabbling for hub land and building the ugliest, most obtrusive store that they possibly can.

This is basically Ron's idea with some ideas for implimenting it. If this is how hubs now work, and direct teleportation is limited to landmarks (perhaps paid-for landmarks to cut down on them) then this seems a good system.

Current hub-land still has the advantage that the telehub is free, but they will still lose values as good businesses move with other good ones to form more stylish, attractive and less laggy areas of their own.

I'm mostly with Saul and Templar and musicTeacher on these ... problems. These aren't over-arching issues to me. Personally I'd rather we didn't have any teleporting. Makes no sense to me in a virtual space with simulated land.

That said, there is at least one very good option available that was mentioned months ago on these forums. It requires no LL intervention, just some capitalist creativity (and a bit of haste, the advantage will be lost if not implemented before the change). No doubt there are other ways to take advantage of those locations without artificial LL involvement. I hope to see them all.

I agree on fees for P2P teleportation. That'll encourage newbies to use the telehub system, since they won't want to spend 10l$ (sum chosen for convienience) per teleport. In addition, the P2P fees would help "destroy" some of the L$ that are created by LL to pay stipends when the upload fees/rating fees don't cover the stipend amount.

I'd also like to see landing pads and such for people to teleport to, sort of "mini telehubs." I have heard the idea of a central landing zone in every sim, instead of a telehub serving many sims. I like this, as it places people in close proximity to where they want to go without being obnoxious.

This may be an unrelated issue, but I've heard summat about people being able to port directly to people on their friends list, without the person they're porting to inviting them. I'd like to see some sort of dialogue box that comes down to tell you that someone wants to port next to you, and gives you the option of telling them to bugger off, and send them to the nearest telehub/landing zone. I don't know about everyone else, but I don't want people popping in on top of my head when I'm in a meeting or talking to a client, or summat, unless I want them to.

anyway, those are my concerns on the issue.

CCC

There should be no compensation.

1) Land near a telehub cost extra, but you DID get extra value from it, more customers came and so on. So you are already even. And you are getting tons of notice before the change takes effect.

2) Your telehub land will lose a little value, but ALL YOUR NON-TELEHUB land will GAIN a little value. You can put a store etc. on it and it won't be penalized for being 'out in the country'. So you STAY even.

No compensation is necessary.

Therein lies a major problem, as this means that RESIDENTIAL land also goes up in cost, meaning that buying land to put a house on becomes less affordable. I'm pretty sure there are more houses/non-profit buildings than shops, perhaps not more than ALL businesses combined, but it's difficult to measure many of them.

Please do not restrict P2P in any way. As a land owner I also do not feel the need for any compensation for telehub land. I would rather people have convenient transportation.

Thanks

I had some time to think about this, thinking back to my first day as a resident in sl, this was during a trial for basic before i upgraded, I arrived in the welcome area during the night cycle, then i found my friend on the map and teleported to her, found myself at this hub in the middle of a snow sim, it was dark, i saw this red beacon with an arrow so i tried to follow it but there was a very large mountain in the way, i was flying up and down, hitting buildings trying to get closer to the beacon but it seemed like she was in the middle of the mountain, after a few minutes i gave up and rather shyly asked for her help as i was lost.

Now although i first thought p2p should be for premium members to get conversions, i think you really need to keep the customers here in the firstplace once they have joined, Its already confusing enough learning everything about sl in your first few weeks without having to deal with teleporting to one place and finding yourself at a hub in the middle of a mess then try and fly out into a lag mess as you get stuck in buildings as they rez around you.

So old hub locations may get more pleasant as only the people that want to be there will be there and the people passing through wont hog the sims resources, combined if you offer a better customer experience and remember your land will be marked on the map next to a gathering area of some sort, which will get traffic, success will all depend if you can embrace the new type of business needed, which is more like how private island malls have attracted people

Exactly, Nathan.

Perhaps now it means that to be popular people will actually have to work harder to provide a better service, prices, whatever, to attract visitors, rather than being able to buy more expensive land closer to telehubs by having more disposable income in their pockets.

Lewis

Firstly...



Zoning was actually one of the big reasons for the introduction of telehubs. This was back in what some folks call "the day".

Since the introduction of telehubs the only real change to my SL experience is that I can now look at the SL map and know exactly where I do NOT want to be: near a laggy, obnoxious, advertising warfare, noob shop nightmare telehub. If I have to use a telehub the first thing I do upon arival is fly up to about 256m and head immediately for my red beacon. If anything (based on my experience, certainly not stating this as a researched fact) I'd say that being near a telehub is a good way to get ignored and passed off as hub-trash. Anyways, yaddayadda i'm for p2p, my point is...why would anyone pay extra for hub land? I have yet to see actual numbers anywhere that indicate owning land by a telehub increases traffic/revenue for store owners (if the numbers exist, please eliminate my ignorance with a link).

I see no point in compensating hub land owners for any "loss" they may incure. The only loss I can imagine is that they were charged too much for the land to begin with, basically paying for an unproven "concept". Buying land anywhere is a risk. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. It's wise to hedge your bets with quality products and services instead of relying entirely on location.

As far as a sense of space/geography is concerned I agree with a few others in that this is already quite lost. The only sense of geography I get is when I am at my destination and not trying desperately to escape a hub mall. I had a much better sense of geography before telehubs, and it was merely due to the fact that there were less people in SL and it was just alot easier to fly across the old grid than it is to fly across the current one.

Penalties/Fees/Requirements for using p2p? I can't see a single reason why new residents should be forced to use a defunct system just because they are new. Is this idea coming up because we all know a new resident is more likely to fall prey to the crap sprawling around telehubs? Is this basically picking on the new, little guy who doesn't know better? YES.

10L a port I'd be *ok* with. It's a money sink and it would increase the value of the L$, while also taking a baby step to prevent "abuse" of a p2p system (repeated/constant teleporting).

Not really sure what the issues about privacy are, as you aren't going to be able to teleport into anything you can't fly into. Privacy is a bit of a joke in SL anyway, and really only goes as far as your faith in it. (once again, if this is just ignorance, feel free to let me know otherwise).