Land Piracy

if land scanners are just a myth and the land sales pages are being used in this way then i say that the land for sale pages should not be live that there be some sort of delay in it to prevent such underhanded tactics as you state.
you can be guaranteed that if a any plot of land is set at an absurdly low price it is a mistake by the seller.
and if you buy such land and don't give it back for the price you purchased you can just think of your self as just another thief cause that's what you are.
it may not be illegal but i repeat it is unethical.
but if your actively looking for land in the find that is set absurd low they you probably don't have any ethics to begin with.

Agreed, but ethics is something that is personal and contrary to popular opinion can't be regulated by laws or a TOS.

All I was stating was that it is near impossible for the Lindens to do anything against this practice. What price exactly is "absurd low" for a piece of land, what is just "cheap", what is "stupid" and what is probably an error can not be objectively determined.

In Sims Online, there used to be a common scam when trading rare pets - the old 'bait and switch', where you would be shown a rare pet but when you entered the 'secure trade' mode, you would get a normal pet in the crate instead as there was no way to tell what was inside.

The solution? All EA did was to change the code so when you hovered the mouse over the item in the trade window, instead of 'cat' it would say 'cheetah', or 'tabby'. This stopped rare pet scams for all but the careless individual.

It's a shame that people can't be honest, but I guess that's online life.

Lewis

It is not the fault of the Buyer who picks up a plot of land which
was under priced by the Seller. It is the Seller's responsibility to
correctly price their land. If they do not, it is their loss. The buyer
is not responsible for the lack of attention to the market by the
seller. That is life. It is no different than you seeing a 72" Plasma
TV for $100 instead of $10,000 and going to the sales clerk and
saying, "I think you made a mistake, let me help you redo your
pricing". You know that 99.99% of buyers would be jumping
over each other for that incorrectly priced product.

Responsibility resides with the (Seller), not the Buyer. As such,
Land-Scanners are a legitimate tool for finding discounted land.
If you do not like land scanners, I suggest you hold educational
classes for the masses along with mailing lists to keep
everybody informed on the market value of land.

And lets not be high and mighty. Where is your arguement on
Sellers who OverPrice their land (ie: The City)?

Well if people are finding this uber cheap land for sale through the Find system, then there's a simple solution. All LL needs to do is add (yet another) little checkbox saying "Add this to the Land Listings". And then maybe LL should charge a small fee for it too, just as another sink.

they are most likely using land scanners.

I do not believe this. Put your own land up for sale for $5L when no one is around, and see how long it takes for someone to show up. Took about 10 seconds two nights ago. There is some method they are using.

With 5K users online at any given moment, there needs only be a handfull searching the land sales to have results like the experience you had.

The method they are using is a dilligent watch of the "Find" list. Set the list to sort by price/sqm and you have low priced lots appear at the top of the list during the search.

The land buyers will arbitrarily purchase any land set below a certain price. ie < 3.0 PG and 4.0 Mature.

It's that simple.

Can't say as I agree. I think it could be regulated by TOS. I think Lindens could take a step (as Crucial observed) in which land listings don't immediately go to the FIND window and totally eliminate that problem. There have surely been enough instances of this happeneing for them to decide to do something about it.

They did employ the "sell to" concept, which has helped a great deal, and if a person always sets that, there's not much way it can be bypassed. But obviously more is needed, because the problem still continues.

How can the Lindens tell if an Owner intended his land to sell for an absurdly low price? That's really quite simple: take the word of the owner. I think he would be most qualified to determine what he intended to do. It's totally within their right for the Lindens to take the ethical high ground and tell the buyer, "Look this land was intended to sell to someone else, so we're returning it to the seller." If the buyer had any conscience to start with, he'd have returned it to the owner the moment the owner voiced an objection. It's just the honorable thing to do.

Like one person pointed out back there: anyone willing to jerk someone else around and make an enemy over the few bucks that a land sale will earn them really doesn't have much to complain about when it comes to the concept of fairness. They're thieves, pure and simple.

Let's go to an extreme and consider this concept: let's say I had some puppies I was selling for $1 and made a sign giving them away. After they're gone, I put that sign in my car to take over to a friend's house, who also has something to sell.

A passerby comes along, sees the "$1" sign, puts a dollar on my doorstep and takes the car. I think he can argue all day how he thought it was a legal deal-- he's going to jail.

There are some things that are just plain obvious and all the rationalization or excuses in the world aren't going to change that. A thief is a thief, no matter how much he rationalizes his actions.

Thanks for your kind words... I was ready to let the evil goof choke on the virtual soil, but since the plot of land I managed to screw up was smack in the middle of our SIM, we kinda sorta had to get it back.

The whole experience was all very Felinni-esque... about 5 pals were hovering about as we were having a happy dancin' afternoon, I was weeping on the phone with my partner over the mess I'd made, a nameless Linden was there, trying to help me with the task at hand -- her presence just completely riled up the hawk, and I never could figure out why she couldn't just turn to one of her office mates and say, hey, can you help here? Naively, I thought somebody would respone to my email... I didn't know to call. *hangs head and sighs*

The point with this all is that it *is* easy to make mistakes (I personally quiver and quake when I am editing land and that very scary ABANDON LAND button is taunting me). Some folks understand all of the nuances, some of us don't. It would be nice if there were some additional tabs to work with, forcing a person to go deeper into the process to make sure they really want to do what they are about to do. Heck, its harder to retexture a silly prim box than it is to lose your land due to error.

And, sadly, there are just mean people out there, ready and willing to get something they don't deserve. Thank heavens for karma?

I hear that. I wonder how many people have lost their land by not knowing exactly what that means. If I remember right, the label on that button used to be different (not sure) but I at one time almost reverted over 4000m to Linden Lab when I was trying to remove it from group ownership. A lot of these things are obscure and all to easy to mess up.

One of the items that ticked me (and caused me to abandon my Premium memership and revert to basic) was the Linden Lab tier situation. All over their board they were advertising, "Go ahead and buy land. Your tier level will automatically adjust". Well, I did buy land, which shot my tier level up about 2500m, then turned right around and sold that land to my business partner the same day. OK, I figured I was going to pay for that land that month. Fair enough.*

What Linden Lab didn't say is that although tier rises automatically... it does not lower automatically. So the next month, I was charged $15 for tier that I wasn't using, land that I didn't own. My partner finally pointed me to a not-so-obvious reference in the land instructions which states that to lower tier, you actually have to visit the website and order that your tier be lowered.

That seemed to be a very unethical way of doing business-- and I cancelled my Premium membership the very same day. So they took me for $15 in bogus tier charges... and lost $9.95 a month in Premium charges ever since then. I'll live with that.

Every day hundreds of people are charged for land they don't own by paying a "tier fee"... and not owning enough land to fill that tier. Land is expensive enough here without being charged (dare I say ripped off?) for land we don't own via some etherial concept of "tier". Of course, that's LL's method and people agree to it (the only alternative they have is the alternative I took: don't buy any more land), but it still seems a shady way of doing business.



* (Question: why is land charged on a monthly basis? Is it that hard to put it into the program to prorate it on a daily basis for the number of days it's owned? Very shaky dealings, that).

Land scanners for cheap land are a myth. There is a very simple wiki that shows all the functions possible in SL here. You will see very quickly that it is impossible to do a land scanner that looks for cheap land. Using basic logic, the only way to get to land in a matter of seconds is be the first one to see it in Find, and no delaying it going to Find will not fix the problem. How many times do you recheck your land when you put it up for sale. It doesn't matter if it sells in 5 seconds, or two days, the first time someone sees it they will buy it.

I still say that 1$L/meter is a perfect limit for mistake prices. Land prices will not be below First Land prices any time in the near future. Linden Labs would have to stop growing for that to happen. I don't think the growing is near done yet. If someone is selling to strangers for lower than 1$L/meter2 for real, chances are that something else is shady like its group land being sold by a single officer. If they can set it to not allow you to sell for 0$L to just any person, they can set it to not sell for 1$L/meter to just any person. If you want to sell at 0$L you have to set to a specific person, do the same thing, just with 1$L/meter2.

land scanning is not done for 'cheap' land its done for 'public' land which is what happens all too often when inexperienced people screw up the land transaction dialogs :/

you can sell direct from one group to another, by setting the land as sellable to *ONE* person, the one who contributed group tier, and have them buy it for the new group directly, and re-contribute the tier as part of the transaction. Theres ALOT of dialogs etc to wade through, but its not a terribly difficult process...

it is however pretty obscure and ANY one mistake basically screws you irrecoverably..

what i say is the land should *ALWAYS* default for sale *ONLY* to the person who bought it
and *RELEASING* land shold have *NO* part in the main land dialogs, and should be relegated to like a 'my land' or 'group land' right click on the parcel and pick it an answer like a security question, and then it goes into an 'innacessable' holding tank for an hour or something before its actually lost to the land scammers

but thats just my two cents

I commend your actions.

I made a typo with some land I put up for sale, so it was listed at an tenth of the proper asking price.

Someone "swooped up" and bought it - then asked if it was a mistake, and I said yes, and they sold it back to me for the same price.

I didn't think of them as a sap, just a decent person with a conscience in the normal range.

the one problem with your response is that because this is a complex world where many may not know how or what they may be doing or even how much there land is worth.
where in the seller of the plasma TV is a retail professional and knows all there is to know about selling plasma TVs.
where in the sell of land in second life may not know anything about selling land.
but there are plenty of buyers who know all about buying land and all about the mistakes that people will make who are just a little to fucking eager to take advantage of.
so i will say to you sir that if you believe what you are saying here you are no better then the common thief on the street.
the way these people steal land from others in second life is more like taking candy from a baby rather then buying a plasma TV for a 100 $ at circuit city.

over priced land is another argument equally as important but not nearly as dishonest has land thievery is cause a land thief can swoop in and litterly steal 100's of us $ from an individual in a matter of seconds.

Are you sure? On the occasions I've bought land that exceeded my current tier rating, I've had a warning message saying I'd have to go to the website and manually raise my tier, otherwise the land would be forfeited. No automatic raising at all for me...

All my realtor friends (and myself) work like this, afaik.
buy first, then ask (if the price is insanly low).

It's a very good commercial act, in many way, and i never regreted to work like that.

Every other land seller I met personally seems to give back improperly priced land. I know I've made mistakes with the Joining of land in the past, and I have been relieved when Nolan Nash or Calvin Millions bought them, because they sold it back to me for the same price they bought at. It would be a shame if we are getting new land realators that don't give this basic courtesy anymore. I get the feeling though, that most land swooping is done by random people making a one time purchase. I personally sell a alot of land to non-realators all the time. There is always someone looking at the Find list, and they aren't always a realator.

I'm sorry. I just cannot agree with you on this point. It is my
belief that Sellers be responsible for correctly pricing their land.
Ignorance of the Seller is no excuse to blame a Buyer who
aquires the land at a discount. Regardless of the game's
complexity.

If this issue angers you so much, then please start a website
which educates all sellers on the Market Value of their land.
Your page would become common knowledge for sellers to
base their sale price on and it would end any Land Pirate
operation.


I know it sucks, but you can't save all the ignorant people
in the world. Some of them will just have to learn the hard way.

Maybe we need a closing, where both partys sit down and complete the deal. Until that time we will always have people who will try to advantage of others.

One time about 20 months ago when I was buying up Jenner I saw someone had a parcel for sale at a VERY low price, tried to contact them but they werent on. I bought it myself, even though it made me tier up. Set the price at the original price it was set at to sell back to them. They of course bought it back. I lost some money due to tier but gained a freind, friendships are priceless.

There are programs that can control your mouse, such as timed macros, there are programs that can do some process every minute, or every second, in a specified window (Like the system scheduler campers use to stay online).

Who's to say a programmer didn't write a program that sits on SL and looks and land sales every second and processes the data to find cheap ones?

I've used programs for games that added features by 'infecting the game executable' and adding in an icon of it's own, such as Furnarchy (www.heroinpuppy.com)

This could be done to process the output of SL's land sale listing.
Just because it's not an LSL script or something from INSIDE SL, doesn't mean it's not possible.

What you believe is irrelivent. They do exist.



This is false. Land scanners do exist. They have limited funtionality, however - they detect land that is public, IE, for sale with no owner. That is all they detect.

For what its worth, Land Scanners and the so-called Land Pirates
are good for the Economy. Their arbitrage work keeps the land
value at a constant. Which is much better than wild swings in the
marketplace where oneday land is L$20/m2 and the next day
it is L$2/m2

With a ethical mind like yours theres only proof why this world isnt the nice place it could be, be it SL or RL

Theres always wrong regarding the law and wrong regarding common ethics, a lot of the common ethisca arent in law because they are common, noone would think about doing it because people know inherent it IS wrong.

Up an level things like murder as defined to kill somone just so is in all societies considerd civilised wrong without question, there may be minor difference in the exact definition but it is common to societies.

In RL you will hardly sell land accidently at a insane low price for the simple reason that "interfaces" in RL prevent this mistake, wich they do not in SL

I was robbed this way and the buyer made very clear that he was aware that it was an mistake and laughed his ass of.

Would be to nice if it would be legal to post the chatlog here, but this would only mean ban for me and not for the thief admitting to steal knowingly.

Sucks when you cant bring out the evidence of a crime for legal reasons.