BIG DAY TODAY, passenger number 200,000 riding my vehicles.

[AnnMarie Otoole]

Actually the forum population is not representative of the general population.  The compliments I get by IM outnumber complaints 10 to 1 and really make my day.  But positive impressions don't motivate active forum participation to the extent that antagonistic impressions do so you get a biased view here that is not representative. 

Bottom line is I do not irritate the average resident and nothing I do violates the TOS intentionally. 

A large percentage of the forum contributors come looking for something to **bleep** about so if I can provide subject matter that feeds their appetite I'm happy to oblige.

[Phil Deakins]

---

AnnMarie Otoole wrote:

If you have not encountered public roads then you would not have encountered

my vehicles that bring life and realism to the roads.

---

There is absolutely no realism in vehicles that are too big for the roads they are on, that zig-zag all over the roads, so they are usually difficult for road-users to negotiate and therefore spoil the roads for people, and that have nobody driving them or even being on them. Where do you imagine the "life and realism" in that?

I'll say one thing for you though. You have a very thick skin. Not many people would put up with the level of perpetual flack that's aimed at you and still keep on coming back for more. Most people would only come back for more if there was somebody on their side, but you have nobody - not one single SL user - on your side - except your 1-post alt, of course, but that doesn't count.

[Phil Deakins]

---

Dillon Levenque wrote:

That leaves the second possibility: you know you're irritating people all over mainland but you keep doing it just because for some reason LL lets you get away with it

---

Aaah. That took me back to the good ol' days when most forum users were dead against traffic bots but LL allowed them. The forum hasn't been the same for me since traffic bots were disallowed, but it's very nice to reminisce once in a while :matte-motes-grin: Of course, I never stood alone in my support of traffic bots, because there were genuine pros and cons, but I was always in a minority. AnnMarie does stand alone because there is nothing at all on the 'pro' side for her vehicles.

[Dillon Levenque]

---

AnnMarie Otoole wrote:

Actually the forum population is

not

representative of the general population.  The compliments I get by IM outnumber complaints 10 to 1 and really make my day.  But positive impressions don't motivate active forum participation to the extent that antagonistic impressions do so you get a biased view here that is not representative. 

Bottom line is I do not irritate the average resident and nothing I do violates the TOS intentionally. 

A large percentage of the forum contributors come looking for something to **bleep** about so if I can provide subject matter that feeds their appetite I'm happy to oblige.

---

Bunk. I've been here four years. I don't start a lot of threads and I don't post all that often but I read damn near everything. The majority of threads in this Forum have to do with things that interest people. A SMALL percentage are from people who just want to bleep about something.

As for your statement that Forum contributors are not representative of Second Life residents: I can't prove that statement false (nor can you prove it true: you're just shooting off your mouth).

Of the people I spend time with and converse with in Second Life, maybe 10% contribute to (or even know about or read) the Forum. And that is a generous estimate; I believe the actual percentage is smaller. The non-Forum contributors do not in any way seem different from the Forum contributors. They all seem to go about their Second Lives in much the same way. In fact, several of my non-forum friends have themselves become friends of my forum friends, something that delights me beyond measure.

[Qie Niangao]

---

Czari Zenovka wrote:

---

AnnMarie Otoole wrote:

 

HOWEVER, I don't need to justify their existence just as the thousands of empty shopping malls, empty dance clubs, empty renal houses, empty billboards don't need to justify their existence.  I would continue to brighten up the empty SL roads even if they didn't accept passengers.

---

Here's what I don't get: empty shopping malls, dance clubs, I think you meant "rental houses" (I'm shuddering over what a "renal house" would be), billboards, etc.

all have to be on land where someone is paying tier or LL would take the land back

.  I don't understand how your vehicles have open access to Governor Linden owned land.   If I step over the boundary in my water sim from the parcel I rent to Linden ocean I can't rez a boat; one step back on my land and I can.

I'm one of the people who have been in SL for 6+ years and have never seen one of your vehicles, much less rode on one, in case you want to figure that into your stats.

---

Emphasis mine; unfortunately the bolded part is not correct, and indeed that makes the problem worse. The thing is, automated vehicles that are not absolutely 100% reliable cause even more trouble now that an astonishingly huge amount of Mainland is invisibly abandoned. It's not just that the owners don't login very often to clear out the crap that's accumulated on their land (and is bugging their neighbors into abandoning their land -- I've seen this pattern over and over), but even more: the owners don't actually exist anymore. Individual accounts deleted, groups with no contributed tier, but no: LL does not take the land back.

I'm not talking about a few instances, either. I mean a substantial share of Mainland. There are builds on the parcels -- stores, even -- and the land appears to have owners, but scratch the surface and those owners are long gone.

It makes sense, in a way, that LL doesn't reclaim that land. The Mainland situation is so dire now -- there are so few folks remaining to give it any appearance of being used -- that leaving long dead content strewn around is preferable to letting folks see just how desperately deserted these continents actually are.

The problem is that nobody is ever going to return vehicles that go astray onto those parcels. They'll just keep accumulating forever. It's not just the vehicles, of course, but griefer prims, lazy shopper unboxings, random detritus that escaped the build tool from several sims away, all that crap slowly filling the invisibly-abandoned Mainland -- and in the process driving off the few who remain.

[Timothy McGregor]

Man, that was a really depressing thing to read. Indeed, a topic in and of itself, even though It's probably been done a thousand times now.

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Zaphod Kotobide wrote:

Man, that was a really depressing thing to read. Indeed, a topic in and of itself, even though It's probably been done a thousand times now.

---

And then there are mainland sims such as the one on which I live that currently has no parcels for sale and the builds are well in keeping with the overall "look" of the sim and each other.  Granted it is a water sim bordered by two oceans, but it is still mainland.  I was out exploring mainland a bit earlier and found other such regions so while there may be a lot of abandoned land (and I'm not denying that there is) there is still quite a bit of fascinating mainland that many of us call home.

[Coby Foden]

---

Czari Zenovka wrote:

 

... there is still quite a bit of fascinating mainland that many of us call home.

---

Yes I can agree to that.  I'm constanly exploring places a lot.  What I have seen is that even though lots of mainland looks like garbage, there are still good supply of well built beautiful places there.

:smileyhappy:

[Perrie Juran]

---

Coby Foden wrote:

---

Czari Zenovka wrote:

 

... there is still quite a bit of fascinating mainland that many of us call home.

---

Yes I can agree to that.  I'm constanly exploring places a lot.  What I have seen is that even though lots of mainland looks like garbage, there are still good supply of well built beautiful places there.

:smileyhappy:

---

I know its a side subject but yes I agree with this too.

I still hold that a limited amount of zoning would be good for the Mainland, make it more desirable, with some SIMs designated residential only.

I think Linden Homes are a proof of concept.  One of the reasons they remain desirable is because the areas are strictly residential.

Bu that is a separate discussion.

[AnnMarie Otoole]

Part of the problem is over supply of land.  In the days when I first joined they were getting 30,000 new members per DAY.

My first sim cost me over $5,000 US DOLLARS.  Then they started to look at the fortune they were making on tier costs and decided that instead of a one time profit from selling the land, make the land cheaper so more people would pay tier fees.  Early investors lost millions of RL dollars.

So they started building new continents and dropping the purchase price to get more landowners, based on an expansion rate that was just a bubble.

The days when we were just about hitting peaks of 100,000 people on board are long gone, we are lucky to reach 50,000 now days.  Some new marketing structure is needed to put some life back in SL mainland.  I would suggest considering the following ideas.

1. With apologies to those in the Real Estate business, new (or abandoned) (main) land should be only L$1 per sqm to get newbies addicted to the creative opportunities of land ownership.  This is somewhat true already.

2. No membership required for first 1024 sqm  to get newbies involved (but land cannot be sold without paid membership to discourage alt accounts from squatting).

3. LOWER tier costs based on actual land owned, scrap the tier levels.  For someone who is at the tier borderline they currently avoid expanding due to the massive jump in cost.  If it was $$ / sqm / month and prices dropping with volume that would be an incentive to add a few sqm to get into a lower price bracket rather than avoiding expansion.  Once in the next price range, adding a little land would be just incremental cost.

5. Ban that scourge of automated vehicles on the roads that have caused the mass exodus to private islands and precipitated the downfall of mainland SL.

 

[Perrie Juran]

---

AnnMarie Otoole wrote:

Part of the problem is over supply of land.  In the days when I first joined they were getting 30,000 new members per

DAY

.

My first sim cost me over $5,000 US DOLLARS.  Then they started to look at the fortune they were making on tier costs and decided that instead of a one time profit from selling the land, make the land cheaper so more people would pay tier fees.  Early investors lost millions of RL dollars.

 

---

You and early investors did not "lose" any money.  Just your investment did not pay off.  Yes I know it was a pretty direct result of LL's actions.  But did you and the other early investors really think that the market would be able to sustain those kind of prices?  Even you further down in your post are encouraging lower Tier and land costs.

 

---

AnnMarie Otoole wrote:

Part of the problem is over supply of land.  In the days when I first joined they were getting 30,000 new members per

DAY

.

The days when we were just about hitting peaks of 100,000 people on board are long gone, we are lucky to reach 50,000 now days.

 

---

Really, it became a bubble.  If growth had continued, even at a slower rate, the Market would not have collapsed.  Investors hedged on it continuing but it didn't.  Still, the Market was in dire need of stabilizing.  Any one who could not see that there was a cap that was going to be reached really wasn't thinking it through.

 

 

 

---

AnnMarie Otoole wrote:

So they started building new continents and dropping the purchase price to get more landowners, based on an expansion rate that was just a bubble.

---

Space was needed, a place for all those new people to go.  Also, land pricing needed to stabilize and come down from the exorbitant rates that it had reached.  The expansion helped with this.  New people coming into SL who simply wanted to share in a little piece of paradise.  The price gouging on the Mainland was inhibiting this.  Really, affordable housing (and yes I know that is a subjective thing) was scarce.  That may have actually contributed to the Bubble happening and popping more so than the Land expansion by LL.

 

 

 

---

AnnMarie Otoole wrote:

 

2. No membership required for first 1024 sqm  to get newbies involved (but land cannot be sold without paid membership to discourage alt accounts from squatting).

 

---

What about us Oldbies?  And with how ever many of us there are who active, would there be enough land available to handle us all?

As far as Newbies are concerned, I think my proposal is better.  Time limit on the Linden Homes.  After six months kick them out of the nest and let them build their own.

And I do think membership is a good idea otherwise you will wind up with abandoned parcel after parcel after parcel that were claimed by accounts that later became inactive.

 

---

AnnMarie Otoole wrote:

 

5. Ban that scourge of automated vehicles on the roads that have caused the mass exodus to private islands and precipitated the downfall of mainland SL.

 

---

 

At a minimum, the creator at least needs to take responsibility for them and quit blaming LL because the Servers don't live up to her expectations.  If she can't get them to stay on the roads then she needs to remove them until she figures out how to.   She needs to stop making it every one else's problem.  It is her problem.  No one else. 

Just because she doesn't like the fact that as far as LL is concerned the Servers are living up to expectation in the category that causes her vehicles to be a problem, it is no excuse for her abdicating on her responsibility.

Quit blame shifting.

[Dillon Levenque]

I had extra time today, so I checked on the most active forum that is about Second Life but not run by LL. There is a still-active thread that in many ways mirrors this one. Qie posted a link to it early on in this thread but even without the link it's easy to find. When I looked in it was top of the list in the 'General SL' category. It started because of the self-rezzing bus stop sign business, but the cars quickly became part of the discussion.

It's an interesting read. There are several 'drops' from AnnMarie; she displays the same arrogance she displays here (and makes many of the same unprovable claims, such as that SL residents who 'like' her vehicles outnumber those who don't by 20:1). She repeats what she said in this thread, that it is only forum participants who AR her. She wrote she's never had a complaint from a landowner. That got the response you'd expect, since many of the people complaining in the thread were landowners.

I found it an interesting way to work through a news story, since everyone involved was speaking directly to the medium and not being 'reported' by a third party. Didn't waste too much of my time, either. I'd just have been reading the BBC World News anyway, and who cares about that stuff?

There was quite a lot of comment regarding the self-rezzing bus stops and how they were built to defeat the purpose of auto-return. AnnMarie never denied that was the case, but used her usual argument that if it was wrong LL would stop her. It seems they may be getting ready to do just that. I am sorry I'm unable to figure in which which meeting and on which date, but on either Monday or Tuesday (Tuesday being 8/27/13—today for me) Andrew Linden said they were working on ways to:

• Nerf the use of recursive rezzing to prevent griefers getting around autoreturn by creating an object which rezzes a copy of itself, then gives a copy to the rezzed object. The original is then autoreturned, but the copy carries on before creating a copy of itself, and so on.

Pardon the bullet, but the formatting wanted to do that and it worked okay in my opinion. The full story, from which I lifted that paragraph, can be found on Inara Pey's blog: http://modemworld.wordpress.com/. I found that very interesting, since it describes EXACTLY what the bus stop rezzers do.

[Perrie Juran]

Hopefully this link works better on getting to the specific post in Inara's blog.

[Dillon Levenque]

Oops. That's what happens when you live in the moment. I should have put a 'Best Used by 8/27/13' tag on my link, which was to whatever the first page of her blog happens to be at the time you click.

Thanks for digging out a link to the actual article I'd been talking about. I don't think there's much doubt about who caused that whole discussion to take place.