Our favorite little adfarmer takes aim at Linden Lab auction Sims

Yup. The only time they enforce ANYTHING is when the people who make the laws show up at LL headquarters. If the German reporters had not done that story, ageplay would still be visible. If the FBI had not cracked down on gambling they would not have banned it. VAT and the bank ban came to be because of outside pressure. All of these things have cost LL dearly.

Well, I think its a totally separate issue, though adopting MISC-894 certainly would have an impact on it.

Problem is, without that... are we really saying we ant to FORCE people to chop off small disjointed areas and sell separately? Isnt that the problem with ad farms we're trying to avoid?

I would agree that the problem really is extortion of those 16m plots and people stupid enough to buy them at exorbitant rates. In this particular instance, I would cap the price of these plots. Instead of regulating what people can do with their land, it is better to make it easier to buy the view. Cap any plot below 128 at whatever the spreadsheet calculated average price per meter is.

Absolutely. L$20/m2 is way in excess of any legitimate land price - a full sim at L$20/m2 would work out at well over $4000 for that price, which nobody in their right mind would buy when you can buy a full sim for less than half of that.

The 'actual land value' of a square metre based on proportion of region purchase price is about L$7/m2.

I honestly can't see many *legitimate* land traders being affected by this - after all, position on the grid has no 'real value' as you can now p2p teleport, and unless you are really close to your neighbours, you don't *have* to have that particular plot when you could just buy a larger plot in another region that suits your needs.

Before anyone starts going on about 'free market value' and 'rights of landowners to choose their own price' ... what about the rights of neighbours who actually live there not to have to play L$10,000 to some idiot just to get rid of the ad crap that has been put there?

It is clear that some people cannot regulate themselves, residents have no powers to do anything about excessive land prices, so the only option left is for Linden Lab to step in and regulate it on everyone's behalf by setting an upper limit for land sales.

Advertising does not work anyway. I've yet to find anyone who's seen something on a spinning cube and thought "I must go and visit that place". Perhaps the thought of 'advertise everything everywhere' is just another american concept that doesn't work on the rest of us?

Agreed, and I've proposed a plan along those lines at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-894 .

Please, log in and vote for it, and spread the word.

Translation -

Never propose anything that might negatively effect Elanthius.


Sorry, but your rationale always seems motivated by your personal involvement in whatever scenario being discussed.

In this case - removing 16M plots would hurt your group trying to own a 16M plot in every sim.

Everyone loves to talk about SL being the wild west. Well, you know what? The wild west is now made up of towns and villages and counties and states that all have regulations. Why is that? Because it didn't work.



Broccoli, Broccoli, Broccoli. You had such a good post and then you had to go and America bash. It really gets tiring.

*sighs.

I thought people usually got voted out because of taxes, rather than not increasing them?

Unfortunately there's a big flaw in your logic about Linden Lab "losing money" if you can't have ad farms.

Ever considered how many huge lumps of land are for sale, and remain for sale, or abandoned and no tier being paid, because of an ugly ad farm? Four regions could have land virtually unsellable because of some ad farm stuck in the corner of them. Perhaps if it wasn't for ad farms, then a lot more of the currently unsellable land might get sold, not only increasing revenue for Linden Lab by land sales, but people upgrading to premium so they can own some of this land?

I'm quite convinced that 100 people buying plots of land to use for legitimate purposes are worth much more to the overall good of the grid than two or three ad farmers who probably never log in except to cash out their profits.

Set up an Ad Zoo. That's what I did. Name and Shame them. Incorporate their crap into your build. Surround and obscure it. Educate people not to buy them. Show others how to do it, too. Eventually, tier will break any and all of the twits, then it is off to Gov Linden to get your free land!



Unfortunately, that isn't true. None of it. Advertising DOES work, which is why my email inbox contains THOUSANDS of spam messages each week, because some dolts DO buy Viagra, or fake Rolexes, or loan refis, etc from those who send spam.

Advertising isn't a particularly American invention, either, your bashing notwithstanding. Yes, we take it to the level of an art form, but so do most capitalist societies. Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Great Britain, many European countries, even. Americans aren't the only ones responding to spam, either.

Hey thanks for reading my mind! Universal Network is a fun hobby to me. I don't lose if you remove 16s from the game I save ~$160 a month in tier fees. I am pretty much ambivalent about increasing the maximum size of parcels.

It won't affect my land trading business in any way, it will aid my land rental business significantly since all my land will suddenly be worth a lot more. The world would be a prettier (but less free and presumably more expensive) place. All in all I'm pretty much around on the whole idea.

Additionally, of /course/ my opinions are based on my personal involvement in the scenario. I mean, is that such an odd thing? That I express my opinion about what I actually think about the things I actually care about? Should I instead make posts representing other people's opinions? Let's swap places for the day. You be me and I'll be you.

Heh, true.



Land for sale is just as valuable to LL as land that is not for sale. They get the same tier payments on both. As for abandoned land. I confess I've not studied the matter or thought it over thoroughly but I don't think there's really that much abandoned land around. Regardless someone buys every parcel they put up for auction so even if there is abandoned land it's only by the choice of LL that it stays that way.

I'd guess you're intelligent enough - like me - to just delete them for the rubbish they are. I too get email spam for medication I don't need, enhancements for body parts I don't even have, winning lotteries I haven't even entered, fake watches that don't do the job any better than the one I bought down the market for £5, and orphan Nigerian millionaire princesses that need my help in spending $25,000,000.

Unfortunately we can't "delete" in-world ad farms yet. There are so many more tasteful and less intrusive ways of advertising, but why do people go for full bright spinning cubes up in the air???

Of course you could preempt the whole idea buy just selling them off before waiting for LL to ban them.
$160 per month tier spent just for a hobby that creates drama seems expensive to me.

Hmm, If I were you for a day,....sell all the 16m and buy real land I could rent out and make money from for a lot less drama and better streetcred.

Oh save it.

Your post which I quoted showed huge Bias.

Please explain how getting rid of the 16M plots would hurt the SL economy as a whole - which you infer?

Without simply trotting up the tired limited government argument.

<G> We have around 100 parcels of various sizes available for rent at very reasonable rates right now! Check out our store in Steamboat sim!

I must say I didn't realise there was so much drama in our group. No-one has ever complained or commented before.

Dude, I AM AROUND ON THE IDEA. I'm neither for nor against. The more I think about it I am probably slightly for removing 16s. Economically speaking, as I mentioned, I'd personally be a bit better off. Why are you misrepresenting my position as the exact opposite of what I keep saying?

Also, yes I am biased. As I wrote in the post you quoted I am biased for myself and for the things I believe, most people are. I don't deny it at all.

16m plots do have their uses above and beyond advertising...

I could name a number of shops that have a 16m "rez boxes here" area in their centre as a method of allowing people to unpack merchandise without making the entire shop (set to no-rez) susceptable for griefing...

Just an observation that there are numerous methods by which 16m plots can be used constructively and legitimately.

I'll get my coat...

Yah, of course, but next week, there will be thousands more, and the week after that, and the week after that, because somewhere out there, someone clicks on the link in the email and drops some dough on whatever they are selling. Even one sale in 10,000 spam emails is justification to send out 1,000,000 more, because email has almost zero cost (in many cases, it does have zero cost, because the spammers are using networks of hijacked servers to send their spam).



Dunno. I think the majority of adfarmers are actually being land speculators, and just use the advertising angle as a "legitimate" cover for their extortion business. They aren't stupid; they know that people hate adfarms next to their virtual home or business. That's why most ad plots are for sale for anything from L$500 to well over L$10000.

Outside of that, I think that people who use them to advertise their products or services are naive and don't realize the nature of their business until it is too late. Case in point, the ACS Relay for Life fiasco. I also think there is a lack of alternative legitimate advertising companies out there. Something that some crafty soul may remedy and make some serious money on.

These cities also tell people what colors they can and can't paint their houses. Which style of windows to use, if they can have square or round columns on the front porch.

No thanks.

The slippery slope is a real danger and no way in hell do I want a committee of residents setting standards for the rest of us.

Some people find furries just as annoying as they do ad farms. Do their opinions not count?

They go for Bright spinning cubes in the air because advertising is not their goal.. its selling the otherwise worthless plot for 10,000X market price to the person next door that cannot take it any more.

I suspect that if someone invented a cheap way of making brightly coloured cubes spin in the RL air, there wouldn't be a billboard left anywhere within a month.

Having said that, most of the adfarms clearly are about annoying the neighbours into buying the land for inflated prices.

On the mainland, it would be Linden Lab.

On private islands, you have to follow whatever the landowner decides is the "building code" for that area, or you lose out.

I don't see a problem. If what is now so clearly needed hadn't been resisted by Linden Lab several years ago, then we wouldn't have such a big issue now.

As someone else stated... "the Wild West didn't work".

Its funny, however, that some of the most expensive land in sl is those few sims that have the most second life zoning.

This is the case in RL also.

However, you aren't FORCED to live there.