Currently, there is enormous dissatisfaction among the merchant population with the inability to find readily available commercial stores in Ridgewood Enclave, where large tracts of them were dropped in the last year. When the Moles release entire sims' worth of the stores, inevitably at an inconvenient time zone for significant portions of the population, there is a mad scramble for them. Thus, few can obtain them in a fair and orderly manner, sometimes camping the store spawn for hours or even all day in the fever to get a scarce store. Numerous examples abound where a single person has grabbed more than one or two stores and uses alts and enlisted friends to sequester multiple stores under one brand without even an effort to make them different. Worse, when a store is abandoned, a throng of people can develop waiting in anguish for the 1.5 hours or more to elapse before the AVAILABLE sign appears. While the kiosks that now give lists of available stores are an improvement on the original insane scrum, in fact the available stores do NOT appear on kiosk lists WHEN abandoned but are only listed AFTER the AVAILABLE sign appears. Only by constantly paying attention to Bellisseria Merchants, a resident-run group which has taken over store registration, as well as other Bellisseria groups, can prospective store owners hear of an abandonment coming. The Premium Plus account of $15.99 a month, a substantial expenditure for many, has the feature of requesting certain exact Bellisseria homes by location, instead of accepting a random option from the web site. So there is no reason not to add requests of stores for Premium Plus. This could be done in addition to the "kiosk" available list and the "sudden large drops" by Moles. But ideally, ALL STORES SHOULD BE REQUESTED BY TICKET to reduce the amount of hoarding and sequestering of multiple stores under the same brand/group and more importantly, the stress of the survival of the fittest in the mob rush to get a store. The Lindens can either automate this random fulfillment of ticket requests if it seems like a burdensome chore, or advisedly, eyeball them to see if multiple requests by one person are occuring. A "first come, first serve" solution that would randomly deliver an available store to each person who filed a ticket would be more fair and more predictable for both residents and Lindens/Moles.
