What if Second Life removed teleportation?

[Sid Nagy]

13 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

My thoughts are that being in SL is already elitist, just compare the userbase with Farcebook.

I do actually agree with the OP's thoughts on TP, I've had problems in the RP place I ran where people would TP into the middle of scenes, invite their friends to come tumbling down from the air onto our heads...

Taking SnowCrash as the most likely inspiration for SecondLife, there was no TP, no flying (without a valid flying-apparatus), travel was by monorail, motorcycle, possibly cars. I can understand the Point of view that TP and flying abilities in SL are distracting from the immersive experience.

I hope I'm not spoiling your fun with my views, I'd hate to be the downpour in this current spell of sunshine.

What do you think would happen with your roleplay sim, if one of the main roads to the Mat.....a body shop would lead through your sim?

Edited July 20, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Silent Mistwalker]

4 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

When am I not listening? Or not treating people with respect? I propose an idea. People point out a problem. I try to address the problem by clarifying my idea or adding to it. People list more problems. And on and on. That’s how we come to a consensus which LL can act on. 

If my replies to you come across as me being totally against anything you come up with, I am sorry I didn't make it clearer that that is not the case. 

I can't just ignore someone who is trying. By trying you are doing more than most. Most would just shrug and walk away. You care about SL and it shows. For that, I thank you.

[LittleMe Jewell]

23 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I do actually agree with the OP's thoughts on TP, I've had problems in the RP place I ran where people would TP into the middle of scenes, invite their friends to come tumbling down from the air onto our heads...

Easily handled by enforced TP Routing

[Silent Mistwalker]

27 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

My thoughts are that being in SL is already elitist, just compare the userbase with Farcebook.

I do actually agree with the OP's thoughts on TP, I've had problems in the RP place I ran where people would TP into the middle of scenes, invite their friends to come tumbling down from the air onto our heads...

Taking SnowCrash as the most likely inspiration for SecondLife, there was no TP, no flying (without a valid flying-apparatus), travel was by monorail, motorcycle, possibly cars. I can understand the Point of view that TP and flying abilities in SL are distracting from the immersive experience.

I hope I'm not spoiling your fun with my views, I'd hate to be the downpour in this current spell of sunshine.

True, SL has always tended to lean towards the elite side. Something I have been battling my whole life, both RL and SL. 

TPs can be disallowed on regions/parcels. There is no need to force the whole grid to conform to things that fit only RP when the rest of the grid does not roleplay.

I posted a video of what Philip actually said in 2001 before SL ever opened to the public. If you haven't seen it, you may want to watch it. He never mentions Snowcrash. just the metaverse.

 

I don't find it fun when other people make proposals they haven't thoroughly thought through. Not when the usual outcome does more harm than good. 

Edited July 20, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker

[Rowan Amore]

[Rat Luv]

22 minutes ago, Eddy Vortex said:

That's a hard no.  Getting trapped in a spot surrounded by parcels with ban lines is not my idea of a good time.

Good point...some sandboxes would become unbearable if you couldn't TP out...

[Extrude Ragu]

1 hour ago, Bree Giffen said:

I'm trying to be progressive

There's your problem 🧐

Jk jk

SecondLife hosts many different communities who use the platform for many different things. Making a large sweeping change like you propose would prevent many users personal enjoyment of SecondLife as they've come to know it and enjoy. SecondLife is a mature platform where users come because they know they like how it works already. What you suggest  comes across as arrogance because rather than making this new way of living something people can opt to try, you instead suggest it would be best to force it on users - An 'I know better what's good for you than you do' mentality generally will get a bad reaction.

If I was creating a new game, I would say that your idea has merit. Many multiplayer games and online worlds work in this fashion already. But what you are suggesting is not a 'new' product it is fundamentally changing a product that people have already invested into.

How this play style could actually be implemented, without upsetting existing users:

We'd have a new mainland region, which I'm going to refer to as Region Alpha from here in out:-

1. The first time users teleport into Alpha they are placed in a random starting town.

2. Users can teleport out of Alpha to any region on SecondLife they like, except to somewhere else on Alpha

3. When users teleport back into Alpha they always end up in the region they last left off in Alpha

This way, Alpha operates as a sort of parallel world inside SecondLife with different rules. It's totally up to users if they want to play on Alpha or on a normal region/their private home etc.

There's nothing wrong with the play style itself, it's taking away the existing one. So why not let users choose for themselves which play style they want.

 

[Silent Mistwalker]

I have been in SL long enough to remember when we didn't have point to point TPs. I really, really do not want to ever go back to that again. And the first person that mentions taxing TPs or prims or anything of the sort... 

 

[Innula Zenovka]

32 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

There's your problem 🧐

Jk jk

SecondLife hosts many different communities who use the platform for many different things. Making a large sweeping change like you propose would prevent many users personal enjoyment of SecondLife as they've come to know it and enjoy. SecondLife is a mature platform where users come because they know they like how it works already. What you suggest  comes across as arrogance because rather than making this new way of living something people can opt to try, you instead suggest it would be best to force it on users - An 'I know better what's good for you than you do' mentality generally will get a bad reaction.

If I was creating a new game, I would say that your idea has merit. Many multiplayer games and online worlds work in this fashion already. But what you are suggesting is not a 'new' product it is fundamentally changing a product that people have already invested into.

How this play style could actually be implemented, without upsetting existing users:

We'd have a new mainland region, which I'm going to refer to as Region Alpha from here in out:-

1. The first time users teleport into Alpha they are placed in a random starting town.

2. Users can teleport out of Alpha to any region on SecondLife they like, except to somewhere else on Alpha

3. When users teleport back into Alpha they always end up in the region they last left off in Alpha

This way, Alpha operates as a sort of parallel world inside SecondLife with different rules. It's totally up to users if they want to play on Alpha or on a normal region/their private home etc.

There's nothing wrong with the play style itself, it's taking away the existing one. So why not let users choose for themselves which play style they want.

 

What you describe, or something not unlike it, could reasonably easily be realised in SL at the moment, I think, with judicious use of region settings, experience tools and a bit of scripting.

[Rowan Amore]

2 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

I'm trying to be progressive to improve our second lives.

It's actually regressing back to the old days.  Hey, maybe we could reintroduce Pay to TP.   NO, NO, NO

[Rowan Amore]

13 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

I have been in SL long enough to remember when we didn't have point to point TPs. I really, really do not want to ever go back to that again. And the first person that mentions taxing TPs or prims or anything of the sort... 

 

Ut oh

[Sid Nagy]

It was nice knowing you Rowan. 😰

Edited July 20, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Extrude Ragu]

8 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

What you describe, or something not unlike it, could reasonably easily be realised in SL at the moment, I think, with judicious use of region settings, experience tools and a bit of scripting.

It really could. Many private roleplay regions already turn off teleports as it is, including mine for much of the same reasons OP states.

If I were a land Baron in SecondLife I'd be tempted to invest in some regions to create a private 'mainland' with this gimmick myself. I'm not sure if there are any on SecondLife successful enough to be willing to experiment on a new concept like that.

It'd probably have to be done by LL for that reason.

[Eddy Vortex]

48 minutes ago, Rat Luv said:

Good point...some sandboxes would become unbearable if you couldn't TP out...

It would be an absolute nightmare not being able to escape the griefers.  This right here would make me log out forever and never return.

[Theresa Tennyson]

2 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

I'm trying to be progressive to improve our second lives. Everyone is so conservative here.

Everyone saying that travel would be difficult is only thinking of SL as it is currently configured for teleportation. The mainland would change, people would move closer together, maybe there will be zoning to help stores relocate. Imagine large shopping districts where you wouldn't have to travel so far to reach them. If people want to live on an island they still can and pay the price for exclusivity by having to travel further to go shopping. It would be a status symbol to have a yacht because people would know you have to sail to  your house. That's an unintended consequence right there. Status can be had by where you live. I'm sure land sellers will be happy with that because now they can sell based on location.

Yes it does introduce more real life consequences into SL but people know how real life works. New residents will come into SL and instead of teleporting around confused they'd simply know how to get around because the SL world would be familiar. So many SL problems would be solved by removing teleportation.

If you create an artificial barrier to what people want to do in an environment with the flexibility of Second Life, they'll create an artificial way around it. Within a month of removing teleports, I see the vast majority of people getting around with "vehicles" that just shoot them across the landscape as quickly as possible, making the scenery meaningless while multiple people zoom through people's home plots every day on the way to somewhere else.

[Silent Mistwalker]

9 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

It's actually regressing back to the old days.  Hey, maybe we could reintroduce Pay to TP.   NO, NO, NO

[Silent Mistwalker]

6 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

It was nice knowing you Rowan. 😰

You get the brush and you get the brush and YOU get the brush!

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

But did you have to turn me into a frog on my birthday?

[Qie Niangao]

I don't think it's realistic to seriously consider reverting to no teleports at all, but nonetheless I think there may be an opportunity here. As others have mentioned, there's already an ability to restrict a region's teleports to telehub locations. What might be interesting is if that constraint were applied to some of the fully-abandoned Mainland regions (or the being-abandoned older Linden Homes regions), redesigned by Moles to have public-access cow paths and alleys and sidewalks, etc., so all parcels on the region could be reached from the telehub, with parcels set no-join no-subdivide (as in Bay City) but able to be resold (also as in Bay City but unlike Belli). Maybe a prim bonus of 1.5 or something if the cow paths are Land Impact efficient.

This would still allow inter-region teleports (and normal TPs within other regions, too), and wouldn't really be that much of a change from existing abilities, except imposing on parts of Governor Linden's domain pretty much the same constraints that some Estates already impose on some private regions.

Not sure this would be the big success that Bellisseria was, with its specific set of different but quite strict constraints. But it might be worth a try.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 minute ago, Rowan Amore said:

But did you have to turn me into a frog on my birthday?

Oh . Sorry. You were supposed to turn into a... 

What?

Oh. Sorry. Can't say that on this forum. 🤭

[Tari Landar]

3 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

I'm trying to be progressive to improve our second lives. Everyone is so conservative here.

There is literally nothing progressive about adding limitations, which the removal of teleportation would necessitate. How would that be progressive and conducive to the longevity and continued growth of sl. What you're suggesting would actually be the opposite of progressive, because we would have to regress back to the drawing board and hope beyond all hope that enough people stick around to make such a change worthwhile, efficient and successful.

That simply cannot and would not happen at this juncture of sl's lifetime. Perhaps a more well thought out plan could help to reduce the need for teleportation, but the mere idea of eliminating it entirely is preposterous at best, asinine at worst. It would most definitely cause the beginning of the end, and I'm not one that has ever suggested something like that before. I'm actually pretty judgmental of the whole sl is dying, sky is falling chicken little mentality people bolster about as if it's a nobel prize idea. But this idea, what the actual hell? 

I honestly agree that I don't believe you've thought this idea out very well. Although I may think it's asinine, I may be able to understand where some of the underlying idea came from. It's one of those things that might sound okay in theory (it doesn't, but I'm playing devil's advocate for a minute), but put into practice, it's worse than shooting yourself in the foot. At least if you shot yourself in the foot, you'd have a greater chance of living, even walking. Something like this would cripple what sl is and has become and would make it damn near impossible (imo, completely impossible) to recover from. 

[animats]

I wasn't here for the telehub period, so I don't know what it was like back then. Double-click teleporting to avoid walking short distances may have made it too easy. I have that turned off.

There are some things SL could do to make the sense of space in the world a bit more real.

• When teleporting, you should see something like what Google Earth and GTA V shows you. You get a view of the world map where you are, zoom out, pan over to where you're going, and zoom in again. (This also allows more time to load the assets for the new area, so  more of the loading delay is hidden.)
• Parcels with privacy on ("Avatars on other parcels can see and chat with avatars on this parcel" unchecked) should not allow camming in. You have to go there. Right now, you can cam in, but can't see the avatars.
• On parcels with privacy on, you would not be allowed to sit or double-click teleport while camming. You have to walk there. This also means you can't "sit" through a wall, so locked doors offer some security. You can set the landing point for the parcel outside the house, so visitors appear at your front door, not inside.
• Smarten up camera control, so that the viewpoint is never on the other side of a wall from the avatar. Pull the viewpoint towards the avatar until there's no obstacle in between. Just sitting on a chair should never result in a viewpoint outside the wall. This reduces the need for camming.

 

[Maitimo]

2 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Taking SnowCrash as the most likely inspiration for SecondLife, there was no TP, no flying (without a valid flying-apparatus), travel was by monorail, motorcycle, possibly cars. I can understand the Point of view that TP and flying abilities in SL are distracting from the immersive experience.

Except that the Snow Crash Metaverse has a massive highway running through it, and every place that exists in their grid is attached to that highway.

SL doesn't have such a highway. It would be impossible to create one without literally wiping the grid completely clean and starting from (literally) square one again.

 

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Another fine thing which you can happily do in your own privately owned continent consisting of multiple sims... but don't force your stupid idea on me and my usage of the existing possibilities.

[Pixie Kobichenko]

I don’t remember where I read about it- what started the clicking, but it was about other grids & how they don’t have direct access tps.  It’s almost like a to B and B to c, c to d.  There is no direct access from a to c or a to d.  You have to play connect the dots & use these dr. Who telephone booth like hubs, some of which are on privately owned properties & as such, the owners can charge a fee to move down the line, just like a toll road.   
 

I’ll try to go thru my browsing history & find it.

edit- this was the link.  But I don’t understand most of it (the purpose oftge block-chain  not the actual writing- that was all good). https://ryanschultz.com/tag/cryptovoxels/

Edited July 20, 2021 by Pixie Kobichenko