New Continent News Damping Sales?

I don't deal land, but I have 512m open on my tier, so I was poking around at available plots, considering branching into another sim (a little plot in a city sim would be cool, I think). Then, flying around, I stopped and thought: there's a ton of land on the market, and a new continent coming soonish--doesn't it seem like a terrible time to buy?

I'm surprised prices are as high as they are now, and they seem bound to drop (if anyone wants to get these for-sale plots off their tier).

I dunno, I could be wrong--I'm just multiplying my response by however many would-be buyers are out there. Does this make sense or am I full of it?

From someone who bought a crapload of land right before the "new continent" announcement, no I don't think you're crazy. I'm personally a little but upset about it, but, hey, what am I going to do. I'll have 8k of land that will be worth 1/4 of what I paid for it soon. What's new? I have yet for something to go my way in Second Life yet.

I feel your pain aaron, i paid 2k usd for my mainland snow sim and a few days after they added a shitload of snow sims..

Well, land hasn't sold well for a long time, with new sims being added. I know new sims have to be added, but with so many unsold plots, I wonder if it should be so fast?

And teasing the world with hopes of a huge landmass (what, 100 sims? 10 sims? 50 sims? 1000 sims?) doesn't help the situation.

I like the themed buildup of the release of "new land". It's fun. (Though I think this is just buildup to the KidGrid.)

Then again, I'm not here to make money.

Land is definately on the way down. DO NOT BUY NOW!!!

I'm far from a land expert, but is there any chance that land isn't selling well because it's overpriced relative to what people are willing to pay for it? Prices seem to get bid up awfully high.

I'm not criticizing anyone, just wondering.

But aren't your remarks un-captialistic?

Naw, they're just plain Alby-esque.

No, a capitalist buys low and sells high. Not buys high and sells low. That's a fool.

Well, it is over priced relative to what people are willing to pay for it...

But that's only because they keep dumping shit on us over and over again. It wasn't always like this. Land used to sell for A LOT more than it does now. And people were scoopin' it up quick, too.

I really hope that new landmass is the kid grid. Cuz this is madness.

no matter when they announce new land or how much warning they give someone will have just bought land right before the announcement. it's just how things work in a universe where time is linear.

Bah. Everyone whines about how LL doesn't want to set/control a "target land price", then when they keep "dumping" land to keep the price down, they whine about that too.



DOWN WITH LINEAR TIME!

Well damnit! I propose we petition the Lindens to switch to an eternal temporal model, then we won't have these kinds of problems.

Just get a bunch of people together, buy one plot of land, and then keep selling it between each other for a higher amount each time.

Land isnt selling well because the Lindens have run off a lot of the land traders by ignorant economic moves. If you go through and look at the completed auctions you'll notice that other than the one main land trader there is almost no one else competing with her on a regular basis. Part of the huge list of sales is just that there is way too much out there. As for it being overpriced, i'd say just the opposite - land is undervalued compared to what it could be worth if the game had any stability whatsoever. When people know they will be able to withdraw their investments (possibly even profitably) they are much more willing to purchase goods, be them virtual or not. Sadly, in this environment there is almost zero chance for anyone to actually do so. Instead, because of random exchange rate and land release changes, SL residents are unable to do anything but pay out of pocket for everything, as if the Lindens really thought that to be a better model.

Every two months someone will either bring up the idea that land is too expensive or too cheap. Usually because of some previous bad move by our good friends help really is needed, but because the lindens end up acting on a four month lag they never seem to respond to the correct concern. IMO, there is no set level that land should/could be worth and its silly if they are really trying to target a specific price. Instead they could focus on smoothing out the extreme fluxuations that are based on nongame factors and make all our lives easier and better. In reality though, when prices drop instead of slowing the flow of land periodically, they sit and wait until they see the exchange rate drop by 30% or more and ingame prices half to do anything about it. Most recently they were forced to actually buy over 2 million L$ back off the market just to stabilize the forces they created. On the other hand, when mature land skyrocketed to over L$10-15/m2 (at $1.40/L$250 exchange) what did they do? Introduced a massive amount of snow land that is to this day being held by land barons waiting for the day it MIGHT be worth anything again. Whatever the reason for it, Second Life is more unstable than any dictator-led third world country - which at least has to worry about feeding its own people.

In short, any time is a bad time to buy as a consumer. Prices might rise or fall from this point but I wouldn't expect anything to last. Instead expect your purchases to be just that, expenditures you will never recover.

Just a theory... maybe land was never intended to be a commodity and they release it at a rate that allows people who want to use it for something other than resale to get it at a reasonable rate? Yeah, yeah... I know... crazy talk.

Umm, resellers arn't regular consumers. It is much easier to profit on a trade when you can buy and sell again in a short period of time.... What I'm saying is as a consumer buying a home, expect your money to go down the drain because its very unlikely you'll recoup your money regardless of the price.

Right, I got ya. What I'm saying is... so? If you buy land because you wish to use it for something other than reselling for a profit then the use and resources are the return on investment. When viewed in those terms it's not a speculative venture. I'm saying that the Linden economic moves may not be ignorant at all but actually intended to run off the land traders.

Hmm, but like i said its still possible to profit if your not a regular consumer, especially for the very highest volume traders... I think many traders (like myself) have just tiered down because they don't have faith in Linden Labs; not due to a lack of opportunity.

I seriously doubt running people off is their goal, but if stopping land resellers from abusing their position was the plan I think it would be within their power to change the system in a much more effective way. Maybe I'm wrong (often am) but as it stands now newbies still buy land at highly marked up rates, paying a tithe to a subgroup of non competing players.

I really don't know I've never been able to figure out what (if any) LL's feelings are towards the land resellers. Just speculating on why they might be bringing the new landmass on when prices are pretty reasonable already. There's been a lot of dissent lately after the ratings and stipend changes so maybe they're just trying to get people excited. I'm looking forward to seeing what the hoopla is about.

Deklax is correct -- if the Lindens keep devaluing land by constantly rolling out loads of new, fast, fresh sims, then eventually large traders especially will probably stop buying, at least in such large quantities. They may be replaced by a new generation of large traders just coming to the game who haven't figured out the racket yet, but there's a serious contradiction here, and investors are definitely right to pause before investing in this game, and yes, Chip, it is crazy talk:

a) on the one hand, the Lindens put their land -- pixels on server space -- up for sale at real US$ prices (not converted Linden prices), and collect a pretty penny at auction for these lovely pixels -- *they* sure value them when they sell them! And they are only too happy to collect loads of real US dollars for this land, and then even charge "tier" or maintenance fees on it in perpetuity!

b) on the other hand, the Lindens constantly then devalue this lovely purchase they've just accepted money for themselves by constantly rolling out new sims so that those who bought yesterday's sims are holding a lot of tarnished goods -- sims that devalue because the FPS goes down and the Lindens move the sim to older servers to make way for the fresh, fast sims.

c) on the third hand, players have been content to stay trapped in this tier-anny because they are held hostage to ugly builds, griefer builds, laggy clubs and malls, and are constantly in a frenzy to find new fresh sims, and especially new faster telehub sims to sell their wares in malls

Chip, if "land was never intended to be a commodity" in your utopian socialist vision (maybe move to Russia for that?), then WHY do your good friends the Lindens treat it as a commodity when THEY sell it??? See, you and others who are so furious at land barons seem to think it's OK for Lindens to sell land, but it's not ok for other people to buy it, let alone mark up the price!

So all this screaming about land barons who commodify land and charge prices for it is coming to the wrong address -- go back to the Lindens and ask them why they don't just lay out, I dunno, Animal Crossing, where everyone gets a little house and a land and they take their wares to Tom Nook to sell.

But I can guarantee you that if the Lindens would cease their incessant sim production even for 5 days, all that land that was sometimes grossly marked up from the last auction, to 9-10-whatever per square meter, will start to come down in price! Land barons only mark up because they must deal in large volumes to make any kind of profit whatsoever, and they mark up because they have to try to make a quick profit before their tier bills hit, and before the Lindens make new sims to devalue their existing inventory.

All of you guffawing that the Lindens have been rolling out sims since Time Immemorial and that is just the Way It Is have to remember that the Lindens at some level are conscious of this inherent contradiction in their system. They stopped the roll-out madness in August, but they didn't gut out the screaming, perhaps made the changes too fast without enough cushions, and it led to everyone (ordinary players, not land dealers) howling that their "investment" was devalued which the Lindens were touched by this cri de coeur and then started rolling out more bunches to accommodate the screamers.

And the Lindens would not be making radical economic changes now with the ratings and stipend system if they didn't intend to drain the swamp of socialism and start to make this an ordinary capitalist market-based system where they put up land to sell it, people buy it, and they develop it and give it more value, or they re-sell it. Land sales are a significant source of income for the Lindens.

I believe that eventually there will be more zoned residential or zoned business or zoned entertainment areas that players will maintain, and this content-rich and enforced pixel space will gain in value in the game and create a secondary market for players away from the original auctions. This will then lower prices on the auctions, and the Lindens will have to consider a slow-down in land production because it won't be moving at prices they can pay their programmers at.

This notion of the "reasonable rate" where the tekki wiki types can have free land to play with forever is a hold-over from "the old days" when there was no tier, and free land galore available in charter accounts, and just from an era when land cost less because there were less people to value it. It's all changed now.

Pixel space on servers sure is a valuable commodity. The Lindens are right to sell it because it involves them buying equipment and paying people to maintain it, and they have no incentive to do that without a profit motive. What I think will begin to bring some equilibrium to this world is when the Lindens do not roll out sims as fast, and when people began to sit up and look at each other and see what they have on each existing sim and see what they might do to vastly improve the look and feel and function of sims.

Heaven forbid that a company might actually wish to make a profit. I agree. We should demand that they reinvest all of their ill-gotten gains in the world, so that Prokofy doesn't have to pay tier.



They are constantly adding sims because their desire is to make money, and to reduce the cost of sims. Even a basic understanding of the law of supply and demand (or some common sense) would reveal that the Lindens are trying to keep the cost of land low by pumping up the supply.



Funny. I've never witnessed this frenzy to move that you claim is omnipresent. I've moved my home twice, and most of the people whom I know in-world have moved two times or less. Though, of course, it's possible that the people whom I meet are capable of coexisting with their neighbors...



You've accused LL of being profiteers, yet you advocate removing the free land market and replacing it with a single-plot allocation. Though it's definitely not utopian, it IS socialist.



If you want to play Animal Crossing, go play Animal Crossing. This is Second Life. You've also often confused it with TSO, but I just checked and the world is still Second Life. If I want to own more than my little parcel, what do I do in your system? Am I limited to building a cute little cottage? Can I no longer build what I like? And why would I want to sell stuff to an NPC? An NPC doesn't enjoy what I've created. He doesn't offer meaningful criticisms or compliments.


Soooooo... we drastically limit supply, despite an ever-increasing demand. Obviously, prices are going to come plummeting down. This is an obvious contradiction of basic economic principles. But let us assume for a second that you are right. Let us assume that land is artificially overpriced because the barons paid too much at the last auction, or because they've got to deal with so much land. If that is the case, why would these barons suddenly lower the price of their land to sell it, when doing so would (per what you've described) mean even less profit for them?



Ahhhh. So we get to your root motivation. All of the inaccurate economic analysis was just a cover for you core passion: exterminating ugly builds. If we decrease the supply of sims, despite an ever increasing number of players, and we remove any incentive to produce new and interesting content, then everyone will shut up, slap a beautiful little prefab cottage on their 512, and go fishing in The Sims Life Crossing Online. What a marvelous vision for the future.

Very well said Prokofy! I agree, but I also wonder; After all this time its almost impossible for me to believe that they havent looked carefully into this stuff considering how important it is to their core business. Although it doesn't make sense to us as players because we get screwed; rotating the good servers to different/new sims and intentionally devaluing old land is actually a fairly genius move.

Recently LL claimed they would try to keep at least an equal hardware configuration on the newer sims that come out (Who knew they hadn't all along?) but for a long time it was their policy to intentionally misrepresent the land being purchased by using their fastest equipment and then change it quietly to different hardware that was apparently 'good enough' by whatever unknown standard exists in their mind. In the past people who purchased good quality new servers were quickly screwed over and put on older servers so they could sell the new ones again and again. The idea that they can't afford to sustain equal hardware capacity is ridiculous. They choose not to.

Although we are told the cost of the land is meant to cover the hardware aquisitions and facilities I think its clear they don't give us real access to either. I never once heard a linden come by and say to me, "Oh btw, the sim you purchased a few weeks ago - we decided to replace the server with something slower." When one day FPS drops by half at your newly built home and you assumed its that annoying neighbor that just moved in- was it really?

As long as they keep the illusion going by have ingame sales, auctions, etc, I would imagine it takes many people quite a while to figure out whats going on, if they ever do. N00bs will go out and purchase land believing they might be making an investment rather than a purchase only to be greatly disappointed 80% of the time if they don't choose to sell it immidiately. Luckily for LL, by this point they have already tiered up and paid their money, investing themselves in the game and getting those recurring charges rolling. If the sim that holds their home then degrades for any of the plethora of reasons that exist and forces them to relocate and/or purchase new land - from the Linden's point of view - whats the harm in that? The player will feel it was either their own fault or their neighbors and focus their energy on land barons, griefers, trolls - rather than the real people that are not only abusing them, but charging them to do it!

On most MMORPG's turnaround on the active players is usually pretty high - and I doubt SL is any different (other than the misleading user figures that probably include basic and lifetime accounts that are never used). If so then there is always a pool of people that don't know any better and will believe any line fed to them about capitalism in an environment that appears at first glance to be a free market.

You were exactly right that land barons mark up to cover their costs, and its really a joke when people blame them for the system the Linden's created. There are some people out there that are literally holding hundreds of thousands of m2 of land (and paying tier on it) waiting for the day it might be worth something again. What this means for a consumer is really pretty simple. Those sim tier fees are being passed along to each individual who purchases land from them. Meanwhile because the market is so dominated by such a small subgroup of players there is very little competition to drive prices down or force sellers out of the market, leaving the consumer to bend over and take it until they get fed up and leave.

Well said Ardith. Prokofy and Deklax, what you're failing to take into account is that auction fees aren't where LL makes the bulk of their profit from releasing land. It comes from people paying tier fees. Because of that it is in their best interest to keep buy in prices reasonable so that people will tier up and buy land. If the prices are artificially inflated by land resellers it can prevent people from tiering because land is too expensive to obtain. Land resellers also make it difficult for LL to judge true demand for land because resellers gobble it up as fast as they can make it but have no intention of paying tier on it for more than a month leaving LL with the cost of hosting empty sims. Land is intended to be used by people who want to build. They don't add it just so resellers can line their pockets.