Auctions - why?

Can someone explain to me why the auctions are in US$ too?

Or even why there are auctions? I know some people never go on the forums so its not fair to them.

Can't they just make plots and you have to buy the whole plot, not parts, and do away with the auctions?

Why inflate the prices? Aside from getting rid of inworld cash?

If you win a auction using US$, does that mean you have won the property for as long as you are subscribed? Or do you have additional monthly charges in US$ for the same amount every month?

I think you have the additional monthly fees, I was trying to get an answer to that with my post thats down a lil bit about the Island.

I think the auctions should have been anounced via email, and/or in world messages, it does seem unfair.

As to other questions, those would take too many forum posts

My understanding is that auctions are a new way to claim ownership to land. You still pay monthly fees based on your tier.

Auctions are one of the strongest tools to counterbalance inflation, since the money is taken out of the economy roughly in proportion to it's value.

-- Kex =D

The auction system allows those uf us who havent built up a big stack of Lindendollars to have an equal chance at getting decent property. The free for all that occurred when new sims were released in the past often got pretty ugly and chaotic at times, so I'm glad to see it go. The forums are the way that all events are announced and all official Linden announcements are made, so anyone not reading them should be, and on a daily basis, too.

There was also an in-world announcement by Haney when they started.

And there was a notice in the message of the day when we logged in, too. I forgot about that.

yeah, I've seen the inworld messages but the majority of SL people don't log into this forum.

I still don't like the whole auction idea. To me it cheapens SL and makes it really seem like the Lindens are just after money.

The Lindens are actually trying to make things in-world have more real-world worth. Linden dollars used to be 12k to the US dollar on a rough estimation, but are now 2k to the US dollar. The value of our online community is growing, that's what we need.

Plus, Linden Lab isn't exactly getting rich off of auctions if you compare the price of an auctioned sim to the price of a real-world LL server.

Dave, out of curiosity, how did you reach the conclusion that the linden dollar is 2k to one us dollar? I'm highly interested in how you figured that out

Lf

I could be wrong, but maybe he's going by the converion rate to pay monthly land taxes in Linden dollars, as listed at the bottom of this page:

http://secondlife.com/support/faq-v1_2.php

Yes, any land you win in an auction may move you into a higher tier and increase your monthly payment. However, if you do win, you will have some time to release other land before you have to tier up.

An entry-level 1U rackmount server from Rackmount.net, with 1.7 Ghz Celeron, 256 MB DDR266 DRAM, and 40 GB drive will cost $425 dollars. The entire sim that's being auctioned soon will probably go for less than that. I hope.

I was actually wondering about this last night. Currently I have 9216 sq meters of land remember someone stating you had to have the land free in your tier to be able to bid. I did not want to release my land due to the fact that I could lose the auction and would than have no land at all.

So I could bid on this new land and get some time to release my current land if I do win?

at this point, dan, you tier up, bid and still have time to tier down before the 12th whether you win and move or lose and stay where you are.

after the 12th, you'll either have to tier up and pay the fee that month, or sell/release land to bid.

it's good of the lindens to hold the first auction this week while we still have the flexibility to tier up and down without paying extra.

You can wait until after winning an auction before you need to tier up in case the new land puts you in a higher tier. You can also release other land after winning the auction if that helps.

Yes, you can wait a couple of days after winning an auction before tiering up - in case the new land puts you in a higher tier. You can also release other land after winning the auction if that helps.

$5/month L$10,000/month 1/128 region (512m2)

That's the conversion.

I like the idea of L$ auctions for land. As long as land keeps getting added, it's a counter for inflation: as the amount of money in circulation increases, the price of land will too, reducing the money supply and, consequently, the price of land.

I'm strongly opposed to auctioning off parcels smaller than an entire sim for US$, and I'm undecided on auctioning off full sims.

it seems like not a lot of people are participating in the auctions. is it not going to work as well as they thought. or are people lurking, like they do on ebay, to jump in five minutes before the end?

I'd put my money on the latter

I'm not participating because there's nothing there I want. There are only two parcels near the size I want (Magenta 10 and Magenta 12), one of which I refuse to bid on, since they want US$ for it, and neither of which is in a good location.

If Magenta 7, Magenta 9, Magenta 11, or Magenta 35 were a few square meters smaller, I'd consider bidding.

Of course, what I really want is 1024 square meters in the middle of the bay in Indigo.

I hope they run way better systems than that! At the very least they should be dual power supply RAID 1 systems. I suspect more than 256MB of RAM is needed as well, and more horespower than a 1.7 Celeron. Don't forget needing a good motherboard to handle all the massive traffic they have.. Tons of data is being pushed around here. I recall them mentioning gigabit ethernet, but no sure if that was for the back end database servers or for everything. I would bet those are RAID 5 and multi processor and probably $5k to $10k if they have the storage needs I suspect they do.

With at least 65 servers, chances are almost 100% that they will have multiple drives failing every year, and power supplies going kaput too.

Redundancy is your friend.

** deleted **

I remember saying they use gig ethernet and yes, it is expensive but it's also the only real way to go when you have bandwidth requirements that exceed 100 meg ethernet.

OC3 is great for transfering huge amounts of data from one point to another, but simply doesn't work for multipoint like ethernet does.

The newest chipsets from Intel like the 875 series have special pipes designed to ONLY carry gigabit traffic. Otherwise it can max out the memory bus of the whole computer! I'd love to see what kind of traffic they get on the back end database servers.

And lets not even THINK of putting any P4 Celerons in any of these boxes.. ugh.. what a way to cripple a server for the sake of a few hundred dollars. P4 Celerons are a waste of money even for home users.