Our favorite little adfarmer takes aim at Linden Lab auction Sims

This has always been a convincing argument in theory. But the reality is if someone sets some land for sale for 4/sqm then there isn't anything anyone can do to prevent one of the 50,000 people online from buying it. Nonetheless at the top I'm going to concede you might be right.

As for the 512 thing, I don't quite see how this helps the cutter. He bought some land for 10/sqm (for example) sold most of it for 4/qm and he's stuck with the last bit. By my reckoning the guy just lost a ton of money. There's no reason why anyone is likely to buy that 16in the middle at this point. My assumption (could be wrong) is that he will keep it essentially forever and the "512" will rapidly devolve into primland.

Naturally I've cut the land into one 16 and one 496. Which I think is about as fair as I can be. I agree that non contiguous parcels are deliberately deceptive unless they are across a road or something.

All these numbers are meaningless in the situation of a adfarmer who is selling 16M plots ABOVE the going rate of course.

Beginning to wonder if you wear mirrored shades with the mirrors on the inside.

That only matters if the 16 actually sells. There's a big difference between setting something FOR sale and it actually selling. Nonetheless I already conceded it was a reasonable argument.

The 16m plots I captured and recombined were priced at a reasonable level. The plot with ads on it is for sale at 10,000$L. I bought a plot last night between crashes for only 500$L. I will recombine it into the larger plot.

I will not pay the overly inflated prices for ad plots since that is the other goal of the land spammers.

"CX"

It's not that hard either all of it can really happen client-side, with no server-side changes.

1) Being on the land ban list means that the client will (optionally) not render prims that person has rezzed while you're physically on the parcel (if you step onto a parcel where the owner isn't banned they render once more).

The only extra overhead is that the owner of a prim has to be streamed initially (right now I *think* that's a separate request) and an overhead each time you cross a parcel border (the client has to sort the list of prims within draw distance into visible and invisible prims based on the land ban list).

Havok4 will eventually get rid of encroachment so the problem of a seemingly invisible barrier goes away at that point as well.

2) In addition to the above, you could hide prims based on your own personal mute list. To avoid bumping into invisible non-phantom objects you'd render them the same way you do banlines (from a distance you don't see them, when you're almost right on top of them you do render them).

(That would probably incur a relatively rather big overhead though)

You can already do that with "Hide Selected" so you're not introducing anything that isn't already possible today.

This is really a very contrived example that doesn't apply to SL much at all.

If I have you muted you can say whatever you want about me and I'd never know, does that mean we should get rid of the mute feature? Of course not.

If we forget about ownership and concentrate on parcel content, then there is no real overhead.
The client can download (all of) the sim content exactly as it does currently.
When the rendering code goes to consider the rendering any prim it simply runs the prim x,y past a list of '>x<, '>y< pairs and ignores any prims whose centre falls within the list of coordinates.
It would also have to run avatar positions past the list.
In the case of a visual-muted parcels with a complex prim/texture set, this would speed up client-side rendering.
If the avatar crosses into the visually-muted parcel, there is no sudden download hit. The rendering code simply begins to render prims that were already downloaded as they are currently.

The only change to the server code would be to allow a parcel to feed a set of visual-muting x,y coordinates to the clients in the parcel.

If avatars are to have their own visual-muting lists of coordinates, then that's obviously a hit on the avatar databases, but the data set is only 4 values per rectangle to be visually-muted.
Private visual-muting lists would be possible without any changes to the server code - if the lists were maintained in a cache in the end-user hard disk. Right-click on a parcel and click "Visual Mute". That would not allow for users moving between machines however.


The simpler the implementation is, the better.


Edit to add:
As others have posted, the only rational way to make the IDV 'protection of unverified eyeballs' work is via visual muting of the contents and avatar activities in a restricted-content parcel.

Without visual muting of a parcel, then a restricted-content parcel surrounded by non-restricted parcel is wide open to viewing by all. That visual muting would have to be done based on the parcel footprint. Ownership is irrelevant.

Whoa! $500L for an adlot IS an overly inflated price. It's over $30/sq.m. I wouldn't buy anything for over $200 - otherwise you're giving them enough profit on the lot to encourage them to buy more land and keep doing it.

Well, yes and no.

I have to say that I've bought ad plots.
In Hengill, a 256 area right on the Linden waterway had been sliced into ad plots. It was the only ad space in the entire sim. We bought the plots (except the Herbst one). Now the sim is probably too 'mature' in price to attract ad farmers, especially for those plots bordering Linden protected land/water.

In Dunnylun, we bought the front row of plots bordering the Linden water and the cheapest disjointed internal ones. That joined 160m collection is now a pro bono free-for-all canoe rezzer. We hung back from turning on build-for-all, but in the absence of abuse could turn that on for people to rezz their own vehicles.

The way I rationalise the buying is that the plots were strategic. Buying them removed the entire 256m (less 16m) ad-farm in one case and in the other case rendered the ad plots behind them useless as ad plots and screenable as land-grief plots.

Yes, the plot owners made small RL US$ markups on 16m plots, but they only had that markup on a very small number of plots of the total number.
The improvement to SL in general was worth a few US$s

I wouldn't make a habit of it however.
I certainly wouldn't be interested in buying random plots in a large farm or in a roadside stretch of plots. The buying of a small number of plots would have to have a very large effect on a sim as a whole.

They do sell. People are gullible enough to go "gee.. L$1000 to get that little block of land away from that evil adfarmer and extend my plot so my bedroom will fit; sounds like a bargain to me!". Because people who buy land look at L$1000 as a little more than pocket change in addition to the L$5000+ they just spent on the rest of the plot. Problem is, the adfarmer goes right out with that money and buys/cuts more 16s and does the same thing. If I am not mistaken, I believe there is a "business in a box" for adfarm extortion. Seriously.

If it didn't work, they wouldn't be doing it.

I have to admit, building my mall, I was sorely tempted, and I did buy a few at no more than around L$16/sqm, but that was before I met Timo Daehlie and he showed me the right way to deal with the adfarmer extortionists: The Ad Zoo.

Short answer: DON'T buy them at above L$10/sqm, preferably lower. Instead, surround them, ridicule them, make them choke on their tier, and when they abandon the land, you can get it for free from Gov Linden, if you surround it on at least 3 sides.

QBYD

Quoted Because - "YEAH, DUH!"

The correct answer is yes, yes, and YES!



..and enabled them to go and buy/make more 16s elsewhere; probably in some of your friend's back yards. It happened to me.



For every 16sqm plot that they are paid market value x 2 (around L$17/sqm), two more pop up. Don't think for a minute that they are "only" getting one or two. They are doing this in hundreds of sims. If 20 people a day (and that is a VERY bad day for an adfarmer) buy their insanely marked-up plots, 40+ more of them will pop up somewhere else the next day.

Simple answer: DON'T buy them. Don't feed the Adnimals! Make a zoo out of them.

Anyone who has bought an adfarm plot above the land market value has contributed to the problem.


Its simply rationalizing to say any different.

Yup.
Well, I did say up front "The way I rationalise the buying is that........."

I do have to admit that even though the motivation in the two instances was pro bono, and removed or screened the normally unscreenable, such purchases if repeated widely would indeed contribute to the problem.

For every 20 or so people reading this thread and thinking "well, duh, of course!" there are a hundred residents that don't see the big picture, don't read forums or blogs, and just want their view back. Small parcel extortion is social hacking. It works and will always work until the economic incentive to do so is curtailed.

Blocking is an "OK" short term solution in your sim, but on the big picture, it doesnt matter one bit. if an exortionist is successfully blocked, he can always sell that parcel at cost or at a loss to free up tier, and move someplace else. Also, if you do the tier math, each 16m parcel only costs about $L13 per MONTH to support. At some prices that are asked, l like $L777, minus purchase cost, that means he can make profit if he sells that lot anytime in the next 4 YEARS. For someone selling at $L9451, he can wait 60 YEARS. You know, I think given that much time, someone would buy it. Say he has 4096 (one sim of tier) of these L9451 16m parcels... that means selling just 5 per month out of 4096, covers tier. I betcha he sells a lot more.

You wanna hurt this business model? Set an upper limit which land parcels of small size can be sold for.
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-894
Visit, log in, vote, spread the word.

ya know these ad farmers really do suck but ya know what? They play within the rules that LL allows for. Until LL changes the rules, we need to live with what these soulless bastards do and don't let them get to us. THEY WANT TO GET TO US. They are reading this thread right now and masturbating over it.

The evil ad farmer that was the cause of the initiation of this thread was the first to buy a parcel on the sim I just won off the auctions recently. Then after splitting the parcel into an ad farm he went out of his way to let me know what he did by sending me an IM that stated: LOL and an SURL to the lot.

Guess what? I forgive him. I place a few trees around his ad farm and i'll move on with my virtual life. Did he bring down the value of my sim? Maybe a little. Did LL give him the right to do this? Yup. So who am i mad at? No one. I took a chance when I sold a 2000ish sq m sized odd shaped lot and he took advantage. My loss. Live and learn. I'm over it.

I hope auctioneers of the surrounding sims to this ad parcel see this before bidding but if they don't, who should they be mad at? Probably themselves. They should know the rules before dropping $2000usd for a sim.

However,

I am not responsible for the stupidity of others.

Grammar school age kids should have learned the bully/lunch money lesson, I would think.

I don't think it's stupid for a person with some cash on hand and no real understanding of ad farmer motives to buy back their view. Sad that they are unknowingly perpetuating the problem, but not stupid by any means.

Look its Stupid to not see how paying off a bully only leads to more bullying.

People do Stupid things all the time, but it is what it is.

Yeah, kids that age also learn "if you can't say something nice about someone, don't say it at all". You know what, how DARE you call anyone stupid. Ill-informed, oblivious, blissfully unaware... those are words I would more likely use to describe those people. "Stupidity" is a kindergarten response, since this isn't a matter of intelligence here.

I like the way you are handling this, Jake. And yes, if the person bidding on a sim doesn't do a thorough job checking the sim they are buying and the surrounding sims, they deserve to lose money on the deal.

And I forgive you...

Look I do stupid things all the time. Okay.

I'm sure most of us do. Before you all go and rant about it. Think about that.

Paying off Adfarmers is one stupid thing some people do.

I don't think calling paying off adfarmers stupidity was one of my stupid things I've done, so you probably shouldn't forgive me.


I'm not trolling for a reaction from people who have paid off adfarmers. Im just saying it like it is.

If people didnt pay off ad farmers there would BE NO ADFARMERS.

Don't people watch the mandatory bully episodes in every sitcom since 1952?

In that case, I only see one stupid thing happening in this thread - you insisting that calling a broad population of people "stupid" and continuing to justify it.

The closest I will come to agreeing with you is saying it might be a selfish thing to do, since you are fixing your own issue while perpetuating it for others. But since most people think they are doing their sim a SERVICE by removing the blight, I can't really even go there.

Your turn, Sammy.