The Question of Land Cutting

Rock on.

If I have one 16 sq. m. of land, I should be able to sell it (or give away for 0L$) if I have no other land in the same sim.

The price cap of 64 sq. m. or smaler sounds great to me. Rather than limiting to the average price, I would recommend a cap of average price * 2. Land markets fluctuate and can easily be considered as too expensive the next day if the average price of land goes down. Also, PG land has a different average price then Mature, so steps would be preferred to go by the average price of mature/PG category.

Why not give users the option to specify a specific price, or choose "market average per sq. m." option for any size land they want to sell?

What happens with existing land for sale today? Do they get taken off market, reduced to the avg. price, or automatically abuse reported? Some people appear to sell small parcels of land without intention of selling it. 16 sq. m. for what amounts to be a few thousand dollars in US currency.

If a parcel is 64 sq. m. or less, the option to ban people from it should also be prevented.

My other concern is 16 sq. m. of land in the center of other peoples property. These are parcels that cause problems with building up large buildings. Instead, the surrounding land owner has to build around a tiny void. I would like this problem addressed with the ability to request "orphaned" parcels to be moved to the edge of parcels that they are contained within.

If land is cut up into smaller pieces but not for sale - that should be ok. Take Torley Linden's "Here" sim. He cuts smaller pieces of land to watch different movies on each parcel. Although it is not on the mainland, I believe people on the mainland may already apply this same technique and may be affected by this change.

Also, you can set it up so someone can not purchase 64 sq. m. or less unless they already own land in the same sim (or are a member of the same group if the land is deeded). In fact, maybe you could add that option to the land purchase option. Sell to Anyone, Specific User, or Neighbors.

Traffic should be reported as zero, and unable to show in search if a parcel is 64 sq. m. or smaller. Classifieds should not be tied to that parcel as well.

Well actually owning rentals and a recreational area we often have a need to peel a slice from one group to feed prim to another. So we may have a very small lot on one side of the land we own that we have taken to place into one of or other groups to provide prim for a vendor or renter Normally when we do that we look for an area we do not have anything on and that it will not mess up the music stream so it could very well be smack in the middle of other parcels. You need to take in to consideration some of us are spliting our own parcels to use with in our groups to accomadate a prim need and I do not see that you have mentioned that. I think some blanket rule like that, which came about because of a few, hurts those of us just trying to do buisness with in our own groups. Having a set rule on lot sizes that can be sold seems a much better way to monitor and control this type of land misuse than to punish all of us. There can be real reasons you may want to have smaller lots with in the land you own.

Although I use a full region for my store, I often like to cut it up into small sections to allow for teleporting and search purposes for specific product areas of the store as a whole. Also cutting up small patches works for locating atm style deposit boxes, or media keosks. I would say focus on limiting the ability to sell small cut parcels, but not on the ability to use them if they are part of a larger surrounding parcel.

Limiting price on them is a good way to eliminate some of the land extortion that goes on, I would say selling anything under a 16x16 meter parcel should be eliminated all together.

"Do you agree in principle that land cutting needs to be a violation?"

No.

Placing teeny-tiny parcels for sale at insane prices is what needs to disappear.

"Are there any legitimate reasons for land cutting (excluding profit) that we should consider when setting policy?"

* terraforming basements precisely

*"arrival" parcel for first-time visitors
(so that the larger main parcel doesn't have to have forced-arrival-point for regular visitors)

* individual movie booths for my theaters

* multiple cutting and rejoining projects that REPAIR old bad landcutting shapes done by previous owners

* in-store or in-mall reserving of a single corner or section for a client who needs it set to a different landgroup

* in-mall landcutting for each mall client, for easiest tracking of prim use/overuse, or for varied Permissions

* mini-cutting of new add-on parcels so that the "SL-search popularity rating" of the older main parcel will not be lost
(SL has set it so that if you have a popular 512sq.m. store, and decide to expand, and buy an adjacent 512,
you risk losing your popularity rating if you join 2 identical size 512s. You have to split the new 512 into smaller pieces
and join them to the old 512 sequentially, to maintain your store's current popularity rank.

* search-word marketing.
SL caused this situation when they added that Google-type algorhythm to the Search system.
If you have an 8192sq.m. store and a customer searches for "purple turtleneck sweater" and you have it, now they have to wander around your store to find it.
So I slice my stores into 256sq.m's so that customers can find the product they came for.
For example: I have an 8192sq.m. store in 256sq.m. increments.
Each parcel presents a specialized type of clothing, and runs its own land ad.
Customers searching for each specific item find my land ad,
they arrive directly in front of the vending machine, they buy and leave.
They don't have to wander around the whole 8192 store.
This is incredibly convenient for the shoppers, and SL makes more money in land ads.

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Thus it should not be forbidden to CUT our mainland to maximize its usability.
Instead, it should be made impossible to SELL tiny pieces of mainland [except to directly-adjacent land owners].
(By tiny I mean smaller than 256sq.m.) This would have to be implemented after a warning period, though.

The reason I am selecting the 256sq.m. size is I notice SL already previously designated this as a "legitimate" land size in one manner:
land-ads on parcels smaller than 256 are NOT carried in the first search panel! (Chance Unknown, I believe your post indicates you didn't realize SL had done this. Yes, they only display land ads for under-256sq.m. parcels in the "old search" section (last panel).

Petronilla is spot-on correct.

And ATLWolf has a clever alternative concept - that if you set a teeny-tiny parcel for sale, it's gonna default to a cheapie price.

"With land that is already cut up, but still mostly owned by the resident that cut it, should we ask that the land be joined back together?"

No.

So I sell land to my alt 5 times increasing it by 25% each sale until I get it to the price I want it to go for?

That would be something !; do that every month !

I don't like the idea that 64m plots are sort of ok. If 16m plots go by the wayside, parcels will simply be cut to 32m, 64m or even 128m, and it's business as usual.

I see no reason to cut a parcel to anything less that 512m and put the smaller parcels up for sale - not even into 2 x 256m pieces. I do see good reasons to cut a small piece out of a 512m parcel, or larger, and sell the rest as a single parcel as long as the larger piece does not surround the small piece - no doughnut holes.

Land cutting is not a "new" issue, in fact it's as old as the hills.



Cutting land for the purpose of profit is not limited to 16m parcels. For example, purchasing a sim at auction, subdividing it into 512 sqm lots is "deliberately chopping up of parcels in an attempt to sell those pieces collectively for more than the value of the original parcel". Once subdivided, the sim will has the appearance of a checkerboard. My concern is, the new policy does not go far enough to define extortion and exploiting motivated buyers. All I read into this statement as it's written, is more legitimate users, needlessly coming under the microscope of scrutiny.

I don't need a ton of bricks to fall on my head to know the difference, yet the Lab continues to "pussyfoot" around this definition. Extortion is illegal IRL, period.

For the mostpart, ad farming was a grey area for extortion, by exploiting prims, boundaries and access restrictions to be annoying as possible. Ad farming was never really farming, nor advertising. Only a small minority of residents were engaged in real advertsing. These people fell through the cracks in the policy and alot of otherwise decent landowners, live in fear of of advertising their own products.

Since "ostentatious advertising" was greatly restricted, the cutters jacked up the prices of these lots to (even more) outrageous sums. Disciplinary action at Linden Lab on these offenders continues to be seriously deficient. There is no way on earth, $19,999L for a 16 meter plot is a reasonable price by any stretch of the imagination, even in high traffic areas. We have not heard a single word from LL in this matter, who have the appearance of "grandfathering the benefit of extortionists" as 10's of 1000's of these plots are still present on the grid.



Land cutting, checkerboarding et al, has been around since LL implimented the tier system. When SL had only a handful of residents and plenty of land, plots were "publicly" available to anyone who wanted to pay tier. Residents would buy public land at 1/sq, use it for whatever purpose, then resell it at whatever price it would sell for. Asking outrageous prices was neither practical nor viable, because land was still available at 1/sq, which in general, kept the overall price of land low.

Well, this was all well and good while SL was small and developing. After a time, there were residents who chose to exploit this policy in a couple of ways. First were the disgruntled residents who would buy public land and checkerboard it... for annoyance (as opposed to profiteering) by rendering land as unuseable for neighbors. Linden Lab frowned on this behavior and would discipline abusers.

So you see, cutting, extortion and griefing are not new tricks. Linden Lab had wide-sweeping discretionary powers to manage the problem from the outset..... and did.

What policy went out the window then? When that happened, we ended up with today's mess. LL had it under control, but then turned a blind eye to it.... for many more years.

Enter land scanners. A handful of residents began purchasing 16m plots for the purpose of running scripts. While this practice has always been allowed by Linden Lab, some residents used it as a cover to exploit high pricing. Many of us oldtimers remember Chance Small's laggy 18 script parallel land scanners and his plots set for sale at $1,600L.

Then enter Lazarus Devine. LL ignored "Bush Guy" for years. Despite the outrage and warnings from residents, his practice of placing annoying signage on his property was allowed to become epidemic across the grid, with nary a peep from LL. It was Lazarus' own undoing, that eventually stopped his streak of terror. LL flatly refused to see this as an actionable issue, likely because the bottom line was not affected, as the overall population, concurrency and land base was on the rise.

It only took LL 5 years to realize, this is bad for business?



There is way too much ambiguity in this statement. How much is "extensive", what sizes are unacceptable/acceptable? What uses are reasonabvle and which ones are not? For example, let's say I buy 4096 sqm for 15k in a new sim, cut the land into 32 128 sqm plots and offer each for sale at 15k.... is this cutting? The reason I ask, is because the extortionists will simply look for another loophole in the rules for the purposes of exploiting communities for profit.



Yes, I do, but not without clear guidelines as EXACTLY what is meant by "cutting".



Yes there are. Disclosure is a touchy subject though. While Linden Lab has the ability to inspect and investigate any situation internally, it's exceedingly difficult to state publically on these forums, specific details of proprietary information or speak to details under NDA agreements from clients.

Clearly, our group is not in the mood to broadcast our operations, practices and future plans.



Absolutely not. Unless a violation of the rules is clearly identified, LL must never intervene in disputes between residents.



No. Absolutely not. Many of our plots were bought and paid for at much higher prices than the current market value. Coupled with our labor, tier and customer service costs, many of our plots are valued higher. In some cases (particularily in full terra sims) we paid thousands for our plots. It is patently unfair to anyone.. to develop arbitrary caps, which will likely only punish legitimate users and excuse those who use loopholes.

Our groups overall valuation is based upon the network of nodes and a business model, as opposed to the value of the sum of it's parts. Although we have offered our group for sale in the past, we maintain the right to sell it for whatever we choose.

Simply put, extortionists will not put the plot for sale, but in some way, will arrange a third party sale outside of SL to thwart this development.

While on the topic of "outside" sales, I will mention we did this at oine time. We developed a procative solution to prevent Lazarus Devine from buying our small parcels. Neighboring residents had the option of clicking a cube on the land, which would IM notify us of their interest in purchasing the land.

This brings us to a very, very important point, which I cannot emphasize enough. Since LL co-opted public land for their own profitability, they eliminated a 100% automated system, for one which is a liability, causing thousands of hours of manpower to manage. Even with this change, landcutting, extortion and checkerboarding was rampant and multiplied prolifically.

When land was released publicly, it would go up for sale to anyone in-world. The land would (almost instantly) go from one paid tier into another paid tier. In recent times, land owned by Governor Linden often sits for weeks, months and even years, with no disposition in sight, or is unmarketable or useable. Why is this? It's because LL turned a blind eye for years at the plight of the mainland, by permitting extortionists and griefers to run roughshod. To this day, I put the onus of blame on LL themselves for allowing it to happen in the first place and for having the lack of foresight by expecting residents to do "the right thing". It only took a few bad apples to ruin things for everyone else, yet those people are still on the grid (as themselves or their alts), developing the next scheme, meanwhile "edge-case" users needlessly come into focus.

Never once, has our group been disciplined (or even asked) to change anything about our operation by Linden Lab, but we have borne much of the brunt of community outrage about land cutting. While 99% of requests from land owners for trades etc have been polite and amiable, it only takes one or two to ruin your day. Simply because we chose for our own protection, not to disclose or discuss our operations, does not imply anything nefarious, but there are those who will never accept that. We have been accused of some of the most paranoid delusions possible and even though we've never done anything wrong, I am quite sure LL has received alot of unfounded abuse reports against us. This is not fair to us, Linden Lab or residents at large, who have real concerns needing attention.

Several years ago, Philip mentioned his desire and the need for a resident land auction system. Why has this been shelved? Likewise, Philip also claimed "These things are better managed by the residents, themselves" Manually ticketing Governor Linden's land for sale is cumbersome, expensive and a huge strain on the staff.

LL needs to put a stop to this silly "cow-tow" ambivalence of the definition of "extortion" and throw their asses into the street. Period. Once and for all. They have the power and they'd get no argument from anyone. What part of this solution is too hard to understand, Pete?

Here's my opinion. I'm more than happy to provide my thoughts on this issue!

1. Land cutting with the intent of selling the cut-up pieces separately needs to be a violation, yes, most definitely.
2. Land cutting for private use (media streams, parcel reconfigurations, landing points, etc.) should be considered.
3. Don't ask, demand that they be rejoined, if the intent of the owner is to sell them separately.

I like the idea of limiting the sale price on 64m or smaller parcels. It removes the profit incentive to cut. Perhaps some people would just move to cutting parcels of 96m or larger and continue to do the same thing. But I think most wouldn't bother. Would you apply this to the microparcels currently for sale at outrageous rates?

Some people recommend that you just deal with the known major offenders instead of making a new policy. This won't work, because as we have seen, the same offenders keep coming back with new avatars. They can make new accounts faster than you can find and ban them. So yes, we certainly do need an overall policy.

Land cutting in and of itself should not be a violation. Many things (access, ban, passes, media, landing point, object creation, script, push, fly, etc...) are set or permissioned on a per parcel basis, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to subdivide a parcel that have nothing to do with making a profit off creating an eyesore.

What if you divorce these settings and permissions from the parcel? Allow the user to set these things on a 4mx4m subparcel basis, and then there's no reason to cut up a perfectly good parcel. Then you can disallow cutting as a general rule, and handle exceptions on a case by case basis (maybe even charge a "subdividing fee".

I agree, cutting is very*annoying.

But there are some undeniable legitimate uses for small parcels:

- Media streams. Seriously, this is a big one. The one stream limit has caused me to parcel many things I'd much rather not in order to work around this limitation. Yuck.

- Permissions limitations for auto-return. Sometimes you might need to let someone set something out without giving them group permissions, etc.

- Prim limiting. i.e. for jewelry construction tools. A lot of the jewelry tools can consume an inordinate amount of prims very easily without anyone realizing it. If you've got a renter or group-member building this kind of stuff on the property, they can very easily consume the entire prim budget and break stuff and not even know it. Aaargh. Making the darn jewelry machine sit on its own parcel helps fix that. A 16m is still probably too small for this purpose, but you get the idea.

- Redundancy for Xstreet magic boxes. This is also an important one, more so in the past than recently but still important nonetheless. These boxes are prone to failure if the sim goes down. Customers are understandably annoyed if their item isn't delivered promptly. The easiest fix for this is to keep more than one box on different sims. I have a spare water parcel anyway so I keep my back-up box there, but considering the box is a single prim I could see someone using a 16m if the couldn't afford the tier.

- Other similar communications devices also benefit from redundant copies on different sims.

Simply creating a 16m2 parcel can't, in principle, be a violation. Others have listed a variety of legitimate uses. SELLING it on the open market, however, should be.

I support a minimum size for land sales, say 256m2, below which the price defaults to an averaged or token amount. (There are legitimate reasons for selling small parcels, as well as for splitting them up. But I think defaulting to the average L$/m2 as a maximum is a fair solution.)

The market has decided that land cutting doesn't work in and of itself. Otherwise the cut parcels would disappear overnight due to eager neighbors snapping up those extortionate parcels like pancakes on Sunday morning.

However, the market *has* decided that ruining Mainland is good for estate sales, and that ruining some parts of Mainland is good for the market in other parts.

Thus, when the market talks, the largest single resource available to SL residents is ruined. It's called a 'tragedy of the commons.'

(Hopefully everyone is reading the whole post before getting to the questions....)

As described, yes, it's an abuse of the tools available in order to unjustly profit on the grief of others. The basic selling premise: "Yes, I ugly up the place. Pay me to leave." (T_T)

I own land in one particular region that was reclaimed from a large amount of cut up land. My main parcel is oddly shaped, and I recently picked up some 16m parcels to pad my prim count after I saw their prices fall to L$100. There are still 16m parcels scattered around the region priced at and over L$700. (T_T)

Re-configuring land among neighbors.

'Terminal' parcels where autoreturn is turned off for the sake of placing a uniquely owned terminal. (Think XStreet).

Media specific parcels.

This shouldn't be necessary. The direction I think is... Require ridiculously low price caps on parcels 128m, 64m, or smaller. Something short of a full prohibition of the parcel's sale, but, not to the point where it forces abandonment. That way people can do their L$1 or freebie land exchanges to fix odd corners and such. Or it would simply force the seller to re-join the parcel anyway in order to cut any form of profit. (^_^)

Now... Another thing... In reclaiming land, I see people with holes in their own parcels. Usually a nice big build with 16m or 32m smack in the center because of someone who just won't leave. If someone has a parcel completely surrounding a microparcel, they should be able to request the land be sold to them or abandoned then transferred in order to be joined to their one parcel. Obviously the owner of the microparcel should be contacted and given the opportunity to show a valid reason for keeping the parcel. But, a time limit should be set on this contact. (^_^)

Heh... Yeah... I'm adding work to the process. But... I'm living around a small number of eyesores in the park I keep my store in. One of them in particular decided to rez glowing, lit prims... Just to fill the limit and ugly the place up. This is NOT someone with goodwill at heart. In my mind, this is someone who should NOT have free reign on the appearance of mainland SL. (>_<

Allow sales of 512M plots as a minimum allow any size down to 16m to be subdivided but to resell them they must be joined back to a 512. Permissions can be issued to those using retail locations less than 512M but they can not be sold as an individual plot. Seems simple enough , oh wait the coders will have to implement this, well maybe not so simple ))

I have a donut hole - in the middle of a live music venue - where musicians can rezz tip jars and other paraphernalia - while the space around them enjoys the security of not allowing anyone but group members to rezz - this is so that they are not required to shuffle groups once again in order to play at my venue. However that donut hole (32sqm, I think) is not and will not be for sale.

What she said. Unless you're willing and able to provide more granular control over one's parcels, rather than having many settings apply parcel-wide, there are definitely legitimate reasons for slicing them. (I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at one point my place of employment had a teleport pad on its own itty bitty parcel; it needed to be set to a different group than the main parcel in order to allow it to function for the right set of people.) Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Sometimes Linden Lab has created the mainland in such a way that there is a diagonal Linden road in between, with 16m chunks at the sides. I always chop those 16ths off to set the main parcels on sale for 512, 1024, 2048, etc, as per tier table.
I don't put the 16m chopped off on sale to avoid adfarming, however i give purchasers the option to buy the chopped of bits for L$0 for extra prims if so wished.
Sometimes they are equivalents of 16m upto 144m, but i don't put them on sale to avoid adfarms.

Linden Lab should also start to avoid those weird land creations in the first place ( they create it ).

There should be a possibility of course to transfer those bits created by LL like that; purchasers may want them for extra prims.

Actually, no, 'the tragedy of the commons' refers to the exploitation of unowned or common-owned resources. The lack of private ownership results in no market at all.

Enjoy long distance ocean travel there and free lag lol
Head to the protected beached at many usuable linden ocean regions.

hi, I cut my land to testing some scripts right for renting or other right sometime and also cut a small part to give the land right need for the X Street SL terminal. Some Stargate also need some special land setting. Thanking off the land owner to cut is land will mess a lots of items.
So as long the owner do not sell it, and make some cut for is use of is land. The land owner most keep that right.

Set a minimum size for selling a land, that will fix most issue.

Apologies to those who have already posted similarly, too many to list, and to Weedy, whose plight is not sufficiently accounted for, but ...

Any kind of price limitation is unilkely to be effective because it can be circumvented by arrangements made outside of the inbuilt land selling system. There are already many microplots that are effectively for sale in this way.

Instead, I would propose that a lower limit (maybe 256m) be placed on the size of parcels that can be transferred between owners, by any means. Most of the "legitimate" uses of microparcels, such as separate media streams, object options etc., do not involve transfer of ownership. Neither does the cutting needed to reshape plots (or any of Kim Anubis' uses). The needs of advertisers can be met by their renting microplots cut for them by the owners of larger parcels to create the required special permissions. The data collection (or whatever) networks might be compromised in new mainland. Transfers of multiple discontiguous but joined microplots would seem to circumvent this rule. The rule would thus be more effective if it meant that only contiguous plots of at least 256m could be tranferred.

A policy that adresses only the creating of new microplots and does not lead to the coalescence of existing plots will not effectively deal with the problem. It is essential to create incentives for combining existing microplots as well as for stopping the cutting of new ones. A minimum transfer size would help here, as the owners of microparcels would no longer have the prospect of collecting high prices, how ever long they waited. This is likely to be slow.

A more radical approach would be to change the tier calculatioins to something like A*(number of discontiguous plots)+B*(total area). Some care would be required in deciding the relative values of A and B. They would have to be chosen so that the dealers in normal (512+?) plots were not disadvantaged. Mathematical simulation with available ownership data should allow suitable optimisation. Simpler would be to treat each discontiguous plot less than (say) 256m as counting for the same tier as a 256m plot. Note that the legitimate uses are again not penalised because they involve only parcels cut within larger parcels of the same owner, which are therefore contiguous. Again, the data networkers would be somewhat disadvantaged.

The proposal to incentivise rejoining of multiple contiguous microplots under the same ownership is not going to be effective unless you are going to intercept the cutters in the act of cutting. Generally, the dispersion of ownership in newly cut grids (and don't forget to include linear roadside grids!) is rapid, whether to alts or to collaborators. It is obviously ineffective in dealing with most of the existing microplots.

You can cut your land into little bits for land management uses, they just are rejoined if you sell it. No one cares how one large chunk of land is subdivided internally, just the sale of little postage stamps for extortion prices and that is the only reason to sell these micro plots.

* Do you agree in principle that land cutting needs to be a violation?
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Yes, IF its set for sale or left blank and done in multiples... like one plot all cut up


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* Are there any legitimate reasons for land cutting (excluding profit) that we should consider when setting policy?
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Many uses - video/audio streams, TP points, Kiosks (like for Xsreet lol).. BUT..all the uses i can think of do not involve transferring ownership - except one... using them for valid and legal advertising - which although you publically state is ok...u still allow other residents to harass via enclosing.
Something should be done about that too..i have a multiple parcels on a sim including a 512 that one neighbour harasses over and over by enclosing to try and force me off sim. ARs sometimes remove the megaprims..but she just puts em back up in different way. Most ARs get ignored by your team.
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* With land that is already cut up, but still mostly owned by the resident that cut it, should we ask that the land be joined back together?
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No...see above..there are legitimate uses by owner - however they should not be allowed to be sold.
BUT if it's an obvious attempt at sale extortion..ie land not for sale (unless you enquire personally) and no other land on sim and it's all cut up - then confiscate and auction.

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my recommendations;
Limit price on all blocks below a certain size.
Use AR process to clean up obvious extortion...like the 25k and 15k ad blocks i complained about a month ago and got told "no issue there" by concierge team.
Allow cutting for own use..if part of a larger parcel..or owner has interest on sim. But use Ar team to determine if valid useage if there is a complaint.
Most important... change AR process..let people know results, and provide better way for them to respond. AR is a joke..they are often ignored by the team and no-one knows if any or what action is taken.
It is the main problem on mainland - that AR only seems to work to certain rules and anything tricky to decide gets ignored in favour of easy rule based solutions. I can get an overlapping object removed quickly..but my neighbour deliberately harassing my 512 section via mega prim screens to a height of 140m is not actioned cause its only 3 sides and does not violate the 4 side 'rule' - let your AR team use commonsense PLEASE.