New Land Changes in SL: Town Hall

Thanks for crunching those numbers, Tiger.

I agree with some other cynics that the major barons will likely work out a deal for not bidding against each other to keep auction prices low. It's not hard to do that, and they have a huge motivation to cooperate that way.

And a clever land reseller could do some stuff to avoid paying a lot of tier. Pre-selling plots seems to make the most sense. Get a few people to sign up and once you have filled a sim's worth of orders, then you buy the sim. You divide it and sell it off right away. If you can do this twice a month, then you only need to make US$1098 to break even.

With 10% Linden protected land, that means L$4.65 to break even. I don't know if this is likely, but it is certainly a possible outcome. If the land sells for L$5 that is a 7% profit, which isn't too bad.

Looking at these numbers, the shocking realization is that LL is shifting their cost for subdividing sims into sellable parcels onto resellers. LL doesn't have to pay a monkey to parcel things out, but resellers have to pay tier cost to hold the land until it sells. LL never had to pay itself tier for unsold land, so this is a new cost to factor into land prices.

How much are you paying for an island sim?

Up until this announcement they were $980.00 from LL.

I wonder if anyone has considered what L$8.00 a square meter for land will do to the people who wand to jump up to low tier. I wonder if anyone has thought what ths might do to the desire of new people to come inot the game.

It seems to me that if SL is a game, then the lindens have basically torpedoed the small, casual player, SL is now simply a place to come and make money. However, drving away your smaller casual playeers ultimately kill you market. Sure there will be a core of solid players remaining (I am sure some people still play TSO and There). But how do you keep the core market from getting distracted? I mean sooner or later somone will come along with a flavor that is better, or just newer.

One fo the big advatages of fostering the casual, small tier player, is that it gives someone an easy way to get established in the world. It fosters thie continued involvment and particpation. If you can get established for a total initial investment of say US$60.00 and then pay $10-15.00 USD in tier, you have a sold market base. the number is accessible to many people and is enough to encourage ongoing participation, even if the interest fades for a month or two. A big part of the initial $50.00 investment will be in purchasing linden to buy land, geta decent skin, and decorate a house. If land costs go up hugely, then you are impeding the ability of small players to get established.

Now if you tell me LL is supposed to be a new model of cyberspace, where ultimately the gridverse will foster communication and business development..well then you still need growth and participation and and even greater priority should be placed on brining people inot the system. Then you could use SL to facilitate RL business and not just SL "game" Business. Right now SL looks like its trying to be a playground for a 150 or so content/land barons and little else. Apprently entertainment is keyed to be nothing but the opiate of the SL masses and therefore does not need to be supported or good, and community is insignificant.

I think the roads and waterways are important. But since many sims have none, and others have a lot, this should be taken into account in the base auction price.

If a parcel has no Linden Reserved Land: US$1000 starting bid

If a parcel has 10% Linden Reserved Land: US$900 starting bid

If a parcel has 20% Linden Reserved Land: US$800 starting bid

It's only fair. Otherwise someone bying a sim with criss-crossing waterways and roads not only has to parcel around them, but loses any profit from the resale of that land.

Fairness.

( And if one argues that sims with roads and waterways are more valuable and that compensates... That subjective value should be reflected in the BIDS and not the base price. )

Perhaps allow the purchasors of these sims to create their own infrastructure. With LL agreeing to accept up to a certain percentage back. While the purchase price may still start at $1000, the resale price for parcels in a sim w/ decent infrastructure may fetch quite a bit more.

Just a thought.

I thought about that, but it would introduce more problems than it's probably worth. You get varying quality in such things as roads and bridges, you can't terraform the land enough to control waterways and roadbeds, and there's the issue of how to sell back land to LL. How much of it? For how much money?

I think it best to let the basic highways and rivers to be always in Linden hands. (Bu adjust the base auction price to match, as I posed above.)

There's no reason sim buyers can't lay out MORE roads and waterways, and either sell them or keep them in their own reserve to improve the "value" of the surrounding plots. (Cheaper to just sell them, of course...)

I can see people plopping down entire towns/villages/cities - buildings, roads and all - and selling plots there at a higher price. Chinatown you can LIVE in anyone?

This is something that could always have been done, but it FEELS like a better deal under this new proposed arrangement.

I am perplexed why LL have chosen now to introduce these changes. The mainland is awash with land for sale and prices are extremely low (I have seen 1024 plots in the new continent for sale at 2,500L for example). I'm pretty sure land barons are currently trying to sell their mainland plots as quickly as possible, some even at a loss. So which of them, in their right mind, is going to buy a mainland sim when they are already trying to offload their old land?

Would any land baron care to comment on this?

Alexa

I agree with others that the overall effect will be to set land prices at $5 to $8 per m2, which does make it harder for small, causual players. ("small" meaning "people who don't have a lot of money to spend on a game".)

However, I don't think it follows that "SL is now simply a place to come and make money". It does become more expensive, but what does that have to do with making it nothing but a place to make money? If the supermarket raises the price of bread, that makes bread more expensive. It doesn't make the supermarket nothing but a place to go make money.

While you can make money in SL, the cost of "playing" SL doesn't have anything to do with that. You can buy a plot of land and build a house. You could before, you still can. Costs a little bit more now, that's all.

In fact, if it costs more to live in SL, that means its actually harder to make money. Fewer people can afford to look at it that way. So if you want to play SL, you have to be able to pay what it costs. (Just like cable TV, going to the movies, or any other entertainment you might buy.)

Actually, land prices had been trending down for a long time, so any resulting "hike" from this is actually more of a return to normlacy.

Buster

I tried that with Chicago apparently it didn't work.

hell me and clair built MarClair village lotta takers for those 1024 plots with cottages on them for rent for L$1 per 2 weeks. No one ever came home.

Although I'm not a land baron, I'll take a stab at this. From now on, all new land that comes out will only be sold in huge chunks to folks that can afford it, and most likely wish to turn a profit on it. Eventually, this will mean ALL new land, other than the plots for sale on the present mainland, will have to go through the hands of players looking to make a profit. They will be chopped up and sold for enough L$ to pay for the sim at it's auction price PLUS a nice profit. (higher initial costs to small tier buyers)

As more residence come into SL, many of the smaller land sales going on in SL now, will be snatched up, and as that happens, the small non-baroned land, will begin to be bought either by barons themselves, or by those that want to stay awhile. This will eventually create a funnel effect, in which all land prices will rise sharply to enable the sim buyers to make a profit. This land pricing will effect not just the new sims being auctioned, but also the old land plots being sold on the mainland. That will force either more folks to run to GOM, which LL greatly desires, or leave people paying huge tiers on land they can't sell, which is great with LL as well, cause those huge tiers are huge for virtual land.

On top of this, the price is being increased on the sims, which take them further out of range of folks merely wishing them for creativeness or special projects, and makes them more narrowly focues toward folks buying them to turn a profit.

A good reply David. Maybe now is the time to buy some land from a resident (rather than land baron) and hang on to it.

Whatever happens, the land barons will get richer and the regular residents poorer it seems to me.

Alexa

Exaclty my point buster, a handfull of people who have made a lot of money thus far will still come and make money, while squeezing out the smaller players, who will lose interesting in the game out of an increasing sense of frustration that the market is closed, and based on the prim limit a 1024 is about the minimum size you can have and build a house with 2048 being more reasonable, this means people are into thier land for a cash outlay of US$20-$40 or if they chopose to rent it is likely that much of the base stipend will be consumed by rent. My fear is that this will drive people away from the game.

Oh, Chromal, that was beautifully written and well thought out, and so reflective of many of my own feelings!

coco

P.S. And David, too, whose post appeared right below Chromal's!

P.S. And everything Jake said, somewhere below David!

I think very few people actually make money in SL (let alone "a lot" of money). I think many content creators offset their costs, at best, and view $L as a way to guage popularity of items they create. Just like in RL, most SL "businesses" will probably fail to live up to their founders' hopes. Depending on your source for statistics, 95% to 99% of all new RL business fail within two years. Lots of people try, very few really succeed. At least in SL the stakes are not usually so high.

I think just about any change could be said to drive people away from the game. Anybody who was bound to leave anyway needs an excuse, so all the people leaving in the next few weeks can use the land sales change for their reason.

The important thing is for Linden Labs to not show up here!

Now that I have read everything here, and it is on the topic of land, I would like to say that I believe First Land is a hoax, nothing but a come-on to get people to move from Basic to Premium accounts.

Moreover, I think they are trying to gradually phase it out.

coco

Spoken like a true cynic! er, anyway, typed like one.

Being a mere skeptic, I disagree.

Buster

Yeah first land is a hoax since many old players, some of them your beloved friends make alts and snatch up first land.


First land is not a hoax, there is first land available. You yourself admitted to be holding out for mature land, when there was PG available. My first land was PG and my Second Life hasnt suffered for it yet.


Entitlement is a dangerous thing.

Assertions are meaningless without evidence.

Well, I did just now read a post in the hot line that clued me into the fact that people who are not really first time players are buying this up via their alts. Also, Robin, or whoever was answering, said they were trying to do something about the situation, so I will reserve judgment for now.

I did make it a point to be on hand on Monday and today for the first land that was supposed to be released on Monday, but it wasn't.

You want cynical? Here ya go . . . looks to me like if a player isn't affected by a problem, well then, hey, they just say there isn't any problem.

coco

P.S. That's a lovely thought, Jillian, but I didn't check my tendancy to try to figure things out at the door. Especially not when I have been looking for First Land for quite some time now - along with others - and seen a few parcels (all PG) released only once, a little while back.

If you read my posts in the threads in Land and Economy from people asking where the heck is the new land, you will see my suggestion that the literature be rewritten so we don't expect that this actually will be available when we are ready to get it. As it stands, that isn't the way it is at all, and it's no matter of speculation or "assertions," whatever that means, to take note of the fact that the written promises nowhere near live up to the reality. THAT is why I consider it a big fat come-on.

P.S. One tends to get a "sense of entitlement" when the game literature promises you you will be entitled to get First Land when you become Premium member, just by clicking on the "First Land" tab. And it's not there, it's almost NEVER there. Seems reasonable to me to suspect it may be in the process of being phased out, especially considering these other things going on.

And when they say to look on Monday, and we do, and it's not there - of course I know things can go wrong, but this haunting of the computer to no avail is pretty disheartening. One DOES get the feeling of being led on.

But then, hey, that couldn't possibly be a PROBLEM to anyone could it? It just absolutely has to do with something slanderous about myself.

Also, I would like to know, has it always been this way? Did those of you long past your First Land days manage to find First Land with little difficulty?

I had to wait several days to get "first" land through land for the landless and it was assigned to me. I didn't get to pick it.

I do think they would be MUCH better off to go back to that system. Everybody would be in a queue and would eventually get theirs. That wouldn't solve the alt problem, but it would be much better than having to haunt the game trying to figure out when it is going to show up.

Besides, from what I saw that one night, picking out your own isn't much of an advantage - it was all pretty much not real desirable.

coco

HA! Boy did I luck out! After posting here (crankily), I realized I hadn't checked for that land this evening.

And it's up! What they intended to put up yesterday, I guess.

Anyway, I ran to one place, landed on a bunch of people; it was PG.

I ran to the next, it was mature. I spent maybe ten seconds running toward the water, found a spot, with an AFK girl on it, and bought it right up! I wasn't about to waste time checking any of the others!

lol When she came to, I told her and the guy with her I just bought it. She said, oh dear, I was about to. Then she said, well, at least another Koala got it!

lol

Now I have a place for my very small, hopefully tasteful . . . STORE.

YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!

happycocowithsomeeggonface

Four kinds of owners possible in SL after 15 July:

(1) "Wealthy private elites" who either import USD from RL or invest time, effort, and USD to create real-scale businesses inworld.

(2) Groups of small owners who pool resources to buy and develop private land.

(3) Little people in isolated newbie 'hoods who are sold on the "SL dream": up and out.

(4) RL companies who invest in SL as a platform for product awareness, services, and other ventures.

Fantasy, it's definitely not.

(5) unemployed bums taking foolish risks with their limited savings