Residents unfairly buying land out from under others

i had just purchased land in Honister (33.61.55). I was in the process of trying to change the land to my familys group. i was given a messae i didn't have enough land holdings to do what i was trying to do . In those few seconds the land was purchased from me without me ever seeing the buyer. This person has just shattered my family's dream. i have left messages with the purchaser and the group he purchases for. So far i have not heard back from either one. They need to change the way the land is sold. Losing that kind of L and regular $ hurts. Makes me not want to try to buy other property now.

report it to LL or a Linden.but don't hold your breath.they're to busy screwing the rest of us

Well i've done that but hopefully people will look to see who it is before they buy from this group.

Sounds like land swoopers....

*sigh*

Is the land now set for sale to Weedy?

Pay attention and read when you do land transfers. It makes sure you know anyone can buy it for 1 linden if you fail to set it to someone, and it gives you the option of cancelling the sell.

Pay attention and read and this wouldn't happen to you.

Pay attention and read when you do land transfers. It makes sure you know anyone can buy it for 1 linden if you fail to set it to someone, and it gives you the option of cancelling the sell.

Pay attention and read and this wouldn't happen to you.

I was trying to sell it to my group and they took it while i was doing so. If YOU had read what i said you would have seen that.

Weedy had nothing to do with this transaction.

Set it to sell to a specific person then.

They DO have a warning if you actually pay attention.

Yes you can still set it to sell only to yourself or another officer in your group, allowing your group to purchase it. Sorry about your bad luck.

Begged and pleaded with SL to make land sales less able to be land swooped, in that you would have to ok the sale at the time the transaction takes place, for gods sake we can send a man to the moon...whats so hard about doing this one thing that would protect ppl. The land sale is difficult at best for most ppl that are experienced to understand, much less newer players...and hence they are defenseless against land sharks, but then again, SL has a track record of keeping certain land sellers more than happy in SL.

Always in the future set the land to sell to a certain person in SL, no matter what your doing, in joining or deviding land, selling to a group, transfering land, make this your first step always....this rules out anyone else that can swoop you. Sorry once again someones been hurt and has absolutley NO Recourse...

There are a lot of times the so-called "swoopers" have asked that the UI is changed to make mistakes less likely too. Most of the time they are ridiculed for it, but I think in some cases it's genuine.

At least, it is in mine. I have "swooped" land sell mistakes several times now, and it's a real pain in the ass for everyone involved. Or at least it is when you aren't intending to ruin someone's day.

You rush in when you see a good price, and there really isn't much time to think about it when you know a 1 second delay might mean that you miss a good deal. I'm not talking about the $1L deals, I'm talking about the ones that look completely legit, like $4L per square meter... Then you find out they were trying to join parcels or something, and you gotta give it back or try to work it out, but there's fifteen people there talking all at once, some of which want the land from you and the rest are calling you a thief even though you aren't *trying* to actually steal land, and.....

There are all kinds of fixes proposed, none of which has been implemented by LL for whatever reason. Even a simple 30 second delay before listing a parcel for sale publicly would go a very long way towards reducing the problem I think. 30 seconds is not long, and maybe there could be a checkbox that sez "List Immediately" that is not checked by default, whatever.

The system is slightly broken, and users by and large just don't read the f'ing dialogs, and newbs don't know that it can happen so fast, and on and on, and there's clearly something wrong here that deserves as least some small attempt at making it better.

But still LL doesn't appear to consider it important enough to try to mitigate it in any way that I can see I'd really like to hear their opinion on why that is, but I won't hold my breath.

What really sucks is if a purchase ties the buyer into a higher teir for the month.

if u didnt have enough land creds, just click the "owner makes contrubution with deed" button...... then click deed again.....

Yes, that happened to me once. I really hated that. Wouldn't it have been great if I had talked to the person first and saved us both the time and me the $35USD? But, had I waited that long on a legitimate deal, I'd have missed it.

Still, I only got in a position to tier up because I was buying and selling land in the first place, right? So I eventually found a use for that extra tier We'll see by months end if I'm still upset about tiering up, but so far I'm optimistic.

Personally, if I bought land at 4 or more lindens/m2 and it bumped up my teir, I would not return it due to a 'mistake' until I have the lindens from the person whom I bought it from -and- the excess teir.

I wish it was as easy as that for me... I mean, I really enjoyed that sub-game of "who's gonna get there first", it was a rush and I was making very good money at it! But I just hate people instantly calling me a thief because they can't read a damned dialog or nobody ever tells a noob that their land can sell in two seconds flat.

<rant>Um, how about a big fat modal dialog/notecard that you cannot dismiss until it's been read the first time you ever sell land. One that spells this shit out? And leaves the notecard in your inventory? Do not rely on a noob to go find the info in Help or whatever, hand it to them the first time it's needed for crying out loud! Would that one time thing be too much of a bother?</rant>

The first time it happened I returned the land, the second time I did not. I still feel like shit over the second time, the guy seemed so very upset.

Around that same time, I "swooped" land from an SL Mentor. I was genuinely surprised that a mentor could make a mistake like that (the land was set to just over $2L/meter), and of course I got accused of theft then, too. And by the time I found out it was a mistake, I had already sold the land again. We worked it out so that she got her land back, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Of course, I've also paradoxically gotten more cynical about it since then. I did the swooping thing for maybe a week, and read the forums a lot, and I've already heard so much on both sides that I'm kind of sick of it.

Dunno if any of that made as much sense as I'd like, it's late and I'm tired

Just think, with no forums you can let your conscience dry up and blow away like dust. j/k

~Kami

Better yet, we can have it pop up each and every time you sell land! And it can clearly spell out exactly what you're doing, and not let you do it unless you hit "Continue" instead of "Cancel". It could say plainly and clearly:


So, clearly and plainly, it tells the user that ANYONE can buy the land for L$1. Wouldn't that be great?

Wait a minute, that's exactly how it works right now.

If the current interface doesn't prevent people who don't read from selling land they didn't mean to, I just don't see what else can be done.

Some people here are apparently under the mistaken impression that if a user wants to do something silly, that programmers can somehow prevent them with warning dialog after warning dialog. It doesn't work. The more you throw at them, the quicker they hit OK without reading.

This is going to happen to people no matter what LL does to the interface, short of requiring telephone interviews with each person who marks land for sale before allowing it to be sold. And even then, some people will unintentionally sell land and complain about it later as if it's anyone's fault but their own.

Hmmm: not quite. If you join two pieces of land and one of them is for sale, the newly joined land is also for sale...with the whole lot at the price of the original. This one, to me, should absolutely *not* happen.

I've never made a mistake with my land, but I know there are several error-prone mechanisms. Given the number of problems that occur, and my own knowledge of how the interface works, here are some things that could change:

1. joining land should immediately cancel any "for sale" settings, possibly with a "your sale has been disabled" message
   
2. putting land up for sale should perform a "sanity check" on the price per metre, and present a dialog if the price is below resonable levels (E.G.: below L$2/m2).
   
3. All land sales should by default require approval before completion. E.G.: if you choose "buy" on a piece of land, the sale becomes a "pending" sale- the owner is prompted the next time they log in to approve or reject the sale. This could optionally be turned off by savvy sellers
   

None of these things would be terribly hard to implement. Since land is generally the most expensive commodity sold in game, it should probably have extra protections built in. Proposition 1739 and 1752 incorporate ideas like this.

Gaius is right about one thing, though: no matter what safeguards are put in place, someone selling land will still mess things up. And some unscrupulous SOB will still be there to screw them over.

Sigh. Well, I wish *someone* had better answers I know that it is just very common for users to not thoroughly read dialogs, and that it's not just restricted to SL. You could have a dialog pop up that says "WARNING: Pressing 'Continue' will DELETE YOUR HARD DRIVE" and there'd still be some people calling customer support to find out what the hell happened. Support would ask "Did you see the message?" and they'd say "What message?" or "Yes, but I thought I'd have another chance to say no" or something.

For joining parcels at least, LL could do *something* to show that they care about the problem, I guess.

As it is now, the practice will continue, and some people will call it stealing, and others will say "Oh, no it's not" and I'm sure it's very frustrating on both sides



Seems reasonable to me.



But what are reasonable levels? Nice idea in theory, but I don't think I want LL to make that determination. Reasonable levels are what somebody is willing to pay, and that depends on a lot of factors that software will not take into account.



Can't say that I agree with this one. I think it's quite nice that I can sell my land and take off for the weekend and know that it will probably sell without my intervention. And to know that I can buy that plot next to my existing one without wondering if the seller is on vacation for the next two weeks or whether he just hates me.

I think there are a great many suggestions that have been thrown out (and even put into proposals) that would help without hindering, and I'd love to see some action on them. My 0.02L

Sadly this is the case all over SL as long as theres idiots in the world. Decent people wanting to buy land or just trading it lose it to these people. It happens all over the grid. Theres no way to warn new residents about this. Not even the forum is good at that since new people most likely dont think about the forums and just jump right into SL. Since the forums are about to be ripped out of the community, it definatly isn't a choice. If the residents could control the content of oriantation island, we might be able to put up signs or something. I'm in the process of believing that Linden Lab encourages theift.

Here we go again. Unless your a regular forum reader, or you have been screwed over by some opportunist, you are stunned by the speed at which a swooper can fly in and grab your stuff. Like Stori said, you wont even see em' when they do it. Until there is a reasonable time delay in effect between the moment a seller sets the land for sale, to the time it is posted on the 'for sale' chart, this will continue. Yes I know some real estate people dont like the concept of a delay for whatever reason, but this will save a lot of land novices some grief. And theres more rookies than pro's out there. So lets say the seller sets his land for sale for two bucks a meter, ten minutes later the land hits the for sale board, and twenty swoopers fight over it. But in the meantime, the person fusing their lots, or changing group ownerships, or whatever, has time to complete their task before the 'refresh button pounders' come racing in to take advantage of unrealistic bargains.

Currently there isn't a good and effective way. Strangely, though, when you create a new account there are all sorts of things that pop up the first time you do anything. First time you do this, an informational popup is displayed, first time you do that... Why don't they do that for land sales? Dunno. There really needs to be a way to give new users the info and not make them go find it, which they probably won't until it's too late.

Even if the forums were to remain they are not at all effective in that regard. Forums require that the user is seeking relevant info, which they probably are not until it's too late.

I wonder why? It doesn't seem that bad an idea to me, though I would argue that even 30 seconds is sufficient to curtail most of the mistakes. We'd still get to play "who gets there first", only not within the first two seconds since someone put the land for sale. Unless there was someone already there to buy the land, it'd be the same game. And if there *was* already someone there to buy the land, that's probably what was intended in the first place I'd think.