And you think you’ve had a bad patch day:

“We're working on code changes that would allow anyone to teleport to a point on the map without first going through a telehub. Obviously there are many details to consider, particularly as it relates to access permissions. However we expect that we'll have something to test soon, and will be able to release the code some time in December.”

From the 'In Development' Second Life Forums. Now this is going to take a little explaining, so bear with me.

Travel in Second Life takes three main forms; walking (and ground vehicles), flying (and airplanes), and teleporting. Walking and flying work pretty much as you’d expect – everyone in SL is Superman in that regard, but for long distance travel, teleporting is the way to get around. This works by opening the world-map, clicking where you’d like to go, and pressing Teleport. You then get swooshed to the nearest ‘Telehub’, and have to fly to your destination from there – sometimes up to two or three kilometres.

These telehubs are scattered around the common world areas (as opposed to the private island sims), on a fairly evenly distributed basis, and of course, like any other piece of land, the plots immediately surrounding them are tradeable, and developable. So we’ve got travel hubs which people are forced to go through, and real-estate directly next to them…I think you see where I’m going with this…

That’s right. Enter Commerce, stage left. The plots adjoining the hubs tend to be worth at least four times the price of land out in the sticks, and are invariably crammed to the gills with extremely complex and texture-intensive mall structures and shops. This tends to make arriving at a Telehub a fraught process, involving much standing still until everything has loaded, which can be several minutes in my case. You then have to fly up, over and out of the surrounding ring of brash garish shopping malls and casinos, and more often than not, will end up colliding with the upper floors of one before it has loaded fully. In the worst cases, you’ll make it clear through the first wall before the building registers, and end up actually inside it, fumbling for an exit. All in all, a pain in the arse for most travellers, but an ideal situation for mall owners.

This is all set to change. In the upcoming version 1.8, Linden Labs are to enable direct point-to-point teleporting (P2P). When this happens, where you actually click on the map, is where you will appear. No more Telehub transfers. It surprised me a bit, because when I was brand new, I thought this was how it worked anyway – a much more intuitive system. Suddenly, prime Telehub plots are not nearly as valuable, as even the mere news of this changes causes land values to plummet there

Now, while in something like World of Warcraft, a nerf to a major aspect of a class, or the difficulty of a raid encounter, is annoying, and in extreme cases may cause a player to reroll a new flavour of the month, in Second Life, very real financial interests are at stake. I’ve just got back from trawling their ‘Land and Economy’ forum, and boy are they pissed. Of course, just like any gaming messageboard, it’s mostly wringing of hands and impotent frustration, threats of quitting and demands for ‘our rights’, but one player in particular, a notable land owner with a leaderboard net worth of…get this… L$ 6,624,805 (or around $ 26,499 USD of in-game cash and assets) is claiming that this figure, mostly invested in Telehub shopping malls, will drop by something like $20,000 US once the changes go through, as they are left with a huge amount of land plots which no-one would visit out of choice. Mind you, you can guess exactly how much sympathy this claim seems to have attracted from the usual crowd of bored-at-work board-jockeys.

As a non-landed serf type, I have trouble seeing their side of the story really, but do think that if you own a store, it should live or die on the reputation of its stock and service, rather than simply being the architectural equivalent of a browser pop-up advert. From a purely selfish point of view though, I’m looking forward immensely to getting to where I want to be instantly, without having to lag my way through some kind of three dimensional yellow-pages first. And of course, I am a bad, bad man, and can’t help but be entertained by the misfortunes of others – especially the well-off kind. Anarchy! Down with the petty bourgeoisie! Storm the Winter Palace!

Anyway, next time they nerf your magic missile, stop and think – it could be much worse…