Prokofy Neva

Let's start by noting that the Lindens will never zone the legacy Mainland. They never have in 15 plus years, and never will. Their notion of zoning is to make the Linden Homes, and put extra rules in them or simply to build them in such a way that it is hard to make problems for other people, i.e. there are a lot of easements and levels so that view isn't so easily destroyed around the coast. They don't allow commercial activity, which is one way they keep out ugliness. But let's pretend they might consider this, or that groups of residents could actually band together and make rules among themselves that they might try to enforce at least with "soft law" i.e. by banning those who break the rules. I find this even less likely to happen than Lindens changing anything, because as in real life, various communes that get started usually end in tears; one famous socialist commune coddled heavily by the early Lindens ended with the builder bombing and deleting her builds to spite the people who controlled the sim when she had some sort of disagreement with them. I find that a lot of the time, you can keep areas nice by just informally getting along even in a superficial way with neighbours, so that you don't shock them with big black boxes in the sky or giant billboards or whatever. But here's what I think are the minimum guidelines: o No domes or builds of any kind in the view, which means nothing below 500 meters or even ideally 1000 meters for those with higher draw distances. The ability to de-render on some viewers isn't a solution, because when you're driving around or riding around you're not going to stop every few meters and de-render giant domes. I have studied these more and now I understand something I didn't at first -- it's not that they put them at 100 or 200 meter so that they dominate the view for 4 sims and kill all organic life underneath them because they want their tenants to look *out of* the dome to the pretty scenes that perhaps you and your neighbours created years ago; in fact they tint the glass of the dome so the tenants cannot see out and no one can see in casually unless they cam in. The reason they are so low, as it turns out, is because there are exactly 24 or 25 of them stacked up all the way to 4096, after which you cannot build or get teleporters to work. Apparently they guarantee their customers "privacy" that requires more than the mere 20 m required to keep non-IM chat private and not overheard in public chat. Or maybe they want to hamper camming. Or who knows. But it's the need to cram as many domes into a big pile up that puts them so low. Since most of them stand empty a lot of the time, they could cut out one or two of the lower ones and make for much nicer areas. But they don't need to, because usually when they buy a sim or part of a sim, they drive many people to abandon their land. I didn't realize this, either, until I saw the process unfold in several areas. Of course, the Lindens could figure out how many sims these companies own, and make a "dome continent" where they allow them all in one place to stack up. But that's not likely something they will ever do. The dome rentals aren't going to buy expensive islands; their money making machine depends on cheaper sims, often purchased abandoned or for low prices on the auction; stacking; and as I said, killing all organic life for miles. It's really quite something to fly around and behold -- continent after continent, killed by domes. Making the domes sky blue isn't much of a help when they loom over you like a spaceship. Plus, the undersides are scraggly messes of all the cheap sculpty landscaping they pile into the domes. They could mitigate this with false bottoms but they don't. o No self-driven vehicles -- People who tout the scourge cars once rode them years ago and retained a romantic memory of them. They maybe ride them more frequently and find them "convenient". But if you have land next to them, you see them coming all day, every day, every few minutes, with no one in them. They are driverless cars WITH NO PASSENGERS. Only the owner knows how many people actually ride them. The Lindens could track this and discover that there's only a tiny percentage of users, relative to the huge number of spam cars. There currently isn't a script that calculates how many *driverless* vehicles go by; only those that have people in them can register on some kind of visitor tracker. In theory, it could be done even manually to prove the point. But the Lindens always love people with grid-wide ambitious because they love load-testing for free by other people than their paid staff. There are a few forums' regs who howl at any indication that these scourges might be curbed. Still, this spam could be significantly reduced by having them put out ONLY at rez areas. That should be plenty. Every sim or every other sim has Linden rez areas; let the Lindens put out their own created vehicle, or let them choose their spam car friends even, but keep them only at rezzing areas and only when someone actually wants to get in their spam car. Particularly awful are the "out of theme" ones -- buses on the water, airplanes on the road, cars on the railroad etc. There's a green bus with wings that is particularly obnoxious. All of these pile up; get stuck at seams; don't budge even when you get in them to try to push them away. In any other context it would be conceded that these are spam. o Regulate billboards and signs and ads of any kind as to size, style, and location. Ideally, the Lindens should provide a network of advertising boards at hangouts, infohubs, and roadside. It would be a great sink for them and help the pent-up advertising of SL that then bleeds into other venues where it shouldn't be like the events list or bots that spam things or idiots getting into groups trying to sell stuff, etc. Those types will always persist but some of it could be addressed by advertising on a scale that isn't just the classifieds, which basically can't be seen or can't work unless you spend like $10,000. Sure, you can spend just $1000 and get some click-throughs, but it's rare. The Linden search system is rigged by their own admission to be "fair," so they don't let the highest bidder or the store with the most traffic rise to the top, as these are "gamed," but they use whatever they use, their secret formula, like Google, which they change -- various key words, picks that aren't paid picks; who knows, perhaps something like snapshots taken or purchases made. But whatever, search doesn't work very well and frustrates people trying to start or maintain a business. Perhaps the point here is to drive people to the MP, where search might work better, and the Lindens can skim off their 10%. So that's why I don't think we'll ever see any change here. Still, it can be posed as an issue and a need, and perhaps independent entrepreneurs could make better billboards. Currently, the lion's share of them are political messages bought up by people with strong views, money, and time on their hands. There's Trump, Sanders or the French yellow jackets. Or spammy things that aren't even in SL, but some kind of click bait Internet sites. Or "fishing games" where you can "earn Lindens" which don't really work. I fly around a fair amount and I don't think I have ever seen a thing on a billboard that I actually wanted to click on, except for the ones I maintain at some infohubs that people rent, and possibly a few other managed communities with ad signs like Mieville. o No photo-real "privacy" boards; flat trees and bushes, giant pictures, walls, etc. I find these things the ugliest manifestations in SL. There are very nice areas with really nicely maintained builds and landscaping for a 24 sim radius, but some idiot will put up a giant photo-real mountain picture or something, completely out of place, for "privacy" or because they "like to look at them". I ban them in my rentals because while you may like to look at them, those outside of your picture box don't. The ones that have sandy beach scenes from Florida in New England sims or other out of place things are the worst. This is something that I think absolutely nothing can be done about, as the Lindens won't police it and some forums regulars likely are hearty practitioners of this aesthetic barbarism. It's worth pointing out that if you are doing this for "privacy," it's insane, as anyone can came over or through those big boards. You can uncheck "avatars can see me" and be invisible. You can put up 3D trees and discourage most casual look-sees and look so much better. There are very cheap good-looking 3D trees -- I see my tenants put out all kinds of them. You can go up in the sky in a skybox with an orb. Or you can stop obsessing about someone seeing you on your cheap Mainland parcel and live with it, if you don't want to spend on a humper bunker island or homestead. There's more -- like not building smack on the property line for 16 or ideally 32 m -- but that's also something people endlessly argue about -- although when it happens to them, and a giant black box club modeled after the Black Sun in "Snowcrash," they get it better. What could you do to incentivize this better behaviour? Perhaps group gifts by a neighbourhood association. Perhaps the Lindens could hand out free land to "best neighbourhoods" or something. It's easier to envision the disincentives. For example, I know a store I will never shop at if they don't texture their outward-facing plywood pretty soon....

There's already a way to re-name the Mainland. It's called buying a private island, and naming it whatever you want, if that name isn't taken already. I think if everything is coded with that name, it might become a chore to write code to make some change or cover for that.

If your point is that the Lindens may make a profit on the float, that is, the money that is in their hands after you turn it into dollars, but before they let you have it at PayPal, yes, they may do that, although a Linden once swore to me that they didn't. But if they did, they'd be doing what every red-blooded Silicon Valley online business does -- makes bank off the float. PayPal itself does that. You don't instantly get your cash in your bank account unless you pay an extra fee; if you don't want to pay the fee, wait a day or even three. This is a normal if predatory practice.

Maybe the task should be to make SL more welcome for everybody, and then males, females, whatever, will take care of itself. The forums wouldn't be putting the best foot forward. And indeed, the topic of *this discussion* is indeed why women want to be subjugated and brutalized. So if you think that's fine, and some sort of "culture" or "lifestyle," then your plan is to attract the most brutal and authoritarian men who retreat from real life where their wives and girlfriends want freedom and equality, to a world where they can have a harem, and subs, and capture roleplay. I guess I don't see the Lindens, who are basically liberals and leftists, as doing that. I think if they were to deliberately advertise to the worst sort of men who want to brutalize women, before long, their peers in Silicon Valley and the tech press would go after them.

I have never found a grass in SL I am happy with, but some I'm less unhappy than others. An issue is whether you can afford to have the grass look good AND have a high land impact count. I think these merchants have pretty good grass: Simply Shelby KIDD alir flow/allirium Hayabusa But I find myself mixing and matching and using different ones for different things, for example Fourth Wall has the coloured grasses. Dysfunctionality (DDD) has grass with wildflowers. A lot of grass looks like a circle or has gaps in it requiring you to mix and match them.

That's silly. That's not the topic. The topic is, why, in our emancipated time when women are equal and have their rights, do some women wish to set the clock back. And some men revert to a less civilized time. And people in our age, who live in our time, did not adjust to the cultural changes that made the normalized bondage of marriage and relations between the sexes more obsolete.

I'm telling you the truth. A lot of relationships are destroyed when someone finds out the person of their dreams is the "wrong" gender. Ordinary men are creeped by the idea they may hook up with the "wrong" gender. You wanted to know how to attract more men, and I'm telling you the answer, like it or not. I don't care about someone's A/S/L myself. It's not my purpose or interest in SL. I'm telling you that if you wanted SL to have more men in it, you would have to provide them with more assurances that they weren't coupling with other men, as that can get them seriously angry and crazy. So you could have that path in SL, that it is more like a real life dating site attached to social media. And you can have the other path such as it is now. But social media and RL never really took off related to SL because the base population wants it to be a masked ball. But again, if the question is "how to attract more men," you need to ensure that there are more verifiable females. The idea that you don't have to do this, or that you shouldn't do this for ideological reasons, means that you won't attract more men. So it's up to you, what your goal is.

Because people have a propensity for doing what they are told, and some don't have enough inner drive to make their own way, and want to be told what to do. Some like being contrarian to what the prevailing norms are. The changes in culture have come very rapidly in the last 50-100 years, much faster than other times in human history, and this has been painful for some and they wish to resist it and have a place to enact the old ways.

Any ideology that involves hatred and violence and subjugation of women *should* be condemned, and condemning Gor, BDSM, capture roleplay etc. is a good thing. It's not about me needing a soapbox or even about me, as many people share these views and indeed, this behavior is a crime in RL, like it or not. It's fine to shame people with these violent and criminal views. That's how you maintain civilization. Stalin is the opposite of civilization and himself justified violence and slavery. A survey of some limited number of people put in a popular magazine doesn't prove anything, and even if there was some rigorous scientific study, it doesn't mean this is something to be encouraged. I'll go on condemning violence and slavery because these are antithetical to freedom and civilization. Yes, it should be shamed. Deal with it. It's not about being evolved, but backward.

Because there is no free press inworld or on the forums. With a free press, you could report on violent and terrible behaviour freely, and call out people and businesses by name, which is not allowed on the forums. You could copy chat and publish it. These are basics that would be required to raise public awareness and consciousness about reprehensible activities such as "capture roleplay" or worse. It shouldn't be socially acceptable to simulate rape.

I don't think the Lindens "make money" as such from events, formation of groups, or any other inworld charges, like texture uploads. Those are what are known as "sinks" in the monetary system, they merely take money out of the supply. In theory, if there are more sinks, the value of the Linden dollar rises as the money supply is tighter. But I gather the Linden fees paid on the MP are revenue, and not sinks. But perhaps a Linden could confirm this.

Yes, it might have made more sense for the Lindens to charge adult events more, or admit that many "events" are merely sales opportunities sometimes not even with the "event planner" present, andthen charge specifically for sales events, then maybe Live Music could have been left alone. But...If you don't have $50 or $100 to pay for a live music event every day, and can't get that back in tips to the venue or musicians, then maybe you shouldn't be in the live music business. Or just make a group and IM your group members. I am really looking forward to reading the events list again if it cleans up. I stopped looking at it literally years ago, it's a morass.

Technically, we're all renters here, even those of us who buy sims directly from LL and then pay tier and rent them out to others, or those who buy private islands and homesteads and "sell them" (really rent them, because they can seize them back any time) to others. You don't need a premium account either to rent on the Mainland or rent or "buy" on an island -- it's all done without the premium. The premium is only if you want a Linden Home or to own land on the Mainland. It's cheaper to rent on the Mainland from rental companies or another resident because you aren't paying the $11.99 premium per month and other costs (sometimes a house or skybox cost if they are provided), and they will have a bulk discount and typically a group 10% discount so they can give you a much cheaper price and/or more prims per parcel. Private islands are usually more expensive to rent or "buy". Rentals have all kinds of levels of rules or freedom, some with no rules, some with a few rules (like in mine, you can't have a security orb except in the sky above 500 m) and still others with heavy theme or RP or community rules. It's a renter's market, you have a vast array of options to choose from. Look for those that are refundable, usually for a small fee so you aren't locked in for a month until you settle on what you like.

The stalls are both together with a mall, which I prefer to call a "plaza," which might have a dozen or so stores, and also just on a boardwalk, where there might be only a few stores or no stores. Yes, people used to rent these stalls merely to place their XStreet boxes because they had to be out inworld someplace and not everyone wanted to rent land. Perhaps they might want a stall or store now if leaving the Marketplace, but I tend to think people leaving the Marketplace due to the 10% cut will leave it for good. Especially if they made the migration from inworld store to MP and didn't do so well. It seems things sell better on the MP; certainly gatchas do, because you can leverage search. Yes, serendipity inworld helps, and certain things, especially houses I should think, just have to be seen inworld before a purchase. But I just don't know. It's always hard to tell because we don't have enough information. I have closed one mall in the last decade because it was in PG which is always hard to fill. But I like them. I think they are needed.

I have no idea what this percentage is that you've invoked, but a store in my rentals, for example, if they paid, say, $700 for 850 prims and got 10% discount for 4 weeks in advance, they would have to sell past the $2520 for the rent -- and they do, often by just selling a few of their more expensive products. They can also be in a $25/50 stall and do it that way and have less of a cost.

Yeah, Alyona must be a fan of Ayn Rand. How much putting up and shutting up does she do? I see nothing wrong with bitching about the change of the exchange rate and asking pointedly if this is a function of Linden Homes and trying to get people to feel like their Lindens are cheap so they can buy all the add-ons for the Lindens homes made by the Lindens' friends. Oh, and as Qie pointed out, the cheap currency flooding in from all those stipends attached to the premium accounts. So thanks! Linden Homes has been swell for the economy -- the Lindens' economy, not just those in the inworld economy.

No, I'm not "way off" on the cost of events, dear. I am describing the lower end of merchant events that *I myself take part in*. Imagine, there is such a thing! I make stuff, and take part in events, even some "famous" ones. So I'm reporting what *I pay*. I write about *what I know*. And I don't think these are "third tier" because one of them is on Seraphim. The price is $1000 as ordinary merchant and $1500 as sponsor on one, for example. But another one is only $400 and yet another is $500. I guess they're beneath you. We could have a debate about what "first tier" and "second tier" is. But it doesn't matter. $500 or $1000 is the minimum, and it goes up. Sure, the very top events probably pay more like $5000. But we don't know because they don't openly tell you their price and it seems a closely-guarded secret. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the fee for the most crowded, popular events, however. And I don't doubt that after only two people play the round of 20+ at Epiphany, say, to get the prize, that the merchant makes back what she put into it and the rest is gravy. I don't doubt the top tier make money but then they get fatigue. There are too many events. They come too frequently. All along the way, they harangue the merchants with all kinds of rules and reprimands and intrigue and it gets really tiresome. I am near to done with it myself, with most of it. My feeling about the Lindens isn't one of gratitude because I pay them. I am not grateful to my phone company or electric company. I appreciate them. I appreciate that they function better than their counterparts in Russia.

But isn't what he is saying that *per sim* it will count as 512, i.e. they can't spread their microparcels all around with the one 512.

Well, no. Plenty of things don't happen "as they shouldn't"; this one thing happened which you are describing, not many. That's not just nit-picking, it's merely pointing out that you can't extrapolate, even if you have "this impression" that there are "lots of other cases". I could note, for example, that a number of times I simply didn't get the auction to work. I thought I had bid, and even had the highest bid, and in fact it wasn't registering. So yeah, stuff doesn't work. But the reason I am objecting to your portrayal of this is because you are modifying your behavior and waiting a month to do something when ALL YOU KNOW is that: one person didn't get the auction to work. That's it. That's really all you have the facts about. And yes, I've found the auction doesn't work. But it does work in general because you see all this land selling. But taking tier out and having it immediately available -- that is something that generally works. Abuse reports "go nowhere". But I have never known a ticket about land or your avatar to go "unanswered". It might take 3 weeks to answer. You might have to add a comment and try to nudge them. But they do answer.

What are these policies you protested?

Well, it isn't just "theory" that doesn't work; it *doesn't* work that way. I have alts that sometimes put in 1024 when they need to because a tenant has pulled out; when they pull it out it is available and they can put it in another group, or take land as an individual and sell it; or cancel the premium (and there, once you *cancel the premium* even though your account isn't over yet, you can't use the 1024). I have literally done all those things recently; got a Linden home and abandoned it; immediately applied that tier to a group; taken that tier out of a group and put it on land as an individual to sell as an individual etc. So the question is *whether you canceled the premium account*; if you didn't, that 1024 is available immediately to be used elsewhere. If somehow it isn't, you shouldn't be waiting months; you should contact support because something isn't working right. So it's expected behavior that canceling the premium, you immediately lose the use of the tier. But merely withdrawing from a group doesn't mean there is some "waiting period". I have never seen that. So you need to get support to fix that. Occasionally I will see an account of mine that says I have 512 free. But I know I don't have it free; it's taken, in a group. So why is it saying that? I've even asked Lindens, and they don't know, but assure me that no, it's not available if it is in a group. Yes, you have to refresh the page and re-log. You will not see it available without those two actions. But there isn't any mandatory month-long period, truly there isn't. Yes, there are glitches as I just explained. But this is not normal and not required.

Charging to list events like you charge for ads in land or making a group or whatever is really a brilliant and overdue feature and I do hope it will get rid of the gadzillion of spam events at which the event "planner" isn't even present as they are merely glorified ads to sell stuff. I'm all for ads to sell stuff, and we don't have enough capacity for this in SL. But because we don't, it bleeds into other venues like events or 16 m parcels. The Lindens tried to wrangle events in the past at oldbies' behest who hated commerce and hated new people doing commerce, and they took a very punitive approach. They revised this with a notion that yes, you can advertise a new product you made or a new condo development as an "event". That is now abused, of course. $10 is not really enough to restore sanity. I think $100 might so clean up the events list that it might finally become usable again.

What's the major problem? You aren't saying what it is, and proving that it is major. You can search for things and buy them easily on the MP. You can sell things on the MP which can be hard if you aren't big and important and have a big ad budget.

She didn't have a premium account? That 1024 should stay with her as long as her account is paid, and if she withdraws it from a group, as soon as she refreshes the web site page she will see it as available again. But tier is always billed in advance. So in a month, you are billed for all the tier you used that month, it's highest level, regardless of whether on day 2 of that month, you withdrew tier from a project and didn't use it again.

Well, you mean coastal properties. Inland, you find prices as low as half a Linden or even .02/Linden as people want to unload the bleakest, flattest, landlocked parcels.