Land & Public Works

I'm a Premium member since forever, and I was delighted when semi-regular gifts got offered for Premium members. They often were from a home/garden or gadget category, which was perfectly fine. Later, when the Lab sought collaborations with popular designers and released designer branded gifts, they became more fashion and accessory oriented, but as such, still catered to all genders, with the collaboration partners usually offering 1 gift for female AND male avatars. This is what I expected from the inaugural event at ACCESS, but I got dearly disappointed. The number of participating designers was impressive, the number of gifts that could be used with male avatars was not. It was not even close to the roughly 40% in previous installments, but more in the range of 1-digit percentages. As a paying Premium member for almost 2 decades, with those gifts by now included among the officially announced perks of a membership, I felt duped. Sure, I did not become Premium because of those gifts. And I would stay Premium even if those gifts would vanish. But if you say (paraphrased) 'Premium members get cool gifts every now and then', then you should make sure that ALL Premium members should get those gifts. I'm not even expecting 50% (or 100%, like when the gifts were not primarily fashion items). SL is a rather feminime world when it comes to fashion, but I would have hoped for at least 30%, better 40%, of the gifts being usable for male avatars. And yes, the irony of suddenly being the disadvantaged gender does not escape me. You're preaching to the choir here. I have my doubts though that this was an intentional message, and merely assume an oversight, or negligence. So, please, more male fashion, or more gifts - like before - from gadget, landscaping, home and garden, vehicles, etc. Thank you!

Just south of Corsica continent there was a line of private estate sims which provided passageway for marine craft, aircraft, space craft. Recently, the owner of these regions took them offline permanently, eliminating a key passage way to western Corsica and places in that environs. This request asks that only FOUR regions be created, each one south of the existing Neyaci, Optiman, Plague Port, and Feersum regions. This would provide marine, air, and space traveling residents clear passage across the stretch of Corsica south shoreline that was eliminated above.

I need to give direct feedback on the Ridgewood commercial release system because right now, it’s not working in a fair or realistic way. People are being forced to sit there for long periods, sometimes hours, just to spam refresh and try to click a parcel the second it becomes available. It’s not a proper release system anymore; it’s just luck and timing with who clicks faster or who’s got less lag. And on top of that, when land actually becomes abandoned, you still have to wait ages for the sign to even show. So by the time anything appears, people are already sitting there for hours watching and waiting for nothing. That is not a functional system for commercial land. It also creates unnecessary conflict between residents because everyone is under pressure doing the same thing at the same time, and people end up speaking to each other badly. That is a direct result of how this system is set up. The “7-day rule” enforcement also doesn’t feel consistent. We are told to send abuse reports, but parcels still stay claimed with no clear change, even after repeated checks over time. From the outside, it looks like inactive or unused spaces are just sitting locked while others can’t access them. At this point, the system feels unclear, slow to update, and not fairly managed. If the intention is first-come, first-served, then it still needs to be done in a way that is actually transparent and updated in real time, not based on waiting for signs and hoping you catch a window. This needs a proper review because right now it’s frustrating, inconsistent, and does not reflect a fair commercial allocation process.

I've not seen it in SL, but it could possibly be fun idea for the LL Moles to build. A British style canal network. Sure, on some suitable continent where there is some space available, or maybe Bellerissia. I as a boat builder would be happy to build a selection of canal boats, and I know a couple of other builders who have already built canal boats. Narrowboats as they are known, 6 foot 10 inches wide and 57 feet long (that could be scaled up by say 15% for SL avis), travel around a network of canals that are often only as wide as two or 3 boat widths. Allowing boats to be moored on the side, and others to pass. Locks that are often only one boat width take the narrow boats up and down gradients. Locks make the whole journey interesting, and could be fun in SL if done well. I'd be happy to get involved with designing and building some locks too. This could be a fun activity.

A couple of folks I spoke with that are a part of the First Person Shooter Community find that having the mini map on does ruin the immersion of combat in the region and would like to know if it would be possible to turn off the mini map and tags for those that enter the region/parcel. It would be preferred to disable the option as well so users cannot just use the developer tool so they would not bypass it. The current workaround is using RLV to disable the mini map and tags and it would have to be called on command and it can be a waste of script time

This is only cosmetic. Almost all mainland regions have a 20m water height. Some inland regions have other water heights. which is fine. That's how mountain lakes and rivers work. There are four exceptions, regions at the edge of the world with non-standard water heights. This produces a discontinuity in SL's infinite ocean. These edge regions all have a 7m water height, instead of the usual 20m. Sandbox Wanderton Sandbox Cordova Sandbox Newcomb Sandbox Goguen They don't have deep lakes or anything. They're mostly flat land. This is probably some artifact from the early days of SL. It may not be worth fixing but is worth logging. Attached is a screenshot of what that does, from Firestorm. I happened to encounter this in Sharpview experimental viewer testing. It raised an internal warning and so I had to chase it down.

Second Life needs a built-in original soundtrack. You could have cool ambient vibes when logging in, exciting beats when teleporting. It would greatly add to the immersion and atmosphere when doing anything in SL. Imagine zoning out to cool tunes when teleporting or the excitement of zooming through Blake Sea with cool electronic tempo. I urge you to upvote this important proposal.

OFFICIAL PROPOSAL UPDATE: USING ABANDONED LAND AS A TEMPORARY SANDBOX I want to propose an alternate, secondary function for these abandoned Mainland parcels when they aren't actively being rented. We can turn these empty zones into a high-value, hyper-secure benefit for current Mainland landholders: A Shared Temporary Sandbox System. How the Sandbox System Works: If an abandoned parcel is sitting empty, Linden Lab’s backend can read a user's account data to verify if they are a paying Mainland owner or tenant. If they are, and they have available, unused tier/prims (Land Impact) on their account, they can temporarily utilize that empty parcel as a quick sandbox to rez items. To ensure this system remains highly secure, appropriate, and lag-free, it will feature the following hard-coded protocols: Maturity Rating Lock (Moderate and Adult Only): To prevent content violations and ensure compliance with grid policies, this temporary sandbox feature will only be available on Moderate (Mature) and Adult regions. General-rated regions will be excluded entirely from the sandbox pool to protect the family-friendly nature of those areas. Aggressive Auto-Return Timers: These temporary sandboxes will feature an un-bypassable, system-enforced 30-to-60-minute auto-return timer. The exact millisecond an object is rezzed, a countdown begins. Once it hits zero, the items are instantly deleted from the simulator and returned to the user's inventory. This guarantees the land stays 100% clean. Instant Grief-Reporting & Account Blocking: Because access is strictly locked behind verified Mainland accounts, accountability is absolute. The system will feature an instant "Report Griefing" option. If a user uses the space to deploy malicious scripts, lag-machines, or particle spammers, the system will immediately execute a Parcel Ban and temporarily block their account from using any automated sandbox close by. This turns ugly, abandoned eyesores into a premium, secure, and appropriately gated perk for paying Mainland residents without creating any extra work for the Linden support staff. Option B make it available to premium members only as a perk. Then users are more likely to want premium. Why Gating This to Premium Drives Real Revenue (The Math) Looking at SL’s metrics, we have roughly 500,000+ monthly active users. Estimates show that only about 15% to 20% of those users actually pay for Premium. That means there's a massive pool of over 400,000 Basic accounts currently paying $0 in subscriptions. We already know utility drives upgrades. When Linden Lab launched Bellisseria, Premium subs spiked instantly because people wanted the exclusive housing perk. If we use that same logic here and convert just a tiny fraction of those basic users: 0.5% Upgrade Rate (2,000 users): At $11.99/mo, that’s an extra $23,980/month. 1% Upgrade Rate (4,000 users): That’s an extra $47,960/month. Annual Impact: A simple 1% conversion adds nearly $575,000 a year in pure, high-margin profit. Since the Lab is already paying the server costs to keep these abandoned mainland sims turned on anyway, turning them into a Premium-only sandbox perk costs $0 in new infrastructure but creates a massive financial incentive to upgrade. It turns a total money drain into a huge sales driver.

Subject: Feature Proposal: Automated "Pay-As-You-Go" Rentals for Abandoned Mainland Hi everyone, I want to propose a new system for the massive amounts of abandoned Mainland currently sitting empty across the grid. Right now, this land generates $0 revenue for Linden Lab, and the ticket/auction process to get it back into circulation is slow. What if Linden Lab implemented an automated, "Rent Now" option directly into the About Land menu for any abandoned parcel? It would act as a highly flexible, convenience-driven system for players. 🏠 How the System Works: Instant Activation: A player finds an abandoned parcel, opens About Land, and clicks "Rent Now." No land purchase fees, no upfront tier commitments, and no third-party landlords. Pay-As-You-Go / Abandon Tomorrow: Renting would be purely flexible (daily or weekly). If a player stops paying, the system automatically clears the land via auto-return and puts the parcel back into the abandoned pool. The 20% Premium Rule: To protect existing private estate owners and Mainland rental businesses from being undercut, this automated system would charge a 20% premium above the average local market value. Inflation Protection (Rate-Lock): While the starting rent for an empty parcel fluctuates with the real-time market, once a player rents a plot, their rate is locked in. If local land values or inflation rise later on, the tenant keeps their lower legacy rate for as long as they maintain their continuous rental. 📈 Why This Benefits the Grid: For Players: It is the ultimate convenience. It’s perfect for builders who need a temporary sandbox for a few days, photographers setting up a quick scene, or players who want to "lock in" a great rate on a hot piece of land before the neighborhood inflates. For Private Landlords: The 20% premium ensures that anyone looking for standard, cost-effective long-term housing will still choose private rentals. It positions the Lab’s system as a premium convenience service, not a cheap competitor. For Linden Lab: It turns dead, non-revenue-generating land into an instant Linden Dollar sink, pulling currency out of the economy while monetizing empty space.

This is something I've been wanting to pitch for a long time but never really had the nerve to but here it goes. SL has been around for a long time and is really old as far as the Internet is concerned. Because of this and due to it's nature as an ever growing/evolving creative sandbox has a lot of history as well as historical sites to it. One could even go so far as to say that there's a field of archeology to exploring it. But this creates a dilemma. We're going on 20 plus years of evolution in 3d modeling, engine development, etc. And there are a lot of places with structures made of prims with many of them being very complicated and sophisticated builds and that's a LOT of land impact, plus rendering for anyone who wants to experience them or is just passing by. But on the other side of that same coin, it would be an absolute atrocity to just demolish them. My proposed solution is that if possible, LDPW Moles take/are given a copy of these prim linksets (soft linked or hard) and using 3d modeling software clean the prims up before joining them to create a smaller number of mesh objects which are then used to create a new and near exact replica of the original that under most cases is lower land impact and easier to render. This can be done in Blender fairly easily although it is a tedious process and not as quick or efficient as creating an object from scratch inside said 3d modeling software, but it will retain effectively the same geometry with less vertices if not faces. These linksets of mesh objects can then be used to replace the originals.This however would displace the originals, which is where the second step comes in: The Linden Labs Museum of Prims (Placeholder name). This would be a series of sims if not a dedicated continent, be they full regions or homesteads that may or may not be a direct part of the mainland where the original prim creations would be moved to and displayed for their preservation and for their historical value to be retained. Possible issues: Consent of the original creator of the objects or current owner of the land they reside on will likely be required. Ontop of this many of these people have likely left SL or are deceased. Not every prim is going to be suitable for conversion, this is especially the case for "tortured" spheres, torus and similar. Likewise prims that have been tapered, path cut, hollowed, sheered etc will require some faces to be replace. And by nature of merging the prims into singular mesh objects the UVs will likely need to be redone. Physics models for these new mesh objects or linksets may also be problematic. I know that this is not a small request and will raise some debates but I believe that it is something that should at the very least be taken into consideration if not possibly implemented in the future in some way shape or form for the continued optimization of Second Life for it's residences to further enjoy without completely disregarding the preservation of it's history.