consensus about 10% tier bonus exploit

I need to correct an inaccuracy here. If you donate land to a group, you are no longer eligible to buy First Land. This bit my friend, especially as there was no warning at the time of the donation. If you want to buy First Land, do not donate your free tier to a group.

very poor performance art...

I love how Jauani honestly really does not 'get' that this was the actual intention, To allow people to pool together, and do bigger and better things than they could on their own.

Also, as described previously, the most 'regressive' tier rates end up equaling the feature superior islands.

Well, history has shown that people generally DON'T happily collaborate on anything, and precious few groups have pooled their tier into something tangible such as Luskwood or Taber. Most people just use it to get some extra land for free. Scale it up to Anshe-sized land owners and you will see how much money is being bled from LL's pocket to keep around a silly legacy system from the good old days before capitalism.
I would much rather have LL get paid for those 10% and hire more coders.
I like Luskwood, but SL development is best done by people with the drive and resources to eat the costs without blinking. People who have developed projects of that scale IRL and will be happy to hire talented builders and scripters like the Luskwood folks for $30/hr.
Besides, if a sim costs $200, a 10% discount puts that at $180. $20 is the price you pay for a sandwich and a cup of coffee in america, and heck, even in portugal I spend a lot more than that every weekend when I go out with my friends

Eggy, i hate to say it, but yer way mistaken. It would not cost 10% more for a small land owning group, it would most likely cost 100% more, or 50% more...

If it bumps you over your tier.. lets say a group has bought a sim worth of tier and is building on it up to 70k worth of land (this is what a sim tier in land buys a mainland theme group) You don't *GET* a 10% discount on tier, you get a 10% increase in area. To continue to use this area, you could be bumped to the next tier class, not pay 10% more,

aka you would not not be bumped up to $220 tier, you would end up at $300 for 1.5 sims of which you are using about 5% of the 'extra' half sim of tier.

Yer specifically going to be heavily punishing group projects because a jerk like jauani exploits the boon. The only real thing that would happen, is mainland groups would end up having fire sales of land that they'd have to shave off their groups, much to jauani's profit and the profit of all the 'land barons' you are trying to 'punish' with that action, while the mainland groups that this was actually helping, end up screwed, with a casino or heavy lag store popping up on land they used to own but could no longer afford.

Oh joy something more LL can take away.

I wouldn't worry *too* much...

Generally LL doesn really seem all that eager to hurt large numbers of people so that one or two selfish/self interested people can make a few bucks.

Government subsidies *are* what hurts large numbers of people.
LL should not own a single square meter of land, because SOMEONE has to pay for that land, and the high land prices are on everyone's list of complaints.
If LL stopped giving away land for free just because you are in a group, or because they somehow think they, rather than the sim owner, should control what it looks like, they could make land cheaper for everyone.
IRL I am a libertarian. I want absolutely no government interference with my life. Specifically I don't want to be forced to pay outrageous amounts of taxes to subsidize "cultural" events I don't attend and socialized healthcare so crappy that it kills 4000 people a year, and all those things the government does POORLY and that I don't use anyway.
I find it even more ridiculous that LL has to pay someone to run around deleting trees from the land they shouldn't own in the first place.

Thats a somewhat nieve view of the way things tend to work in the world. There is value at all in land because people wish it to be used for things. If a sim did not have a specific geographical feature, preserved by LL land ownership (which is usually very little) it may not be nearly as desirable for people who wish to make good use of it.

So by holding say 3000 sqm LL can substantially *INCREASE* the value of the rest of the sim compared to a sim that was basically a bulldozed flat 65k sqm.

A similar argument can readily be made in favor of land supporting group/theme builds on the mainland. LL is sacrificing a few dollars in tier money, today, to help make it desirable for users to create desirable content and landmark places that will attract huge numbers of new users, down the line.

Sometimes, as in people like jauani, they end up on the 'loosing' end of the stick, sometimes, as in luskwood, the aerodrome, and others, they end up on the winning end of that stick.

To say that overall a system should be removed because it can be abused, even though it is also heavily used for good, is at best dubious... To say that a group successfully coming together and holding some amount of land together, in a theme/collaborative effort, is somehow 'exploiting' a system, designed, by LL, to help facilitate groups coming together, and creating theme/collaborative efforts, is just silly.

Jauani and anshe, and potentially others, are exploting group land. That does not mean group land as a system has not proven to be an overal boon to LL however, or to the SL community. Trying to paint an attack on group/theme builds and the mainland's long term viability as a 'valiant' social effort to help SL tho is just sickening.

what the heck are you talking about? you keep asserting i'm motivated financially. how the heck does devalueing my own land benefit me?

secondly, this would not happen. nobody would move off the mainland because of this. least of all luskwood, which sits at teh age of the noob rez station and draws unsuspecting noobs into it's web.

actually we generally don't... nor would we really want to.. we already have more than enough 'fun and excitement' without a never ending stream of people who don know the rules of the game yet...

We're well past the default draw distance from the welcome area, and with direct teleport there is no such thing as fly over traffic anymore... i haven't even personally seen a new player 'stumble' across LW 'what is this place?' style more than once a day, in months, nowdays people go where their friends take them, with a teleport.

i exploited the group land to build larsen shops. you exploit it to ensnare noobies into the furry lifestyle. they are both exploitation.

the main grid is not under threat. this is just your rhetoric to continue bleeding LL and the small tier land owners out of their money.

Our key difference here is that you think of a sim as something that is owned by a large number of loosely connected people, whereas I think of a sim as something that is owned by a single person, who is constrained in his or her use of the land because somehow LL feels they have the right to tell you what to do with your server.
How would you feel if you bought a web server from someone who felt entitled to allocate 20% of your disk space to storing his own personal files, or who somehow imposed constraints on how your website should look like. You would think it's amateurish, wouldn't you?
People are being forced to buy islands so they can be assured they won't get a server with some stupid river in the middle of it, or to *gasp* be able to terraform it beyond a paltry 4 meters. This is terribly inconsistent with LL's vision of a contiguous world. It makes the map look like crap, too
The only reason people are forced to buy islands is because of all the whiners who continously freak out at everything that pops up next to them and say "zomg this is ugly, it's LL's fault for not being like every MMORPG, with tightly controlled, unchanging, professionally designed content!".
There is a clear historical trend for increasingly large parcels. Back in 1.2 LL thought that the "free 4096" ought to be good enough for everyone... and there was like one or two people who owned anything close enough to a whole sim. These days sims are sold in blocks of 50 for christ's sake.
If SL is truly our world, then it should be up to us to decide how to terraform it.

Yeah this thread is dead, sorry i bothered to try and actually engage in a discussion here, at this point theres really nothing worth saying.

eggy so what do you want?

LL preserved land stops people from having potentially unwanted builds next to them, which you have said is a bad thing thats driving people away.

But you are also saying that there should be *NO* LL preserved land, that sims should be 100% user owned.

Is there not a fundamental contradiction in those two statements?

Believe me i know about both perspectives.

There are blocks of LL land that have been inconvenient, and it would always be nice to have more prims, especially in lusk. But at the same time, people like jauani are already attacking what land we can hold. We couldn't really afford to take on additional thousands of sqm currently held by LL without even more tiering up.

Its kind of a balancing act.. To little LL land and then people are risking being bordered on all sides by giant cubs/casinos/malls. To much LL land and there isn really that much incentive to take on a whole area as you won necessarily get the prims you need.

Theres a balance... and its not like you don't have a choice, if you really do need 65536 sqm all in your name, you can buy an island, having choices is good, and the mainland should be somewhat different than island ownership. In this case you can get a slightly smaller area, and not worry so much about a neighbor, if a sim has more LL land on the mainland.

Remember LL only needs to sell about $200 of tier on a sim to run it, or even make a profit on it, as is shown by the islands... On the mainland they are not 'loosing' money if they block a few thousand sqm out to preserve a multi-sim contiguous waterway or hill, etc. Thats a fallacy. They still make more per mainland sim than they do per island in tier. They *HAVE* to, because their is no circumstance where they will be paid *less* than $200 us per sim used (unless they make less than 32-35k sqm available, and on the mainland even a heavily LL preserved land sim usually has 40-45k more of developable land there.

You're kind of arguing a point that isn really valid because one of your premises, one of the key ones, is wrong

This is a Public Service Announcement:

For those of you who are racked with guilt over exploiting your 10% group tier bonus for projects, I will take it off your hands. Donate today to my groups and feel the burden lift from your shoulders!

Or Furry Vermin, or the Coonspiracy.
No money is being "bled" from anyone. LL is offering a 10% discount, it's their choice to offer it, they know that some people might use this to get a little extra tier but in general the amount is so small that it rarely compensates for the hassles of managing group land.

And Juani's original argument is incomprehensible to me, because it's the 512m of tier that's what they're after, not the extra 50m bonus.
I'd rather LL either quit pretending to have a realistic economic simulation (I mean, there are real life advantages to "group ownership" bigger than this, and the real world has better protections for members of corporations and partnerships), or do a better job of it (bring back dwell, bring back some kind of rep bonus, cut stipends back to pay for it if necessary).
That's why Windows is the most secure operating system out there. LOTS of things are done better by lots of different people instead of one monolith. If you want a centrally cotrolled government, China will be happy to have you.

Linden Labs isn't the one selling land for L$5000 for 512m.

If your sim is something owned by a single person... you're on an island and island owners benefit from the 10% group bonus more than anyone.

On the mainland a sim is a shared resource.
I'd like to see contiguous private sims, too, but you have to admit that the experiments in this direction ahve been less than encouraging, whereas Anshe's new private continent is gorgeous!

But I don't see any problem with islands, either. You have options, why is that bad?

Because someone, somewhere, somehow, may be enjoying one of those options.

And that *really* pisses some people off.