I should preface anything I say here by saying that yes, I have a sailboat in Second Life. Anyone who has visited Harbour has seen it tied up at the dock.
Regardless of what’s sitting at my dock, I don’t really consider myself part of the sailing community. This is, in large part, because I totally suck at sailing in SL. I used to sail for real, years ago, but I seem to have lost all ability to do much more than run aground. So my sailboat is a lovely, and rather primmy, decoration in Harbour, but it isn’t really what I would consider a pastime. I had to search my Flickr photostream to find a single photo of me with the sailboat underway to include in this blog post.
That said, the sailing community just seems to have scored a major victory in the openspace skirmishes. An official blog post announced a 40-region sea is being put into place next to Nautilus. After insisting that the sailing community can’t afford to keep their regions under the homestead policy, and also insisting that they can’t use the new and not-improved openspace regions due to the lowered agent limit, they’re getting a shiny new sea of homestead regions, funded by the the Lab. Merry Christmas for sailors!
Additionally, the estates who own the United Sailing Sims just got a special perk: being attached via this new sea to the mainland. We’ve come a long way from the owners of those regions threatening to shut them down in the wake of the openspace announcements. Of course, this coming summer, the same price hikes that those estate owners were insisting would cause them to have to abandon their regions will come into place. Is the added value of being uniquely attached to the mainland enough to make them more valuable and save them from sinking into the Linden ocean?
What about the other estate owners? While I don’t think that the lab is terribly interested in having a Gorean continent (Jack Linden made it pretty clear in his forum post that the PG nature of the USS was important to this venture), and I don’t know that themed areas like Caledon would be interested in being connected to the mainland, other estate owners are likely to want a piece of the action, especially if it means higher value/occupancy in their regions.
I’m curious to see if this is a big policy shift in how the mainland will be managed and developed, and if so whether it stabilizes mainland land prices. If so, I’m sure that from LL’s business point of view, it was a good thing to do with 40 regions worth of computing power that were abandoned by openspace region owners who can’t afford the rising prices.
i am kinda mixed on this too. it’s great for Linden Labs and those USS sim owners but it’s a hell of a great way to get loads of new customers for those private sims too
we used our OS under the guidelines with most having over 50,000 sm of free public space as water. so with 81% being open water space for boating in 13 OS sims, don’t we have the same issue?
oh well, if I wanted fair, i would leave in Cuba or something with communism . . .
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As said, iliveisl, get hold of Jack Linden and talk to him. I’m pretty sure that he’s quite unaware of the existence of your lovely community and that’s why he hasn’t talked to you first.
Be strong, earnest, but polite in your demands. You’ll see that most people at LL are more reasonable than they often look in “public”. But don’t expect them to run after you
Second Life is way to big these days, too many things are happening, hundreds of thousands of communities are bustling with activity, and LL is totally unable to keep up with all of that.
Be pro-active in your demands — but make them reasonably: remember, Linden Lab is pretty much “immune” to griping, whining, and complaining, most of their employees were picked for the ability of being able to handle the worst kinds of insults with a cool stance.
They’re not really “monsters” but most of the time just ignorant of what is happening in SL…