How landcutters are still hurting the mainland

I was out there the night it was reported, it does seem this was the exception to the rule, the land was cut in strips and it seems the previous owner had done it then set them for sale cheaply.

I think the problem is that you are misconstruing what people are saying to mean something they aren't intending to infer... or, in simpler words, you are creating a strawman.

You have to realize that this sentiment has grown up after YEARS of abuse, since long before the "Impeach Bush Guy" really demonstrated just how well a 16sqm can be used for harassment.

I started out in my region in Oct 2006 with just over 2200sqm of land. This past January, I started expanding. There were adfarms (512-1024sqm plots cut into checkerboards originally, though long after I bought my original parcel) all around me on three sides, and several other places in the region. It has taken me almost a year to finally clear them out and have one large, contiguous plot that I can build something substantial in, because the land on the south side of the road was a peppered mess until now. For a long time, quite a few of those plots had ads in them, which was the first and most obvious part of the problem which LL has only recently resolved (October). However, the majority did not, and more or less made the land look like a rather perforated slice of swiss cheese. You can't do ANYthing with land pockmarked with holes like that. NOTHING. Well, except maybe make an Ad Zoo (which is now verboten).



My surmise is that you've never been exposed to the harassment not only represented by the mere existence of them, but also by the owners themselves, who regularly pledge to make your life miserable until you buy their overpriced crap.

We have collected reams and reams of evidence. Screenshots, chat logs, catalogs of thousands of plots over hundreds of sims which are intentionally cut and strategically placed there to do one thing: harass the neighbors into paying their "extortion tax".



Which is where you come in with the strawman. If the plots were in nice, quiet, out of the way places, not in the middle of a checkerboard swiss cheese nightmare next to your parcel, a hole in it, or corners cut out of it, then yeah, no one would care. However, the extortionists couldn't make money if they were out of everyone's way. In fact, they take great care to MAKE DAMN SURE it is in SOMEone's way.



Yet another strawman. No one ever said anything of the sort. However, if you want to make a nice square building on your plot, and you can't because some idiot extortionist is forcing you to put in a concave corner to avoid his extortion tax, then I, for one, can understand why someone would want to "square up" their plot. If you can't, due to roads, water, whatever, that's one thing, but when someone deliberately placed a cut microparcel to act as an irritation inducement to "buy him out", that's the part where it becomes completely reprehensible.

As for me, I work with my neighbors to re-form the plots into our region back into rectangular plots. So far, we've restored around 8k meters of plots back to a semblance of squareness, so now we can enjoy our builds better.

Okay, that's a good point.

It still seems to me to be the sort of intervention that LL is philosophically disinclined to---meaning the original idea about prohibiting sales of any parcel under 512m. The 'trust me, pay this Landbot $100 and then the land will be set to you at $0' workaround COULD be the solution, maybe....

I mean, I guess your solution is workable on the theory that people might trust those asking only, say $5/meter, and would go ahead and pay the landbot, having faith that the land would then be set to $0 in their name.

But on the other hand, people might then go into the business of offering to sell parcels for low prices, with no intention of following through with the 'set it to you for $0' part. And they could claim the landbot's script was at fault, or make some other excuse.

And would LL intervene?

Hehehe. Actually, I responded without noticing there was another page of replies in this thread, so I missed one situation where there could be a sim full of parcels all of standard sizes, except for a few microparcels. And I can see that happening in the case of newish sims, cut to parcels by conscientious resellers. I've never had such an experience, but you're right: it must happen sometimes.

I was thinking of the much more common instance of microparcels carved out of the middle of a standard-sized parcel, or along roads, etc., where the sim has at least one (and usually many) non-standard sized parcels.

Almost always, though, there must be at least one landowner in the sim with a standard sized parcel who hasn't yet discovered the wonders of the Group bonus, and therefore can have a bit of spare tier they don't even know about. I've explained that bit a few times to give a microparcel to an abutter.

Some of us have reservations about using the Group bonus. Personally, though I've met people in SL of whom I have a good opinion, I don't care to put any of my financial concerns in the hands of someone I don't know well in non-virtual life, in this case by giving such a stranger power over hundreds of USD worth of my land. (As we all know, such ventures don't always prosper.)

And: I have some problems with the idea of making a Group of my alts. I know not all people have a problem with that tactic, but I do, and I doubt that I'm the only one.

So, yeah. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that all sims contain people willing to add to their land holdings.

Hmmm. That never even crossed my mind. I honestly don't know of any other way I could go about creating a separate landholding group for each tenant's parcel permissions.

What you describe does sound like a legitimate use of the 'alt group' tactic (which is why I refrained from making a stronger statement such as 'I think making a Group of one's alts is unethical).

But I still feel that using an alt Group merely to get land more cheaply, rather than to serve tenants, is a practice that has some ethical questions attached. (I don't mean to get into a discussion of this, but wanted to clarify my position.)

Oh come on. Give it up already. Can't you stop beating that poor strawman to death?

NO ONE EVER SAID "ALL MICROPARCELS ARE BAD! THEY SHOULD ALL BE BANNED!!!". If they did, they were being naive, and I don't think harping on the same obvious stance over and over and over as an attempt to attack all other positions against them (yes, that is what you are effectively doing here, Phil) is doing them, or us, any service.

So, here, let's get this out of the way: No, not all microparcels are bad. OK? Done. Now you can go back to the peanut gallery.

What the REST of us HAVE BEEN talking about is microparcels WHICH ARE BAD. Can you now join us in THAT conversation? Hmm?

Several of your assertions have already been disputed. You said that an empty 16sqm cannot be bad. That has been not only stated as wrong, but PROVEN as wrong.



I have yet to see a "grid of microplots" which was not an eyesore, either via terraforming or via some combination of banlines or adspamming. One of our favourite extortionists goes OUT OF HIS WAY to make sure that all the microplots he cuts out of his checkerboards are wildly terraformed. You can see this easily by looking at his handiwork just about anywhere. Just look for his infamous "4 corners" cuts, and you can well see what it's like to be in a sim near one of his messes. Which, I might add, can appear next to anyone, at any time. Thus, you better have a right of first refusal covenant with your neighbors, or you can pretty much count on him eventually paying your region a visit.



That's a pretty interesting contradiction in terms, Phil. On the one hand, people can't be expected to buy land defensively; on the other, they can't complain about the results if they don't. I'd like to know how you resolve that in your mind. I imagine it will take some pretty creative thinking, or a lot of spin.

I buy defensively; I have to. Because of my activism on the matter, certain people have pledged to do everything they can to harass me with land. One of them even pledging to do so until I committed suicide.

The problem is that cutting is never an isolated action; there is always a follow-on from it; either adterminals have been placed, land has been misshapenly terraformed, ban lines have been put up, etc. ANYthing to make the cutting the maximum level of nuisance so that the neighbors (present or future) have the maximum pressure to buy them out at their insane prices.

Okay then, too bad for your edge cases. Let those people use private islands.

I'm personally peevish about 512 cutters. Those guys are causing just as much damage as regular ad cutters. These are the sort of people that take a beautiful roadside half sim, or quarter sim and cut it into dozens of faceless irritating 512s each one with it's own personal for sale sign. Luckily fields of "for sale" signs are outlawed now so at least there's that. However, I've never subscribed to this theory that only 512s, or 1024s, 1536s sell and except in cases where the parcel would be so absurdly shaped that no-one could possibly want it I always join and never cut.

Remember, every time you cut a parcel you make the world a worse place.

OK, Phil. Let's say prices are irrelevant.

You buy a nice 1024 in a new sim and build your little home or business on it.

Some days/weeks later, one of our "little buddies" happens through, buying up a 1024 adjacent to yours and turns it into a checkerboard of extortion plots and whatever else. You go "well, that's OK; prices are irrelevant". Next, another comes by, buying up one on the other side and checkerboarding it the same way. Now, let's say you are now surrounded by these plots, sim border, neighbors, etc. You decide. "Hey, I have built up a nice place, but I need more prims and/or a bigger place!". There's a chunk of land for sale on the other side of one of the checkerboards, and the plots in the checkerboard are for sale, mostly. If you want to expand at all, you will HAVE to do one of two things: 1) Move somewhere else, or 2) Pay the extortion tax.

Now, you can say "well, I will just move somewhere else!". OK, so you spend hours packing up your place, put your land up for sale (and wait...., or dump it to the bots, most likely losing a significant chunk of your investment), and try to find another piece of land which isn't threatened in the same way. Wait, there ISN'T any, because no matter where you go, if there isn't a checkerboard extortion mess near it, there will be soon enough, and you will have to go through the hassle of finding another place.

I don't know what your time is worth to you, but simply the hassle factor is enough for me to call foul on those who ply this odious scam.

This is even true if it was only a single extortionate microparcel involved. Over time, the mainland has, and will continue to have, more and more isolated extortion microparcels peppered throughout it. Why? If people don't buy most of them, they will sit there forever, because the economics of the microparcel extortion game allow for it. They pay a NICKEL's worth of tier PER MONTH. That's US$0.60 at current rates, per YEAR. The average price of microplots is around L$100/sqm, which means that they can wait TEN YEARS for any particular microparcel to sell, before they are in any danger of losing money on the deal.

With enough appropriately-placed microparcels, they can effectively dot the mainland to where no one will be able to find a plot larger than 1024sqm that doesn't have one of these extortion landmines cut out of it somehow, or is adjacent to one. That's the goal of these people. It's their stated "business model".

Those aren't "edge cases". Those are all common use cases. And this option has ALREADY been run up the Linden flagpole AND been rejected because of these use cases.

Deeding this land to a group gives a stranger power over hundreds of USD worth of your land? Not true. Create a group. Now you're the owner of that group, and have every single possible form of power available turned on. Give every other role in the group zero abilities whatever save those you actually want them to have. Make nobody else an owner in the group. Now you have all the power and they have none. Settled.

There are numerous problems with that. First and foremost, there are a lot of plot owners who own only 256sqm-496sqm of land in a sim. There's even a guy in my region who owns 48sqm and has his little Kanji tattoo shop on it. That's all he owns on the grid, period. There was even a famous club/bar which was on a 128sqm, I think it was.

Despite Phil's strawman (which causes more of these kinds of suggestions than suppresses them, btw), there are legitimate uses of small plots, even microparcels. However, when microparcels are specifically used for extortive or harassing purposes, they need to be reclaimed and the perpetrators banned from the service.

So all properties should live up to some standard of squareness, and somebody who doesn't want a square build should still own a square plot anyway, and live with the fact that part of it is empty, featureless, boring land that they don't even need the prims from? This doesn't make sense to me personally.

Yes, some people might even get ripped off for a hundred or so Lindens and not get a 16 square meter parcel, but you can bet nobody will get caught that way more than once, instead of being ripped off for a few thousand Lindens for a 16 square meter parcel, as happens now.

I don't think it would be that common, any more than it's that common for people to pay vendors for products and have the vendors deliberately eat their money. I'm sure THAT happens, too, but it hasn't killed scripted vendors.

And it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough that even with these kinds of scams there's no potential for "big killings".

You don't need to do that. Even if you don't trust the current group system (which works VERY well... it's not perfect but it's a huge improvement over the old one) you can always use your own alt as the second group member.
What problems?
Why?

Phil is not arguing that these microplots *cannot* be abused. But the logical end of getting pissed off at empty, non-banlined plots is that they all are bad. Argent already thinks so, because he keeps property lines on. But Argent is the rare case. For me, I generally don't care so long as the field of view is clean. The terraforming is a sign of extortion and it should be reported. I imagine that Jack will come out with that in the new policy.

But generally, I do not let these things get that much power over me. People that feed these land cutters are just as complicit in perpetrating the problem. If you buy a 16 because you need it to fill up your tier and want a few more prims, it's one thing - but defensive buying only enables these people to go on doing what they do, on greater scale.

Um, no, I didn't say that. I said that *grids* of the things are bad.

You certainly made some strong accusations against me, but as we shall see, didn't manage to succeed in backing them up with either evidence or logic.

As a beginning, you might want to look up the meaning of 'strawman', as you appear to misunderstand it.

To be specific: the only way I could have been 'creating a strawman' is if I had 1) made up an argument or claim and 2) attributed the fictional argument or claim to one or more people in this thread. Though both requirements are important, the second is particularly crucial: none of what you quoted from me constitutes an instance of me claiming that someone had specifically argued what I was discussing. Let's look at your accusations one by one (I don't reproduce your entire post as it's on this page--#151):

*****note--since the thread DID move on to a new page, I reproduced 151 a couple of posts below this one.




You then continue with a personal story which is quite interesting, but which fails to detail any instances of me 'misconstruing'---and even fails to refer to any such instances.

Your next accusation:

I'd written: If the small parcel isn't inside a large parcel, and it is empty, then.....well, I just haven't seen a single person make a case for that situation being bad and wrong.



Again: you're misunderstanding what 'strawman' means. You seem to think it means that I typed something you don't like. But in fact, for your accusation of the use of Strawman to be correct, I would have had to have claimed that someone argued "X" when in fact no one did argue "X". In the quote from me that you claim to be Strawman, notice that I wasn't saying 'someone argued X'---I was saying that no one had made a case for a position (in this case, that all small parcels--even if they are empty and aren't donut-holes--are inherently a problem).

Of course several posts in this thread DO claim that the existence of non-donut-hole, non-content-filled microparcels are a problem. Just read through the thread---starting with the OP which discusses small parcels that are NOT in the middle of the writer's parcel, and which are empty.

Your next accusation:

I'd written: (This doesn't even take into account the fact that after YEARS of land changing hands, the only way for Mainland to become nice rectangular parcels with no 'bits' would be for LL to seize all land and redistribute it. And that sounds a bit too Early Soviet Union for my taste, thank you very much....)*



Again, you misunderstand what Strawman means.

If I had said "Person ____ argued that the only way for Mainland to become nice rectangular [etc.]..."----and Person _____hadn't argued that---then THAT would constitute Strawman.

But neither of those requirements are met. I didn't claim that anyone had argued "the only way for Mainland...". I was the one who was musing on the supposed 'problem' of small parcels and of how only a mass redistribution of land by LL could eliminate them. I wasn't attributing such musings to anyone else.

Do you see the difference?

Now, on to a different type of faulty reasoning:



Your surmise couldn't be more incorrect. There have been just such extortionate 16m parcels adjoining my build in my home sim for months. We've been through the 10m Spinning Neon Tower phase and the 'raise the 16m parcel above the surrounding land' phase. And still the owners of those parcels, which are indeed priced very high, remain with empty pockets. I will never pay them more than the average per-meter price of the land in the sim, and I will never care two cents about the presence of the parcels. Why should I?

Furthermore: just yesterday I bought 1600m adjoining a road. It's quite Swiss-cheesed at one end by 16m bits in checkerboard formation, and indeed they are raised and lowered to their maxes, making it impossible for me to fully flatten my own land.

So I take it as a creative challenge. I'm having fun making plans to include the deformation in my own build.

I wouldn't dream of letting it raise my blood pressure.


If you choose to be irate over small parcels, that is your prerogative. It is your choice and your option.

But for anyone who might, hypothetically, want to convince LL that this is at (or near) the top of the list of issues to be dealt with: I think it's fair to point out that not everyone would agree.

And no, Talarus Luan, I'm not saying that anyone in the thread has typed that argument. However, the very existence of the thread implies that some people hope to convince LL that this issue is at or near the top of the list.

And many of us would beg to differ.

The trials and tribulations of being in business, ya know?



Nope, I would have been happy, since that's what I would have done, and I wouldn't have had to put up with the idiot.



Not sure why you think that it is impossible. You're a programmer/analyst. Think like one:

1) I just bought a microparcel (whatever parameters your choose to discern that fact are up to you, preferably configurable), yay!
2) Set it not for sale and do other housekeeping work for it.
3) Look up all adjacent parcel owners (you have the data right there), if group-owned, get the list of officers.
4) Send them an IM and/or drop them a notecard with the notice.

If they contact you (first-come, first-serve, whatever), then the only manual part of this process kicks in: you enter into your database to set the parcel for sale to the requestor. Your bot then runs out and does the work for you. Is it more difficult to code a bot to set a plot for sale to a specific user than to set it for sale to all? I certainly wouldn't think so.

Some time later (again, configurable), if you still own the plot, your bot automatically sets it for sale using your normal microplot sales parameters.

Maybe I am missing something in how your systems are designed, but that's how *I* would do it. /shrug

In the time I was away, the thread moved to a new page, so here's the post I didn't quote in its entirety, in my reply to it just above (in the interest of readability):

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ponsonby Low
But if you read through many of the posts in this thread, people who acknowledge that LL is cracking down on extortion are STILL maintaining that a 16m parcel sitting, empty of content as well as ban lines,to the west (let's say) of a 4096m parcel, is somehow Retarding Good Development.



I think the problem is that you are misconstruing what people are saying to mean something they aren't intending to infer... or, in simpler words, you are creating a strawman.

You have to realize that this sentiment has grown up after YEARS of abuse, since long before the "Impeach Bush Guy" really demonstrated just how well a 16sqm can be used for harassment.

I started out in my region in Oct 2006 with just over 2200sqm of land. This past January, I started expanding. There were adfarms (512-1024sqm plots cut into checkerboards originally, though long after I bought my original parcel) all around me on three sides, and several other places in the region. It has taken me almost a year to finally clear them out and have one large, contiguous plot that I can build something substantial in, because the land on the south side of the road was a peppered mess until now. For a long time, quite a few of those plots had ads in them, which was the first and most obvious part of the problem which LL has only recently resolved (October). However, the majority did not, and more or less made the land look like a rather perforated slice of swiss cheese. You can't do ANYthing with land pockmarked with holes like that. NOTHING. Well, except maybe make an Ad Zoo (which is now verboten).


Quote:
My surmise is that people are letting their understandable dislike of extortionists lead them into making wild overstatements about small parcels.



My surmise is that you've never been exposed to the harassment not only represented by the mere existence of them, but also by the owners themselves, who regularly pledge to make your life miserable until you buy their overpriced crap.

We have collected reams and reams of evidence. Screenshots, chat logs, catalogs of thousands of plots over hundreds of sims which are intentionally cut and strategically placed there to do one thing: harass the neighbors into paying their "extortion tax".


Quote:
If the small parcel isn't inside a large parcel, and it is empty, then.....well, I just haven't seen a single person make a case for that situation being bad and wrong.



Which is where you come in with the strawman. If the plots were in nice, quiet, out of the way places, not in the middle of a checkerboard swiss cheese nightmare next to your parcel, a hole in it, or corners cut out of it, then yeah, no one would care. However, the extortionists couldn't make money if they were out of everyone's way. In fact, they take great care to MAKE DAMN SURE it is in SOMEone's way.


Quote:
(This doesn't even take into account the fact that after YEARS of land changing hands, the only way for Mainland to become nice rectangular parcels with no 'bits' would be for LL to seize all land and redistribute it. And that sounds a bit too Early Soviet Union for my taste, thank you very much....)*



Yet another strawman. No one ever said anything of the sort. However, if you want to make a nice square building on your plot, and you can't because some idiot extortionist is forcing you to put in a concave corner to avoid his extortion tax, then I, for one, can understand why someone would want to "square up" their plot. If you can't, due to roads, water, whatever, that's one thing, but when someone deliberately placed a cut microparcel to act as an irritation inducement to "buy him out", that's the part where it becomes completely reprehensible.

As for me, I work with my neighbors to re-form the plots into our region back into rectangular plots. So far, we've restored around 8k meters of plots back to a semblance of squareness, so now we can enjoy our builds better.

Only put yourself and the people you trust in roles that have any rights to touch the land.

You do know that you can control who can do anything with your land via the roles and abilities, right?



You only need to put two people in a group to keep it active. Why do you consider that a "problematic tactic"? Just curious.



No, but I think it is reasonable that the greater majority probably do, at least to the point where it makes Qie's argument reasonable.

Well, LL isn't going to say "too bad" for the edge cases in this instance, so the point is moot.

It was suggested to them, and Jack specifically denied it.

I still don't feel comfortable doing this, even with restrictions, with someone I don't know in non-virtual life. But I'll grant, of course, that this is a quirk not shared by all.