Four new sims appeared today...

Four new sims appeared today, right before my very eyes! One minute, a great void. Next second, POOF! New Land. Trees growing in the middle of the road though, and along came a Linden cleaning them up.

New Sims are West of IronJaw.

How long can the SL community absorb this much new land each month? When does the number of new members start to slow down and the number of quitters speed up? Surely we will start to approach an equilibrium at some point, and only a slight deflection in the membership growth rate or the retiree rate and the economy will crash and burn, '29 style. Don'tyathink? Do we have 10 days or 10 years until the Great Undoing?

Buster

since we can't possibly know what the membership numbers are doing it's basically impossible to know so all we can do is speculate and doomandgloom at each other. LL does know the number tho and since they keep adding land like crazy (every time i look around the map there's something new seems like) then either they're dumb or it's a sign the crash isn't coming any time soon.

i think it's cool all this land showing up all the time. makes SL feel all dynamic and growing and it's nice having the wildernesses for a lil bit until the signs start popping up. plus i bet all the space makes people feel like expanding into it which means more premium accounts and tier for LL which means more money which means more SL! or more drunk binges and bets at the dog track if they're dumb as previously mentioned hehe.

almost forgot to mention that's awesome they popped up right in front of you. i want to go running around the world with sims popping up just as i'm about to run off the edge.

I double-clicked clicked in these regions in the map, but there is no flyable (or walkable) path from the nearest telehub to these sims. I had to manually go through the Brownlee telehub and fly over. This brings up an interesting question: when clicking in the map, does one automatically go to the nearest telehub, or is "nearest telehub" something set on the servers? If it's the former, then at least one more sim needs to be added in order to get from the Isabel telehub to these new sims.

I would expect and hope that SL is growing at a decent pace, and that adding new land would be a sign of that. There is a huge amount of possible expansion of the SL world, and if growth is slowing, or not increasing, then I think some better in-world content and promotional activities would easily do the trick. Entertainment and education are huge industries, both of which I see SL having a lot of potential in.

It would be nice to see some numbers on SLs size and growth rate, though, including types of accounts and how active they are. This would allow someone more informed choices about land purchases to be made.

LL's continued release of New Land is the Number (1) reason property values continue to decline month after month after month. I understand they don't want a scenerio where land costs L$20/m like it did back in the Summer. But what they should do is set a
minimum High and Low range they would like to see land trade in. Then adjust the
auctioning of New Land accordingly. Maybe at L$5.00/m avg the number of sims auctioned a week is (1). Then when land is L$10.00/m avg, the number of sims auctioned per week is (10). Adjust the new land according to average land valuation.

It sucks, because every new plot of land is like a Cancer on EVERYBODY else who purchased land. The only thing of any value in SL is Land, and its being systematically destroyed.

SL needs more things of value other than land!!! My number 1 suggestion is being able to sell unused prims on the open market. The down side is the supply/demand of prims is directly tied to new land. The more new land, the more new prims, the lesser the value. But its a start in the right direction.

I think it's good to have an overflow of land. It's true some of my land is selling for less or not selling at all, but having an abundance of clean, fresh new spaces to explore and populate is wonderful... It's one of the best parts of SL. If we continually tie land to people we'll have to wait for new members all the time before we get any more land.

I would say, let go of land. Stop paying crazy prices for it and seeing it as an asset or investment. Live on it today, enjoy it, then go somewhere new when you want to. If you don't want to make money off it you won't mind if it's not worth that much.

they will release new land until they start seeing public land sitting on the map unclaimed. it matters not one wit to them that load of land sit for sale forever at 1L/sm. i doubt they particularly care if auctions are being won at introductory prices.

all that matters to them is that somebody owns the land and is paying the tier fees for it. that's their cash flow. so the anwer to your question is that they'll continue to release new land until they start seeing noticable amounts of unclaimed land on the map.

it's kinda hard to tell from your post but you're saying cheap land laying around is good for players right?

The question was, HOW LONG until the big crash. (My guess: three years.) Eventaully, the RL community that is interested in things like SL will be saturated, or a competitor to SL will emerge with better technology, or somebody like Anche will thow in the towel and cash out. Land value will go below $1/m2, as one or more large land holders try to get at least something for their land. $L will go to ground also becase people trying to cash out land are also trying to convert to $US.

People who are in SL for socialization or creativity reasons don't care, so I'm not saying all of SL crashes. This is not a doom and gloom story. Quite the contrary, SL can thrive for a long time regardless of land values. The number of community members who are land speculators is a small fraction of all members.

What I am saying is that land speculators are playing a game that is riskier than they may think. The SL real estate market resembles a pyramid scheme. (Not "is", "resembles".) Early players do well, but late comers could get stuck holding the bag. Eventually.

The only real threat is if there is a huge contraction in the number of people paying tiers, resulting in a sudden and unexpected revenue contraction for LL. How well they can react to that will determine whether SL survives. (Probably a few years away from THAT problem, I think.)

Widely known law of economics: All free markets periodically adjust. (read: alternating cycle of "bubble" and "crash".

Buster

For some of us that purchased land last Summer, the crash already happened.

I purchased half a sim between $L25 - $L30 a square meter back in August. It's selling for L$5 a sqm now. I am sure this happened to many others.

My suggestion would be to consider your money gone if you buy anything here. Look at it as an entertainment expense as opposed to a purchase or investment.

If you think that way from day one, you will be able to enjoy the game as opposed to sitting there crying while watching your money / investment dissapear.

- T -

There are still 5999970000 people who have not yet joined Second Life

On a brighter note they are a WONDERFUL place to drive

cheap land laying around is good for ll.

ll makes most of its money in recurring costs (land tier fees).

good advice.

or consider it a very risky investment - e.g. a gamble.

I'm just happy that I'm a single connecting sim away from being able to easily fly and drive from Drawbridge to the newest sims. As an avid pilot and motorist, easy access to unpopulated sims just makes me smile.

that's circular. using only disposable entertainment money for gambling is good advice too.

Let's just hope its the later Buster...

SL really isn't growing that fast. It's not like the number of users is doubling every 3 months or something -- and that's what out-of-control growth looks like on the Internet. At it's current size, SL is still at best a cult hit.

Really, it's hard to imagine that we have more than the tiniest fraction of the potential market for SL so far. Look at how huge a horrible game like TSO was, with the proper brand name and marketing push behind it.

A competitor is a more legitimate risk. Still, the massive amount of 3rd party content that has already been developed in SL makes for a pretty good defense.

I'd say the biggest risk to SL is that after it keeps growing for a while and people realize it's a good business, the Lindens get bought out by EA or Microsoft or Sony, and SL gets completely screwed up by the new owners.

Actually, 5999969999. My Mom will NEVER play.

Perhaps there are others who will never play. Like inmates on death row, people who are in a coma, President Bush, have I left anyone out?

So the number isn't THAT big. At some point the growth in membership WILL slow down.

Sincerely,

Chicken Little

They sure are pretty before all the for sale signs

With around 600 to 700 new memberships a week since June 2004 I dont think there will be much of a land glut even assuming 20% of the new accounts are alts, that's still a steadily growing population. New memberships have dropped off a bit in the last 4 days, but, that seems to be a consistent end of the month trend...

you're just being silly, go sell land to newbies =P

(edit - wordage)

Make that now 8 sims and forest meets snow

I like those for sale signs.
They "Brighten" Up the landscape with light. Literally.

But that's exactly what the Lindens say they do. They claim that they roll out more sims in response to the absolute numbers of new people joining.

They don't tell us, however, how many of those people go basic or premium, i.e. with land tier or not, how many use the first-land option, how many sell first-land and tier up, etc. If we had those numbers, we could examine our world better and understand its vicissitudes and believe the Lindens better. Otherwise, we'll have to assume that like any monopolist in a closed society, they are extracting money and value out of the people to enrich themselves. It's an arrangement in which everyone is happy, though, like some early communist utopias. Lindens outsource their doggy programmers' work to parcel up and administer sims to land barons who are only to happy to do this work for free as a business cost, then re-sell in smaller parcels. People don't go on the auctions, and buy at those higher prices. What's not to like.

I think the crash might be coming sooner than 3 years, but hey, the Soviet Union had a good long run of 70 years before they killed so many people, and ran so many natural and human resources into the ground, and the infrastructure finally just collapsed.

I predict that waves of new people are going to be more "mediocre" in their tastes, and mass-taste driven, and looking more for residential sims to be nice and pretty with row houses like in the burbs, and entertainment sims to be less laggy. That demand will force the Lindens both to zone new sims and retool old sims as zoned, which ever costs them less, probably the latter.

It feels to me that the Lindens are rolling out a lot more sims than they used to, but I haven't been in the game long enough to tell. And as a result, land prices are both higher on the auction as more people rush to play land baron and bid higer up over the barons' savvy margins, and more people in-world have more land to chose from at different prices for what they want, and prices go down.

I think SL will need some Chinese and Indian translation devices before we hit that number

The second I hear a similar game to SL exist with major backing and advertising from Microsoft, EA, or somebody, I'm selling everything and repopulating my GOM account with USDs.. Cause I'm not gonna get caugh holding the bag. I did the same thing in the fall when the bottom started falling out of the SL real estate market. I watched it nose dive from L$20/m to L$5/m. I got out with minimal loss.. Now that the bottom was reached, I'm back in baby.. '