From the blog: Update on mainland supply

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/07/17/update-on-mainland-supply/

Ok, who's going to be the first sim owner to bitch and moan on the forums (they've already started on the blog)

/me turns around and counts to ten before turning back

Is it me or do they sorta seem to not have many gray areas when it comes to growing mainland? Kinda seems, and I confess to not really following it too closely, that they're either dropping some number of sims per day or not growing it at all.

I wonder if it'd be easier for the to manage this by adjusting the number of sims per week that get added.

You a sim owner ?
If so I guess We have a winner.
If not a troll.

/me turns around and counts to ten before turning back

Mmm... it seems like a pretty smart move to not release more land now.

The land market is the worst it's been in years - price of mainland up or down notwithstanding. It's a market *shift* as well as a price point.

We'll stabilise with a lot more people renting openspaces from landbarons, I think, than owning mainland of loosely equivalent cost. At least as compared to the pre-March 08 market.

Pot calling the kettle black if I do say so myself you posting on this thread solely to deride me for creating this thread. Let me know if you want me to build you a prim bridge for you to hide under. And from an alt with 8 posts at that I might add.

For the record I am not a sim owner and for reasons outside of the land issues with LL will most likely never be one however I have certain financial and other interests in that aspect of SL so I like to keep myself abreast.

Several commenters (especially #5) called LL on the fact that they only use price/sqm to determine the rate of sim release which is a very good point. If they used more factors they would get more accurate data although that's no comfort since it doesn't seem like they'd make better choices even if they had better data.

You Black?

The sim owners do have one point worth considering: the "population density" is almost certainly at an all-time low, and falling still. It's hard to get the relevant statistics, now that a substantial chunk of the total sqm corresponds to OpenSpace; it should be something like the ratio of resident in-world hours to total supported primcount (to weigh the OpenSpace sqm at 1/4 that of full sims). But however one measures it, total landmass has grown a lot faster than resident in-world hours over the past few quarters. That doesn't seem like a sustainable trend.

But some of the other numbers seem less interesting. For example, I'm not sure it would be such a tragedy if all Estate property sold for L$1 from now on, and buyers just routinely abandoned their Estate parcels rather than trying to resell them. I'm sure it would be a hardship for Estate owners who "bought high" but LL never promised to maintain anybody's profit margins.

And yet... Must changes in land availability always be huge step functions? When they raised tier for new estates, it wasn't by a few percent a month, but by 50% all at once. And more recently we saw a similar step function downward in the price of Estate sims. The Mainland auctions are a bit more self-regulating: when they get no bids, no land gets added... but that floor price was lowered abruptly, too, when the island pricing was cut. If those levers were operated less like a switch and more like a throttle, the system might be better behaved.

Reputation is everything.

That goes for land barons, for Joe Avatar, for the service provider too.

Maybe nobody ever promised anything - how can one promise? There is such a thing as force majeure too, even if intent is good. Say everyone leaves to play Spore in September.

But what you can always do, is act honourably and the best you can in a tough situation.

So yeah, it would be a bad thing to change the rules midstream, even if you can, just because you can. It matters if "land barons" get burned. It matters if any of us get burned!

I'm one of the first people to say that "investment" in the grid is an iffy proposition at best.

But I honestly think that at the highest levels, our service provider does realise that they do well when we all do well, and act in good faith toward us. If I didn't think so, I'd change my business model immediately.

Of course they are gonna make mistakes - big ones. But like you are saying Qie, there is an upside to a cheaper land economy: it will be *that much* harder for a competing service to get started against lower costs here.

Not a bad tradeoff in a way, provided people survive in business here long enough to make the tradeoff in the end.

June 17th: "In recent days we have seen it dip below L$6 per meter which we feel is a little low."
July 18th: "the price is now holding steady at an average of L$7.25 (averaged over the last seven days)."

Of course most of us are seeing prices closer to 4/sqm although to be fair the "average" price is probably a bit higher than that, plausibly even 6/sqm.

To be honest the last two decisions to stop releasing land have given me a little more faith in SL. I think they're just not nimble. They're a little bit out of synch with reality and they can't react quickly to market changes. Their heart is probably in the right place though, they do seem to be trying to maintain stability and largely speaking we've seen rock stable prices for the last month.

Separately, I suggest not paying too much attention to all the whining mega-land barons. They're all sick because residents are moving out of full sims and into openspaces. This leaves them with a ton of half empty full sims they can't sell without evicting half a dozen people. Leaving them with a choice between losing money or losing reputation. The private estate market is just fine, it's just evolving and moving along. Everyone better keep up or lose out.