Smaller Private Estates?

Would there be a market for smaller private estates if such a thing were possible?

A private island that was only one forth of a sim, just for example.

I think so, if they were comparable in price to regular land. Look at all the requests for things like "parcel basements".
You can already buy "void sims" in four packs, if they would just let you split them up so they didn';t have to be one estate...

Though even a quarter of a sim is a bit rich for my blood, but it'd be a start. I'd really like a private 4096 at tier rates. That'd be more profitable for LL as well, because of the exponential cost of tier.

I'd still want to be able to llTeleportAgent there from a Gate or Stepping Disk on my public land.

hrm, while the idea is good, the technical and economic part might not fit quite right.

A problem with smaller sims, is that the server isn't set up to change a sims size. I understand it to be hardcoded in, in several places, which means it would be a lot of work to do. A lot of work isn't impossible however , might just cost more in time than it's worth.

Another problem is that by shrinking a sim to a quarter the size of a normal sim, you don't gain the ability to put 4x the number of servers on one machine, which is how it would have to work for LL to save any money. I'm guessing, that a quarter sim might use maybe 1/3 of the resources of a normal sim, but each sim is a separate instance of the server software, and the server software doesn't play nicely when trying to share a cpu with another instance, even if neither is using much actual computing power. This is why void sims can't contain too many objects and are more prone to crashing. They're 4 normal sized sims (without much in them so not using many actual resources) trying to play on 1 cpu. That's why they're sold in groups of 4. LL is selling a CPUs worth of sims at a time, either as one normal or 4 void.

I would think that this would logically be implemented by having a mechanism for setting up "firewalls" between parcels. You would still have multiple parcels in one sim, but if you were on a parcel that was "firewalled" then you'd just see "void" around the edge of your parcel, and people on the other side would see a void edge there too.

For peole's sanity, I think you'd need to allow owners to see through the firewalls, and only have either firewalled or non-firewalled parcels in a given sim.