Telehub Ecology

Seeing this ad and the other one for Malibu hub space prompted me to think (and MrsJ, notice how I am *outside* of the classifies, which is NEVER the place for discussion because people should just have their day in the sun over there to sell their stuff without any comment).

Is Anshe going to sell all her telehub land, or a lot of her telehub land, and move out to her new Ansheland sims with them?

I looked out over the empty vista of Midge today, and wondered whether she'd keep Wixom Wild West.

I supposed it would make sense if she did that. She is making residential sims, but she probably has a few tucked away for shopping that she will manage much better than the way it was on the open grid. On the open grid, upstars like Viper might appear in her midst and vie for telehub oxygen LOL.

Without those giant Macy-like stores of Anshe and Burke, what will happen to telehubs? Will we see a huge drop in their value? Will smaller entrepreneurs pick up the slack? Without the Anshe and Blue type of mall machines, the spam lists, the pre-orders, the ready-made vendor placements, how will telehubs survive as a commercial species?

It might be that Anshe will keep her own Ansheland sims for residences, and then keep some major telehub malls for making the traffic flow out to Lindenland where she doesn't have to then think about managing the commercial/residential friction in Ansheland. But in Ansheland, she could remove not only upstarts at malls that don't "get with the program" she could direct her considerable residential population to her own stores, with all kinds of tie-ins. The public commons *is* the mall in these equations. If the residents complain about Tringo, well, she could keep Tringo out in the Lindenland badlands, and let that lag and griefing by-product just stay out there, bringing in cash and some traffic, but not upsetting the gated communities.

I don't know if she ponders these things, but I do. I'm predicting some seismic changes in telehub ecology from the introduction of both Ansheland, the rendering of Lindenland as Badlands, and the introduction of possibly just one telehub up in the New Continent. I feel a still hush coming over the telehubs. Something different is going to be happening with them. It's just my hunch.

Ansheland will draw people who are willing to cede a bit of freedom and cross a little bit of hurdles in understanding the deal in exchange for really pleasant residential living with great views, access to your parcel to do things like URL even if you don't "own it outright," and freedom FROM griefers and viewblockers and big stupid builds. Freedom FROM is often as important to people as freedom TO.

So what will be left in the Badlands? Aimless newbies, bands of griefers, angry young men, experiment big builders, W-Hat, clueless midbies who didn't figure out Ansheland, poor people, oldbie 4096 lifers who can't trade in their 4096 now to Ansheland -- it will be an interesting mix. I personally want to remain in the Badlands to see how it will all work out.

LOL. The fact is, that even after the sucking sound of Anshe repositioning from the griefed-up, lagged-out Old World recedes, it will still be evident that lots of old sims remain where players themselves created their worlds and remained free and happy.

As difficult as it can sometimes be to live and work in an unrestricted sim. It's still the only life for me.

The thing that I wonder about with private zoned sims is what happens if the sim owner goes away or decides to scrap the project. I don't know exactly how it works. If people are buying land in a private sim and then paying tier to the sim owner. What happens if the sim gets resold. and converted into something else. Are there contracts in place to protect the landholder in this case? Or do they just lose the money that they paid for the land? Maybe I just fundamentally don't understand what's going on...