Land Monsoon

Free advice:
If you have to move around on a moment's notice, and $2000 is not cheap for you, you may wanna think very long and hard before investing that kind of money in a video game.

I think its well worth it im just stating i would like the market to steady.. it could steady at 1 a meter for mature land and i would be happy as a hog because then you could get what you put in. And whats cheap for me is differant from cheap for a sim just because i spend 2k on a peice of virtual land doesnt mean i want to just throw it in the air and only get 500 of it back if i have to sell it.

Thanks! Just bored, suffering from insomnia, and feeling silly. No offense meant billy. I still think you offer a lot to SL, just an honest disagreement.

Tina, i dont think its even a dissagreement i just dont think i am expressing what i think clearly. Im me in world i should be there in 5 hours or so if everything goes correctly and we can discuss this.

We all want security in our investments, for sure... but as you pointed out, it's virtual land.
Further it's a rapidly growing game.
Further it's Internet.

All these things are very volatile. With any business venture, risk has to be factored in.

Look on the bright side - this volatile market will likely mean that during the next player swarming, land prices will likely rise again, and you can make back your investment.

But the overall bottom line is that there is a normalized worth of the land. It's clear it's not as high as how much you purchased it for. Eventually, someone will have to take a loss for that land. =\

If LL were ever to enforce "stable" land prices it would either kill the market or force people to do deals underground with paypal or something.
One new major media story tomorrow could drive a new population boom that will make land more valuable. Anyone who buys land because they think they might someday sell it for more instead of because they really want to own it has to deal with whatever ups or downs fate tosses at them.

Stop thinking of it as land, it isn't. It is a service and rather unlike land is not limited.
It is the service of access to a vague number of CPU cycles and some storage measured in units we shall call 'prims.'

Think of it like DSL or cable; you pay some fee upfront to get the required hardware and then you continue to pay some monthly fee. The fact that you can only sell your modem for a fraction of what you paid for it originally does not mean you 'lost' money so long as it was a service you wanted and used.

Now lets take this example one step further, what if when you wanted DSL the only manufacturer of the modems had a shortage and to make sure the people that really needed them got them, they auctioned the few they had off to the highest bidder.
Now if you decided that you /must/ have DSL now you can hardly fault the manufacturer for continuing to produce more modems and lowering the cost. You can't reasonably complain that they are costing you money because you won't be able to resell your modem for the same prices that they were going for during the shortage.
You knew that modems would continue to enter the market when you bought your's. If you bought it early because you actually needed it then, then you have lost nothing. If it was worth it to you to pay that price at the time then it remains worth it to you now.

There will always be newer, more features, shinier for less money coming out next month. At some point we draw a line and say "I need/want what is available now at that price" and we buy.

I don't want to split hairs, as I agree with the overall "consumer beware" theme, but there are 2 problems with what you say:
1. LL clearly wants us to consider it "land" and feel ownership. Just look at the main SL homepage.
2. Land has a marked less amount of added features... there really won't necessarily be better ones... it's pretty much a flat out commodity. The only major upgrades to land have been private sims and the addition of snow land, and it's clear that they have quickly become available en masse to become a commodity as well.

Modem / DSL / cable technology, on the other hand, is highly competitive and will continue to have upgraded technology. (Watch out for wireless broadband this winter!)

This winter? We have had wireless cable TV (odd isnt it... wireles... cable... ) since the dawn of cable, and broadband works just fine over it.

Yes, but not via cellular phone carriers

yall are wild!

I agree with that. I bet the Lindens do too. The problem was they so underestimated the amount of land needed ever since 1.2 that prices went astronomical. Now they finally brought out enough to get prices down but things haven't stabilized yet. I'll bet in another month prices will appear stable.

Billy,

Your initial post was clear as the water in my now worthless Maui land.

I totally sympathize with you, we're in the same boat, but I think you can count with the fingers of your right hand the number of people that would actually come out and tell you "Yes, Billy, I know how you feel. It sucks, doesn't it?"

So, Yes, Billy, I know how you feel. It sucks, doesn't it?

Anyone else?


-tito

Yeah, for some of us, it sucks.

I bought some land for prims, across the sim from my cabin. Some time later, my friend and neighbor decided she wanted to reduce her tier, and offered to sell me some land adjacent to mine -- way cool, much more useful. But in order to do that, I had to sell my prim land to free up some of my tier and to raise the money. And I had to do it at a loss, because of the huge dive in property values. Then came the "fun" discussion with my friend and neighbor . . . her land was not worth even near half what she had paid for it -- more like a third -- but I didn't want her to take a huge loss. She didn't want me to be screwed by overpaying. It was the kind of conversation and deal one never wants to have to have with a good friend.

So yeah, this sucks. Although, it doesn't suck nearly as much as it'll suck if I ever decide to move and have to sell my land at less than a third of what I paid. Fine and dandy, lower land prices for people just getting some land now, etc., -- that's way cool. But that doesn't negate the fact that LL knowingly did it at the expense of some of its other paying customers. For us, it sucks.

what land monsoon happened this week? i don't see any new sims.

I'm betting on Thursday afternoon. They always come fairly soon after establish sim lots get added to the auction list.

I'm also betting it won't be snow

I think it might be south of Inari, north of Rothernberg.

/rant on

OMG i bought 14 sims at $3000 US each when all the posts on the boards were screaming how overpriced land was, then I had to move out of the country, which my job tends to do often, and then my friend asked me to pay off the $900,000L debt from the bad land deals he made, and now land has gone back to the uninflated price and boo hoo hoo I should have listened to the kajillion people on the boards who were saying not to pay the exhorbitant prices for land, and I forgot the fact that speculation on virtual items is extremely risky, and then I had to fund the military's bill for Iraq because I didn't check whether my evidence for WMDs was credible and there's all these extra expenses and no other countries wanna pay for it, which causes me to pay off griefers because I don't have enough time to deal with them and now they just grief me more because they realize they can get lots of money blackmailed out of me, and I'm buying Linden dollars off GOM en masse because I have no actual sellable product because all my funds are due to my land speculation and not creative efforts and then GOM was scammed and was down for 4 days so I had to pay higher prices at IGE and then all these people started stalking and spreading rumors about me how I'm a land barron and that I'm addicted to cherry flavored nerds and I hide behind alts when I stick my foot in my mouth in the forums and in real life I'm the kind of person always expecting handouts and things to be easy and takes stupid risks and expects the government to provide a blanket safety net even though I have a crappy driving record, can't figure out how to use birth control, and I'm hoping I spill hot coffee in my lap at McDonalds so I can sue them for burning me and making me fat after eating there every day for the last five years and supersizing everything, and the general public will have to pick up the bill in increased consumer prices but it's okay because I'll be rich and that's all that matters to me and being fair is just a fairy tale that exists in the mind of crazy people.

/rant off

buy uranium. send me a 1000$ wine in five years as a thank you.

I see what your getting at, maybe you should read all the post in this thread before jumping to conclusions.

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I'm really looking forward to see what price Voti. I'm guessing up to 2K

Just hold on to it, if you think selling is so bad at this time.

How difficult is that? Unless you've overextended yourself, then I guess the only person to blame is you.

I find it amusing since there's not exactly a firestorm of controversy over land prices *dropping* as it is when they rise.