A lot of Auction Land went unsold today

I think more than half of the listings that ended today had no bids on them.

Could it be that the adding of way too much land is now finally making land so worthless and unattractive that even the hard core competitors who usually snatch everything not nailed down at the auctions, are getting the real message?


I would like to know if LL will now add 9 more Continents so they can try to collect more monthly tier to make up for their deficit from unwanted abandoned Land or if they will address this major problem of turning this game into a total wasteland of un-inhabited, completely undesirable virtual Real Estate that has no entertainment of financial value to anybody but them.

I am curious to see which of the big Land Owner Players ( LOP's) will get bent first and throw in the towel. Maybe they can become professional poseball hoppers in their next virtual career or go for a pay raise and go flip burgers at Burger Slop down the street..

LOL

Who'd have guessed that spending L$1/sq.m. to reclaim abandoned microparcels would start to look pricey?

Where can you see the closed auctions? Advanced search doesn't seem to work anymore.

I've been watching this carefully.

It's been almost a perfect storm.


1) Summer

2) 95/mo HOMESTEADS GET THEM NAO!!!!!

3) Move to Zindra or no sexx0rz! (bunch of fine print)


Let's look at each in turn.

1) fall is coming

2) they prolly won't do this for another 12 months

3) Bay City, Nautilus, Zindra. Nuff said.


There's a stabilising factor. At some point, the land glut will hurt the service provider more than the land barons, especially on the mainland.

Land barons can cash out. But will our service provider close a continent and tell its remaining residents to go to a newer, smaller one like say Zindra?

Ultimately, those who have the most stake in valued land are the owners of the Company themselves. Watch for an evolving, maturing realisation of this. I wouldn't be surprised to see each major continent get a dedicated manager at some point, perhaps in a couple years.

you can only do it if you keep the auction page open with all the listings on one page. Then when you come back to your computer, you can then click the individual links and see what the bidding history and final price was. ( or watch list them, which is too much work)

I tend to ( used to) always keep the L auctions and sometimes the $ auction pages open in separate tabs.

A little more than a week ago, I won a 4k parcel that went abandoned about 6 months ago. The Lindens finally got around to recycling it.

This place isn't your typical flat green nowheresville. It's a series of small islands in one of the artist sims.

I ended up paying about L14.8/sqm because someone--none of my neighbors are admitting to it--had a serious bid on it.

A few days later, an 8k plot next door to it that's been for sale for a while now just went to someone else for similar (imo, too high) numbers.

There's still land on the grid that people fight for. Things the lindens don't seem to do any more like create protected lakes, and snow covered regions.

Why is empty land a problem for Linden Labs? Land is really server space and even cheap land 1L/m2 or less is still very expensive server space.

Second, there is a huge jump from being landless to being a premium member with a 512. It's six dollars a month (payable yearly) plus a small cost for the land. The jump is psychological (You're paying for this! You have an ongoing commitment). The marginal utility of a 512 is rather high. You get radio playing rights. You can rez things. There is a quiet place to which to return periodically. You can't have the houses seen on big builds, but it is possible to have both indoor space and a garden. It took me months to learn to get my 512 right.

There is a barrier at the bottom end of the land market. I jumped that barrier thirteen months ago, but I'm not a normal SL resident. I know that the drop in land prices is not going to stimulate demand, due to the barriers to becoming a residential owner.

That said, dropping land prices and emptying out of mainland increases the marginal utility of a first 512 for any one thinking of going premium. Here is how it works. Most cheap mainland (nonprime location) is far from a road. Neighbors put up ban lines or obstructive walls. More empty land means more walkability. More walkability means better quality of life.

At one point, about six months ago, I had a very hard time reaching the road (RT 7 and RT 7B) from my land. I had to take a fairly round about course and there was only one route thanks to ban lines. Now I can reach the road three different ways. I can almost walk all the way to the northern shore as well. Empty space has its advantages, and server space is cheap so land is cheap for Linden Labs. I don't think it hurts them either.

*decides to quip up* Well, it could be that LL is trying to push us all over onto Zindra, where we're all verified and tucked away for the media to not see any more! No seeing adults having fun means no bad news for LL!

LL is not renowned for being able to make the best business decisions on the spur of the moment. It does seem like they'd take a look at the plots, decide what plot is likeliest to sell for highest and put them out, using the smaller plots as a filler.

Or it could be that LL is counting on the same phenomenon that most websites pray for.. the person that doesn't comparison shop.

good points , yes they will have a hard time closing existing continents unless they run a super complex chinese fire drill to get people to jump ship.

As to the hurtin, I always felt that the service provider should maintain the feature product, which to my understanding is a " Virtual World". In my eyes the Virtual World can only exist if there is a community and Mainland is the only place that facilitates any resemblance of a openly accessible community. If I knew when I first joined, that most people hide themselfes away on a private estate with their access controls cranked to max and never come out of the hole except to buy a ten pack of poseballs, I would have never given this place a second thought.

They seemed to go over the edge with their add on products ( Estates and then the el cheapo Homestead/OS whatever they are called this week) and that will be their undoing in the long run. When I joined about 1-1/2 year ago this place was a blast, there were cartoon characters everywhere you looked and always some fun to be had or a button to be pushed. To me that was the product I paid for.

Now there are tumbleweeds and most green dots are traffic augmentation aid alts wherever you go and now my land is practically worthless.


The have to do something fairly fast, or people will get bored and bail.

I don't think a Continent Manager will help the situation unless I can be Building Inspector and can take kickbacks for allowing untextured floating Garbage with glow on full blast..

When reading this I imagined all those in Zindra will have the continent pulled out from under them. And there will be thousands of residences floating and screaming when they find that flight has been taken away as well.

Of course if this happens, poor Phil will be screaming "My bots! Someone get my bots."

I like this description of SL in the distant past. It certainly is a constantly changing place. I know I'm not an old timer by any means, but being here for 2 1/2 years I've seen a few changes. It certainly seemed more wild in MY early days. Casinos, sky-high real estate, crashes every few days, campers, banks, stock exchanges, land bots, and a lot more real avatars. To name a few. I guess I joined soon after the basic accounts were thrown open. But I went premium and bought land on day three I think it was. Tried camping in those first few days and soon realized it sucked, but back then campers were mostly real people so you could have a convo while you camped. It seemed a lot more wild wild west back then.

Anyway, not sure what my point was. Just nostalgia.

I'm not sure what's happening with LL. I snagged some cheap land at auction on Sunday. Still hasn't been transferred over to me. Put in a ticket yesterday. LL hasn't gotten around to looking at it. I guess they're just too busy dealing (or not) with the Zindra fiasco.

What was this thread about?

I've been watching Mainland prices carefully and despite all the doomsday scenarios, land bot runners and speculators are keeping the market stable at a base of L$2.0 a square meter. And prices creep up quickly on the first page to L$2.2 a meter. Land is not selling briskly, but it is selling, at least on the first two pages of search.

Mainland plots are not worthless yet. Just worth a heck of a lot less than they once were...

be careful. reminiscence of years gone past is frowned upon by a few on this board.

i can understand that feeling..it used to feel like an unlimited amount of things you could do ..money was really pretty easy to come by because the economy had more influx..
it seemed like more of an escape but now you have voice to add more RL to it.

it does seem to run better now than back then..
but..it feels like a bigger world with more land more limits and less things to do..the economy is nowhere near as good..

i guess what i mean is a lot of things are gone and there is so much of the same thing all over the place now..

I paid $30L/sq m for one small parcel - and I watched bids jump 10,000 Linden at a time.

So yes it happens.

If there's too much land sitting around it's because *it is overpriced* and for the most part, it isn't worth what sellers ask. In the above case I had put in a max bid never dreaming it would climb that high to meet it. It was mostly so I could sleep and not worry. Har...

I still haven't seen ultra cheap land and I've from time to time gone looking. Maybe will check out auctions JUST to be curious.

Looking for a 512 plot to use as my freebie with my premium account. A lot of shitty parcels out there. It would almost be worth it to me to spend more for an old continent 512 but I'm sure they're rare.

Keep searching Raymond! Much to my amazement, I recently picked up a couple of small parcels in a great region on Heterocera for less than L$5 sqm, one of them Linden road-protected and the other near water. Admittedly, I spent a lot of time looking at yellow patches on the map, but it paid off when I eventually stumbled across them.

I remember when they used to get really nasty, and not just frown.
Those were the days!

I only reminisce the other way around. I used to pay more than 10L$/sqm in my home sim, and now I get them for 2L$/sqm, wtf? Do these people know no shame?

awww $10/m will always be the golden age in my mind.
$2/m is a letdown imo. i think anytime you devalue something too much people will not treat it with much care or respect.

What are you hoping to find, Raymond?

I think you already got this advice, but just block out some time for yourself and go th the areas you think you want and just bring up the map and start TP'ing to the yellow spots. If you find something you like don't hesitate to IM the owner and make an offer at what you think is a fair price. I've gotten a number of small plots (that I joined) plus another 512m this way. Just be fair and don't insult the owner and you'll find that most will negotiate a reasonable price.

If Blondin Linden is appointed Guvnah of whatever continent I'm on, I will very shortly not be on it.

Theoretically that makes sense... but have you looked around the mainland ever? I remember quite a lot of people not taking very good care of their $10/m land. Things are actually better now, and it's not all due to the adfarm policy.