Land Business crisis ?

You were already told how it benefits SL. Lower land prices allow more people owning space on the grid, allowing more people on the grid. More people to buy stuff in shops, etc.

When I talk about land prices, I also would like to see prices come down all across the board - that includes estates. If I wasn't renting from Desmond, I would buy an island.

You seem not very up to date on the direction the Company is taking... it's only a matter of time before you'll see private sims hosted by other companies other than LL, adding competition to the prices of sims. This market is very likely to migrate to that of a server colocation/rental market before long. Right now LL has a monopoly, and all the headaches involved with it. High maintenence costs, more people to employ to maintain all those servers. They will cut costs like crazy once they are able to open source and offer licensing to third parties hooking up sims to the grid.

Watch for a geometrical grid explosion if/when that happens. I look forward to it... maybe you don't.

honestly i was suprised they paused the release of land, before corsica was finished



if this is true, why should they not release 10/20sims daily again, i am not convinced they have reached their goal, i still see L$6sqm+ on the board as lowest price, i think they want to see people own more land, this would have several benefits, not only would it make nicer sims, but also bigger tier profits ?

This is how:

1) Prices coming down means that more people can enjoy the grid - mainland is the entry level, basic product. Price -vs- volume of customers is a fairly simple relationship.

2) Mainland is a very crude, simple product. Insanely expensive, insufficient customer support, and subject to anarchic 'ad farms' and other blights. This is why thousands and thousands have sought private estates - better management. Yet - the Company gets tier payments there too! That's how it benefits the grid at large.

* * * * *

Incidentally, if you've been watching my posts closely, yes, I predicted my own land-baron doom.

I'm not stupid enough to think current conditions will last forever. Sooner or later there will be cheap enough competition, and tier charges will come down. Waaay down.

I'll still be able to charge a little bit extra for a super-premium area, but not a lot more over tier. Eventually the margin will be such that I'd be working a part time job for free - which even as an enjoyable hobby I'd have a rough time justifying, maintaining tens of sims. I'd probably work something out with the residents, to continue Caledon overall even if it ultimately wasn't financially viable timewise for me to manage personally.

That won't happen tomorrow, but it is more than likely to happen on a 10 year horizon. And at that point, mainland will be worth less than ever, because everyone will be able to get enough cheap, decent land away from ridiculous adfarm blight.

It was a bubble and now the bubble has burst. This wont be the last bubble and wasn't the first bubble. Basically you have to wait for the next bubble to come along for dramatic stuff like that. If you keep track of forums most of us have been talking about it. I know I was last winter and my comment was its a bubble. This is also the case with the rest of the SL growth. It goes up and down like anything, but due to the medium its in its more dramatic and the ups and downs move a lot faster. Lower your prices and/or sell to a land baron that is willing to shoulder the cost for the land you dont want to pay tier on. If you were depending on land moving fast then this is not usual in sl previous to this bubble land would sit for months before selling. I had land that sold as the bubble started that had been up for sale for 3 months or so. You have to remember that land and everything else in sl are generated artificially so in the case of land anytime LL wants to lower prices they just have to dump sims onto the market and they cause them to drop.

This is life inside SL. Although some people hate this kind of thing it does get rid of "land flippers" who are basically opportunists they buy land and flip it and work on the basis of it being a fast sale. Land flippers are the ones with those ugly signs all over the place. The less land flippers in SL the happier most people are hehe. If you land sold fast at one point it was not due to end users it was due to land flippers and barons selling to each other. This will not be the case now because they can't dump their land fast enough. End users are happy and just hang onto their land and may sell it once and awhile. What you were experience was barons and flippers selling to each other which was a fake market to start with. Now your starting to experience the real SL market where end users buy land and then dont sell it. End users are not that large in number and land flippers can no longer dump land so the market slows down.

Here's how it pans out from my low-end premium account perspective. I have some land in one sim that's split across a Linden road with a horrid little mess of an adfarm on one side. Effectively in the middle of my land. So I went touring around the new land to see what was going, but everywhere I went there was an ad farm. Even in brand new sims. This is a total disincentive to relocating, let alone a new resident looking for land.

If Linden Labs is serious about premium account holders owning land on the mainland, they have to make it an attractive proposition. The current status quo makes the mainland the ugly sister next to the beauty queen private island estates. Get rid of the ad farms and you'll see a flood of residents snapping up land. Simple as that. Otherwise the mainland is doomed and LL might as well start recycling empty mainland sims as 'B-stock' private island sims. Lower the tier across the board and you'll see a much higher retention and investment level.

Between ad farms and sky-high tier, LL would have to give away the mainland land free in order to clear the huge swathes of yellow. And even then they'd be merely giving you a montly tier bill to pay.

Just my 2L$ worth.

I just paid as much for half a sim as an Island costs for mainland that was next to mine in Corsica. Why? Because I am thinking long term and want to maintain a contiguous land mass.
Most of it is for public use for a place to chat that is peaceful at this point. I only became a landlord by chance when someone flew by and loved how open the place was and asked to rent.

So by now you know I'm not into land for profit. I guess I'm thinking like the long wave theorists in that at first new tech creates a gold rush like frenzy and then after that, the real phase begins of building the new cultural and social structures. I want to be part of that.

Is it a gamble? Oh yes. No guarantees at all.

SL is not entertainment for me or an escape. It is the next step in my artistic and social development. I believe that Phillip is a visionary and life is better in the wake of a visionary to me.

So what land is worth depends on the motives of who is buying it and what part of themselves they are investing in.

LL is more at risk from the swathes of purple. (abandoned land that nobody is paying tier on) All that yellow - someone is paying the tier.

But yes, I think the mainland is a failed utopian social experiment. From reading Phillip's previous statements about it, I believe that he thought that it would spontaneously erupt organisation out of anarchy. A giant Burning Man experiment. But even Burning Man has some basic rules...

Well... we see reality in action now. Total anarchy doesn't spawn organisation, it spawns more disorganisation. It's been my belief for a long time that riding the edge of order and chaos, is where great complexity (of all kinds) arises. So of course, you see communities spontaneously self-organising out of the net.ether in places such as Caledon, where there's a few basic rules, preserving as much freedom as possible while limiting certain kinds of behaviour in ways that foster a healthy community.

Yet, it doesn't happen on the mainland. Those basic rules do not exist.

Problem is, some of us aren't quite willing to give up on it. I like the diversity of the Mainland. I don't want to live in a virtual "gated community." I like having neighbors with interests and tastes completely different from my own. But it's just not fair that the whole thing can be turned to sh*t by adfarms. LL may choose to act on the adfarm jiras. If not, we should give them one more chance, with a serious round of organized civil disobedience. And if they still don't get it, then it's only a matter of time until the continents are ceded exclusively to the adfarmers, who'll finally have an appreciative audience: each other, in a sea of Linden purple.

Your statement is worth a hell of a lot more than that. If only LL would listen...

The tier for the SL projects, err I mean mainland is too high. If they want more premium accounts then they need to lower tier and not the initial cost of land. Mainland is a huge disappointment for many. People get packed in like sardines, they cannot really enjoy their land or make it look like how they want because they are surrounded by others poor taste in builds and have to resort to putting up walls that are just as ugly because we have no ability to visually mute other people's objects yet.

As far as there being a 'crisis', only the greedy or just plain stupid got burned when the bubble burst. The signs were there all along.

As far as people losing on their 'investment', there is no such thing. Land in SL is an extremely high risk gamble when abused to make quick and easy cash, and guess what, LL could close up shop tomorrow and no one has any recourse. They may also change the rules at any time and you still have no recourse.

People do not need to own land to join up here, in fact if that were the case land prices would be going through the roof. Plenty of people don't want to own land, that's a simple fact.



We'll have to see how much LL charge for them to join the main grid before being able to make predictions like that and LL are going to charge them to join the main grid.

Thanks for the advise Wilhelm.

I have sold to end users only btw, and still do.
It took 4 weeks on average to sell and 8 weeks max.
Well, just to set the record straight, ggg

But I get your point, I'm experiencing the real sl now maybe.
And land flippers, oh yes... I've seen them.

well.. they can either regulate it or not. If they say no ad farms then they are starting to regulate. Anytime anyone brings up any form of mainland regulation there are always 20 people pop up and say nonono leave it be we like our freedom. They can either tell you what to put on your land or not. Since the idea of the mainland is to have it completely yours they can't dictate who buys or not. Those guys paid lindens for the land and yes put up ad farms on it. They can't suddenly turn around and say no you can't sell the land like that and you must join it all up and sell it "this way". Well they can but then people will start screaming about them meddling in affairs. So unfortunately its a damned if you do and damned if you dont situation. They can't take the ad farms down because that means that those ad farm holders would have to basically be told what kind of content they can put on their land (we already have people upset about that). They can't tell them to join it up either its their land and they have the option to slice and dice. They can't take it back because that would mean refunding tier and initial layout cost. Since no one on mainland wants any form of regulation then they leave it be. So it is as it is because whenever any type of minimal zoning is suggested there is usually some form of outrcy and LL has a hands of role in most cases anyhow.

The additional servers allows SL to disperse the load of all those free logins. That was already addressed. And those free users often buy lindens, or make lindens, and spread the joy around as they participate in the economy.





google for colocation of game servers and look at current prices for other MMORG servers, now, in the same hardware class as SL uses for simulators. That's going to be a general going rate for total cost, by all estimations.

Some of those companies have SL like worlds in dev right now. Competition is coming, mark my words.

I think LL expects more people like the mainland landlords to buy land and make it pretty. We will pay the 195 tier, and keep mainland pretty. Problem is, that is a lot to pay for most people, so you don't see a lot of us out there. We can only pay so much because of competition with private islands, and the fact that there are a lot of people out there who are unwilling to put any money into the game, and don't earn enough from the piddly jobs that ARE here (since these likely have no skills).

i'm looking at eventualy putting money down on a sim, but having looked at the options and what I want mainland sims have too much limitation. I can't put in void sims like i wanted for a place to go boating. I can't make my own terrain (that's no big deal but its a nice idea i guess if people like that). I may be attached to sims which use so much bandwidth that mine suffers as well. I can't add another sim to it later on withouth attempting to buy a neighbour out making it very hard if you want to expand. So in the end mainland sims are for people who want a bit of a bargain on owning a sim and who never intend to go beyond 1 sim. Sure there are people like that, but they are rare islands have so much more choice and so much more control over things that yeah there is a discount on tier on mainland but that's for a reason its not as nice as islands

hehe your welcome. If you sold to end users you were in competition with flippers then. I"m nto sure how you only sold to end users unless you didnt put the plots up for sale and sold them one by one to individuals, but likely your prices were somewhat more reasonable as end users dont often overpay. Well they didn't used to anyhow although some were paying that crazy 16-18-20 price back near christmas but that was a rare few and many were warned that they will loose money because they wont be able to resell for more then what they bought it for if it even matters to them.

I'm not talking about the price of hosting or running the servers, I'm talking about the price LL will charge for these servers to interact with the main grid. This is a slightly different issue.

Now if someone comes up with a super grid of their own, then they may take some numbers away from the main grid but the main grid is where it's at. LL recognise that their core business is selling land and receiving tier fees. They are also going to still want to sell their own server space and are therefore highly unlikely to allow competitors to be able to vastly undercut them on pricing.

Of course IBM once believed nobody would be able to make PC's cheaper than them

There are all kinds of regulations on content already and more all the time, and technical limitations already placed on minimum size of parcels. But the solution doesn't even have to be regulation: some of the jira items just call for the ability to visually mute all contents of a parcel from another parcel. It doesn't matter to me if the ad is there, as long as it's not visible by anybody standing on my land (or with their cam over my land, whichever's easiest to implement). Doesn't restrict the adfarmer's rights in the slightest, in fact they get the added right to visual mute my parcel, too--they'd just have to "buy the viewer's view" to get anybody to see their ads.

LL is always in this predicament of saying "you guys handle it" (meaning the residents) while not giving us any tools to do so. Can you really have a resident-run law enforcement or business regulation without any ability to punish the badguys? Can you really expect residents to clean up the mainland when we have 0 power over distruptive elements? Nope.

To me, it seems that the good stuff doesn't come out of total anarchy. It comes from cooperation (meaning, a voluntary agreement to follow some set of rules). We don't need LL to regulate the mainland at all, provided LL gives us tools to let us make our own local rules.

Here's one idea: if you own 100% of a mainland sim, excluding linden land, you get to choose some set of covenant clauses such as: no ad farms, no clubs, no camping, residential only, pg, mature, adult etc.

Less land for sale now than 72 hours ago

50 000 + online now

I"m thinking that there is some wierd issue that makes this not possible because the covenant page is in place etc. In all honesty though not many people buy mainland sims in their entirety because its kinda like the rest of us with prim addictions once you have one you can't just stop at one. YOu get another and another making it more sensible to buy islands where you can keep your entire land holdings in one spot. In any event the covenant page exists on the mainland sims. I have no idea if its usable or not though in any event mainland is associated with no covenants so i'm thinking that they have that turned off to keep mainland the way it is and if people want to have rules they buy islands.

I've heard unsubstantiated rumours that price could be the same for one island - for one server.

spread that across four sims (one server is four sims) and do the math. I did - the cost comes in about the old rates for sim tier - 195 a month for a sim. Of course you're paying more because you're carrying four sims, and not one. But those who need contiguous land of more than one sim, this is great. Mind you the cost for setup will go down too - more likely around 50-200 dollar setup fees, depending.

LL will certainly cut costs, because they wont have to pay for upkeep or maintenance for that server - they'll be playing registry. For a quick look at what registries charge for domain names - well, they were once a lot more, but now you can get them for 10-20 bucks a year.

Yes... a year. And Verisign is certainly not doing badly at all.

That's the scenario I see too.

Like webserver domain names, and like Google selling adspace (search relevance), the Company will be selling grid name/location + grid search.

Which will pretty much be the end of any form of land barony, except perhaps in some super-premium, well known areas. And even that's not assured.

I generally echo your sentiments except that it is not hard to go beyond 1 sim - you just do different developments in different sims. Buying up your neighbors is problematic and I wouldn't bother unless it was reasonable. But when I look at Zamyatin, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole - disgusting. I have to keep my draw distance down to keep my sanity. Fortunately, Richard Palace developed Malyshkin and it's nice. the other two neighboring sims don't appear to be bad.... yet.