Attn: Lindens, wholesale sim resellers, property buyers... a new idea

Second life has traditionally been a world of laissez-faire property rights; that is, I can't meddle on your land, and you can't meddle on mine. Due to the linden's jurisprudence in trying to make SL a platform for a 21st century information age, they have taken a decidedly low-key approach to all things social and economic. Aside from the occasional tweak here and there, they are mostly silent.

And yet, they also do the occasional experiment; in land/prim allocations (in Olive in version 1.1, in the Nova Albion Sims, etc.), in social structure (allowing for Themed communities prior to 1.2), and in economic ideas (removing all event support). These are all done, I think, to "push" us as a loosely-combined community towards bigger, better, and hopefully more organized things.

SL as it stands now, from a planning perspective, is an unmitigated disaster. It is urban sprawl to the max. Houses are next to factories. Factories are across the street from clubs. Clubs are adjacent to business towers. Business towers are leering over beach resorts. And so on and so forth.

This isn't necessarily a Bad Thing(tm), mind you; a hands-off approach gives you the maximum freedom allowed in an environment. However, there are times when having a community of like-minded individuals, or at least a proper agreed-upon guideline to work with, is prudent.

The Lindens have from time to time tried pushing us towards ways to make our little corners of the world a little "better"; themed communities, zoning restrictions (boardman, de haro), community support/recognition of hard work (Luskwood, Darkwood, NeoTokyo when it was around, etc.), limited infrastructure development (roads, telehubs).

They always do it half-way, though. They take our hand and guide us into the toy room, but then want us to explore with the toys ourselves.

As SL gets bigger, sheer socieital pressure within the world will require more and more planning and organization. It will either happen from the top-down (the lindens institute a player government (not bloody likely) ), or from the bottom-up (N-burg, Luskwood, Darkwood, Taber, etc.).

And now that I've gotten that rambling diatribe out of the way, let's get to the meat of my discussion and ideas.

It is widely a held assumption that the auctions are the playground of the hardcore land resellers; these folks come in, buy gigantic tracts of land, mark them up for a few percent, and sell them off. Usually little thought, planning, or foresight is taken with these purchases; they are bought, combined, reparcelled off into smaller chunks, and sold.

What I would like to see is the following. It requires the cooperation between the Lindens, the wholesale land buyers, and eventually the end consumer (land purchasers).

1) Linden Lab puts up entire sims for sale. Gigantic, one-plot Sims with no development on it; no roads or bridges, perhaps a telehub in the center.

2) A land wholesaler (someone who's main intention is to buy the land and resell it) bids and wins the plot.

(so far so good, this happens all the time...)

3) The wholesaler either then takes the Sim and plans it out properly, or hires someone else to do it (regional planners, for instance). This includes road access, telehub access, basic infrastructure, and most importantly, proper Public Space (open areas between buildings). Public space would mean, in my mind, places for everyone to enjoy. This could include flower gardens, fountains, ampitheatres, meeting places, shpping stalls, and so on. A master plan is devised with the wholesaler and the planner for the entire Sim.

4) The wholesaler and planner parcel off the remaining land into sizable, useful chunks; the "fronts" of lots face the roadways, for instance. Interesting geographic features are properly lotted off so half a hill isn't on one, with another half on another plot. The sim is interlligently and "properly" planned out.

5) The wholesaler then takes the "public space" and the "infrastructure" land and (and this is going to be the controversial part, I'm sure) SELLS IT BACK to the lindens for market value. Market value means, in this situation, that if a wholesaler paid the equivilent of say $L5/m for the entire Sim, then the lindens will buy the "public spaces" back and reinburse them the money paid proportional to how much land was sold (easy way: using $L equivilent for payment; hard way: reinbursement on the credit card level at LLabs offices).

6) The wholesaler then sells the plots to various passerby as usual.

Intended results:

1) Better plots. If all land plots have a "universal" direction to point towards (a road, or a telehub), then better communities and areas can develop.

2) higher land values. If properly done, people will definitely want to live in a nicely-planned neighborhood than the equivilent of a SL ghetto.

3) An ability to "suggest" a way for a Sim to be used. This is as close to zoning as you're going to get, by the way. If you design a Sim with a "spokes" design coming from a telehub, for instance, you may be encouraging more "commercial" interests to pop up rather than residential. Likewise, if you make long, winding, gentle roads along rolling hillsides, you are more likely to have prospective residential buyers. Again, these would just be suggestions; true enforcement of zoning is impossible (unless strictly enforced by the Lindens, which it won't be), but with proper planning you can swing development one way or the other.

4) An easier way for grassroots communities to develop. It's much easier to have a continuous area have a theme or a general feeling among it if it's not a bunch of hastily-chopped 512 plots. You add a sense of place with liberal usage of public space and proper lotting. An early version of this idea that I'm working on can be seen in South Grignano; within it, you can see several things. first, the area seems like one continuous place. Secondly, the buildings are built to accomodate the current infrastructure (or infrastructure built in). Thirdly, by having a uniform "feel" about it, people can relate to it better. Finally, there is enough public "space" within the area to make it feel special and useful (there is an ampitheatre, forinstance, and a park, interspersed between shops, houses, waterways, and other buildings)

5) better feelings of community. Maybe it's just me, but I truly think that the Nova Albion sims are becoming a better "community" as the place develops. Perhaps this is true elsewhere as well, like in Taber or Luskwood. This should be encouraged on a more general scale.

Anways, this is just an idea. Please discuss. I think this would be an excellent way to foster better growth and more intelligent building within the grid, while requiring a minimum of change and effort for all parties involved (the lindens and the wholesalers, really).

LF

Can you? I've wondered about that myself. All this kind of stuff interests me, so when I had the chance to buy a bunch of land in a zoned sim with sidewalks and lamp posts, I did, and tried to turn as much as I could of it into the burbs, which is what LL intended for that area.

I'm a bit of a purist. Are others?

People seem to like the city sims alot. Would they bother to make sure their builds "fit in" with it's intended look and surroundings? Grignano and Miramare look as nice as they do because you, Marcos, Caroline and Salazar own large areas of those sims and you're able to control what goes up there for the most part.

It would definetely be an interesting experiment, one that I hope would work!

sounds interesting although i'm not sure i like the "sell back the infrastructure land to the Lindens" part. that's kinda saying "i want to buy a sim and have my way with it but i don't want to have to pay for the whole thing."

could be a pretty good idea and i'd definitely like to see some more structure if the builds that come out of it are nice. you might have to have a way to enforce what people build so that your plan doesn't fall apart the moment someone moves in but i dunno.

hmm......

I think the number one thing LL must do immediately is allow for full sale and transfer of all object ownership on a parcel. I don't even understand why this hasn't been placed in a patch.

Is the code so difficult? (for each object. Is object sellable? yes, transfer object to buyer - done)

I don't understand the problem with this.. it's almost criminal their lack of vision on this particular issue.

I wouldn't mind seeing a pilot program like this with a few sims just as an experiment. I'm not sure it is the way to go long term, but LF presents enough interesting points to make it worth seeing it in action to find out what would happen.

Planning and developing a sim like this is a lot of work, and even 2 people is probably not enough to work it right on the insane timetable of 30 days, when you are trying to avoid tier burn. You can go to 60 days if you can spread the tier enough and make enough sales, but it's hard to justify.

I think you need a wholesaler, planner, builders, and promoters or real estate agents to function as a team to get the results that quickly. Ideally, architects and builders should have houses already completed to more or less fit on 2048 or higher, with adjustment to the actualities of the given sim. This team has to stay highly devoted to the project and not be scattered across other more high-paying or interesting projects -- building a residential community is not necessarily a thrilling experience but it is an important job and needs focus and rapid response and problem-solving.

You talked about trying to preserve natural features like hillsides, but that's an artistic ideal that is not realistic in the real virtuality of SL:

-- Buyers want 1024 sizes to keep to their tier limits in many cases, and the hills or mountains or whatever may not be accommodated within that sub-divide.
--Sub-dividing is always harder than it looks, and you always end up with some strange parcels unless you want to chop everything into 512-land and risk cheek-by-jowl tract houses.
-- Sales don't occur as you think they will, people have different subdivides in mind, or they take 3 plots or want half a plot -- and at a certain point, you have to sell the land to beat the tier burn, and give people what they want, not what you think looks pretty as a subdivide going around natural features.
-- This is debatable, but it doesn't make sense to have plots facing a road when a road is essentially pointless. A road is merely a psychological crutch to make the transition from RL. You can't really use them for travel, as cars still really can't travel in a straight line or cross sims. So it's just a kind of trope. I find that commercial buyers tend to find a plot by the road and face a build toward it all on their own, but not for any reason. Most lots need to face the best view in a residential area. If we accept the convention that roads are necessary, it would be best to let the developer himself decide where they go -- that is the only part I would be for "selling back to the Lindens" -- roadways and walkways that the developers themselves lay down according to their own plan.
-- Could we get some more information about why it is so hard to install or remove telehubs? People are always complaining about their presence of absence -- do they really eat up more server power such that communities themselves couldn't make a routine request to install or remove them?

I would not be in favor of turning public land over to the Lindens. I think players need to get as free as possible from the Lindens, and to disentangle the considerable symbiotic relationship between Lindens and players, especially old players. There is really no reason except the usually SL player contrariness and spite, that people can't get together, pool their tier, pool their purchasing dollars and get themselves a sim, and carve out some public land for their tier. If 10 people each put in 512, that's 5000 acres, and that's quite a bit in terms of adding a green belt, forested dividers, gathering spaces, etc. on a 64,000 sq. acre sim.

Your experience tends towards the urban, but most of SL land is suburban or countryside or mountains or snow. It's not so realistic to put slender lines of green and tree between houses -- who will pay the tier? What happens when the owner sells? What about prims? These green belts tend to get sold for prims because you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too high a prim allowance. (You idea of doubling prims from the amount of prims in a house, BTW, turns out to be off -- it really should be tripled or even quadrupled given the realities of the nesting instinct and the items people put in their houses.) In reality, you can make a commons, but no one wants to pay tier for prims they don't get, so you end up selling commons land with agreements that it will be used for prims only and sold back to the developer for resale as primland upon departure.

The public space issue has to be studied a lot more, and studied by actual field-tested, peer-reviewed scientific-type studies, not studied by a lot of people spouting off utopian ideas. Everyone among the upper classes, the chattering classes, the creative intelligentisa, the geekigentsia, the technocrats, purport to hate telehubs, clubs, and malls. Some people preserve an image of themselves as puttering in their workshops on their own sims and teleporting to their friends directly and organizing wacky events of their own like rezzing weird vehicles. Their notion of the public space derives from the sandbox. But the reality is that even THEY go to telehubs, clubs, and malls at one time or another. And most people do. They actually go shopping waiting endlessly for vendors to rez and they huddle in laggy, crowded clubs. Go figure. So you have to study what they actually do, and build accordingly, and not make fake intellectual cafes of Paris for absinthe-drinkers when in reality, real SL people won't go to them, they will sit empty, and they will actually sit in a black dark box club as long as it has dance animations in it. So many better black dance boxes, I dunno, you have to look at what the public wants when you make public space.

I'd like to think that if you built better architecture and had more interesting public space that the cultural level of SL in general would raise and people would really be in a community and maybe even be nicer to each other. I fear this is a fallacy, however, just as it is in RL. There is the famous essay about "the turds in the public square" -- horrid modern art pieces that everyone hates clogging up large, glaring white plazas that people dread crossing. These kinds of things happen in RL because designers, artists, and architects use a public space as a canvas or a CAD, and don't really live in the spaces and think from the perspective of space-users. That can happen in SL too. Just to take one tiny example, scuzzy-looking urban cemented canals provide a wonderful gritty urban downtown feel to Grignano. But they are terribly easy to fall into when coming out of the telehub or trying to fly around putting stuff up in your property. They're narrow, and hard to get out of when you fly or fall into them.

I think the Lindens should extend to non-island purchasers of sims the same courtesies. If a group of 10 or 20 like-minded people get their act together to conceive a design and pool tier, they shouldn't have to fight the auction, they should be able to just purchase a whole sim for $995 or $1500 or however it is valued. We would see a lot nicer communities if this were possible.

I agree that objects should be tied to the land to enable houses to be sold with land better, but it is still possible to do even now by merely pricing the land with the house included, and then having the architect sell the object for $0 to the customer after the land sale.

Planning and developing a sim like this is a lot of work, and even 2 people is probably not enough to work it right on the insane timetable of 30 days, when you are trying to avoid tier burn. You can go to 60 days if you can spread the tier enough and make enough sales, but it's hard to justify.

I think you need a wholesaler, planner, builders, and promoters or real estate agents to function as a team to get the results that quickly. Ideally, architects and builders should have houses already completed to more or less fit on 2048 or higher, with adjustment to the actualities of the given sim. This team has to stay highly devoted to the project and not be scattered across other more high-paying or interesting projects -- building a residential community is not necessarily a thrilling experience but it is an important job and needs focus and rapid response and problem-solving.

You talked about trying to preserve natural features like hillsides, but that's an artistic ideal that is not realistic in the real virtuality of SL:

-- Buyers want 1024 sizes to keep to their tier limits in many cases, and the hills or mountains or whatever may not be accommodated within that sub-divide.
--Sub-dividing is always harder than it looks, and you always end up with some strange parcels unless you want to chop everything into 512-land and risk cheek-by-jowl tract houses.
-- Sales don't occur as you think they will, people have different subdivides in mind, or they take 3 plots or want half a plot -- and at a certain point, you have to sell the land to beat the tier burn, and give people what they want, not what you think looks pretty as a subdivide going around natural features.
-- This is debatable, but it doesn't make sense to have plots facing a road when a road is essentially pointless. A road is merely a psychological crutch to make the transition from RL. You can't really use them for travel, as cars still really can't travel in a straight line or cross sims. So it's just a kind of trope. I find that commercial buyers tend to find a plot by the road and face a build toward it all on their own, but not for any reason. Most lots need to face the best view in a residential area. If we accept the convention that roads are necessary, it would be best to let the developer himself decide where they go -- that is the only part I would be for "selling back to the Lindens" -- roadways and walkways that the developers themselves lay down according to their own plan.
-- Could we get some more information about why it is so hard to install or remove telehubs? People are always complaining about their presence of absence -- do they really eat up more server power such that communities themselves couldn't make a routine request to install or remove them?

I would not be in favor of turning public land over to the Lindens. I think players need to get as free as possible from the Lindens, and to disentangle the considerable symbiotic relationship between Lindens and players, especially old players. There is really no reason except the usually SL player contrariness and spite, that people can't get together, pool their tier, pool their purchasing dollars and get themselves a sim, and carve out some public land for their tier. If 10 people each put in 512, that's 5000 acres, and that's quite a bit in terms of adding a green belt, forested dividers, gathering spaces, etc. on a 64,000 sq. acre sim.

Your experience tends towards the urban, but most of SL land is suburban or countryside or mountains or snow. It's not so realistic to put slender lines of green and tree between houses -- who will pay the tier? What happens when the owner sells? What about prims? These green belts tend to get sold for prims because you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too high a prim allowance. (You idea of doubling prims from the amount of prims in a house, BTW, turns out to be off -- it really should be tripled or even quadrupled given the realities of the nesting instinct and the items people put in their houses.) In reality, you can make a commons, but no one wants to pay tier for prims they don't get, so you end up selling commons land with agreements that it will be used for prims only and sold back to the developer for resale as primland upon departure.

The public space issue has to be studied a lot more, and studied by actual field-tested, peer-reviewed scientific-type studies, not studied by a lot of people spouting off utopian ideas. Everyone among the upper classes, the chattering classes, the creative intelligentisa, the geekigentsia, the technocrats, purport to hate telehubs, clubs, and malls. Some people preserve an image of themselves as puttering in their workshops on their own sims and teleporting to their friends directly and organizing wacky events of their own like rezzing weird vehicles. Their notion of the public space derives from the sandbox. But the reality is that even THEY go to telehubs, clubs, and malls at one time or another. And most people do. They actually go shopping waiting endlessly for vendors to rez and they huddle in laggy, crowded clubs. Go figure. So you have to study what they actually do, and build accordingly, and not make fake intellectual cafes of Paris for absinthe-drinkers when in reality, real SL people won't go to them, they will sit empty, and they will actually sit in a black dark box club as long as it has dance animations in it. So make better black dance boxes, I dunno, you have to look at what the public wants when you make public space.

I'd like to think that if you built better architecture and had more interesting public space that the cultural level of SL in general would raise and people would really be in a community and maybe even be nicer to each other. I fear this is a fallacy, however, just as it is in RL. There is the famous essay about "the turds in the public square" -- horrid modern art pieces that everyone hates clogging up large, glaring white plazas that people dread crossing. These kinds of things happen in RL because designers, artists, and architects use a public space as a canvas or a CAD, and don't really live in the spaces and think from the perspective of space-users. That can happen in SL too. Just to take one tiny example, scuzzy-looking urban cemented canals provide a wonderful gritty urban downtown feel to Grignano. But they are terribly easy to fall into when coming out of the telehub or trying to fly around putting stuff up in your property. They're narrow, and hard to get out of when you fly or fall into them.

I think the Lindens should extend to non-island purchasers of sims the same courtesies. If a group of 10 or 20 like-minded people get their act together to conceive a design and pool tier, they shouldn't have to fight the auction, they should be able to just purchase a whole sim for $995 or $1500 or however it is valued. We would see a lot nicer communities if this were possible.

I agree that objects should be tied to the land to enable houses to be sold with land better, but it is still possible to do even now by merely pricing the land with the house included, and then having the architect sell the object for $0 to the customer after the land sale.

Well, it's either that or you sell the land to the various new land owners in the sim, in the hopes that their tier holds up to keep the road/arenas/ampitheatres in place. And considering how much people move...

Eventually the infrastructure will "break down" due to user entropy in a sim. Lindens, however, don't move. Hence my suggestion for them to keep the land and infrastructure. The key difference is that the USERS build the infrastructure, rather than Random T. Linden.

LF

When the Lindens own stuff, we get stuck with things like the ugly market stalls in Boardman.

I think a more prudent solution, in this sense, would be to better facilitate "renting" land as a feature.

While I like many of the suggestions posited, Lordfly, this assumes that the folks with the capital are also savvy on sim planning, either by themselves or with one friend.

However, many of the sims that I see most as "successful" retain ownership by one person, who then "rents" property on the basis of creative judgment (and typically dictates what goes into the sim). This is, as a direct result, why I gravitate toward people I feel are benevolent sim owners, as opposed to going out and "purchasing" property, which I actually do not any more. I'm even considering dropping back to Basic membership, as I get better benefits for less renting than I would from owning a parcel.

This also renders users free of "market" prices on land, as most renting schemes are flat. Occasionally, a sim owner may scale the schema to reflect market prices in Lindens-to-USD, but in a general sense I rarely, if ever, require thinking of the issue. This also raises "traffic" through the roof for a particular area.

Rambling aside, I see renting one-sim property as beneficial for the following reasons:

- One authority on what goes into/leaves a sim (the sim owner)
- The ability to "pick and choose" where you wish to live based on the people involved, not the land baron scalping
- Proactive building on the part of the sim owner
- Win-win scenario, given a good sim owner (win for the owner in pocket, win for the Lindens in sim fee, win for the users due to a better-themed sim)

Edit: I think personal sims are the closest to what I think is the future of the MMO - player-owned persistent, graphical "worlds" on the scale of MMOs today.

I endorse this product and/or service.

yeah i got you Lordfly. maybe instead of the "buy a sim then sell some back" method you could have sims for this kind of thing sold with like 3/4 available land and 1/4 land reserved for Linden protection but flexible. so you'd buy 3/4 of a sim and once you had your plan all nice and worked out the Lindens would come in and protect the land of your choosing as long as it was at least 1/4 of the total. those fractions are arbitrary.

i mean they'd have to do that anyway if you sold it back to them but this way you avoid the whole buy/sell back thing.

now that i think of it though that still doesn't cover the fact that you're getting a whole sim worth of use (i count the infrastructure land as "used" since it's not going to have a club plop down on it. it's part of the "community plan".) but you don't pay for a whole sim. i dunno if it's really a fairness issue but i can't see the Lindens leaping at it when they could charge for a full sim.

Aye, there's the rub, to paraphrase someone, I like the idea of land resellers, only resellers tend to ruin it.

Insofar as you are looking for people whose demonstrable interest is in turning a fast, low margin, turnover sale, asking effort beyond sales is overly optimistic.

As the maxim goes, lease a man an acre for 7 years and at the end he will have extracted every bit of value from it. Sell a man an acre and 7 years later its value will have increased manyfold. I think investment and ownership are inherently linked.

The Lindens could take a couple of more basic steps to accomplish most of this:

1) Allow anyone to buy a whole subdivisible sim at any time, not just the ones you have to compete for in the auctions. On-demand sims would allow groups to take their time forming up and buying the property at a predictable price, just like single island owners do. The same would be true for developers.

2) Code in a method for subletting or renting property. As long as the landowner was paid per the contract, they could not remove the tenant. If the tenant fails to pay the property reverts to the landowner.

can i get the cliff notes for this thread?
just kidding. i'll be back. i have a date with donald trump right now.

That psychological trait can be taken to advantage, however, if you build facing some sort of common area (town square, public garden, etc). Neighbors gravitate toward these things...I've amazed myself by watching the effects of a decent sized animated-texture campfire on a group of people. ^_^



Yes, cafe's and such do tend to be ignored (I'm thinking of Cafe Jack in Gringano, awesome build)...but there's another reason for that. SL is not a case of "If you build it, they will come". What do clubs have that other places don't? Staff, marketing and regular events. (...Ok, then there's sex and free money, but point asside...) To get people to your location in SL and keep comming back, you have to promote it, or hire someone else to. Events can be as simple as scheduled get-togeathers, or more complex
affairs...for a cafe you might have poetry and art contests, trivia, "mixers" and dating events, bring in a live jazz musician to play through the land stream...and I'm only talking about stuff that's already been done in SL, to say nothing of ideas that haven't been explored yet. If you get the word out about your place and give people good reasons to show up and stick around, your place could be sucessfull and popular. Events are the bread and butter of Montmartre Island traffic, they seem to be keeping Spittoonie Island going to some degree even though its co-owner and coder has gone AWOL, they bring trafic and customers to shopping malls, etc, etc. Plywood Chef and Survivor SL wouldn't be able to run if there wasn't an interest in new, creative events Now they just need to bring residents and visitors to Gringano, Living Cities, all the various sport stadiums in the game...

Really great idea!



They already do this in a lot of mainland sims with water and roads. The only difference is that someone other than LL would be designating the Protected land.

Of course, it's not quite as straightforward as that, but it's not totally without precedent.

To address the fairness issue, maybe you could impose lower prim limits on the flexible land to ensure that the privilege isn't abused.

good thread

my suggestions have been, and will remain, with a systematic implementation of zoning laws... have commercial sims, and residential sims, and have ways the code (and not lindens) can help distinguish between them... differnt prim densities, allowable build heights, etc could all be built in to sims before they are ever given out and would be essentially self-mantaining.

to help ease the 512 squeeze i think some form of 'buffering' could be built into the system, allow people to own an extra square of land around their builds, that would not count against tier, but at the same time, would not allow anything to be built on it, and wouldn't grant any additional prims... this would have the combined effect of lowering the overall prim count in crowded multiple owner sims (which would help ease lag slightly) but it would also prevent anyone from 'locking in' anyone else's build/plot (there would basically be a mandatory 8m border between structures)

this wouldn't necessarily be 'backwards compatable' with the current sims, but would be not that terribly hard to implement for new sims, again, before anyone ever bought into them.

Having the zoning "coded into" the land, is the best and fairest way to implement zoning, I definitely agree with that.

But if they do this, then they ought to put out an equal share of "zoned" and "unzoned" sims. Or else the old landowners will have an undue advantage/disadvantage depending on how you look at it.

Personally, I would never live in a zoned sim. Unless I zoned it myself (maybe allow island owners to "zone" their own sims when they first buy them?). Just on principle, if for no other reason.

its easy to make a strong case for wanting to live and let live, but the problem becomes there are builds, clubs and malls, that when poorly implemented, even in just a fraction of a sim, can basically destroy the whole thing, from a usability perspective.

Once that happens to enough people, i can see a strong demand for zoned land to help keep that kind of mess out.

i would thinkg sim charters, would be votable by residents, or obviously you wouldn't move into a charter sim that forbade you from doing something you wanted to do with the land in the first place etc (an idea like this would not be backwards apply-able to older sims, or at least not older plots in older sims (aka grandfathering)

yeah it might make more work for the Lindens (but what wouldn't? hehe) but a solution to the whole problem of a club using every last bit of a sim's resources might be for the Lindens to monitor that kind of thing and tell the club owner "hey, tone it down big guy. you got neighbors" if it gets out of control.

i know this would take time for them but they have to be able to look at sims behind the scenes and know which ones are struggling already you know? even if they can't tell on a per parcel basis they could know which sims have massive resource hogs and a quick glance into that sim should make it pretty clear where it's coming from. or just look at the map and see where there's a 24/7 blob of dots. that's right DaBoom i'm looking at you.

The problem with the lindens monitoring anything related to zoning, land use, etc., is it just doesn't scale.

Sure, it might be feasible with 500 sims.. what about 5000? 50,000? Heck, even a few thousand sims and it's impossible to completely police, thus making policy hard to enforce, if not unfeasible altogether.

LF

I think it is a good idea.

Jesus. When will people learn how to be succint?
I can't read all that crap, the web has ruined my attention span.