Land Bots

I've been traveling all over SL lately and I've noticed that almost all the land for sale is owned by just a few large land barons. I'm often on SL during the middle of the night (I'm an hour later than SL time) and have noticed land go up for sale by residents, get snatched up within minutes by a bot and then the price is doubled, sometimes tripled.

I thought LL was cracking down on bots? Residents should have a shot at buying land before the bots do. And by the way, I'm not in the market for land. I've just been noticing how much land is for sale lately and how little of it is for sale by actual residents who are not land barons.

Welcome to SL. I'll abstain from any comments on "land barons" since I don't want to get negative.

There used to be dozens of land traders in SL. When land bots came in they drove most of the human barons out of business. Those that stayed in get nowhere near the profits they used to because the bots get all the cheapest plots. LL said they would do something about the bots but they never lifted a finger.

The bots actually did me a favor because I was addicted to land flipping until they drove me out of the game. I enjoyed being a sim landlord a lot more.

Most of the bot runners are decent people who risk a lot of money and put a lot of hours in so don't feel bad if you end up buying land from one.

The bots are not as smart as they think they are...

They will often mark up plots that honestly need to be marked down...

I've seen bots feed on each other - each buys the plot from the other, raises its price, fails to sell, human manager shows up days later and lowers the price, it sells to the other bot, and repeat.

If you can find a bot's trigger point you can clear unwanted land very fast by setting it 1L below. Even very bad cuts can be offloaded this way...

By contrast, some very good land stays cheap and out of reach of bots simply because its 1L above a trigger point. If you explore enough, you can get some of that land.

If there really is a glitch where bots can snap up land priced cheaply and set to sale to a specific person, I hope it's looked into, because that ain't fittin' that just ain't fittin'.

The use of bots does seem unfair, as much as in land flipping as in false traffic numbers - perhaps more.

It's kind of like all those bad bank loans ruining real estate in real.

Going back to the original question, they haven't done anything about land bots, just traffic bots and camping.

?

What they do is buy it for their group. Human operators come in at some later point, if the team is smart, and evaluate the purchases for resale.

The dumber bots are really obvious: they buy, auto flatten the land by lowering it all to the lowest level of any nearby land, and then auto-relist at a default markup.
- the resulting new parcel is usually utterly useless to anyone and very ugly.

Some of these land flippers also make some insanely stupid choices about cutting land.
- like going into a large plot and subdividing it into a back 1024 and a tiny piece alongside a protected road, rather than putting the usable sized plot along the road.

Doing that made sense in the ad farm era, but this isn't the ad farm era, and almost anyone buying that front parcel for any use at all other than to gain prims for their actual plot elsewhere is going to get AR'd...

- While at the same time nobody wants the back parcel because they're afraid of who might buy the front one...

One of the biggest and most successful landbot runners (and also one of the most honest) has ceased operations and is no longer buying land.

Says something pretty dismal about the mainland market, I should think.

Actually, they did do something about landbots. That's what the Teleport Throttling added in the latest server release was for. It may not have stopped them completely, but it did slow them down a lot. They can't just TP over and over snatching up plots like they once did.

Who is that?

Yeah, watch out I heard he's going into furniturebot draw runners next

That just encourages more bots. Can only teleport 20% as often as you used to? Your bot army has to be 5 times larger.

Never do this. Just go to the first page of land search and set your land to match the lowest price per meter on the list or go .1 lower than the cheapest plot per meter. It may not sell instantly, but it will sell within an hour or two. You'll make a bit more money and your land will most likely go to a non-bot runner since the bots will be set for lower priced plots.

Damn Low Prim bots!

I used to mess around with buying/selling land (it is very competitive) and when I decided to quit, the bots were a great way to guarantee at least some of my money back. So they are not all bad.

But I do understand the negatives outweighing the positives in this case.

There really isn't much money involved buying/selling land. Buying/renting/selling servers is the way to go now because of the over saturation in land.

If we are talking about the same person, I don't believe he voluntarily ceased.

I'm just saying, it's a good way to be sure you can offload junk parcels.

Try to make sure usable lands goes to real people. But the bad cuts and the junk - let the bots deal with that. They can trade it back and forth all day long, and eventually maybe a human will step in and use their much higher than us tier allotment to fix the cut and put it onto the real human market.


To gain the 560 plot next to my first plot, I had to buy 2100 or so of land, spread all over the place, from 3 different land flippers. I recut it all to make my parcel, two good 368s, and was left with some junk strips spread across the sim...
- I wanted the junk off of me asap, so I set it to 1.7L sqm and bots zipped in and grabbed it. Its completely unusable. You could not even manage to recut it with nearby plots unless you bought up a big chunk of the sim and recut everything... So bots were my best way to get it off me.

- The two 368s were very good cuts, but abutted a few strips in the hand of abandoned accounts that could make them perfect...
so I priced them just a little higher to try to get them into human hands, after putting 'free homes' on each to show someone could in fact use them. One went off-market to a land holding company, the other unfortunately got grabbed by a bot. I'd miss-guessed their trigger point. The bot is now trying to sell that parcel for something like 2.9L sqm...

I could feel guilty tricking a bot to buy junk land - there is a real human team back there after all. But I don't. They're gaming the land market, and they're the ones who caused mainland to get so badly cut in the first place years ago... I'm just trying to fix the situation. Doing what I did and then offloading that junk to landbots added 3 useable plots to my sim, even if two were undersized.

(I AR'd some abandoned account and doughnut plots next to those 368s yesterday, if those go through, the two 368s might be able to be repaired into very nice protected road 512s).


My initial 560 was made in a similar way... a neighbor bought up 2 plots around her that had 'fragments', she cut off the fragment that was wrapped around part of my 512 and sold it to me for 100L - giving me a nice shaped parcel and the excuse I needed to jump up a tier and get my second plot.


- That's what I really don't like about these landflippers... they're were a driving force behind so many bad cuts in an attempt to maximize profits alongside ad farmers... if that's coming back to bite them now, so be it.