Linden Letter about Land

received this yesterday. Thought it might be of general interest. --Shack

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Dear SL Resident,

I am emailing you because our records show that you purchased land at
auction in the last 8 weeks.

In the past we have created new land based on a projection of growth in
SL and what we know about the average amount of land Residents own. This
process may or may not be accurately capturing the amount of land the
community wants. In addition, the current process does not allow groups
who wish to buy large contiguous mainland space an opportunity to do so
without substantial effort. Allow me to propose a hypothetical
alternative. What if we allowed SL Residents to choose how much land we
bring online?

Imagine that we published a map of the entire Atoll continent in the
north. This map would be viewable/downloadable from the website. The map
would reveal a plan for where each sim will be located, where the
infrastructure will be, the relative height of the land and any telehubs
planned. Each sim would be marked by a number. Residents could decide
which sim or group of sims they wanted to buy for a minimum price of
US$980/sim, note the sim number(s), and send mail to
[email]fakeemail@secondlife.com[/email]. By sending mail, Residents would be agreeing
to pay the minimum price for that sim or group of sims. If the order was
canceled, a $100 fee would be charged per sim canceled.

Once we receive a request, we would trigger an auction with the orderer
as the first bidder. The identity would be hidden just as it is with
auctions now. If Residents wish to buy a group of sims, we would create
one auction for that group of sims and the minimum bid would be $980US X
the number of sims in the group. If two people requested the same sim,
the email timestamps would determine who the first bidder was. Once a
single sim was designated part of a group by request, it would not be
auctioned individually but as part of that group. Each auction would
last 48 hours. Linden would request a two week period in which to
deliver the sim(s) to the winning bidder.

To reiterate, this is only an idea that we would like to get your
feedback on, not a feature that is in the pipeline to be released
without further exploration. Would such a process succeed in giving
affinity groups a chance to purchase large tracts of mainland? Would
supply meet demand? I would love to hear your thoughts. If you would
like to share them with me, I would appreciate that you do so by sending
me return email rather than starting a thread in the forums.

Look forward to hearing from you,

Ryan Linden

thank you for posting this shack.

Can someone please clarify, I'm missing out on something here. My emphasis added:



???

Guess I just blew my fast track to FIC.

Yes, Shack, you shouldn't have posted this in the forums.

You should have sent it directly to me for publication in the Herald

There are so many ways in which this is not only a questionable idea but a questionable way to go about polling the community that I'm not even going to list them. Sad.

I'll just say this: There is *so much* buy-in among *everyone* right now -- whether you own land or you don't, whether you make money or not, people love it here -- that anything that cuts people out of the loop is going to be bad for the future happiness of the Grid. The more LL leans toward replicating a RL system of inequity (in who gets a voice in decisions, whose opinion is solicited, separations based on socio-economic status, etc.), the less attractive this place is going to be.

Thanks Shak, quite interesting.

This sounds to me like it just makes it easier for the landbarons to buy up whole sims. In fact it seems to be specifically designed for that purpose. We're gunna see ALOT more for sale signs in the north continent sooner rather than later.

What we need is a system that will give people interested in actually USING the land (as opposed to immediately parcelling and reselling) the opportunity to buy without having to bid against land profiteers. A 'can not sell before' date should help in this. This system could even be specific to make 'Time release' auctions and traditional auctions seperate, so the landbarons can still buy subdividable plots for the masses, while people that are interested in large purchases for their own use could do so as well.





Why are only recent auction winners being addressed?

-Ghoti


(edited for spelling)

I received the above mentioned letter and am more concerned that the author included everyone's email address in the To: line instead of hiding them in the Bcc: field.

I got the same letter and was just about to post it too. I talked to a number of land dealers last night about this.

One thing that seems to have happened is that the markets reacted with allergenic contraction. I was told that land sold for only $2L/meter last night in the new continent on the auction. I'll have to study that, there may have been other factors.

Other factors could have gone into that $2L/meter stuff:

1. A few moderate land dealers liquidating out of the new continent in disgust because of too many bugs, problems, losses with the new patch.
2. Some slowing or stopping their land purchases due to uncertainty about the telehub issue
3. The appearance of Ansheland on the servers which constitute a significant competition to LL's own New Continent effort.
4. Lack of customers coming to businesses or to buy land in the New Continent due to transportation/flight problems.

But the fact that the Lindens are implying that essentially they will sell sims for just a $981 bid now will make the price of their own auction plummet, and considerably devalue land in-world. It's the kind of short-sighted thing they often do because they are computer geeks acting out some resume-polishing utopian gameworld fantasy, not community or land managers -- at least as far as I can tell, but I'm fairly new.

I know Philip has asked several times at town meetings, and other Lindens have talked about the need to put larger parcels and whole sims out on the market to make it easier for groups to get sims. I'm all for that. They need to fix the group tools to make land work in them better too!

It seems reasonable that more sims should appear on the auction starting at $981 and more consistently. Now it happens that weeks go buy, and no whole sim comes up. Or one comes up, is crappy, and sells for $675 and nobody buys it. Or one comes up, it's good, and it sells for $1501.

The system Ryan is proposing seems too complicated to me. There are not THAT many bidders. So trying to organize micro-auctions among a couple of vying groups seems like just to set up unnecessary rancour between just a few players. That's the down. The up side is that micro auctions might make more land available for less to groups to make group projects on their own like residential sims in auctions free of oligarchic participation from land barons (who might give microauctions a pass and wait to get the secondary market). And that I can only endorse. What I think a micro-auction would do is enable more groups to come in the door in the first place, encourage cooperation, and get them buying a sim for the same price as a private island, only on the grid, where they can get fly-in customers and socializing and telehub sales. And then those groups and either add value or not, and if they add value, they will resell or rent and then be the winners, and constitute a good competition to oligarchs buying up entire batches of private islands.

So what's not to like? One byproduct of doing this "first sim" program is that it is like "first land" program. It's a subsidy -- and any subsidy like that in this game opens up the question of why so much socialism in this capitalist game. First land is given for $512. Now "first sim" is going to be given for $981 essentially because you just won't get a lot of people bidding in a microauction, not with that many sims you're planning to push. Some will just walk away with the sim for $981, just like now they often walk away with 8192 of PG for $2/L because nobody wants to bother.

One of the factors that governs how a sim will do on an auction is how it looks, obviously. If it is a big flat pancake with no geographical feature on it, or a windswept hump of a hill that isn't quite a mountain, it won't move as much as a gorgeously crafted cove with viewlines cascading down the hill, an island, protected cove, Linden roadside, etc. etc. like Ravenglass, Pimushe, Alston, etc.

Now, if you buy a private island, you get to have all these things customized on it. In the wild grid microauctions, you'll get Eric Linden's Notion of Nature and Wilderness (some day, grad students will do studies on this fascinating subject of How Eric Linden Conceives Nature, which as, we know, is the culmination of the fruits of our civilization in some 2000 years of Man Conquering Nature LOL).

So the Lindens will sort of keep the microauction (or macroauction because it is big sims...but micro because small number of bidders?) spiked with interestingly-shaped sims, and I dunno, throw in some pancakes now and then if they are busy or can't be bothered or want to cool down the markets.

I think we should be greeting any Linden move that appears to be sensitive to more player requests and niche markets. But we always have to be wary of all the unintended consequences that Lindens wreck every time they try to do a good deed.

I'm going to tentatively answer the questions in this letter then:




Yes, but the chief obstacle to affinity groups gathering together is lack of trust and propensity for griefing and sabotage in this game, not lack of land. You can't fix that lack of affinity just through land. And the group tools are horribly flawed for land mangement due to officer recall, tier-pulling without notification, lack of ability currently to reset group land to another group to hold prims or transfer land, etc. etc.

I've bought sims and large tracts of sims both on the auctions and in-world. And I can only tell you my experience about planned residential zoned communities. They need those four things first: a) a plan b) residents c) a means of zoning d) tools to keep a community functioning. When you have those 4 things, you can set them down on land, and the land management begins to take care of itself. When you first have the land, then struggle with the land and try to put down those 4 things, you'll end up with lots of difficulties.



Currently, supply overfulfills demand. There are enough whole sims or half sims coming on the auction or in-world. There's Midge now for example, split into 4 big chunks sitting there, with view corridors into Stump and Grace and Wixom all sitting there. Sitting there, and not snapped up by that "affinity group" that one would think would have formed and been zealously shopping for old-world bargains.

Currently, groups don't get together and buy land. They don't do that for whole bunches of reasons we can have another thread about. So just putting land out there for them doesn't help cement them.

Currently, what happens is that when a whole sim appears on the auction, only a very determined end-user community manager can get that sim, and only if he is prepared to pay a lot more for it and even take a loss. When he gets to work on it, he has to try to sell it and stave off not only griefers and annoyed neighbours who accuse him of being a grubby land baron, he has to stave off other land barons who just want pieces of it because their tier needs filling that day. It's hard work to parcel and sell a sim sensibly. Most land barons who buy sims just chop them up for quick sale. You can't blame them because tier payment are relentless and come every 30 days whether you do well or not in sales.

Making the "first sims" program available eases that hardship by setting the price bar down a little and making auctions where only end-users meet to bid, without land barons presumably, since they are going to be busy elsewhere...or will they? That's what's hard to understand. Just as the first-land market can be gamed through alts or getting newbs to sell out for less or just being persistent about buying out bad 512 situations. So in the same way a first-sim market will emerge of oligarchs buying out botched community experiments where one person flipped the switch on the tier and threw the whole group into peril of being seized by Governor Linden. Or one group of players will make a first-sim but a determined oligarch will leverage their success by buying them out and putting them into his whole network, like the private-island secondary businesss works now for some big land dealers. And maybe this is ok?

It's important to discuss big land changes like this with the whole community, not just in letters to those who might stand to benefit from them (although they probably won't with this suggestion).

email [email]ryan@lindenlab.com[/email]

Considering how I suggested a few months ago that LL should definitely publish their plans for expansion, and probably even integrate them with the in-world map... I can't wait to see this.

Hehehe, your sacrifices are appreciated, comrade LOL.

Am I the only one who noticed that this email revealed the RL email addresses of everyone who bought land at auction in the last 8 weeks to everyone else who bought land at acution in the last 8 weeks? Not connected to avatar names, but still, now we all have a very interesting spam list. Coming during the heated discussions in these forums about Linden taking privacy seriously, I am starting to wonder if there is any adult supervision around that place.

Buster

You weren't the only one, but some of us deleted it : )

It is an invasion of privacy because not everyone thinks to get a separate game e-mail to avoid stalkers.

Well, since the only use I'd make of it is to spam people to buy or rent my land, and they are *already* land owners, let me take this opportunity to tell you to Buy My Tier Garden Amazing New Scripted Invention to Calculate Your Tier! In our Clunn and Ross Stores or IM Me In World! Only $50! And It Enlarges Your Penis, Too!

LOL Prok!

I really do wish that they'd give a little more respect to the little guy. sigh.

It seems to me that polling the winners of land auctions (who are presumably profiting from the status quo) is not quite as productive as polling the losers would be.

The exception is if they're seeking the answer to a very narrowly-targeted question, such as "how will this impact the land barons, who are a major revenue stream for us?"

I have no strong opinion on the proposal, other than to note that if it does drive down land prices, that is (on the whole) a very good thing for consumers.

I had planned to start bidding more often on land. Why was this email not sent to all customers, even those that have not won an auction? I've bid on a large tract and did not receive this email, though I've never won an auction. Don't even get me started on the email address issue.

I don't see a shady business practice AT ALL. I see Linden looking for ways to make things better, and seeking to do some community brainstorming.

Linden rightfully specifically wants the opinion of people who have actually bought land at auction. Those people have spent large amounts of RL$, and constitute a good sample of proven "target customers". Linden MUST be able to direct questions to specific groups, to find out what that specific group thinks. This is market research 101.

I see this as a step in the right direction -- asking people who would be most affected by a change what they might think of the change.

As for the change they propose, I don't like it at all. Land values fluctuate, and different types of land become more or less popular. Mature green shoreline is currently hot. Snowy, cloudy PG isn't. (The former is worth as much as $L10 per m2, the later is worth maybe $L2.5) If you try to sell all land at the same price, that makes no sense at all.

Buster

Your right Buster. I have retracted that portion of my post.

Just to throw my 2 cents in...

Without knowing what Ryan's intentions are, I think it was somewhat of a mistake to post this to the forums. Here's why:

1. Providing the plan was to eventually poll the community as a whole before implementing this new process -- after getting some one-to-one feedback from some targeted residents first - I see no problem with Ryan elliciting feedback in this way.

2. I think anytime the Lindens ask for feedback from us its a good thing - even if they're only talking to one or two people. Posting this may make Ryan think twice now the next time he wants feedback on something.... I see that as unfortunate.

3. The forums can be a superheated drama factory at times. Possibly Ryan was attempting to get feedback from a small amount of residents first -- (and maybe have the idea killed) -- before taking it to the forums, and potentially set off a flame explosion.

This is all based on assumptions, of course... fully possible I could be completely wrong on this one

For the record, I've never purchased land at auction, and probably never will. I can't even try to comment on whether this proposed new plan is a good or bad thing... land auctions aren't something I can speak intelligently on

It's not necessarily a shady business practice, but it begs the question of just what Philip means when he says he's creating a "world", one in which we're all "residents". If that's what he really wants, then the right thing to do is find some way to take *all* residents' opinions into account. That or announce that it's an oligarchy and let us decide whether we want to stay.

To my eye, this wouldn't be an issue if SL weren't cast so strongly as a "world". LL never calls it a "game" and never calls us "customers", and I think that's very intentional. That's part of what generates the passion here, which is great. LL is of course a business and needs to keep its customers happy. But if this is to be more than a game, and if LL wants to maintain the high level of passion that residents show for it, they will probably have to do better than this. I for one at least want to preserve the illusion that my vote counts here (as I try to preserve that illusion in RL), and not be baldly presented with the fact that LL doesn't care what I think just because I only own a few measly 512s here and there.

And whoever thought that email wasn't going to find its way to the forums needs to spend a little more time on the forums and in-world, it seems to me.


I don't completely agree with you here, Travis, but these are good points. Maybe LL should simply have approached people for their opinions in-world, one-on-one, which doesn't seem a bad idea to me, instead of going ahead and actually creating a real FIC and even letting them know who each other are.

I think Travis has some good points and argued the P.O.V well. however, on balance, I think I'd trust the wisdom of the crowds rather than the individuals that the Lindens are seeking out.

Ghoti Nyak:



Good point, Ghoti. Those who deal in land as a commodity are already provided with the mechanisms necessary to conduct their business. Those of us who enjoy the USE of land are forced into the reseller-oriented system. This causes resentment at the resellers for keeping the prices high, although I've observed that a determined non-reseller will outbid everyone in order to secure land of particular interest. That can't help but jack up the market perception of land value.

Looking at some of those bid histories I want to say, "c'mon, guys -- it's just pixels," but that's not a very popular view. People get emotionally attached to their virtual land just as we feel an innate bond to land in RL. I'm convinced that without that depth of attachment we would have fewer of the outstanding installations we currently have in SL. Regardless of the skill level of the builder, landscaper or architect there is an additional dimension of artistic engagement required to craft something extraordinary. Emotional ties to the land are one factor that can induce this level of artistic committment.

As an aside I've always wondered who's responsible for certain areas. I've compared sims that look like they were designed by a different individuals. Too bad they can't sign their work! Windermere is so enchanting with its meandering green coastline and deep blue ocean horizon that I'd like to congratulate whoever is responsible.

Ghoti, you propose one suggestion for a separate land supply that would presumably be unattractive to resellers. Another suggestion might be a series of fixed price buy-sell paired transactions. You buy the land for L$x at auction, and use it for as long as you're prepared to pay the tier on it. You get your L$x back when you release that land back into the auction system to be sold again for whatever the market will bear. Whoever wins that next auction has just set the new revised value for x.

I'm sure that many of us can devise suggestions like these that would make a category of land unattractive to land resellers, who would be disinclined to bid on it. We'd need a steady supply of new land to prevent scarcity value from driving up prices, but that is certainly doable. The question is whether the cost of lower returns from auctions and the added complexity would be covered by revenue from increased tier held by players who are currently reluctant to bid against resellers to get a larger chunk of land.

Wow, Traxx and Ghoti, these are such very good and important ideas. It would be a great addition to the economy to have something along these lines for a few sims here and there. These are both solutions that are found in real life to accomplish exactly the same thing: set aside land not for profiteering but for someone who wants to make a commitment to it, for whatever reason. I hope a Linden is reading this thread, because these could make a big difference.

To restate the ideas as I understand them:

In order to preserve a certain portion of land for use in projects or by those who aren't able to compete in the normal auction progress, implement one or both of the following:

1. Set aside a small portion of new sims for auction under time constraint, i.e., buyer would be unable to sell the land for some period, say six months. This would help limit bidders to people who feel they are going to get at least that amount of use out of the sim, which would probably draw people who have a large project to implement, of whatever nature.

2. Set aside a small portion of new sims for auction under resale constraints, i.e, buyer would be able to sell the land only at the purchase price. This would somewhat reduce LL's initial income on the land, but tier would be paid normally. Once resold, the land might remain under the price constraint or could be released as a normal auction, depending on market conditions and how the experiment worked out from LL's point of view.

LL might also consider limiting the pool of eligible buyers for this land somehow, perhaps to people who own less than a certain amount of land, a kind of First Sim program.

These are terrific ideas, and they would help encourage the kind of content development I think LL and all of us want to see more of on the Grid.

I heartily endorse this product and or service!

I think this is a brilliant statement. OF COURSE they should ask those who weren't willing to bid sky-high what they'd like to see happen! And they might find that people are prepared to pay more, but not THAT much more and they'd have a nice market niche.

Currently the system forces end-users who want to make communities or projects to bid really high for what they want to get. They can often get it these days because land barons are keeping close to their pre-determined margins for auction purchases and they simply won't go above a given line. The question is how to strike a balance between end-users and traders so that trading can still be a viable activity on the auction. If the Lindens turn the auction into merely a lot-drawing system at a fixed price, there is no vibrancy and dynamism to it and it cannot raise money for either the Lindens or the players. If you create more fixed-price or low-price micro-auctions, you might be serving a target audience and increasing sales volumes for the Lindens, but you'd have to see whether you so undercut the sales volumes for land barons that you can no longer "use" the land barons to "subsidize" the micro/niche auctions -- and that is exactly what seems to be asked here.

I see a tendency in this discussion to denigrate land dealers and celebrate end users, as if end users are the only ones provide rich content in high-end mansion estates, zoned residential communities, architectural showcases, or sandboxes, and only "end-use" can be truly valued.

But while few appreciate it, land dealers also add content and service to land too. Many have an exaggerated notion of land barons as rapaciously buying up land on the market, chopping it up, and gouging high prices for it before they move on to turn the next sim into a slag heap. But there are actually not many that do that. The best land barons, and there are some good ones, try to parcel the land and terraform it thoughtfully so that it can sell rationally, enabling dozens of strangers to have a sim together without having to lift a finger to make a formal "residential community". Barons don't have a lot of choices given that they can't move around the Linden land on a given sim or designate land for parkland to separate tracts and then declare it "protected" without holding tier on it themselves (Anshe is making "Chung protected land" now in her sims and we wil have to see how it turns out.)

Land barons are often there to liquidate out players who need to sell their land quickly and move on for whatever reason, and this can include the viewblockers and griefers problem many suffer. They help keep sales moving along in this way, often enabling players to use more thought and care to back out of a bad purchase and study another sim better and make a better buy, improving the look of sims by putting in stakeholders. Land dealers hold the tier on large tracts of land for 30 or 60 days in many cases, enabling small groups of players to move in and live on just 8192 k of land in their organized community, for example, while pacing sales over the weeks exactly to those people in a community who more slowly acquire land over time as they can afford it, sometimes with adding new members with tier or by a business. That kind of invisible service of a land baron is never, ever considered when everyone looks around and snarls at all the "for sale" signs in their viewline. They couldn't buy the view; the land baron is holding the view for them in their land empire until they *can* buy the view. You have problems with that?

Currently, some land that people give up or abandon does find its way back to the auction and is resold, but those people don't benefit. So the suggestion that people could "turn in" their used land and "recycle" it back to the auction makes sense except that once again, it is not a capitalist system so you'll have to ask "who will pay for it". There are so many variables that affect pricing that it might be impossible to arrange a scheme where you cashed out exactly what you put in--the price of the GOM, the performance of the latest LL patch, whether a telehub was put in near your land since you bought it, whether griefers built a giant tower next to it in the interrim making it impossible to buy -- I honestly don't think LL could accept such a proposition rationally. It also means that someone who buys 32k and thinks better of it and cuts out 8k then is returning to the Lindens a piece he didn't actually buy in a whole set. If a plot was valued at the auction based on its "wholeness" in preserving certain geographical features (like an island, cove, mountain with cascading views, etc.) why should the Lindens take back the butt-end of that piece of 32k now remaindered to 8k? Anything that poses these kinds of administrative challenges for the Lindens isn't going to work.

What I hear some players saying is: take away all the vagaries of the auction, the land barons, the prices, the uncertainty, but give us something on the grid that is like the private island system. Then the questions arise: can selling more fixed-price land, or micro-auctions that essentially amount to drawing a few straws for undervalued land be a good business proposition for the Lindens? Can it avoid undermining the incentive of land dealers who keep the auction values afloat for the Lindens and smaller-bid players in the long run? And only they can answer that question.