What's the logic?

Qie. The price of one of the parcels dropped a long way below 20L/m.

I agree that dropping the price until someone buys is a very good way of selling if time isn't important. And I can see that, if he's tweaking his system, the prices can make illogical moves, but why do you think that one of the 256s is usually priced much higher than the other? The one that is usually priced much higher is in the corner of the sim. Does that make a difference in value to some people's thinking?

Yes, location does make a difference in some people's thinking.

However, with this particular person, it appears he is manually lowering the prices, and he gets to some before he gets to others. Thus, some stay higher for longer, or maybe you saw it when he jumped the price back up.

Hard to say, but there could be several different explanations.

Can't let the price get too low, someone might actually buy it, removing their powerful hold over the sims entire populace.
Some aren't paying full tier on the land anyway, you may notice the land changing owners in a cycle. Aren't infinate anomymous free alts fun.

How does that work? If you change owners surely you end paying for tier on overlapping dates and so pay more.

Seems to be an awful lotta folks willing to sit on six-digit land in Bay City, just eating tier on nothing rather than realize no one is going to pay their price.

I love Bay City, and I love seeing it finally blossoming. But those plots are still not worth six digits, and probably never will be.

Last time I said my post got deleted by LL, Jack Linden & co are aware of an exploit. the cycling of some plots through the same 3 or 4 groups regularly means there's something behind it.

Heh, I'm always the last to know about these brilliant scams. I know of some things you can do with groups thoough I thought you meant they cycled through avatar owners.

Anyway, this guy who we're all mysteriously referring to and not naming may or may not be executing some kind of scam like this but if he is then he's wasting a hell of a lot of money renting tier from me. So I'm inclined to believe there's nothing too funny going on.

Anyone can know if a parcel's ownership group is under tier, and that's not the case for these. (The ad network has 44,770 sq.m. donated, using 42,928 at the moment.)

Maybe I missed a time when the local instance dropped under L$20/m2, but it's well above it now. There's a sim corner 64 for L$5422 now, and surrounding it on both sides within the sim another 208 currently listed for L$20307. It had been down around L$5K before, and therefore considerably less per sq.m. than the corner, so Phil's observation of the "corner premium" would have been applicable here, too, for quite some time.

You know, there may be some (manipulative) advantage to the "random auction" over the "reverse auction" in these cases. The normal reverse auction is an elegant way to let the market set the price for land, making some standard economics assumptions such as competition among rational agents. But these microparcels are vanishingly close to worthless on the open market; in this particular case they could really only have value to me, were I to try to square-up an abutting parcel. So perhaps instead of prices falling to the point somebody will buy, the scheme may be to cycle the prices to try to tempt a purchase from the sole possible customer on the whole grid: "better buy now--can't tell when the prices will jack up again."

As with all these scams, it doesn't have to work very often.

I'm sure that all of the people using sharp practice and generally screwing the system would claim that. The majority seem to just get on with their activities and don't appear in public discussions, so the question doesn't arise.

If they did, then they would say that what they do is not against the TOS, only uses the features the LL give us, and that LL accept their activities. This translates into 'upstanding' for some people.

I wonder if it's possible to screw the average land values by continually selling 16m plots for $1m from alt to alt?

Adfarmers are in their own lala world of their own even if someone contacts them offering to buy majority are too much in lala world to respond unless its a Linden saying do something or else. There is no logic other then giving them extortion fees or ignoring them.

We could try it, I could probably set something up to do it a couple times a second for a few days. Only trouble is eventually there'd be a blip and the $1m would vanish.

Well mayb $1000L at 10sec intervals would work just as well, although it might overload a server or 2 as well or get us in the poo for just investigating possible exploits

Jack claims that the numbers they really look at in determining whether to unleash more sims to auction (or whatever decisions they're making) are an array of different measures--presumably intended to prevent "gaming" among other objectives. Understandably, he's fairly tight-lipped about exactly how those measures are computed. But even the Mainland average selling price that he gives during most office hours excludes some outliers, so probably any skewing attempt would be more effective if it didn't use extreme prices. No idea if they have a way to count only one transaction per parcel per week or anything.

In this case, the owner doesn't even have a very weak fingerhold over the sim's populace. He doesn't have any hold at all - not even For Sale signs, and even if they had signs on them, there's nobody on the ground to be bothered by them.

What hadn't occured to me is whether or not the owner changes when the price goes up. I'll take note of that.

That's noyt the way your friendly Adfarm baron sees it, please don't crush their fragile views of reality