Yes, I think the grid model and charging for land was a very good choice for SL in hindsight. Charging for virtual land sounds stupid to a lot of people, but t

Yes, I think the grid model and charging for land was a very good choice for SL in hindsight. Charging for virtual land sounds stupid to a lot of people, but the tradeoff is that everyone has neighbors. As you do something on your chunk of land random passers by see stuff happening, you start talking to nearby people, and a community forms. Over time it makes for organic development. High Fidelity and the like are much trickier socially -- you're always either on your own turf with barely anybody choosing to visit your place specifically out of a big list, or on somebody else's domain. Visiting places can feel less like wandering around and more like randomly teleporting into somebody's house. One thing High Fidelity seemed to be considering is domain nesting -- something like you go into a building and the inside is another server. This might be a good enough hybrid of both models. You can't have an infinite mainland, but you can have hub worlds of sorts. It could be interesting to try.