Land Limit - Enuf is Enuf

Recently a favorite location of mine was bought out by someone who obviously owns a lot of land. Fine. So I leave to see if I can buy more land to work on, and low and behold this person owns every freakin one out there I'm interested in. I do not want to buy from this person....so what do you do?

I personally think there should be a limit on how much land you can own. SL needs to inforce something so we can enjoy selling and buying without worry about inflated prices. Think of it this way...someone with lots of money can own all of SL. Scary right? Well it's happening as I see it this person already owns most of SL and is still spreading.

I know SL prolly won't do anything about it. Why...it all comes down to the money. So we will all have to answer to this person who owns SL....which sucks. If there was a limit, I would feel so much better about buying land.

This is just my opinion and hopes on the subject. I'm just fusterated and tired. I know people hate limitations, I do also, but sometimes it's a nice thing to have when it comes down to situations like this.

I hate to play the "capitalist pig" this time, but capitalism to that extent is largely protected in Second Life. I'm sorry, but enforcing a "maximum land limit" would just not stop that, either.

I'll write this off by saying that in the not-too-distant future, there have been quotes that the Lindens want to release the server software eventually. If you're concerned about "buying from these people," you can eventually just start your own server.

Currently, you can also purchase a personal sim for a large, but fair for the value, sum of money. This sets a limit at the supply level as to how high land owners may charge.

As for the smallest of land buyers, I'm sorry, but you may just have to deal with this market if you want a specific area that badly. Without quoting the (obvious) name of this seller, there is still plenty of land out there on the market that isn't owned by her.

Land sales are an art far more than they are a science. Spend some time watching the "Land Sales" tab, and you're sure to find something good.

I would have to say no, I disagree with you, though I share your sense of frustration.

I can only say that after you have been in SL awhile, you'll figure out that the Lindens keep rolling out new sims, including sims that look almost identical to ones they already rolled out somewhere, so if you shop anew, you will find the same thing you wanted, and probably at a much better price.

The reason "one person" can own so much land is because it's for sale on the open market. An open market land auction system is what creates value in this world. It makes your land valuable for you to own and to resell some day.

If there was just a static number of squares to dish out with a cap on it, it would aquire no value. In the early days, the beta testers basicaly had as much land as they could grab to build on. It helps explain their privileged position today, But you couldn't keep a system going like that because it costs money to make land, and you have to have a valuation for it by having an open market system.

If there were a cap on land ownership, you and your friends would have to live under that ceiling too .That means no one could ever grow a business or join together or make something ambitious, they'd always be living with an artificial limitation.

The way to solve the problem of "one owner" is to have more competition. That will happen as the game becomes a more secure space for investors and when the anti-market sentiments are held at bay. Competitors can't appear when there are people clamoring for there to be caps on amounts of sales. Then there is no land business, and no one will bother buying it. Then the Lindens can't justify spinning it out if they can't get paid for it.

It's a complicated, interlocking system and I think SL offers an excellent chance to learn how value and markets work, even in a strange, exotic game atmosphere.

I guess I am a minority user I only got land so I could help SL otherwise I have no reason to even have a premium account. I got it soley to give money to sl because as of now I am able to afford it.

so my little 512m plot is more than enough and because its on 2 sides water I do not have to worry that much about a behemeth going up next to me. (although I WOULD like to see some form of informal "zoning" in at least some areas of SL so a house does not end up with a skyscraper next to it

limits would be bad in the long run and I am here for the long haul. EVENTUALLY these people will get bored and move on. in the end a "leveling" will occur. things will balance out. it will just take time.

I actually think the SIZE of SL is growing in a bad way Faster than membership (in world membership) is growing. this is going to lead to problems if the membership does not increase to meet land availability before the land value crumbles (and it inevitably will) right now its high because its in demand its new and cool. eventually we will reach a critical mass and things will level out. hopefully SL is nice and profitable by them and should be nicely self sustaining.

it would be nice if we could have a tiny bit more than 512m without incuring charges. this would lessen the need people have for going "vertical" since they will have a bit mroe room to spread horizontally. one idea is to make things transparent but it sucks when you fly into a transparent wall hehehe

I want to make a movie screen on my land (just for fun no profit as I have no interest in making money in sl or devoting the needed time to such a thing) so my plan is a high POLE with the theater on top. I will make it a single object if I can so I can "put it up" when I need it and take it down when I dont.

it would be nice if buisnesses had an easy way to do this. I can see this. your land has a nice scenery in it. if someone wants to shop there is a orb they touch and poof the buisness materilizes on a pole a few feet above the land. when no one is there for mroe than 5 minutes ot goes away again.

implimenting something like that would be pretty neat !

Or just have zoning

Chris Taylor
http://www.zodiacreview.com/

Hm. Nice response, Prok. I mean it.

One thing that interests me is how Second Life "land" changes peoples' perceptions of it so much. Instead of thinking that this is somehow "just some storage space in a database somewhere," people feel it is a tangible, finite resource and occasionally pay insane amounts of cash for a single spot.

I for one don't exactly get it.

Since you're a land seller yourself, perhaps you can elaborate on that here? Since it's on topic with this thread, I'd like to hear your responses to that. How does that perception affect your land sales? And, for that matter, how do you feel the growth of the personal sim/personal server-over-time will affect them? Do you think those perceptions (as held now) will change?

Edit: Correction. It seems you just spawned a post to the issue on the other thread.

I don't think LL should limit how much land a person should own. The market or RL will adjust all of that in short order.


Cheetah contact Bob Bravo or Buck Spinnaker, I have had land deals with them in the past and they are both honest and fair. Oh, they are also nice people

yeah, I think so too. I like seeing people testing the parameters of what is possible..

ok ty, I just don't want to buy land from this person. Everywhere I look it's them..so...it makes me fustrated.

I hope I didn't get anyone upset, thanks for discussing, we'll see what happens I guess.

Jeff, SL is an immersive world -- that is, if nobody gets in its way with griefing, RL intrusions, etc. People enjoy being in an immersive world where they suspend disbelief. They may be in little more than a colored chat room with other rather dull entities, but if you make the trees sway, you have the sound of waves hitting the shore, and a sunset on the beach, you can fake somebody out pretty good and get them to rivet to a tiny screen and sit for hours clicking.

A lot of real estate in RL is emotional and impulse-buy and a lot of it is in SL. It even takes a special kind of cynicism which I don't have to be a successful land dealer and not care if you take a beautiful island and chop it up into 512 or even 16m just to sell it.

I think that personal sims/personal servers are only going to be one part of the market. You're forgetting that people want a RL replicate. In RL, as isolated as they may get in their suburban tract houses going to their warehouse schools and offices and picking up their fast food, they still crave human contact. Sometimes, if someone makes a convincing enough town square with something to do on it, they'll go on it. And we know they'll go even to the darkest dankest black box club in search of other green dots like themselves. Green dots have to first greet and meet and socialize and sort themselves out. Therefore I think SL will continue to have a role.

Some of the people promoting open source hate capitalism even as they profess to embrace freedom, which often is better at preserving freedom over socialism. They are the Bazarovs of our time (like Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons". They are nihilists, repudiating the old, but creating something in its place which is often rather tawdry and merely only sectarian. I don't think SL is going to be in as big a hurry to go open source as they say, for bottom-line reasons as well as ideological/ambivalence reasons.

What's interesting about the SL landmarket is not only that the Lindens could create an auction, but that people in world could keep giving that land value trading and retrading it and even creating RL gated enclaves like Boardman or Taber or the "colour sims" etc.

People create value even on the moon.

LL should do a little more to tame the cycles of boom and bust in SL.

For example, they could educate the land buyers a little more about the fact that they are trying to keep the price of land stable and if you buy when price is above the stability point you risk suffering when a land flood occurs to bring the average price down.

Finn jensen & Blue Burke are two ppl I have personaly done buisness with also and are great. Course I have never had a negative experience with anyone I have done land sells with including Anshe, it all goes back to doing some research on the player before commiting to the sale.

Jesse, Finn Jensen is just a staff person of anshechung.com So cheetah and you would still be still dealing with Anshe Chung when you deal with Finn and that's no secret at all, Anshe publishes this fact openly on her spam lists.

As for researching players, well, I don't know how easy that is to do. Look how easy it was for you to think finn Jensen was somebody separate from Anshe.

What you have to research, if you can mange it in time, is how much someone paid on the auction for a piece of land. That gives you leverage to get them to climb off their price further. But you can also just fly around and see what's what and just take the best buy on a sim by right-clicking without having to form some personal interaction with the seller.



blaze, only experience can teach something like this. And you have to factor in the GOM rate too, and other things, like are the Lindens putting up telehub on the auction that week, because siphons barons off to bid on that $10/at least land, leaving the other parcels sometimes hanging with no bids so you can get a bargain. I guess there are a lot of little tricks like that you can try to master -- the early closing of the land auction on Saturday which mitigates against some barons in some time zones, etc.

I think in making the game of the land auction, the Lindens have done as credible a job as they have in making the game of playing house, making the game of moving up the apprentice and reputation latter to the FIC, and making lots of other kinds of club, mafia, furry, etc. games within the game. It's a game. When they can get more comfortable wit that, they will feel better about themselves.

well the reason for thast is that socialism is in conflict with freedom

SO IS CAPITALISM. its the polar opposite of Socialism and JUST as bad as it.

Pure Capitlism that is. just as we try to restrict socialism in the name of freedom we must also restrict capitalism for the same reasons.

limiting land however wont do this

Chris Taylor
http://www.zodiacreview.com/

I knew Finn Jensen was part of Anshe's staff, I was only offereing other players she can deal with if she did not want to deal with Anshe directly. I guess I might of wrongly assumed she was refering that she did not want to deal with Anshe on a personal level. Anshe land is usualy within the same price range as other land in the same area so the conclusion I came up with is it was Anshe herself she did not like.

Land is land, the price of land is the price... only reason you would not want to deal with someone in peticular is personal reasons.

I think this player would probably rather not line the pockets of Anshe or any of her minions.

As to why we consider vLand to have inherent value, I'd point to a few hundred million years of evolved territoriality; in the struggle for life, territory is one of only two useful resources and just about every organism fights hard for it. That we view vLand as territory is as much a mis-cueing as printed images of potential mates can be arousing.

Even without needing to invoke collusion, it does appear that the large land holders may be inflating land prices. I guess that a mechanism akin to RL retailers may be operating in SL. If you try to buy a retail consumer good in RL, you will find almost no price differentiation as the marketplace becomes ever more efficient. I imagine if I were to get into the land brokering business, that I would look to the other brokers for pricing cues and would be loathe to undercut for fear that my commodity would be viewed as sub-standard. I think this is tied to inelastic demand for land whereby most players are paying more than they would prefer for land because there are few suppliers and those suppliers have perhaps noted the demand inelasticity and have priced accordingly. Tobacco and gasoline are two RL examples that (I think) fit the same model: price changes do not seem to affect quantity purchased as much as say, entertainment.

Disclaimer: I have more land than I need and thus am simply not a participant in the land market, so the above is not sour grapes. Also, I only ever took Econ 101 so here is a big grain of salt □ to take with the above conjecture.

That is defiantely their right.

To call someone that does not have the same views as you (again their own right) a minion is a personal attack upon them. It is also saying their rights to their own opinions hold less value then yours.

Regardless if Cheetah wants to line Anshe's pockets or not, there is no reason to call those that support Anshe "minions". Everyone has the right to do as they see best and to believe who they want. You have shown no supporting evidence that Anshe has ever done anything wrong to anyone at anytime and all I see is hearsay and rumors, both of which I give no credence to.

I like the word minion and will continue to use it, it is a term of endearment not a personal attack. Thanks for your opinion. Just because you haven't be present for all the fucked up things that Anshe has done, does not mean they haven't happened.





dictiionary.com

History is still on the forums, one only needs to search for it. I read some of it, most of it was hearsay and rumors again with no supporting evidence and was retorted with personal first hand accounts.

I am glad you like the word minion, neve told you to stop using it. You were using it as a derogatory term though, it is clear as day. We all can sit her all day and post clips from the dictionary, but I believe we have better things to do... like play the game .

Was it Elvis who said "do not bend to pluck the mote from your neighbor's eye while ignoring the plank in your own"? Never was good at history, either.....

No... Elvis is the one who said to not judge another unless you have walked in his blue suede shoes.

- Ace

I have nothing personal against her, just for the record.

I just want to buy from someone else and just got upset cause all I see is her. thas all.

Another place to look is the SL Auction's. They auction off land for both $L and $$. Some are great deals, others not so great but it is another source to see what is out there.

And of course the immortal:

"Wise men say - only fools rush in"

Malachi, Elvis?? are you *joking*??? It's from the *Bible*. I don't know if people get any exposure to that anymore. The King James translation says "don't take the mote out of your neighbour's eye until you have removed the log from your own.*

Fact is, I find, you often have one eye free, and fact is, your neighbour often has a log in his, too LOL.



I look to other brokers for cues, too, up to a point but the reality is, you don't have much leeway. Land costs what it costs. It costs what you paid for on the auction, plus your margin of PayPal fees, etc. and then holding the tier on it. Tier becomes the major limitation on it because you are not going to go up or down too much given not only that you have to pay tier, but the person you sell it to has to pay tier, too.

So it's not so much that demand isn't elastic, it's that tier is the cap on everybody's activity, as are auction prices, which can fluctuate but tend to remain around 5-6 for mature.

There can't be more competition appearing until other things could happen, like less Linden rollouts, more private islands that would then siphon off some activity away form the mainland so that other brokers might step in and assume the risk.

The other limitation is time, of course. You have 30 days to sell it before tier kicks in. There's some land it's not worth hanging on to once tier goes past 30 days, so you lower the price -- a lot of small and medium barons start dumping and liquidating then. The bigger barons then merely get to fill out their tier and sit with that stuff until even 90-120 days pass. All land in SL sells pretty much, if it has a price tag on it, but you have to either lower the price or lengthen the wait.

It's not any kind of natural situation because tier is way more than the RL equivalent of taxes.