End or Fix First Land

I have a friend who just joined SL. I was helping him set up his first land, and had never really gotten a chance to see what first land is like.

Basically, it's a trough of land resellers swooping in and offering cheap prices for land using floating, rotating cube griefing.

This is absolutely not what first land is about. First land is about helping out new residents, not being a subsidy on land barons. This is Linden Lab pissing away its income.

How is is frittering away it's income by selling land?

You would prefer Linden sell it to the newcomers at a price high enough to keep people from offering to buy it from the newcomers?

Or what?

Let the barons have it, they have to eat too! This is fantastic!

It's a subsidy for new residents. They buy it and sell it for some $Ls.

at 1L/m, Linden Lab is selling a sim that they normally sell for $1250US for 65000L, or about $275US.

Then new residents are selling at around 2-4L$/m, or about 600 - 1200US.

Land barons then turn around and sell for 6 - 10L$/m.

So all in all, Linden Lab is underselling their sims so that land barons can prosper. Way to go.

If you want to subsidize new residents, just give them 3000L or something with the accounts. This is a land baron subsidy.

True and they probably know it too. LL knows best! They rock!

Well, not really since some residents actually want the land and giving them the money and having them buy it from the barons would subsidize barons and LL is not subsidizing the barons with the underpriced land, the stupid new residents are.

You know, I was a "stupid new resident" once who didn't know crap about land values. I had some people help me out, and I lucked out with good land.

This attitude that residents are "stupid" for falling for scams that are running rampant is just plain bull crap. Most residents probably assume, "Well, if this is allowed, it's probably fair." - there's no part of the Second Life tutorial that explains how there's all sorts of scammers out there.

New residents aren't stupid, they're new. Do you realize how out of touch with reality you sound?

Well Hiro, what altenate method of doing things do you propose that will benefit me or you or Gabe?

No it's not. You're forgetting that L$s mean nothing to LL, the money they get from the land comes from the premium account subs and tier payments. As long as somebody owns the land it doesn't matter one bit to LL what happens with it.

This isn't about benefitting you or me or Gabe.

The counter suggestions are out there: fix it or end it. One way to fix it would be what I just said 2 seconds ago.

Okay, but servers costs RL US$, not L$. When Linden Lab sells them for 1L$/m instead of $1250US like they do private sims, they are losing money. Period.

Math.

A sim full of 512m plots nets way more monthly income than a single sim owned by a single person.

Single person = $195 per month

128 people = $1280 per month

In a single month the server pays for itself. The rest is just icing.

Incidentally, we can have some fun with the numbers and calculate LLab's current maximum tier revenue, assuming all land was reverted into 512 First Land plots.

~1200 mainland sims = 153,600 premium accounts @ 512m a piece

$1,536,000 a month, or $18,432,000 a year. This isn't counting private island stuff, of course. And also assuming we were knocked down into Geocities-esque 512 plots.

But there you go. Assuming maximum efficiency, the mainland can currently milk about $US 18 million dollars out of us yearly.

The real number is much, much lower.

I disagree. If you are selling anything anywhere, checking the going rates is probably a good thing to do. And it is fair. Very fair. Knowledge is power. There are any number of methods and sources to get the information. If they do not avail themselves of it prior to making a financial transaction, well I don't think I will worry tremendously about that.

I really don't see what this has to do with my grasp of reality. Your comments are certainly appreciated, though. I would suggest thinking LL is unwittingly "pissing away it's income" would be closer to being "out of touch with reality".

The solution to which is to stop creating public sims and eliminate first land all together, not change the way first land is sold.

EDIT: Yeah, what Lordfly said - no problem, no solution.

I wouldn't worry too much about the Lindens losing money by offering First Land to players who are going to become premiums to get it.

Not all of them can afford islands, after all.

And you're right, new players aren't stupid. They generally give some thought as to whether to become premium to buy First Land in the first place, and most aren't likely to give it up easily for little profit.

coco

Broken system. Get rid of it.

So they would get some money and there would not be any land allocated for them and no new sims made with land set aside for new users, its that right?

How does the current system harm you.

The comment I made about benefitting me or you or Gabe iwas an example of what is knoiwn as being silly.

Hower the change would need to benefit someone in order to be worth doing.

So the new user gets no first land, but gets money which they pay to land reseller for higher priced land.

I don't see why you should be bothered. Linden Labs resources are theirs to do with what they want.

Personally I think the main problem w/ first land is that it's crammed together and quickly becomes a crappy mish-mash of buildings, stores, floating ad cubes, and what not all thrown together with no style or plan. Basically what i've seen quickly becomes really ugly.

I know there have been some experiments with West Haven and now Shermerville, 2 nicely laid out suburbs (not exactly my style, but at least these sims HAVE a style). What was funny about West Haven is that I, as someone who have never owned land, was unable to get any land as people who already own land in West Haven were given first dibs on all owned land in the area.

Hopefully though, the Lindens will do a bit more with Sim planning than they have inthe past.

And for the record, I was not labeling all new resis stupid, just the ones selling below market value, which is stupid, unless you can't wait for it to be sold at market value.

Which you'd hope nobody's going to do since there's a big spinning sign telling them how much it's worth.

except the land barons wind up combining plots and it becomes more like 8 or 16 people instead.

8x$40 tier = $240 per month
16 x $20 tier = $240 per month.

It doesn't add up.

Your math assumes a basic premium account. So that's $72 a year, for 500x52 = 26000L over the course of a year, or... about $90 - which means LL forks over more in stipends than you pay per year.

Since residents pay nothing over that $72 / year to get the 512m tier, that means that they are essentially being paid to own land that they got for downwards of 1/10th the normal cost.

You also fail to incorporate the price of hosting the sim, paying for bandwidth, etc.

Math.

I like that "mish-mash of buildings, stores, floating ad cubes, and what not all thrown together with no style or plan". It would be nice if there was more space around the edge of my plot to move my camera in though.

Hello? Not costing LL anything to pay stipends.