What if Second Life removed teleportation?

[cunomar]

No TP would really upset those who use alts only to manipulate . I don't need to read any comments to know the idea will be met with strong opposition .

Vast sweeping changes will always be opposed but if TP could be disabled on a sim that proved to be popular then like as not that sim could grow to become a continent of adjoining sims .

I like the idea , know your neighbour is the essence of community , you don't have to like them but i have in the past defended (in group gossip) a bitchy cow who most certainly doesn't like me but is nevertheless consistent . 

To provoke then eject her target was the game she played constantly, so everyone came to recognize it was her way of deluding herself of her own importance and just ignore her until she was in a better mood .

I'm sure it would annoy her to know i actually liked her for her consistency 🤣

Edited July 21, 2021 by cunomar
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[Rat Luv]

6 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

No freakin way. 

Do you realize how long it will take me to do the weekend sales if I have to actually walk or drive to every single store rather than TP there in an instant?

That is just not going to work for me.

"You should check out this store, they're doing MASSIVE discounts for the Shop & Hop!"

"OK, see you there in 10 hours" 

[Sukubia Scarmon]

Hrm. In general, I'd like to keep teleportation, for the same reasons many already voiced. It'd just be to cumbersome otherwise, and take away from many things. 
What I'd like to see, tho, would be maybe a designated landmass with no tp for the specific goal to explore and travel - with no banlines or other methods to restrict movement allowed. Not nessesarily a no-homes-no-shops area, but one that has to be themed, with keeping in mind that everyone can come in and stuff.
That way, the people who'd like to explore, or who'd love to live that way, can do so without restricting those who don't.

[Extrude Ragu]

29 minutes ago, Sukubia Scarmon said:

Hrm. In general, I'd like to keep teleportation, for the same reasons many already voiced. It'd just be to cumbersome otherwise, and take away from many things. 
What I'd like to see, tho, would be maybe a designated landmass with no tp for the specific goal to explore and travel - with no banlines or other methods to restrict movement allowed. Not nessesarily a no-homes-no-shops area, but one that has to be themed, with keeping in mind that everyone can come in and stuff.
That way, the people who'd like to explore, or who'd love to live that way, can do so without restricting those who don't.

This.

The whole conversation makes me think of Minecraft, where there are Creative mode Servers and survival mode servers. Some people like creative, some prefer survival.

[Chroma Starlight]

6 hours ago, Eowyn Southmoor said:

In a thread in the mainland forum section, someone fairly recently took a vehicle and did basically the longest continuous journey you can undertake in mainland - East Gaeta V continent to north Heterocera Atoll continent.

If I recall correctly, the journey took them over 5 hours. Yes, that's 5 hours.

In early 2004, you could visit every single region on Second Life (save any secret handshake ones) in under two hours of unassisted flight.

Edited July 21, 2021 by Chroma Starlight

[Silent Mistwalker]

5 hours ago, Chroma Starlight said:

In early 2004, you could visit every single region on Second Life (save any secret handshake ones) in under two hours of unassisted flight.

That was then when there was only mainland. This is now when there are thousands of regions both private and mainland.

Residents fought long and hard to convince LL to give us point to point TPs and now a handful of residents want to take it away for selfish reasons.

Quote

In late 2005, Linden Lab removed most Telehubs on the grid, opening the way for "direct teleport" from one point to another. Previously, after teleporting, Residents had to fly from a Telehub to their specific destination. The Telehubs were mostly converted into Infohubs, meant to be community gathering spaces and "welcome areas" for new Residents.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/History_of_Second_Life

[Ardy Lay]

On 7/20/2021 at 9:11 AM, Bree Giffen said:

What do you think will happen if LL decided to to remove teleportation from SL? Chaos? The end of SL? Or maybe something different will happen. Roads and oceans suddenly become used by everyone. Planes, trains, boats and automobiles become required to get around because it is too slow to walk or fly. Stores begin to cluster together. People stay in-world longer because they have to travel. Philip's idea of an interconnected community on a single main land would finally be fully realized. 

Your thoughts?

If that happens I'll dump my land, log out and uninstall the viewer.

[Sid Nagy]

It won't be any time soon, so no worries.
It's only a what if question.

[LibGwen]

What strikes me about the topic of this thread is

1) The original poster's contention that people should be forced to spend more time in SL.  Not only that, but that extra time should gain nothing for the time spent.

2) The original poster's emphasis on status and status symbols.  This is particularly noticeable if you've been reading comments on YouTube the last day, which are full of bots and bot heads lauding and cursing the fact that billionaires can afford things that only billionaires can afford.  Ooh, shocking.

This is just another tentacle of a multi-platform social influencing campaign by some agency of some nation that has a large portion of its populace making a living on the internet, one where status symbols are important, one that believes in bombarding people with advertising, one that doesn't quite grok a concept like free will.

 

[Lewis Luminos]

On 7/20/2021 at 3:11 PM, Bree Giffen said:

What do you think will happen if LL decided to to remove teleportation from SL? Chaos? The end of SL? Or maybe something different will happen. Roads and oceans suddenly become used by everyone. Planes, trains, boats and automobiles become required to get around because it is too slow to walk or fly. Stores begin to cluster together. People stay in-world longer because they have to travel. Philip's idea of an interconnected community on a single main land would finally be fully realized. 

Your thoughts?

Nope.

For all the reasons stated elsewhere in the thread.

Once upon a time (like, 2005/2006?) it was possible because the grid was small enough and only one continent of mainland. As the grid increased in size it became impractical.

Contrary to what the OP seems to think, most SL users do not spend all day and night logged in. They do not have time available to take out from their real lives to spend 5 hours travelling from home to a store or a club. Even if there was a viable road network connecting all parcels to all other parcels, people would still need teleporting because the grid is just too big now, even the fastest SL vehicles (if they could manage a region crossing without crashing) wouldn't be fast enough. In RL we have vehicles which can cross the Atlantic from London to New York in 5 hours. There's nothing in SL that could make that kind of speed and if it did, it would crash you out on the first region crossing. 

If there was no teleporting in SL, I would quit, uninstall it and never come back.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 7/20/2021 at 10:11 AM, Bree Giffen said:

What do you think will happen if LL decided to to remove teleportation from SL? Chaos? The end of SL? Or maybe something different will happen. Roads and oceans suddenly become used by everyone. Planes, trains, boats and automobiles become required to get around because it is too slow to walk or fly. Stores begin to cluster together. People stay in-world longer because they have to travel. Philip's idea of an interconnected community on a single main land would finally be fully realized. 

Your thoughts?

You are old enough to remember when we did not have p2p teleportation, but went through telehubs. And a certain oldbie faction, especially merchants far from the (then) new telehubs who didn't want to pay for expensive telehub land, or rent from Anshe, howled endlessly about them, citing one or two of them that were avatar traps like Fuji (most were not; some were downright bucolic). If I look, I bet I could find you among them.

So the Lindens,  and concerned about their oldbie friends/alts' loss of business, and guilty about the god-mode that gave only them p2p, put it into the world after creating a better map that enabled it. If you landed in a gulch or on somebody's head, no matter, now everyone was a god.

Then they encouraged grid-wide transportation experiments to reinforce contiguity, no matter if the vehicles crashed or never had riders and spammed sims. And here we all are. 

Stores already clustered together, which was a good thing -- on telehubs. But there was oldbie resentment against newer residents like Anshe and Blue and others who dominated this market. They were used to reigning supreme and people had to curry favour with them to get even a corner of their store to display new merchandise. Now anyone could rent an Anshe store, even if a steep price -- it democratized the market. Now it's back to less democracy as only some merchants can afford a whole private island or homestead, and others have to rent from them or buy scrappy Mainland.

There was such ideological clamour about telehubs from this oldbies forums faction -- representing nothing, not even significant landowners -- that the Lindens even created an entire continent without telehubs -- Heterocetera, the Moth Continent. This was supposed to encourage that lovely slow-down and communization about which you fantasize. It didn't. As I have noted many times, some people began scalping operations to ferry or fly people to this new continent; I even sold cheap log-in spots so you could log in already there. This was helpful if you didn't own land but wanted to fly around for that lovely communal experience you referenced without attempting to fly 2000 meters or more across choppy seas.

Eventually, when nobody would buy the sims they auctioned, and when existing land owners, unlike the forums dwellers who didn't own land there, protested volubly and said they would abandon their land, the Lindens put in telehubs. Turns out they could make them so that they were not avatar traps (like the Moth Temple in Iris) but interesting. The functionality of the telehub is merely a disc, the same disc you activate on a private island. The build is secondary. The Lindens used to sell the land around telehubs at a fantastic price on the auction, back when they put new land and not used land on the auction. Then they stopped as they prepared for p2p -- but not soon enough, to ward off complaints of bait-and-switch to those last bidders on telehub land a few months before p2p went in, and their once golden land now was next to indifferent hippos over which the grass grew.

I advocated keeping telehubs as a landing point from map searches of just the sim name, while having p2p. That would give you a landing that was reasonable, not in the sea or underground, at the 128-128-0 mark. Stores could still cluster and there could be serendipitous meetings.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 7/20/2021 at 10:53 AM, Bree Giffen said:

I guess LL will have to move all islands next to the mainland or at least connect them with a waterway. I am slightly in favour of it. I am open to have my mind changed of course because maybe I haven't considered all the bad things that might happen. Which I'm sure we will see in this thread...

And it's not my idea, it was Philip Linden's idea. Per the Second Life Wiki, "He envisioned a vast green, continuous landscape, distributed across multiple servers".

We still have 6180 sims that are the vast, green, continuous landscape across servers. Like the future, it is unevenly distributed.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 7/20/2021 at 12:37 PM, Silent Mistwalker said:

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. 

Here's Philip's exact quote about the Mainland, when asked if everyone should move to private islands:

"I'd say, stay on the mainland, the idea of clustering and the magic spell of working with your neighbors is just a great appeal." Philip Linden, Town Hall, Second Life, 7/7/06

[Prokofy Neva]

On 7/20/2021 at 2:34 PM, animats said:

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.

 

No, that's not reasonable at all.

Camming is not just used for perving neighbours, which is the only use case apparently you can imagine.

If you own a sim or property on adjacent sims, you use it to manage the land, to remove crashed vehicles, to fix floating trees, to remove things customers have asked to remove inside furnished houses, etc. All this work would be enormously impeded if you could not cam without constraints, an option now.

You also could not reasonably shop in a mall with multiple stores, or an event with booths.

You could not take part rationally in a hunt on a shopping sim or RP sim.

If being invisible on your lot is not enough privacy for you, and going in a skybox still leaves you feeling vulnerable, this world is not for you.

[Marianne Little]

I remember I was in some sale events where the teleport point was fixed, and it was impossible to teleport directly to the booth.

It had the same silly reasons, "Immerse" "Like RL" "Customers stroll around and look at everything, leading to them buying more".

Yeah, right. SL is not like RL at all. We do not have grey bloobs in RL. Other people does not lag us down. The idea of your customers strolling around and enjoying all the marketstalls is delusional. It is only possible for bloggers that have had access before the event opens. They can walk easy and take their pictures. Or the last days, when the interest dies down and it is few people.

I hated such events like to no other shopping experience. But I have a TPV viewer where I could use auto search and zoom to the things I wanted to buy. Then I was out, never to return and "stroll around".

[Drake1 Nightfire]

On 7/20/2021 at 11:23 AM, 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.

How exactly would people get to sky platform stores? Would they fly there in a plane/blimp/whatever and then have to park it there till they were done shopping? Who would take up the Land Impact of such items? That would enable all griefers free reign in SL as every store would have to have object entry active for their store. 

Aside from that, I dont want to walk, drive, fly, sail to a store. Why would anyone possibly want to spend hours traveling about SL just to shop in a day? Forget about grid wide hunts. "We have 100 stores in our grid wide hunt and you only have two weeks to complete it." Looks like i'm stocking up on jolt and instant coffee. 

TL:DR Bad idea is bad. 

[Bree Giffen]

Everything has to be moved closer together for the idea to work. It would be easier if you only needed to go five regions to reach the shopping area and you could get a really fast plane if you want. Anyways, I did admit that the idea needs a lot of planning if LL were to attempt it. 

[Drake1 Nightfire]

2 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

Everything has to be moved closer together for the idea to work. It would be easier if you only needed to go five regions to reach the shopping area and you could get a really fast plane if you want. Anyways, I did admit that the idea needs a lot of planning if LL were to attempt it. 

And who is going to pay for all these vehicles? Are we really going to put that cost on top of everything else new users need to buy? 

[Crim Mip]

I'd likely stop using SL. I manage a number of places and it wouldn't be in any way workable to have to go over land/water to get between them.

[Lewis Luminos]

5 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

Everything has to be moved closer together for the idea to work. It would be easier if you only needed to go five regions to reach the shopping area and you could get a really fast plane if you want. Anyways, I did admit that the idea needs a lot of planning if LL were to attempt it. 

Bree. Even if all the regions in SL were arranged in a perfect circle it would still take 5 hours to get from one side to the other.

A "fast" plane would crash on the first region crossing. You can't cross a region at any kind of speed beyond "slow and cautious". As a sailor I know that going above about 25 knots it's a coin-toss.

On the other hand, with only you remaining in SL and everyone else having quit, there would actually be only one. Assuming you're extremely wealthy and can now afford the new US$20,000 per month price tag.

Edited July 22, 2021 by Lewis Luminos

[Noelle Delaunay]

13 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

It had the same silly reasons, "Immerse"

I don't think it's fair to call "immersion" silly and putting it only in a context of merchants trying to sell you stuff. You do perceive a world in a completely different way when you have to travel long distances. I want to compare it to World of Warcraft where, in the beginnings, you could not fly and there were fewer teleports than today. The world was perceived as huge compared to today where the world is actually way, way bigger but you can reach every spot superfast. Today you will have lots of people crying when there is a new expansion and they cannot fly for the first few months. This is mostly due to the fact that it's not about the world anymore, not about experiencing the world anymore, but people are under a pressure, all of the time, to complete their missions in the fastest time possible in order to not fall behind. So in the end it's the point of view from where you're looking at it. I can see enough non silly reasons to increase immersion, while there, of course, are also enough arguments against it.

[Lewis Luminos]

48 minutes ago, Noelle Delaunay said:

I don't think it's fair to call "immersion" silly and putting it only in a context of merchants trying to sell you stuff. You do perceive a world in a completely different way when you have to travel long distances. I want to compare it to World of Warcraft where, in the beginnings, you could not fly and there were fewer teleports than today. The world was perceived as huge compared to today where the world is actually way, way bigger but you can reach every spot superfast. Today you will have lots of people crying when there is a new expansion and they cannot fly for the first few months. This is mostly due to the fact that it's not about the world anymore, not about experiencing the world anymore, but people are under a pressure, all of the time, to complete their missions in the fastest time possible in order to not fall behind. So in the end it's the point of view from where you're looking at it. I can see enough non silly reasons to increase immersion, while there, of course, are also enough arguments against it.

There are better ways to increase immersion without removing the ability to teleport.

For example, in order to teleport, you must have access to a teleport device or portal. You can get a private one one to put in your home, a public one to put in your store, or you can use other public ones. That still allows people to go where they want, but gives a real in-world reason for why teleporting is possible.

[Resi Pfeffer]

1 hour ago, Noelle Delaunay said:

I don't think it's fair to call "immersion" silly and putting it only in a context of merchants trying to sell you stuff. You do perceive a world in a completely different way when you have to travel long distances. I want to compare it to World of Warcraft where, in the beginnings, you could not fly and there were fewer teleports than today. The world was perceived as huge compared to today where the world is actually way, way bigger but you can reach every spot superfast. Today you will have lots of people crying when there is a new expansion and they cannot fly for the first few months. This is mostly due to the fact that it's not about the world anymore, not about experiencing the world anymore, but people are under a pressure, all of the time, to complete their missions in the fastest time possible in order to not fall behind. So in the end it's the point of view from where you're looking at it. I can see enough non silly reasons to increase immersion, while there, of course, are also enough arguments against it.

Im pretty sure, in Warcraft there are no borders every 256 meters, where its pure luck to make it over them. Or, to make it less likely to crash, when you take off all armor and weapons at every crossing to get a better chance to suceed.

SL could install something like the "genius" hyperloop idea above 4000 meters. You get in your space elevator, get into the tube and then you arrive at the other end of the world within a moment. Wait, that sounds like a TP.
 

[Bree Giffen]

Sometimes you've got to stop and pretend to smell the prim roses.

[Maitimo]

19 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

Sometimes you've got to stop and pretend to smell the prim roses.

For 5 minutes, sure. Not for 5 hours, just to buy a pair of shoes.