When is enough, actually enough?

This evening, while the hubby and I continued our quest to get our store set up so we can open, a neighboring parcel owner was having an event.

I'm all for businesses in SL, regardless of their type (unless they're illegal, naturally), but am curious to know how all of you folks would deal with this situation.

I am on a relatively narrow parcel bordered on one side by a narrow strip of rentals and on the other by a very large parcel.

The large parcel now has a casino/club/strip joint that's been built rather near to my parcel. (Personally, I'd have built smack in the center of a large piece of otherwise empty land, but I digress...)

Tonight, they had -- I presume -- their Grand Opening Event. Everything: their sploder, their random money giver, the hostess, the dancers.. all shouted.

Ok, I live in NYC, in reality, so noise is something I'm used to. However, when it goes above and beyond, we tend to take matters into our own hands

Since this is NOT NYC, and since I prefer to be diplomatic when I can be, I'd like to know what you all would do in this situation.

My choices (as I see them) are as follows:

a) Wait it out and hope that every night there won't be a repeated situation.

b) IM the owner (if I can figure out who that is) post-event and ask her nicely if she'd please lower the range of the objects set to shout, to something that won't enter into my range of hearing.

c) Nip it in the bud and move our store and all its contents up 100 meters (and hope that the landing spot is actually set -- sending potential customers kareening down to the ground doesn't strike me as good PR!)

I'd love some suggestions from anyone out there who's had this happen before.

Things to note: Yesterday the land had a store on it. Before that it was pretty much desolate. It's a tremendous piece of land, group-owned and I've never met anyone from the group, much less anyone who's done business there.

Thanks for any direction, ideas, suggestions. Silly, over-the-top responses welcome!

-Dea

Wow..that sucks. I think if it were me, I would move the store into the sky until it is safe to return to the ground. SL tends to be a "here today, gone tomorrow" kinda place, so the odds are pretty good that this new club will have a limited lifespan. Resetting the landing point is easy, when you get the new spot decided, just go into Land Edit/Options and set the landing point to where you are standing.

If the club is at all large, they probably won't stop shouting since they need to reach further than the 20m chat range.

If the club becomes busy enough that you can't even teleport into your sim, then you are going to need to move..if you can't get there, neither can your customers....

Wonderful. I mean, I wish them success, but I certainly hope that doesnt happen LOL

Thanks for the suggestions and info

Very true on the lag. We'd been in our skyhouse and there was an unusual amount of lag (at least we know it's based on something non-grid related, now. Silly to think of that as a plus-side, but hey.. lol)

I've had the land since probably 2 weeks after I went premium, back in August (First Land was a newbie-nightmare purchase). The lots been pretty much deserted since then, and rather than jump right in and cause potential issues tonight, I thought I'd ask around first.

I also didn't want to interrupt their event with a request. For one thing, our store isn't open yet and for another, regardless of the noise, I didn't think their Grand Opening was the time for me to start asking them to change the settings on stuff.

I suppose my best hope is that they're as successful as they are amenable to requests from neighbors

I've owned stores, theaters and clubs on both the mainland and private islands. That said...

I would highly urge you to sell your land (and try to make some profit if possible) and move to a commercial private island where there are rules about such things and where you can complain to a landlord that will do somthing about it. Also, many commercial sims already have built in traffic which could help you.

One other thing... it's a bad idea to take to the sky. The only traffic you will get is people that TP directly from the search results. You will not get "walk ups" because people won't find you. Even if you did have several visitors to your store and people saw lots of green dots on the map they would probably think they are at your neighbors and go there. You could put a sign at the bottom of the land for them to TP to your store but many people probably won't use it....most people would rather just find "where the party is" instead of reading the signs.

Unfortunetly, no matter what you choose to do there is nothing that you can do that will be enforced as long as they are not breaking the ToS. This is what you have to deal with on mainland. Mainland is pretty much anarchy land.

I'm sad to see 2 of the 3 responses saying potentially it may be best to move. I'm not in the Fortune 500 of residents, cash-wise (Lindens OR US$ lol)

In the meantime, I'm hopeful that either the club proprieters are sensible and friendly or that things settle down again.

Out of curiosity --and as a side-dish to the main course that is this thread-- has there ever been a suggestion that there be a script/resource limit set to the size of a parcel (much like prim usage is)?

Deandra - I definitely feel your pain. I had to move from the mainland (where I was happy) when the club in the parcel next door just got to be too much. It was a PITA! But, am very happy now on my island parcel where there is a covenant that protects us. So we tried the mainland and I wouldn't do it again to be very honest.

I hope your situation will be different. If not, you should look up AmySue Shirakawa in game as she has great commercial island parcels as well as the residential ones, like the one where I am. Super landlord.

Here's hoping for a good update after you've contacted the club owners.

There is already a rather woolly-worded thing inbuilt into the rules about not using up more than your fair share of the sim resources. Unfortunately, it's quite a difficult thing to quantify.

Whereas with prims, you can set a number of prims and that is more or less that -although there are differences in resources according to textures, flexi, shiny, shapes, physical objects to name a few...

With scripts it's even more complicated. You can have 10 efficient scripts running beautifully well with no active listeners etc or you can have one horrendously written script which use up just as much resources as that ten. I would be interested to know if there would be a way of measuring efficiency/resource usage of scripts rather than just script number - I'm not sure "script performance" equates exactly to this but I'm no expert!

boy oh boy would I like to quantify this. Far away on the other side of my home sim is a club; when it runs an event, you might as well pack your bags and go home: something about the way they choose to operate kills all otehr activity on the whole sim, stone dead. My supciions are that this has to do with streaming media - I've been in the club and heard them having pointless conversations about bits-per-second rates far, far above any discernable improvement in sound quality, and I think the problem then arises because the poor old server is being told to give 40 people something like 320bps each, and fails miserably... at whcih point, everyone else on the sim gets about 2bps.

I'd love to be able to run tools that show the sim is being unfairly (and more relevantly, pointlessly) overloaded by one tenant - but I can't find anything that would help with this. I also can't find any Lindens online when it happens, to invite them over so they can verify that it's happening. Currently, my only option seems to be to clump up and sell my land (8000 metres!), or start my own pointless high-bitrate music uploader, to achieve "balance".

Except, being in and around the music business, it will be a cold day in hell before I risk an accusation of copyright infringement.

I'd go for the "wait it out" option. Most SL clubs are dead within a couple of weeks.

From my understanding of streaming media, the sims see nothing at all of that bandwidth as it is delivered directly from the streaming server elsewhere on the net directly to your client. If I had to guess, most of your problem stems from the simple fact there are 40 other people on the sim. I could be wrong.

I have a similar situation. A casino popped up right next to my shop. Now it's full of camping Zombies! When it first opened up, I was a bit bummed too. But hey, live and let live live right? So I walked over and met the owner. He turned out to be so nice that I bought him a new pimp suit (he's still a noob) to wear at his club. I also worked with him on his side of my property better accomodate his landscaping. After a few days we had a conversation about the placement of his business and he moved it over a bit (he volunteered!!!). Now he comes over to say hi or I'll pop in to laugh at zombies with him.
They even come over to my place on occasion to spend their camping money!
My point is that in my lucky experience, neighbors are pretty respectful if they know there's a problem. I much prefer looking over at "My Friends Casino" next door than that
d*mned lag factory in my SIM. lol

BTW, I live in NYC too! I've made it a point to get to know my neighbors early on in my buildings too. I've had pretty much the same good results.


Much Luck with your business!
remeber too that as a last resort, too much noise is considered griefing in TOS.

All 3 are good options, and you can really do all three to some extent.

Of course, don't expect every night to be like the grand opening. But they will have frequent events, so it won't be unusual either.

Go hang at the club a bit, try to be seen as a patron first, and introduce yourself in person. Say good things about the club if you can. Be a good neighbor. And after chatting about whatever, mention you're the next door neighbor, and when they have some time you'd like to chat about possibilities for cooperation.

Even if you skybox the store, you'll want something attractive on the ground floor. There's a real opportunity (perhaps) for cooperation with your neighbor, to make it an attractive place that somehow enhaces both of your properties. Remember that a good club can draw a lot of walk-in business, so this just might be a good thing for you.

I also think that in SL, you find a much wider range of types of people in a dance/sex club than in RL, so even if there's no obvious connect between your products and their style you might be surprised at the amount of business it can draw.

You really want your neighbors as allies, so find any way you can to make this an opportunity for the both of you. Put your grievances aside until you establish rapport with the owners, if you can.

If you can't establish any rapport with the owners, better start looking for new property. SL is supposed to be a GAME, for FUN, so no point in living with big neighbor problems any longer than necessary. Sure, you can profit too, but it's not likely to put you on the beach in RL!

If there are other shops adjoining yours, work with them too.

Um, gee, missed Jax's post -- what he said!

And Jax is correct about streaming. It's the people, objects, and scripts, not the media.

I can tell you what I do.
I am a club owner, we do live music once or twice a week'

I was IMd by a neighbor a few lots away that is in a rental informing me that people were shouting.

I did not notice that any one was but promptly put a stop to it. I hate nothing more than non stop shouting and the repeater things that shout many many times and fill up your screen you can't even talk normal with all the spam.

my advice is to IM the owner of the land or owner of the group asking if they would please set the sploders and such to not shout (did you know they will cross sims?) and to please try to refrain from shouting (there really is no need for it in a club its not like the AVs cant read cause the music is to loud LOL)
if that dosent work AR each individule that is shouting



and Gummi streaming media is directly from the url to the UI has no effect on the sim, besides the sim pointing uses UI to the url.

All really good suggestions and input. I also appreciate the referral if it becomes necessary to make a move (though, obviously, I'm hoping that doesn't happen. Moving being a pain, aside.. My hubby and I were married on that parcel and it now has sentimental value *heart throb*)

Jax: Thanks for your input too, neighbor! It's too bad I can't go about things in SL the way I do in reality.. and I think you know what I mean, there LOL

I hate the idea of jumping all over people the first time there's something going on. I had a club, myself, months ago (seems like EONS), and it didn't last. I hope their business flourishes (and not just out of a potential cross-customer thing, though that would be nice!)

I'll certainly give the "good neighbor" thing a shot.. I'd rather be a good neighbor than an a-hole (though some of my friends both SL and RL would heartily disagree! LOL)

I also really appreciate the input on the script/resources thing. I'm still confounded by it, but I try to learn what my poor little non-techy brain can absorb as I go!

I love the fact that so many of you replied with not only good suggestions, but valuable information, too. Makes me hopeful for the future of SL

Thank you!!

You could try the approach, lets do business together!!

Ask if putting up signs to the club AND your shop on eachother land. This will show that you can both potentially prosper from eachothers traffic?

It's true unfortunately that clubs do seem to come and go. Some of the best clubs in SL have fallen by the wayside very quickly, one alongside our own business openned for less than a week after spamming all its neighbours with sploders, greetings, and patrons shouting. Clubs that are not supported by vendors and shops rarely last a long time. Maybe for the time they are there, you can benefit from their traffic, even if it's only for a short while. One other 'advantage' is that many would have made landmarks to the club, after its gone, it will take a while for that traffic to slow down.... then is the time to put up signs and advertise.