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

The land extortionists and ad farmers don't care. They will ruin every sim they can, and they can do it, because people keep buying their overpriced microplots.

There have been numerous proposals, both on JIRA, and also from groups like the Ad Zoo's War Movement. Every week, we sit in Jack Linden's office hours and keep the subject fresh on the Linden's minds, and will continue to do so. We bring them evidence (and quite a bit of it from the land extortionists themselves), and offer all kinds of proposals to eradicate the abusive practices.

In closing, I am going to make a shameless plug for the War, and ask those who really want it to end to join us: http://etakeh-oh.net/adless/

Yep, I thought about this right after I hit the Submit button: prim density per sq.m. *does* matter at least as much as density per CPU, because of draw distance. Thanks.

I have way too much to say on the adfarming issue to stay on topic, except that I do not like the idea of disposable "land." Maybe I'm just hopelessly deluded, but I really want to think about these pixels as if they were land--emphatically *not* that I think they should appreciate in value or anything like that, but that I want to feel like what I'm building on this stuff is actually improving something, not just a fun little diversion while I wait for the adfarmers to f*ck it all up and force me to move somewhere else. Again, maybe I'm just stuck with an inappropriate mindset, but really, if we're ceding Mainland to be just toilet paper for adfarmers, I'm done with owning any of it, and quite possibly done with owning anything at all in-world.

I totally sympathize, Qie.

Look at the unemployment news in the U.S. today and the news that gas will be at least $5 a gallon this summer.

I'm thinking more about paying for the skyrocketing costs of groceries and gas right now, not mainland next to megaprims and spinning ads on a laggy sim where I can't play for five minutes without crashing or find most of my inventory.

Besides, as much as we kid about the "Important Announcement", people with the smart money are holding it in reserve to see what changes M will make in land creation and tier structures.

Hmm interesting meeting, unfortunately Sunday is Monday Aussie time, so can't make it, would be interested in joining the group anyway.
Unfortunately while it is nice & cheap to pack up your house and sell your land anandoning the sim, it's also cheaper for the adfarmers to do the same and follow you once they know a sim is dead.

In the coming versions of the SL software, the max build height is being lifted to 4096m. In theory, this allows turning any sim into a low density one. What you do is pave it at 1024m height intervals with a sculpted 256x256 megaprim, so you have four "floors" and allow each layer 3750 prims.

If you simply want an un-encumbered view, then the extra height will allow moving skyboxes up higher, and far enough apart not to be visible from each other.

Heres another suggestion: continue to allow small parcels, so that people can rearrange and swap freely, but any parcel smaller than 512 is automatically capped at the average price reported on the economic stats page (3.9/meter at the moment), so that it cant be used for extortion

Location still has a lot to do with it. While looking around before purchasing land for the first time recently, I went to some of the 4.0L/m2 and up to 6.0/m2 plots I saw...just by doing some random searches. There was some nice, green flatland, but those were in sims where nothing else existed except other parcels for sale. On the one hand...nice for someone who wanted solitude, but a bit of activity would be nice instead of feeling like one was pioneering a new continent.

Others in that range were in, to me, undesirable locations.

I ended up purchasing land in the sim we rent land from for our home - it joins two protected Linden oceans. 6 months or so ago, the land was selling for 33.0L/m2. I picked up a 512 and the adjoining 1024 for an average of 9.0L/m2.

Last time I looked at the map there was the beginnings of another smaller island to the north-west of Gaeta. The provisional names for the regions there were also Gaeta. I even TP'd there for a look.

Yes, but a lot of sky junk on the mainland is way below the old 768m limit, so I guess there will still be a lot of silly stuff visible from the ground!

Hence the "rinse and repeat".
IF that happened, then maybe LL might begin to get a clue.
IF that happened and IF it were publicised all over the Net, somebody in LL might be moved to go out and buy a copy of "Clue for Dummies".

I suppose it depends where you look. The core of the mainland from years back is considered nostalgic and is pricey. Ahern and such. Bay City is a total joke. A 1000m was over 2000USD that I scoped last night, saldy Bay City is a vacant ad farm now. Not what I had hoped. Assume not what the Linens hoped either. I would say that the real estate as a trade is over. Flipping land is so over. But the average person buying land, why not? Just don't assume you will get the value back.

As long as residents buy the new mainland regions on auction and residents buy the abandoned parcels on auction, Linden will happily mint more land at as low as 3L per sqm. Even if 50% or more of these new regions end up being continually resold or turned into ad farms, the tier is getting paid. The interesting stat would be the percentage of land that's perpetually abandoned and not producing income for Linden. Can't seem to find that particular metric but just from casual observation, I'd say it's about 5% - most of it being small ad farm plots that don't apparently get sold on auction.

If the 5% increased .. or
If the 5% was 5% of a much larger area than heretofore ...

..then maybe a LL beancounter would be unable to contain his/her outrage.

I don't want to dump on Bay City, because the intent behind it really is a good thing. But any business that gets 2 weeks of promotion on the front page of the SL website is going to become the hottest spot on the grid. Even if it is a 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 plywood box sitting in an empty sim. Location doesn't mean anything. REPUTATION is what is important, whether built up legitimately over time with thousands of hours of work (Caledon) or promoted with 100x more exposure than the most expensive classified ad (Bay City).

My concern, as I already mentioned in another thread, is that too much land without any attempt to increase the population will turn SL into an unusable Dyson Sphere, where no business model is sustainable. The economy will be gone, and the only people left will be those who just use their own money to play house.

That certainly would be an interesting statistic. But I'm pretty sure it's already *way* more than 5%. For one thing, there's a lot of purple on the map, whenever LL bestirs itself to actually give auction IDs to the abandoned parcels, and just looking around at parcels there are a lot in the Governor's name that haven't got auction IDs yet. And from watching what happens when groups fail to maintain adequate contributed tier, there's an awful lot of non-revenue-producing property of that class, too. And I'm guessing there's even more belonging to premium residents who haven't officially abandoned the land but have stopped paying tier, the subject parcels in limbo while LL billing catches up with the gap (or maybe hangs on in hopes the resident will start paying again).

To be honest, I'd guess the total non-performing land share to be greater than 25% as it is now--and that's on land that was sold for twice the current prices or more; if land prices remain this low or fall further, that non-performing share will likely grow.

(On the other hand, L$ auctions seem to still generate bidders, even when auctions for full pristine sims are getting ignored now. Granted, the L$ auctions are sometimes going for very low prices now, and a number seem to reappear on the next round so maybe the winning bidders are reneging, but I don't know if any have just gone unbid at all.)

There's lots of business models in SL that aren't dependent on a limited land supply.

I think there's a lot of that.
Just in a few random sims where I had an interest and noted ownership details, I've noticed "First Land" 512s coming to auction about 6 months or more after the anniversary of the owner born date and land claimed date.

Maybe the tier payments stopped 1 month after the born date.

Excellent points and my only observation was based on the amount of abandoned land that I could ascertain from the simulator usage info.

Interesting note on the auctions. I've put watches on the new mainland regions and I was surprised to find one that closed on the 4th with no bids - the region Exitros (65536 sqm) couldn't find a buyer even at 750 USD. Granted it's a steep sloped hillside but it's green vice granite. Don't know if that's a first, but I wonder what they do with a region nobody will buy?

I will use this to dump on Bay City, the concept.

It is brand new land, not part of the existing continents or even the planned new continent, Gaeta, that LL cranked out to compete with the rest of us. It has interesting builds and is pretty, but is an isolated area of beauty attached to older, established mainland. Despite the fact that Heterocera and Sansara are dwarfed by five other continents, development continues and land values, especially that of brand new land in the five other ignored continents, has sharply fallen. We have had not one but three full sims be completely ignored and fail to auction, whereas Bay City plots have gone for the price of a full sim, or more.

And Linden Lab intends to continue expansion of Bay City. Instead of adding value to the rest of the mainland, where most people who are committed to this game live and have businesses, they instead will continue to add new sims with prettied parcels nearby to compete with people who may wish to develop mainland.

LDPW is finally starting to do some roads... in the old continent, which already has some roads built up. Jack didn't even WANT to do roads at first. When are we going to get more protected green spaces with interesting builds for the rest of the map? When are the rest of us going to get things that improve the value of our land? At this rate it'll be 12 years before Satori, Nautilus, Corsica and now Gaeta get anything to improve their value.

There's about 120 sims in it now, all named and readied for auction, cut off on the Eastern edge. Low tropical sand.
It looks like something that could end up with another 600 sims or so stretching Eastwards over Corsica and Gaeta.

This could get interesting.

For those of us who are old land owners, we are screwed if we try and move. I wonder if the Bay City parcels that sold at auction for $L 270,000 will ever drop to $L 4.0/m2. That would be funny haha -- oh wait, I have a Bay City parcel I'm trying to sell

There's an itty-bitty little problem with the shores of the new "Moreland" continent in the North.
Beach properties are going to need very, very long docks if they want to sail keelboats, or large displacement boats - or even swim!
The water is really shallow and slowly shelving.

No doubt that's true. But those industries don't exist in a vacuum. If renting and real estate crumbled and everyone got fed up and left, I can't believe that could be good for any other industry. I'm still doing fine, and I'm not hugely concerned about what my land is worth, because I'm using it and none of it is for sale. But there's a limit even to my formerly unlimited patience.

Land is the basis of the SL economy.

Rentals are priced to allow the landlord to meet tier (and enough over that to meet other expenses and pay a profit, one hopes).

Content is priced so as to allow the shop owner to meet her expenses, and tier/rental is one of, if not the largest, expense.

The *amount* of land on the grid isn't the driver, nor is the purchase price. It's tier.

Right. I don't even see how they can do much after the continents are essentially complete.

When asked about the failed auctions, Jack did mention the possibility of LDPW going into the unsold sims and adding some content to make them more marketable. But I just look at vast swaths of Satori, Nautilus, and Corsica with no provision for any roads at all, and wonder how any of that will ever be worth anything. (Jeogeot at least got a few paths that could be roads someday.)

I remember there was a time that people just wanted to buy the most sq.m. the sim could hold, for resale, back when "flat green" was worth something. And there was (and is) concern about what happens to the oddly-shaped bits of land bordering roadways. But these days, featureless Mainland is a losing proposition, and it's kind of hard to see what will turn that around.

OK, but
"renting and real estate crumbled" and "everyone got fed up and left" are two separate things and they are not related to each other for the general population.

Renting a build makes sense for someone who doesn't have the skills and/or attitude to rezz a prefab or build their own.
There's always going to be a demand for some of
- Build renting
- Well scripted house rezzers that advise the user and keep a build level and within parcel boundaries
- Help (paid or unpaid)

Real Estate as a business is nonsense in SL, particularly when LL are printing more land.
Most people in "the property business" just flip land.
Flattening a piece of what used to be interesting ground and sticking down a few prims that the buyer is going to zap takes a few seconds. It isn't "development".


You want to sell your land? Set it for sale. No lawyers, contracts, viewings, keyholders and all the complications that we pay others to handle on our behalf in RL.
You want to buy land? Go look, click and buy.

When the First Land program was running, people got started out without the aid of the "property business". I did, and all around me in that sim and other sims all around others did the same. It was no big deal. I understand that the main reason the program ended was that it was being raped by the land barons.
LL could easily start selling direct again, and this time at market prices. They could either sell at a set price or just auction everything.
They'd be in competition with land dealers?? Who the hell owes land dealers a living? Most that I have talked to are quite OK people, but we don't owe them a living.


It would be refreshing if the only way to make a few dollars in SL was to provide a real service or create content.
I'd include build rentals in 'real service', because some people are just not cut out to build.


If large numbers of people get fed up and leave, it won't be because they can't make money in the land business. It won't be because there's nothing to do or wonders to see.
They'll only get fed up if the thing continues to be broken.