Revisit Your Beginning

With not a lot to do one day I decided to list my inventory by date and visit the oldest landmarks I had, dating from January 2007. Well what an eye opener! The first half dozen or more were just open spaces and with some I was trapped by “No Entry” on all sides, one had actually been abandoned and was Linden land. Slowly working my way through I managed to delete 2 or 3 dozen. Where has everybody gone? You can not say it is because of the new adult regions because a lot were PG landmarks. Another thing was the lack of people showing on the map at most of the regions. I realise that some places have relocated and not being in the group would not have been informed but is this a sign of the number of people leaving?

I don't think the phenomenon is a new one. I have regularly carried out the same sort of exercise over the last two years and it merely reflects the "churn" of landowners. It is particularly indicative of the problems that businesses have of maintaining interest, since the landmarks are likely to be clubs and other places of entertainment for which there is (I reckon) huge turnover of both clientele and owners with not so deep pockets.

Pep (Of course, it is going to get worse with the forced migration of Adult businesses)

I agree it's pretty much normal. Land changes hands often.

Then again any land or business cycle goes through upheavals and with the current changes the insecurity people feel will be apparent in the market also. I think that it will shake out, however. Changes tend to have a ripple effect but then things will settle down again.

"Prosperity is just around the corner!"

Whenever I explore old landmarks, I'm constantly amazed at the vast barrenness of land, especially the older western Mainland continents. There's just a tremendous amount of land that's still owned by individuals, not for sale, with a few stray prims on the ground. Inspecting the prims, the most recent may be a month after the parcel claim date, and checking the object count, there's nothing in the sky, either. I don't know how many of these are for accounts that are still paying, and how many the Governor never got around to reclaiming when the account lapsed. (There's some of this on private Estates, too, but I assume they're almost all still paying, unless the Estate owner is AWOL too, still automatically paying the monthly fees. I would think that rare.)

It might be nice if there were less of this, just to make the place more vibrant. If one wanted to reduce it, however, I'm not sure what would be an incentive. (Higher tier??? )

Lifetime Resident Inactive Land Follow-up
Posted by Iridium Linden on May 2, 2007 9:32:43 PM
Recently, we reached out through e-mail to Lifetime Residents who own land and haven’t logged into Second Life during the past 12 months. To our surprise only 13 Lifetime Residents were not active within the last year. While none of those Residents opted to sell their land, several did decide to return to Second Life to see what they’ve been missing. Welcome back!

There are lots of 512's left over from the early days as well. The problem is that these parcels are generally set for sale, but at prices way above current market value. Since tier is free, there is no real incentive to sell at a lower price.

I went back to the first little bit of land I owned, in Sourmilk Ghill in 2006, and everything had changed - not surprisingly, EXCEPT that I recognised two 16m plots with money pyramids on that were still there after over 2 years!

We moved 4 times (meaning 5 locations) during our first year in SL. Every few months we'd expand a bit and it often became impossible or impractical to expand on that sim, so we'd move to another. Now we have our own sim so, PTB's willing, we won't ever have to move again.

I know lots of people who have made "lateral" moves as well - many times because the area ends up looking terrible because of a few bad seeds moving in or it gets laggy. When that happens, a lot of people look into relocating - and that ends up with a case of "Yogi Berra Syndrome" (i.e. "No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

So, it's definitely not safe to assume that old LM"s are "gone". It may be the case in many, but I bet half of them are still around - just off in other lands.

I am hovering atm over some former land that I bought back in March '07. At that time it was all empty, that part of Satori just coming on line. Totally full now (pg region) and no parcels for sale. I notice that my two original neighbors are still here, and their builds show very little change from what I remember.

As I recall, 512's were going for around L$6,000 back then.

I just somewhat did this yesterday by going through LM's to subscribomatics I had. I went through the old ones first and found alot of places gone.

Even clubs I used to pop into are nowhere to be found. And I'm not even a year old yet!

You know i still keep a few old LONG gone LM and picks. For me its a way of remembering great times past that I have enjoyed.

I do that a bit, too. Especially for places I used to go to but never took pictures of, somehow the old landmarks are a way to keep the memory intact.