What Is A 'Sim' ?

I see this word but don't know exactly what it is.

Also, what is a tier?

And...how does it work to buy land as a group? Do you still retain full rights to your investment or can that be a risky venture?

Sorry for all the 'newbie' questions, but...I'm new

SIM - When you look at the map, each square is a SIM

TIER - Needed to hold land, Must be a premium member and get 512 of tier included
with the monthly fee, can increase tier to as much land as you want.

With Groups - Officer can do anything with land, sell, edit,etc.. Members can just use it (usually autoreturn on group land, so need to set item to group to stay, so need to be atleast member to do that).

The wiki's a bit rubbish, especially the search, but has a glossary of SL terms.

Hi Jaye..

A sim is like a district I guess.. you can tell when youve moved from one sim to another, you'll see the name change... the mainland is a whole bunch of sims all adjoining.. I believe each sim runs on its own server...
Tier is what Linden Labs charge you every month for using the land you own...

With group own land.. yes there are risks associated with it.. and you do lose some control. When you ded land to a group, it is owned by the group. If you sell it, the proceeds are divided evenly amongst the group, regardless of who deeded it, who payed the tier, not just to officers in the group, but all members. Any officer of a group can sell group land, even if they didnt buy it or pay the tier, and they can sell it to themselves for $1L if they wish.
Which kinda sucks. So if you deed land to a group... either make only yourself an officer, or only people you absolutely trust. In my case, the only person I'm prepared to trust to be an officer of my group is my girl.
There are advantages to group owned land as well. One is the 10% bonus... groups can own an extra 10% on top of their land holdings without incurring extra tier. Also, when land is group owned, officers and members count towards dwell... if you privately own land, you dont count towards dwell on your own land. It also allows things like group members to set the land as home, which is useful if you are renting to people.
Before deeding land to the group, do a lot of reading. I have some notecards about group own land... if you IM me in world I'll pass them on to you, and I'd be glad to answer any questions you may have, as far as my knowledge takes me. Live help is also a good resource for these things.

Used to. Not any more. IIRC the void sims are 4 to a server since they don't have to do much. Also, some normal sims are 2 (or maybe more, not sure) to a server, but they each get their own CPU.

Sim stems from Simulator and denotes a (virtual) server on the internet, that simulates a small area (256m x 256m = 65536 sqm) of the Second Life virtual world and all that is happening inside this area.

Tier denotes kind of monthly land owners tax. The amount you have to pay depends on the maximum area of land owned in the month preceding the billing date. More details here: http://secondlife.com/whatis/landpricing.php.

Regarding land and sharing and groups etc. you can find a lot of very readable introductionary texts here: http://sl-help.game-host.org/HelpWithLand. (This wiki is not finished but the pages about land are faily good already.) The famous 10% bonus for groups is described here: http://sl-help.game-host.org/HelpWithGroupsAndLand

Thank you so much for everyone's help, I'll be referring back to this thread for a while I think

The squares on the map are also referred to as regions, with sim meaning either the computer it runs on or the geographical region.

The majority of servers seem to be 'Class 4' and run 4 sims.. I've encounted very few that are 3 or less, and some that are actually running 5! sims on one server. There's actually a website that you can type in the name of a sim, and it will tell you what other sims are running on the same server.

Before I bought my 8192m2 land, I checked out the other 3 sims to see how the lag was (# of running scripts, ips, sampling of the average number of Agents over a long weekend, etc.). I ended up living in a sim that's very fast because all 4 sims are pretty low lag. Needless to say, it's a tool I use in determining where to buy land.

http://neighbours.maxcase.info/

It's kinda deceptive in my opinion.. If I bought a sim, I'd expect I'm ultimately in control of the lag.. not so.. put 3 other highly commerical/popular sims on the same server and they could adversely affect my sims performance. But in all fairness, considering there 1300+ sims, it would be a major undertaking to house and cool 1300+ servers.

Whoa, Teddy, that link is very interesting