Fishy Auction

Thanks for the link Sindy. It does sound like a fun party, but since I don't always have the time to read the blogs. I didn't find out about it soon eough to go

I just thought it was strange that this guy would spend this much money on land and then sell it at a substantial loss, and that his profile is blank. This is usually the sign of an alt or a newb but he was born in August of 2007 so he can't be a newb. He only belongs to this one group which you can only belong to unless you are a concierge client or are a guest of one. If you are spending that much money on tier and have been around that long, you usually would have more in your profile than that unless you don't play much or don't want anyone to know who you are. Again, I just think something doesn't seem right to me.

Could be but if he's in the conceirge party group, he's either at (or above or even well above) the 1/2 sim tier or knows somebody who is...

That is a logical fallacy that is LOVED by IDIOTS that are dumb enough to deny everything.
Absence of evidence is not evidence for anithing!

Perhaps a adfarmer figures he plans to make $40k on the $5k block anyway so why not bid that high then get it back in the $5k pieces he sells afterwards if you really want it that bad.
Regardless it stinks of week dead fish, all these damn concierge level alts the barons run cutting to and from each other in some sort of shuffling process to skip tier?
I seen plots in my sim change owners twice, cut sliced in the weirdest ways then rejoined, then back to the original baron.

LOL, idiots?

Maybe I'm too dumb to understand your sentence. Deny everything? I didn't deny "anithing" LOL

Seriously now, if a large corporation, or any corporation for that matter, is suspect of wrong doing like scamming the public, it is in their best interest to clear the air or pay the consequences of losing both customers and profits. Being silent about it and letting the issue carry on is suspect in it self. I do believe LL has the inherent responsibility to it's customers to clear the air here. LL has nothing to lose and everything to gain.
As we can see by the posts, this isn't an isolated case. How many others that never read the forums have gone through this?

I guess I have a hard time understanding how the "inside job" works. I think a smoking gun would be if they managed to force the bid to almost exactly the maximum price bid by another. If that were too common to be explained by simple uniformity of land prices, it would be pretty good evidence of rigging. But I haven't seen this in the few auctions in which I've participated.

But the moment they go *over* the maximum bid price--if they had inside knowledge of that maximum, they're taking a big chance that they'll get stuck with the parcel at too high a price to unload except at a substantial loss.

Now, if the hypothesis is that it's more than inside knowledge and that LL is just totally manufacturing bids to drive up the price... still, it's a losing proposition unless they guess right about the other bidders' willingness to keep escalating their bids, and that's a very dicey proposition. If they guess wrong, they're stuck with land that should have auctioned that now they have to unload some other way.

Maybe, having some parcels "sell" at very high prices would make the average L$/m2 for Mainland look higher--but that would suppose that anybody actually has or uses those figures, and that LL actually gave a damn about Mainland resale prices, neither of which is true AFAIK.

That's a gross oversimplification that doesn't take into account the entire situation.

Suppose, instead, that it really is a third party who didn't understand what they were doing. Having established a policy of keeping the bids secret, LL can't just arbitrarily decide to reveal that information in this particular case just to protect their own image. They'd be breaking their privacy promise to that third party.

Or, more likely, this simply hasn't been brought to the attention of someone with authority to act, or else the potential of losing customers that you mention isn't perceived to be bigger than the many other PR issues they need to address. In other words, the silence is most likely because they have more important issues to deal with.

Yeah, I guess the hundreds or thousands of dollars being potentially ripped off from their customers isn't very high on their list of ethics or morals either.

Not a big chance at all. They do know what the highest bid is and bid 10L under thus raising the prices. If they bid higher and lose they unload it cheaper than the winning bid was just like they did with us. On one auction we were in the winning bid was 16K and we bought the land within hours for 10K. It apparently changed hands from the winner, to some person with nothing in his profile except one group owned by Lindens to us. Of course this person wouldn't tell us who he bought it from. All within two hours of the auction.
LL doesn't lose anything except time as they do control the money in SL.

I agree with your first sentence up to the end of the word "idiots", but I disagree with the second one. It was an idiotic thing for him, or anyone, to say, but silence is evidence of a possible number of things, including being totally unaware of the discussion/question/accusation.

InsiderTrading Linden?

It's an interesting thread. I don't entertain the idea of LL doing anything underhanded and, other than a mistake, I can only think of one reason why someone might buy high and immediately sell lower - someone want the other bidder to pay a lot more than the land is worth - it's personal - but it went wrong when the other bidder opted out. That doesn't seem to be the reason in this case.

But at least sometimes it has to work. And as far as I can understand it, the OP's example here is of something that was *sure* to fail, if it were an example of such a scheme. And yours seems to be another example of a failure, albeit less dramatic, if that scheme was what was going on.

Here's my hypothesis of what's really going on in these cases: I think there are speculative auction bidders who believe that on average they can just keep bidding to win, battling it out with competing neighbors till they get the parcel, and then turn around and sell it for a profit to one of the neighbors who develops "non-buyer's remorse": regret for not having made that last winning bid after all. Problem is, sometimes more than one of these speculative bidders goes after the same parcel (possibly sight-unseen, based only on bid history) and end up auto-bidding each other to an absurd price. The auction closes, the unlucky winner takes ownership of the parcel, TPs in to look for that remorseful neighbor, and suddenly realizes s/he's made a Big Mistake, and has to unload it through an alt so as not to besmirch their own brand.

(Just an aside: the Concierge Party group thing is kind of a red herring, I think. A lot of us got that added to our profiles automatically--even if we already had 25 hidden groups--and it would have shown on the profile until the resident explicitly turned it off like s/he may have done for all other groups. The one-group-showing individual was certainly being secretive about any other affiliations, but showing only that particular Linden group in profile is evidence of secrecy, not of any Linden affiliation beyond being a moderate-to-larger customer.)

Good points.

As your DRAMA unfolded with the 50K 512.. there was parallel Drama elsewhere

2 1008's went for the Identical amount of 80,010 with the second bidders bailing at 80K even.

another 1008 went for 65000

all three went to different buyers

here is the profile quote from on of the winning Bidders:

"im very risk taker and a big gambler i love travelling alot and i live my life day byday and im enjoying it so far , very moody person here maybe because my job im a stock's trader in rl so you will see me up and down this is my 2nd life and 1 st life im the same person ."


maybe she works for Bear Stearns ...haha

If they are really a successful stock trader L$1,000,000 would likely to be short change for them, I remember when I made a lot of money the interest I earned alone was L$1,600,000 a month (about .01% of that now I should add) and stock traders then made 4 times as much as me.

Not sure if I am off topic or what... I'm not familiar with the forums... And this tread is all about parcels auctioned in L$... But... I have the need to write something today! The auction system really looks "fishy" lately. I only follow the US$ one...

Full sims are being sold at higher prices then before, on average. I'm not talking about the unique waterfront cool sim that some crazy person wants to buy for a fortune... Just the standard plain sim. Auction prices are going up while land prices in SL are going down.

What really looks fishy is this: A lot (many, many) sims auctioned in US$ never get to anybody... They remain owned by "Governor Linden"!!!

The honest assumption is that somebody bid on the sim and, then, didn't have the money to pay so LL ends up keeping it. But... That many sims?!? On some days, it's most of the sims!

I've opened a ticket 2 weeks ago asking about it... Of course, the status of other people's accounts is none of my business... But I've asked about the "policy" on people bidding and not paying... Shouldn't they be banned from bidding the next day, for instance? I got... No answer. This is my only support ticket that has never been addressed at all...

Meanwhile, prices are going up in the US$ auction so the sims that are really sold brings in a lot more money for LL.

Welcome to the forums!

I don't actually follow the US$ auctions but it *would* be suspicious if too many sims ended up still owned by Governor after the auction was complete.

But the quoted snippet above: Are Mainland prices really going down? That hasn't been the trend I've noticed, but maybe there's been a reversal I didn't see yet. In any case, I can think of one reason why full-sim auction prices might be higher now than, say, a month ago: In the past, auction prices were often depressed by the existence of adfarms planted right on their borders--quite intentionally, so that the adfarmer could get a better price on another adfarm in the newly-purchased sim.

Sims sold at auction and still owned by Governor Linden:

March 16 (1 out of 2 sims):
Minten

March 15: All 3 sims really sold.

March 14 (2 out of 4 sims):
Toothsum
Pearl

March 12 (1 out of 2 sims):
Krongower

March 10: All 4 sims really sold.

March 9: All 5 sims really sold.

March 8: All 4 sims really sold.

March 7 (4 out of 5 sims !! ):
Henrietta
Quenzle
Zveltsa
Umbridge

March 6 (2 out of 2 sims !! ):
Shergon
Lestern

One thing a person can do is win a sim but not take it. I forget how much penality they get charged with this happens. Something too painful to do more than a couple of times.No, they are holding steady at the same base they have been for the last month.

I really dislike the total anonymity of the new auction system. I can understand it being anonymous during bidding, but not after. Plus, I've never found a way to see a list of "Recently closed auctions." It seems like you have to already know the specific auction in order to be able to check its status later. I guess eBay does this too, but you can usually look up peoples' closed auctions by checking their profiles. Here we don't even know whom to check.

This is NOT an LL inside job though. Yeah, it's a whole lot for a 512m lot, but LL makes far more money on island sales, and there's not even an auction there. It does seem like something weird and/or malicious was going on, but who knows. I've actually seen people turn around and sell expensive land at a loss many times in SL and I've never understood it.

Thanks!

So we don't notice that Lindens are bidding them up?

Not saying that they'd do that, but shouldn't openness be a requirement in case that they might?

coco

/me adds WEB-559..


Vote it up at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-559 .

Isn't that why closed auctions remain hidden?