MegaTowers Closing

Awww that kinda sucks I liked being able to see the tower from my front porch and being so close to the shops

Sorry to hear this hank,

The open air markets really do make it hard to have any "more realistic" mall be successful, but if thats what the vendors, customers want what can we do?

Oh no.... is there any way to make objects delete on return? or at least make them go straight to trash versus filling my lost/found folder, or worse... returning to my object folder. I helped construct one of the sites, so I have a lot of building prims in that area.

Hank,

Sorry to hear this isn't working out. If you look at the L$/month you were making from renting the towers versus the monthly cost of the number of square meters they were sitting on, how do they compare? If the land tiers were different, would that have helped? How close was the nearest tower to breakeven? What was the vacancy rate?

Phillip you can see his real numbers in the spreadsheets he posted.

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I had to use OpenOffice to open the file because Excel just mangles it.

I think that tier adjustment would help with "turning a profit." His Megatower 1 has to be 88% full to break even if I remember the numbers off the top of my head. (Hank jump in please.)

You mean, if the fees were merely astronomical instead of hilarious?

Actually,the break even point in the spreadsheet was for all 3 buildings. 88% occupancy. But occupancy was actually more around 45-50%. MegaTower ^1 had the highest occupancy, around 66%. The other places were smaller, and had very low occupancies.

I chalk it up to a learning experience, a "first run" as it were. I'm still interested in working to create a dense living community, but just gotta find a way to soften the blow of the land tier that's required to support it. Part of the problem was that I was trying to create extra reserves of prims for community content, lag reduction, and just extra space that I think is needed. When everything is crammed into a place, using up every prim and sqm of space, things tend to get laggy.

I'd still like to create a true town, but it would take a group of artists, planners, scripteres, builders to do it. This was a creation that was almost entirely my own building, texturing, and scripting. Being mainly a scripter, it could have been built much better

I'm working with a couple of people, looking to see what to do with these huge chunks of land rather than selling them, we'll see what happens. I love SL, and intend to stay!

Well, if you mean having to jump from the 1 sim tier to the 2 sim tier, yes Finer grained land tiering would make it easier

sad sad day I love renting at MegaTowers and just got my apt all setup the way I liked it and now I am having to move back to my old apt and reset it back up but with just 45pimes I just do not have the $L to pay a lot of rent to get a apt with more pimes.

sorry it did not work out.

Sad to see cool projects go.

Wish yah good luck with whatever you decide to do next Hank

awww Hank, I'm sorry to see the towers go. You always do such great work in SL, so I'm much looking forward to whatever you do next! Best of wishes to you!

Sorry to hear this Hank. Your build inspired me to re-open my store. I don't think I'm going to bother finding another place for it.

One great feature with a tower shopping layout is it cuts way back on video lag, since all of the objects present are culled above/below your view, instead of half of all of them being in view at once.

I think the biggest problem with growing a community structure like this is there's no way to buy land in SL and grow outward from it at a steady pace.

For example, you can't start with 8192m, and then add another 8192m when you need to expand, then another 16384 again later, until you build up a huge community area.

Sure, you could get lucky and have your neighbors pull up and move just at the time you need to expand, but that's a very rare situation, and unlikely to happen once more when you need to expand again.

This is why community-collaborated projects are so rare in SL. You have to foot the bill from the start for a full island sim, and then expand a sim at a time. That granularity (and financial risk) is just too large for most people's budgets.

I have to commend Hank for giving this a try though. It could have worked, but the signal:noise ratio is becoming so hard to overcome these days. People seem to prefer mediocre creeping sprawl fueled by an endless cascade of disingenuous events.

This is where Alts are useful. Got 8192m sqm and need another 1536, get an Alt. Got 1 sim tier and need another 2048 sqm, get and Alt. The stipend will more than pay for the Alt account and as a bonus you will get initial money plus a referral bonus!

Expect SL to provide finer grained land tires? Get real, that will cost LL monthly cash income--not going to happen, as PL says, they would have to find another way to obtain the same income level. So game the game, it's all within LL rules.

Well, I guess what I mean is that I had to use an alt to add more tier. However, I lose the discount that I get once I get to the 1 sim tier. 1 sim on one account, and half a sim on the other account is not a good a deal as 1.5 sims on the one account (at the 1 sim rate).

another way to tackle this problem would be to give groups graduated bonuses.

for example:
ten percent up to 16ksm,
fifteen percent up to 32ksm
twenty percent up to 49ksm
twenty five percent up to 65ksm
thirty percent over 65ksm

i'm making these numbers up off the top of my head so please don't argue their validity. it's just an example to demonstrate the concept.

You will always come up with great ideas Hank, you always have... good luck...

MegaTower Demolition Party Event on Monday, December 6, 2004...
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