The Question of Land Cutting

In general, a high relative price of tier-cost to land-price encourages disintegration (demand for small lots, subdivision, ad farms, artificial price-boosting methods, harassment); a low relative price encourages consolidation.

Parcel-based harassment is as old as SL itself - usually conducted by a few well-known players - but the big ad farms didn't appear until the spring of 2007 when LL began dumping vast quantities of new land on the market. People who had invested time and money to create a home suddenly saw the value of their properties halved. The relative price of tier to land doubled, encouraging many on the mainland to flee to island estates. Sadly, LL repeated the mistake in the summer of 2008 with yet another massive land dump - driving up the relative price of tier-cost to land-price to disastrous levels.

I agree that the mainland needs help, but the best way to encourage consolidation is not via legal, technical or regulatory restrictions but instead by providing tier to land-price incentives that encourage larger lots.

Can literally one-up you. Land used to extort is *2* of the big six.

"you keep using that word, I don't think you know what it means"

I agree.

Linden Lab should be targeting the methods used to harass people.

Rather than targeting the existence of parcels that have legitimate uses.

There are only a limited of business method methods being used and they are easily targeted.

1) obstruction. Four things spring to mind
Make it compulsory for owners of contiguous land areas of say, less than 256 to swap land for a similar sized area within a sim when requested,
Make banlines on areas less than 256 explicitly contiguous illegal. (Great if you could do this in software)
in the case of encroachment, make it possible to return items on ones land whenever there is any overlap.
Disruptive terraforming can prevent free movement or hinder anothers terraforming.

Lindens should be free to landscape as they see fit 4m either side of a boundary line.
2) Fraud.. not only bots buy fragmented parcels make the practise explicitly fraudlulant and introduce code to prevent it as soon as possible.

3)Spam, this is diverse. particle spam is generally effectively dealt with under the existing rule or it would be if the reaction were faster. Text spam needs to be tightened. we need a a parcel wide chat command in LSL and its use should be mandatory for objects when in open channel.
other forms of visual spam will always be a problem i am loathe to suggest ugly build regulations though forcing all builds on 64 or less to be ad rules compliant is a possibility
and glow really needs to be looked at closely.

I want to be able to heal cuts as soon they cause damage. i cant point to all to many sims that wont be helped by cutting bans.. the damage is done instead we should create a system that can heal itself. that allows quirky little builds, server stations, and folks to buy and trade land three prims at a time if they want to.

160m2 = 160 square meters.
L6k = 6000 Linden dollars.
L6k/160m2 = 6000/160 = L37.5 per m2 = 37.5 Lindens per square meter.

NO NO NO NO NO.

That would open up griefing against people who cut land for land management.

ANY kind of automatic compulsory transfer is just too open to abuse.

Get rid of the incentive for exploitive landcutting by preventing microparcel sales for exorbitant amounts, and deal with existing cuts on a case-by-case basis.

Legitimate land dealers don't engage in extortion, so that's not a problem.

You can always win stupid debating points by oversimplifying things, but that doesn't change the fact that they're stupid debating points and the people reading your posts understand that they're stupid debating point.

The issue is the way that the current rules make harassment profitable, because small plots (a) amplify the ability of a single person to harass others, and (b) Linden Labs guarantees the process of selling that land, for any price.

There are two ways to resolve it.

* Increase the size of the G-team so they can take the time to make a personal and appropriate decision for every individual case, on an ongoing basis.

* Figure out a way to remove the ability of people to profit, by removing Linden Labs from the process of selling small parcels.

That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about banning small parcels, I'm not talking about making it illegal to cut them, or to sell them, it's simply to make buying a small parcel no different from buying from a scripted vendor. You pay your money, you trust the owner of the vendor to deliver your product. If someone set up a particle emitter on a parcel next to you that accepted L$500 to turn it off, nobody would pay it, no matter if they called it a "vend-o-weather" machine. If they set up a one-prim sculpted toilet on the parcel and set the parcel for sale for L$500, a lot of people would buy it to get rid of the toilet.

BECAUSE they know that once they buy the land, the griefer can't do it again. Because Linden Labs is the bagman. There's no reason that Linden Labs has to perform that duty for all parcels.

Again, this won't penalize people who want to sell small parcels legitimately, as prim reserves, any more than I'm penalized by having to have a scripted object on my land to sell through SLExchange does. It's fair for people selling objects. It's fair for people selling land. Yes, they'll need a bot. Most of them HAVE bots already, and this would be a far more legitimate use than most bots.

Because landcutting extortion using larger parcels is not economically sustainable. See above.

I'm not suggesting denying anyone the ability to sell land for a profit. See above.

As for WHERE the limit is, I can't say, somewhere between 64 and 256 seems reasonable to me, but it would be best to do some statistical analysis of actual extortion plots, see where the 95th percentile is, and maybe pick about twice that.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. Those were not the words I meant .... no quibbling about those definitions. I was responding to 37.5 L/m2 not exactly being what I would call 'reasonable'. Maybe if there was a special case (nautilus, world edge, there was something special about that particular spot, etc) since the average mainland price is usually 2-10 L/m2.

No, I'm not calling you an extortionist because 512m2 is not a microparcel, and you don't make a habit of doing it (I hope), though I think you should have bought the land back from the idiot who bought it no matter what they called you. And I'm not putting the tag of extortionist on someone who sets the price to 2 billion lindens, because nobody's going to pay that. I'm labeling people who set microparcels for sale for extortionate prices (prices that people are likely to pay to get the extortionist off their back) extortionists.

Permaban is NOT the only punishment. There's a whole series of sanctions from short suspensions on up... and given the situations where people have engaged in deliberate and sustained griefing and only gotten a few days of suspension I think you're being ludicrously melodramatic and just plain silly.

I don't think anyone has any objection to people buying tiny plots to actually use. That's not the subject at hand.

No, for reasons clearly outlined in this blog.

Referring to previously mentioned stupid debating points as "reasons" is not really as effective a technique as you seem to think.

I just checked who *owns* that 16sqm in Sistiana, and that person is one of those for what this problem is all about. A "Land Cutter" - A Predatory Land Sales Specialist.

And you know what, that same person has a remaining 16sqm in Poidor and when I had 1/2 the sim, he would not negotiate a reasonable price with me, maybe because of one group (Arbor Project) I belong to, even though there was no incentive except to get 1495L$ out of me for a 16sqm in the middle of the sim - no roads, nothing.

Land cutting as defined by LL is bad and needs to go away.

The AR system could be used, so no extra coding is necessary.

1) 16m plots must be contiguous. or border other land owned by the same person or group, or the owner must hold at least 512 contiguous meters in the same sim.

2) 16m plots completely surrounded by another landowner should either be surrendered to that land owner at no cost ON REQUEST, or sold ON REQUEST at the current maximum average sales price for that sim. for example, if the last 10 sales for a given sim averages 10/m with a peak of 20/m the price for a 16m square should be a max of $L320.

[those two rules would solve all of my problems]

3) plots less than 64m in size should not be able to set ban lines, restrict object entry, set no fly, set no script, or complain about parcel encroachment.

Bottom line, if you own a bunch of 16m plots in a sim that you are not an active participant in, you should surrender those plots to those who are actually trying to use the sim.

Those two rules would screw over people who are using small parcels for reasons other than extortion, like Weedy.

That seems unfounded. It may be true--market agents are not as rational as we may want to assume--but rationally, any of the listed practices should be a function of total cost of ownership, not of a ratio between two component expenses. OTOH, cash flows would respond to that ratio, so it might affect a time-sensitive metric such as churn, for example.

That's not to argue that tier should remain high relative to purchase price, nor that it should continue to be based on the current formula. Rather, I just see no reason why changing that ratio would have the cited effects.

Please explain how this would screw anyone except land extortioners??

It depends. Protected coastal 40/40 is trading between L30 and L50 per m2. Protected coastal 4/4 is trading between L10 and L40 per m2. Inland 40/40 ranges from L15 to L30 per m2. Inland 4/4 ranges from L3 to L15 per m2. Flat green is preferable to mountain rock, though certain people value it very highly. Snow rises and falls with the seasons, but mountain snow is prized by a select clientele. I personally won't pay more than L30 per m2 for Bay City. I might be willing to pay L100 per m2 for Nautilus depending on the lot. As in RL, the price of land is dependent on many, many factors.

The bottom line is that something is 'worth' what someone is willing to pay. I think Google shares at $300 are expensive, so I don't buy them. Other people think they are cheap, so they do buy them. If you think $100 is too much for a bottle of YSL perfume, don't buy it. This is the normal working of any market. We make such decisions every day of our lives.

Please explain how this would screw anyone except land extortioners??

The landcutters have made a fine point in this thread, the last few prims in a sim are more valuable, that's basic economics. However, the damage they do when it's a small parcel is the issue, Linden Lab need to move to disallowing the small parcel sale. I'm very reluctant to agree to price caps, but Linden Lab should buy up the small parcels and then disallow the practice of selling them.

Joe has a scanner in the sim, and Fred thinks scanners are evil, so Fred buys the parcels around it and takes Joe's scanner down by eminent domain.

If Joe doesn't have at lesat 512m in a sim he has no reason to have a scanner there. If he does, there is nothing fred can do about it. [see rule 1] Rule two should only apply if rule one does not..

Happy now??

It doesn't matter whether you *think* he has a reason for having a scanner in the sim or not, you're still screwing Joe over, and Joe isn't an extortionist.