Land Barons and how its hurting our SecondLife

We all know about Land Barons, they buy land for a low price off auctions or other people, then charge way too much for it. How are regular inhabitants of SL supposed to cope with this? I saw 200m^2 going for over 200US$, or an entire sim for 3,000US$ (that person, who i will not give a name, could have easily bought an island for 900US$ directly from LL). Or inworld, 512m^2 going for 2500L$ to 40,000L$.

I just want land to build myself a house, a place to call home. But how can i do this when land is just way too expensive?? Huh?? I remember when i first joined SL in Febuary 2004, i wa able to buy 1024m^2 for 1,500L$.

I didnt join SL in the intention of become a Bill Gates, and i still dont. I just want to be able to have a small shop and a place to call home.

Im sure that there are alot of people out there that agree with me and others that would say the opposite, that Land Barons are part of SL. I beleive that SL was supposed to be all the good aspects of life, plus some bonus ones that we werent able to have. Where what you do, who you are doesnt matter here, here you can be who you trully are, no pressures. He you can express yourself no worries.

Im glad for LL resent success with all the new people joining, but things were better when SL wasnt so big.

I know that this post wont change anything, although i wished it did.

You get yourself a land for the landless plot for a premium monthly price, and pray they don't put huge for sale signs next to you, if they do your sol, shit outta luck. This is there plan, to get you either to sell your land to them cheap by destroying your view of any land nearby. It's psychological warfare, and it's legal by the current standards.

Your best bet is to just stay landless with a lifetime account nd let these people pay for your bandwidth usage. You don't own land in SL, it owns you...


If you feel your land rights are negligable, downgrade a.s.a.p to a lower tier(basic membership), back to the lifetime membership is my current plan. Don't let land barrons control what you thought was going to be a good plot of land.
The best plan of attack is not to play there game at all.

If you can find people in an established area that have group land for sale or shares then go with that, you taking a huge risk buying any new land as it is now with new sims, it was meant to drive land prices down but the underlying problem remains. These people have the will and the way to make your second life miserable with there wallets. Auctions are just like ebay and the highest dollar wins, not what they could do with land. It forces some people to buy there own sims, which is so expensive I can't even imagine...

I wouldn't condone owning land to anyone looking to have a good time in SL from my experiences so far, it just seems like the biggest hassle you could ever face when you just want to log on and have a good time.

Resident Land Auctions (RLA)

The problem is with the auction system and the rapidly growing population of SL, not with speculators. Auctions are designed to put the goods in the hands of the people willing to pay the most.

If somebody buys the land with no intention other than selling ("Land Baron", then they will sell it eventually, even if they have to take a loss. I think a lot of these speculators are going to start losing money real soon now, and will go to other pursuits. Then we won't have so many Land Barons to kick around.

But let's say that someone does buy the land for re-sale, and then sells at a profit. Who bought it from them? And where was that person when the original auction was going on? If the second buyer (the final owner) had been present at the auction, they surely would have been the winner, no?

So the speculator is effectively acting as a proxy for the eventual buyer. The buyer does pay more than he would have at auction, but he is the only one that pays that price, and it is his decision (it is effectively a fee for the service that the speculator provided). The buyer always has the option of continuing to look or getting in on another auction. Maybe he just doesn't like auctions.

Now the fact is that the fewer people that are present at an auction, the less the land will sell for. The more people that are there (on balance) the more the land will sell for.

But an auction where there are only a few people (when the population of SL is growing by leaps and bounds) sounds to me like the people who happen to know about an auction taking advantage of everybody else who doesn't. Low prices at the expense of the majority of people who weren't there.

These "Land Barons" allow people to (in effect) retroactively participate in auctions that they missed, resulting in more and fairer access to the auction system. Higher prices, of course, but that is the natural consequence of more people being at the auctions.

However, there is another way that Linden Labs could set things up that has occasionally been mentioned: no up-front fee at all for land. Everyone gets in line with their land requests, which are dealt with first-come-first-served, and there is no charge other than the tier fees.

To my mind this other way of doing things would be a disaster: it would be a huge chunk taken out of the economy and just discarded (some people think the less economy the better, of course, and some even want to see in-world currency eliminated completely).

But the economy here is a Good Thing. When our economy is strong enough that some people can pay their rent and buy groceries after cashing out a month's Linden dollar earnings, then you will see a huge leap forward in the quality and quantity of content that are created here.

I'm looking forward to it.