Island and accounts on sale on eBay

Many apologies Ricx - this was definitely not my intention when I thougt of doing this auction for the Holiday Season.

Wilder Linden

Good news Soleil! Amsterdam is not being sold, rather Stroker was kind enough to let me take some screen shots of his build as an example island.

Wilder Linden

I think RICX's comment was meant to point to this situation as really just the tip of the iceberg in a vast sea of bad choices made by the management at Linden Lab in the past few months rather than a personal slight against you and your marketing initiative.

I'm curious, though, is this intended to test the price point of private island sales for the possibility of future increase? As I mentioned in another thread, if the price gets bid up to the Buy Now level of $10,000, it indicates a greater willingness of at least *someone* to pay more than the going rate of $1250 for an island sim, and I doubt your bosses would ignore that potential increase in revenue stream.

Not at all Ricky, thank you for asking!

Wilder Linden

Wow, between Jesse's comments about how spending more money on ads means it is more important to you than it is to others, and now this island auction that does not fully disclose costs or terms...someone needs to reign in the PR a bit. I am not opposed to this auction, but the listing itself is seriously deficient in accurate information, to the point of bordering on fraud, even if unintentional. Additional disclosures need to be added at a minimum.

Wow. Um, Wow. I think there are pieces of a great idea in here... But if the reserved price is over $4000 and the buy-it-now is $10,000... When you bundle a bunch of good/services like this don't you try to lower the price a little to make it appealing?

I do the math like this(and please correct me if my logic is wrong here). $6 per month per prem account paid annually for a total of $72, * 20 premium members = $1440. The E-bay ad says "Valued at $3620"??

Also, I thought basic accounts were free now, right? It says "20 Basic Second Life memberships for your family and friends to join you valued at $228" ??

Our island is $1250 plus $195 tier fee * 12 months in a year, $3590. Add in our $1440 per month for the premium members and we reach a total of $5030 - if I wanted to just buy an island right now, pay the tier for the first year up front, and get 20 basic and 20 premium accounts, I could get this all from LL for $5030, all prepaid for 1 year. I know if I were looking at this ebay auction, and then went to www.secondlife.com and learned I could get the same things for about 1/2 the reserved price by buying them seperately, that I wasn't even getting any "bulk discount" and I could not have to make such a HUGE commitment... Wow. The only thing that makes sense to me is - that's the entire idea, put a ridiculously expensive auction out there that will make people curious and look at www.secondlife.com... In which case you really should have made that a hyperlink, bigger, and put "try it right now for free!" in bold letters

I think... E-baying off the "Jumbo island package with 40 accounts" is giving some bodies a pretty big, pretty expensive serving of SL... at a pretty hefty price... Also, all the screenshots there may give the impression that you'll get an island with a build already on it, I think someone could buy this and be mighty dissapointed when they learn that they'll need to either use that L$500 stipend and more money to buy all their furnishings, or spend a lot of creative time and sweat to hammer out their dream-island. And that they didn't get any sort of "package deal", assuming it ends up selling for anything more than $5030... Wow.

Having an auction like this that gives SL exposure on Ebay in this style is cool, but I think having a more prominent link to the SL homepage, and maybe mentioning "Go try it out now for free" while selling a much smaller package (Private sim for 6 months and 5 premium accounts for $3000 or something even smaller) would be much more effective.

LOL it looks like someone is selling mining land in Alaska

Right now thats probably a better investment than SL.

This looks like more of Second Lifes bumbling marketing antics.
Someone picked up the morning copy of the Times and Miami Herald and then the Virtual Realms Mags to see the article on the $100,000 VR Club sales in Project Entropia.

Came to work, Called a meeting acted all in-charge threw the material across the table and then said

“ Why Cant We do that “ .... watching to many FedEx shipping commercials

Staffer says , umm ummm we could do an Ebay auction ... Guy at the end of the table (wheels spinning) no wait yes yes but like this...... put a package together set a min / max make it look very cool , attractive , put all our pull them in stuff all around and on the ad. Then use some of our alts to help boost it up then buy it with an alt and send it all to every news gamming media out there. Ok boyz Get to work I want this Out for CHRISTMAS.

I could care less about them TOS sing out there own TOS For a new idea for Selling Avatars

But please guys..... Hire a Professional Firm to do it ..come on spend a few of my Dollars. Make it Believable the numbers don’t add up right just checking from the SL web site in a few minutes would tell you that. If you really ever intended for a plain off the street cuf to buy this instead of an in-house ploy in Advertising.

from the desk of an idea man

*Feed the live Tuna Mayonnaise

'That' my dear is the standard common or garden Linden Lab fcuk up, as known and loved by us all.
*sigh* I really am beginning to believe they are cursed. Nothing they are associated with ever seems to go right. Granted they have some, um, less than stellar intellects on the payroll, but I can't believe the monotonous frequency with which they seem to find the corporate banana skin is entirely their fault...

*shakes head in disbelief*

And yes, it does look like a poorly conceived attempt at drumming up a bit of PR. I'll be very interested to see 'who' (should I say which Linden alt?) 'buys' this amazing deal.

Still, it brightened the day up a bit. Even if like everything going on lately it does smack more than a little of desperation...

Hey Wilder, how about shedding some light on your corporate strategy here.

Well, it has got me more than a little nervous.

And it's not the competition I'm worried about anymore.

What Blaze said.

AND, if this is NOT a real ebay acution - then whoever has created it has broken several Calif. laws and is in voliation of eBay policy.

And the SL TOS.

But it is real, so it doesn't matter.

Who cares what LL does anyways.

Holy mother of pie, I seriously think something like this may have happened. And the conversation ended with, "Y'know, we've tried some pretty crazy promotions in the past... But this holiday season, let's do something... Wilder."

LOL Oh this is too funny.

Lets just skip the market BS and just sell islands straight up for $20kUSD shall we?

I DO believe U've hit the nail on the head.

I hear the developer in question is Bedazzle or Foxy Xevious.

Hi David -

The winner of the auction will be the one to select the developer(s) to work with. If the auction is successful we will make sure he or she can connect up with the developer community to get started!

Wilder Linden

So, LL decides to do an ebay auction of a virtual island
so?
wilder has already stated in numerous threads, there will be no price increase to normal island buying etc...
it also sounds like, who ever the auction winner is, will be able to choose their own developers, and then those developers will get paid by LL for the work they do for the island's new owner.
we get a few new eyes in SL (and a few more voices to hound the lindens LOL)
since it has been confirmed as a legit auction, and who ever bids is free to go to the SL website and check things out etc... I really do not see what all this fuss is about =)
now if they would just fix the texture loading issues someday I may actually think about buying an island!

I was just curious about the ebay auction, how it went etc.

There ended up being 27 bids on this auction but none of the bids met the reserve price. The auction ended with the final bid being $4,050. There are currently no other auctions listed on ebay by LindenLabs.

The reserve price was set way too high.
Not too sure what the thought process was on this one....