Sansara Continent

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

Hello all.  I decided to start a new thread specifically for my favourite continent, Sansara - where SL all began, as did it's precursor, Linden World.

My first post for this thread fixes one of the biggest problems with Sansara, as there is currently no way to move by boat from Sansara's north coast to south coast, or vice-versa. Why? There is no contiguous waterway and water levels are much higher/deeper in Sansara's interior lakes.

My plan involves a short relocation of a 16 region sized micro-continent called "Islandia North" (to the north-east of Sansara) and adding 38 new water regions for an entirely protected waterway along the east side of Sansara, creating a proper coastline for the first time in its long history. The coastal route also utilises some existing water regions (between Sansara and Islandia South micro-continent) and connects at it's southern end to the north shore of Bellisseria, the new Linden Homes continent.

 

A second cheaper alternative is to leave Islandia North where it is, but dig a protected water channel through the current Pine Coast (1031,1008) region, or Torver (1030,1007) region which could also work - and reduce the new region count by two to "only" 36.

A third and the "cheapest" alternative would be to link only as north as Bleaberry Tarn (1030,1004), using a total of 33 new regions.

 

Edited May 31, 2021 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Coffee Pancake]

Plan B ... Sink Sansara into the void as peace offing to the gods.

It's as likely an outcome as 38 (!!) water regions and moving an island.

We're 18 years deep and haven't managed to get the voids filled (pictured luskwood, there are many others)

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

@Coffee Pancake , 38 regions is "only" twice the number of new regions that were added to Jeogeot's north coast in 2019 to link it to Bellisseria.

As for moving continents or smaller micro-continents, that is something that LL employees have already said can be done.

And I've included two "cheaper" alternatives of 36 and 33 regions too.

Edited May 31, 2021 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[MoiraKathleen]

Perhaps wait to see what happens as the remaining Bellisseria themes are built out?  There is at least one new theme on the way, and perhaps 2 or 3 more after that.  To me, it seems like the connecting the continents that has occurred so far has tended to be included with building out different sections of Bellisseria.

[Stefanie Starlight]

1 hour ago, MoiraKathleen said:

Perhaps wait to see what happens as the remaining Bellisseria themes are built out?

Where do you see Bellisseria expanding to, in relation to where it is already?  Is any of it potentially to the east of Sansara so they could use it to fix this navigation issue?

[Aethelwine]

I hope Bellisseria links Bleaberry Tarn, to Stromberg or Atanua on Satori, that would really open up the possibilities for boat travel. Maybe if it expands far enough the East coast of the Atoll, but that coastline seems too far to wish for.

 

[Stefanie Starlight]

1 hour ago, Aethelwine said:

I hope Bellisseria links Bleaberry Tarn, to Stromberg or Atanua on Satori

That would be wonderful, but there are hordes of private sims already in the area that would cover, so I would doubt LL would be so ambitious.  But there is a large triangular void north-east of Van Gogh which at least could link the east coast of Sansara with some of the central areas of current Belliesseria.  Heterocera would then be covered by any route facilitating travel from central Sansara to Bellisseria and beyond.  The east coast of Sansara is really the only obstacle to linking the whole Mainland apart from Gaeta I and the Sharp Continent (and of course Zindra which will be forever beyond the pale!)

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

I was curious about an alternative north-south route that goes around and through Sansara.  At the moment, its possible to sail from Sansara's north coast all the way south via Nova Albion, the San Francisco 16,  to Abbots airport and down to the Chamonix City regions.  But no further than that, as there are too many ban lines and no further protected waterways.

So I added some imaginary regions to the south of Chamonix's regions, around the Snowlands and eastwards to the Elements regions which complete the southern coast of Sansara.

A full coastal route which touches land costs 29 regions, while a shorter more direct route that's partially separated from the shoreline costs 26 regions.

Both these routes use fewer resources and are cheaper than doing a full east coast route from Omoo to Bleaberry Tarn.... (oops!) 

Edited June 2, 2021 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Aethelwine]

The protected waterway North of there is very difficult, especially in Clissa, where it is narrow, requires a turn right after a sim crossing infront of a banline and zig zags across the region.

Only the most adventurous would consider it really open unless they added waterway right up to Mnemosyne.

A few regions around Clissa a minimum, because of the way banlines are located around the passage it is really only open to small boats that can reverse and go at a rowboats speed.

Edited June 2, 2021 by Aethelwine

[MoiraKathleen]

On 5/31/2021 at 9:42 PM, Stefanie Starlight said:

Where do you see Bellisseria expanding to, in relation to where it is already?  Is any of it potentially to the east of Sansara so they could use it to fix this navigation issue?

Depending on whether LL wants to relocate existing private regions (and if so, how many) I could imagine Bellisseria expanding north from the log cabins, stilts and chalets areas into the area between Sansara and Satori.   Otherwise, I could imagine it expanding to the south/south east from the stilts and chalats areas, towards the Sharp continent (and perhaps also north on the eastern side of Satori).  Perhaps both would happen. 

[Stefanie Starlight]

As an aside to all the excellent thoughts here, I am more and more loving Sansara.  I have a small property in Miru which includes now an LCC launch point, and really love sailing the various waterways.  I love how close I am to the San Francisco sims, and only a water passage through to Bellisseria and beyond is lacking for me.  If LL can see their way to adopt one or more of the ideas here, I am sure there will be many grateful Mainlanders.  While I have no interest at all in living in Bellisseria, I am very thankful that its expansion has joined some of the real continents at last   

[Tary Allen]

I love Sansara too, I have land in Waring, and love to ride a horse around mainland, even with all the orbs and Ban lines. I wish there were more protected roads around my place linking to the main roads. Enough empty land for that

[Prokofy Neva]

On 5/31/2021 at 8:47 AM, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

Hello all.  I decided to start a new thread specifically for my favourite continent, Sansara - where SL all began, as did it's precursor, Linden World.

My first post for this thread fixes one of the biggest problems with Sansara, as there is currently no way to move by boat from Sansara's north coast to south coast, or vice-versa. Why? There is no contiguous waterway and water levels are much higher/deeper in Sansara's interior lakes.

My plan involves a short relocation of a 16 region sized micro-continent called "Islandia North" (to the north-east of Sansara) and adding 38 new water regions for an entirely protected waterway along the east side of Sansara, creating a proper coastline for the first time in its long history. The coastal route also utilises some existing water regions (between Sansara and Islandia South micro-continent) and connects at it's southern end to the north shore of Bellisseria, the new Linden Homes continent.

 

A second cheaper alternative is to leave Islandia North where it is, but dig a protected water channel through the current Pine Coast (1031,1008) region, or Torver (1030,1007) region which could also work - and reduce the new region count by two to "only" 36.

A third and the "cheapest" alternative would be to link only as north as Bleaberry Tarn (1030,1004), using a total of 33 new regions.

 

I think Sansara is where I have a lot of my land because that's all there was 18 years ago besides private islands! I'd have to sit and count to see if in fact non-Sansara, mainly Heterocera now is greater, plus Nautilus and other "new" continents as I still think of them although now they are very old. I don't think the Lindens are going to put in even 2 sims, let alone 38. They have no motivation to create sailing land where it doesn't now exist, and therefore devalue the value of Blake and even Bellisseria.

My very anecdotal impression is that Blake market is soft now. There has been this frenzied and aggressive effort by some land dealers to turn Sansara and other old continents into "sailing areas" which is very stretched in some cases -- the incredible 50-100 sim journeys you would have to make that would dwarf what you just did in the snow lands make these prices of $10 or more likely $20/m just absurd. And if they sell, it's sometimes to other dealers or the unaware, not end users.

I think you could get through the sim sims for one important reason: snow is a bad buy, snow is abandoned, snow is not populated once winter is over, so there are less security orbs, less obstructions from active users. Try the ride from Cub all the way around the horn to the Sea of Fables by Sutherland without going backwards and falling over the dam. I'm not sure it's at all possible even though it seems as if it is on the map. But really, the key reason would be dilution of the value of Blake and Bellisseria, which is more of a inflatable raft/fishing boat kind of puttering area, not sailing, as there are too many land obstructions, but still...

So I hear the other day someone died or became ill and defaulted on 12 Blake regions, which sold at auction for the equivalent of US $30,000 which seemed like some fantastic sum, and of course it is. If these figures are wrong, someone can correct them, but go look at the map and see what Blake sims go for in the resident market --- I merely flew around this area the other day to observe this auction windfall for the Lindens and immediately one of the land dealers tried to hustle me a hump of sand in the water surrounded by not exactly Mainland blight but overly busy Blake busy, which is all those airports and seaports and giant RENT MEs in the sky. He wanted like US $800 for basically a boat slip surrounded by heavy users. No thank you. Ahab's Landing is the place for me.

So that legendary Blake auction is US $2,500 per sim, a seemingly insane sum -- except in re-sales and rentals, it will be made back, it will just take a year -- or maybe not, seeing the fantastic prices on the now-parceled sims and how they are going pretty quick. Back when the Lindens sold Mainland sim individually at auction, I won the bid for Ravenglass at US $1501, which was considered a prime mainland sim with waterfront, protected Linden water to save the coast (up to a point, upon which hinges much history), and a Mainland island, not a private island but Mainland surrounded by navigable sea. But that wasn't telehub land, or sandy coast, and those sims *did* go for much more, near to the equivalent of a rocky Northeastern type waterfront Sansara sim. I don't know if they quite reached the level of $2500, but certainly $2000 plus. Hard to imagine that Sansara sims were anywhere near Blake level of value -- and at a time when the Linden dollar was strong and not weak as it was in the interim years between then and now. Yet they were, because they were new, fast and shiny.

But the Lindens don't like to return to their past. "A dog does not return to its vomit," as the Latin saying goes. Adding any sims to Sansara would make sense in their terms only if they put void sims AND another layer of sandy sims that they could sell for young fortunes like Nautilus, Bay City and now Blake. And then that becomes a significant cost. I don't know what the wholesale price of regions is for them, but it's not like Open Sim. It also dilutes Blake for everybody -- and concurrency is 50,000, and while people point to how it went up on March 24 to 60,000 (what happened on that day????), that's not the norm. There's the same 50,000 of which only X percent in the low double digits can afford costly rentals or purchases.

Wouldn't it be great if the Lindens instead released new textures, especially for Heterocetera which has that awful chemical waste toxic sand which was supposed to be "blue coral". If they had parcel-level texture on demand, which many people would obliviously love for themselves, it would look even more like the crazy quilt it already is. Fortunately, I don't think they would ever do that. There are just too many problems trying to revisit old continents, even unfinished ones, for them to bother.

The old model the Lindens used for about five years starting in 2004 was this, after they grew out of the original core sims of "Linden World" and the first Sansara sims. They would roll out new sims and put them on the auction, some in their entirety, some in parts. A few sims would be chopped up into 512s for "First Land" which was a land like Bellisseria except it was empty. Only those with X day accounts as newbies could get "First Land". So a side market developed with zillions of alts and oldbies terrorizing newbies to get at their first land (I experienced this in Refugio and other sims). Oldbies and alts would put boards over land and root them so you couldn't see their "First Land" status inworld -- this was before the elaborate map we have now. A scourge of land barons sprang up who snagged all the first land on alts and flipped it, or cajoled it out of the hands of newbies who didn't understand the system or the pricing.

Ad-cutting came about because originally, abandoned land fell into 32 of 16m pieces under the theory that neighbours on a sim would just come and take a 16 or a 48 here and there just to get a few prims. Instead, ad farmers took them and ad extortionists.

Eager to leave behind the terrible mess that resulted from these poor policies, the Lindens just kept designing and issuing new whole sims extending out Sansara and started new continents . (I will never forget as a newbie when I accidentally abandoned a first land and had it fall into 16m squares and then watch how vultures descended on me. Lindens wouldn't reverse things like this. They later put all sorts of child-proof caps on the land menu like "Do you really want to do this?" and "doing this will jack up your tier" etc. Not then.) I remember we used to stay up late at night and watch how a new sim appeared out of the mists, and these little green triangles which were like tree bundles appeared on them to make the Linden forests, then rush to the auction page to see if it was listed yet. When you have seen a sim be born, when you have attended its birth and later nurtured it, you will never call it "region". 

So they kept rolling out new sims, ever Westward, ever lighting out for the territories, rolling, rolling, rolling, because they recapitulated the American pioneer myths (which are related to ancient human migration myths -- you run out of food, you move along, eventually, when you pasture animals, they run out of grass, you keep moving, etc.) Of course, you could comment on how rolling out land all the time when the economy hadn't absorbed it was like printing Lindens and killing the free currency market outside of SL -- and indeed nature followed its course.

But each new shiny sim building out Sansara, or each breathlessly awaited new continent with new textures would make brand-new sims a hot item. The servers were also faster -- they would be newer. I can remember when "new, fast, mature" was a real estate phrase to attract customers because it meant a new sim just hot off the auction, that ran faster and wasn't yet blighted by Mainland insanity, meant a better life. For some people, it meant taking a whole sim and trying to control it and keep it nice, as a group land or as cooperating neighbours. For others, it meant chopping, abandoning, chopping, abandoning, and here we all are.

The Lindens kept doing this until...hmmm the Bragg court case? The slump in concurrency after 2007? P2P and the end of the telehub era? All of the above plus the US recession of 2008?  I'd have to research that, someone may have a ready answer. The Lindens stopped issuing new whole sims they had made. The whole sims no longer sold except very rarely after being abandoned and recycled -- the auction system was changed, mainly parcels were put on it, and no new sims were developed and rolled out, only old, used sims were sold. And remember, the ad farm scourge to four long years of struggle to end, and it didn't even end permanently and has crept back.

I don't know how much institutional memory the Lindens have, but painful memories tend to be imprinted and probably they recall all the reasons they came up with not to develop new sims to extend continents or make even new continents. And today, I think the biggest reason is "Bellisseria" and also "Blake". They are willing to develop their product to compete against their own pro-sumer customers in the land business. They aren't willing to compete against themselves. 

And every void sim they roll out has no tier backing it, and is only their sunk cost.

 

Edited June 4, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Stefanie Starlight]

@Prokofy NevaThank you for another amazing recap of SL history and some powerful insights into present motivations.  It's all a bit discouraging though, and makes me wonder if I should just end it all and head off to RL instead, hehe.  I guess I knew it is mostly about money, but you have confirmed it all too convincingly!

I do have one specific question:  Bellisseria I think I understand as a concept (though does it properly include ALL of the Linden Homes areas between Sansara, Jeogeot and Satori, or is it properly only the really well designed bit between Sansara and Jeogeot, with the large accretion towards Satori then being a sort of cancerous growth?   )   ...  but what is 'Blake' as a real estate area, as distinct from the actual Blake Sea navigation sims?

[Prokofy Neva]

2 minutes ago, Stefanie Starlight said:

@Prokofy NevaThank you for another amazing recap of SL history and some powerful insights into present motivations.  It's all a bit discouraging though, and makes me wonder if I should just end it all and head off to RL instead, hehe.  I guess I knew it is mostly about money, but you have confirmed it all too convincingly!

I do have one specific question:  Bellisseria I think I understand as a concept (though does it properly include ALL of the Linden Homes areas between Sansara, Jeogeot and Satori, or is it properly only the really well designed bit between Sansara and Jeogeot, with the large accretion towards Satori then being a sort of cancerous growth?   )   ...  but what is 'Blake' as a real estate area, as distinct from the actual Blake Sea navigation sims?

Well, I live in hope. I just was flying around trying to find ideas for cabins as I mentioned in another thread and found this wonderful 1024 for sale which I may buy even though I personally feel this isn't a time to buy land. So IM me and I'll give you the location, there are others there for sale. Don't be discouraged, get something, work on it, abandon or sell, move, find another place. Just don't spend too much money on it. For me, "too much" means more than $2/m and for really nice waterfront $7/m.

Bellisseria is the new, growing green tip of Linden Home sims merging on to Jeogeot etc. now. The older part still has old LH homes and the Lindens say they will keep them but most people if they choose an LH go into Bellisseria.

"Blake" is one of those things like New York City where they claim "Gramercy Park" even if you are 20 blocks from that park and have no view of the park. Real Blake sea you can tell by the outrageous prices. The too high but not outrageous prices can be not actually Blake, but kind of near to Blake. Of course "true Blake" is directly on the Blake Sea. But people expand this out to adjoining sims sometimes as well. I'm not in Blake Sea so I don't have this argument but someone could.  Sea of Fables is another sea area with nice old Linden builds to perch on and open sea and the land there is getting more expensive.  It has the NE look and not sandy beach.

[Sister Nova]

10 hours ago, Stefanie Starlight said:

I do have one specific question:  Bellisseria I think I understand as a concept (though does it properly include ALL of the Linden Homes areas between Sansara, Jeogeot and Satori, or is it properly only the really well designed bit between Sansara and Jeogeot, with the large accretion towards Satori then being a sort of cancerous growth?   )

The whole of the continental landmass that is situated beneath Sansara, above Jeogeot, and reaching north eastward up to the southern tip of Satori is all Bellisseria, and with more themes yet to be added it will be growing even more.

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

On 5/31/2021 at 9:21 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

Plan B ... Sink Sansara into the void as peace offing to the gods.

It's as likely an outcome as 38 (!!) water regions and moving an island.

We're 18 years deep and haven't managed to get the voids filled (pictured luskwood, there are many others)

Yeah this is silly. They need to fill that up.