Mainland Revamp

[Gingir Ghoststar]

Dearest Linden Labs, 

 

I love you, really I do. Hell, I write about you more than I do other games and I work in the video game industry. Second Life is, I believe, the future of mmorpgs. It's the frontier of gaming, you can log in and see up and coming developers of tomorrows MMORPGs. There is so much creativity and imagination in our pixelverse that you could never ever manage to see it all. I love it. 

 

Okay, enough with the gushing. I've heard rumblings and rumors for a bit, I'm going to assume they're just that, rumors. I'd like to propose that the one where mainland gets revamped, we get some sort of organized land we can explore, communities built be not just a rumor. How hard would it be to create a new mainland, have it sectioned off "this place for homes" "this place for business" sort of like the real world. You have certain areas that are business only and certain that are homes. We could have roads and travel through them and maybe elected officials who over see the community areas to keep them within a code of sorts? Watcha think? Land Barons of sorts who are maybe given a stipend monthly or free land to over see a larger area of residential land to keep them within a certain look. Bring back people from these over priced private lands to the mainland. I hate to see how much abandoned land is just sitting there useless. We could turn abandoned lands into parks until someone picks them up and adds them to their own. Lets make SL mainland beautiful! I don't want to have to live on a private over priced parcel or island to get that neighborhood feel. I love my mainland parcel though I keep to the sky to avoid the eyesore that is the ground. 

 

 

xoxo

Gin

[Marigold Devin]

Have you seen the Bay City sims?  They are exactly as you are describing, and they are part of the mainland, created back in ... 2008 ... I think it was. And look at the price a parcel of land sells for there, compared with other parcels on the mainland.

And I, for one, love the eclectic chaos of the mainland, and do not wish to see it zoned for business, residential, or otherwise.

I think LL would have loved it if we, the residents, for whom the mainland was created, all did keep our little corners of the world pretty, but just like in real life, a place is only as good or as bad as those who inhabit it. 

You could submit a support ticket to LL and apply to be a 'Mole' - one of the volunteers who work under Michael Linden to help pretty up the mainland with roads, bridges, signage, street lights, etc.   

[JoJo Aurelia]

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mainland/My-Mainland-What-a-Mess-Now/m-p/1384797#M2423

 

You can read my rant from awhile ago.

 

[Sidnella Riler]

As said before, Bay city, Nautilus, beautiful places in mailand, but really private sims are still a go, when you prefer something more nicer

[Irene Muni]

---

Marigold Devin wrote:

 

And I, for one, love the eclectic chaos of the mainland, and do not wish to see it zoned for business, residential, or otherwise.

   

---

Me too!

[Perrie Juran]

I don't spend a lot of time wandering the Mainland.  But yes, it can seem disorganized and cluttered at times.  And no matter how you do it, 'for sale' signs are sure unsightly.

Recently I ran into this historical tid bit that I think relates to your post.  Bolding is mine.

"Telehubs were created with the release of Version 1.1.0 as an alternative to pay-to-direct teleportation. Linden-owned, these properties and builds created a network in which a resident would teleport to the closest telehub to their desired destination. Another intended use for the telehubs was as a social structure and meeting area, but residents rarely seemed to stick around. A side benefit Linden Lab had hoped would be that telehubs would help in "urban development", creating more commercial centers around them, and leaving the outskirts of land further away from the "hubs" for residential-type land. The telehubs also provided free content often created by Lindens, ads placed by residents, and a map of the resident's current location in the world (these maps were often left out-dated). The world map in SL's UI was later updated to include helpful information on telehubs, such as location and coverage of which telehub the resident would end up on depending on where they wish to go."

 

http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Telehubs

[Smoovious Laxness]

I started when we still had telehubs...

 

I remember at the time they got removed, and they allowed direct TP anywhere on the mainland without a LM, and quite a lot of people were against it (me included)

 

I remember how all of the businesses did cluster around the hub, and residential ended up further away, and it felt completely natural.

 

You could also fly around a lot and rarely hit anything in the sky. Try flying around in a plane on the mainland now, good luck.

 

One of the things we said was going to happen was people would start just building doorless boxes for their homes and clubs, and since everyone would TP all the time, it didn't really matter where you were, as you would never see what was around you anyways, and this has definitely happened.

 

One of the appeals back then, was TP'ing to a new telehub I haven't been to before, and walking around or flying, exploring the area.

 

Take the Zindra continent for example.

 

I'm not a fan of the grid-style layout there, but in a lot of ways, it is superior to the older continents. There are some areas where the builds are absolutely gorgeous, especially with full shaders enabled. I spend a few days doing nothing but exploring Zindra about 6 months ago, feeling like I used to back in the telehub days.

 

I also think it a shame, that with the unrestricted direct-teleports, that there are so many, who aren't even aware of just how much there is to see on the ground.

 

I even swam through all the piping in a dam in one spot, just to explore it.

 

The businesses benefitted because of the foot traffic, and with the telehubs, you had a kind of self-zoning happening.

 

As some telehubs became more popular, the business district would grow outward from it, and you ended up with some big cities, some small cities, some in between, with users building their homes in the suburbs.

 

I miss those days, and even this many years afterwards, I still wish things were still that way.

 

Now, everything is scattered and a mish-mash of everything on top of each other.

 

Exploring shops and other commercial areas isn't as simple as it was, as they could be anywhere on the mainland(s). They might not even be on ground level and you'd never notice them.

 

I know of a couple dozen businesses on the mainland that are set up in skyboxes instead of on the ground, one of them being a stream provider. Why they didn't just set up on ground level, I don't know. So, instead of having a shop down there, where they might make a few more customers through foot-traffic, and help add to the skyline, while their shop-skybox is up there, their land remains empty and barren, adding to the appearance of mainland-blight. They didn't even put in a few trees just for appearance. This kind of saddens me some.

 

If I had enough sims to do it, I'd try and recreate that same feel on my own estate, making a private mainland that would rely on the telehubs, but there is no way I can afford it, and with the marketplace making commercial land ownership unnecessary, land owners are hard pressed to keep revenue up to pay for their estates/sims.

 

There have been so many changes, and unfortunately, I don't really believe the ones who make those decisions, have put serious long-term thought into the consequences of them.

 

The most recent one of them I can think of is the username fiasco.

 

Someone needs to put their foot down on that one, and lay down the law. Stop telling us how hard it will be to re-implement them, and start thinking about, how, there is massive unemployment with tons of people just itching to replace programmers who don't want to get the job done. (whole other rant)

 

I would like to see at least one mainland estate go back to the telehub model.

 

If nothing else, it might make for an interesting experiment to see how the culture develops from a blank land-mass, and after a few months, compare the differences between the free-for-all that we have now, and the telehub model from back then.

 

We just might find ourselves suprised at the result.

 

-- Smoov

 

[Perrie Juran]

---

Smoovious Laxness wrote:

 

I remember how all of the businesses did cluster around the hub, and residential ended up further away, and it felt completely natural.

As some telehubs became more popular, the business district would grow outward from it, and you ended up with some big cities, some small cities, some in between, with users building their homes in the suburbs.

-- Smoov

 

---

 

I find this very interesting because when I joined Second Life, before I ever logged in the first time, in my minds eye this was more like what I was expecting to find.  I'm not sure where I had got that idea but it is what I thought.

Sometimes SL really does seem like a scattered mish mash with no planning.

Maybe it would make better sense to refer to SL as a universe, and when you go say to a sci-fi themed location like Alpha Point, you are TP'ing to another world.  It could add more coherency to the whole SL experience.

[Indigo Mertel]

I am concerned about the suggestion of creating a new continent. With all the unused land and its value down to pennies, do we really need a new continent? Even worse is having a new continent with different rules (say, zoning) than the rest of Mainland, which would devalue the existing continents even more. And, while I welcome initiatives to revamp Mainland, I hope Linden Lab won't disrupt the several communities which have been working to preserve parts of Mainland for years.

[Vesper Kling]

I totally agree. Stand alone sims bores me to death. Though some areas of Mainland looks like **sh-t**... Something has to be done! Great ideas.

DsThe high prices in Bay city Shermerville and Nautilus are mostly due to double prims....

Reinventing the cities of Second Life

Pretty in Pink

[Marianne McCann]

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Vesper Kling wrote:

DsThe high prices in Bay city Shermerville and Nautilus are mostly due to double prims....

 

---

Just as a point of order, Shermerville does not have double prims. Would that it did!

In Bay City, the double prims are a big part of the interest, but the amount of tastefully done mole builds, the Bay City Alliance, and the number of great Resident builds, IMO, play a part. But I'm biased. ;-)

[Marianne McCann]

---

Marigold Devin wrote:

Have you seen the Bay City sims?  They are exactly as you are describing, and they are part of the mainland, created back in ... 2008 ... I think it was. And look at the price a parcel of land sells for there, compared with other parcels on the mainland.

And I, for one, love the eclectic chaos of the mainland, and do not wish to see it zoned for business, residential, or otherwise.

   

---

I like both. I enjoy the places where limitations (in this case, theme and aesthetics) force creativity, and I like the "no holds barred" spaces that *also* force creativity. Room for both, I suppose. 

And yes, Bay City came online in May 2008.

[Vesper Kling]

Sorry my bad =)

[Marianne McCann]

---

Vesper Kling wrote:

Sorry my bad =)

---

's all good. I assumed they had double prims once, too. Thankfully, before I moved in. :matte-motes-wink:

[Anaiya Arnold]

 I agree with Marigold in not wanting to see mainland zoned. 

I think that linden homes though really opens up possibilities for mainland if LL chose to implement mini developments, preferably laid out in a block near a road, near an LL plot with some kind of LL provided organized activity, with free for all use land of varying intial plot sizes, bordered by protected roads, also in the vicinity. 

If done right, and laid out in enough places, in existing mainland, mainland would be totally revitalized. 

There would be some point to shops in such an area because the areas would attract visitors and by-passing traffic.  Placing the linden home development down one end of the "township" road, and the linden activity down the other would encourage too-ing and fro-ing down the road and make paying tier for a roadside plot for a shop a much more viable option than placing a shop on a sim you have to attract visitors to, or in the middle of mainland-nowhere. So long as each is within common draw distance of the other, there is every chance people will choose to walk rather than tp, and anyway they can still see what is between the two and choose to detour to look at that interesting house, those cute meroos in someone's yard, or that shop whose brand they have not yet discovered.

Settlements like this could somewhat alleviate or even reverse the trend for shutting up shop in world and putting all the eggs in the marketplace basket.  It would also be a great place to own a home for those of us who do not want linden homes, are happy to see our neighbours and would love to be able to "people-watch" from the comfort of our own front yard.

Since this would bring more visitors and allow linden homes to not all be squished together in an endless Edward Sissorhand-esque sameness, it might make lindens homes more attractive too.  At the moment every time I have visited one of these developments it has depressed me.  It's just endless, squished together, and seeingly empty house on house, all cut with the same cookie cutter.  By being discretely tucked away from the grid, they also invisible unless you deliberately go to a linden home region, so they have no opportunity to inspire by-passers to want their own little residential linden home.

  The extra prims for linden homes could be a sacrifice made for being on mainland rather than in a linden home only area (ie there is no free house and its prims come off the land usage prims available to the home owner), or could be gained from sparsly primmed linden owned "open land" areas placed in the very centre of the linden home development area (a kind of local "commons"), and from having more roads within the sim boundaries (since they are low on prims and ought to be able to built in less prims than the land they sit on can usually support).  We know that protected road frontage is highly desirable so this can only increase the value of effected land.

In a sense, this would be a different way to "lower tier" without encouraging people to pay less tier.  LL would get less teir land from each or many of their mainland sims, reflecting the lowered cost of the hardware to host sims, and would heighten value for many by causing more plots to be bordered on one side by "protected linden land", and more land to be in areas of high traffic, but it would not cause someone to pay less for what they already have as would occur if absolute price were lowered, and is likely to happen if people were given more land/prim at each price point.  Instead of giving us more land or prims each, LL could raise the utility and enjoyment of our land and simultaneously recognize that the hosting hardward costs less, by accepting less teir paying land per mainland simulator, and devoting that land (and its computer time resources) to roads, Linden provided activity areas, and sparsly primmed open land at the centre of the "new" mainland linden home blocks.

Of course the patchwork ownership of mainland might make it very difficult to find spots where there is enough abandoned or for sale land to do this without inventing more land which is kind of self defeating on a number of counts.  I suspect adult mainland would be the best place to prove the viability and desirability of such regularly scattered townships, because it has not been "ad-farm" carved in the same way longer established mainland has been.  However there is a lot of land for sale in small patches that LL could simply generate lindens to buy where enough of it coincides and some limited and very carefully planned and consulted "forced moves" would be more justifiable for such a project than the Zindra-bound frogmarch, especially if accompanied by advantageous compensatory steps.  When they completed the building and auctioned  highly desirable roadside land in the middle of the settlements, I suspect they'd get a lot of the generated lindens back (ie could 'resink' them) so it probably would not impact the exchange rate on balance.

Since linden homes are supposed to be stepping stones to eventually moving into mainland (or at least that is how LL appear to have promoted them) it would make a lot of sense to place these homes where their owners are expoed to mainland and "owner built" uses of it.  You could take a linden home and never get any better clue of what it is to own mainland land, because you might never see mainland.  If linden homes were on mainland, this would be much more likely to encourage linden homers to move into a less restricted plot they can put their own house or building on.

The important thing to me is recreating hubs of activity and visitors and mixing them into areas where residential and commercial tennants can choose to be in a hive of activity, without averse limitations on their creativity, as since teleporting came into being, most of mainland only really caters to large plot owners (if you own enough land you can make your neighbours fairly irrelevant) and those who'd rather not see their neighbours and are happy to build in the sky to avoid them.

A few managed estates with zoned spaces might be ok too, for those who want to see their neighbours or build at ground level but have small plots and do not want a "ruined" view or nusiance next door.  But for a frontier pioneering feeling as Rodvik has indicated a desire for, there needs to be areas that attract good numbers of visitors and facilitates opportunities to see interesting things, meet or observe interesting folk, interact with interesting content, and all with an opportunity for commerical venues to capitalize on attracted visitors.

I love teleporting but I do think LL should have done something to ensure that there were still many, many places that attract visitors and invite them to explore more widely.  If you knew that there were little townships scattered all along the road, hubs of activity where you can be sure to see not just interesting things, but interesting people/avatars going about their interesting business, I think more people would explore those roads.  I gave up road wandering because it just feels so barren and desolute even when surrounded by builds.  We need to feel if we go for a walk we'll see someone in their yard, come across other road walkers, and encounter hubs of activities on our travels, rather than simply endlessly empty builds or even just barren country side.  Some people might not mind endlessly wandering without a sign of life, but many people find that  kind of depressing, which is worse than merely boring.

 

As to the liden provided activities, these should be something residents cannot offer but which encourage the use of stuff residents do offer.  A place to see and be seen for instance encourages people to buy content for their avatars and having activities that do not interfere with seeing and been seen rather than activities like linden realms that distract one from other avatars and call their attention merely to game mechanics provided by the lab itself, would not be so useful.  It's difficult to imagine quite what these activities would be.  Some obvious ones that would work for new users would be the kind of tutorials that have historically been used, with an indicator in your profile that you've completed it.  If Ll are going to gamify and people need to learn to use SLbut do not want to be forced through a tutorial, dumping them in an activity area like this rather than a welcome area or a random place, and awarding them a "I completed" indicator for their profile would be an improvement over forcing people to go through a tutorial, launching them into the world with no idea where they are or what to do, competing for game time against content creators, or dumping folks in troll infested, confusing, unwelcoming welcome areas.  If you do not want the tutorial you walk into town or tp elsewhere.  If you do, then there it is.  And afterwards, you have an immediately obvious starting place for exploration and encountering people and who are not welcome area trolls, and interesting, resident generated content.

[Qie Niangao]

Whatever the Lab does about new or existing Mainland "zoning", they could do more to leverage the advantages of large contiguous landmasses -- something not so easily replicated by competitors.

One thing that I've always wanted was geographic proximity-based search -- a way to know what content is in the vicinity that I might want to visit while I'm nearby.

There is almost enough information in search.secondlife.com to make this possible for a third party, but it's difficult to imagine how that third party could monetize it adequately to cover the cloud processing costs.  In-world scripts aren't an option, barred from accessing that search site, among other problems.  

If a search API were exposed to in-world scripts, it would open up a host of possibilities, only one of which is this geographic proximity search.

Alternatively, it might be something a next-generation viewer could incorporate.

(I also have some ideas about how different approaches to a "new Mainland" could affect the Lab's business, but that's a different post for a different time, maybe.)

[Knowl Paine]

I've supported Zoning some of the Mainland Regions for almost as long as it has been discussed (since the beginning).

Residential

Commercial

General use (not zoned)

Nature

Educational

 

I would start with a small grouping of Regions on each Continent. The Regions zoned for Nature could act as buffers between the Residential and Commercially zoned Regions.

West Haven and the adjacent Regions would benefit by being Zoned Residential only.

Regions with Resident who primarily engage in Educational activities would benefit with a clear and defined Fair Use of the region's resources.

Regions with roads and road junctions are storefront friendly. The road offers some open space for visitors and helps to guide Residents, when the stores line either side of the road.

General Use Regions could carry on as they are, or as they wish.

 

 

There is value in being organized.

 

 

[Marianne McCann]

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Knowl Paine wrote:

West Haven and the adjacent Regions would benefit by being Zoned Residential only. 

---

West Haven, Blumfield, Shermervile NW, and Shermerville Central would indeed benefit from that - but while I have my residence there, I also know more than a couple who have small stores and other non-residential builds there, who have been there for years before I showed up in the neighborhood. Should they be forced to move?  I recall how... painful... the forced Zindra move was. Such would likely be that much worse. 

I'm not saing it's a bad idea -- but I'm not 100% sure that's the best way. Heck, I'm not sure there *is* a best way.

[Vesper Kling]

I think residential and light commersial blends fine. Just move the heavy stuff to mall regions. Actually pure residential will prolly become bedroom towns and that´s a bit of a bore....Isnt it? I think we need to remember how people want to live irl. We are different of course so there should be some different solutions. But a city is always more alive when we blend residential with light commercial.

[Marigold Devin]

---

Knowl Paine wrote:

I've supported Zoning

some

of the Mainland Regions for almost as long as it has been discussed (since the beginning).

Residential

Commercial

General use (not zoned)

Nature

Educational

 

I would start with a small grouping of Regions on each Continent. The Regions zoned for Nature could act as buffers between the Residential and Commercially zoned Regions.

West Haven and the adjacent Regions would benefit by being Zoned Residential only.

Regions with Resident who primarily engage in Educational activities would benefit with a clear and defined

Fair Use

of the region's resources.

Regions with roads and road junctions are storefront friendly. The road offers some open space for visitors and helps to guide Residents, when the stores line either side of the road.

General Use Regions could carry on as they are, or as they wish.

 

 

There is value in being organized.

 

 

---

Going back to just 2008, it seemed whenever I was looking for new land, I would build or rezz a building that was in keeping with what a particular sim already had built on it.  Some seemed to be themed up; it was just how the residents seemed to be back then. I found a parcel of land on Oxal sim attractive, because it looked quite medieval; there was a large castle on part of the sim, a store selling medieval attire and furniture, and a couple of smaller castles on separate parcels of land, so I purchased a parcel on that sim and rezzed a small castle that I called home for a few months.  All my roadside parcels either had freebie stores, or small stalls displaying Sion chicken eggs or sale (! - one of my worst phases I think), or others were just decorated as gardens.  Tigerclaw seemed to be mostly amusement arcades, dollar stores and clubs, I liked the feeling of the sim, and bought a 2056m parcel of land and built a club on it where my friends at that time would meet up.

Maybe LL intended for us to go with the flow, to link up with other like-minded people to either build complimentary structures on sims, or collaborate to create bigger builds.

Of course, when Zindra adult continent came into being, a lot of people moved across there, land prices in mainland dropped dramatically, and it's how you see it now. Some continents are more loved than others, with hardly any land coming up for sale on them, others are just barren wastelands, dotted with the occasional beauty spot

or have stores that line the linden highway,



(ooooh those driverless vehicles are everywhere)

or "interesting" build (I stepped into a church I found along the way).



If LL did zone some of the mainland regions, how could they enforce residential, commercial, etc? Unlike the private regions, where the owners and estate managers staff those regions most of the time and can ensure no one breaches their particular covenants, LL don't seem to have the staff to oversee themed sims too. Again, probably why the Linden Homes sims and Bay City, and Linden Realms, and Zindra were set up separately from mainland regions.

Some groups inworld have done a lot to support the mainland, working together to get LL to outlaw ad farmers, and many of the 16m land cutters/would-be extortionists have ended up abandoning those parcels, which have been joined to bigger parcels.

There is certainly value in being organised, and there is something very satisfying about being able to tidy up bits of the mainland.  It is just a shame that some people are hell bent on alienating other people by building ugly structures that overwhelm the sim (but I see Yoshi Linden has been in and removed these and other items of harrassment quickly when ARs are submitted).



[Knowl Paine]

The value found in those regions is directly related to the objects and features pre-placed by LL in those Regions. The area has a Residential theme, and the result is about 90% residential use.

Zoning may be a bad idea because of the many special interest in SL who need to be catered to. Realizing this has really taken the wind out of my sails. :smileysad:

 

 

[Indigo Mertel]

I am one of those people who actively worked to clean up and beautify the corner of Mainland where I live. For the past 4+ years I have worked hard and spent tons of money to consolidate land, remove ugly builds, merge micro-parcels. I have been following this thread with interest because I have invested a lot into Mainland.

IMO, though zoning could bring some apparent benefits I don't think it's a viable solution. I'd like to suggest a different solution.

April 28th 2008, founding day of the East River Community. We started with 1/2 a region.

In 2008, I and a few friends founded the East River Community. I believe our community is based on a model that may work on a larger scale to improve Mainland. Today the ERC is a federation of groups with a common charter and a steering committee. Candidates (groups or individuals) who want to be part of the federation must comply to some requirements set in the charter.

Our goal is to create a positive, friendly environment and a cohesive ambient, preserving our area from the uglyness so diffused on Mainland. We have a set of rules to regulate the relations of land owners but our charter is also made as to keep the red tape as low as possible.

Though we don't actively pursue affiliations of new members (but we welcome new ones), our model is working pretty well and those who know our community agree it is one of those gems that can be occasionally found on Mainland.

Map of the ERC, August 2010. The community is a lot larger now, spanning about 6 regions... but our cartographer is a bit lazy... :matte-motes-asleep-2:

In my opinion this is a model that Linden Lab should encourage. Rather than forcing zoning on everyone and forcing lots of people to adapt -- while at the same time forcing Linden Lab to police zoned areas -- I believe it would be more productive to encourage people to form self-regulated communities.

Linden Lab should only set some basic rules (land preservation being one) and offer incentives to encourage people to aggregate (say, a discount on land tier, better land management tools, etc.). Communities such as ERC offer a good environment, better land value and automatic zoning. They are autonomous, self-regulated and run by enthusiast people who invest work and money into the community. Committed people who take the wealth of the community at heart.

Muirhead Village at night.

Anything forced from above on a reality as complex as Mainland, and Second Life in general, is bound to fail and make lots of people angry. The best solution, imo, is to encourage people to aggregate and form self-regulated communities based on some common values.

 

[iSkye Silverweb]

I'm REALLY uncomfortable with the idea of elected officials and all that bother.  Just let people create, with just a few good, basic, common-sense ground rules. I've always liked the comparison to a sonnet - simple rules, with potentially beautiful results: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter - within that structure you can write anything you like.  

We all know the line about beauty and the beholder...

[Qie Niangao]

Whether there's an opportunity to spur better Mainland development top-down through market force incentives or something like "zoning" or bottom-up through community formation, it will not matter if Linden Lab doesn't follow through.

And things will continue to get worse on the Mainland if Linden Lab keeps introducing new things that actively undo what little they've been willing to do to date.

Here's an example:

How do you get a mess like this?  Two simple steps:  First, install a simplistic script that automatically sets parcels for sale after abandonment without any awareness of what it's just done in the vicinity. Second, fail to enforce the rules, including landsplitting, that were introduced to mitigate the violence done to the Mainland by adfarmers

I used to submit support tickets whenever I found these things, and indeed Support would take care of them.  But it's just gotten to be too much.  Here are two more I came across in recent travels, still in the same state today:

Without follow-through, it will hardly matter what new Mainland ideas are adopted.

[Knowl Paine]

I would imagine that LL could enforce Zoning the same way they enforce most SL policies "You Cannot Access Second Life with this Account".

I suspect that there was a time when it benefited LL to spread out the content, so that it would appear that we had more than we did.

LL doesn't need any additional staff to enforce Zoning, the AR process would be sufficient. Self Governance of and by the Residents. 

The hardships and struggles of those who were forced to move to Zindra, often overshadows the hardships and struggles of the Residents who were left behind. As stated, many Mainlanders live in an abandoned and barren wasteland. From the map, Zindra appears to be alive and well on a brand new Continent. From the map, it is clear to see where massive amounts of time, energy and resources have been allocated.

 

 

........................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Many Private Regions have a Building Codes in their Covenants. A claim that building codes are only good for them, is hypocrisy.

I will offer an equal and opposite recommendation, why don't all the Residents who want Pink buildings, search each other out, form groups, make notices and place AD's in order to get their own Region. This stuff drives me crazy. The suggestion that Residents in a residentially themed Region would all need to move so that a few stores could run businesses in residential settings, is Insane!. Get out of my Back Yard! Every aspect of my SL is not a potential for corporate profit. Stop trying to monetize me.

break, now focus.

This is not about micro management of people.

If an avatar is naked in a PG region, and nobody can see it, or reports it; did it really happen? Does it matter? No.

Agreements have spirits. The spirit, is the grounds' or demeanor of the parties, or people, who are a part of the agreement.

Zoning could be used as a factor in determining Fair Use.

A store could operate in a Residential zone. If numerousreports are filed, that would not be good. We should first ask "why" are neighbors so unhappy with the Store. The owner should be given a chance (or several) to work things out with the neighbors. If I owned a Store, I want to make people happy.... right?

If land was for sale in Kuula, and a resident built as house, should the rest of Region owners move? Of course not. The region, and others like it, should be zoned Educational. Same goes for Entertainment and Clubs.

I have seen Residents accidentally purchase land near a popular meeting place, and then try to AR a club that has been there for years. This lot of frustration, purchased unwittingly, could have been prevented had the Region been zoned.