Land Bubble has Officially Burst, and LL Pours it On!

I can't believe I'm seeing this, after all these years: land, good land in large chunks, is selling for under 4.0L/m2, I'm even seeing prices at 3.8 or less.

Unbelievably, Linden Labs is pouring dozens of sims on still, even with supply clearly outstripping demand by a wide margin.

I'm glad I'm not a land speculator, mainland has just cratered.

I guess this is good news for the ad farmers though, with so much cheap land to cut up, spoil and dump the leftovers.

I wonder who's going to pay for the electricity on the new servers though.

It certainly is strange and at the other end of the scale you've got Bay City. Boom or bust?

Did we miss the official announcement? Or are you a Linden?
It's hard to belive there's actually a point wher even Land Filippers finally stop bidding against each other and their alts

If LL income weren't made by 90% of the land *fees* (both mainland and estate) i would agree with you (notice: fees, not entry price). Remember: the fees are paied per month, until you run your activity, the entry price is one time income, with 3 months (and few days) of fees, you've already reached the sim setup price (estate).
There's an "optimal" are where the selling prices should float (it's not ZERO, because in this ppl may abandon their land without triple thinking at it), i say it's something like 200 USD per sim (both mainland and estate) as setup price. There would be even another formula that may works: paying X months of fees in advance when you signup (ie: 3 months = 900 usd).
The monthly fees aren't "balanced" as well IMHO, if they will lower those too, they will increase their income as well, because many ppls would be attracted of it. I say something like 150 USD per month (per sim) would be a fair price.

We already have a good example with the recent openspace simulators, they doubled the prims, they lowered the price (with the regular ones..) and they gave us the possibility to buy only one at time (not a pack of four anymore), at a first eye it may looks like less income for LL, but they are doing more money than before.

So land (first) costs has no impact on LL bill, but the opposite: it is increasing the income.

and we still need even more cheap land to help reduce overcrowding.

MORE LAND!

MORE LAND!

MORE LAND!

MORE LAND!

* Looks for a "MORE LAND!" placard emoticon but fails to find one. *

Moreland would be a great name for the next continent. Gaeta has been rounded off now.

Reduce overcrowding?
Mainland actually IS overcrowded - in a sense.
The small plots can have an oppressive feel. Like many other Premiums, I started off in a First Land 512. It was beside an ad-free paved road however. I'm not sure that I would have been so enamoured with the idea of a SL mainland home if my only option at entry-level cost was a 512 buried in a ghetto or wasteland.
First impressions are a major factor. Quite a lot of SL first impressions suck.


LL could reduce and reorganise tier to encourage more to buy and particularly go for bigger parcels.
A 1024m entry-level parcel would tend to clean up the environment. That in turn might encourage more to buy.

I don't necessarily disagree with this, but there are a couple things pulling the other way.

One thing that does *not* pull the other way is the sunk cost I and others have in now nearly worthless Mainland. I suppose there were land speculators who are burnt by the decline, but speculating on commodities is always a dicey business, and if there weren't a risk of a downside, there'd be no reward for the upside (competition inexorably driving margin to zero, and all that). And those of us who bought the land to use still have the land to use, so we're out nothing. (We can rue paying too much too soon, but really, it's pocket change compared to the tier we've already paid, and will continue to pay.)

The biggest downside of the current nearly-free Mainland prices is that there's practically nothing left that's worth paying tier on anymore, thanks to the explosion in new-style adfarming. (It's really very simple: get an alt or a business partner to own the extortionately-priced microparcels, and another alt to put up pretend ad networks with gargantuan spinning, particle-spewing ad towers on other parcels to make the whole mess totally obnoxious. Or, if you're really lazy but still greedy, just put banlines on your extortionately-priced microparcel so everyone is inconvenienced any time they try to navigate around it, till they relent and pay the ransom.)

The problem is that cheap land makes it easy for these scum to buy and chop up more Mainland than ever before, and we're definitely seeing this happening now, all over the grid. At these prices, every beautiful Mainland sim is one parcel sale away from becoming--quite literally--worthless. Until LL decides to do something serious about this problem, the current land prices offer no barrier at all to simply paving the Mainland with ads and land extortion schemes.

The other thing is whether "overcrowding" really is such a bad thing. We get lots and lots of posts from people wondering why most of the grid is empty, but with as much land as is out there, and concurrency as low as it is, it's hardly surprising that most sims are empty most of the time. Don't know what an optimal average population density would be, but based on the appeal of Bay City, it would seem that people like higher density more than wide open spaces. So maybe we're not crowded enough?

If only the minimum parcel size was 512m, 99% of the problems with ad-farms and false pricing would cease overnight.

This is true. Buying a 512 plot in the middle of an empty sim means that you're still at the mercy of the wolves. Yet the plus side of this is that we can just move elsewhere the moment a wolf moves in nextdoor. Mr wolf can huff and puff all he likes, but me and my buddies will just sneak out the backdoor and go live elsewhere.

The wolves can't afford tier on all the mainland and so they'll never have control.




Yes, overcrowding really is a bad thing. It's bad socially and technically. Overcrowding means poor frame rates, lag and neighborly disputes. It also looks fugly and puts a huge strain on the asset servers as people try to fly (stutter) over it.

As for the mainland being seen as void of people - well that's just the way it is. People don't really live in their virtual homes. And even if they did, it wouldn't necessarily make them sociable. Just like in RL, when people are in their virtual homes then they don't want random strangers knocking on their front door and asking for bum secks.

Sorry, but they *do*, and for any supported draw distance, there's no escaping them. Most certainly not to the new continents. Have you *looked* at what's left of Corsica, Nautilus, even Jeogeot? About the only land that hasn't been totally ravaged are a few of the oldest sims (and Linden Village, of course), where lifetime members just haven't traded any of their parcels (and, one prays, never will). There are a handful of sims left on the newer continents, too, that haven't yet been ravaged, but as I say, that's just one parcel sale away.

Seriously, just *look* at what has happened to the new continents. Even if we had ten times as much land, any new sim that gets divided for sale in under 1/4 sim chunks is instantly chopped.

The Lindens fell victim to the same mistake: the idea that "market forces" would somehow work to contain the spread because the tier would be too high to support it. But with a single premium alt's group-deeded bonus 512 able to destroy 35 sims at very low cost per month after stipend, there's simply no containing this--especially when the land itself is nearly free.

I think that the attractions of Bay City were
1. The theory that it was going to be zoned
2. Open spaces around
3. The theory that it would continue to be high-profile going forward
4. Double prims for the tier

High density of people works in RL, it doesn't work so well in SL.
As 2K notes, there are SL issues.
Lag for one.
Unsolicited chat filling the screen is another.
In a club environment, it's to be expected that the screen might be be filled with a mixture of high-intellectual debate and WOOT's.
Conversations appearing from a totally different context next door might be seen as a pain. If the contexts were Mature on one side and PG on the other, this would be even more noticeable.

There's only one answer: permaban land choppers and ad farmers and reposses their land. No if ands or buts. If LL is serious about getting residents to make something of the mainland then serious action is needed. There's so much land on the market and so much tier already coming in that LL could quite easliy take the income hit incurred by taking adfarm and land extortion plots permanently off the market.

The way to get more people to go premium and buy more land is reduce tier.

Or put in intermediate banding. If you have 1/2 a sim and just want a tiny bit more, you still have to double your tier - that is harsh.

Maybe the market force that will change things is that with near-free land prices, people will just dump land when a sim gets raped by ads. They just move on to the next clean sim, rinse and repeat.
LL get left with a pile of abandoned land in sims in which only a few small ad plots are paying tier.

In response, LL either make the land more expensive or they eventually get a clue and zap the ad farmers.

Yeah, as I said, I'm just not sure about the overall "overcrowding" thing, and good points about the most likely appeals of Bay City. But I kinda don't grok the lag thing. If this refers to the (very real) lag caused by agents and child agents in a sim and its neighbors, then agreed. But the problem of lag due to builds (geometry and especially textures) isn't a function of parcel size, but of prim count, right? So, unless we're arguing for reducing the *prim* density (/me avoids incoming rotten fruit), I'm not sure how density affects this kind of lag.

(Note: Although OpenSpace sims reduce the prim density per sim, they don't reduce it per CPU nor per server NIC, so no net impact on "prim density lag."

Hmmm how about this rule
No build on parcels < 512m
This way, you can still divide up a small piece of your lot to sell to your neighbor so he can expand his lot.
I think LL make the parcel units 4mx4m so that the shapes of the parcels would be organic.

I was thinking of high-density lag purely in terms of the dynamic factors both server and client side.
That would be avatars moving about, avatars with script loading, ARC factors and textures changing in displays.

How I wish something like this would happen! I do not understand why LL is so insistent on defending the land cutters' and ad farmers' "rights" over 99% of other residents. I really don't. It's so obvious that what they're doing is completely exploitative in nature. There's no fine line between beauty and ugliness there. I've spent my own energy and time picking up cheap land and putting it back together only to have the 2nd or 3rd person down the line chop it right back up again. My abuse reports on obvious ad farms are continually ignored. I'm through with that.

The thing is, most people won't abandon their raped land for fresh territory, because they've taken the time and care to landscape and furnish it and establish it as a base. If they run a business, picking up and moving all the time will be their ruin.

I don't understand what the plan is with the continual flood of mainland, if there is one - it pisses me off, though. The land cutting seems to be happening at a faster rate than before. It seems apparent that whoever's in charge has decided to focus on a small niche in mainland, and leave the rest to the wolves, as long as they can get tier out of it.

Dropping tiers prices and lower land prices.........nice combo

You're onto something there, Elgyfu. I'd take your idea to the logical conclusion and drop the current laddered tier scheme altogether and replace it with a scaled fixed rate of US$ X.XX per Sq metre that changes when you cross certain thresholds: 1/8 sim, 1/4 sim half sim, full sims, etc., and that the amount you pay in tier would be directly proportional to the amount of land held no matter how much or how little you hold.

Nice idea idea, but you *know* that ad farmers and land choppers will only coalesce their itty bitty plots in each sim into a single 'block' and then fill 'em up with the usual crap.

Because at the moment adfarmer all try to only own 1 or 2 16m in each sim, but make it 512 and they suddenly need to find 32x the tier to do that.
Perhaps we ned to take some time lapse footage of a few pristine sims as they are raped & pilliaged and dump them on M-Lindens desk.

They will always find ways around minor restrictions, as long as their activities continue to be condoned by LL overall and they continue to make a profit.

Additionally, there are legitimate builds on lots smaller than 512 size. With prim-stinginess and sculpties, it is possible to have a decent small home or business on smaller lots, and a few people (including me) have done this. If restricted in this fashion, you would see legitimate users abandoning their small lots while ad farmers simply work around it. I can see large ad superfarms where enterprising ad farmers rent out portions of their 512s to other ad networks, for example.

On one of my explorations through Bay City (while I could still TP there) I saw an office for an ad network there. Obviously at least some of them are making good money exploiting mainland if they can afford to have their offices in Bay City.

That's exactly it. The extortionists can only operate when there's a limited supply. They hate the idea of LL releasing more mainland.

Although I pity the people on the coast because the coastlines are always gonna be in high demand and short supply. So they'll always be an easy target for the wolves (or sharks?).

From what I've seen, openspaces are pretty good because you are loading typically 75% less textures within your draw distance, say, than on a standard region. Which is a huge lag advantage.

Of course, prims can be clumped together and you could be smack in the middle of that, so it sort of varies.