There is no monopoly on land

I'll make this short. If you think there is a monopoly on the land market, why do you find so many different people selling land at the lowest prices on the For Sale list? If there was a monopoly, I would only see one name right?

If you think land prices should be cheaper, why do land sales happen all the time at the prices they are at?

"Monopoly" is not the only form of economic skullduggery that exists.

Take a look at the list of people who own the most land, and ask yourself why exactly they need that much land. For that matter, take a look at the amount of currently *unowned* land. You'll find that it's nearly zero.

This is the reason that the automated land scanners are so widely regarded as evil. Someone operating one can manage to snatch up every piece of free land that someone doesn't find interesting during it's auction period for L$1/sqm, and you can bet they're going to list it for more than that when they resell it. This is called "manufactured scarcity". Scarcity is supposed to be a "natural" force that raises prices as people try to get their hands on a limited set of resources. By making those resources even more limited by purchasing land that isn't needed, these people create artificial scarcity, as well as place themselves in a very advantageous position for dictating the selling price of all that land.

Let's look at it in another theoretical situation. You've got Bill Gates' money (and his immunity to anti-trust suits) and you decide you want to make some money from gasoline, so you very quickly buy up half of the nation's gas refineries and start storing their output. Suddenly the companies that buy gas from those suppliers see their supply dry up and the price shoots through the roof as they become ever more desperate to make sure they've got something to pump into people's vehicles. You've just created a scarcity that didn't previously exist, and nevermind the fact that gas now costs $8/gal at the pump, you can be a saviour of the common man and open your own gas stations here and there and sell the gas you've now got quite a bit of for a discounted rate of $7/gal. You've got the advantage in that you've got huge manufacturing capacity, plenty of gas ready to sell, and the other guys are rapidly going broke because they're having to compete with each other over what gas you didn't gobble up, bringing their profit margins to nearly zero. It's simply a matter of time before you can buy them out because they're handing over tons of money to the refineries just to get what gas is left, the "cheaper" gas you're selling comes from your own supply so you don't have that problem, and there's not really any way for anyone to play catch-up. (Hint, this is called vertigal integration if I remember correctly)

In the meantime, the rest of America freaks right the f' out over paying $8/gal for gas.
Now imagine that those refineries don't cost anything to operate when they're not producing gas. You have SL and Land Barons in a nutshell.

When someone can abduct part of the supply chain, either because of vertical integration or because they've got the capital to fake it, they can and generally will create artificial scarcity to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else.

No, I am not a communist, BTW.

Dude, trust me on this, it can be done and _easily_. I was making *mint* during the WoW beta (I hit 40 and bought mounts for me, my alts, my girlfriend, and a few other people just because I could) just by deliberately manipulating a few commodity markets before my concience kicked in. You can't say "it's a beta and the people didn't really put much value on their currency" because at one time or another I've pulled similar stunts in several other games just to get some quick cash for a vanity purchase of some kind.

It sounds communist, but I personally look at it as if there's only so much food I can eat, only so many pairs of shoes I can wear (particularly in a video game), so I don't see much honor in screwing over everyone else just for huge piles of wealth that I can't put to much use. Other people *clearly* don't see things this way. Being the king is no good to me if everyone else goes to the poorhouse as a result.

I think the term Elberg is looking for perhaps is racketeering. It's only racketeering however if there are laws against it.

Although I don't think any of the current landbarons have a monopoly. Anyone can get a landscanner. No wonder sim performance sucks so bad .

Edit: Or maybe profiterring better descibes it. It's something 'teering anyway

Who in the world has a land baron land scanner? I don't know of anyway in scripting to look at the price of a piece of land, and I script quite a bit. I leave objects that kill themselves when I sell land, but I have to enter in the information myself of where the land was and what the prices were that it was bought and sold for. All the objects do is send a message to a record keeping machine so I can keep better track of how much money I'm spending on land and how much money I'm making on land. It is not a complicated script constantly running or listening on channel 0. If I run a scrubbie after dropping many of them, the sim seems not to go lower. It is hard to measure small changes with a scrubbie though. The one thing I've noticed to quickly add up lag in scripts is anything listening to everything being said on channel 0. I've seen alot of poser balls do this. Things that do scans also add lag, but the most useful tools I've come up with for land sales only send 1 email and die.

Back to the land though.. You can't buy land with a script. It is faster just to look for it yourself using find. You have just as much chance of finding a cheap piece of land as a land seller. The only difference is that a land seller through experience will have learned what land is truly worth. They will know if a cheap piece of land could be sold for more, or if it really is worth as little as it is being sold for. If you know someone that has hacked a way to find cheap land, evaluate its value, buy it, and then resell it, then they are doing something more than just making LSL scripts. That would give an unfair advantage, but the land scanners I know about aren't looking at evaluating or pricing land. The land scanners I've seen are looking for scripts or people. Both of which has nothing to do with land sales.