Jump to content

If You Could Zone the Mainland, What Would You Do?


Prokofy Neva
 Share

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 1573 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Recommended Posts

On 11/30/2019 at 7:27 AM, ChinRey said:

They did that long ago. Some of the earliest regions are themed and when they introduced the telehubs, the idea was that the regions right next to them would be commercial and public ones while the ones further away would be residental. There were also the "I am" notecard givers (I think they were disguised as mailboxes but I may be wrong). You put one of them in fron of your house, added a notecard telling a bit about yuorself and your interest and when somebody were looking for a new home, they would walk around and check the info notecards of the established residents until they found a community of people who shared their interests.

What they totally forgot to take into account that their customers are humans.

I'm afraid the horse has fled now so it's too late to close the barn door. The existing mainland is what it is and drastic changes are bound to backfire badly.

 

Isn't that what they are doing with Bellisseria?

Bellisseria is only one zone though. We need a lot more variety in themes and it's simply not possible for the Moles to cover them all simply because there aren't enough of them. There aren't enough of them for all the work that needs to be done and, perhaps even more important, there aren't enough of them to provide the variety of creative input that is required.

 

It may be rude of me to say this on LL's official forum but to be absolutely honest, if you want to buy and develop an entire sim, at least not unless you're a well established and experienced landowner already.

Yes, there are far more people in SL than on all other grids combined but the chances you  are going to be noticed by anybody outside your close circle of friends is microscopic and the the tier is more than ten times what you have to pay elsewhere.

I don't know but I'll probably leave this thread now. Not because it isn't interesting (it is) but because it's rather fruitless. As I said, there's no point closign the barn door after the horse has fled and not matter how good the dieas here may be, they're all about could-have-beens and should-have-beens.

The Lindens didn't deliberately zone the telehubs as commercial regions. If they had, they wouldn't have gotten rid of them. Philip once told me that the highest spending inworld occurred on telehub or next-to-telehub sims, yet he had an aversion to commerce that other early and even current Lindens share ("no business but my business") and he was determined to get rid of the telehubs once they had malls on them. It happened because Anshe and Blue cornered the market and rented out the stores for a high cost and "created value," if you will. The Lindens actually thought some of the more "bucolic" telehubs they created in later years after the screeching of oldbies would help people meet each other. In fact, it did, and I cited that in my defense of the telehubs. But they didn't meet in the way that the Lindens imagined, to form happy building collectives where they could return each others' prims...

The oldbies were mad at the Lindens over the telehubs because it freed new people from their cartels and anyone could start in business not by cozying up to an oldbie and getting a corner in their store or getting on their network, but just ponying up the hefty telehub rental fee. That actually opened up the economy from failing oldbie businesses. The other factor was that before p2p, you had to fly great distances to get to oldbie businesses especially on the "colour sims" and they hated that and resented the telehubs where you arrived and were right near stores. Oldbies claimed falsely that telehubs were "avatar traps" based on just one telehub -- actually dominated by oldbies -- that did trap avatars (i.e. it rezzed so slowly with so much junk that people landing would get caught inside buildings and not be able to move).

Yes, Philip Linden had this idea that he was putting Jane Jacobs into practice, but not with commerce or zoning per se, but with the notion of "mixed use," that a bodega underneath the "el" could appear next to an apartment building because people needed to shop after work. But in SL, you didn't "need" to buy bits or bling, the dynamics were different.

I still have those mailboxes in inventory, but I only recall them in Board and Brown, and because they had this flashing green SL hand insignia that seemed to loom up at you, people didn't put them out. They never caught on. But they weren't everywhere just on a few sims that were "zoned" in the sense that there were streets and "suburbia" and the Lindens did not allow selling or skyboxes.

And yes, that's what I said, Bellisseria *is* zoning. And it  shows the great appetite of people to be saved from *each other* and have rules and have zoning! Remember when M Linden said "each other" was the killer app? What folly. People want to be rescued from others. They don't want serendipity in fact, unless it is managed serendipity at a "pickle party".

This thought seems incomplete: "It may be rude of me to say this on LL's official forum but to be absolutely honest, if you want to buy and develop an entire sim, at least not unless you're a well established and experienced landowner already."

You're saying "don't do that unless..."? Or saying you can do this in other virtual worlds for less? But there aren't any people there so there isn't commerce and creativity at the level there is in SL and that matters.

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/30/2019 at 6:53 AM, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

Build platforms in the sky are very helpful for creators who need an area to do whatever needs to be done inworld before they set something out for sale. Prevent those on mainland and store owners will have to either cram their work areas into the ground level build or leave mainland. (And "nothing above 250 m" however it's done will guarantee more low level sky platforms - better to have them above 2000 m, which means ownership and ability to set security if needed up there too.)

Separating living space and store space makes sense for those with busy stores, but mine's always been small and low traffic so it's best for me to have them nearby. It's just easier and also increases the chances of a conversation with a browser or customer starting, which is my favourite part of owning a shop. Having a shop and residence on the same sim used to be a done thing. I don't know if it still is. But being on mainland increases the chances of someone with a sense of curiosity and adventure happening by and dropping in for a wee nosy. Those are often the best conversations.

Just some thoughts from a "hobbyist" creator in a niche market. Please bear us in mind - collectively we're important to the vibrancy and diversity of SL.

For that matter put them at 4000 meters. The problem is to devise a rule that still enables this business model where 25 domes are stacked on a sim. I believe you could start stacking at 500 and still stack and still have sufficient distance between them. But for some reason, the dome businesses -- who have extracted profit out of sims the way no one else has -- decided they need to be in the view. This may be a form of advertising, where they imagine the few people traveling on a sim in which all the life has been killed will see a dome and want to live in one, too. I don't know what their reasoning is. But they currently have way more than the 20 m you need for chat not to travel, and camming from to another is still possible with the distances they do have, so there must be some other consideration. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Lindens didn't deliberately zone the telehubs as commercial regions.

They certainly did at Waterhead, as public areas rather than purely commercial that is. I don't think it's quite that clear cut around the other telehubs and besides, none of them are as well preserved.

Here's a snapshot from the commercial district at Borrowdale, right next to Waterhead, crammed full of stores and bustling with life:

image.thumb.png.9180ab018af8ae828172b863b49a345d.png

Oh well.

Even Nyx' office is gone now. I should have known since he was one of the Lindens who left during the recent Sansar staff massacre but I didn't think of it and it was a rather unpleasant surprise. :(

Aime Weber's cafe is the last building standing. I suppose its days are numbered too now so those of you who want to admire a true little masterpiece and see what magic the early master builders could do with "only" prims, better hurry up before it's too late.

Anyway, I digress. I think this picture illustrates what happened. The Lindens had their ideas (often different Lindens had widly different ideas) and simply assumed everything wold turn out the way they assumed. Never did they understand or take into account how people actually behave.

Edited by ChinRey
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

This thought seems incomplete: "It may be rude of me to say this on LL's official forum but to be absolutely honest, if you want to buy and develop an entire sim, at least not unless you're a well established and experienced landowner already."

You're saying "don't do that unless..."? Or saying you can do this in other virtual worlds for less? But there aren't any people there so there isn't commerce and creativity at the level there is in SL and that matters.

There's at least as much creativity on the other grids as there are in SL but you're right that there aren't as many people there and not much commerce going on.

But if all you want is a virtual home for yourself, there's no need to worry about how many other people there are around and the equivalent of 1000 L$/week can get you a whole sim on your own elsewhere.

And if you want to open a club or rp sim or some other public faility, what difference does it make to you that the grid is full of people? It's not as if any of them is likely to ever come near your place.

The people it does matter to are of course those who are trying to run some sort of rental business within SL. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place here but it's not as if LL cares and they're the ones who call the shots.

 

Edit: We have to be a bit careful with the "no people on opensim" meme from now on btw. Some of the better commercial and semi-commercial grids are growing incredibly fast these days both when it comes to concurrency and sim count. One small grid I have a store in, went from 80 to almost 800 sims in less than two years. Opensim people also tend to be far more social than they used to and if you know where the most popular hangouts are (and they're not too hard to find anymore), there's no need for you to feel lonely there.

Edited by ChinRey
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

For that matter put them at 4000 meters. The problem is to devise a rule that still enables this business model where 25 domes are stacked on a sim. I believe you could start stacking at 500 and still stack and still have sufficient distance between them.

Position-related rounding errors are too great at 4000 meters so build platforms do need to be lower.

I'm not a fan of stacked rental housing at all and I didn't address it in my short post. I just added some overlooked considerations for regulations others have suggested. That's all.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 hours ago, Raspberry Crystal said:

It is possible to have a lovely home anywhere in second life, it's the lovely neighbourhood which can be more of a challenge. Especially if you don't want to restrict your view distance to the shortest settings.

Yes.

Did you continue to my second paragraph where I proffered that Belli is just easier? That it's appeal isn't just the familiarity of American suburbia to many but that it is easier than the near infinite choice SL offers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

But they currently have way more than the 20 m you need for chat not to travel, and camming from to another is still possible with the distances they do have, so there must be some other consideration. 

It's probably more about inconsideration (if that is a word). I don't know if any landowner stacks as many as 25 skyboxes but even if they do, there'd still be plenty of room for them above 1,500 m. Open sky platforms need a little bit more space between them but even so, 600 m is still well outside any normal draw distance and that should be more than enough.

When people stack skyboxes lower than that, it's either because they don't care about others or becasue they don't think about it.

Edited by ChinRey
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, animats said:

I've mentioned the idea of "walled parcel continent", for people who want to build a wall around their property. Found this on the SL world map.

...

There are other groupings of parcels on the map cut up this way. This is just an example.

Yes, it's quite common and it makes a lot of sense for the people who want maximum privacy.

The nominal size of the grid is 268,435,456 km². It's smaller than RL earth (510,072,00 km²) but the population is a little bit lower too so it's not as if we're ever going to run out of space.

Or to put it another way: We've got room for almost five billion sims here and we only use less than 25,000 of them.

One of the great paradoxes of SL is that we have this effectively endless amount of space yet people cram up together and then complain about their neighbours. There's lots of good food for misanthropes there. ;)

Edited by ChinRey
Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

It's not wrong to have a need and care to that need, is it? I was growing up poor. I started working full time just before I was 18, so I don't have education and a job that pays so much. Oh, it is not like I have a bad life. But I can play with stuff in Second Life that goes beyond what my money in RL allows. As a child, I used to daydream about a nice house, my own room, a fine stereo, a mother who was well liked in the community, and she had put up a cork board on the kitchen wall with postcards and cute stuff pinned to it. This is taken directly from one of the few times I was to another kids home. I never forgot the corkboard and the pain of jealousy. It was a ordinary home, nothing special, and yet another world for me. I had never sat down by a table with a complete dinner set and a couple tealight candles in ceramic holders. I am happiest in SL when I create a version of a perfect home again and again. I am not attracted to space stations and mermaid homes. I would love to be in one and live there for a week, maybe.

No, it certainly isn't wrong to have needs or to find good ways to meet them. I do have empathy for that impulse and the situations which lead to it. We all have needs and we all seek out ways to meet them. For many though the perceived need for airbrushed perfection is artificial, created by industries to sell more and more things we don't actually need. Or where the need isn't artificial, it's shaped in particular directions by those same industries. That is what I'm uncomfortable with, the use of needs, whether artificial or real, to sell more and more stuff especially in conformance with a narrow vision.

If we're using personal examples, mine was a very bland, middle of the road, unassuming childhood. My sister and I had different reactions - she embraced that sold vision of sanitised perfection and encourages our mother to do the same. I found the blandness stifling and went off in search of different things. My crappy health prevents me from living that out as I'd like to. SL used to be a good alternative for encountering a broad diversity of creative visions. There's still some of it, but so much less and finding it can be hard work. Part of the delight before was the surprise of just happening into every shade of creativity without looking for it. It was just there, all around, with the accompanying sense of serendipity.

So perhaps for you this idealised mainstream is just what you need and you're able to grow in its prevalence. Maybe it's also limiting you, only you can assess that. It does limit many others and society as a whole. My sister was the creative, exuberant one growing up. She isn't any more and that's a loss.

 

Edited by Bitsy Buccaneer
  • Like 1
  • Sad 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

It's probably more about inconsideration (if that is a word). I don't know if any landowner stacks as many as 25 skyboxes but even if they do, there'd still be plenty of room for them above 1,500 m. Open sky platforms need a little bit more space between them but even so, 600 m is still well outside any normal draw distance and that should be more than enough.

600m gap is quite low, and whatever you draw distance you use yourself tends to be thought of as normal (I use 1024m a lot of the time)

In my opinion it is only the economics of second life which have led to low expectations.

When land is cheaper, the stuff which needs to be rendered gets spaced out more and owners don't feel as much need to squeeze every last buck out of their square meterage and prim allowance. If the landscape were not as dense, even lower end systems could can cope with longer draw distances. 

2 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

Did you continue to my second paragraph where I proffered that Belli is just easier?

I did!

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Raspberry Crystal said:

In my opinion it is only the economics of second life which have led to low expectations.

Yes, that's very obvious.

A full sim comes with 25,000 prims. If you're a little bit careful how you spend them, that's plenty enough to fill up five, ten even 20 regions - depending on what you are building.

With the high price you have to pay for it, you don't want to waste those extra prims - if you're doing rentals you can't afford to - and the only way you can go to make room for it all, is up.

 

I think I'd like to sum up a few things from my earlier posts:

If you want a full region in SL (let's use that as an example - it all applies to smaller parcels too only on a different scale) you first have to pay a few hundred dollars to start with, eitehr as purchase price on mainland or as setup/transfer fee for a private region. Then you have to pay about 200 dollars a month. For that you get 256x256 m of land and 25,000 prims to play with.

The two other grids I'm most active on at the moment, both offer 15,000 prims at 15 dollars a month, no setup fee of any kind. Add a fiver and you get 5,000 prims more, add ten and you get 10,000 and so on. Sim size is flexible ablthough 1024x1024 (16 times the size of an SL region) is usually regarded as the largest practical size. That means nobody builds skyboxes there. There's plenty of room on the ground so there's no point.

Overall quality of service is about the same, not as good as LL in some areas but also better in other so it evens out. There's not nearly as much content there as in SL of course but for the most part, if you want it, you find it. (I'm not talking about copybotted content btw. Unlike some girds, the two I have in mind are quite strict there, if anything they are stricter than LL.)

There aren't nearly as many people there are in SL but if you want company, you find it. As for visitors to your own land, well if you don't want them it's irrelevant, if you do want them, well, it doesn't matter if there are ltos of other people logged on to the same grid. It's not as if they're going to come to your place anyway.'

The result is that while SL is slowly declining, those grids are growing. They are growing fast too. One of them went up from 80 to almost 800 regions in a year, the other one is close to 18,000 now and is considerably larger than SL in land size.

Those grids owe much of their success to SL and Linden Lab but that's LL's problem. They are the ones who decided to make the viewer open source opening the field for competitors. (They should have learned from IBM's MS-Dos blunder but they didn't.)

The situation now is that Second Life is squeezed between commercial opensim based grids taking more and more of its traditional market and new fancy virtual worlds caputirng any new market that may open up. SL really only have two advantages by now. One is that it's still better known but that's not going to last for long. The other is mainland. I don't know of any other virtual worlds that has anything like it but unfortunately, after years of neglect most of it is in shambles.

There's a limit to how long LL can charge more than ten times as much as competitors do for similar products and from what I can see, they know this. They just don't seem to have a solution. They are trying hard though and I sincerely hope they can find a way.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

While the American suburbs can represent the Western worship (Europe included) of 'things' as status symbols and all the commercialization that goes with it, the house itself is not the problem. I've known people living in suburbs that believed they were better than others by attaining the status symbol of an expensive house, while I've known others who did not have this attitude toward their suburban home. I think the latter learned how to "make a house a home" -- the love and care they took to make it beautiful reflects the love and caring attitude they have toward life in general -- the love and care that goes far beyond the acquisition of 'things' in order to feel self-worth.

And I do wonder, Marianne, if it's this love and caring you're manifesting with your virtual home that is working so well for you too, along with being able to feel what it's like not to be poor.

Edited by Luna Bliss
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

57 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

They are growing fast too. One of them went up from 80 to almost 800 regions in a year, the other one is close to 18,000 now and is considerably larger than SL in land size.

I've been wondering about this!  I got a request for a 3-sim project in opensim, and I haven't had requests from there in ages.

Edited by Luna Bliss
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 12/2/2019 at 12:41 PM, Marianne Little said:

It's not wrong to have a need and care to that need, is it? I was growing up poor. I started working full time just before I was 18, so I don't have education and a job that pays so much. Oh, it is not like I have a bad life. But I can play with stuff in Second Life that goes beyond what my money in RL allows. As a child, I used to daydream about a nice house, my own room, a fine stereo, a mother who was well liked in the community, and she had put up a cork board on the kitchen wall with postcards and cute stuff pinned to it. This is taken directly from one of the few times I was to another kids home. I never forgot the corkboard and the pain of jealousy. It was a ordinary home, nothing special, and yet another world for me. I had never sat down by a table with a complete dinner set and a couple tealight candles in ceramic holders. I am happiest in SL when I create a version of a perfect home again and again. I am not attracted to space stations and mermaid homes. I would love to be in one and live there for a week, maybe.

Marianne - It absolutely isn't wrong. Build and rebuild your idea of the perfect home as often as you want, and be as fabulous with it as you want! Build giant mansions and spent as much as you want to decorate it! If it makes you happy, that is truly the only thing that matters.

Shame on anyone who tries to shame you by trying to be all pious and holier-than-thou.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/30/2019 at 2:41 PM, Marianne Little said:

I would instead see parcels set to 1024, 2048 and up to ?.. This is supposed to be residential areas, not land where 200 ppl go together and create a roleplay land. So parcels for max 5 - 6 premium avatars would perhaps be enough.

This scenario is similar to the "neighborhood" where I have mainland now and its working pretty well actually.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Beth Macbain said:

Shame on anyone who tries to shame you by trying to be all pious and holier-than-thou.

Is this what you've decided I'm doing here and why you left a sad face on my last post? It certainly wasn't my intention to shame or be pious.

I would genuinely like to know. If there's a misunderstanding, I'd like to clear it up. If I wrote poorly, I'd like to know so I can try to improve.

Edit to add: If Marianne was offended by my post, I apologise unreservedly. I respect her a great deal.

Edited by Bitsy Buccaneer
  • Like 1
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 12/3/2019 at 5:19 AM, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

My sister and I had different reactions - she embraced that sold vision of sanitised perfection and encourages our mother to do the same. I found the blandness stifling and went off in search of different things.

Why do you think your sister chose that, and if I may ask, what did you choose to fit in?  It's an interesting problem, how everybody chooses to fit into this world and have self-esteem. I"m wondering myself as I write, how am I choosing to fit in...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 12/3/2019 at 6:29 PM, Luna Bliss said:

While the American suburbs can represent the Western worship (Europe included) of 'things' as status symbols and all the commercialization that goes with it, the house itself is not the problem. I've known people living in suburbs that believed they were better than others by attaining the status symbol of an expensive house, while I've known others who did not have this attitude toward their suburban home

I don't think the American suburbs represent anything else other than exactly that - the american suburbs. They have a very distinct look and feel to them (I think someone else already mentioned, that they don't feel familiar, if you are from a european country). I grew up in a city that could be categorized as a suburb to a big city. My parents moved there, because its literally the only place a normal two income household can afford owning a small house with garden. 99% of the people living in this city had nothing to brag about in terms of materialism and status symbols. You are rich, if you don't have to move to the suburbs to own a decent sized house.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Why do you think your sister chose that, and if I may ask, what did you choose to fit in?  It's an interesting problem, how everybody chooses to fit into this world and have self-esteem. I"m wondering myself as I write, how am I choosing to fit in...

Fear is probably the best descriptor I think. When we were young she was adventurous, daring, didn't accept externally imposed limits or expectations, not when she could do her own thing her own way, whatever that was at the time. She was so much fun and my hero. Everyone thought I was her role model since I'm older but it was really the other way around. Along the way she lost that. I know some of the reasons and can guess at other factors, like our mother's influence and need to have her own choices affirmed. This shining wild child became an often hesitant and timid woman, defined by her husband and sons.

For your question about myself, I never really chose to fit in. It's more like I started rejecting the values and beliefs I'd grown up with, and found my way into recognising the value within everyone, helped by progressive communities, a decade living in a sort of post-hippy cooperative household, lots of religious and spiritual exploration, practice and study and by my own struggles to value myself. Part of that was recognising and changing what I didn't like in myself and learning to value what I did.

One of the things I learned along the way was that trying to meet needs by other people's solutions rarely works. My sister's quest for a magazine perfect house won't heal her fear because her timidity is rooted in something else. Repainting the living room keeps her busy though and lets her avoid what's going on inside. Sometimes it's useful to find these sorts of temporary solutions, if they give you some peace to recoup your energy, but ultimately they paper over the causes instead of addressing them.

Since you brought it up, this is the teaching I have to share on developing self-esteem. One part is learning to see and value what is good in others. It may help you learn to see what is good in yourself and it will reduce the chance of your own needs and pain harming others. The other half is to always look for the real reasons for your discomfort within yourself, then muster the courage to find ways of addressing those needs which genuinely heal your pain.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

Since you brought it up, this is the teaching I have to share on developing self-esteem. One part is learning to see and value what is good in others. It may help you learn to see what is good in yourself and it will reduce the chance of your own needs and pain harming others. The other half is to always look for the real reasons for your discomfort within yourself, then muster the courage to find ways of addressing those needs which genuinely heal your pain.

This will sound tautological, but a major reason (maybe the only) I try to see what's good in others is that, if I don't, I'll be living in a world where I see no good in others. There's probably no point in having self-esteem if you're the only one in the world you think deserves it.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Syo Emerald said:
On 12/3/2019 at 11:29 AM, Luna Bliss said:

While the American suburbs can represent the Western worship (Europe included) of 'things' as status symbols and all the commercialization that goes with it, the house itself is not the problem. I've known people living in suburbs that believed they were better than others by attaining the status symbol of an expensive house, while I've known others who did not have this attitude toward their suburban home

I don't think the American suburbs represent anything else other than exactly that - the american suburbs. They have a very distinct look and feel to them

Yes, I love the varied looks of European towns, and some of my fondest memories in SL are projects where I was hired to create a town environment in France, Greece, and other places -- and Europe in that respect is quite different.  However, I do need to point out that most of America does not look like an American suburb.

What I was starting to examine though, is the underpinnings of the Western World's obsession with 'things' -- the commercialization, mass production and the like which began in Europe with the industrial revolution -- because I feel it's relevant to people's childhood when they grew up poor,  their self-esteem, and what they do/prefer in SL (Marianne's post evoked this for me).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You are about to reply to a thread that has been inactive for 1573 days.

Please take a moment to consider if this thread is worth bumping.

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...