no more protected land ?

i was just flying around the " new " southern contenant being added to the grid and it struck me there is no none nada any protected land.
i realize with the advent of p2p there is less need for protected land but protected land has much more value then providing a though fair.
it provides buffers between blocks of parces where you can be guaranteed there will not be any thing built.
also the roads and rivers of second life look good.
a con tenant just littered with homes and such just does not look good as land that has roads and streams and waterfalls
but i guess there is no time for this with SL growing so fast.

very sad indeed

Totally agree with you Crucial.

But I can see that as the developing landowner, the choice between selling every square meter of a sim is simply more profitable than handing some of it to the lindens for nothing. Maybe they should have stipulated a minimum amount of protected land per sim in the bulk auctions.

The Southern Continent's not all privately-owned sims, is it?

I've seen protected land being kind of included by default, and here's what I mean.

The new sims are given a week to be terraformed and have typically included island plots with waterways in between. When they get locked down to the + / - 4 meter terraform restriction, there are natural waterways which can not be terraformed above the water line. This allows the sim to have maximum primitive use while still having some of the same effect that protected land does.

Regards,

-Flip

i am not referring to the bulk land sales look further south this is linden created land with no protected land.

There are around 20 protected water (void) sims around the outside edge of the continent. I know this because I made a tour friday to list Linden sims that ought to have scripting turned on like it is in the void (water) sims in the northern continent.

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The residents I talk to in the southern continent that just want the water to remain around the outside edge of the continent. I'm happy without roads and rivers in the sourthern continent if we can retain navigable water around the outside edge. This would tend to attract to more people like those who are already there , and give a different (and more aquatic/maritime) feel to the southern continent.

LOL!!!!!

WOW! I've never scanned down that far south!!! I need to go look around!


I still like roads and protected waterways, but on the other hand, it's easier to get a big continquous land area without the protected land. HM...

The problem with this is when land owners block access, these red line fences extend into the waterway. If land owners on both sides block access, the waterway is not passable by boat traffic.

Yes...this is something that I've noticed too and have taken into consideration while working on Nara. Having a whole sim to work with, I have more freedom.

But yeah, with the southern continent's lack of roads...there just isn't any breathing room. The other sims in the area are basically gridlocked in terms of land mobility. It's a shame, because it's such a pretty area.

I thought the purpose of protected land was two-fold, in that about 15% of a sim was utilized by LL for maintenance.

My whole house in SL is below the waterline. And I'm not even a dolphin.

Yes, indeed. We are gridlocked down here now. Especially since LL took a beautiful protected sim called Jindalrae and sold it off. It was like a big park surrounded by crowded sims... why could they not have left it alone?

This is a very common misunderstanding of residents buying land near a Linden owned area and enjoying access to undeveloped land; more common with waterfront and beaches actually.



Really protected land usually consists of small strips of land owned by Governor Linden in otherwise "normal" sims. The only exceptions to this rule are some special purpose sims (like the Welcome Area) and pure water sims.

Never buy a parcel, which you deem attractive because there is a whole Linden owned sim right beside it! This sim most probably will be sold over the next few weeks.

If you look at the Northern Continent, most sims there are crossed by protected land. This land forms a huge system of connected areas, shaped like there would be pathes, roads or infrastructure buildings there, later. In some cases, three wide lanes of protected land crossed a sim, making it impossible to ever resell the area without a loss.

All of these projects have been abandoned (or maybe paused?) sometime in November or December, though. The building of the great wall came to a grinding halt and many new sims on the acution block are now without any protected land. It looks like LL gave up the idea of constructing infrastructure for all but their communal residential projects; which is understandable because it is a huge effort. An effort that the company cannot afford anymore with 100 or more sims entering our world every month.

All of the sims on the new Southern Continent are put on the auction block with 65,536 sqm. But newer ones on the Northern Continent are like that, too. I just won one with 65,536 sqm in the middle of the Emerald Mountains. This gives us at least a chance to sell the land with a small profit in spite of the low L$.

But as we all know it will lead to land which will soon be very much crowded, too.

This may sound funny, coming from a (small scale) Land Baroness, but I think protected land and the idea of infrastructure (even if roads are not much use with current vehicle technology) was a good idea - while it lasted.

One of the primary activities of a government is providing public goods that could not be done efficiently by individuals. Public goods (in the economist's sense) are things like defense or roads which will be underproduced by a free market.

This "market failure" in the production of public goods can be seen in real life by the development of toll roads prior to public roads. As the referenced article notes, a toll road eliiminates one of the necessary conditions for such a market failure: non-excludability. I can feasibly build a road for use by anyone, so long as I can charge a toll to those who use it to recoup my costs of building that road. Since waterways in the real world build themselves, there are no costs to recoup so they served as natural public goods for much of history. However, if I build a lock on that river to aid traffic, I will almost certainly chage a fee for the use of the lock, for the same reason the independent road builder will charge a toll.

However, in Second Life, there are no self-building waterways, nor would you likely be able to successfully charge a toll for the use of a road by others you have constructed at cost to yourself. Thus, as Linden Lab distances itself ever further from trying to act even quasi-governmental they are in essence encouraging the loss of public goods such as waterways, roadways and public spaces.

I saw this most plangently in South Africa where the government was in such dire fiscal circumstance that they could no longer provide adequate police protection. It is now rare to see private lands that are not gated with signs saying "Armed Security provided by Fred's Private We'll Shoot You Firm".

If the waterways and roadways (and air travel due to "we'll shoot you home security scripts" slowly disappear from SL as the others in this thread are noting, I can only wonder what public good will be next to disappear because of market failure.

I already know a number of players who will not hold an event without a unarmed-sargeant-at-arms present to cope with griefers. This is a certainly a bellwether of the failure of sufficient policiing by LL. Sadly, these event sentries are hobbled like rent-a-cops in US gated communities whose greatest power is to be vigilant and try to get the real cops to the scene in the event of actual need.

One cure for these market failures is for the citizens to agree to tax themselves more heavily in order that the government can efficiently provide these public goods. I've known of situations where this has happened: some years back, the business people of center city Philadelphia got disgusted with the trash and crime and petitioned the city government to tax themselves more highly so that order could be restored. The irony here is that even if a contingent of similarly concerned SL players were to petition Linden Lab for higher fees so that public goods could be provided by the only governmental body in SL, LL may have no (or negative) incentive to do so.

Oh well. Their world, their lack of comprehension of Econ 101.

Introvert Petunia makes many excellent points about public good and market failures. One bright spot is that Nova Linden replied to my request to turn scripting on in the linden water sims, so at least one govenment provided public good (boats functioning well in water) seems to be improving. I can't wait to try it tonight.
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This does not address the bigger issue of planning, taxing, and infrastructure, but in the meantime, long distance sailboat racing may have just gotten a lot better.

LL seems to be 'trimming the fat' financially lately. If the average amount of protected land per sim was 10% of the total land area, that is 6554 meters per sim that LL did not sell, nor gets paid tier on. If LL is selling 100 sims per month, after just one year that is 7,864,800 meters of unpaid land. That is about 120 additional sims that LL would have to put online to compensate for the protected land.

Assuming that the average premium customer owns 2048 meters of land (a number I pulled out of my butt) , that customer pays $24.99 per month to LL. That is 3,840 more premium customers paying LL $95,961.60 per month ($1,151,539.20 per year) while saving LL $120,000.00 in server costs (assuming each sim costs LL $1000 USD to put online).

Odd, a lot of parcels advertise that they're adjacent to protected land, and have higher prices if they do. It seems like an obvious selling point, to me.

The dAlliez Islands have dAlliez protected land around every parcel and they're doing fine.

Which is a possible "negative incentive" for LL to provide "public goods" such as waterways, roads, or greenspace, as I noted above.

However, this pure cost analysis ignores the perceived value of public goods as an attractant to players and thus is perhaps short-sighted. One can often see this in Letters to the Editors of newspapers: "How can <city> justify <aesthetic public good> when there is <some privation somewhere> that the money would be better spent upon?" The proper answer to this is that if you want to increase privation, neglect the public goods as it will cause an outmigration of taxbase. I'm sure LF can name a theorem from urban planning that says the same thing.

Alternatively to your back-of-the-envelope cost analysis above, consider this: Allocation of 10% greenspace in a sim costs effectively nothing (it does have the opportunity cost of uncaptured tier as you noted). However, if it improves the "experience" the net resulting demand could indeed be higher than the the 3,840 players you cite above. LL is indeed caught on the economic dilemma of directly measureable costs and the inherently immeasurable "quality of experience".

...what a cogent analysis, introvert; i thoroughly enjoyed reading through your posts...

...it's worth noting that, even in absence of governmental sanction, the free market will find ways to address public goods within the degrees of freedom given its hand...historically we've seen this in the supplementation of church by state, state by corporate, and even corporate by community interests: not always in its most ideally accountable implementation, and frequently subject to tragedy of the commons, but certainly evolving in the way that free markets abhor a vaccuum...

...in SL i've seen this implemented to varying degrees of success on private islands - not everyone takes the myopic approach of squeezing maximum short-term profit out of the lands at her disposal...my own home on cosy island, for example, is part of a development which by design reserves nearly 25% of its area to public lands and no-build 'prim lots', and features a strong emphasis on maintaining high-quality public facilities and preserved landscapes...in this case, it's worked wonderfully, adding value in tremedous excess of the token infrastructure costs borne by all our private parcel owners...

...personally, i find linden lab's increasingly-georgist approach to managing the grid to be an ideal incubator for a menagerie of such solutions...yes, the grid's often ugly, but you can't grow something truly beautiful without the living muck of compost generating its humus...

I have heard this rumor too, Argent.

Maybe that is why those sims with lots of protected land are always the first selling at the auctions and commanding the highest prices?

Point taken Dana. I noticed you were the one that bought it, LOL. I do appreciate you not chopping it into 100+ 512 lots - that makes the crowding even worse.

And, as another poster noted, I see a lot of land advertised as "bordering Linden protected land", and usually demanding a premium price. Yes, I bought my land just because it was beside a protected sim. Who would not want at least one side of their land bordered by a huge empty no-build sim?

I've made the point in other threads that the Lindens need to put strips of public land in residentially zoned sims. They collect enough in "taxes" that they could afford to do this.

Nice job on the lake, btw. There was a small pond there, and I always had the idea of making it into a huge lake!