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

This is a great idea.. it would be great to be able to theme a sim, but LL doesn't necessarily have to be directly involved with that to this extent. They just need to provide low level tools to allow people to do this themselves - i.e. zoning and contracts. Assume if you buy a whole sim you can zone it how you like. Buy a sim, zone it into business/residential/club land however you want it, then ask your buyers to agree to a basic contract that says if they buy your land then they'll attempt to continue your theme or agree to your style of management/government or agree to build strictly inside your zones, or agree to your more specific zoning laws, etc. etc.

LF, why does zoning have to significantly increase LL's workload? If the zoning system was there, and there was some reasonable system to allow people to report bad-building, and a significant punishment for people who built outside zoning rules, it would manage itself. Remember people are paying for land they build on. They're not going to pay for land to have it taken away or build a house to have it deleted if they're outside zoning rules.

This is a great idea.. it would be great to be able to theme a sim, but LL doesn't necessarily have to be directly involved with that to this extent. They just need to provide low level tools to allow people to do this themselves - i.e. zoning and contracts. Assume if you buy a whole sim you can zone it how you like. Buy a sim, zone it into business/residential/club land however you want it, then ask your buyers to agree to a basic contract that says if they buy your land then they'll attempt to continue your theme or agree to your style of management/government or agree to build strictly inside your zones, or agree to your more specific zoning laws, etc. etc.

LF, why does zoning have to significantly increase LL's workload? If the zoning system was there, and there was some reasonable system to allow people to report bad-building, and a significant punishment for people who built outside zoning rules, it would manage itself. Remember people are paying for land they build on. They're not going to pay for land to have it taken away or build a house to have it deleted if they're outside zoning rules.

I agree with Elle that "if you build it, they will come" doesn't really work in SL for long. The events have to be the glue that make them stick, so you have to keep coming up with new events. People don't seem to congregate spontaneously on their own unless they are in a sandbox rezzing stuff.

I have re-read Lordfly's idea and I continue to be troubled by the idea of a) focusing it mainly on the creation of public space and b) focusing on the Lindens buying that public space. That feels backwards to me.

I feel that a developer imposing public space concepts are future buyers open up some problems. I'd rather see FIRST a community coming together, deciding their theme, figuring out what the main buildings are in their sim, THEN conceiving of how the public space need could be met. Maybe Lordfly intended that as well. I'm just concerned about dictatorial notions of public space being laid out that may look like art architecturally but which real people don't like and don't gather in -- and I think that deserves a lot more study in SL.

I think the key to all this is to get the groups together first, to work out a tier-sharing arrangement, and then watch the auctions for a purchase opportunity. I put up the suggestion about the new sim Midge in the other thread to see if anyone will do this. I think endless theoretical discussions about how to organize a sim, especially if they involve the Lindens, are pointless. Organize yourselves first, the sim and the Lindens will follow. Why should the Lindens hold your hand while you dither?

Once again, I speak from the experience of organizing a residential sim without any Lindens (except a persistent plea to grid monkeys to get the telehub at Waterhead fixed when it was broken for 3 days).

Call it residential, put up for-sale signs that say it is residential, advertise it is residential, and people tend to keep it residential. As for public space, we did our best, but the issue is really: who will pay the tier? It's hard to get even all the owners on a sim who like having some forest land to realize they could all put in 512 of tier and keep it nice that way collectively. Still, there are options, like agreements to keep areas free of build in exchange for prims.

LF is an urban planning student. you need to read his post with planners glasses.

cliff notes? like eggy, i can't decipher posts longer than 500 words.

LF is just pushing the same tired old zoning agenda, and demonstrating his fundamental misunderstanding of SL.
SL homes are vanity items. Most people do not use them. They merely own them because, you know, everyone else has one and so I have to have one too. They also like decorating. Especially the TSO peeps.
In SL transportation has no cost or effort involved, and so location is irrelevant. There are no communities because they arent needed and make no sense. I can reach someone instantly via offer teleport or IM. It doesnt matter if they are on the other side of the world or right next to me.
Also, there is the issue of concurrency rate. RL has a concurrency rate of 100%. People are in the real world 24/7, and since transportation is costly, weather is sometimes not optimal, and entertainment is easy to have at home... they sit at home.
Still, in most of the world there still is no friggin community. Because none is needed. People just want to live out their little lives and dont care about whoever the hell happens to live in the same building.
People in SL tend to congregate at events, clubs, malls, games, whatever. Some especially social and popular people accrue an entourage that spends a lot of time with them. There are also a few couples who spend a lot of time together... probably cybering
I have "lived" in Afton since the sim went up. I am its oldest resident. People could have chosen to face their house towards me, but why would they? Why should they give a fuck about me? They dont even know me, and they probably want to be left alone rather than visit me. Not that I spend an awful lot of time there. Nobody ever does.
Your agenda is merely one of frivolous aesthetics. It does not bring anything into this world. If my sim had all been planned and built to encourage a feeling of community I would still not know or want to know my neighbors, simply because staying at home is not what you do in SL. There is nothing to do "at home", unless you're busy working on something, in which case you may not wish to be interrupted.
Heck, if anything I would say to LL, come up with a way to make void-like sims buildable so we can have more land for the buck and space out our builds more.
SL is modeled on the web. The fact that a few web sites share a similar server does not mean they are in any way related or that the owners know or care about each other.
I believe the "continuous world" approach is fundamentally flawed. We aren't gaining anything from it. People want their private area, and they seem to enjoy the centralized entertainment spots.
There is no reason why I should have to see and download whatever my "neighbor" builds, and aside from a few selected areas built with the goal of presenting something beautiful or entertaining, there is no interest in exploring SL.
Carefully planned urban sprawl does not fit my definition of "beautiful or entertaining" either. If it's something that exists IRL, then I will surely find it very boring.
In a future P2P-based SL, everyone would run their own server on their own computer, build on their local, private area, at no cost to LL, maybe getting the odd visitor, and optionally storing their stuff on LL's asset server for safekeeping or distribution.
Having SL be a single centralized world owned and run by a single company makes about as much sense as the now defunct proprietary online services like Apple's eWorld (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eworld), the old MSN, AOL and CompuServe, etc.

jeez Eggy way to be succint. you lost me after "LF is just".

i like this kind of idea in theory but phrases like "some reasonable system to allow people to report bad-building, and a significant punishment for people who built outside zoning rules" just give me hives. too much reliance on subjective taste and the fact that people on the internet are horrible monsters who deserve to die. i think it would get like irl communities that have strict zoning rules and people get into blood feuds cause someone painted their house the wrong color or has 2 christmas lights too many. headache city.

for whoever said to make lots face the streets, how do you know which way a lot "faces" in sl?

People try all the time. Ads in boardman. Houses/shops in the tent/cabin sims. The lindens can barely respond to only a few sims worth of special zoning rules... how would they be able to respond to many times that amount, even WITH special coding in place to facilitate it? They would have to investigate every single complaint and accusation prior to deletion, thus bogging their time down more.

Direct, continual linden personell involvement is not possible for long. The grid and world is getting too big.

LF

Ohhhhhh....ok. Didn't realize Grignano was a dissertation

Eggy, geez, you sound sour. In RL, my neighbours don't mean anything to me in theory because I can get on the Internet and talk to people in Russia and Afghanistan and Montanta and they can become "my community". Tha'ts the theory of people like Will Wright of TSO anyway, that there are new online communities all different than RL. Of course, in RL, it's actually not like that even with the Internet, and you do talk to neighbours and postmen and Korean deli owners and whatnot, and you do live in a little village, even in the middle of a place like New York City.

But in SL, there's a world, and proximity does count for some. People do want houses, they do want to decorate, they want to live in them, not only for cybersex, but to host friends and just make stuff or sit in IMs. People like to have a place to perch. Maybe my sample is coloured, they tend to be the TSO types, and perhaps these aren't the elite urban planners and architects of the world, but I just watch how they behave and see what they like -- they want to nest, decorate, and have people over and they like to chat across the fence with those doing the same thing right next to them.

People do actually come over and talk to you in the neighborhood. They hang out on open spaces. If you have a commons or a picnic area or an ampitheater, people do sit in it, and they rez objects, and talk. If you have an organized event, they come to it, even the most last-minute, silly event, I've seen it happen over and over again.

But...let's not argue about it. I said in my original post here that it all needs to be studied to see what people really do. And I think taking the opinions of a few old-timer content barons who just putter in sandboxes or have their homes as sculptures on land they get for free in perpetuity by being charter members is not a way to research this.

It's backwards in the sense that the Lindens don't have to "make" public space willy-nilly in new Sims; they don't even have to parcel it. They can sell the entire thing to a prospective buyer, and the buyer can do with it as he wishes (which may, but doesn't have to include, public space and infrastructure). This has the added benefit of lowering the time needed by the constantly-pressed lindens to do other things, like fix bugs and listen to their customers.



So you need a potential group to be there before the sims can be sold by the wholesaler to the new group? Nothing would get done. Groups come and go, ideas come in and come out, and lots of words are trumpeted around SL all the time about groups, projects, and whatever. ANd the land wholesaler is stuck with a Sim with no "group" to buy it from them.

The most interesting communities are the ones that start grassroots; Luskwood, Darkwood, Taber... they all started small and expanded and molded themselves around the land as they needed to.

The concept of space and public areas does indeed need to be researched further in SL, but, as usual, it's going to take some sort of Linden push (in the way of them holding player-defined spaces) to get anything done in that direction.




That wasn't my intention for this concept; I want the lindens to come in AFTER the group/neighborhood/land wholesaler gets together, parcels off the land, and designatespublic space, to then come in and hold the public space, theoretically ad nauseum (just like how the lindens hold bits of land everywhere in the world; this is simply user-defined Linden-held, unspoiled land).



Agreements mean nothing in a world like SL unless they are legally binding or otherwise enforcable. Without that, all agreements end sooner or later (unless the community is EXTREMELY tight knit, which usually doesn't happen in a random pool of land owners).

It's sort of like a prisoner's dilemma; everyone gets the "good" benefit of having public, shared space, as long as everyone keeps their tier in it. However, it is "better" or "best" to
keep the tier to yourself, or simply not to invest in it. Which one will most folks choose if left to their own devices?

LF

Profofy - Yes, I specifically said that some houses, though few, are used to entertain guests.
But, when everyone has a house, a person that hosts a little get-together for 5 people will be making 5 houses empty. This is why most of the world is empty.
As for sour... well I have my grumpy jaded moments but overall I'm a pretty cheerful person.
I've got a fever right now, maybe that explains it

Yes, because SL isn't a place for people to get together and enjoy time with each other. It's a scripting, prim-making, cybersexing machine hell-bent on world domination.



Web pages are vanity items. Most people do not use them. They merely have them because, you know, all their friends have them so I have to have one too. They also like formatting with html tags. Especially livejournal peeps.

You are completely missing the point of a home.

Many many MANY folks use a home as an extension of their personality, fashion statements, personal thought processes, or belief structures. Yes, there are tons of homes that are devoid of any meaningful content, but there ar ejust as many homes that house content that is very deep and meaningful to the resident and his/her friends (pictures, poetry, dedicatinos, memorials, shared experiences, communal objects, and so on).



So is that why Telehub land costs more? Huh. Coulda fooled me.



This is, of course, why there are cliques in SL, why people go to clubs, why there are tons of social groups, why folks have social events, why certain folks hang out in certain places, and so on and so forth. To declare that SL has no communities is a pointless and blatantly false exercise in futility.



...What does this have to do with anything?



...in your culture, maybe. In others, maybe even in other neighborhoods, an apartment building is a rich place to meet friends, family, get together, and enjoy life with others. Humans are social animals; always have been, always will be. Human beings enjoy congregating together in whatever they they can; virtual or otherwise.



So why is it such a bad thing to make a nice place for these groups of folks? Why do we need group A shoulder-to-shoulder with group B, in neighboring Housecubes of Doom? Why can't we make an artistic statement while still making the sense of place a natural thing?




Um, well, are you a a) telehub, b) road, c) body of water, or d) public space? IF not, then why would you expect them to face their houses towards you?



This is depressing to hear from you Eggy. Don't you remember the days in 1.1 or 1.0 when folks would drop by at random and strike up a conversation? I did that all the time as a newbie; OH BOY! GREEN DOTS! TIME TO SOCIALIZE! Everyone was like Torley back then; always happy to explore and see what those green dots are up to.

You of all people should realize the potential of coaxing people out of their hidey-holes and into the commons for some people-time.



Many folks do. The Umberites spend a LOT of time at their "home" in Umber. Many folks stay in Indigo. There are countless private sims where the owners and their friends rarely venture into the main grid.

Your entire perception of the SL world is off, Eggy

Furthermore, EVERYTHING in SL is done for aesthetic purposes. If it wasn't, it would just be a chatroom that requires 100% CPU power.

And who is to say that aesthetics offer nothing to the world?



For you, maybe. For me, I'm sitting at "home" in grignano typing furiously in the forums while I wait for a friend to log in. I'm not busy; I'm awaiting guests.



Space out our builds... hmm... sounds a lot like you need a "buffer" ... OF PUBLIC SPACE! hah.



In a technical, binary, logical way, yes, SL is built on the web. But, the web also brings people together in unheard of ways. There are communities online that would never have existed had the internet not been in existence. SL is the exact same way. To say that everyone doesn't give a crap about anyone else is a callous worldview.



People also want their public space, as evidenced by the welcoming area. As evidenced by Umber. As evidenced by people congregating in Grignano (amazingly, people have, even without me advertising it much, or even "opening" it.)




Loki, Torley, and Bino would probably smack you for saying the above statement. Exploring is their main preoccupation within SL. You are projecting your sour, dour views of SL on the rest of the community. Again. And, it's wrong. Again.



First of all, that statement contradicts itself. Urban sprawl means precisely NO planning whatsoever.



Like? Everything ever made in SL has some basis in reality (unless the creator was on totally mind-bending drugs); the entire world is indeed modelled on reality. Gravity, for instance. Or the concept of a self. Or the concept of land ownership. Or the concept of money.

Boring, indeed!




In a future, hypothetical based web, everyone would run their own web server on their own computer, make webpages on their own intranets, at no cost to Verisign/CERN/etc., maybe getting an odd visitor, and optionally storing their stuff in a DNS record system.

What a fucking useless tool that would be.

A decentralized, user-created world was tried once; it was called Activeworlds. Thus far it's been an unmitigated failure.

Furthermore, AOL is far from defunct; a properly done "walled garden" of content still draws visitors. AOL is failing due to bad business decisions, and STALE content, and shoddy tech.

Blah. Eggy != teh rightzor.

LF

excuse me but that is now my trademarked motto and i will thank you to use it only to refer to me.

I envision this happening in real time simultaneously or more quickly -- the group and the group purchaser designated by the group, or a wholesaler with the capital to make the purchase and cooperate with the group, or even an uncooperative wholesaler who reasons that a group taking tier off his hands in this economic climate might be something he can deal with.

So there's no sequencing in the sense of "nothing gets done" because it comes together, or it doesn't. It's precisely because lots of words are trumpeted around SL that I suggest coming together for a very, very minimal, common denominator: let's take a sim and just zone it ourselves at least FOR clubs or AGAINST clubs or FOR malls or AGAINST malls or whatever -- or a mixture, but a slighly more planned mixture. A wholesaler doesn't get "stuck," he just chops up his sim like he always does and sits there, frankly, 3-4-6 weeks and waits for it to sell. Go around and see all the huge tracks of land in sims 3-4-5 weeks old, see the claim dates, and notice that wholesalers are not moving their wares so well. Look at one big sim buyer who recently completely dropped out of the game, leaving some pre-paid renters high and dry.

And why think of furry woodland creature themes or person-to-person combat games? That could come, if somebody could produce it on this insane deadline, maybe somebody who has been hacking around with the idea and not getting off the dime. But I'm actually suggesting something much more bland, which is people just trying to cooperate to manage the sim a bit and try to give it some low-common-denominator zoning plan. It would be like this: "Please Anshe or Blue, don't put up malls and bombard us with lagging tringo and slow-rezzing malls, let's work together for you to have maybe a smaller mall because we're going to create a public commons, some residences, and maybe just one club we like" -- or whatever. Or it could go in the other direction -- let's make a giant world here with clubs and weird residences all in a theme fitting the atmosphere.

I take your point that the Lusks of the world come together with very close-knit, like-minded individuals who have bonded like Spartans against the world. But...you can't have a whole game like that, it doesn't scale. We've got to develop a formula to make it easier to claim and work sims.

Now, as for your ideas that the Lindens should buy back public space that we define. Several have suggested I should go to the Lindens and ask them to take the 5000-6000 sq meters or so that I designated as commons in Ravenglass and which Shack Dougall landscaped and built with a dock, trees, waterfalls, teleporters, etc.

And my answer is...why? It's not enough probably to interest them. If they turned it into Governor Linden land, we'd all lose access to it for prims if we needed them -- and people always need prims. And then they'd clear off the landscaping and leave it blank except for their excessively-waving trees...so...why? And my point with this project is to experiment with what is possible under the natural conditions of the open market in the game, such as it is. Maybe your point is that your public spaces would be more like 20,000 sq m out of a sim...but what person in their right mind loses 20,000 sq m out of their purchase of 60,000 or so that they need to sell ASAP to make back their investment, even granted if the Lindens would buy it back at a set price? I'm thinking none of the land barons would go for this idea, it can't possibly be profitable for them.

Again, I know the received wisdom is that nothing but the most tightly-knit, ferocious, Spartanicst type of band of hardy players can be expected to agree to keep a zoning/them/tier arrangement. But...what if that's not true? What if people actually do more or less cooperate, even though they have nothing in common, to just keep the minimum for themselves, which is a residential sim? I guess I have faith in the good of human nature and the ability of people to see what is in their own interests if they cooperate. OK, set your watch and see if I am back in 60 days crying bitterly about how ebil peeps in SL built a laggy club in my hood.

This is probably another thread already, but why? Ask yourself this question from the perspective of a brand-new player with only a lousy 512 they just bought in First-Land Land, where they have an acute case of 512-disease. Lindens put first-lands all together often, and they cry out to become isolated next to behemoths, or hemmed in by idiots. It's an awful situation.

All people in that situation would be so better served by taking their 512 and putting it into a group and living on a larger piece of land where they could lay it out with some sense. And this is exactly what I intend to try to get started.

Lordfly, you suck
Tell you what. Get together with Anshe or something and make your pretty planned sim.
Watch as people delete what you built and pull out their own stuff.
The first thing people do to land they buy is return every object. I dont even know why LL bothers to plant trees anymore, they just get returned.
Then, watch as the people who moved into your sim never even meet each other, because they live on opposite corners of the world, or just log on at different times/days, or hardly ever log on at all.
Then watch as most of them leave SL and the land goes to auction again...

I did 3 homes in Ravenglass for Prok. Thus far the customers have been quite happy with them. The houses still stand by their own volition.



If you sell a home with the plot, the person buying it perceives it as a value, and hence doesn't return the home.

Besides, my proposal details putting player-built objects on linden-owned land (and the objects transferred to linden ownership), so what's your point?

I appreciate how well thought out your suggestions are. You have definitely spent some time considering this important topic and your input here is welcome.

However, I cannot see any approach working which includes a component of governance by a group of one or more elected or self-appointed indiiduals. Before anyone accuses me of being an anarchist let me explain

I'm an American so I'll use the U.S. government as my example. Linden is either God or government in this world. They set law, policy and direction. I personally like the limit of their involvement. So for the sake of discussion, they are the federal government. The problem with governance in SL is at the State and County levels. I agree that here it is a free for all. My 2st lot started as a nice house. My neighbors all had nice houses. Then a neighbor built a club, then folded, then I built a gallery which became a club and then a club and a mall and now about 6900sm of commercialism. One neighbor also decided to go commercial while the rest are hating life because of my porn filled club and mall in their backyard. Oh well, no rules on zoning.

So here is the paradox. I appreciate the need for some type of zoning control but the last thing I want is some ambitious Alex P. Keaton wannabe to volunteer for the zoning board, get on it, and dictate policy to those of us entreprenuers who have to deal with neighborhoods that routinely flip lots every couple of weeks.

The reason we try to avoid having factories next to schools in the real world is because factories belch out filth and destroy our lungs and having that next to schools is a bad thing. Fortunately, in SL we do not have these issues. So, I say leave the zoning alone. Who gives a cancerous rats a^% whether a factory is next to a school. Supply and demand should reign. If Linden wants to be more involved they need to not release any new land until property ownership hits a certain level. Fill up existing sims first before adding anymore. We need to pack more people into our areas. For businesspeople, this is key.

I'd be curious to see your idea applied LF. Though, personally, I would love to see a sim dedicated to Chaos. This is not sarcasm - I'm serious. It would be really cool to see a sim dedicated to a completely unique build on every plot and to have forms of transportation that don't necessarily link or have anything in common but get you where you want to go.

The difference between a Chaos Sim and what we have now would be that no one one the sim could do the same thing. So if there were already a club, anyone else coming into the sim would need to prove that their idea for a club was so distinctly different that it qualifies.

I'd actually participate in something like this.

Though, this is still zoning, just zoning with a twist.

LF;

That was a very interesting read, thanks for sharing it. I see where your going with it and it's pretty kewl. The only drawback I see is getting ppl to agree on what will work and what won't. All and all it looks pretty good.

*Blinks*

You know, it might be a good idea to take a break from the game for awhile.