The Question of Land Cutting

I don't mean to pick out you in particular--several people have referred to 'blight' and lost chances to expand or make interesting builds---all supposedly caused by Checkerboards.

What I can't find is a single explanation of this:

HOW does a checkerboard restrict 'chances to expand' or to make 'interesting builds' any MORE than any 512 or 1024 or any other larger parcel?

Isn't it the PRICE of the parcel next to the one that could otherwise be expanded, that stops the expansion?

And if so, how is an overpriced 16m x 32m that's uncut different from a 16m x 32m that's been cut into 4 x 4 squares?

?????

With reference to my plea to be told how a 16m x 32m parcel cut into overpriced squares stops development MORE than a same size, same dimensions overpriced 16m x 32m...


I want to make clear that I DO think Linden Lab should step in with regard to donut holes.

I believe that all owners of donut holes should be given a choice of maybe three different evenly-sized, evenly configured parcels. Inevitably there will be protests, because (for instance) a 256m parcel smack in the middle of a sim IS worth more than a 256m elsewhere in the sim.

But I agree that donut holes DO hold back expansion and creative builds. So I think a policy change about donut holes would be worth the added manpower hours that LL will have to devote to dealing with them.

However....the checkerboard issue is NOT worth the added manpower hours it would cost LL to deal with all the various instances.

I'll believe that until someone gives one valid reason why an overpriced checkerboarded parcel retards development more than a overpriced parcel of equal area and configuration, that's uncut.

Because one 4x4 can be kept on the market at a high price for 1/32 the cost in tier of the 16x32 (while the remaining microplots are sold on cheaply or abandoned.) ... or 32 times as long for the same cost? The cut-up version is enormously more sustainable.

This seems too obvious for you to have missed. I guess you must have some counter-argument, but none occurs to me immediately.

So are you saying the land jock will not lower his price? What make you think that the land jock is happy to waste money? t In real life if the house or car does not sell people re advertise at a lower price sl should be no different.


people can harass with a small parcel easily as with a big one cost in particular Tier fees mean that the small small er the parcel the more bang you get for your buck.

this is why people want to target small parcels 8 16m parcels cam harass

a sim. one 512 can a harass a lot less.

There are other practical problems with getting a valid average. It would be hairy to even weed out fake hyper-inflated transactions among the landscammers themselves, which would drive-up the averages. For all we know, they might already be doing that to the grid as a whole. I think that's why LL is fairly circumspect about how it calculates the "real" mean sales price used to determine when it's time to dump more sims to auction: they don't want to make it too easy to figure out how to game that system.

Personally, I favor an arbitrary low price cap for sub-256 parcels--say, L$1/m2, and draconian penalties for any proven "under the table" transactions trying to circumvent the cap. This doesn't deal with larger parcel price gouging, and we have evidence that this can occur (e.g., 4x128 strips), so "intent" (or "effect" should be part of the policy, too, but no matter where they are nor whether they're being used for harassment at the moment, the Mainland would be better off without these tiny parcels on the market: they're time bombs.

And I have a couple of them myself. In the course of setting up a build to span the corners of four sims, I bought and swapped for what I could get, and in two there's just not enough that I could responsibly dump them to the current market: they'd be cut and hyper-priced immediately.

In fact, they're a case where the current land sales tools are pretty useless: There's no way to sell a "parcel" spanning 4 sims using in-world sales, but that's what this really is, not four separate little parcels. So it's not like the existing land sales mechanism is something handed down on stone tablets, containing the wisdom of the ages; it's just what was convenient to implement by developers eager to get on to something else.

But already stemming from the ToS, no-covenant Mainland comes with quite significant restrictions beyond that of owning one's own Estate. (E.g., too many temp-rezzers? Too many camp-pads? Too many laggy scripts? "Bad" megaprims? etc., etc.) And the technical restrictions such as the +/-4m terraforming limit exist to make it possible for many landowners to coexist without LL constantly needing to intervene. The Mainland is not some anarchist paradise, despite Philip's Paleolithic political views.

Just in passing, I really doubt that most Mainland owners bought to avoid covenants, per se. I think, rather, they wanted more land/prims for the buck, and to avoid the risk of a non-Linden middleman: capricious, unaccountable owners who've made "covenant" a synonym for "gotcha." For all we know, the vast majority may have gritted their teeth and accepted the implications of having no covenant at all, in order to get the other benefits of Mainland ownership.

LOL.....really I feel you should retain the ability for making micro parcels for legitimate use. However limit resale of parcels to 512sqm. Obviously there will be some time needed for all the existing small parcels to be reabsorbed. For me at least, a 512 mainland parcel has always been the smallest practicle parcel to purchase. Land cutting and add farms have always been about exploitation and made the mainland experience a rubbish one. I'm pleased this problem is being addressed.

Wake up Gordon. SL is not a hiding place for fraud or extorsion. Linden Labs simply do not have legal jurisdiction, or the ability to pass such laws in Congress and never will. Even the mighty TOS has no power in a court of law and there is even precedance on that one. (Braggs vs. Linden Labs)

Real life legal authorities and the courts do however have the ability and Linden Labs would need to co-operate with the authorities in a legal investigation. The fact is there are many laws that are relevent to the Internet especially designed to protect the consumer from fraud and extortion; all punishable by imprisonment.

So are you saying that I responded to a strawman argument with a strawman argument?
So you're saying that you believe that someone was proposing a "land can only be sold through IMs" policy? Or not?

Completely unworkable, since (a) there's uses that have nothing to do with "extortion" that involve owning less than 512m in a sim, (b) many of the land management tools require deeding the small parcel to a separate group and at that means _it has a different owner_, and (c) Jack Linden has already said this kind of restriction is off the table.

SL is not just an online community, it's a bigger and more complex environment than ANYTHING I've seen online, anywhere. There may be bigger communities, but the environment they're in is infinitely more constrained than Second Life. Even the other virtual worlds like There are simple to the point of being simplistic by comparison.

But more to the point, it doesn't matter whether the G-team is capricious because they can't afford to pay for a team big enough to solve the problem, or because LL is malicious, or because LL is incompetant, the fact remains that the G-team *is* capricious and not a group who should be implementing a policy based on loose and subjective definitions.

The adfarm policy is a perfect example. They're *not* enforcing the rules intelligently, they *haven't* eliminated adfarms (I still have one I'm masking off with an invisiprim), and they *are* enforcing them against things that aren't adfarms.

The worst examples are gone, but there's been a lot of collateral damage.

The cut one is quickly owned by 10-15 different people who all have some different "get rich quick" scheme for their microplots.

I know of precisely one 512 that's been restored, and it took Jasper over a year and I don't want to know how much money to get it all together again, and there was only one ad tower on it, ever.

I have to agree that thet mainland has been a mess for some time now. I simply stopped going over their because of the way it was. But recently I have seen a vass Improvement in what they have been doing to clean up the mainLand.

I feel that Landcutting Needs to be a violation simply i remember seeing segments of the mainland that just looked like a waffle iron with all the forsale signs in rows from some one landcutting for profit.

The better the mainland is managed in this respect the better it will be for all of us in SL and people in thoes locations.

Ted

I buy some parcels on a sim.

a) I want to buy other peoples land on same sim. I start trading my parcels between me and my friend and force the average down.

b) I want to sell my land to other people on same sim. I start trading my parcels between me and my good friend and force the average up.

This the major drawback with price capping based on averages.

Deltango,
The TOS is not a substitute for a covenant. There is no single mention of the word "land" in it.

I suggested the option of a covenant on the mainland for "NEW" purchases, meaning either new land or simply land newly acquired. But ultimately it should apply to all to make sense as hard as it sounds.

You put it well when you said: "The real question is whether LL, as estate owner, can and should do anything to improve the user experience? This is a far more difficult question to answer."

What's difficult is to convert an unregulated land into something more civil without making people upset or outraged by such changes.

I personally think unregulated land without at least some kind of guidelines will always be the cause for trouble, which is probably costing LL a lot of support time. So I suggest having some kind of broad mainland regulation in the form of a covenant.

If Linden lab is going to start regulating mainland time after time with new rules, they might as well put a covenant now with clear guidelines and get it over with.

Having been, for a brief period, a landlord in a rent-controlled area... this is just the tip of the iceberg. Some kind of limit for microparcels, yes, but ONLY for the smallest possible sizes it's possible to get away with.

Pretty late into this thread. There are many legitimate uses of cutting a land because of all of the properties associated with parcels, most of which seem to have already been mentioned a few times. There are certainly abuses that occur on the mainland. I happen to own a parcel that has a long line of 16m2 parcels selling for 999L$ each in front of my land. My vote would be allow cutting, but restrict banning rights to a mnimum sized parcel, maybe 512. While I like the idea of clamping down the price, I would suggest limiting it to twice the average price to capture one full standard deviation.

Let me help here. I own a 384 sq m strip of land in my sim which is what remains uncut from a 512 sq m plot; the southern edge of 128 sq m was cut up into a checkerboard of 16 sq m parcels. The build I'm developing currently spans about 40% of the sim . . . but I can't build on that 384 sq m strip anything of consequence that will fit with the rest of my theme. In effect, the 384 sq m is only good for my prim count.

If I could buy that strip at a reasonable price, I could put an additional building on the land that would fit with my theme concept.

See my example above. The answer is yes . . . and the checkerboard strip costs an obscene amount of money for each of the micro parcels (e.g., L$9999 for one, L$14999 for another, etc.), making the purchase of such, a stupid economic decision for the person who wants to expand.

Others have replied to this one; I'll defer to them.

Umm .... what about groups getting a 10% bump? Or is the 10% unusable unless you own at least 5120 m2 in the group?

Hehe, I will go in fun mode.

Create the continent of the sixteen, and move all over priced sixteen plots that are on sale there...

The entire continent will be formed of sixteen parcels for sale at over priced values.

More do not place the sixteen parcels from the same owner togheter so they can be joined... no... place then spreaded so they CANT be joined.

Then allow then to place sky high rotating megaprims, ban lines, terraforming, no fly, no scrits, etc to their heart content.

Then just be away and see they try the extortion between then.

THAT would be fun

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After all if they are using the parcel for a legitmate use why place then for sale at sky high prices.

This would be great as long as it's not used to allow a**hole neighbors to force their neighbors to sell their land or manipulate them wrongly. The rules at the onset should be very very clear, and abuse of the system should result in aggressive retribution by LL.

Each and every AR of this kind should be followed with a personal investigation by a Linden who -understands- the rules. It is way too common for LL staff to make assumptions without viewing the evidence in person and communicating with the involved parties. This causes a lot of problems which require more communications, aggravation, etc.

Forced Market Price on Micro-Sized plots is a good direction to go, but I think it will just result in people setting it -NOT FOR SALE- and then putting messages up which ask for interested parties to contact them, pay them x amount, and then they will sell the land for 0L. Which then leads to an AR eventually, etc. While a No Sell for Micro-Sized plots would make that even more difficult or impossible for them to do.

How do you handle that for existing landowners though? there are some people, who for some reason or another have smaller sized plots, I have a 256 or 178 in one location where I keep a few of my servers. If a minimum size of 512, for example, was implemented, would the only way to get rid of the land be to surrender it to Gov. Linden?

And... speaking of minimum land prices, abandon land to LL needs to be disabled, or LL needs to start paying market value for these parcels. Sort of a 'default sell.' That's assuming LL believes in all this other stuff about land value manipulation, land size manipulation and other horse manure they're spreading around.

I actually filed a JIRA suggesting something similar: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1461

It attracted no comments

I believe we need a control measure on the farms, this has been a growing issue since I arrived in 2005 (with another avatar). This is one of the reasons I have never purchased land in the mainland districts. I agree that there are viable reasons for selling small 16m parcels for various reasons but when you divide the land for sale in order to inflate prices or monetary gain then it becomes an issue.

This is not about dividing for media purposes, nor is it about those trying to maintain a valued tier cost effectively. It is about ad-farming and how it effects the landscape and the pricing of the lands.

I for one am in favor of corrective measures but it must be done in a way that it does not hurt those that are selling small parcels for viable reasons other than to make a profit and inflate the current values.

It may have been mentioned, but one legitimate use I see for land cutting is media streams. Second Life's media system is antiquated and weak. The "one parcel, one stream" approach forces land owners to create small parcels for incidental music, different video feeds, etc.

Another is security. Ban lines are ugly and rude, but the only way to keep people out of secure areas. As a commercial sim owner, I cannot lock people out of the whole sim. That would be pointless. But I can create a small, limited access 128m parcel to house my servers.

Many malls do the reverse too. No rezzing allowed throughout most of the land, and a few small areas with "unpack your packages here" indicated.

Given these factors, a previously suggested idea sounds best. Don't forbid users from making small parcels if they need to, but enforce a minimum parcel size on land marked for sale. And perhaps consolidate any such parcels automatically if they share the same owner, media settings, etc.

This is the first we've seen of a claim from you that I had made a strawman argument. Are you willing to tell us which argument of mine you're claiming to be a strawman?

Or perhaps you're calling the other poster's argument about the problems a 'sell micro-parcels only with IMs' policy would create for those who don't speak the same language, or those who aren't on SL on a daily basis.

If so, how are those strawmen?

How are they not valid objections to the "IM only for small parcels" plan?








I think you're being silly. It's clear from the context that I was simply referring to your proposal that small parcels be taken out of the Land Sale system---not claiming that your proposal was that ALL parcels be taken out.

Can you cite one place where I made the claim that you'd proposed that all land be sold by IM?

Of course you can't. All you can do is keep quoting a sentence in which I neglected to type a lawyerly set of subordinate clauses---but which clearly refers only to your small-parcels plan, not to any alleged all-parcels plan.

I'm disappointed in you. I'd had a higher opinion of you.


And you still haven't answered the valid objection that other poster made to your plan.

I agree completely.

And this is not being judgmental about LL employees: it's simply recognizing the reality that LL is NOT going to invest in the number of employees and the training level for those employees that would allow any 'case-by-case- solution to be effective.