Expensive Island!

I just watched the island go from $500 to $1100 in about 2 minutes. And it's still going up.

I suppose though, since a yearly rental will run $2400, that the price isn't out of line.

And still almost 2 hours to go...

Thats an insane jump in pricing.

What do you mean by the rental fee?

The auction is just for the title to the land.. whoever wins it (and every other one) still has to pay the monthly maintenence fee of about $200 a month.

That is stated in a few places, but it needs to be made much more clear the diffrence between buying land and paying the monthy fee, which they should just call a tax because it IS, and maintinence is hard for me to spell.

If Obscuro placed a legitimate bid, then it appears he/she may end up with it. If they did not, they are f*cked. Congratulations to whomever ends up with it, I have finished bidding. At this point, it is not even about the money for it, which I have, it is about the principle behind it. If people are willing to pay the $195 a month fee for an entire sim of land, I think LL should work with them to make that land available to them, instead of having us go at each other when no one benefits from this but LL. At the very least, an auction of this magnitude should have been sealed bid. Auctions are auctions, and I understood that going in, I am just reminded of how much I hate them, and what the process is going to be like from now on. This is progress?

Oh i see drathor, i'm not good with math so i didn't add it all up to equal that big of an amount

And yes I agree Cris, if people are willing to buy their own sims they shouldn't have to go through this processes. Hopefully LL will start offering sims soon.

A thought just occured to me though, maybe LL set this up to see how much a Sim is worth to people. If you think about it if you were to buy a sim in SL it would cost you 65536 L$, as I stated before I'm not good with math so I'm not sure how much that would be in USD. Most likely LL would charge a one time fee for buying your own sim along with the monthly, so perhaps they are testing to see how much it'd be worth.

However this auction has gone way above what I thought it would be (I didn't think it'd go over 300 heh).

I hope the end result of all of this is a change to the land granting policy. Auctions for land, and especially using real money have been a sour point with me since it was announced.

If the reason for doing it is to give the USERS a better way to get land, it's a horrible failure. If it's a way to make land more expensive for whatever reason (inflation control or pure want of money) then it's a roaring success.

However, the rest of the first sim hasn't ended yet.. so perhaps it will wind up being more sane. If so, I'll be happy.. but if not, I really hope they fix it. Auctions are and always will be a way to get the most money out of an item.. not the sort of thing you want to be using to make things friendlier.

Welcome to 1.2 everyone!

<tooting my own horn>
I was right. This game has become so money-driven, it is sickening.
</toot>

I still hope things turn out differently, but I still fear that the creativity that was once the backbone of this game is being ripped out by greed-mongers at Linden Labs. This is absurd.

I doubt I would ever bid on land, I will just take my chances looking for abandoned land of those that win bids. I sure hope that option does not disappear.

I don't think the island is representative of what's going to happen with auctions in general. It's an entire sim, and it's not directly connected to any part of the rest of the world. If you look at the prices for the other US$ auctions, most of them are going for less than two months' rent.

Most people do not bid typically until the last few minutes of an auction - these still have awhile to go in some cases, I think you may surprised at how much they spike in the end. On the L$ side, there is a glut of money in the world right now from refunds, and on the USD side, if someone will pay $1150 for a sim, I imagine land prices themselves will end up being higher than you would think.

While I would not agree with Tony necessarily about LL, I do agree that the auctions are not a good thing in the long run for SL for such a desired resource as land. The only one who really stands to benefit from them are LL, and that does not gel with their "oh we don't need the money that is not why we are doing this" statements.

Obscuro at $1150 with 20 minutes to go.

$1150 US! I thought for a while I might bid on half a sim but with these types of bids I doubt I could keep up .. I possibly could but that is a lot of money to throw down without a plan on what to do with it. Plus 195 / month? Way out of my league but awesome none the less that SL will be getting that much cash at once from one land deal .. that is nearly 77 old school 14.95 accounts all at once.

Nice

$1200?!?! LOL...what do you say to that?

And the winner is Fizzik Baskerville at $1200. In the last 10 seconds she/he bid $1151. Obscura bid $1152. Fizzik bid $1200 and that is how it closed in the last five seconds.

I say party at LL .. booze is on Fizik Baskerville

j/k

Fizik you bastid...muuaaahhhhhhh...trickey mofo...lol

Oh come on. You're acting like there isn't land out there to bid on.

It's an entire SIM, what do you expect? 20 bucks and a lollipop as a final bid?

Servers aren't cheap, and I bet the $1200 final price was maybe a couple hundred dollars over what LL paid for the server. So they made a few bucks in profit. It is a company, after all. They have to feed their families too.

It amazes me whenever a large amount of money is put on the table, 20 people crawl out of the woodwork and declare this a greedy failure for the whorish capitalist pigdogs at linden labs.

Let's reach a few conclusions, so I don't have to read any more "OMG SL IS DEAD THIS SUXXORS" posts:

1) Linden Labs is a company. They run this venture to make money.

2) Linden Labs, however altruistic-or-not their intentions, have investors that must be paid. Venture capitalists. Loansharks. Those kinds of people. The venture capitalists do not care about your 200-prim house, or your expensive new plaid skirt.

3) Servers aren't cheap, they aren't made out of thin air. They cost money to build, maintain, and connect to an internet BACKBONE at Level3 (or wherever the hosting thingie is at). Costs like these are expected, because people want the land.

4) If you don't like it, there's always There

LF

Lordfly,

One thing you left out of your cost estimate is the $195 a month cost for that amount of land, and the fact that nothing is being purchased except virtual land rights - you are not buying the server physically, and as written there was no specific contract for how long the "purchase" of this land lasts. My main complain about this auction was that it was not done sealed bid, which is why it was driven so high. I don't think it points to the destruction of SL, but as predicted the involvement of this kind of auction for cash is creating a feeding frenzy that did not exist in the past.

Cristiano

At the moment according to a quick count 35 individuals have bid 109 times on 29 auctions (not including the Island) and only 8 of the auctions are using US$.

I think "feeding frenzy" may be a bit of an exaggeration at this point.

Granted. However, money is not an infinite resource in the Real World Eventually, people will run out of money, I'd imagine.

If they somehow don't, LL will just keep expanding servers... land shortages are a Bad Thing for a MMORPG. Just look at Ultima Online's land shortage a few years ago

LF

Perhaps, but the two USD auctions that closed tonight close at $1200 and $141 respectively, and most of that ended up at the last few seconds of the auction. It will be interesting to see how the larger L$ plot bids end up.

The first Sim auctions were always going to go for mad money, that was inevitable with such a scarce resource. And regardless of the ongoing monthly fees for the Island, Linden won't make that much on it considering cost of buying, hosting and insuring that server.. and of course whatever bandwidth it munches. They have provided a mechanism by which an individual or group can own a sim - something many people have wanted for a long time.

The sad thing would be if the new owner does not do something truly great with such a wonderful resource.

I suspect in time there will be a fixed fee price in both Lindens and US dollars to just straight purchase a new Sim and have it dropped onto the grid. Still very early days really.

These initial auctions are also being used to drain money from the economy which is essential if we are to avoid hyper inflation now that there are no taxes. There are store owners now who are making thousands of lindens per day, and bluntly - they need something to spend it on that isn't giving it to another resident.

..and I quite agree with LF, at the end of the day Linden are a business.. and if this is how they feel they need to do things to survive and grow SL, then good for them.. I'd be a sad rabbit without it.

Auctions were chosen because they are more "fair" (in some ways) than having people compete for land in a "land rush"...so why does it strike me that this auction was totally NOT fair? The last bid took place 5 seconds before it ended...what if someone else wanted to bid higher, but couldn't because they weren't able to respond fast enough?

How about if every time someone bids, 5 more minutes is added on to the auction time to allow others to respond? That will ensure that whoever wants it the most gets it, and not whoever is lucky.

The way it is now, the auctions might as well be one or two hours long and you'll get the same result (as long as there is advance notice) with most people bidding at the last minute.

If you're going to be selling this stuff in US$, the winner should be the one who is willing to pay the most, not whoever got the lucky last click, right?

Edit: Removed an idea after the new one I have seemed better, I think that's what is responded to below...

I'm not sure that SL auctions can really have an indefinite period of bidding as you suggest Garoad, simply because some people have a real life that makes this difficult. If the bidding hots up and you are forced to go offline.. well.. that would be frustrating. I prefer the idea of a defined end point, even if this does favour the US timezones.

I think auctions are essentially fair. If you are concerned about being pipped at the post, then be sure to bid high early making a late counterbid harder. That person bidding very late is taking a big risk too.. and can just as easily underestimate the leading bid.

An alternative might be some form of closed auction, so let everyone secretly send in their max bid.. but I imagine that would have meant far less money for Linden.

What about the five-minute extension after every bid concept? Sure it's not totally fair if it ends up extending the auction an hour and someone has to log off because of a RL issue, but no system is going to be totally fair (the current certainly isn't). IRL if you want to go to an auction to buy something, you set aside time for it and go. If you have to work that day you have someone else go, take a day off, or skip the auction. Why should an online auction be any different? I think adding on more time would be MORE fair than the current system, anyway.

Also, real-time (live) auctions don't go on for hours and hours, so I seriously doubt that a system like this would make an auction go SO long that real life interferes and you have to drop out. You'd still be able to do what you mentioned...(bid very high well before it ends and hope you're the highest).

If you're concerned about auctions being extended two hours or something, set a limit to how long it can be extended, for a happy medium.