Land values down 90% from 2006 peak?

And do not panic even then. That was the part I really liked about Elanthius's post. No "It is the end of Second Life" alarms, instead he said what he thought and added at the end that this changes things but will not kill Second Life. Hopefully he can get out of all of his land as painlessly as possible.

People that were leery about buying find that land is cheap enough that they can finally experience it for themselves. Once you have a little ol 512 then a lot of people decide that they can not live without a little bit more(and more & more & more). You can find 1024 lots for under $9 now, that plus the extra $5 tier per month is still cheaper then buying a new video game for the xbox. Plus you end up with one hell of a lot more return.

The city sims that Mari mentioned will always command some premium over others on Sansara. And the two oldest continents do have some character that may give them advantages. Sansara is kind of incoherent, with snow sims next to what's reverted to standard-issue tropical beaches, but it does have snow and some areas of quite nice terrain. Heterocera seems to have been the peak of continent-scale terrain and infrastructure design--psychadelic coastal textures notwithstanding. Since then, well... Jeogeot is pretty nondescript; the others (including Zindra) have some scattered features, but to my eye, nothing quite as coherent as the Atoll.

About Mainland lag: One factor is that Mainland sims generally have neighbors, so you get some lag from the avatars in neighboring sims, and some extra client and image downloading lag from having stuff to render all around. If one owned a Mainland sim, some of the terrible texture lag within that sim should be mitigated, if built with a constrained palette--in contrast to having each parcel using disjoint sets of textures.

Isn't that something they're making available to everyone in the new viewer now?

Which we will all have at the end of the year or beginning next year.

If you had gotten in about a week ago you could have had 90% of my sim... Now its more like 60-70%, but I suspect some of what was taken was taken by the last of the land flippers to come through, and now they're just trying to plan when and how to sell it again. There are only 3 of us that actually use the sim - the rest of the owned property has unused builds on it. One of the 3 is a marginal user - I see him very infrequently. The other one rents half her property to friends, to in a way that is four users of the sim.

I've always found mainland less laggy than private - might just be my luck though.

Uh huh.. I'll believe that when I see it.

Nobody would be pushed anywhere. The abandoned land on the existing sim would be cleared and become protected land, and the sim would be simply turned into a homestead *in place*, with a sim prim bonus such that everyone got the same prim counts they started with.

The ability to run 3-4 times as many such mainland sims on the same servers.

I think *some* of the information from Estate tools will be exposed to Mainland dwellers, but not all. We'll be able to see how our scripts are performing, but last I heard, it won't be possible to see what's really going on with the neighbors. Of course, if one owns the whole sim, I guess that's moot.

Skim through Babbage's office hour minutes. It comes up in most of them.

/me looks forward to this feature but it's a chicken I won't count until I hear it peepin'..

Been waiting for it for years now. Ever since (before, actually) SVC-835 got added.

So long as it's not a sion chicken.

Nah nah nah! I beat you then cause I was raising hell about not being able to see our own script times BEFORE jira

Seriously though, this is in active development and both Babbage and Vector mention it frequently. They HAVE to put it in because they can not put into place per parcel/per avatar script memory limits until this is done.

And people say innovation in Second Life is dead. I do not think I would have one of the little lag monsters but the idea is just waaaay too cute. Hopefully the dev will get a clue and go the phantom/non physical route.

Just so we're clear too, sometimes there's a good reason some of that really cheap land is so cheap:



- The snapshot removed property lines, but on the upper horizontal line you can see a little dot that is me - right in the center of the image. I'm standing in a 512 plot that runs the horizontal length, but notice that the black castle doesn't fully enter its last square. The parcel is normal shaped for a 512. Its for sale for 942L.
- But that's middle of sim, no water or road anywhere.

It might be over-priced...

But it is in a better condition that some I have seen in its price range.

Yes.. It has to be done because it's an essential part of SL. Just like being able to TP or cross sim lines or not lose inventory or have a money system that's transactional or.. well.. never mind.

/me does indeed look forward to seeing this feature.

"Lag" is always a complex term, but certainly a single region with no neighbours is at a great advantage, as compared to a region solidly surrounded by others. If you can see it, it's adding server side load. One measure of this is "child agents" (not to be confused with child *avatars*) ~ which are avatars in surrounding regions that you could potentially see. Lagwise, no region is an island... unless it's literally an island, all by itself with no neighbours.

So all things being equal, identical class 5 regions in identical settings can't "know" if they are on mainland or estate.

The difference is this, though: many estate owners will design in features to minimise this particular sort of lag.

For instance, if you are surrounded by relatively empty regions, the impact isn't near as bad. So if you weave openspaces into the estate, their relatively low enforced primcount and typically quiet traffic means that you have largely mitigated the effects you'd have, if surrounded by eight fully loaded class 5 regions instead.

* * * * *

I think Elanthius is correct about mainland prices not skyrocketing again. With community gateways on private estates now, many new residents actually wonder what "the mainland" is, when people use the term. Having never been to that one fifth of the grid at all yet, or noticed it if they had.

And even if you take pains to explain it, many wonder why you are annoying them with such arcane land details until they start looking for land themselves. With most estates renting month to month, or even week to week these days, often the reaction is "I have to pay (twenty, fifty, one hundred dollars) up front for a parcel of land over there?"

Not really you just double the # of land bots you have and its just fine.
Besides bots also dont rez graphics so the throttle only hurts the people who play by the rules.

I agree with the first sentence, but don't understand the second. Probably I'm being dense, but what does rezzing graphics have to do with it?

Asking the sim for textures and objects and stuff does add load to the system. I don't think it's that much of a problem, though.

edit: that is, bots don't have to ask for all the stuff that non-bots have to ask for in order to rez things..

Right, I understand that. It's a reasonable defense of bots in general, and assuming that bots don't accessorize with a lot of attachments, it means the TP'd-to sim doesn't get hit very hard when a bot pays a visit. I get that. What I can't figure out is how it plays in to the TP throttling: it's going to throttle regardless of whether the client is a bot or a viewer. I'm not understanding how "the throttle only hurts the people who play by the rules."

[Edit: gonna keep typing, in hopes something will "click" for me. Those "people who play by the rules" and are hurt by the throttle might mean the folks who don't have multiple bots to herd around the network--cuz if you've got lots of bots, you can just schedule their TPs around the throttle, unlike normal folks. Okay, but how are they differentially affected by the throttling because they rez graphics? Nope, the penny still isn't dropping for me. ]

Remember how LL introduced a throttle on how often you could do search/land? Botlords just added more bots and only *people* search ended up having to wait.


It's not because they don't rez graphics. I really don't think that comes into it very much, if at all. You actually do get it - rezzing's not really an issue.

alot of the new throttleing has to do with rezing graphics.

You sure about that? I thought it was all around TPs...

I suspect that will be the case in some instances. I *still* suspect some of the more "themed' lands that I named above will always have a *bit* more value, if only for their double-primness (that does not include the suburbs), or theme, or whatever. Nonetheless, I could see some slight falloff in price, though I think there are deals to be made in Bay City right now.



's true

There's (thankfully) been a steady decline in rates. That's because there was a bubble in SL too.

Also, the ratio between the peak rate of new account sign-ups and available land is much more favourably skewed towards the buyer these days.

I am glad to see the rates coming back down to around where they were when I used to deal in land speculation in 2005-2006 (initially on a different account). They were artificially inflated, and no one was promised a fortune from simply flipping land with little or no added value.