Private Islands - Do they disappear?

Not relevant to me at all, since I don't own any land, but was chatting with a guy last night who said he had bought some land on a private island. His landlord was fine, and quite co-operative, and all of a sudden the island disappeared, and the landlord, too.

I don't know all the facts, but assume that the landlord wasn't paying his/her fees any more. Linden did a good job, apparently, of re-activating it for long enough for the "owners" to get their property off it, and then shut it down again.

Is this something that happens often? If you actually buy land from a Private Island owner, do you have any recourse whatsoever?

Seems to naive little me that this is an argument against buying land on a private island from the island owner. What do the denizens of this forum think?

It could very well be that the person that owned the sim sold it, having nothing to do with LL at all. This is one reason if I ever needed land again, I would rent and not purchase first. Its too risky to me, but others do very well with it. People need to check with the owner of the sim, see their reputation as a landlord first. Sorry to see your friend lost out in this situation

This is admittedly one of the risks to leasing (or whatever you want to call it). That said, it is a rare occurence I would think simply because of the investment an island owner is making - don't pay your monthly island charge and there's $1400/£700 down the river. More frequently heard is "I paid for my bit of island and now I've been booted off with no refund"

Inc

I understand you are referring to Private Islands and Private Estates but this could be misconstrued as in all Land for a newbie and could be misleading.

If someone sold it, would the whole island disappear, though? Apparently it's just plain not there (until LL came by and re-activated it so that people could get their stuff...). I certainly don't think it's LL's fault, since the owner disappeared at the same time....

I think the answer is No if it was sold, unless, someone correct me if I am wrong, the new owner could re terraform it and therefore it would not appear to be there. But for LL to reinstate so people could collect their belongings sounds like the owner went over the edge.

Also, there was another post today about someone losing their land on a private Island, perhaps this was the same landlord.

Sorry that your friend lost out, this is not the first or the last time this will happen to people that purchase on PI/PE's.

Our whole island group...some 40 to 50 sims...is being relocated to another part of the map tomorrow.

Should be one heck of a teleport. I wonder if I should pick up all my prims and box them in preparation for the move?

When an existing private island is sold, the service charge that LL takes for the island transfer includes a free island name change and island move. So if someone bought it and changed the name, then the island would for all intents and purposes 'vanish', i.e. it wouldn't appear on the map where it used to be and would not appear in search.

I do not know how this would work with landmarks. The landmark system currently uses the region name and coordinates, so internally a landmark would contain something like 'Island Name/128/128'. Presumably if 'Island Name' was changed to 'New Island' then the old landmarks would probably all be broken. And again, the appearance would be that the island vanished.

(Note: The landmark system used to work with global grid coordinates, which would be unaffected by island name changes but broken if islands were moved. I do not know when LL changed from global grid-based landmarks to name-based, only that both old and new landmarks will work fine but any new ones made are the name-based ones. Got all this from the wiki.)

A final possibility is the new owner could click a checkbox that makes the island invisible to anyone who's not in their access group. This too would make it appear that the island has vanished.

Alternatively... I would assume that if an island / estate owner were to decide to walk away and never log in again, cancel their account, etc, then when their island fee was billed and not paid, LL would reclaim (disconnect, shut down, vanish) the island(s).

LL can (and have) also deleted islands when the owner was banned / the island was determined to be used for griefing activity / the owner and island were otherwise in violation of the TOS. E.g. if you get an island under the educational discount, then LL find you're running a business and renting residential land, they'll shut it down.

Disclaimer: I don't have direct firsthand experience with any of these situations, this is a combination of assumption and heresay based on what I've read in the knowledge base and various forums etc.

-Atashi

There are many reputable estates and estate owners in Second Life. Yes, there is a risk of a private island disappearing (being sold/moved/renamed to someone with other plans), but if you stick with estates run by established, well-reputed residents you're likely going to be okay.

To be honest, I'm fairly sure island rentals are lower-risk than mainland ownership. The risk of an island one day vanishing is a LOT lower than the risk of your mainland neighbors moving away and some scumbag snatching up the neighboring land to put up an ad farm, camping den, shoebox house/store, banlines, or a hideous skybox 9m in the air.

So you can have the very low risk (assuming you do your homework) of losing your home on a nice, zoned island, or the very high risk of having your property rendered worthless and unattractive by your mainland neighbors.

EDIT: I will also note that a lot of estates do not charge a "purchase price." They only charge rent. Arrangements like that are even lower-risk, in my mind.

If a sim is moved and renamed, old landmarks to the old sim name do continue to work, at least for a while. I used to have land (rented) in the "Kisune Valley" sim. It got moved and renamed to "Kitsune", and my old LM still worked to get there, as did the "home" setting for an avatar that had their home point set in that sim.

If the sim had merely been sold, the Lindens wouldn't have had to do anything to provide temporary access.

Since they did have to, I would presume the sim owner either defaulted on his tier payments to LL, or got himself temporarily or permenantly banned. In either case, the sim is taken off-line. Nothing is deleted, and Linden Lab could, as they did in the case you cite, bring it back on-line long enough for land owners to get their prims off the sim. But if you "owned" any land there, you're out of luck, and just lost that land. In some cases, LL will work with the former owner and current residents so a new owner can take over the sim, as-is.

Considering how much an individual must pay up front to buy a sim, and how much they pay each month to keep it, there are few cases where they just turn their back on that sort of investment and allow it to default. More often, it is some temporary issue, like the card they charge their tier to is maxed out at billing time, or is declined for some other reason, and they don't work with billing fast enough to fix that problem.

Thanks Atashi: you say its all inference on your part but as an Island owner I can say its accurate, and very helpful to me to see the issues from the renter's point of view.

Now some stuff from mine. There are four ways of acquring a dwelling: a) buy from Linden and build (they've been little lax about this recently, and this, together with other debatable decisions on their part, has driven up land prices; but Linden are trying to put this right; you Pay Linden via a credit card in US$ or L$ turned into US$ equivalent

b) buy from someone else, in absolute terms, in L$: you take over the responsibility of paying tier to Linden and so the land is YOURS in Linden's eyes; you then pay tier as under a), henceforth. Only under these 2 arrangements do you own the land in Linden's eyes.

c) 'Buy' the land (a partitioned parcel) from a Land Baron; this means that you can terraform the land, you can stream your own music and video into it, it is to all intents and purposes yours BUT IT ISNT. You pay the Land Baron an INITIAL PURCHASE price in US$ via Pay-pal, and then continue to pay a monthly tier, also in $US, at a rate that alows the Land-Baron to cover their tier to Linden plus some extra which is fair or unfair depending on how nicely they've prepared the land for you and how many prims they give you to work with

d) You rent some land and perhaps a dwelling from a land-owner for however long you stay there, WITHOUT any upfront fee and without any pretence that you own it, paying the rental in L$. Unless the landlord does a special deal with you to give you your own partition, you can't stream your own video and sound into your own land. You get some prims to work with and that's that; the rental is lower than under arrangement c), but the security of tenure can be as good.

And so, to come back to our main issue. ONLY UNDER a) and b) do you have any security of tenure, under the terms of the basic Linden agreement we all sign up to when we first join (if Linden ever collapses, or decides you're a baddie, say goodbye to everything you own and have built). Its as sound and as stable as it gets in any Sim world.

UNDER c), you pay an upfront fee which does NOT give you ownership in Linden's eyes, but you get your own partition. Under d) no-one pretends you have ownership, there's mo personal partition, but there's no upfront fee. Both c) and d) leave you helpless if the owner of the land, or the private island (there's no difference so far as these terms of ownership are concerned) goes toes-up.

If you want security and cheap, go for a) once there's land made available.
If you want cheap, go for d).
b) and c) are intermediate cases.

Having said all that, we're all trying to be honest and fair, I think. I run a d) arrangement; I know many Land Barons who try to give a good deal under c). Enjoy SL!

Always look at motivations.



Anshe's prolly not gonna vanish as long as the accounting books are black, not red.

A private sim owner makes from rental... maaaybe 200 a month if they are stratospherically high priced and full. More likely 150 or 100.

So for someone working hard on one or two sims 'for the money'... heh. Danger, Will Robinson! You are betting they love a dollar an hour job soooo much they will never quit.

Look for people that are on the grid because they love doing it, not for the money at the 1-10 sim scale.

Another land baron trait: land baron's aren't supposed to ever quit, are they? Think about it. No stepping back, ever.

So drama queens and land barony... it's like watching a car accident in slow motion. You can see it coming... even if they can't... You know it's gonna be bad, but you just can't look away...

Some really interesting insights for me, a relatively new citizen. Thanks, this clarifies a bunch of stuff for me. I'll bet a few people wished they had known this before they did option "C" and thought they actually owned something!

Actually, no, I am not only talking about private islands. I've owned land in a large variety of ways, from renting, owning and buying on private sims as well as mainland. Its a large risky deal, as you can see in the valleys and peeks of the land business. Trust me, that wasnt misleading at all...in ANY land purchase case, I will instead *rent* because if whatever I needed the land for ends, I can walk away without initial investment, just simply a payment per time deal instead.

That being said, I still have a lot of land (mainland) currently and plan on keeping at least half of it. I just wont buy again as I saidm, its risky...but some people do very well with it...just not me lmao

Option C is the the same model for mainland "ownership" too.

I just moved 8 sims, not quite the scale, but outside of a bit of downtime and a few hours of not able to find us on the map, nothing was lost. It was just like a 15 minute restart of each sim. I really wouldn't stress over picking it all up and then having to set it back out based on my experience.

As for the a/b/c/d thing, I try to make certain that every prospective resident is aware of precisely all of this information before they chose model C with me (I do have a model D on SkyBeam FirstLand).



Why, Des, I do believe you just recommended against choosing you as an estate owner... you do have a few more than 10 now, don't you? <g>

Hmmmm. Do I count my Open Space (low prim) sims as one or four? If I have to count them as four, omg, I'm no longer in that category either

I still love doing it, though.

Char

I just want to point out that in the A, B, C, D examples, the poster said that in an outright rental arrangement that the tenant doesn't usually get a parcel and music/audio streams. I'm not sure how most rental places do it, but the one I own (The Cottages at Ivy Hollow) does parcel out the homes and gives quite a few permissions to tenants, including full media control.

I have a 25th of a island parcel, it comes with full media control and most permissions needed to control it by myself. There is even a work around for players with no payment info to use this too.