Solution to first land profiteers?

Umm... what? If Joe owns land already, he could pay the 3100 because he'd already have owned land negating the first land option to him....

The concept of locking the resale of first land would make the problem even worse. It’s very hard to gather up a large block at a decent price for a mainland club. I personally own 1/8 of a sim, but it’s scattered all over the sim with most of it just adding prims to the main area.

Please elaborate on how you think it would make it worse.

Large blocks are not hard to come by, when you look at the per sm for the sizes, many of the larger are selling at around 8-9sm, versus resold first land running 10-15.

Are you saying that your scattered pieces of land are results of first land barons buying those lots as first land and then you bought from them?

(This probably looks like I'm being snotty, but it's genuine questions, I just don't sugarcoat, I'm blunt )

At least make it less attractive.

I don't think they'd do that because unlike stipends and DI and dwell they actually make a profit on first lands.

I don't see how that's possible in your scenario. You proposed that first land be unable to be sold for more than $512 in the first 45 days, right? So even if Jane wants to sell the land to Joe, she can't, because he can't buy the land from her for more than L$512 for another 44 days.

They're almost certainly from new land owners selling land to each other. That really does happen. All the time. When we started putting together the Coonspiracy after a friend bought First Land and talked me into joining him, I bought several parcels directly from other original First Land owners... all over the sim... and gradually traded them bit by bit into a contiguous chunk. Some of them ended up getting more than 512 (you can get 560 on your basic tier by putting it into a group) as a sweetener... they got a bigger parcel, and I got a contiguous one.

This was all at $3000 to L$4000 per parcel, by the way. First Land was still selling in that range until about a month ago. There were always parcels listing higher, but it's not until the recent land shortage that they were actually getting buyers.

Best way to stop first land abuse is to prevent a certain realtor whose name rhymes with Wagon Spleen and his associates Bimbo Vinegar and Nestling Bulka from creating alts. Between them they grab dozens of first land plots.

The lack of land is the main reason that I have not purchased a subscription and went off to play other games. I usually only come back once a week to throw my stipend into the bank.

Ah okay, I was thinking you meant Joe was on his first land and wanted to buy more.

But Jane would know what she was getting into when she first got it. Joe would have seen it sold for first land and would know that's the stipulation. Either way, yeah, Joe can't buy it, but neither can anyone else for 512, then she could just sell it to him at the end of the term. If it's that extremely important, then it can grace 6 weeks.

I'd say add in a stipulation that if you relinquish first land before the 45 days (however you do it), then you are eligible for another first land, but I'm not sure how doable that would be overall, keeping track of land hoppers, though it wouldn't be all that bad, since some people when they buy end up with really crappy neighbors who force them to sell in some form.

You're kidding right? You really believe that almost all the first land purchases and resales are from actual first time users? You do realize that those 'first land own'ers' are the alt accounts of people right? If a person wants to stay anonymous and still make money, they don't always deed to group to resale, though it makes it easier. I emplore you to take a few weeks, watch out for first land. Watch the person that buys it, sits on it a few or even weeks, then see where the hands are of that ownership, almost all of the time, it's into either A)land baron, or B) an account that has been premium and doesn't qualify for first land and that name wasn't the first on the parcel. Another addition to this scheme, or so I'm told by anonymous land guy, is that if the land isn't transferred by the time the sub runs out, they throw it up on another alt. What happens is, if the land does not sell, the new more recent sub sells it's first land, qualifying it for more land, sells to that recent alt and goes on to try and sell it from there, without losing any money, because that alt can still buy and sell land for another 3 weeks since they've already dumped the first land they bought.

See Kazunori Takakura's post for my point. They are losing a helluva lot more sales.

According to Adam Reuters, there are currently 365,000 current premium subs. That means a minimum of $3.6 million a month is sub fees ALONE. I would hope that that alone would pay thier small staff, leaving god knows how many tier fees are gained. But, how many stay that way, how many new accounts are created? How many cancel after the first month? These numbers are the important ones and they know them.

How many users premium accounts that could be there for months are they losing in this deal? As the above post points out, there's at least 10 a month lost, and as other resident threads have shown, there's at least another 50 over the last 3 months that may have stayed premium throughout.

No, that's NOT what I said. Please go back and re-read what I wrote in the context of the message I was replying to without assuming I'm an idiot.

That's off by a factor of 10 if you read Zee Linden's latest blog entry.

Purchasing and reselling first land should not be so profitable that it unduely incents people into to creating dozens of avatars simply to "flip" first land. If first land was an infinite resource, I suppose it wouldn't matter, but it isn't. And people legitimately looking for a homestead are being shafted by profiteers.

I like the idea of a "cooling off" period after the purchase of first land, and it has a real world analogue I believe. Weren't homesteads back during the settling of the west given with restrictions requiring productive farming of the land for the first year? This has no real meaning in a virtual world, but precedence makes me feel all warm and fuzzy Exactly how long that cooling off period should be is something Linden Lab can work out.

Argent: your argumentation has a big flaw. You say that under the restrictions proposed you would have been pissed off. But you came inworld at a time where you had the chance to be pissed off, because you had a chance to get first land. The problem now is: new residents don't get the chance to be pissed off at some limit, because they don't get first land. It's not wether first land is available unrestricted or time-restricted (with regard to owner-transer). The question is wether residents eligable for first land can get any first land, or wether some land baron with lots of alts will be able to game the system for profit.

So, yes, if there wasn't a way to game the system, I would say that the proposed restriction suck - but under the current situation, where a resident has only a very small chance to actually get _any_ first land, I would be in favor of those restrictions. What is the worst happening for the resident - he will get first land and will be tied to it for 45 days, only being able to pass it on as first land to another first-land eligable resident. So if he wants to make bigger th ings with others together, he will either have to wait, or spread over disjunct parcels and work around the 117 prim limits or share his own land with multiple builders.

But if those restrictions (or any other measure to prevent gaming the first land)are not put in place, the same resident will supposedly never get any first land at all - which most surely will reduce those planned projects much more than the proposed resale restrictions.

And if the proposed restrictions existed, I wouldn't have gotten first land at all, I would have continued renting. Seriously. the Linden estate is marginal enough as it is... make First Land harder to trade and consolidate and you're going to make *all* the first land like the section north of your old "First Land" parcel instead of the one south of it.
Which is why I've proposed two alternate sets of restrictions that suck considerably less and would be at least as effective at removing the ability of the First Land barons to game the system. Don't assume that because I'm opposed to a specific set of draconian restrictions that I'm opposed to any restrictions at all.
He'll have wasted his opportunity to get First Land, and paid Linden Labs real money for the privilege.

It was never a case of "using First Land to do it" and "not do it at all". It's actually as cheap or in some cases cheaper to rent on an island than to pay tier to Linden Labs for quite a lot of projects... even ignoring the cost of "buying" the land... and you don't have to become a Premium resident to do it.

I have too have noticed this very disturbing trend in my area in particular. I am an officer in a fairly large club. We purchased over 10K meters of land for 6L per M about 5 months back. Since then the land around us has been bought and sold many time by barons and profiteerers. They are now wanting so much, there isn't much hope of us addiing more land and continue to add improvements.

A large chunk of land was returned back to the Lindens about two months ago north of us. It was put back up as first land. This land sold very quickly. It was reparcelled and sold for 5-6L per meter. Now after changing hands several times. What is left is now going for 15L per meter! An example of this a 2048m piece of land next to ours is selling for 34500L. Thats close to 130 dollars with the Linden being at $4 per 1,000. Not many people would pony that kind of money for so little space except for the land barons who are the only ones who can afford to.

Land values have doubled overall since summer and it has to end sometime. At some point people will stop buying and it will likely end the baron run the market. All I can say it's long overdue for the barons to take a hit for what they do to the rest of us who want land to live on.

I am sure all these land sales are great for the Lindens, but for the actual users who are trying to build, improve and live on land in SL, it's hurting us. We are the ones you want to keep in SL because we add the value to being in the world.

I would like to suggest a cap on land value at 10L per meter. This would discourage buying land for the sake of profit and make it easier to both the established and first timers to continue to enhance the SL experience.

As a person who has paid to go premium and now wishing to purchase a piece of first land I have read this thread with interest.

I just wish that there was some way a 512 plot could be guranteed for the likes of me as part of the incentive to go premium. As it is I'm having to pay L$30 to join a group of people who apparently watch for first land becoming available and will Im me immediately ( fall down is that there won't be anyone online when I am or the land is released when I'm not in sl). There also doesn't seem to be very much released anyways. only two parcels in the past week that I know of and they'd gone before I tp'ed to the plots

My initial thought is that as an incentive to pay premium maybe a plot of first land should be allocated as part of the package. The person paying premium is then in ownership of land with out all this hassle and the barons are cut out. Maybe a holding time should be imposed so that first land isn't then sold on immediately or the selling price must remain below a certain figure.

As it stands at the moment though I've got about as much chance as a chocolate fireguard of getting even one plot and I'm finding it highly frustrating. why did I go premium if I can't actually get a piece of land I wonder?

Fluff Starbrook

I posted this elsewhere but can't find it. Basically;

The easiest way to prevent first-land abuse, and to ensure first-land is available, is to make it impossible to sell first-land as anything but first-land! When you wish to move on, your first-land is sold at L$1 per square metre and becomes first-land again. This way if LL set-up 10 simulators worth of first-land, then there will always be 10 simulators worth of first-land.

This also prevents abuse, since you can't ever sell the first-land for more than you got it for. If you want to make a profit off of your first-land, you have to set-up a shop or other service upon it.

When I got my First Land there was a writeup on the ebsite about First Land and how it was intended to give everyone the experience of owning land, including being able to trade it and expand it. They were very specific about this.

Otherwise it's just a kind of long term sandbox. Which is useful, I guess, but it doesn't serve the same purpose.

I wonder if they'd be better off implementing a "newbie sandbox" like that and getting rid of the First Land program because right now First Land is an incentive to avoid upgrading to premium and buy land because you'll lose your First Land rights.

Hmm, I didn't know that. You would still 'fully' own the land, and can sell it on for what you paid so you're at least guaranteed to break-even. Still a good learning experience I think.
I'd prefer to have that kind of system if it meant land was available. I never got first-land in the end, as it was too small for what I needed so I went straight into an inexpensive 1024 square metre plot.

Yeh, but it's not a learning experience that segues naturally into normal land ownership. If they're going to do that, why charge people L$512 in the first place, since they're already charging people US$9.95 (or about L$ 2700), less L$1200 stipend (so about L$1500) per month for the privilege. Just have a bunch of "long term sandboxes" where you could take ownership for a month or two and learn how to build without treating it as something you "own"?

I guess I think this important because I was reluctant to upgrade to Premium and get FL to begin with, and one of the arguments that convinced me was that even if the sim I was buying first land in turned out to suck, I could sell out and use the money to buy another parcel elsewhere. As it turned out, it didn't suck for me, but there's a few people in the group whose first "first land" was in other sims and they sold out and moved in to Noonkkot when they got a chance.

Yeh, that's a problem. The *expectation* of First Land is no doubt keeping people away.

I don't see why this is such a problem. There are some number of registered users who are still eligible for first land. Why not just create that many new parcels of 512 m^2 first land, and add in another parcel automatically each time another premium user signs up?

Each premium member should be able to only buy one new parcel, as after that it's not their first land anymore. We're paying hard cash to LL for this benefit when we sign up, so that should be producing the sufficient resources to see that there is first land available when each new user signs up.

Would you go down to the greengrocer and pay him for an apple, only to be told to wait by the appletree in the backyard with a hundred others all waiting for an apple? Or would you just feel you'd been conned out of your money?

Cadaei, the issue is that you can buy 1 month of premium, grab a first land parcel, sell it right away for L$10,000 or more then let the premium expire. If you do this, you can net some US$. A number of people belive that land barons, existing or wannabe, do nothing but create alts and do this all day.

I think that unless LL tells us stats on how long first land stays with the original owner and how long those owners stay premium, we can't really know if this is truly a big problem or not. I don't doubt that some people do this - I've seen land barons confess to it here in the forums - but don't know how common it is.

If LL made it so you couldn't sell your first land parcel for the first 32 days, any buyer would have to get at least 2 months of premium and the US$ incentive for people to exploit the system would go away or at least be far less.

But however many alts there are, if they're signing up for premium accounts, each one is paying LL real money. If that real money is getting used each time for the system resources to get an additional parcel of first land available, then there would still be no shortage, however many alts there were.

That's true but it kinda screws over people interested in actually participating in SL. It drives (in theory) land prices up, making it harder for existing land owners to expand. It also (in theory) makes first land far less available to legitimate new users who want to start something in SL.

Personally, I think it's a good idea. The only option on first land should be "abandon" until the check for your second month of premium clears.

The problem is that you can't create 1 first land. You can only create whole sims of them.