Hate thy neighbor
Posted by myg
I’m at a loss these days.
Every time I turn around, someone or something else is pissing me off.
If it’s not the casino with its bazillion scripts and campers, its griefers who come into town and leave their shit laying all over the place.
Then there are ex-neighbors who pop into town and give us shit for using the name “Philadelphia” because supposedly, they thought of using it first. Um, hello? I think that was Benjamin Franklin or some shit like that. Whoever it was, it wasn’t you, idiots. You can’t think that when a community develops around a theme, just because you pack your shit up and leave, that community will fall apart.
It hasn’t. There’s still a strong core of us who really care about this place, have invested in it, and plan to fight for it.
But it’s not easy, given that Second Life is no democracy and there are few rules or limits placed on its residents. And let’s be perfectly clear here–I’m all for the lack of rules and regulations on resident behavior. However, it does mean that any jackass can buy land in my backyard and build an ugly fucking mall with scripts and camping chairs (and yes, this craptastic noob magnet is literally in my backyard in Topgol.)
I’m not saying I want Linden Lab to actually regulate who can build what where on which sim. That adds a whole layer of fucking bullshit the world doesn’t need. I’m already shuddering repeatedly at the whole “broadly offensive” content ban–another rant I’ll save for later. I just want residents to not be motherfuckers when deciding what to build in their Second Lives, or more importantly, where to build it. Know your impact, people.
To be honest, I cannot quantify exactly how much the casino and the mall contribute to lag and the horrific problems in Topgol right now, but I do know this. It’s far fucking worse than ever. Topgol is literally broken right now. Every time I try to log in there, here’s what I get:
Can’t rez attachments or objects. Can’t TP. Can’t attach AO. Can’t build. I can’t even *be* there longer than 5 minutes or so without crashing. And I’m sorry all you PC users, but I have a beautiful macbook pro and the sucker never crashes. So this is truly a fucked situation. And it’s been this way since Sunday.  A bunch of us have filed help tickets with Linden (*LAUGHS OUT LOUD*) so we’ll see what that gets us.
Alex and I now own a big chunk of land in Topgol, and we’ve got a lot of shit to do there–but we can’t do any of it. So let’s just say a little prayer that the L’s actually get on the stick and fix the fucking server. Or something.
In the interim, I’m left wondering, how the fuck did this happen? Who do I shoot with the fart gun? And what else can I do about this besides sell, bitch, or moan?
If this was your Second Life home, what would you do about it?
Ahem, what would you do *besides* sim crash and leave griefer trash all over? Because I’m not doing that, nor do I want anyone to do that, as already discussed here.
honestly if i was you guys i would pack up and leave. i would go around talk to all the philly people and see if they would be interested in putting everyones money together and buy a private island.
if they said no i would leave and get my own little piece of land. it sucks and i know your attached to it but this is obviously hurting you and if it goes on you might start thinking about leaving second life, which would totally suck.
i am also for the lack of restriction but the other side of the medal is that idiots are free to do what they want and those people are the ones who need the most restrictions. Sl is a selfish and greedy place because it was badly advertised and linden lab isnt doing there job correctly.
i know this isnt much but if you ever feel like building small objects and such you and alex can come to my land if you want and build there. i usually have about 100 prims left or so, i’ll send you a land mark, today.
seeing what happens to you i really makes me wish my “creation grid” wasnt just a fools dream…
Thanks Tiana — you’re a sweetheart. And don’t worry about us too much. Second Life is a new world, and new worlds have a lot of turmoil in the early days (even though 4 years of SL seems like 50 RL years–imagine 50 RL years back in the 16th century… progress was slow). It’s amazing anything works at all.
We’re not leaving SL–though eventually we’ll probably move to somewhere more stable. At the moment, as frustrating as it is, it’s good for us to learn to work through all the issues. We have a pretty strong community in Topgol, as far as they go in SL, even with our much-targeted casino owner (we just disagree about the causes of the lag). The current issues are more related to actual server performance and I’m reasonably confident LL will get around to fixing them, though not as fast as I would like.
Myg, I am also on a Macbook Pro. Some weeks ago I started having crashes, complete freezes of my system like you describe, using Second Life. The first 50 or so times I sent in the crash reports after I had rebooted my system. It would happen easily 3 or more times a day and often get me to the point where I wouldn’t bother launching SL at all. I tried TPing to other places (TP was working most times) but I still crashed. I tried running SL only and my machine still froze.
Finally I opened the preferences pane of SL and cranked DOWN every single setting I could find. I figured I’d rather have an ugly SL than a pretty one that crashes taking all my unsaved changes with it every time. It actually worked - it’s been about 2 weeks and my MBP has not had a freeze since. Dunno if that would help you or if you’d be happy with the visuals it results in but the lack of freezing put my temper at ease
Hey Dolmere — Didja check out the new ones? Really nice Nvidia graphics card… uh oh… And thanks, we’ll try tweaking the settings.
I wonder if griefers ever bother casinos?
Wait, is that craptastic noob magnet mall in your backyard called Linden Connections? Can they use the Linden name in-world like that? Seems like there would be a ® or TOS violation or at the very least, a broadly offensive AR in there somewhere.
I would hate to think you guys have to tweak all your graphic settings to their lowest settings in order to reside in Little Philly.
I am not on a Mac, but in my early SL days I did have to lower all the settings as such - only until I ordered more memory and installed it, which cured the crashes for me.
“I’m not saying I want Linden Lab to actually regulate who can build what where on which sim.” Well, I am! To some limit, at least. Just like they can designate some sims PG and others Mature, I want Residential Only, Commercial Only and Unrestricted.
I am also still waiting for them to remove the classified ads from the events listings like they threatened to clean up, but still haven’t, so, oh well.
You know, the Trenton area reminds me of Little Philly. And aren’t they building that city in the sky, high above the lag? I know there’s something about being down on the actual land, but if you’re walking around city streets and concrete sidewalks anyway, I doubt you’d be reminded you weren’t down on the actual ground. Seems like lag is always noticeably (even if not significantly) less above 600m, no matter which sim you are in? You could try rezzing a platform up there and see what your fps is like… Although trying to get all the other building owners to relocate above the land might be tricky.
Again I went on a suicidal mission to check out what is going on in Topgol. I opened the map and voila - some people present in the sim outside the “loveable” casino. As you can predict it was the mall, the poeple - campers. What amazed me was that they worked for 2L$/20 minutes! Before I got accostumed in SL I had started out as being a camper and even I had better standards :/ .
), I will let you know.
I’m fully with you in your war for Philly (I considered living there before the casino, but I was constantly out of cash then). I would love to help you to resolve the issues, but my knowledge of the metaverse is still small. If I come up with anything brilliant (ha, impossible
All you people rock, is all I can say. thanks for the love, folks. We WILL duke it out in Topgol, for now. And luckily, it seems the server is feeling better today.
The issue is, we have a number of owners who have contributed to this amazing place. There’s Romana, Alex, Sable, Diane, Matthew, Barry, and Asifa who have built into the Philadelphia theme. We all cooperate, but we don’t necessarily know each other all that well so we can’t just pick up and leave without a tremendous amount of coordination. And have you seen how huge the area is now? It’d be such a pain in the ass to move. It’s possible–but by no means preferable.
And you know what? The casino owner really is concerned about the sim too–his build is quite nice and fits in fine. He just disagrees about his contribution to the lag issue. In my repeated conversations with him I have to say, he’s really not a bad guy. He has certainly tolerated my anti-camping assault tactics with grace and very little complaining. He just doesn’t see himself as the big problem.
Call this an experiment in virtual politics on the bleeding edge. Can we pull in the outliers (like the fugly new mall), convincing them to abandon crappy scripts and camping chairs? What is it going to take to get the sim stable, keep the excellent theme and going, and for folks to be able to get along and live in peace?
That is the question, and we will answer it here, in Topgol.
@Wrath–yes, that’s right, they call themselves Linden Connections and they’re no Linden affiliate. I think they’re just new and don’t know any better.
You’re too kind, Myg. The folks that run “Linden Connections” have been around at least as long as us, I think. They should know better. My guess is that they’re just betting they can get traffic with the name and fly under the radar.
myg, check out for entire sims that are out there for rent.
i stumbled upon these , when i went on an exploring tour. met a nice couple that rents out whole sims, meaning you dont even need a ” premium account”, you can rent entire sims for about $380 - 400 a month.
the regular sim tier fee is around $329 i believe, so these people sure make a little profit, but it is not that bad, considering they slapped $1700 down for that sim.
and you can do as you wish, its yours and yours only. yet i would check out biggsters who have multiple sims and not leaving the game and leave you stranded.
but its an alternative and YOU decide whats going to happen on your own sim.
tier fees and prem accounts can be a killer. its ads up, i was up to $60+ a month. and if you guys put ya heads together, with the same concept in mind, share the tiers, you come out cheaper as you are now. but you get 65k sq land and 15000 prims and you decide how many people can get on your sim ( up to 100 ).
just an idea… girly.
gala still
thanks gala! <3