Our favorite little adfarmer takes aim at Linden Lab auction Sims

Ugliness due to lack of skill , time or laziness is one thing, for deliberate extortion is another................

I personally think it is form of extortion to spend more if you want more control over your virtual landscape or creative canvas.
The fact LL doesn't care is because they are making profits off it.
It all comes down to money.
If I had tons of money I just hire others to help me build my own world not even bother being here except to be with friends.

Well I'm here for the people, sure there's some oddballs & nutcases and slimballs, but the majority are great people.

I was going to say that but I didn't want to be snarky. I'm trying to be better.

Whatever that is, it sounds horrible. Spider-thing?!?


I'd actually kind of like to see that.

One thing I don't like about the idea of banning 16m.. they'll just move up to the smallest size allowed and go from there. Right now, we're talking three prims of pure ugly (very few of the ads I've seen are tastefully done), so imagine this multiplied by however many prims the 'allowed' land size would be.

This is why I want the visual 'mute,' so they can build on their land.. and I can ignore the crap outta it. Out of sight, out of mind and I'm less likely to want to buy the parcels to remove the ads.. because I won't see the ads.

Yep will be 300 temp rezzed 10m flexy cube prims next

Except, of course, they're *not*--this is losing them revenue and lots of it. Even the largest adfarmers pay only a scant few sims of tier for land scattered in 16sq.m. parcels with which they depress property values for the entire Mainland--excepting those handful of Linden-zoned Mainland sims, where prices are astronomical. And so who wants to be a Premium member and pay tier to LL now? Instead, do we suppose all those folks were driven to island estates? Not hardly. Yeah, there's good business there, but it's a tiny slice of the potential landowning ex-residents who bailed the <503> out of ugly old SL.

If the Mainland revenue hemorrhaging isn't obvious enough yet, LL will have an epiphany come multi-grid interconnect and island hosting as a commodity. They've got what should be an enormous competitive advantage in the Mainland, which they're currently squandering. Fortunately, some of the Lindens are starting to get it. The longer they wait to act, the more disruptive it will be.

Yeah, not to gang up on Desmond, but I was also going to mention that deliberate trashing of the mainland isn't making or breaking his business.

I have an estate too, so I'm okay. But I still feel a responsibility to stick up for the little guy who wants to buy land. That is the core of the SL experience, and right now it stinks on ice.

3ring, I get what you're saying, but 1 sim isn't big enough for that; 4 sims, and maybe I can ignore the fact that I'm an island in a sewer, and put up some border mountains. But I'm not going to pretend it doesn't bother me when there is upwards of $4000 and $195 a month at stake. For that, I should be worry-free. And it's LL's responsibility to provide that worry-free service, and do something about this problem. Whether they ban it, or provide a visual muting, or provide some kind of zoning; whatever. Just fix it.

grins

Yeah, no fear, I don't mind a little snarky

What amazes me is how a handful of prims - and not even very big ones! - can carry so much intent, and bug the daylights out of people so effectively.

I'm thinking it must be the parceling/pricing in combination, plus a sense of the idea behind it.

Very near where a current 'ad farm' in Alice is, there was this black ugly cylindrical 'cage' looking thing, big enough to contain an avatar, rolling around and eating up sim physics resources for months.

Nothing I could do about it - *that* was horrible, and yet, it didn't bother as much as the intent was neutral. It was simply there.

I absolutely agree though - adfarms need to go.

Which is what got me thinking about this. It's not exactly an adfarm - a slightly wrong-crafted policy would actually leave these clusters in place. These aren't ads posted, just a symbol. The prims don't loom large over the land - not anywhere *near* what an adfarm tower typically is. It seems the criteria here are a) highly priced small parcels and b) any prim whatsoever on them.

And yeah, we have a responsibility to stick up for anyone dealing in good faith, little or otherwise.

What I wonder is who the 'mains' are - I'm almost sure every parcel cutter is an alt of someone who has been around long enough to know to do this kind of thing.

Precisely... the allure of extortionist techiniques using small parcels is just too prevalent. It is NEVER about whether there are ads, it is ALWAYS about the price of that parcel to "buy back the view". As such there is absolutely no policy that can be written to cover the content, because it involves subjective interpretation at best. At worst, it limits creative freedom while not really addressing the problem.

That leaves us to tackle the high prices. The land market here is an artificial contruct. While in RL, zoning and sign ordinances prevent blight, that can't work the same here. In SL, we do have the ability to control the amount of money someone can demand from these small parcels, whereas we cannot do that in the RW. Its perfectly acceptable as a solution. We need to attack the economic incentive in our land system which encourages being a jerk to your neighbors.

--
Proposal for a scalable limit on the price of land, based on total parcel size
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-894
Visit. Log in. Vote for it. Spread the word.

I'm not so sure Avion, why would they wait so long? It's not like the SL community hasn't been screaming about this for a long time.

Bottom line is they make more money pushing people out to estates, more tier.

Everything takes this long. Gambling and unregulated banking were serious problems for LL for years, and were only dealt with a few months ago. It appears to me that the adfarming and deliberate griefing and extortion is getting much worse, as more and more penny ante assholes figure out that they can "make money" this way, while the community at large gets louder and angrier about it.



Not necessarily. I pay $295 a month for my estate. A mainland sim with 64 happy little separate residents would be $320 in tier plus 64 premium memberships! A bunch of residents leaving SL in disgust, since they can go live with less grief and stress in real life, is simply bad for business all around.

Not a huge difference in income for LL, but I see your point Avion. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't think they'll be doing anything about it anytime soon.

To Har: thanks!

Have to agree LL is unlikely to do anything directly to ad farms. They break no RL laws, and they are not disruptive to SL in the way most forms of griefing are and Nazi displays would be. they are only egregiously ugly and effective at getting under people's skin. As are some avatars I could think of.

The long term answer is the power to mute neighboring parcels.

The short term answer is screens.

And Atashi, you're welcome.

I think I'd rather get $295 and deal with 1 person than $320 and deal with 64 any day. Much less overhead, more profit and a hell of a lot more profit.

For this reason I wouldn't be surprised if we someday down the road see a system put in place that makes land barons more accountable and the mainland done away with.

We have some phantom tga mega prims up near our sim border. Since they are tga, they don't block the sky at all. We've populated the sim with many trees so the forested appearnce of the wall looks fairly natural. If you want to get a look at what a mainland sim CAN look like, come to Periwinkle. You'll see Purple, Periwinkle and Marroon all looking fairly reasonable even for mainland sims. Not all of the mainland is a cesspool as some would have everyone believe, nor are they walled in prisons.

More than anything, I've found people just need patience. All land turns over in time. With patience you can end up owning an entire mainland sim that is enjoyable.

Angel

Here's something very strange.
Hax is forced to buy 4096s in some new sims in order to get any land at all.
He cuts out his cowpat of 16m plots and puts the remainder of the 4096 back on the market.

BUT!!!
In a masterstroke of bot/noob-baiting, he's cut some very special 512s.
These have a 16m plot cut out of the middle, making them essentially useless unless one buys the 16m plot also at L$2000.

He makes up the 512m by linking in one of his 16m grid plots.
A bot will certainly detect a 512 and buy it at the right price. A bot will not detect that there's a Hax plot right in the centre of the 512 plot.
Many of the plots have been bought. It looks like Hax was selling them for L$4900.
It might be that an inexperienced buyer would not realise the trap.

But worse!!
Someone who shall be nameless has bought 2 of these plots and built on them for sale, hiding the Hax ransom plot under the build.


It really is time that LL stepped in and put a stop to this.
Whatever about Hax playing with landbots, the deliberate hiding of the ransom plot is absolutely beneath contempt.
Hax is a sweetie by comparison.


And why oh why are Ninjas selling one of those 512s at L$10906?

Example:
Riback 219,165,123
That standing on the roof of one of those villas, right over the spot where Hax's ransom plot lies.


It's absolutely sickening.

I'm wondering if this is a bot thing. I saw another one for sale yesterday for L$10,000 from someone whom I didn't expect to see involved in that sort of thing.

I bet he will be a bidder on these auction sims and his intent is to discourage others from bidding once they see his blight, thereby keeping the bid lower.

I just joined Sling and Drongle there and am absolutely amazed at what I saw. A cute little home sitting right on a 512 lot. Smack dab in the middle of the livingroom is where the 16m plot is located. I can't imagine any noob seeing a land for sale with a house on it and clicking to see the size of the land ever suspecting they would need to check inside the house to see if all the land was theirs. What a nice surprise once they'll get when they buy their own house and move in. Guess who will come knocking at their door?

This is the slimiest of the slime. The guy doesn't care. He knows eventually LL will catch up to him. Some type of regulation will be done and this kind of thing will end. Until then he will have made a crap load of money and he'll go onto some other way of bilking people out of their money.

a 16 in the middle of a 512

zomgz whats next? WATERBOARDING?!?!?!?!

Land shoppers now have to disable volume to shop, it seems, lest you buy land with an extortion plot in the middle. Yet another thing to teach new people...

This is beyond low.

I'm not seeing a 16m.

ETA: nvm

You have to click on About Land Atashi and then if you look inside the house you will see a yellow square located on the lower level inside of the house. If you don't move your camera inside of it you wont see it. That's the beauty of it....the bastards.