The Effects of Casinos on Land Owners and their Subsequent Shifts

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate location for this post, but I've reviewed the forums available twice. Mods are free to move it, of course.

I've recently purchased some land -- the first plot in a beautiful area. Nearby land was purchased by someone putting in a huge rental condo. Then more land snapped up by a casino. A few regular residents purchsed other land on the sim. Now the remaining half sits unpurchased and the poor neighbour who bought next to me who was planning on putting in a really classy conference centre has been hit with the realization that he won't do so well when half the time regular residents cannot even gain access to their own lands because of the camping chair imbued casino.

Today I continued my arduous yet necessary task of reviewing my LMs, going to each location if I couldn't remember why I'd bookmarked it and rename it appropriately. So many shops and nice places have moved out of their locations and what did I see at their former border? Casinos and clubs.

Yes, buyer beware. I'm realizing that the only way to secure land that will be open to land owners whenever they wish (and their friends), is to buy in a sim where there is a covenant. The other alternative is to buy a whole sim, set up a covenant, take half (or whatever size is desired) for oneself and sell the rest to like-minded individuals.

I'm not trying to slag casinos and clubs, but apart from a covenant, I wish there was another way to limit their consumption of resources. The casino on my land is actually spread over 3 sims and not only is the lag brutal, but sometimes the residents can't even visit their own homes.

So my question really is: Is there anything that can be done? Am I missing something?

Thanks for any advice.

Cheers.

The resident answer here is that almost no matter where you go on the grid, you have to balance risks.

Covenanted islands are *very* likely to protect you from most camping chair/casino nightmares, and more.

But you run the risk of the sim owner disappearing, or stealing your money or suddenly changing the entire sim into a poodle ranch just because they felt like it.


Many others start sims themselves, as you have suggested. I've done this myself. However, if you think the 'like minded individuals' will pretty much do what you expect them to do from the start, well, brace yourself.

Mine is a happy story, but also, I can't exactly take off for a few months if I get fed up. You'll hold an awesome responsibility if you manage other people's land in a fair manner.

I don't think you are missing anything, other than perhaps this: the real joys of the grid have nothing to do with prims or owning land. Get less land than you think you need today, keep some cash in reserve so you are wealthy enough and then just roll with whatever changes come along.

You should talk, nicely, to the casino owner and let them know that people who own land in the sim have not been able to get in. If they don't cut down their usage, Abuse Report them and include the chat log. You can only get 40 or so people onto a mainland sim - if the casino is eating too much of that, they are in the wrong.

The LL Police Blotter recently had an entry for an "Overabundance of camping chairs in a region." If the casino is filling up the region because they have a ton of camping chairs, you have a right to complain.

Just remember that you will get a better response from LL if you don't go to them until you've tried to resove the problem peacefully yourself first.

What counts as an "overabundance"? One camping chair is more than I like, but obviously that's me being pissy. So how many is too many? Five? Ten? Twenty?

The casino in my sim has about a half-dozen actively camping AVs. Lag has noticeably increased since they moved in, but hasn't brought things to a halt. And they did place the casino up about 300 feet (right where I had planned to put my sky store, but never mind...).

So although I would love to see them leave the sim, and take their ugly rotating sign and ugly skybox with them, I can't honestly say they're destroying the sim. And I have no idea what proportion of resources they are using (compared to me, for instance, because I also have lots of scripts running).

Thanks for such prompt replies. And it's great to hear the stories of others.

I'll definitely have to check into covenant rules and information in more detail in future. I know that if anything, I'll start the covenant rather than buy into someone else's who think pink poodle ranches are teh bomb! LOL

Seriously though. I agree that talking with your neighbours is step one. The condo owner on our sim was very approachable when her skyrise was blocking a space station. And admittedly, even the casino owner grudgingly changed his land settings so I wouldn't hear his noisy casino from my neighbouring land which I use for building (I own two pieces of unconnected land on the same sim). But in conversations, I could tell that money was his main goal so I don't know how receptive he'll be to removing some of his cash flow. BUT, I will try.

For the present, I do love my land and I'll continue to develop it per my original plan and see what happens.

Thanks and I look forward to hearing more stories as it really helps me understand the nuances of SL outside of "just the rules".

Cheers.

Whilst I despise camping chairs/dance pads/pay-per-zombie systems, what I would consider 'fair' is really dependent on how much of the land they own.

If they own half a sim, then they they could get away with 20 camping chairs...

If they own quarter of a sim, then they could get away with 10 camping chairs...

If they own 8000 sq m, then they could get away with 5 camping chairs...

... and be using a 'fair amount of access resources'. However, the laggy scripts and suchlike may well use more than the fair amount of processor time.

I, like you, get very annoyed seeing 40 camping chairs on a 1024 sq m property completely screwing up everyone around them.

It really wouldn't be that difficult for Linden Lab to bring in rules to prevent this sort of abuse happening, but unfortunately they decide to take a 'hands off' approach to things that need fixing (and, of course, poke their nose in to places that don't need fixing).

Of course, the simple things is to just dump the "popular places" listing. The benefits of this far, far outweigh the almost negligible negatives to 99.99999% of the population.

Broccoli

As I see it a "Fair Use" policy the way prims are allocated should be implemented..

Do The maths for a mainland sim ...

256 x 256m = 65536sqm supports 40 residents <15k prims.

Splitting the sim into 128 x 512sqm individually bought parcels could'nt work .. total 128 residents would like access to their home.


Technically a resident would have to own 1638.4 sqm to guarantee his/her place.. plus an additional 1638.4 per invited guest.

this would run the sim to it's limit of 40 residents and still people would be upset at the lag.


Unless such a policy is ever brought into use I see no realstic end to these problems.
Regards.Rax.

I recently found myself in a similar situation in Rosyth. I owned over 20,000 m2 of land there, the casino opened with 512 m2 of land--and 30 camping chairs/dance pads. Time dilation on the sim dropped to .33 average, and it was a rare moment when I could get more than 2 or 3 people into my business, and of course, a complete inability to get into the sim at all during prime time hours.

I tried everything... abuse reports to the Lindens, multiple requests to Live Help about reduced TD, multiple bug reports, and of course, several IMs to the casino owners who, it turns out, didn't speak English well enough to understand my rants. I also resorted to floating several giant hogs in view of their skybox--that got their attention, but they didn't get the message--so those came down rather quickly.

But as my traffic plummeted and I resolved to ride it all out in hopes that some day the casino would move, I watched in dismay as their landholding expanded. But eventually (after about three weeks), they bumped up against my property lines and could expand no further. They left the sim for larger and greener parcels a couple of days later.

Of course, the Linden Abuse and Help people finally responded to my pleas for assistance about 72 hours after the casino moved out of the sim.

Moral of the story? Buy up all the land on the boundries of their parcel that you can. They will eventually need to expand (if they're going to be sucessful). If they can't expand in your sim, they'll leave.

So far, it's the only solution I've found. But DO AR the casino for Abuse of Sim Resources under the Disturbing the Peace clause of the community standards. The more of those that the Lindens see, the more likely they are to eventually take the hint. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

And ultimately, traffic HAS to go as an advertising ranking tool. Period. It's outdated, no indicator of quality, and it's too easily gamed. It needs to stop.

Kam

I don't think anyone is necessarily bothered about the 'occasional' event that brings in a 'more than fair' amount of people - just the 24/7 camping places.

Back at last year's SLCC, our Stratics building was one of the few places that got the live video stream working properly. For most of the day, we had 30+ avatars in Rosieri, on our 8000 or so sq m of land.

Sure, that was way way over our 'fair' amount of people - but it was a one-off event that lasted for about 6 hours. I don't see that anyone could really complain about that.

Broccoli

I'm not convinced that losing traffic counts will totally fix the problem - people will still have camping chairs to make it look like their place isn't deserted - but I do think it would be a good first step..

I also think that LL will probably look at more than simple m2/campers when they investigate these kinds of ARs. If they didn't, people could AR anybody with, say, a 1024 because there was one person on the land. I don't know exactly what they look at but being able to show that you tried to peacefully resolve the problem yourself first will definitely help.

Best of luck, Lucrezia.. I had some friends who owned about 1/3 of a mainland sim. A casino on 1024m2 moved in and set up 20 camping chairs which quickly filled the sim to its capacity.. When we went and talked to the owner and it turned out that he didn't know land was split into sims, each with a limited amount of m2 and people that could be on it at once. He turned out to be cool and cut way down on the number of camping chairs he had.