Bulk Land Auctions: Phase II

As seen here:
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I am glad to see LL has addressed some of our concerns, with this new offering.

I think we *may* see some diversity in the people that decide to partake in this program.

Thank you LL.

Im sorry but positive comments are against the TOS.

I'll jump in with some non-positives to get the ball rolling.

I am not sure I agree with the premise that a large bloc land buyer is in a better position to determine what the resident wants in terms of terraforming. The value of this is mainly for LL, in that it will reduce the effort they put in to do any of the terraforming work themselves.

I am also a trifle concerned with how much of the 20% possible allocation of protected land will actually be used. I supppose this would depend on the person that buys the land. It would seem, for some, that it would be a difficult decision to remove 20% of land from potential sale, but I haven't really thought this through. There are definitely advantages in marketing a sim with protected land, but maybe it's possible to do it with only 5-10%.

This is certainly a great thing for large scale land buyers. With the 5 sim bloc now available, it will be interesting to see how many different buyers there will be.

In general, all of this is a good thing, but I wish LL would wait to see the result of the first phase before initiating a second phase.

Which concerns were addressed? There were only two that I'd gathered from all the postings. One was even block sizes of 4, 9, 16 without extra sims hanging off the edge; the other was flat pricing rather than pitting serious mainland developers against each other.

Please enlighten me.

There were a lot of concerns (or aspects to consider). I collected a few here for example. And I bet there was a lot of frustration (or concern) among the smaller land barons who were not able to bring up that much cash fast. (I wonder if the large liquidations we could watch at LindeX yesterday and today are not a sign of some Land Baron(s) generating cash.) Maybe these concerns were not spoken out loud at the forums. Admitting that one has less resources than a competitor might be hard for some

That were the "concerns" that were adressed with the change in "package size". I am not convinced that this change will lead to much better results for Second Life as a world. But it sure will heat up the competition a bit; and the prices that LL achieves at the auctions will be higher with more competition.

It is really a "phase of experimentation". And I am very excited to see the results in a few weeks.

Thats true, Gabe. But in the long run (which might not be that long at all), the Land Developers will produce exactly that land "what the resident wants in terms of terraforming". They will do this because that sells best.

What the Lindens are doing, besides trying to unload the burden of terraforming from their overworked team, is creating more diversity and more competition.

Its called a "market". And a comparably free market will allways produce what customers want. (If that is "good" for these customers is another point. But we weren't talking about that, weren't we?)

I agree. There is no evidence at all yet that their premise ("Selling land in large blocks also allows for the creation of large regions with more interesting and uniform terrain design than would be possible if land owners were to terraform sims one at a time." has been proven, or indeed has any merit at all.

It's far more likely that between the short planning time -- a week to make design changes before lockdown -- and the quick turnaround most will need in order to see a return on their investment ... that what we get will be ... flat, in any sense of the word.

Although I'd love to have it turn out otherwise, Im not hopeful.

Your fears are not without merit, Jim.

But I believe that beautiful land simply can be more profitable than a quick hack. If you look at some of the Dreamland sims, you will see that Anshe is not (at least not always) optimising for an easy sale. Some of those sims have a true concept and are very well done. Anshe would not do this if it would not make business sense - besides being more fun.

And customers are willing to pay for it. They accept the upfront payment for buying the land from her, even though there are other Land Barons offering "rent only" model.

I would say this proves that profitable does not have to be equal to ugly/boring.

Um, thanks for the edumacation regarding what a market is. I wish I hadn't skipped HS business class to smoke a J behind the gym prior to quitting altogether and joining the circus.

I think part of the issue currently, and I don't think this new system alleviates it, is that a very large portion of the non-linden owned for-sale land is in the hands of a very few. This doesn't really equate to a wonderfully efficient free market.

Dreamland notwithstanding, a certain mall on perched precariously on the side of a volcano, a "reforestation project" that ended up with trees in roadways, and a set of islands raised up out of a lake bottom in the north continent do not give me a great sense of confidence.

And time is still a concern ... unless there are designs already on the table, a week from delivery to lock-down just doesn't seem to be to be enough time to fully develop something like this. Good /can/ be done quickly .. but Im not sure it often is.

So, while I agree that the market can drive what sells, will this mean a lot of drek gets put out there while the market finds its voice and land sellers are able to respond.

This just seems to be moving pretty fast, and "success" being touted as a reason to move forward, when there indeed has been nothing at all to see, let alone to determine success.

I guess the two things that concern me most are:

** The shortness of the planning cycle. Not so much in terms of the week before lockdown, but the fact that the experiment was announced so abruptly and put into action so quickly. And now we have a second phase coming before the first group has even been terraformed. My best hope here is that the buyer of the sims had already been planning such a project in private sims, so that there was already a tentative plan in place before the announcement.

** The sheer size of it. 30 sims hitting the market at once seems unprecedented, but maybe I just haven't been paying attention. I'd really appreciate any historical info that people have about what the largest concurrent release of sims was in the past.

A week for terraforming that many sims is really kind of short--but I suppose anyone who plunks down that kind of cash must have some kind of advance plan. I hope.

I don't care much for flat. And I hope that they put in some water, even though water is hard to sell. I'm afraid we'll get a bunch of little canals, like those ugly developments in Florida.

I am always baffled when I see Dreamland held up as an example of good non-linden terraforming. While some of Anshe's sims are beautifully done, some are terrible. The terraforming is mostly very unnatural and blocky. On the map, most of her land looks like a trailer park with small artificial streams of water in between each plot. The juxtaposition of land textures makes me cringe.

I was trying to avoid saying this, but I agree with you.

Sorry, Gabe. I did not mean to offend or patronize. Honestly. Just a (misguided?) attempt for a small joke. (I seem to remember some posts by a certain Gabe, which ...

And it is true: The competition could be more intense. But in at least one way it is more competition in the future: we will soon see mainland that is terraformed by another party than Linden Lab.

Anshe's desert sims are impressive, but I'm not sure if they're profitable. Does anyone know?

No offense taken!

Wanna come with the cool kids behind the gym?

An interesting possibility to contemplate is that mainland sims, planned and terraformed by Lindens, and now of finite number, increase in value.

This was a thought I had originally as well. Collector's edition sim-land!

Awww Gabe. That offer is coming some 30 years too late. I allways ran with the boring kids. You see what that lead too. Sighs.

I dont think, I "held up [all of Dreamland] as an example of good non-linden terraforming", Kim. If I check what I wrote it seems to be more or less in synch what you said here "Some of those sims have a true concept and are very well done."

And thats true IMHO. Some of those sims are designed "to sell easily" (a patchwork of small islands) - like you see it with most other renters on private sims. I would never want to live there. Some are nicely done in my opinion. But tastes differ.

In the end, the customers taste decides. It is a challenge to design land that on the one hand sells well (and fast) and on the other hand is not boring. But why should only the Lindens be able to do that? The more residents in this business, the more experiments we will see. Not all will be beautiful - in my eyes. But others probably will be.

As a small, non Anshe-sized developer, I applaud the decision of Linden Lab to lower the size of the wholesale land packages. It makes me wonder a bit what the results of this process will be. Will we see many small regions with completely different designs side by side? That would not be a very desirable outcome.

My little firm specializes in beautiful and somewhat extraordinary parcels, simply because it is much more fun to deal with this kind land. I would hate it if the mainland would deteriorate to a kind of all-embracing trailer park.

I know I quoted you, but I was speaking in general terms.

Clearly, this method rewards those who already have a well-articulated plan and can flip their product quickly. I suspect that the buyer is able to quickly come up with a plan, and may have been lobbying LL for this option for some time.


If one envisions a much, much larger and more populous total world that we have now, LL cannot continue selling "retail" and keep the growth on a power curve. Many folks may think "retail" is 500-1000 sq. meter parcels. I suspect that LL sees individual sims as "retail."

They want to develop and reward an intermediate layer of resellers (like you-know-who) that have capital, plans and the bulldozers fully fueled and idling, ready to swarm over the new territory. That keeps LL's need for administrative staff and working capital down, pushing that resource drain down the distribution channel to the new and old developers (a.k.a. land barons).

As for "waiting to see if its successful," as far as LL is concerned, the first auction was a success: the product sold at or above the reserve. Now they may want to test how much product (sims) the market can absorb, probably while watching how many Lindens are still sloshing around in individual's accounts looking for an investment vehicle or Ponzi scheme.