How Many Islands have gone so far?

With the new pricing now in effect, the numbers will probably calm down a lot for a while. Once we get closer to the next price increase, they'll start dropping like flies again then, hopefully, the grid size will level off and maybe even start growing again.

My guess (more an hope really...): we will notice the dropping for the whole month of January (at least), because people remained are evaluating the possibility to surivive with the new rates, not they can't already make their own counts before, but paying contretely is different mentally, after that the numbers will calm down, i guess we will continue to have a minus sign there because few OS'es will continue to being abandoned, and because there's many regular SIM on the market that can be sold privately, and there's also to taken in consideration the fact that many "new investors" after this bad move doesn't trust (or they trust less, not enough to place other investiments into this) LL.
My opinion is that LL did *NOT* defined the new price increase yet, they just wanted to cover themself "just in case", but the 125usd is likely to not happens because at that price is actually clear to anyone that that product is completely out of the market.
Only after that (whenever the further increase will happens or not) we will start to see a growing again... but it wouldn't be as our old gold age, because it's pretty clear now that you can't plan any money investiment "here": if they can double the price in 6 months and at the same time reduce the quality of a products (20avs/script limits), without listen the reasons of anyone, you can expect anything from a day to another, in example: you can wakeup tomorrow and find that they decided to increase the price of the regular SIM's to 500usd, and no protest will have any effect, you have just to abandon. So in the end you may say: if anyone is forced to abandon, SL will end.. so it's not convenient for em as well; that's correct, but if you examine what happened recently you can see they doesn't have any business plan nor a strategy, they are just keeping random decision hoping to find the correct one (for the company).. so actually i hope they'll hire someone enough skilled to say: "what the hell are you doing.. you're killing this company", and (returning in topic) they wouldn't place the 125usd fees in place. Not that is a big step ahead, but at least it would be a tentative to recovery partially their brains.

Remember, 14 days of 3 auction rounds per day for Nautilus City took place during November which is why this count was high. The Nautilus auction accounted for more than L$29,153,104 during October and November.

Yeah a new batch of suckers will have joined.

Island growth so far in January, as of January 5th: -202.

I wonder if the land barons gave away all their Open Space sims as Christmas presents. Hey, maybe that is why the decline in sims keeps on agoing. Of course, they would have given them away to the enemies rather than their friends and families. So, I guess that can't be any insight.

So this morning the Economic Statistics page said January 6th... I've been refreshing it to see when they put in the December final numbers... and now it says December 24th.

What the heck is going on?

Well seems to me all their stats are going south, perhaps they are trying to find a way to spin them before they issue the quarter end. If you look at the money supply you will see that there has been another big drop in advertising and uploading receipts showing that people are cutting spending in SL, due to the opensim fiasco or due to the current RL economy I wouldn't try and guess. But I'm sure the OS situation was not a help. Then again LL don't want us anyway, they are just after the corporate business ?

If they are going after that market, it is not helpful that corporations are leaving or those sims are forever empty of activity. News media leaving may be a clue to a growing trend as well. CNN, BBC . . . As many others have noted, the trend appears to be forcing a consolidation of estates toward growth of mainland initiatives. Where lag is not too bad, it's a good place to drive my Damani roadster.

While it's certainly tempting to go back and say "Well, the RL economy is in the dumper, so this is to be expected", you can't really give that very much weight in this case.

Look back to October 29, and you'll see that sharply delineated pivotal moment that coincides directly with M Linden's announcement of the plan to reneg on their agreements with their paying customers. While I'd expect the down economy to reinforce paying customer's reaction to severe abuse, the outrage, disappointment and sense of betrayal most people are feeling at this point actually counts for much more of the decline.

It's sad really. This has been noted before, but it's worth repeating.

SL/LL was on a clear path to avoid most of the RL slow down. Like the "Movies" of the last big US depression, SL/LL would have provided an escape from RL woes. At least for existing users things could have rolled on. The last thing SL needed was a shake up like this to remind us all how much we are spending each month....

Bad timing. And a decision that wont be quickly forgotten =/

Well, in the last great depression, the movie companies didn't see themselves as next generation business tools. LL is trying to become just that. So because they want to become the next IBM, they are abandoning all of us who paid the way thus far.

It's kinda like watching someone turn their nose up at a free Jetta because they wanted a BMW.

All LL has to do is fix stability, stop jacking with the prices and leave folks alone to do their thing. While the recession goes on, produce SL 2.0 so it'll be ready for both entertainment and business use immediately upon the uptick. Downtimes is when you fix your infrastructure and factories so they'll be raring to go as soon as the money flows again.

Island growth so far in January, as of January 7th: -301.

I took a tour of Nautilus and some of the other mainland areas and they are the most gawd awful things that I have ever seen. Even the basics like terraforming and land textures are just plain ugly. It looks like it was burnt over by a huge forrest fire. There is so much vacant land for sale there at completely ridiculous prices I could not believe it. I pitty all those land speculators expecting a rash of ex-OS owners to come running. Based on the land pricing I am sure they have sunk a huge sum of money into this. It just isn't going to happen for them though. If there was a LL plan to bump sales on the mainland by forcing O'Sims off the grid this has back-fired terribly.

I would suggest that all land speculators and new buyers hold off on ANY purchases as I suspect the prices will be driven down to near nothing in the not too distant future.

This thread doesn't really have anything to do with the mainland..

Don't be too hasty in that assesment. All land issues in SL are linked.

Are you grumpy today, Sindy? You want a beer?
Who again raised the prices for OS? Who again is owner/initiator of Mainland/Nautilus? Who again wants that to work?
I find that especialy interesting in the context of the USS development/offer.
Somebody desperately wants Nautilus and the new politics (themed mainland) to work out fine and is going a long way to make that happen.

You may have let your emotions gloss over some of the things happening, at least in Nautilus City. True, there are a large number of parcels for sale, but then again there were 519 parcels sold at auction from October 26 to November 14th. Yes, there are some parcels for sale at very high rates. And then again, there are some for sale at much lower rates. And in reviewing the current parcels for sale below L$45,000, many of those are listed below what they sold for at auction. And things change every few days with parcel prices being reduced or taken off the market. What this means is that 10-15 +/- parcels each week are sold to someone who intends to set up a business or home on that Nautilus City parcel.

What we have found is that it is taking several weeks for residents to create their new builds. As an example, we have two parcels we just bought. They have no buildings on them. We're creating the build on another property and it may be two more weeks before that build is finished and rezzed on the two parcels. Our first build took 3-4 weeks before we rezzed it on its parcel and we are still tweaking the furniture and textures. We'll rent this house at a reasonable price, especially since it will be a unique build. We've received very good compliments from people that have stopped by to look at it. So it does take some time to create the resident builds.

What you missed in your quick fly-over. The Moles, and LL, did a terrific job on the design, layout, and builds. Yes, there are some pavement areas that need work, but if you look at the overall sim-by-sim design it is very good. There is considerable room between parcels and sims. You will find a substantial amount of public park space and water areas. The south shore line is a terrific place to ride horses, especially at night. The water is great for sailing with 6 mooring buoys in the area. The Moles left us temples, forums, palaces, and garden areas, all of which help break up the sims and provide space between parcels. I generally see at least one or two planes or blimps flying over the city each day. People are beginning to sail around the city. I also see people fishing off the piers now. Most importantly, you won't find the 16m parcels in Nautilus City, or Bay City, since the parcels cannot be divided or joined.

Adding the Blake Sea and its water/underwater creations and interactive activities to the East of Nautilus City is an important next step. The Blake Sea's connection to the USS sailing sims will add a very large number of contiguous water sims. This will be ideal for sailing, riding on a Ferry or ocean liner, scuba diving, fishing, and flying over in seaplanes, planes, or blimps. It will make for a very large 3D recreational area that many residents will enjoy and have fun in.

Personally, I do not believe there was any plot to drive people from their OS/Homestead to the Mainland. We've kept ours. If there was a plot as you imply, it would not be to drive people to Nautilus City or Bay City. You correctly pointed out, the individual parcels are priced too high for this type of strategy.

I also suspect over time, the land speculators will sell their parcels to residents who want to live or open a business location in Nautilus City, just as they have done in Bay City. That's part of what drives the economy in SL. Will land speculators make money in this, probably...and they should. They are holding on to those parcels for months, or even longer. Will they make very high profits, probably not. There are several who are very smart and price their parcels with a reasonable markup. These folks are selling their parcels and not having to hold on to them for long periods of time. There are some individuals or groups who are speculating as well - not full-time land speculating businesses. Just as in RL, their prices will come down. The market sets the final price, not some artificial or government construct. People buy when they see something they want at a price they are willing to pay at.

Now for the eye-opener -- in case you didn't watch the auctions. Was Nautilus a smart business move for LL - absolutely. They generated over L$29 million for the 519 parcels. I also believe this is a smart move for residents given the new creations that are beginning to appear. It will take a year for Nautilus City to shake out and build it - maybe even longer. I think this is an exciting and fun time to be there and part of the new community. Your OS blinders may be keeping you from having some fun and taking part in building a new community.

Room at Nautilus City, are you kidding? It looks like low income housing. Every home looks the same its boring. The homes are so close to each other you will need to talk in IM's if you dont want your neighbor to see your chat. It will take a year for Nautilus to build up, build up in the air with giant mega prim privacy walls and all the other ugly junk that goes along with mainland. Anybody that dosent think that most of mainland is a cluster of a mess needs a better video card.

Funny, no one's been the least interested in putting up privacy walls so far. The protected space betwen parcels is pretty generous--enough so that almost all parcels have at least 2 protected sides.

While it's true that the basic homes in Nautilus (freely provided by LL) are currently prevalent, there are some beautiful builds there -- and more in progress . As the community grows -- and it IS a community -- there will be more. I'd much rather people take their time to create something worthwhile than to see a bunch of badly made structures thrown together.

I haven't seen too many cheaply-made prefabs there (not the price, just the quality) -- though there are a few of those. If you throw something together just to have something thrown together, you get what you get. As long as they don't violate the TOS, it's all good.

In the early days just after the auction, there were several such 'builds' from those who were obviously trying to get the neighbors to buy them out. Not only were those AR'd by neighbors pretty quickly (the out-of-TOS structures came down pretty quickly) but many of those parcels are still in the hands of those who tried to extort their neighbors --and still empty and unsold. Likely the price will have to come down even further than they already have before anyone will buy from them.

Everyone has a place -- if your's isn't Nautilus City, that works too.

I do find myself there as often as I am on my estate. Solitude is nice up to a point, but community and friends you can ping to have an impromptu trail ride with is good too.

To each his own.

Thank god, those walls are soooo ugly.

Ok so I am getting a bit upset, over 2 weeks of temporarily disabled and/or a completely dysfunctional Economy Statistics page. I was giving them a pass last week because of the Holidays, but this week they have no excuse. What happened to transparency? Where are the December statistics? Are they so bad that they don't want to show the public? Are they telling us that transparency is only good when there good things to report? Are they embarrassed that they had an integral role in the current economic downturn in SL? Are they just so technically incompetent that they can't get the page to function properly? How can they have such troubles with this page when the raw statistics seem to be relatively accurate?

*breathes hard for a few minutes calming down*

As the Lindens have stated repeatedly and was stated at one of the office hours yesterday (I think it was Jack's) they removed it because it was inaccurate and broken.

Inaccurate how? Broken how? Why leave weeks old information up there instead? Why haven't they been able to fix it?

Nobody's thought to ask them that directly it seems but is the question.