Once Were Residents

It dawned on me just this morning that land barons work as independent billing agents for LL. Their duty is comparable to ticket agents that print, sell and distribute passes to concerts et al, then turn the bulk of the money over to a promoter. It's a living; but it's hard work and worry for what amounts to a standard wage.

This describes land barons, not brokers. Brokers flip land, buy and sell; barons pay massive tiers and rent the land to thousands of, what do we call them this week, nons? Granted, they rent to veris as well. These poor souls sometimes charge US dollars directly, sometimes charge lindens, and then have to wash them through Lindex as an added feature to their sixteen-hour workdays.

It's not the money though, it's the customer service that either eats away their existance or their profits, if they choose to pay people. I imagine they quickly discover, as LL has, that you can't pay enough liasons to handle the daily deluge of questions and problems presented by a virtual population in which everyone can own tiny plots of land. We say "barons" because we talk about land instead of people. The point, though, is not the number of sims added to a continent each month, but the number of customers added to that support population.

LL's solution is to foster the expansion of estates other than their own. Let the residential barons handle the day-to-day management of the crowds. This is why people complain about estate feature sets developing more quickly and proficiently than mainland tools.

I wonder when the baronial continents will reach a point of non-profitability or lack of sufficient customer service? They generally rent parcels larger than 512sm so they'll likely support more sims than LL did before they realized thier mainland model was already too subdivided and populated to be operated profitably.

The good news is that Second Life itself can at least reach sustainability, maybe profitability, if LL continues their wise course of focusing on recruitment and offloading population retention to baronial concerns.

Final point, there are several mainland rental operations, a few large ones even, that are caught in the middle of this transition. I hate to use the term "doomed" but certainly wouldn't want to be in their shoes.

I ran up some hypothetical numbers on this once, and I honestly can't figure out how anyone could make a living at it.

But more to the point, if Linden labs sees money being made in that business, it is quite likely that they will decide that they may be able to offer that sort of customer service after all. Then the Land Barons will be competing with Linden Labs more directly.

Ever considered that the future of SL may be one in which the smallest unit of land is a sim?
A sim the owner hosts themselves at that?

In fact, doesn't that picture make a lot more sense than the current muddle of 'mainland(s)', islands, and 'estate mini-continents'?
Of course prices would have to become far more realistic, but then it's a future with almost unlimited expansion possibilities.
Unlike the current grid which seems to be getting creakier and more unstable by the week.

Yes, we have (post #7). That's what LL essentially does with estate sims. There were earlier threads as well that were lost during the Great Forum Debacle. One day LL will only bill whole sims to owners who sublet them from there, even on the mainland.

The only exception will be first land. They'll fix that by having first land sims with 512sm parcels that are freely available, can only be claimed for ninety-day terms, and revert to available first land when abandoned.

Although I agree with a lot of what you've said, I do take exception to this part. I don't mind (well not that much) if they roll the stuff out to estate first. I do object when the CEO says in public they'll roll it out to the mainland too and we're STILL waiting for ANY sign of the extra tools.

As a mainland dweller how irritating is it that I have to ask a linden nicely to come and see what's causing all the script and physics time activity that's killing my home sim? The tools they use are the estate tools essentially (at least from what was said) but I can't get them. OK, so far I've had few problems with that (although I have had at least one Linden who didn't know how to use the tools, but it was an ungodly time in her night (4am ish) so I'm willing to cut her some slack). I understand that I can't return my neighbours stuff, but at least I can check I'm being a considerate resident and if I'm on good terms with my neighbours (which I am) I can ask them nicely about sorting their stuff out. If I abuse that ability and spam them constantly about it... the AR tools for spam already exist, it's just a slightly different form of it. At least roll the information gathering tools out please... It can't be that hard can it?

Sorry for the rant, but it does annoy me. Can you tell?

Is that based on the average salary of boise, or bangalore? cause the big time people are not paying 'minimum wage' in the us, by any means

Can tell, yes, but it's okay. I've had many many many occassions to need estate tools on the mainland. There are many many other individuals and groups that badly suffer the same need. It's foolish of us though to think that we'll have access to them when LL rent parcels to multiple residents in a sim. That simply ain't gonna happen, Philip's rain dance notwithstanding.

Bear in mind this is the same CEO that talks about celebrating the wonderful side-by-side diversity on the mainland, and LL not wanting to do anything to stifle such compelling creativity, then imposes strict terraforming limits and stifles creativity by forcing a narrow, templated sence of contiguous 3D space.

The answer is: you can't really. The only way you can make a reasonable living from it is if you have 100+ sims. The problem with running that no. of sims is:

1. You will spend 24/7/365 in sl, and have no rl, and
2. You simply can't offer a decent cusomer service.

Only when there are better tools for delegation will it be possible for residents to offer larger sized estates, and even then they would only be able to pay peanuts to those they delegate to.

Fascinating thoughts, Khamon.

I'd tease you a bit about some of the suppositions, however.


First, that anyone actually would consider themself a 'land baron'. That implies a certain sort of mindset from the get-go.

Many people who let out sims simply thought that having a sim would be a cool thing. That it would be fun to have people there to offset the cost of it, and to keep the place alive.

And were then stunned to see a 50 person waiting list for a sim that realistically meets the needs of 15-20.

Honestly, if I had been going for mass appeal, I would have done a Middle Ages sim, a furry sim, or I'd be walking around in a leather skirt saying "Tal" to passersby.



As for estate management - expansion is tough, but stability is feather-light.

I've had many, many offers of people willing to watch multiple sims and generally take care of things for a mere 1024m of free land. I've never taken it up, but it's out there.

As it is, I have friends and residents helping me out just... because! Really, you *can* trust folks to ban an obvious griefer, or restart a sim if need be - it makes their life better just as it makes my life better.



For the money? That depends on the person I guess. SL is still a passionate hobby for me, and one that remains so because I have friends here.

A minimum wage job, or even a 'regular wage' job of SL would not be enough to keep me here. I ask everyone: would it keep you?



I often find that folks renting or reselling a single 1024m lot to whomever they can find are a lot more 'land baronish' than many with offshore continents. It's all about the money, little else.

But then take someone like Alliez, and you'll well understand this point - she's the same person she always was before she had ever even heard of Second Life. She's a Baroness to my mind because she's decent, not because of her worldly (or virtual) possessions.

That's kinda my point Desmond. Where the population sees people owning loads of land, what those people are actually mostly, timely responsible for is the people that rent that land. I'll grant that there's a huge difference in the attitude of people who are "baronning" as a hobby, to support a community, to create a themed world, and those whose purpose is to make money, especially to make a living.

But the question still comes down service. It is time, not square meters, that draws that line. LL simply have too many direct customers to service fairly on a single grid with experimental software. Paying enough people to answer all the questions and handle all the problems would run them broke. Granting mainland owners access to estate tools, as long as multiple people rent land in the same sim, would only make the problems worse. I wonder if residential estate owners are learning these lessons by example.

There's no reason for LL to classify the mainland experiment a complete failure and turn it off as I'm often accussed of advocating. There does seem to be enough data, and projection, however, for them to move decidedly in the direction of only the responsibility of supporting brand new residents and people renting entire sims, even on the Linden estates.

Pitching definitive romantic titles of nobility back at me is fair; it's all a matter of perception. We'll all be better served when people finally stop relating a community to a specific block of virtual land.

Nope. No 'first land' 512s. No 'x' square metre plots. Just 'a sim'.
You supply server, bandwidth, and pay, per sim, to plug your server into the SL 'metaverse'

Ok, you want to mess about playing landlord? Fine, it's your sim after all.
But the 'plug in' fee is so low it simply wouldn't be worth it.
I'm thinking SL with millions of active users here. At which point econnomy of scale kicks in and all Philip's hyperbole begins to make some sort of sense.

The difficulty is - how do we get from here to there without FUBARing SL?

The metaphor of land is quite insidious and powerful.

Even if all sims are created equal, shortly thereafter they are anything *but* equal.


SL will survive the transition because of this. Say the metaverse *does* explode forth from SL - a Nova Albion address will be worth something, even in a world of nearly free servers.

Why? Because one sq. km of Tokyo or Manhattan is worth more than 1 sq. km of South Dakota.

Even in a world of P2P teleportation, location matters. The landscape is as much or more psychological than it is physical, especially in the metaverse.

That's like asking "how do we create City of Heroes with FUBARing World of Warcraft?" This is the easy part. All we need is a licensed and shrinkwrapped version of the server and asset software to build our own grids. That has nothing whatsoever to do with Second Life. The world of Second Life can exist on the Internet right alongside the worlds of Christian Life, Cartoon Network Life, Disney Life, Dreamland Life, FoxNews Life, Fur Life, Google Life, HaXx0r Life, Khamon Life, Microsoft Life, NASA Life, New Zealand Life, Nike Life, Rotary Life, Sony Life, University of Cambridge Life, and Weather Life.

What has to change, primarily, is the ability of sims to draw assets from any number of web servers located anywhere on the net.

I think smaller 512's give the new user constraints to follow when building. The idea is to build with little prim as possible, yet make the creation be real. If the new user gets the prim limit of a sim, then learning to build within the guidelines allowed is not important any longer, perhaps it will stunt the growth of stimulated minds to work with what they got. Quality building will be limited.

Just my opinion based on my observations.

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