Why so many regions not "connected" to the world?

Why are there so many regions that don't seem to be "connected" to the rest of the world? I thought that it would be like a real geography, with every region having connections to the ones adjacent to it.

maybe they have lot of 16 sqm plots running lag scripts that crash the sim

Do you mean islands? Those are sims people have purchased for the express purpose of being OFF the mainland, for whatever reason.

What she said. all the individual squares that you see out in the ocean are privately owned "islands." An island = sim = region. People pay Linden Lab directly a sum of money (isn't it like USD 2000 now?) to have their own private regions.

The stuff that you see on the continents was designed by LL and released to the public at auction. Each one of THOSE squares is also known as a "sim" or "region".

Each island/sim/region has a unique name.

Initially truly private islands (no public acess) never even showed up on the map. THis was a GOOD THING. As as happens so often in SL good thigns don't last and now you see all sims private or not.

I think the least they could do is give private sims a small tick on the map graphic or a tinting (liek when a sim is down) indicating private sim. It's frustrating to go sim hopping and come up empty half the time.

You can still have a private island that is not visible on the map. There's a flag called 'visible from mainland' that you can uncheck, and then the island is no longer visible or accessable to anybody outside of those on an estate access list.

-Atashi

Besides.. what's the difference, if you want to keep the general public out, you simply set an access list for those you DO want to allow, and anyone else cannot teleport to the island, and since it's an island.. and you cannot swim, or fly across the ocean areas, who cares if it's visible on the map or not.

Trashy neighbours with trashy looking buildings? With an island you have no one living in a parcel next to you, so it's not about being off the grid so much as it's about not having to look at anything but your own trashyness, lol.

Why was this a good thing?

As I remember After the P2P teleporting was introduced all islands where explosed with in the SL world. That was one after effect that LLABs could not control during the the major release of P2P Teleporting.

According to the current Private Estate guide, you can still make a private estate (one or more islands) invisible and inaccessable, P2P teleporting or not. IIRC, when they deliver a brand-new estate, it is in this condition - invisible and inaccessable to everyone except the owner.

-Atashi

It's my understanding that that option on the estate controls has always been there, but a few releases ago the 'invisible on the map' part was rendered inoperative (because it was causing backend lag). In other words, the option on the dialog is simply 'left over', and no longer does what it says with regard to visibility on the map, and the Estate guide(s) are out of date.

Why folks might want to keep their island off the map - because not only is the island visible, the green dots are as well. This may not seem like a big deal, but for folks who want to appear offline while doing work (and there are content creators that use a private island for just that), the presence of one or more green dots on the map in "Joe's Private Workshop" sim, say, is just fuel for drama ("Joe shows offline for me, but there are dots in his workshop, he must have hidden his online status from me, <inject drama here>" that folks used to be able to avoid.

Have fun!

Who could stand to be friends with someone like that, anyway?