Is LindenLabs going to turn of the new land spigot?

So many mainland sims have gone up in the last few weeks. It's the land rush of 2005, that's for sure.

Is LL going to turn of the spigot? Or are they going to let the newbie land barons bid with abandon?

stay tuned..

Will be interesting to see who is still buying land a month from now and who isn't.

One of the reason LL doesn't sell unlimited currency is because it creates runaway inflation.

However, they do sell unlimited Land for 1000$ / sim, so we have a sort of runaway land inflation going on. This wouldn't happen if all the actors were sane.

Unfortunately, the actors are not all particularly sane. At least as far as I can tell.


Interestingly, I stilly see tony, schwanson, rathe and anshe are still bidding.

So one does wonder what's going on.

I isn't.

Could it be because they are moving land? Have you seen the number of new players coming into SL? There is a natural limit on land, you can't make money and sell it less then about 5l/m. Land prices will not fall far below this mark. If the land market slows, fewer people will be buying land. Less sims will be bought in auction, thus less land total.

Wish the concurrent users would go up as fast

They're going up though, that's for sure.

A steady percentage per month.

SL is growing.

LF

Only if Anshe tells them to.

Actually they have stated that they will always try to keep at least 3-4 auctions open at all times if my memory serves right. It has nothing to do with Anshe. The reason there has been alot more sims than normal, is because prices on land almost doubled practically overnight. They flooded the market with land, and now you will notice that land prices seem to be starting to fall. You can also notice that the bottom price went from 2.0 to 4.0 $L/meter2 in a matter of a month or two. Now we are already seeing the bottom price drop down to about 3.0$L/meter. The amount of plots for sale before the flood was 3000-4000, and it is now between 5000-6000. The Linden hasn't been going anywhere lately, so it is not the reason land is starting to fall right now. What do all these numbers mean in English? Linden Labs is trying to lower the price of your land. I don't think that is something that directly improves Anshe's bank account.

I'm not in the mood to give more details, but from the numbers I mentioned that you could of observed yourself, it is obvious what is going on. Land is being kept from increasing in value, so that new people can have cheap land to buy. I think this is a good thing. I will tell you, I've seen some amazing movement of land. Was a fun ride while it lasted, now I'm getting ready for the land flood to start effecting things, but I think if demand continues to grow like this, it may be a while till it has a serious effect that can be seen.

Linden Labs does not control the rate at which sims come in. There are always auctions in the queue, unless for some reason the queue runs out faster than they can set them up, but if you look at the claim dates of land that gets added as new sims you would see that they prepare them several months in advance and probably have a large inventory of land readily available to keep up with the auctions. As a sim gets bought, a new sim goes up. An auction doesn't start expiring until a bid is made. It's the buyers who control the rate, and so goes supply and demand.

Are we headed for a bubble? Probably. The auctions have been high lately because demand is high, but as the influx meets and eventually exceeds demand we will see prices drop and auctions slow down. Markets rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall again. Nothing new here. No conspiracy. Linden Labs isnt forcing anyone to bid on a sim, and they sure aren't stopping them from doing so.

Somebody give this man a cookie.

The market will judge the rate of sim release. As more people join and see what some of the larger land dealers are doing, they're like OMGWTF all that money!!!!1111. They then want a piece of the action and try their hand. Most will give up after a month when they realise the land fees take a huge chunk of any money they may have made, if any - the first month is not likely to be profitable. Those who stick with it will of course make money, but with more and more dealers entering, less and less profit there will be made (unless the no. of 'consumers' increase at a rate that more than supports them). This will of course lead to less sims being bid on as the world is flooded with land.

Here you are:

LL does control the rate at which sims are brought on line. They directly control it. It is one of their ways of controlling how fast SL grows in land mass. Even if they didn't purposely control it for economic reasons they 'control' it simply by virtue of the resources they have to BRING new sims on-line.

Furthermore they very directly control the L$ by tracking the one major thing that, currently, affects the value of the L$...land sales. Their tracking lets them adjust the sources and drains of the L$ such that it is held fairly constant.

This IS a virtual space so one of the normal pressures that affect RL land values is simply not present...scarsity. LL can and will provide an ever-increasing landmass to support a growing population but it will ONLY do it in a way that attempts to preserve values at stable levels. Granted this may not always SEEM to be what's going on but I'd bet dollars to donuts that that is what they are attempting to do.

Which is exactly what an unlimited supply of land all at roughly the same US$ price will do. Yep, but they don't have to do any calculations or tracking for this one. As long as they keep the sims rolling like they claim they are trying to do, the market will regulate itself.

Now the $L auctions I have a feeling are a fine tuning resource for them to control the $L market. In reality I don't think they destroy enough $L to make a huge difference, but it should certainly have some effect.

Yep, I think you are right.

Haha thnx Dark, you said in one sentence what I was attempting to say, and avoided making the mess of it that I did

Putting a lot of new Sims on the auction page isn't quite "flooding the market". Because of the current "auction only starts when the first person bids" system, flooding of the market only occurs when residents start bidding on large numbers of those Sims. I don't see where LL's actions affect this at all.

I do see a lot of interesting bidding action where most of the auction winners are people who didn't start any of the bidding. It's almost as if they wait till they see someone else who wants to buy a Sim, and then quickly get their own bids in there to make sure that they continue to buy as much of the new land as possible. So the person who started the bidding, then bids on a new Sim, and the process repeats, etc. etc.

That's what I see driving the land flooding - not people buying to satisfy demand at all.

Of course, I could be entirely wrong - couldn't I?

Well even if people are bidding for their personal use, the flood only occurs with an increase in demand. LL's actions are the fact that they allow auctions to be somewhat unlimited. I'm not thinking that they personally decided to flood the market now, I'm thinking their policy causes the market to flood when there is an increase in demand. The increase in demand on the land market and decreasing of supply as more and more land was being bought for personal use, caused an increase in price of land. It became cheaper to go to the auction then to wait for cheap recycled land to show up on the market. When there is a mad rush, surely some people will be found to have been overzealous in the prices they were willing to pay to get land, because with an increase in supply, we should start to see the price leveling out or falling. It seems over the weekend a small part of land has started to fall. Only time will tell if all the land will start to fall in price, but only a further growth in demand will stop that from happening. Land costs more in US$ then I have seen it. I know I'm fairly new to the business, but I can't see this being the natural prices of land.

I would agree to this if the market had full transparent access to the data that LL does.

This is why centrally planned banks work - becaues Greenspan simply has more access to information than the market does. He talks to the policy makers, he talks to the businessmen, they tell him stuff that would not make it out into the public.

Similarly, LL has access to data points that we, auction bidders, do not. They also know when they'll be rolling out new features, what the crash rates are, when they're going to do marketing, etc etc.

They can tame the cycles of boom and bust. Agreed, having a market of sorts is a good idea. Little booms and busts keep things interesting. However, at a meta-level, LL shouldn't just let things go on forever. They should keep an eye on the ball and make sure it doesn't fully bounce out of court.

Which they seem to be. So far, they haven't added new sims to the list.

However, 1.7 could be a priority at this point.

Just noticed 44 (I think) new sims on the Northern Continent today. Have you zoom in close for them to appear.

35 of these sims are a;readyon the auction page again.... and yes the landprice will fall under 5 , we just got them out of that but obviously LL wants to trash the market for the inworld sellers. For them its 35 K USD, as long as anyone buys.

Marmela (i hope this short form of adressing you is acceptable), this might be the way a budding Land Baron(esse) might see it, but actually these sims only sell when a residents starts bidding for them with a bid of at least 1,000 $US. The land market is overheatet a little but this seems to be more a problem with too many many residents taking part at the auctions with rediculous bids; the "I wanne be a land baron too" phenomenon.

This has got nothing to do with the supply of new sims. A point worth mentioning: SL is growing. It is growing FAST! And no, this is NOT just people adding alts. All relevant economic parameters of SL are growing at a rate of 10% - 20% a MONTH. All of them, not just the head count.

Assuming that SL currently consists of somewhat over a thousand sims, this means that the available land HAS to grow at a rate of 100 - 200 sims a MONTH! (mainland AND private sims), as long as the relationship between number of residents and owned land stays the same. So putting up 30 - 50 sims on the block per week is not "flooding" but simply keeping the land economy on the same level.

That it is impossible or nearly impossible to make a profit with some of the "winning" (?) bids for sims in the last weeks is another question. But thats no fault of the Lindens Seems to be more a case of "bidding frenzy" ...

Pham I surely *hope* you're right. I do not see this growth in people that are actually online though. We'llsee what happens.