Prim Rights Selling Scenario

You muse be new Morse. I'm the 10th wealthiest person in SL. I own 7000 meters of freelon and control probably close to a quarter of its resources. Philosophically I agree with you. In practice though it has stagnated the growth of SL because new users can't build so they don't stay. Go read the "prim hogging" threads if you want some background on my personal point of view.

edit: these changes are designed to solve another problem aslo that you're not thinking about. Too many prims concentrated on too little land kills framerates.

Chip, to summarize my views (because things have gotten all tangled up):

Linking Prims to land because Land is what a new user "gets" when they join up introduces an artificial hobble to the development of the economy and is more of a "band-aid" than a real fix.

If instead LL gave a new user Prims when they joined (initially linked with a specific parcel of new land, but transferable), this would be a more rational response to the prim hogging issue and would still keep open the possibility to develop a realistic economy.

-Morse Dillon

I'm skimming this thread, but this sounds like the discussion over tying the dollar to the gold standard.

We threw out the gold standard early this century, if my memory serves.

So we've got inflation, but we also have an increase in quality of life.

Random thought: Is increasing the quality of life in SL possible? Maybe we could call the increased strength in Havok 2 that I keep hearing about an increase in quality of life.

</devil's decaf advocate>

I get where you're coming from, and like I said I think our points of view are a lot closer than you think. I'm playing devil's advocate. I just don't think a realistic economy is what LL is after for SL. Making sure that if someone buys land they're guaranteed to be able to build on it is the goal they're after with these changes, and also keeping prims from getting concentrated in any one specific geographic location within a sim. Not everyone wants to play an economic game. Those of us that enjoy that sort of thing will still be able to play that way, but as we aqcuire more resources we'll also be acquiring more land, and as a result preventing there from being useless land like there is now where a sim is only 60% owned landwise, but all its prims are already used up. It means that land will remain valuable to LL. As it is now they can't attract new users with any of the land in my sim and many others because it can't be built on. It will guarantee a much better return on investment per simulator for LL.

I think you're right, that our views are somewhat close to one another. You are simply proposing that the land-prim linking solution is best for the current situation (i.e. Land-based economy), whereas I propose the more deep-seated solution of converting things to a Prim-based economy.

Part of the issue here is that sims have a fixed land area. Perhaps if the architecture was more "distributed" in the sense that simulation processes assume responsibility for smaller or larger land areas depending on Prim load, that might be a more flexible. More complex, but that's the way that sort of thing always goes Going even further, it would be nice if there was some sort of load-distribution algorithm where it didn't matter *what* process simulated what object or land chunk, but then you get into issues of parallelism and cases of object interaction.

Chip, I think that we are just talking past one another, and I'll go ahead and save my breath. Hope to see you in-world, and also hope that we can get along when I do see you

I have little doubt we'll get along just fine I'm only a disagreeable grump on the forums, hehe. I love people with strong points of view, even when they're the polar opposite of mine (and yours aren't). Look me up in world any time Morse

Thanks for the answers. I can see how removing the fixed cost of prims would make it more difficult for wealthier players to accumulate them since presumably the price would rise to meet demand. But the differences in wealth are so huge in SL that I'm not sure that would prevent the current issues from repeating.

The problem with the current economy and its prim deficits is that the Lindens tend to advertise like this:

"For only 15$ a month you can have your own plot of land and the building blocks to create a home or other fun project!"

NOT

"For only 15$ a month you can compete in a ruthless free market economy for enough fake currency to afford to build things!"

I personally see the value of a completely competitive system, and of a system where US$ gets you a fixed amount of resources, or of a system which blends the two; but in each case the Lindens will have to make clear what they're selling.

Yes, any prim selling will have to be done extremely carefully or we will return to the same place we are now.

The current situation is here because the game allows people to get so much wealth they litterally crowd out a large number of paying users and push Linden server costs into the red.

If we can sell prims off land, the same situation will happen. The Lindens do not have an ifninte supply of servers, so the limited prim resource will always be an issue until the servers can handle a million per sim and nobody needs to worry about it anymore.

I would be saying NO PRIM SELLING but the fact is there WILL be people who do not use many, and some who will use a lot to produce great stuff. I just don't want to again have to suffer 100% prim usage in sims.. that makes the game pretty much unplayable, and I can see why it makes newbies quit.

Morse, I see a potential serious problem with the system of tying prim rights directly to usage fees.

Under your system, land would be relatively cheap. What if I were to buy up all the land in a sim, and use the 200 or so prims that came with my membership to turn it into a park? For $15 a month (or whatever the monthly fee is), I'd have effective control over an entire simulator -- and my $15 won't even cover the electricity needed to run the sim!

What if I were to buy up all the land in a sim, and then re-sell the land to people with prim rights in the sim at exorbitant prices?

What if I bought the land, and let others build on it -- but only under the condition that I have final say on what they build?

There are serious problems with divorcing land rights from prim rights. The true scarcity is not land, but neither is it prims. The true scarcity is server resources, of which both prim limits and land limits are a reflection.

I like it. It's simple and it works.

LOL, I can see the theorists are having a field day with this one! I'll tell you why I like tying prim allocations directly to land:

1. Permanence. As in RL, owning the land you build on is your only guarantee that you'll be able to keep what you build. If all you're looking for is spot for temporary projects, there is lots of room for that. There's the sandbox, and there's all kinds of Linden owned territory that allows building (at least for a day or so). So I think land ownership is exactly the right gauge for rights to build permanently.

2. Price stability. I've already had someone come and ask if I could script a stock exchange (presumably as a place to trade prims and group allocations). I think this would be hilarious, but devastating to the middle class.

That said, I'm all for sharing prims among group members (WITHOUT requiring that members donate land to the group).
Without this function, you'll end up not being able to concentrate group efforts into a single build.

To sum up, I support sharing prims within a group (IMMEDIATELY), and I oppose transferring prim rights away from a piece of land.

Here's my view of the difference between prim-hogging in 1.1 and 1.2:

1.1:
I can (theoretically) buy a small plot of land and use all 10,000 prims in the sim on it. The rest of the sim is unowned but I'm hoggin the prims.

When new users join, they want to buy land, but land in my sim is worthless because I control all the prims.

Linden doesn't see a CLEAR need to add more land because there's a TON of land open, it's just useless land.

I'm using more prims that I should for $15/month.

1.2:
I can buy a small plot of land and buy prims from all the other landowners in the sim. The rest of the sim is owned, they've just sold prim rights to me.

When new users join, they don't bother with my sim because there's no open space anyway. Conversely, any open space does have prims allotted to it and they can build there if they want.

Linden can see a clear need to add more land because it's all owned.

All the prims I'm using are being paid for by SOMEONE for $10/month or whatever.

There's nothing wrong with my prim hogging in this case -- it doesn't hurt anyone because the Lindens will (they say) make sure there's enough land for everyone's allotment. The people I bought the prims from don't care about the prims, the new people can get land and prims, everyone's happy.

The only possible problem comes if a new person wants to buy a chunk of land I own the prim rights to. If they're new and don't understand that the land "has" zero prims, they'll be pissed. But they can go buy an unowned piece of land anyway.

I think that instead we should view prim rights as a person-to-person deal, and when that person sells the land, the contract is off. I get a message (and a grace period?) about it. The new owner gets a normal piece of land, and nothing is devalued. If I want to manage some huge build, I have to work with my "primlords" to maintain my rights to the prims.

Honestly, I've never bought land directly from another Av anyway. Okay, this has gone on too long. Comments?

Here's my take on how prim rights sharing can be done simply and cleanly, and it only needs one feature change which I've wanted anyway, which is:

You hit control-5 and go into land edit mode. You see all your land as green and everyone else's as red. You click on a single unit (4x4 meter) of your land and the selection expands to show the whole plot. You hit control-shift-L and the selection becomes a group of individual land units. You can shift-click individual units to add or remove them from the group. You can then hit control-L to re-link them into a plot. I think this new feature will be absolutely necessary in 1.2 since if your prim allocation is tied to the land you own, you don't want to be freeing land and buying it back again just to change the grouping layout as we have to do now to control land access rules.

Now for the prim rights sharing part...

In the land edit window, there is a space for a player name and an "Offer Prim Rights..." button. Click it to choose a player (or select "Anyone" to let anyone buy the rights in passing) and set a weekly price. If they (or Mr. Anyone) accepts, the land is then colored yellow in the world to denote pseudo-joint ownership. Players who are receiving the prim rights see that land as orange. This is disabled for group-owned land, and land that is being shared in this way can not be deeded to a group, nor can it be marked for sale. If a player who only has prim rights releases the (to them, orange) land, their name is removed and they are no longer charged the weekly fee. If the land owner releases the land, the player who has been leasing the prim rights is automatically offered the ownership of the land. Accept, and the land becomes theirs. Decline, and they lose the prim rights.

Simple and straightforward. Anyone see any flaws?