How low will it go?

Open-space sims have 1875 prims.

Yeah he is talking about void sims a lot of estate owners sell/rent whatever them not as sets of 4 like they come from linden labs but chop them up so you can own a half a void sim or an entier void sim for like 50 bucks a month per 1/4 sim so 200 bucks for an entire void sim or something like that. They just have in the covenant huge restrictions on scripts etc but they are usable I had one for a few months loved it just everyone else had banlines up so the idea of boating and surfing kinda went down the drain cause of all the peple with ban lines up. Kept having to ask the estate owners to come take em down after a few months of this push pull i gave up and left cause the minute the estate owner had his back turned they would go back up again

and compared to normal land, they aren`t worth it as alot more expensive and only for ppl who are really interrested in it

Big cajones demand big pockets. A guy has gotta rearrange himself in public ya know?

I'm amazed one person would buy so many sims at those price. Maybe he thinks that if he buys all the sims available at auction, he can keep the value up because he has no competitors. I'm afraid to buy just *one* sim because I'm convinced the open sourcing of the server will happen sooner rather than later (without any warning) and land value will rapidly deflate. I'd love to buy a sim but can't justify spending that kind of money unless there's a guarantee I'll get a significant proportion back once I'm done with it.

You might want to keep in mind that for 2006 70% of LL's income came from tier and land sales. They can't afford to do anything that would devalue the cost of land/sims or the cost of holding it.

LL looks out for ll and nobody else. if they can increase profits at the expense of island owners they will do so without a second thought.

Hmm so can we buy a void sim island from LL?
1800 prims is enough for a decent sized home in the middle of a lot of water, snow or sand and $50 a month not too bad I guess for that meterage. and you get distance from any neighbours too.

The purpose of a business is to make a profit (and the purpose of most private islands is to make a profit... or are all those rentals and covenant parcels actually soup kitchens and the rental fees being paid simply generous tips?).

Island owners pay a premium (a higher tier) for the advantage (among other things) of not being attached to the mainland, the ability to sub-parcel their sims into covenant land (and revoke it), and the ability to name the sim.

However, it's very nice of you to stick up for those "poor" island owners. I heard that in Monaco a member of the royal family has barely enough clean champagne to drink each day. You better start an awareness campaign over that.

They're called OpenSpace sims, but you can only buy them in fours.

And Kitty, I'll bear what you said in mind. Thanks for that. ^_^

Land value may deflate anyway, but I think it's unrealistic to expect open sourcing of the server to have much if any impact. LL will have to charge an interconnection fee each month to access central services (asset and login servers, for example) that will be nearly indistinguishable from tier, per sim. That's because the only savings to LL compared to existing Estate sims is the almost negligible cost of hosting 1/4 of a rackmount server and any differential in support. (I doubt if LL has yet decided what level(s) of support they'll offer for externally-hosted sims.)

I'd also expect that about the same time open server interconnect is offered, hosting for Estate sims (at least) will be spun-off or sold to some non-LL enterprise, to get this low-margin part of the business off LL's balance sheet.

Thus, the impact on land prices will be limited to any differential in hosting costs, which as a commodity, isn't likely to be very dramatic.

Who knows whether their business model will involve any kind of 'interconnection' at all? I suspect the open sourcing of the server will just allow businesses to set up their own grids, completely separate from the Second Life grid.

It ultimately depends upon how much money I can afford to throw away on something like this. It's not even that I'm badly off in RL. I just see better uses for the kind of money involved in obtaining a limited amount of space in a virtual world. I've owned close to a sim's worth of land before, but bottled it and sold up when the private island prices and tier skyrocketed last year. Everything just seemed so uncertain, and the money I sold it for (not to mention the money I saved in tier) easily covered a two week holiday to Morocco a couple of months back with spending money besides.

I guess some of us, particularly those with no business interest in owning land, just ain't cut out for the risks. When I think of $295 USD a month in tier, I automatically think of the luxuries that would go towards in RL. A new, better Wacom tablet, digital camera, another laptop computer, PVR, etc., etc., etc. When land prices hit a certain level, I think it automatically fell out of reach of many who just wanted it for recreational purposes; those who don't log-in enough to justify such an expensive 'investment' .

Anyway I appear to have descended into a yap. Sorry.

what any of that has to do with the quote is beyond me.

i paid 1500 aud for a rack unit a few years ago. its colocated in sydney and costs me a bit over $90/mo in bandwidth. currently its running 3 hl servers, but when open source comes about i will run 3 or 4 sims on it instead. 4 sims with a 1500 outlay and 150/mo would put me in a position to bury existing island owners unless LL charge an over the top amount to link up with the asset server and whatnot. how you come to the conclusion island estates are 'low margin' for LL is a mystery to me. i reckon theyre raking it in hand over fist.

Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me either. When taking into account the purchase price of the sims he is buying, the tier he is paying, and the fact that much of the land will sit for months before selling -- it just doesn't seem to be possible to make a profit. I must be missing something though, because he buys over and over again so I assume a nice profit is being made and he knows what he is doing.

Is it possible that the larger land barons might have some type of tier deal with LL in exchange for doing all the work of cutting and selling the land?

Oh, indeed! Sorry, I should have bolded "*hosting* for Estate sims," not Estate sims themselves. What I'm speculating they'll outsource is just a modest step beyond what they've already done with colocation. And I only mentioned Estate sims because I can kinda imagine how they could unbundle the hosting part of billing for Estates, but not for the Mainland (although they wouldn't have to unbundle the billing to spin it off or outsource it, of course).

But we do disagree, I suspect, about what would be "an over the top amount to link up with the asset server and whatnot." I really think it will be very close to current tier fees, per sim, per month because not having to host the sim just doesn't save them all that much. (I really don't mean to put words in your mouth, but I'm guessing that would seem excessive.)

Now if I'm right about that, then there will be some interest in alternative unconnected grids, with completely separate asset servers, accounts, currency, etc. (however those services come to be available--e.g., will LL open source the asset servers?) And then it'll be a question of whether the interconnect fee is worth the access to LL's customer pool, and to the rest of LL's grid.

Woke to find some L$8.3 per meter land for sale on the list. This is a sight I have not seen since Black Thursday. Happy shopping, land buyers. Good luck selling today, land sellers.

Also of note, land on the list is going for lower than land you can get at auction. They also dropped 13 more sims to the auction pipeline last night. My condolences to the guy who got 20 sims at auction over the last few days.

Thanks for the updates Raymond. I got a fun little parcel to play with at a price I was happy to pay thanks to all the info.

Thought about tiering up to buy some of the bargain land on the list today. But the more I thought about it, I just can't see putting more real money into SL. Forget Ginko and landbots and casino bans and rotating ads. The main reason I'm sick of it all is the horrible performance. And the layering of Voice and Windlight are just going to make things worse. Forget it.

I actually had a lot of space let in my tier (over 10k, ffs) and was thrilled to get about half of that today at around 8-9L$. That was pure waterland in a corner of a sim that appears to be on protected waterways (an empty sim) because there is an actual stretch of Linden Maint' land on the edge. Works enough for me, to be honest, because soon, very soon, I'm ditching the last sim I have and sticking with crappy mainland. I refuse to pay added tier on the sim when it changes, but am just enjoying it for a while longer.

I am *hoping* that at some point the prices DO go back up for mainland...then all the waterfront and waterfilled land I have may go as well, with me happily walking away with another profit. I paid 6L for the other land I have (all waterways, surrounded by protected waterways too) so...shoot, let it hit half way back up to where it was and I wont MIND walking away from SL. You know, to try another buggy game lol

I'm thinking of moving to a better location soon. If I sell my land at a loss it effectively doesn't matter as the land I might buy will be cheaper too - for those who are moving rather than investing, it is the relative values of the pieces of land involved that are more important than any profit or loss on the original piece.

seems many people are thinking the same thing. ive seen 6 parcels go up for sale on my home sim the past two days, one of them is a 5600@ 90k (wishful thinking). i will offer him 60k. ive already picked up a couple of 1024s at 11/m

A total of 46 sims currently on the auction page. A base of L$8.4 per meter on the mainland for sale page.

LL is in ur mainland, lwering itz valu.

Lower please.

LL is biting the hand that has feed them for the last few years,

It makes me Sick ,Sick, Sick.

seems like the only way to make up the shortfall is by setting up adfarms..........grrrrr.

I've got this mental picture of Lindens in flexi hula skirts playing limbo.

It keeps me warm and fuzzy at night while I see that none of the land barons in my sim have decided to lower their prices too so I can add on to my current plot =( Nope it's 6100+ for 512s, and the sim isn't even that nice. No water, adds all along the protected green road... bah.