What were the reasons to introduce "Bid for Void Space"?

The Land Store in itself is a good idea. And I think it should be applauded that Linden Lab is finally automating most of the processes around setting up private islands.

The idea to have to "bid for protection" seems totally absurd to me, though. It looks like an open invitation for griefing, speculating and blackmail. I bet there are reasons that this feature has been implemented - besides opening another revenue stream for LL.

Could you tell us more about these reasons?

If it is not intented as another revenue source, I would like to suggest a simple feature:

I'm going to forward this question on to a Land Store expert. Please standby, thankyou.

Dana as you might have noticed by now, all existing private islands are in a protected area. This area will be protected for 1 year. During this year, PI owners may ask us to move their regions out of the protected area and into the reserveable area free of charge. Once out of the protected area, they can add regions or reserve grid spaces at their own pace using the Land Store.

Current PI owners may continue to *attach* new regions within the protected area using the old way - contacting [email]islands@lindenlab.com[/email]

Current PI owners cannot add new discontiguous islands within the protected area.

Private island orders have been steadily increasing month over month. As you know, the process to order an island was somewhat difficult - you had to send mail to [email]islands@lindenlab.com[/email]. You would then be sent an email asking you to choose the island type, the rating, name and list other special considerations. Your request would then be put in a queue and someone would fill it within in a two week period. We frequently got requests to put an island in a location - "can you put my island in the south near X?" As a matter of policy, we did not do this. Instead we tried to give people some room to grow while still keeping all estates generally in the same area. On many occasions people outgrew their area, wanted to expand further but could not because of other estates nearby.

Which brings me to continent building. It has become clear that building competing visions of the mainland, ones where different rules or zoning regulations apply is becoming a viable business model for estate owners and Residents are perceiving these services as a value add. This makes sense as many people are strong community managers instead of strong modelers, textures artists or animators. We realized that the friction inherent in the island ordering system might be impeding the growth of these communities, or raising the barrier to entry for people looking to plan ahead before jumping into the waters. Competition is desirable as it will force continent builders to add value to their services in order to win the trust and money of consumers.

So, how do we allow people to order islands or build continents at their own pace, without Linden standing in the way and how do we allow people to choose where *they* want to build these continents? The Land Store was conceived to address these needs. While thinking about how to do this we asked ourselves "how do we let people grow their continents without having to make a sizable investment at the outset? Also, "what do we do when two people value the same location on the grid?" Grid location is really only relevant when touching cardinal borders however people have an emotional attachment to their location on the grid just as they have an emotional attachment to where their parcels are within the continents. Having Linden decide where others grow is not only opposite our philosophy of a user created world but unscalable from a resource perspective. This does not mean that we plan to abandon the mainland. We have already designed terrain for 1000's more mainland sims. As you can see on the Land Store homepage, the southern area has been protected for future Linden mainland expansion.

It also occurred to us that unscrupulous people might use the Land Store to grief others or bully them out of the continent building business. However, we thought about the SL community and realized that these attempts would be transparent and in most cases obvious. Which is why we plan to deal with any and all appropriately just as we do now when someone tries to checkerboard parcels within a region or bully others to sell land using lag inducing measures.

Finally, the starting price for reservations: auctions seemed the fairest way to allow people to value grid spaces. The starting price needed to be substantial enough that speculation was not done foolhardily. Set at 1$ someone could go in and reserve the entire available grid which is just stupid.