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.)

Yes it would be, and also of all of the Linden objects currently out there. But this would be a tremendous effort. And the question must at least be asked and discussed if it makes sense to overhaul the existing mainland, or if it would make more sense to create a new continent and do those things that may be off in a better way. Better Linden objects, better sailing, less to be abandoned unprotected land. I mean they understood it when they build Horizons, or even Bellisseria. I know there are many arguments against a new continent. What happens to the old continents? Will it be impossible to buy abandoned land? Could it be done in any way that Linden could afford it or is there no way to finance it? It would need to be an investment that aims for more revenue through more people that would be attracted by the addition of the new continent. And of course you'd have the people who currently own "premium spots" on the mainland who would face a potential decrease in land value and who are strongly gonna oppose this, too.

Why does mainland have so much unprotected land at all? It contradicts the overall logic of mainland. If the purpose of mainland is to be a connected world, then it is failing its purpose, since all unprotected parcels are not connected. So mainland is supposed to be a connected world but most of it is not connected. Doesn't make sense in my eyes. And this is reflected by the looks of those parcels that are next to protected land and those parcels that are not next to protected land. People on a parcel next to protected land often try to fit into the neighbourhood. People on an unprotected parcel put a skybox on the ground. Or create mountain tall walls. Of course there are few examples of the opposite, but this is the general situation.

I'm not sure what my final suggestion would bet yet, but the problems I see with this one are 2: 1) I see the danger of this turning into a scheme like this: Somebody just holds 512m² worth of micro parcel space in a region and just rents this out. In which case the amount of ad parcels could actually skyrocket. 2) There are legitimate reasons to not own more than 16m² in a region. I think it's connected to vehicles, too. The micro parcel topic would probably deserve a whole own thread since it's a very complicated issue.

That is completely overpriced. By the looks of it it falls into the category of forbidden land cutting. The only right thing to do in that case would have been to file an Abuse Report against the owner(s) of these parcels as soon as they were created. Apart from that. Not everyone who owns land is a "pro". There are people who don't know how to file an Abuse Report or don't know that they have this option. There are people who don't know how to deed their land to their group to profit from the additional %. There are people who don't even want to do that because it's too complicated for them. And that's fine. They're not the ones responsible for overpriced micro parcels getting cut at the road, the land cutter is.

I agree that if anything rules on micro cutting in regards of ads should be tightened. It's not only the fact that a 16m² parcel can ruin 1600m² too easily. It's also that micro ad parcels profit from their surroundings without paying a dime to those. Example are ad farms appearing around busier places like GTFO hubs. It's nothing but blood sucking on people who have actually done something useful, living off of them like parasites while contributing nothing, on the contrary. Since you seem to enjoy RL comparisons, you think IRL you can just plant an ad farm next to a popular place and pay an as low rent as on the level of a 16m² in comparison? I don't think so.

INTERSTATE, not in front of my BEDROOM WINDOW. you can believe me I would shake some fists if somebody decided to put some ad in front of my window. this is really not a great argument in favor of micro parcel cutting.

don't misrepresent what I said. I did NOT say that there is no legitimate interest in cutting off excess. I said that there should be no intention to cut off ROADSIDE MICROS because they devalue the large parcel that it's allegedly all about. no justification for cutting off roadside and selling it except if you already KNOW that you sh*t on the larger parcel. which is the problem here, sh*tting on the "actual" parcel and making the profit through micros.

this statement is so far off reality and honesty that it's just remarkable. a "land baron" who buys a roadside parcel with the intention to keep it (or make profit off it as the main sale item) will NOT cut off ANYTHING roadside. of course not because it completely devalues his roadside parcel. don't try to turn cutting off a roadside micro into something innocent, ESPECIALLY if a land baron is involved. making profit is fine, making profit with the intention to leave scorched earth is NOT fine. if someone cuts off a roadside micro it's with the intention to make profit with that roadside micro ALONE and it doesn't matter what happens to the other land. usually it's like this: 1) buy roadside 2) cut micro 3) sell micro for a very high price 4) sell rest of land for a very low price and of course the only intention of all of this is to leave scorched earth and run away with the profit. and there is NOTHING good about this. afterwards everyone is happy apart from everyone around who will have to put up with crap ads. There is just one thing that can be done against illegal micro parcel cutting: Report, report.. and report!