An Open Letter To Linden Lab

LL owes you nothing more than any free capitalist market owes you. Which is nothing. If you can peddle your wares or sell your schtick, all the better.

If not, get a job at McDonalds. Or in SL's case... AnsheCorp.

So you're not gonna be on the east coast next month?

SWEET!

That would be nice, but I wouldn't count on it. I was one of those who desappeared from the top 10 list last year, hit hard by the changes in event payouts and event handling in general. Next month will see a lot of others hit hard with the end of DI. I can also see the reasoning behind most of the changes. Change is inevitable, and most of use who do business in SL will have to deal with change at one time or another.

Although I have not done business with Weedy in particular, I have had run-ins with scammers and land thieves, and I think that this move in particular is a good one.

After reading Weedy's post I do feel for your situation but I'm not completely on your side. For a brief time (long time ago) in SL I too also tried out the Public Land market. It was quite lucrative at that time but I would try to be fair. If the land was accidently abandon I would always get back with the owners if possible if clues are left. Sell it back for what was bought for or hold on to the land until the Lindens got things reversed. If the land was really abandon I would sell the land at very low market value, not trying to make a fortune. It was always a very time consuming occupation for land would be abandoned at anytime of the day.

Amazingly enough there were several public land traders that competed for land. Many times you would only get partial sections of the land abandon no matter how quick you were. I never like dealing with small sections of land and would sell to the other person for a very small profit.

The problem is just recently sizes of public land were below 512sqm. If partial pieces were grabed they were going to be tiny, almost worthless. Except for a land extortionist. I'm not stating Weedy did this, for what I have seen here and in world Weedy has been a class act. But I do believe some of the people Weedy competed with did do this. I have no proof real proof of this but I have seen some of the weird 16sqm patterns in the world. You might be surprised who is by whom. I feel this is better for all, it won't eliminate all land extortion but it's a step in the right direction.

I have nothing but respect for Weedy, but at the same time... anyone trying to make money based on a specific technical limitation or implementation in Second Life should not be surprised when things change. I somewhat agree on this specific case (even with the 16m^2 extortionists, letting the public handle small plot reclaimation seems a more efficent way to go about it!) and would go one step further - if land scanners were such a problem, why not make some kind of pubically-accessible, automatically generated list of abandoned land?

The only way the current scheme makes sense is if all small plots in a sim will be "bundled together" and auctioned all at once, since auctions for a tiny plot seem kind of silly.

After reading everyone's comments, I would like to add a few myself at this time.

First of all, to Linden Lab. This is an open letter, addressed to CEO, VP and Executive. Should you choose to respond or not, is your option. However, most corporations have the presence of protocol to acknowledge receipt. Will your company do this?

Next, nimrod, Coco and kati. Thank you for taking the time read this and your support in principle.



Thank you Chase for your comments and stipulating to my efforts to return land in the event of errors. As to the next part, Buying public land was a money sink, plus stimulated further sales. These are actions which bolster economic drives. I fail to see how LL taking land for nothing a selling at auction to an end user benefits anyone but themselves, if at all.



Excellent examples Troy. Mistakes are made and the Lindens continue to have a hands off approach to appeals and resolution. Land abandoned by mistake is gone. Right, wrong or indifferent, Linden Lab does not care about your losses.

As a side note, Troy is one of many people who have approached me and request an option of the purchase of land in the same sim which they reside. I always made a note of these requests and followed through where possible. For expansion, the prevention of griefing or prim lots, it was a resident managed system. LL is indifferent to this, while touting it publicly.



Travis, you have never ceased to impress me. We have done business many times and I admire your contribution to the community. You are certainly an inspiration.



Indeed. What they say, what they do, are different things. I still fail to understand how anyone, including LL has anything to gain by this.



Clearly Hiro has a hate-on for land scanners. Period.

Likewise by his responses, has a distaste for someone who has the good judgment to appeal by fully explaining from a standpoint as to how it affects them.



Yes. Particularily when LL has upheld the right to do something. In 1.8, LL made several changes to the abandoned land system to make it more accessable and understood, only to nerf the changes on short notice in 1.9

Clearly a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.



No need to dignify anything with a response here.



Actually, we have done business. You bought my jukeboxes and used them on Elite Island, I recall attending there to demonstrate, and assist setup.

As to the second part. While this may be true, I find it disappointing that penalizing a legitimate business in an attempt thwart those who have no ethics, to be troubling for the health of SL's future and economy. Kind of like biting off your nose, to spite your face.



All excellent points, from a person who has intimate knowledge of the business. I agree that land was sold below market value in most cases, so others could resell at a profit as well.

You touch on a very important point....land extortion. During the "Bush Guy" fiasco, I would hold on to land in my tier for extended periods to avoid him buy them. At the same time, I offered literally dozens, perhaps hundreds of 16 and 32 plots to the neighbors at no cost at all as a proactive solution to the problem. At times I would have 1000s of sq m held in my tier, at my cost. When Bush Guy earned himself a stay in the cornfield for a couple of weeks, it allowed me to dump numerous plots on the open market at cheap prices. Once again, residents could do a better job at managing community values than LL can.

Lastly, you allude to managing these lands as cumbersome. I agree. LL staff is now burdened with this. Cleaning up the land by returning objects, terraforming, renaming and listing for sale are manual tasks, which must be undertaken and seems like a waste of the staff's time.



Good suggestions, but why re-invent the wheel? This used to be a resident run system, I thought Linden Lab encouraged and upheld these projects.


In closing, I am not suprised that some find land scanning distasteful and understand that sympathy will not be an outpouring.

What I am trying to impress here, is that it was in my best interest to apply fairness and integrity to a business which was useful and beneficial to everyone involved, as residents.

How about dealing with land extortionists by giving adjacent landowners "right of first refusal" on abandoned plots next to them? If no adjacent landowner (or landowner in the same sim, if it's only adjacent to public land) has bought it in a week, THEN let it go public or to auction.

(of course, that would still hurt Weedy's business, but at least it would provide a reasonable solution for accidental releases)

I did that. There was a working solution.

Throwing out the baby out with the bath water, to re-invent the wheel is rather odd.

The point being, and what LL claims to preach, is that in-world matters should be managed by residents themselves.

The current changes are an affront to that.

coles notes?

dear LL,

please return ALL abandoned land to the governor for auction. please discourage land scanners. land scanning is not a business. it's a parasitic infection.

land auctions make land prices democratic

j-wu

if you want to reach the executives at LL, there are better ways to do so than open letters on the forum.

change or die.

I'm all ears.... how so?

Jauani, I think we all recognize the necessity of change.

However, there is a difference between random, violent, jumping from idea to idea and thoughtful planned and carefully executed change.

Why was it that public land could go on for over 3 years and yet suddenly they felt it necessary to change it with only a couple of weeks warning?

Clearly someone woke up one day and decided "I want this done" and thought because they have a title that gives them the right to drop lead balloons.

Perhaps that'll work in certain instances, but when dealing with a platform play / community .. it will not.

It seems that the word "Migration" has been banned from the Linden Offices, and they have the mentality if they don't change something they've been doing for over 2 or 3 years *right this instant* they will cease to exist.

This is the sign of people panicking.. I think it is also why there are so many rumours that SL is about to be bought out / about to fold.

Since this is an open letter, and I happen to know more about it than anybody else I'll address it.

The elimination of public land wasn't driven by Philip or any of the VP's. It was a feature request from the Customer Service group. The reason they entered that item on the Big List Of Things To Do (BLOTTD) is because they were spending a significant amount of time responding to complaints of people accidentally realeasing their land having it promptly grabbed by public land recyclers. Often by the time LL was able to respond the recyclers had already turned the land around for profit, which made recovery of the land difficult or impossible.

The feature request went onto the pile along with a number of other items relating to public land. During my stint on the maintenance team I was browsing the BLOTTD, sorting by priority and votes, and I found a bunch of high ranking items relating to public land and auctions. "Hrm. These three items are related and probably not that hard to do. They have lots of votes, and they are mildly interesting (I'd get to do some more python scripting) -- I;ll take 'em" I thought. I assigned those tasks to myself and got to work. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to remove the Public Land information on the World Map legend to free some space for some UI widgets that were starved for screen realestate (yet another BLOTTD item).

The main reason we left public land in place after the intial automatic transfer to Governor Linden of the big plots is that we didn't want to have to manually sort a large pile of very small parcels into For Sale and Auctions, so we just let them go public. However, since then we've added functionality to the servers to accept network packets from external scripts that trigger events within the simulators, which opened up some possibilities for pulling simulator functionality and logic out of the simulator and into python scripts driven by cron jobs. So I added a few hooks for parcel transfers and added a field to the database so we could easily find the many small parcels later.

The way it works now is this: parcels smaller than 512 meters (which used to go public) will now go to Governor. LL will sit on those parcels for about one week -- anyone who has accidentally released a parcel can contact Customer Support during this time to get it back. After a week each parcel will be put up for sale for L$1/sq meter, which means they will be available for the same price as claiming public land. The L$1/sq meter sale price is hard coded in the simulator code at the moment. Eventually I expect we'll make the price an argument for the hooks. When that happens there will be a policy decision to be made about whether or not to change how we give up abandoned land.

(Incidentally, it might be possible to provide some standard API and authentication so that the simulator hooks can be triggered from external Resident run scripts. That is, a land owner might be able to operate on their land without having to log in and manually push UI buttons.)

This is a typical case study on how some (not all) things get done at LL. Anyone can add an entry in the BLOTTD and anyone is free to accept things off the list. Everybody is free to vote on, edit, change priority, accept the items, or close as "Won't finish". This means that quite a bit gets done without the VP's ever being involved. Also, the workplace is realatively flatter and more dynamic when it comes to responsibility.

For the larger projects we usually form small groups with a Project Lead and Technical Lead. Sometimes the Project Lead and Technical Lead are the same person. It may be that the roles of two individuals in a project may reverse for some project in the future, such that the Project Lead in the first project is now a supporting team member, and a previous support member is the new Project Lead.

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philip rosedale

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robin harper

Weedy,

While I am sympathetic to the change in your business fortunes, there is one issue that sticks in my mind and makes it difficult for me to be upset by this change in any way. Everyone dealing with public land was profitting off of free land ($1/m does not count since you turn right back around and recoup that). You weren't a land reseller in the traditional sense. You did not buy this land at auction, or buy it from someone else. Through the use of scanners and other means, you competed for a free resource that really had no reason to be free, and then turned around and made money off of that. Had Linden Lab made some change that altered normal land transactions, I would agree with the outrage. This to me just seems to be finally closing an unfair gap in the land market that people were feeding off of.

As far as a better venue to be heard, sending a private email to [email]robin@lindenlab.com[/email] or [email]philip@lindenlab.com[/email] works wonders, compared to airing your personal grievances with them in the forums.

Andrew, while we all appreciate Weedy's particular situation, we also generally recognize that LL needs to do what they feel necessary.

My question to you though is, and I think it's a very reasonable one when it negatively impacts a subset of the community in a significant way, why didn't the community get more forewarning?

Andrew - what?

Ok everybody, out of all that hooks, pythons, and cron jobs stuff, I did get this:

"The feature request went onto the pile along with a number of other items relating to public land. During my stint on the maintenance team I was browsing the BLOTTD, sorting by priority and votes, and I found a bunch of high ranking items relating to public land and auctions. "Hrm. These three items are related and probably not that hard to do. They have lots of votes, and they are mildly interesting (I'd get to do some more python scripting) -- I;ll take 'em" I thought. I assigned those tasks to myself and got to work."

I take this to mean, things get put on a list. Whenever whoever wants to put something on it. Employees are free to vote on things on that list, or change them, if they feel like it - possibly kind of like the way Wikipedia works. There isn't necessarily any actual discussion done on these, though, I gather. Nor is there just a whole lot of thought as to the impact of these on the community or preparing the community for them. Or as how they relate to anything such as overall Linden policy, really.

(I could be wrong, mind you - I'm just trying to make sense of this.)

"This is a typical case study on how some (not all) things get done at LL. Anyone can add an entry in the BLOTTD and anyone is free to accept things off the list. Everybody is free to vote on, edit, change priority, accept the items, or close as "Won't finish". This means that quite a bit gets done without the VP's ever being involved. Also, the workplace is realatively flatter and more dynamic when it comes to responsibility."

He says some - but not all. I wonder what the not all things are?

Because to me, things work better with a little less of that flattened responsibility and no need to involve VP's in anything, and a little more of some "buck stops here" philosophy.

The way it works now, it's little wonder we get blindsided by things.

It's not my company, of course. Just my opinion.

coco

So, in fact, released land is still going to public. There is just a time lag.

every change will negatively impact somebody. people who rely on the sl's internal economy are taking a large risk. people who rely on sl's external economy are taking a lesser risk.

when risk is high, rewards are high.

people who seek stability should not make life plans based on SL income.

I started to think that, too, and question it - then I thought, $1 really does mean One U.S. Dollar. As in - that would be the starting cost of it on the auctions.

coco

Well, in my view, companies that tout "Your World, Your Imagination" and making real money in that world shouldn't be in the business of putting residents' businesses out of business.

So see, we are at a standoff.

coco

Note the giant L in front of $1 (emphasis mine)

Yes, except this won't be detectable like public land was.

welcome to the network society.



phew! i was getting worried for a second. (omg! did philip sell SL to cocopants?!"