Make "minimum" land parcel sizes 512K

I recently considered purchasing a neighboring plot of land (about 10Km). However, what I discovered is that there were 4 tiny parcels which were separately owned and not purchasable. They were being used as "ad space" of course, despite our sim being a relatively non-commercial one. This essentially ruins the value of the entire sim, as the owners of these little ad spots can pile them up with ugly ads, and hold the land hostage for anyone who inquires about purchasing it.

This is a really old problem which could be mostly resolved by requiring subdivided parcel sizes to be a minimum of 512K in size.

As an aside, of those 4 tiny "ad" parcels:
-- 1 is owned by a very well-known billboard advertiser who has stacked the spot with ugly billboards for useless services, which will never be seen by anyone
-- 1 is owned by an "investment" realtor who is charging about 20k for the spot because he knows someone will want to buy that bigger parcel someday
-- 2 are abandoned and owned by LL

There are a bajillion good reasons to NOT do this. Try searching the forums.

512 is a bit much but I can see making it 128,64, or even 32 meters to make it at least somewhat more expensive to be an adfarmer and to allow legitimate use waive that right if the person owns more than 2x that amount or whatever within the sim that way people who already own land but just one to seperate a piece off for one reason or another can and making it more than the limit will prevent any number of ways to game the ssytem.

You need to be able to cut to 16sqm when cutting bigger parcels up, especially if they border a road or protected water for example.

If you have a non-rectangular plot, say 2048sqm that happens to have a road next to it, it's impossible to cut that into 2 x 1024s with both parcels on the road, without cutting lots of 16sqm plots next to the road then joining them all back together again afterwards.

I think the best variation I've seen on this was that there should be a minimum size for selling land. ie - you can only sell a plot of land if it is at least 64 sq m in size for example.

You can cut it up all you want, but would have to join bits back together before you can sell them.

Part of the problem though is not that it is too cheap to run an ad-farm, but more than there are people who are willing to pay the extortionate rates just to get rid of the damned things, otherwise ad-farmers wouldn't do what they do (notice I'm referring to ad-farmers here opposed to advertisers, two different things imo =).

If that trend continues then ad-farmers may simply hike up prices even further and still cover their costs.

The issue is that people need to have better alternatives to coughing up cash to get rid of them, or using up prim allowance to hide the adverts. It needs to be abuse reportable, or we need to be provided with a way to hide the offending adverts without interfering with our game-play; for example, being able to make an avatar's objects invisible, however this will require some feedback on collision, such as having a hidden object become visible if you bump into it, and fade from view once collision ends.

hehe, this should go in that thread, "you know you've been in the forums too long when..."

you see your 8th "lets do away with 16m plots" thread.

Changing the minimum plot size wouldn't really fix anything, because what is it people are upset about, really? It's not that they are ads, it's that they are something you find ugly.

The ability to mute visibility of objects across a parcel boundary (parcel-based, not person-based) would render ad farms essentially useless, along with eliminating most neighbor disputes, in my opinion. This has also been discussed frequently.

It sounds like the parcel encloses the ad plots? I think you should buy the land if you like it, and screen the ads with walls, towers etc. just make sure none of your prims actually cross the line. Then inform the admeister's clients that their money is being wasted.

One of Nicholaz's viewers has that capability. Done.

How about not being allowed to own less than 512M in any mainland Sim? These can be broken into 16M squares but such a ruling would send a message to adfarmers that the grey area they exploit is being delt with.

Then they'd buy 512 sq.m in a sim and ad farm the hell out of it. They ALREADY do that, because clearly, more ads of the same thing in the same place are 100000 times more effective.

Um yeah. For one thing lets drop the title ad-farmer. Most of these lovely people do it for the 625L$ per m2 they can get when people want rid of a 16m so much that they fork out the 10,000L$+. It's not ad-farming, it's "being deliberately annoying to inflate land prices" aka. "Annoy-Farming".

If it's a true advertising mission, they'd recognise they have a good advertising plot and it wouldn't be for sale to anyone.

So a large part of the problem is that people give them the money. Ok so you have an annoying 16m ad stack in your region. Do what you can within the ToS to block the view of it, then just forget about it. Let them pay the tier and the premium account fees and smile.

No really. That is without a doubt your best course of action. A bit like spam. Just bin it and ignore it. Never ever reply to spam, never ever buy a 16m parcel for more than something like double the lowest rate ... currently about 12L$ per m2 or 192L$ per 16m, call it 200L$ as a fair maximum price for a 16m plot.

If you want to, you can IM the lovely Annoy-Farmer once a month with your 200L$ offer. Actually I kind of wish everyone in an offended region would get together and each IM the Annoy-Farmer once a week with a nice reasonable 200L$ offer. Am fairly sure community action with 10+ 200L$ offers a week would get some results eventually. That is if the annoy-farmer ever actually sets foot in SL. It seems most don't or are purchased by alts that never login.

That's a very delicate way of saying "extortion".

I know about that and greatly applaud the work, but it doesn't do the business owner any good to say to visitors or prosepective renters, "Okay, go download this, run it, set that, and then you won't see all that trash over there. Honestly, this parcel doesn't suck."

It will take a universally available feature for visibility-muting to have any impact on the ad farm problem.

Yeah but technically I didn't actually say the "e" word

I'm no fan of ad farms but I think that parcels of 16m should remain available. If someone wants to acquire a long strip of land for, say, a railway or a monorail to go on, or for an access route, 4m wide is about the minimum necessary. A 16m plot is 4m x 4m

That will stop the ad farmers.

I think they should give zero prims in a sim if you own less than say 512 or 256 in the sim, but still allow you to make small parcels if you wish since its often usefull.

/me walks by with a 2x4 and beats the dead horse some and walks off.
/me wonders if they realize its server space they are renting and if they start putting restrictions on it, that is a very BAD thing.
/me wonders if an ad spun in the forrest and there was no one to see it, if it actually existed.

I only have to say:

What
The
Fuck?

It actually makes some sense, that way if you purchase a 16 m squared plot then all you have is the land. However, if you own land in the sim already and purchase it then the prim allowance for the 16 metre plot is added to the allowance you have already.

I think the idea behind that being that the minimum land you have to own in a simulator before you get a prim allowance is say...128 square metres, but once you have that, you can subdivide it all you like, since the total land would still be 128 and thus your prim allowance is for the total land as usual.

All these ideas about limiting parcels won't work. Here's a proposal that will:

Any prim over a certain size which is spinning can be auto returned by anyone at will.

There, Problem solved.

"I wish to complain about this thread what I commented in not three weeks ago from this very forum."
"Oh yes, the, uh, the Land Parcel Sizes thread...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?"
"I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it!"
"No, no, it's uh,...it's resting."
"Look, matey, I know a dead thread when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now."
"No no it's not dead, it's, it's restin'! Remarkable thread, the Land Parcel Sizes, idn'it, ay? insightful comments!"
"The comments don't enter into it. It's stone dead."
"Nononono, no, no! It's resting!"

---

Uh ... pokes the thread ... why not let the Linden's fiddle with economics a bit more. Set a maximum L$/m2 at somewhere around 50L$ per m2. Then that 16m parcel is either not for sale or would be at most 800L$. More than enough for a bit of profit, but on the low side of extortionate...

Re-pokes thread ... No. You're right. It's dead...

No it's not... it's stunned.... you stunned it just as it was waking up....