There are no auctions at this time.

Well, as of 6:30 PST Friday Morning, at least.

Lindens simply trying to support land prices?

edit to add:

There are 5599 found land parcels for sale (not including first land) .. that seems a bit lower, especially as a % of total land parcels for sale.

Another thought is that they're trying to move Shermerville and now that they're in the land market as well they realise how painful a land glut is on people trying to sell land.

Hardly. I would not speculate on LL throttling the supply of new land ... The auction block is empty because a few dozen sims have been sold last weekend and at the beginning of the week. It was quite a bidding frenzy for some. (And now we know why Anshe paid those very high prizes for some of them.)

At the south end of the map you can see 60 fresh new sims waiting to be thrown on the block.

I only count about 30-40 or so, not 60. Are you talking about the south continent?

However, this seems more like the Lindens I know and I agree it would be a different approach from what they have done previously.



Care to share? I don't know

Well personally my theory would be that if I was LL, I would be wanting to have as much land available in SL as the market could bear and land prices to be as low as possible but just high enough to interest the work of some people who wanted to play land speculation but generally price stablity and not speculation in the wider land market.

In the grand scheme of things, higher land prices or lots of speculatory purchasing of land does not make SL better or more interesting to begin or continue playing longer for the majority of players. This would be what LL would primarily want / need to grow their business - maximise number, spend and happiness of players.

1. Tier - I believe LL would see tier as their real land / server income generation device not the initial sale of a sim on a server.

2. High Prices = no players - If the prices are too high people dont by, dont play or buy less = less tier for LL.

3. High Prices = crowded ugly SL - If land was so expensive and unavailable that all must buy small huddle together, and raise revenue to afford it the landscape would end up looking like one big, jumbled, laggy telehub. I would stop play if the whole place was like that. Land can't be free for market reasons but lower prices mean your only barrier to entry of more land is how much tier you can afford. Money that goes to LL.

4. Concentration of funds can be good but not probably likely in this case - The only good thing about land speculation / higher prices is that this type of activity could ultimately concentrate funds in the hands of a few rich players who might be helpful if they do good things with the wealth they have collected in the game. But most likely it will be used to buy more land for more spec or be cashed out for RL needs. So I don't think more generally this would be something LL would be try to encourage other than to have a couple of PR useful poster players as a sales tool.

Plenty of land now:

http://secondlife.com/auctions/

Perhaps they were simply getting it ready, maybe even adjusting the terraform a bit?

It sound like you have visited the beautiful City of Sagamihara! Where small ugly houses are grouped toughter next to pig farms! The nearby farmer chose Sunday morning to "harvest" his goods!

Getting back to the issue at hand it seems that more and more land is getting under the control of a smaller group of people. There is so much land for sale now! Also there seems to be a glitch in the map part. Everwhere I visit seems to have 512 sm for sale.