Enhancing Landmark Destinations and Seasonal Content
tracked
spirit Wingtips
Historically, Second Life featured iconic, high-impact regions that served as definitive, "must-see" landmarks across the grid. While numerous community-created regions continue to showcase exceptional beauty today, there is a noticeable decline in high-profile "Wonders of Second Life" style builds. Although a few of these legendary spaces remain active or preserved, a renewed focus on large-scale landmark development would greatly benefit the community. Additionally, several official Linden Lab builds—such as the major Halloween regions and the seasonal installations in Bellisseria—are beginning to show their age. To maintain high engagement, these spaces would benefit from comprehensive visual upgrades or entirely new thematic directions. Leveraging collaborative partnerships with prominent community creators could be an excellent, mutually beneficial strategy to revitalize these official builds and deliver fresh, cutting-edge experiences to residents.
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Elbag Gable
As always in SL, unless someone pays the tier whatever it is that you consider to be a build worth preserving ultimately has to go west. I've lost count of the number of lovely builds over the last 20 years that people have created (myself included I humbly submit) only to have them erased when financial hard times have resulted in repossession or forced sale..... of course the only exception is if you actually buy the sims rather than leasing mainland; COVID killed me financially but my two full regions were recovered this year after I was able to pay to have them ressurected and they now form the basis of a 20 sim sailing estate to which a number of people have contributed their building skills. You only though have to look at the world map to see how much land is simply for sale and never gets sold in mainland continents, so how is it that these usually awful messes get preserved yet magnificent builds get wiped off the face of the virtual earth I wonder?
AlettaMondragon Resident
Elbag Gable It's great to see you're back! I didn't know you had a new estate, I'd like to visit it sometime if it's open to the public.
I see a lot of places coming and going all the time, too, I never get to see many of them because if I'm too busy for several months, they close before I would get there. And it's not a surprise because running all those regions is not cheap, if the owner can't make it financially viable, it just eats money. And there's a lot of competition now and not too many people in SL, so the virtual real estate business doesn't seem as viable as before.
Then these places are not protected at all, so no matter how nice or popular they are, if the owner has funding issues, they go down. One day it's still there, the next morning it's gone. If you saw what happened with Gaeta I, LL ruined several old places and some newer but popular places as well with their wonderful plan to move people out and then shut down the continent, just to say nearly 4 months later "oh, we were kidding, we're not going to shut down Gaeta I, move back if you want". Pump a lot of money, effort and time into building a place anywhere in SL now just so that they might say it will be shut down even if you pay your tier? That is the reality of SL after this. And yes, at the same time there are a lot of goddamn ugly junkyards especially on Mainland, but as long as their owners pay for it, it's fine. They only care about numbers at LL, so a junkyard on 60k sq m is more precious to them than a beautifully built home or community place on 1024 or 2048 sq m. In fact some of the big junkyards are not being paid for, I knew several that had overdue tier for years before they reclaimed them. Even if those places were on roadsides which are considered prime locations.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Chippewa Junction could have been one of those, where the railway station was the best after the Bedstraw Project closed. Then you know who wanted the town hall building from Back to the Future in that region, and the Moles who had to rush couldn't fit the huge building in without destroying the station, so they ruined it. The building could actually fit there behind the original layout of the station. The mess there looks awful. At least thanks to Abnor Mole's recent railroad updates the tracks can be used again (after 4 years!!! the original station was ruined in 2022) so at least it is functional, even if it looks terrible. All that just to have a (now gone) corporate despot's favorite movie prop (it's not a real building in the film either) there serving as a "community center" for the Bellisseria Traditional theme, but there only have ever been about 3 community events in that building.
Now we got to my point: It is pointless to build nice places in SL if they completely ruin them later on a whim and if the builds won't serve their purpose, such as event centers sitting empty all the time.
I've recently discovered the NFLA regions which host a football stadium. It was used ONCE in 2021 for 3 days, for one event, and the regions keep running 24/7/365 ever since, looking like the event ended just a day ago, not 5 years ago.
Taking my point further: neglect kills SL.
By the way: does anyone use the Patchopolis region that is still online? Or VWR Test, which is Oz Linden's region. How many years ago did Oz retire? 5? But of course Shareta Osumai, the other original Linden Home infohubs and most of the Three Suns Quest regions were shut down. So much for iconic landmarks.
spirit Wingtips
AlettaMondragon Resident i see your point; my point though is IF nice places are built and they are marketed correctly those places may attract Current AND New Residents to visit. of course at the end of the day it is Linden Labs Decision.
AlettaMondragon Resident
spirit Wingtips Your point is great, it's just that then whatever they do, they eventually neglect it and what was new, shiny and maybe even popular for a short time when they built it, gets abandoned pretty quickly. That's basically true of every Bellisseria community center, not only Chippewa. The idea to involve talented, experienced builders who have already proved themselves through their builds is great, for example there were the SLRR station building contests and as a result of that, most if not all the railway stations in Heterocera are unique. Very old now, but unique builds that make riding the railroads more interesting.
This could have been done in Bellisseria as well, with the community centers, the little parks throughout the various themes, with the little airfields and marinas, etcetc, to involve resident builders in these projects and make unique places instead of a lot of copy-paste parks. I wish they involved the Bay City and Noyo area community in designing the causeway, too, after all it will connect their places, they should have a say in how it will look.
The most beautiful, interesting and popular places were built by and are funded and maintained by residents so we agree on this part, but then would the resident builders be expected to update and maintain their builds regularly to make sure they don't end up like all the 20-year-old builds? And of course that should be volunteer work because LL sure won't pay them to do that.
As for LL putting any effort into such things, they clearly don't, it is apparently a skill issue as well, but most of it is a general lack of effort. They don't put a little extra effort into getting things done, fixing them, upgrading them, taking care of them. "Ooooooh it's 3pm, I'm off work, yaaay!" and there they log out and they're done for the day. SL can even fall apart while they're out having dinner or playing their favorite games which is not SL, or sleeping.
AlettaMondragon Resident
There is that old request to update the Landmarks folder in the Library with infohubs, community gateways, community centers and other public landmarks. This Landmarks folder has a whopping amount of
3
landmarks in it, Orientation Island Public, Help Island Public and the Ahern Welcome Area. The first two are very outdated, just like all of LL's own old infohubs (the new Welcome Hub is the only quite up-to-date infohub), and Ahern is a historic site that cannot be touched now - unlike in 2005 when Ben Linden blew it up to have the current version built in its place. Then there's the less than optimal
Destination Guide which gives us a headache sooner than we can find a place that we had actually seen on the little strip on the login screen. So even promoting places is a very weak point at LL, building and maintaining new ones and upgrading the old ones? Who would do it?
Oatmeal Linden
updated the status to
tracked
Hello spirit! Thank you for the suggestion! We are marking this as tracked for review by our Marketing and SL Studios teams.