Nukasa22

As mainland resident I always greet new neighbours (with the exception of those that have build eyesores which is the minority.) In around 90% of cases I get a response, which is always very friendly. I often see the dots of neighbours around me. To a very few of them I talk to on a regular base, to the majority I just say hi once in a long while. This also has the advantage that if there arises a problem in the region, you already have connections.

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll do that. I wasn't careful enough and didn't make my post clear enough, allowing it to be misinterpreted, my fault.

You misunderstood my post. Let me rephrase it for you: There exist 2 different concepts of mainland. I'm going to explain both concepts. In concept 1 I live in a coherent world together with other people. (I as in the person in this concept, not me personally.) My build exists next to the builds of other people, in co-existence. I see my neighbour and my neighbour sees me. In concept 2 I (not me personally) view mainland not as a coherent world but I treat it as a server, and I rent a virtual server within that server. When I rent a virtual server, there are neighbours, but I don't see them. Those are 2 different concepts and they are not getting along with each other. This is why we have ground skyboxes and people complaining about them. When I build a ground skybox, I do not see my neighbours, but they still see me. They may be people who do see mainland as a coherent world. (the screenshot shows extreme examples of ground skyboxes. those are not mine.)

Ground skyboxes are builds that belong into the sky but a lot of people place them on the ground, therefore I call them ground skyboxes. Sadly those are very common across mainland. When you look at my snapshot you can see what I mean.

What is the question?

The concept of mainland as a coherent world where people live together vs. the concept of mainland as a server where I rent a virtual server within as its own world where I place my ground skybox. Those are 2 different concepts and they are not getting along with each other. (the screenshot shows extreme examples of ground skyboxes. those are not mine.)

I've witnessed a few instances where land was given back to the seller after a fast/accidental purchase. I haven't witnessed a situation where someone said "sorry but I'm keeping the land." If this were a bigger issue I'd expect to see more complaints on the forums. I don't think I've seen even one. I may be wrong but I just don't see the data that would support that this is what people tend to do. To be fair, this has little to do with technical knowledge. When you sell land, you can very conveniently designate a specific person who can buy your land. It's really this, very convenient and there is no technical knowledge required. The problem is also laziness and lacking awareness. People don't realize that the land that they sell immediately shows up in search. And that, if they set it for sale for 1L$, it will appear right at the top, very prominently. It's mostly common sense. What would help is an addition to the land sale UI that makes the user aware of the visibility of his sale.

Furthermore "All advertisers must make a reasonable attempt to fit in with the local area and to respect the wishes of Residents living nearby wherever possible." While this is very subjective, LL will act on obvious violations of the rules, sometimes very quickly, depending on whether you get reported or not, coming down to.. if you don't pi** off your neighbours, your neighbours won't pi** you off.. which is one of the great pieces of wisdom in SL anyway.

There is usually a huge difference between roadside mainland (in which I'm including anything bordering protected land) and the rest of mainland. When you move along streets you will see that many people who are building on roadside land are aware that they're connected to the continent and build in that way. You will have a lot of cute houses with a driveway to the street etc. Whereas on parcels without a direct border with protected land you will more likely run into ground skyboxes and abandoned land. There is just not a lot demand for unprotected land in the middle of nowhere, and there exists way too much of that. But that's why you can't generalize Mainland.

The problem is that there are 2 perspectives from which you can look at this problem. Perspective one is the perspective of a long term SL resident who will look at a build and never only see the visual appearance of the build alone but also the history of this build and the creativity and thoughts of the builder that went into it. Perspective two is the perspective of a potentially new resident who will see the visual appearance of a build and mainly judge based on this. The judgement will be heavily impacted by other recent games the user has played. While the work and effort and thoughts that went into any build can be appreciated, it must be allowed to voice the harsh reality that a lot of stuff in today's SL looks very bad compared to other games without triggering immediate defensive responses. I've looked at a lot of SL20B exhibitions. A lot of effort and thoughts went into them, but yet many just don't look great from a potentially new resident's perspective who compares with other modern games because the objects used to build them were not great. A problem can only be solved if the problem is named. This doesn't mean getting rid of all prim builds. It just means to acknowledge that this problem exists first of all. With that said I don't see any great value in replacing any of the potentially historic Linden prim builds. The chance that a new user is confronted with them isn't very high. They're just not gonna see them anyway. What they will be seeing though are trees and roads and ground textures etc. They need to be replaced asap without being afraid of affecting someone's feelings (counting myself in) when they get their precious Linden road sign removed, or because their ground texture now looks slightly different (not talking about snow vs grass ofc) that they had grown fond of over the years. I've seen current linden road signs using 6 prims. Just replace everything.

Patch potentially announces potential changes to mainland trees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk1nC9PVs_I&t=3356

The main point I find missing from this thread is the business side argument. It was said not long ago that SL has the money to invest, but it needs to be shown that it's gonna result in profit. And that is just difficult to show in this case. I mean, yes, there are so many pretty parcels in SL that are integrated rather than isolated from their surroundings. They're not there because there's a skybox next to them on the ground, but despite a skybox next to them on the ground. Giving all these people the choice between current non covenant mainland and a very simple covenant based mainland with less unprotected to-be-abandoned space, I have a feeling what even most of these people would be choosing. The customer base for a mainland 2.0 is huge. But would it actually attract new people who currently don't own land? I'm not even sure about that. So where is the money gonna come from? I feel like a new mainland can't just be about a new covenant, there'd need to be more that actually attracts new land owners.

You are bringing heat into this thread without any need because you feel attacked out of whatever reason. You're also misrepresenting what was said by many people, that any potential new covenants won't be forced upon existing mainland. So your claim that they have decided what is best "for all Mainlanders" is not only factually false but also tries to turn this thread about suggestions into a "we against them" fight. Not so pleasant. You blame people who are not of your opinion for not accepting that your arguments are better than theirs. How dare they. Because you're convinced that your arguments are better than others' arguments. And sorry, I don't think your argument " If most Mainlanders thought like them then Mainland would already be more like their vision of what it should be instead" is very.. good. Only because some pretty roadside house lives next to a skybox on the ground doesn't mean that this is their vision of mainland.

I don't think this is feasible. If a long term possible outcome is that existing mainland shrinks and the prettier mainland grows, and you remove the option to sell your parcel for an amount that is up to you, you are pulling an incredible amount of L$ out of the SL economy. If I want to buy a parcel for 6,000L$ I have to come up with that money somehow. Either I earn it inworld and add value to SL by doing so, or I buy Lindens.

Sounds plausible to me. Mainland seems like a hot potato to Linden. You replace the ground textures with a better version and people are gonna complain and ask how it can be that they paid for their land and now their precious texture is gone. (I'm saying this having only seen one screenshot of the new ground textures. Maybe it's even possible that the new textures may look objectively worse in very specific instances and it actually would be a legit issue for some.)