Cocoanut Koala

I see what you mean. I was agreeing with the IDEA, but you are right that they will say the idea as if they had ever adhered to it particularly before.

coco

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Cincia Singh

I've seen several instances lately where the estate owner took the tier and then just left SL. The "owners" of the land on the estates were left homeless, penniless, and looking for explanations while seeing the estate they thought was their home "offline" on the map; and buying new parcels elsewhere. All of the rationale for estate living aside, the only relatively safe landlord is LL because, eventually, almost everyone moves on to other games.

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Kurt Ludd

I am like Coco...I have bought up most of my home Sim over the last almost 3 years...and My store covers about a 1/3 of the sim and some of the 2 neighbor Sims...Linden land is the middle 1/3 and I have a nice house and land on most of the other 1/3...other residents own about 6K of the land... I would not want it to be zoned all Residential or all commercial...However I do agree that Adfarms should go...We have a few plots in the surrounding Sims but not really bad...But have seen some really ugly Sims because of them...I am hopefull that SL will step in and help make the Mainland Better

Kurt Ludd
"The Gesture Maker"

Parker McTeague

i'm vaguely optimistic.

i wouldn't worry, coco. i can't picture them retroactively zoning the whole mainland.

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Ray Figtree

Nearly 5000 sims. But the main reason they won't rezone existing mainland is that people bought land based on the current no covenant zoning which does not distinguish residential from commercial. I don't see LL booting people off the land they bought or adding covenants to the existing land. If they do do that, it would be one of their most outrageous moves ever.

The only thing that makes sense for existing mainland is if every owner on a particular sim requests for that sim to be changed to be strictly residential or commercial.

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Beebo Brink

I could see that happening on my mainland sim. The entire sim is owned by just three or four people, including myself, and I was the only person who had a business, which I put in a skybox specifically not to mar the beautiful woodland theme on the ground level. Even before I moved my store off the sim to an island, I probably would have agreed to a residential only zoning to keep the integrity of our sim intact.

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Psyke Phaeton

What they should do is sell zoned and unzoned land and let the market decide.

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Malachi

Zoning? Surely you jest. I mean its a nice idea and all, but it takes both a lot of work and good judgment.

I seem to recall an LL initiative to clean up the events calendar many moons ago. I think it lasted less than a day.

Ray Figtree

Zoning is coming. It will be on a number of sims small enough for LL to handle. How effectively it will be handled has yet to be determined.

Malachi

As well as their gambling and banking bans are enforced? Or would it be more like Age Verification enforced?

Sarah Nerd

I like the fact that he explained that zoning would only be applied to new sims, and that he openly stated that ad farms were a problem that they planned to address soon. And he plans to work on ban lines. I go to a lot of his office hours, and one of the biggest things I like about Jack is the fact that he spends the time to listen to us even when it's 30 people ganging up on him bitching nonstop and threatening to do this and that if demands aren't met. And judging by his latest actions he not only heard our concerns he's making an effort to work on them and change things where needed.

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prinţesă nină

i reckon its more lip-service than anything.

Adam Zaius

me too.

We've seen this one before - LL's created "zoned" sims that fell into disrepair as the Linden involved got bored. (See Boardwalk, original Bay City, Shermaville, etc - new bay city will likely go the same way)

I doubt this will last more than 3 months after initial implementation.

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Originally Posted by Joshua Ignore Adam, he's just a troll.

Malachi

I took a look at Bay City the other day out of curiosity. If the goal of "zoning" there was empty plots, big blue and white "for sale" sign cubes and helipads, then the goals have been amply satisfied.

How long ago did those sims open?

Colette Meiji

Makes sense.

Only in Second Life can the employees getting bored not only make sense but also count as a reasonable excuse.

Winter Ventura

I had to highlight a couple of bits there that worry me.

• I would hope to have a clear policy statement in front of you very soon
  "Clear Linden Policy Statement"... we've seen how well that's worked before... "In Front Of You" read: announced on a blog entry, very probably with comments disabled. Another spur in the side of the SL Economy.. will we have adlotters dumping mainland on the market like crazy? "Very Soon"... is this the "very soon" that we were going to get age verification working? or was this the "very soon" that Havok 2 was coming to the grid? Should we expect our mainland values to become depressed THIS MONTH? or sometime in the nebulous future maybe?
  
  
• the situation inworld change dramatically... ... in September
  This would seem to imply that anyone with adlots to sell might want to start selling them at reasonable prices now, because within a month the market for 16m parcels is going to hell. Linden definition of "for the better" notwithstanding.
  
  
• this isn't just about removing ad farms, which we clearly need to do and soon
  At least we know that "Removing Ad Farms" is on the table.. not just "removing land extorting ad farms" as was declared recently. Simply "setting the land not for sale" may not be a protection anymore.
  
  
• but also about providing a scaleable framework to control responsible advertising in terms of where and how it happens and how much we allow.
  Controlling responsible advertising? isn't responsible advertising, by it's own definition, responsible? why does RESPONSIBLE advertising need to be controlled?Now, not only are you going to go after the adlotters who are just there to spam up the land for their own reasons, but now you're going to tell me how big and how many signs I can have on my store's land?
  
  
• applying zoning to old regions may be unpopular
  It worries me when people in control use the word "may"... Especially Lindens. It's very Robinesque to say "while we understand that these new rules may be unpopular... we own you". I don't like the fact that he's saying "MAY BE"... of fucking course the general population feels that changing the rules of the game is fucking unpopular. We don't want to be held to terms of a contract we never agreed to. DUH. I don't want them rezoning Healy to be residential.. at the same time, I don't want them zoning it as commercial either. I don't want it no ads, or all ads.. I want Healy to remain Healy.. and every sim on the road to Bear. This is a glorious and clever area of mainland in which I rest my store, and I am truly honoured to live here, with a bowling alley to the north, a museum (several actually) to the south, beach homes to the west, and a She-male-sex-club to the East.

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Khamon

I asked in Jack's recent office hour if LL had actually defined the term "ad farm."

He didn't answer.

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Aki Shichiroji

Was that a lack of answer due to not wanting to answer? or simply being barraged by too many questions at once?

I can't say I've been to very many of his office hours, but in comparison to a few other similar sessions, it seems like he gets snowed under rather quickly.

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Khamon

He answered all my other questions, in fact, I believe he answered every other question that was asked. I've asked a few Lindens for a definition of "ad farm," what exactly they consider the bad things that need to be policed off The Grid All Hail The Central Grid, and eaten static every time.

No ad farm policy will be effective until they're willing to state publicly exactly what it is their targeting and not going to tolerate any more. It's hard to believe that residents jump up and down cheering when Jack says LL obviously have to tackle ad farms first. That pretty much amounts to 'we're not ever going to get past this "ad" . "farm" . thing to whatever we're claiming will mysteriously happen afterward but that's all I can say about it now.'

Malachi

I can not tell if you are being sarcastic. Of course everyone had problems with autoreturn. Do you remember when parts of your build would go missing from the world because the auto-return mechanism couldn't distinguish between stuff that was already there and stuff that was just now rezzed even though it exceeded the parcel object limit? They really aren't so hot with the automated bits either (at least on the first few iterations). That was even a way of griefing for a time: go to a parcel, start rezzing things like mad and watch the builds disappear, or just be indiscriminate, launch a grey-goo self replication attack and send entire sim contents to lost+found folders.

I have to agree with Khamon on this, they can be very good at listening. They can be very good at saying that they "feel our pain". They can even make a convincing statement that they are going to do something about it. Unfortunately, they seem to have severe memory impairment; as soon as this fades from the front page, nothing will likely ever be done. Indeed, I'm not sure what prompted this little flurry of "give us your feedback", but most of us here have been to too many town halls and such like to believe that stated concern ever gets translated into real action.

And no, out of respect for the dead, I shall not mention Project Open Letter.

Beebo Brink

No amount of concern can be transformed into substantive action without some kind of organizational structure to set requirements, then monitor and maintain them as part of someone's job description. From what I've heard about LL, there is no institutional paradigm for ongoing support and maintenance of just about anything, including users.

Aki Shichiroji

Just to add this latest announcement on the blog to the mix: August Mainland supply update « Official Second Life Blog

Walker

The only thing that bothers me about this whole discussion is the possibility of finding the sim I'm in retroactively zoned to residential or commercial.

One advantage of owning mainland is the flexibility that allows you to switch from one to the other. How many people start with an idealistic little prefab on their home parcel, then suddenly want to replace it with a store after they start designing?

I've never really understood the theory that commercial builds make a sim ugly anyway. Somebody floated an idea on the official forums a few months ago suggesting businesses should all be made to operate above the clouds, with only residential properties allowed at ground level. But the mainland is littered as many fugly residential as commercial builds so how is that going to make for a more aesthetic sim?

And what about the more artistic/avant-garde/experimental builds out there that are neither residential or commercial?

Malachi

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the idea of contiguous continents is inherently flawed and that the smallest partition of "land" ought to be the sim.

Good fences make good neighbors and exploration has been killed by parcel ban lines and sim hand-off bugs.

Geographical proximity is an unnecessary constraint in a virtual world.