The Question of Land Cutting

This has got to be one of worst ideas to deal with land management on the mainland yet.

There is no land management on the mainland, period. That's the point.

If I buy a big plot and cut it in half, then that's my land, my cutting tool and my right to do so. And really, do you have ANY idea how often the cut tool is used on the mainland? Do you REALLY want an IM from someone asking you to investigate every time that happens?

All you will get it people/bots cutting land up and selling it a couple of times very very quickly. By the time you get there the land is cut, sold, sold, sold again, has a house on, sold again and turned into small mushroom garden for SL's pixie population.

Original complaint irrelevant, no resolution possible. Costs you time to investigate, tme you could better spend painting the wreches pink.

Everyone who has been in SL for a while knows Linden policy often means well, but they don't always look at the consequences for themselves properly and tend to get bored of the problem. Don't fall into the trap of making more work for yourselves because we all know in a few months time, you wil be busy with other newer shiny things - and that's exactly what we all want.


Perhaps it would be better to take a scalpel to the problem rather than a sledgehammer.

Cap the selling price of parcels under 128sqm to the average per M sq market rate. Tiny plots when sold are not for profit - they will end up in the hands of local land owners - Worthless to all but the people who live next to them and can merge them with their own land.

Allow the creation of plots below 128sqm, just dont allow prims to be placed directly on them. Carve it up as crazy as you like, can't do anything with it. Suddenly pointless.

These two combined have one main effect. They don't need a Linden to come out to look at the problem, which means there wont be another mainland policy meeting because everyone is getting very sick of managing the mainland, which really, should just be left to the residents.

Yes, the mainland can end up a little like the cesspool of Second Life, but that is the beauty of the mainland. The answer to this problem has always been the same and has always been a good one, both for business and resident happiness. Hate the mainland, go live on a PI then.

Destructive cutting and selling land continues to occur and often greed is not the motive. rather it is malice. It is seen wish to vent your spleen after a dispute with your neighbours or linden labs is not resolved to your satisfaction.

it would be nice to see more motivation to join land together introduced.



there are plenty of places where 512 doughnut holes have caused problems. as has the related practice of selling lots separately from the Walkways that surround them, Witchhazel and Hilbert come to mind there are others.

I recently bought a 17k square meter plot from someone and didn't really think about checking every square meter of it because it was so big and I'm used to owning a sim. After I bought it I realized there were several little 16m holes in it that were either not for sale or were selling at a high price and this pissed me off pretty hard. I didn't want to deal with these people and I knew I couldn't AR them so I bought all the holes. After that one was left that wasn't for sale by the same person who owned the group most of the owners of the little plots were owned by and who owned the big plot I bought. So I contacted him and he gave me the run around saying I could make an offer or trade him for another 16m plot of land on my land of his choosing which told me he was only interested in extorting money but wasn't going to say it outright.

Anytime there's a 16m hole in someone's land and that hole isn't owned by them they should be able to buy it at average mainland cost calculated based on a curve. And personally I don't think anyone should be able to sell anything less than a 512m plot unless it's to a neighbor who already owns land bordering that plot and as long as it isn't already at 512m or creates a plot that's less than a 512m.

Right. So that will ensure that I will downgrade my premium account to basic as well as sell my 512m and laugh the entire time while I see Premium Memberships deteriorate even further. All this while spending my time in a different grid other than SL, which is so much cheaper. This is a good example of punishing everyone because of a few bad apples, while still not going after the root of the problem which is land extortion.

I was waiting for you to pop up on this thread. I suppose you're referring to me there and I explicitly, clearly, directly told you I am not interesting in you "making an offer". There is no offer you can make. I want the land. I own the land. I intend to keep the land. I don't know why it's so hard for you to believe that I need the land and don't want to sell it.

Also, to clarify another point, the swap was to be for a 16 of YOUR choosing. Not mine.



Absolutely no. I'm seeing a few other people teetering around this kind of suggestion in this thread and to my mind it's absolutely unacceptable. Extortion should be punished, maybe people who ruin sims should be punished, but LL definitely should not punish people who just want to own land thy legitimately bought. Especially in my case where I owned that parcel over two years before you even showed up. Especially in my case where the parcel is carefully terraformed to fit in with the region and the only prim on the parcel is sometimes a small semi invisible cube.

It is distasteful but I'll concede barely acceptable if LL force land swaps within the same region since that wouldn't harm me at all but I can see other cases where people might need that 16 in specifically that location so they'll have to be extremely careful here.

As is becoming clear, the issue is much broader than particular instances of employing small lots for harassment. The issue is harassment itself. BUT, since 'harassment' is very often subjective, Linden Lab has walked into a major philosophical debate about the nature of the mainland.

There is no problem about 'noise' because sound can be limited to a parcel. There is no problem about land ownership because transactions are purely technical (click and pay). Forthcoming script limitation for parcels will eliminate the 'tragedy of the commons' regarding processor usage.

The vexing question of 'visibility' remains. The ad ban was a first attempt to prevent the employment of 'visual noise' for the purpose of harassment. The current discussion on small lots is a follow-up since ad farms tended to thrive on them. In both cases, ad farms are an easy target because of high intersubjective agreement on the nature of ad farms.

While there may be general agreement about ad farms as a form of harassment, there is far less agreement on everything else. Is your pink nightclub harassment? Is my 27-meter-high pony harassment? The last thing we want is RL-type governance. That road leads to Disneyland.

By design and definition, the mainland was always somewhat chaotic. It is the nature of the beast. It is up to individuals to attempt to carve out a home for themselves as best they can. Those who want covenants should move to islands.

If you want to make a drastic change to the blight on the Mainland caused by land cutters, it will take drastic measures. Not sure LL has the will to do it, but try this.


First month: Temporary sweep... Any 16m2 piece surrounded on 3 or 4 sides is automatically transferred by LL and absorbed by the surrounding landowner. Any 16m2 parcel adjoining another parcel by the same owner is joined automatically to the larger parcel unless surrounded on 3 sides by someone else. No money changes hands. Sorry, landcutters. For Botrunners, sorry, too, but you are making your profit...just buy a larger parcel and pay the tax like the rest of us.

Second month: Temporary Cleanup...Any remaining free standing (not connected to the same landowner) parcels less than 256m2 are taken (owners compensated at current m2 prices) by Gov Linden and offered for sale at current m2 prices to adjacent landowners in the sim, with preference given to adjacent landowners.

Third month: Each land parcel less than 512m2 is counted as a 512 for tier purposes, regardless of size, unless adjacent to a parcel larger than 512m2 having the same landowner. Land cannot be sold in parcels less than 256m2. Land can be cut in smaller pieces, for an individual's use.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Bad idea. You can't automatically take someone's land. There are tons of legitimate 16M2s out there. You also can't automatically add to someone's parcel. What if they didn't want it? What if it bumped them up to the next tier level? The only answer is to get rid of the incentive... the ability to use them to extort high prices.

My hope has been that the land cutters would eventually go broke and stop playing. Holding a large number of parcels for a long time with no income coming in until such time as someone buys them doesn't seem like a winning strategy. There are good reasons for holding small parcels, however... including putting up vendors and ads.

I have two suggestions, both of which might be hard to implement.

#1. Change the tier structure so owning a large number of discontiguous parcels is way more expensive than holding the equivalent amount of square meterage in a few contiguous parcels.


even harder (and paradoxical):
#2. double the number of prims per square metre on the mainland. This will make parcels of all sizes more valuable... and it might make it possible to actually build something on a 16 sqm parcel. In that case, the 16 sqm would in due course get merged and consolidated. I suppose you could even make prims per square metre a non-constant: i.e., maybe larger parcels could be allowed more prims than a small one.

I have often cut land into 16m parcels to create temporary landing points and/or change the pictures without affecting the larger parcel. It is also sometimes necessary to cut a small portion off to join it to another portion. Having more than one media stream requires different, sometimes very small, parcels as well.

I have purchased small 16m pieces in the past out of sheer prim desperation. I can also imagine that occassionally a person may have to drop a very tiny piece of land to keep their tier from reaching the next level.

So, the suggestion about making sure only people who already own land on a Sim can have 16m or 32m or even 64m, seems more than reasonable. I cannot imagine anyone needing a 16m piece of land on a Sim for anything other than advertising, if they own no other land there.

Is this something that can be implimented?

Maybe you can clarify this. I do know that you CAN buy land which you are banned from. I myself have done it. (BTW, ban lines are a favorite tactic of small-lot extortionists.) If the land is for sale to Anyone, that means literally anyone (anyone who is a paying member, that is.)

Land cutting for sale, as you describe it, yes.
So long as the definition of land cutting doesn't involve people from splitting off small parcels and transferring them to groups. Say, for media, access control, build control, stall rental, home point setting, and other purposes.
Yes.

I think that could lead to acrimony over the definition of "average price", and I can't think of any use cases that wouldn't equally well be served by allowing only deeding to group and setting for sale for L$0 to a specific person.

Actually Weedy's profile says (or at least has said in the past) that she doesn't do trades and that she won't discuss her business with you and please don't bug her about the microplots.

She owns a large number of 16s which usually seem to have a one-prim server on it. I have never seen any vendors on them. Some people have been wondering what the heck she is up to... but she says she is legitimate... not just in some aspects but in EVERY aspect! So that puts any lingering controversy to rest.

Supposedly, according to unsubstantiated rumors, those lots are used by an old networked radio system with repeaters which shout media URLs to receivers at clients' parcels. She tries to have one repeater per mainland parcel. That sounds harmless enough to me: inefficient but harmless.

Allow sale for L$0 to named avatars.

That wouldn't prevent legitimate sales, because they can be made in two steps, but it would kill coercive sales because without Linden Labs being the "bagman" there's no way to arrange a two-step sale that both parties can trust. There's no reason to trust that a landcutter would deliver the land after you pay them, and no reason for them to trust that you'd pay them after they delivered the land.

We've DONE a trade with her so obviously she DOES do trades and doesn't mind moving her microplots.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the proposal, or you're referring to something someone other than a Linden has posted.

Setting a price cap on all new and existing small parcels must be done. It won't however stop the large scale slicing and dicing of parcels for sale. Not being able to extreme terraform, banline, connect up seperate corners for large prices etc. will take away the incentive to set strategic parcels to multiple alts and begin terrorizing and ugli-fying the neighborhood.

One concern which needs to be addressed are the vultures who are swooping in behind the extortionists who have enough sense to sell out. One such group who previously priced theirs for thousands of $L but likely began selling in advance of the (hopefully) coming ban hammer was strategically bought by an extortionistic vulture who looks to want to try and keep this game going.

All existing small parcels set for sale must also be dealt with in this new policy. Even 50L/m is outrageous and predatory.

Selling small parcels is a practice which could have quietly gone on forever at a reasonable rate. (MAYBE 10L/m max). Whether its bizarre pathology or an attempt to prove that avi's don't have souls- it is instead a practice that has been pushed to far too many extremes.

Stop talking. End it now.

First of all I want to thank LLs for taking steps to address this mainland problem. First ad lots and now the land cutters who were still basically using extortion to sell these lots for huge profits. I never thought I would see this day but I am glad it is being addressed.

My thoughts are that even though there are legitimate reasons to own and create small lots 16m-64m ..i.e. streaming of music ect. from your large lot, THAT there is no legitmate reason to be selling these lots. If you created these lots for a legitmate use, they can be merged back in if you are selling your land.

The only people who will be hurt by not allowing 64m or less lots to be sold are those that are abusing and trying to profit by destroying the mainland.

If you allow these lots to be sold even at current market values, I am concerned. You always quote an average for mainland pricing and its always quite abit higher than what is really the truth. If you want to know the actual low price of mainland, select 512m, pg and mature and sort by price per square meter.

My concern is that this number will always be less than your quoted average, giving those who on a regular bases by a large property and split it into a million 16m lots, a reason to continue. If they can make L$20 per 16m lot, they will continue this practice.

Mainland owners continue to buy these lots for the purpose of cleaning up areas or removing ugly for sale signs, or squaring up their lots.

You can only stop this practice by taking away the demand for 64m lots or less, or by NOT ALLOWING these lots to be sold at all.

Some may try and get around this by trading land and L$s but if these cutters have to hand transfer each lot, they will not be so likely to continue this practice.

"parcels of 64m or smaller have their sale value clamped to be no higher than the current average price per meter. "

This would solve most of the land cutting, making it no longer profitable will stop people from doing it.

I believe this would also cause owners of cut land trying to sell it for a profit to group it back together to get the value from what they own. I see how it would take longer but is probably the best solution.

Just thought of something that would foil microparcelers from renting. If the land is under a set size say 64m (or less if that is too high) then no prims can be rezzed on that property. You can allow prims to pass through it, just nothing permanent and no temporary rezzed prims to evade the no rezz setting. A variance can be requested for parcels used for purposes such as rezzing boats as has been mentioned on land next to water by request of the owner. If the owner get complaints from the neighbors that there are ads placed there and it is substantiated by a Linden, then the owner could be forced to sell that land at the going rate for the area for that kind of property not the avg L per meter for the SIM to be fair to the owner or be turned over to the Lindens if the fail to take action to sell.

Slightly tangential, having an option to trade parcles with somebody else - some atomic transaction that doesn't threaten to bump anybody's tier as they swap land around - would be nice.. Might be tricky to do but it'd still be nice.

They'd just rent through a web-based interface.

And it would screw up rez spots in malls and stores.

The average mainland price won't stop this from happening, it will stop it from happening in the more expensive sims, but isn't that already the case? Indeed restricting the price will just see the problem moved to the lower value sims to the detriment of them.

Linden Lab need to move to a means of preventing the sale of these smaller parcels, and 64 isn't really small enough, it should be 256 really.

Pay them off Jack and then ban the practice of selling these smaller parcels. I'd prefer you to find a means of dealing with this via the existing TOS rather than introducing new policy, new policies end up being circumvented, a broad policy is always easier and to be honest, I thought your existing TOS dealt with issues of harrassment already.

Im sorry but I see other issues as much more important than this.

Im afraid I regard issues such as this and ad farms (by the way isnt it amazing how much clutter and how many second rate, incomplete shabby builds have sprung up to take the place of ad farms) are second to much more important issues of exorbitant tier charges, value for money and grid stability.

I suspect them to be something of a 'smokescreen' myself.

Simple: each premium account has the ability to own up to 4 parcels of land, and may contribute that count to a group. Each parcel in excess of that will be charged some additional fee.

Simple: make it unprofitable.

As for those who think this is not important, this is THE biggest issue right now for premium account mainland residents. Even if I buy land in a "good" neighborhood, I live in constant fear of that one jerk moving in and destroying the place (as has happened number times, even after the recent tightening of ad farms).