LL selling land

I would like to propose that LL start selling land, rather than allowing Land Barons to screw the economy and the playerbase generally.

I know we can get 512m2 plots as "First Land" - although of course much of this ends up in the hands of alts who then link them together and sell it for vast profits - but I'd like to see LL selling plots of land at tier sizes to enable more players to own the land they want - and pay the monthly fee for doing so - but refuse to pay $100 or more worth of L$ to a Land Baron who offers nothing of benefit to the majority of the playerbase.

SL allows great creativity for those who wish to take advantage of that ability - sadly many players are stifled by their real life financial situation.

There is much more that can be done in game that doesn't have to be ugly huge monstrously laggy clubs and malls - but I wonder how many thousands of the players would love to enrich the content of the game through their skills, yet are unable to afford to buy the overinflated land prices.

I'm quite sure a lot of players end up quitting because they can't afford the land to do what they want - do you want your game to grow, or to stagnate and allow it to be controlled by a tiny amount of players with money to throw away?

It's not like there is a shortage of land for sale - just look at the 'land sales' section - so there's no real need for people to be buying up handfuls of sims to divide up and sell. Sadly there aren't many - if any - at prices that people can afford. Given a choice between giving a Land Baron money, or eating for two weeks.... sorry, you lose. I know we don't *have* to play the game - but if you made land more affordable to the average player, you might just find that more of these free accounts upgrade to proper paying accounts and increase your monthly income too.

Lewis

Agreed.

I was actually considering, for a grand total of a day and a half, upgrading to premium so I could "buy" some land on the mainland. But it would have cost me US$200-300 up front, plus about US$50 a month, to get the land and the prims I wanted... and I honestly can't justify that. My computer didn't cost me that much! Heck, my colo server (where I get a root shell and decent bandwidth on a server I can install anything I want on) doesn't cost me that much.

Luckily I came to my senses and rented a slightly smaller plot from Alliez and Tony. It's much more sensible: less money up front, and no premium charges.

I think it would be great if cows just provided those wonderful cuts of meat directly. Screw those butchers and their greed.

And I do not want to have to buy the whole cow, that would be way too expensive. I just want a little sirloin.

Great idea....... but what about the vegetarians?

My idea can benefit 99% of the population. What's the problem?

Lewis

Коммунистическо.

P2

The auction page used to do this.

Personally I will buy no more land until I can buy it directly again.

Linden Labs is attempting to make a profit, or perhaps just break even, your idea gets in the way of that goal. Or, at the very least, the method that they appear to believe is most likely to get them to that goal.

Short term gain, long term loss.

The option is still available, you are just unwilling to spend the amount of money that is required.

Rent, rent, rent, rent, rent, rent, rent, rent.. Rent-a-didly-dent!!

Oh uh..

*cough*Hiro Queso*cough*

Don't be silly, the cows can't provide that. It's the ranchers who should do it. But no, they keep delivering the whole darn cow and I'm stuck paying top price for a lousy hamburger.

Nope,, they have done it.. and they still do.. watch the auctions or maybe you should be spending more time actually looking for land then bitching about the cost in the forums.
Prices for land havent really changed in almost 2 years

LLab providing fine cuts of land isn't scalable. That's why they stopped.

It takes time, effort, and money to take a sim, terraform it, cut it into usable pieces, and pipe it into their shoddy auction system.

Regardless, this was tried in 2004 and 2005. The result was that the same five or six people (land barons) simply won all the auctions.

And if the lindens sold "directly" to residents? The same land barons would buy them up. They're residents too, you know.

"A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.
'Good evening,' it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, 'I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?'"

I pretty much agree with LF, any system put in place would likely still result in people doing what they do today: grabbing the cheaper land as quickly as they can and putting it up for a higher price. About the only way that makes sense to me that LL could lower the price of land would be flooding the market, putting tons of land out there... which I think would be kinda infeasable because the more open, unbought land out there, the more LL's paying for servers that players aren't paying them tier for...

Well there has to be some way to stop it, after all it is not right that 1% of the playerbase control the other 99%'s ability to buy land for themselves.

Just remove the ability for any one person or group to own more than the 65sqkm of an entire sim - that kills off the land barons, and releases all those servers back to LL who can package them up quite nicely and let those who actually play the game to have fun do so, and those who just line their pockets can, for the want of a better term, just sod off.

Lewis

Whoops -- you've just destroyed Seacliff, Boardman, Cowell, Phobos, Abbotts, at least a dozen clubs, and the GameDev sims.

Losing a few ugly, laggy, porno, corpse filled clubs from the landscape? Surely that can only benefit the community?!?!?!!?!!??!?!?!

Lewis

Let's not forget lovely Luskwood.

Some people like those clubs. Some people like porn. It's not my cup of tea, and it obviously isn't yours. Accepting people's differences is pretty important in Second Life, because there are so many interest groups. But that's besides the point.

Capping the amount of land a resident can own in a sim would not only make it hard for club owners, but also for the many emerging little communities in Second Life who have chosen to make a particular sim their home.

You just nuked Chaos/Kor-Azor too. Perhaps you'd like to visit our sims before lumping them in with whatever you don't approve of.

There's this concept, Nerd -- it's called capitalism. You should look into it.

Capitalism: An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism encourages private investment and business, compared to a government-controlled economy. Investors in these private companies (i.e. shareholders) also own the firms and are known as capitalists.
In such a system, individuals and firms have the right to own and use wealth to earn income and to sell and purchase labor for wages with little or no government control. The function of regulating the economy is then achieved mainly through the operation of market forces where prices and profit dictate where and how resources are used and allocated. The U.S. is a capitalistic system.

Throw capitalism out of SL, and 99% of content creators will go with it. But maybe that's what you want, so you can sell your Nerd goods to newbies.

Why don't you try Project Entropia? I think you'd like it.

P2

Have you ever been to Abbotts, Boardman, and so on? I don't think so. None of those are clubs.

Regardless, your solution is easily games. Okay, so a land baron can't own an entire sim with one account. So they get an alt, and split the sim between them. Victory!

Land prices are the way they are because of the land market. Demand outpaces supply, and the land barons have deep enough pockets to keep these plots on the market for whatever price they set. Obviously they sell eventually, otherwise they wouldn't bother.

Hmmm ... Lewis, so you started a thread asking the forum crowd to explain what the sense in involving middlemen (so called "Land Barons" in the land business is. Some told you so and even explained to you that your ideas already had been tried in the past and were given up for a reason. Others told you that your assumptions are factually wrong and that you should go home and do some homework.

Next step: You post a feature suggestion to somehow ellimminate every landseller with holdings greater X and killing some other larger project (because they don't matter to you anyway). We are a little stubborn today, eh?

Today?

lol.