Lefty, as I believe I've said before, your gloomy list of problems seems to have grown out of thinking about this, but not doing it. The problems are both worse and better than you imagine.
i'm not quite sure of the reason for your post... you neither supported nor challenged anything i said previously with anything major. Are you arguing for the sake of argument?
Let's leave aside the private islands, because I think they could become a headache, a $195-a-month headache that you can't undo by selling except selling the entire thing. It won't divide up, so you either find 9 other friends in your hippie commune, or you find 9 or 15 strangers who will buy leased deeds from you and then play building code cop, but you still have a lot of work cut out for you it seems even if all scripted.
you're simply repeating what I said, adding some things that should have gone without mentioning
On a mainland sim, you can declare the sim residential, then sell it. Then the people who buy it take it over as their own, and with pride of ownership, they're motivated to work it and keep it nice. With a minimal community association, you can figure out a commons, prim sharing, residential/business mixture, etc.
nobody refutes that it's easy to set the thing up. It's a whole other skill to keep the thing running which is what i touched on in my post. In this regard, I think my lack of doing these things is testament to my foresight and personal rationale. Thinking it is not always less than doing it. My friends and neighbors go way over their prim limits every day... They also complain about tossed grenades and noise pollution every day. Who needs to be a slumlord to grasp these concepts?
Now you'll face the problem of the neighboring sims and what is happening on them, and as we know, anything from giant griefer towers with huge spinning boxes and lights and even King Kong in the water can attack...but you turn down your draw distance, you wait 30 days, you file a few complaints to the Lindens -- it is doable.
this is common to all of SL. Not worth mentioning issues outside of your sim.
The wildcard is how to think whether the rentals that the community might set up for some businesses, or the dwell for events, will be enough essentially to pay for prims or pay for the initial investment in land. The answer is a fat: no.
I don't want ANYONE thinking this is a wildcard just because the Prok says so. This is just simple business math... Charge slightly more than it costs you. there's no wildcard here. If people don’t' rent from you or if your events don't attract people, that's your fault for sucking or the world's fault for not having the population base necessary to support your addition to the world. That's just business. I'm sure anyone thinking of opening up a sim is aware of this, sheesh.
The thing worth mentioning (which i already did) is getting the disposable income into your sim along with the residential renting. It's a whole different arena on the community side of things for obvious reasons. No more simple community forum... places to spend money are RARELY eye-catching and pose several question and problems for a community bent on certain ideas of where they live.
You are buying and selling entertainment, and that's not an investment. There isn't enough infrastructure in place for that. Renting is easy, and not as unsupported as you say. But it's not going to be enough for every community to sustain itself and return its purchase. Even selling the land to the next customer who'd like to come in may not work.
1. Buying/Selling entertainment IS an investment! Where do you get this poop? Hollywood and the porn industry does just fine without your input and they’ve made trillions of dollars of investments. Events halls do just fine with their investments, too.
2. We all agree the infrastructure is lacking but that does not stop people from dumping cash into SL simply for a little entertainment.
3. Land Renting is not a built-in feature to the land management tools so it is not supported by the existing client software in any GUI form. Nobody said it was horribly difficult but it does require money, time and extra people beyond yourself.
i shouldn't have to be clarifying any of this
I've noticed that the prices in Ravenglass on the mainland have gone up steadily. I once set them to $7.5/meter to make them affordable, and $9.5/meter with custom houses on the waterfront. These all resold, and at 8 or 9 or more. Some have sold and resold a few times. I saw maybe one liquidation to a land baron and a resale at a much higher price. It's just a tiny slice of SL life but I think it is possible to make sims that increase in value, although of course there's a limit to this. The limit is the factor of new sims constantly being churned out -- people will always value the pristine wilderness and the illusion it can be kept over the reality of life on an established sim which will may have better protected views but maybe has more lag.
Sakura is talking about a sustainable sim island haven for a consistent community. No promise of pristine wilderness, no issues of idiot builds, no illusions to sight lines. You’ll have to explain these last points further and tell us what they have to do with Sakura and his topics.
~Lefty
