The VERY WORST of Second Life...

Last night I started a thread and those of you who contibuted to 'The VERY BEST of Second Life' thank you..please keep the comments coming...I suspect you might have seen this one looming on the horizon.

Now's your big chance to name names (with caution), name places, name rip-off merchants (with caution)...spill the beans..go on you know you want to...

What's the very worst thing about SL...what has left a disappointing impression..?

For me it was watching Airtol Hill change within two weeks from being an attractive barren (and yet beautiful) hillside leading down to a secluded bay, into a jumble of walls, boundaries and the inevitable clutter of inappropriate architecture..jeez how many beach houses can you fit onto the side of a hill.

The worst of SL? The mainland.

Took a cross mainland tour over several days last week, ( hadn't done it in a very long time) and CRIPES, WTF!!! All these horrible rotating billboards all over the place. Does anyone actually visit the merchants posted on these things? Sometimes you see someone has built some nice archetecture, and two feet away is another god forsaken ROTATING STACKED CUBE SIGN ruining the ambience. No I wont be buying any crap from those advertised on those things, they make SL look so trashy. Flying around I notice that the new waterfront type sims are being paved over. No more Linden maintenance land I see. No more public channels in the rivers. A "lets sell every friggin inch and make a sad cluttered mess" mentality. What good is water if you cant enjoy it? What good is owning waterfront if you cant get out into the water cus they've sold the damn water to someone else. A boxed in boatdock is worthless. I know somebody who bought some of this water land and ended up building a friggin skybox cus the land on either side was purchased by box building storeowners. The Lindens seem to have forsaken us as far as the new continents are concerned. WHERES THE ROADS? There is no public land to seperate things, if this was RL you would have to trespass just to leave your own property. The whole place is just starting to look real shitty. Who's idea was it to turn this neat little vision of promise into a rude mirror of our own chaotic reality. Its the money hungry who are screwing this all up for the visionary's. This aint utopia, this is the rotting bloated corpse of something that could have been.

The worst : Spinach/Highflyer. The creation that spans both of those sims, as well as another I can't quite remember, and is slowly reaching into new sims is horrific. Perhaps the absolute worst thing I have ever seen in Second Life.

Abso-f*ckin-lutely! Why LL does not believe in any kind of planning/zoning is beyond pathetic.

An idea for the mainland... there's already a "restrict sound to this parcel" setting in the land options, to avoid hearing sound effects played on adjacent parcels. Why not allow the same for visual content?

If you shut off the visual content of surrounding parcels, you (and visitors) would simply see empty grass or sand around your land as long as you don't leave it. Less work for the asset server too, plus less client lag.

Worst thing is 16 meter plots by far. Then next would be the very unreliable asset server.

The other would be 'Herald' or possibly 'Brockade' sims Broken X...pretty nasty...if you own property there..bummer!!

QFT

16m plots and ad signs which are the dumbest thing ever invented in SL

~Jessy

I have a friend who used to live in Herald, and I used to live in Highflyer, both of us were shoved out by that horrific "Spinach Games" place, but it's just a stupid casino, and horribly built.

Agreed... I actually avoid it as much as possible.

I once looked at a 16m plot, it was squeezed (and I really do mean SQUEEZED) between a casino and a sheer rock face..and someone was trying to sell it..how sad is that!!

I had a look..grim huh!!

So...thanks to 'restricted sounds' we can't hear the roar of dinosaurs in the forest next door, or the shriek of someone losing 100 L$ in the casino down the road. We do however have to put up with pink castles, neon lights, sex orgy rooms and 300m high brick walls (Linden walls..upon which we find Linden Highways..on which we CANNOT drive our cars)...right next door!! Think you may have a point there Aleister.

I totally agree with you on this one Aleister. I've been wanting for my entire SL life.

I actually envisioned it more like how mute works (when it works properly), so that I could pick and choose items to hide, or just hide everything by a particular owner.

Can you imagine how incredibly lovely the mainland would look if we had this ability? Plus it would TOTALLY destroy the effectiveness of the stupid 16m ad plots!

(I know you can hide things temporarily with the client menu, but that's only temporary and doesn't really give the desired effect.)

Amen. No offense to anyone who likes it, just not my cup of tea!! 98% of the mainland sims ive visited were trashy and lag-extreme.

I'd be interested to know what you mean by 'shoved out', not that I'm a lawyer or anything (geologist actually), but other residents might find it informative.

Worst of SL? Other than the aforementioned 16m plots with rotating signs?

Buying a big empty plot of land and within 2 months having campers behind you, No Entry/Buy Pass barriers on 2 sides and some big GIANT building (casino, club) on another side- where they've also raised the land about 2 higher than everyone else.

Oh well- time to break out the "annoy & lag my neighbors" toys

Lets not go hatin' on the mainland. While a good deal of it is indeed craptacular, the oldest sims tend to be much nicer. They tend to have few land owners, and have few, if any signs or annoying 16m plots.

I love the mainland. It's home.

I wasn't forced to sell, if that's what you inferred from what I said. What I meant was, she literally buys all the land around, and puts up her awful casino, which you have to see everyday. Then when I simply floated into the air, she started griefing the land, and when I turned that off, it began a battle of lag-tactics, with high lag textures around us. It was petty and childish, and in the end no one wants to live next to a casino that awful, or any casino really.

That's why that particular space will always go down as the worst of SL for me.

Hmm, maybe not the worst, but the worst after some of the stuff already mentioned:

UGLY TERRAFORMING

Not content with merely covering the land with bad builds, too many people are eager to convert scenic sloping land into ugly flat slabs. Surrounded, of course, by hideous 'ramps' of stretched terrain textures. There are plenty of ways to use hilly land without ruining it - skyboxes, houses on stilts, split level builds - but no, bulldoze it and advertise it as "nice flat land".

I tried suggesting zoning just after christmas everyone screamed NOOO not on mainland "FREEDOOOM" so I guess they like that useless chaos that no one can actually use /shrug

It could be worse. The oldest sims (pre v1.1, I think), can be terraformed up to 40m up or down. The Lindens reduced our ability to terraform after complaints of terraforming abuse. The new rules only apply to mainland sims (I think) created after the rule change.

Ad farms are beyond ugly, they destroy an environment. I wonder why the owners assume anyone would ever go to the places advertised. I think its pretty obvious that LL have turned their back on the residents or they would just ban the ads. At least take back all the 16sq m pieces of land and sell as a whole plot.

It seems a lot of people are just not satisfied with anything natural and have to concrete it over so it looks like RL. We have in SL somehere which could have looked so good but people turn it into crap.

If you were to skate along the roads in the older sims as I do sometimes, 95% of the buildings are ugly, with very little style or imagination. Then I skate past a beautiful house and or garden and sigh at what SL could have been. It's a shame that LL didn't create two different sims, residential and commercial, so no-one would have to suffer the lag from a big casino or club or its ugliness next door to them.