Land buying Bots are effecting EVERYONE

Secretly I agree although of course I'd never admit it. The tricky part is the trust issue. It seems to me at some point you have to trust the website owner to hold your land for you. I guess we let slexchange hold our cash so perhaps it's no worse than that.

Can't be any riskier than depositing money with Ginko but that's neither here nor there. Unless LL by some miracle does something it looks like only the saps will use the built in system and the rest of us will either use third party sites to organize the trade or just sell it to third party dealers like Ansche Chung and Sara Nerd, preferrably the latter over the former.

Okay - I'd rather have the bots running amok than whoever this new person is who's using porn pics of some unattractive and possibly underage blond RL girl as the photo for the land descriptions. Have you guys seen those? YUCK.

I just don't think that it would work to remove land sales from search and go to private sales completely - there's too much volume involved. But if LL wanted to reduce the volume of land being traded and slow down the flipping, probably implementing a land listing fee or taking a cut of each land sale would help.

Well, it's pretty obvious that if Apotheus started stealing two dollars here and there from slexchange customers, his long term efforts would be kinda wasted...

And that's transparency for you.

People can at least do the math and see if a person would do better if they:

a) stayed in honest business, or
b) vanished with today's funds.

This is why the private island owners with more than say, an island or two are generally respected - it would be just plain financially stupid to cheat someone or fold up. The consequences are too high.

So I *can* see an offsite service handle grid land successfully. But why? Land sold at any semi-reasonable price gets snapped up regularly as it is.


And history does repeat. I'm dying to watch Rockwell and Reece encounter the next batch, and see what they say...

Just another story of how greed has the upper-hand. But of course it's okay to do it, because it's legal.

I LOVE your work, but you make an item one time, then charge a crazy 4K for a skin over and over and over again for something you put work into 1 time. Land dealers, at least the fair ones, do alot of legwork, quotes, bargaining, holding land, developing land when needed, ect ect for small profit margins 1 time. Like it or not I get thanked time and time again for offering a service when people want a decent quote on land the day before they tier so that they don't end up paying more. I always keep a waiting list of people who need paticular styles of land ect at a fair price. This is anouther SERVICE. I also rent out any land I sell, which means I take a risk holding a piece of land I paid 200K for to rent out for just above tier, and could end up with less than I started as the market goes down. I risk alot of money investing into islands that take me 10 months to get back the initial investment. So while your overpriced skins sit and make money over and over while your online or not, endlessly, decent land dealers need to work daily to keep up a decent income. Your also leeching off of the system just in a differnt way. Your getting paid for your artwork, I'm getting paid for my time and service. I don't see a wrong in either. And I don't consider it leeching. I feel I worked hard for what I have, and provide a service, and I could easily find you many people I have worked with in world who would back me up on this.

And I really didnt mean that as a personal attack on chip, I'm just tired of defending what I worked hard and long for.

/me thinks "Must be older than the join date."

I am not in favor of automated land sales and have told LL so.
I have worked to get a response from Linden Labs. I have emailed them directly, Im'd them in game and posted previously to forums. I distribute a notecard to anyone who will listen that asks people to contact LL by mail, email, IM or personal visit to their RL offices to request they do something about the situation. As yet I have not received an answer from them. In RL I work to develop ethical systems of business as well as other social justice issues. I am attempting to do the same in SL. The difference between RL and SL, however is that RL is governed by a system of laws into which we all have input. As a result, those in positions of authority generally will listen to their constuency. That is not the case in SL. LL has no accountability to the members any more than big box stores have any accountability to the workers of the local businesses they force to close or than the stockholders of a company moving off shore for slave labor (my bias is showing) have to the 100s or even 1000s of people they throw out of work and move responsibility for to the tax payer. I am coming to the conclusion that inspite of the nice language about developing a world created by the members. This whole venture is deteriorating to the lowest common denominator, much as the Old West did in the early days of this country. Will it follow the path of societal development that happened over a 100 years in the American west? I don't know; given the 4 SL days to each solar day it will take about 25 RL years to find out. In the mean time, what to do about the ethical question of applying RL standards to SL that could in the minds of some impede the evolution of technology while a the same time weighing the cost to paying residents scammed by unscrupulous users of bots.

The answer may be staring us in the face... every present RL member is issued a landbot and all newbies are issued one in their seabag on sign up. Give everyone the option to subscribing to program updates if they so choose.That way, programmers are encouraged to develop better, faster bots and the playing field while still bumpy will be a lot more level than it is now. Of course this will give rise to automated sex bots, automated dance bots, automated .... etc.

My point is: if this is allowed to continue SL will be a sublime Valley of the Dolls. The pleasures derived from vicariouly owning beach front property and being able to meet and chat with people from all over the world will disappear as the world is over run by silent avs.

Another option is to put a NO option in the popup that appears as a result of a landsale, giving the seller the ability to disapprove the sale. Granted this will slow land sales down, but so what. It takes much longer to buy land in RL.

While I marvel at and appreciate the minds that develop this technology, ultimately I do not believe that a resolution is forthcoming from LL. From everything I have been able to glean, their reputation for excellent customer service disappeared a year or so ago. I can't even get a reply to a billing problem I had when I initially signed up. So that leaves us with a decision, do we take our complaints off the forum and into messages to LL (keep those cards and letters coming, folks) or do we wait for 25 years for the Wild West to mature?

Time to leave this vale of tears. Stop arguing - there's a mile-wide divide between the greedy unethical and those who are more uh... fully-formed.

That is the stupidest f***ing suggestion I have heard in this thread yet. Let's crash the grid for everyone who couldn't care less about land and bots because we wanna be pissy....

If they can do a better job than Linden Labs, why not?

And, you know, if they can give landowners on the mainland some of the control that Island owners get, and if they can provide a better user interface than the Land Sales tab, maybe they CAN do a better job than Linden Labs.

I love your work, Sarah, and back when there was more opportunity for SL realtors to add value to the process I was always glad to see your plots... especially since you didn't seem to be interested in trashing the landscape with the kinds of ugly terraforming and builds that are, I guess, what most of the people on the mainland seem to consider "developing land". I don't know about Chip, but I've never thought of you as a "flipper" and I hope that the new regime doesn't completely wipe "Sarah Nerd Buys Land" off the map... I'm just afraid that it will.

I actually find this amusing. I think the real reason for this thread was because the people who have taken it upon themselves to offer a made up "service", that we all know full and well any player with half a brain can click on the land and select buy all by themselves, are now seeing their easy grabs of cheap land dry up thanks to the bots.

Maybe now they will see how the average player feels not being able to ever find a great deal on land because someone else leeching off the system decided they should profit at the community's expense.

I hope the landbot wars continue.

A person would have to be starved for entertainment to find this amusing.

Just love seeing people get beat at their own game.

Thank You! I really appreciate this!

If dealing land was as easy as your trying to make it seem, I'm sure we would see you on some plots.

Yes and I know if you had a bot you wouldn't be in the forums with your crocodile tears crying foul.

Cocoa, about the transaction history being on the web, if you've got the new Dell computer I don't think you'd need to leave SL as in exiting it, just alt tab or otherwise switch to a running browser with a a bookmark set to your account history page. I always have a browser running with ten to fifty windows open while SL is running, doesn't seem to cause any problems.

It's a shame they won't let us look at our sl web pages in the F1 mozilla browser.

If you look at my original post it was mainly a concern for the newest one that is taking full advantage of everyone and screwing residents over, Not just to hop on the forum and cry or just to belittle others and be a general asshole like other people. Even if I did (and it would have to be a cold day in hell) have a bot, I wouldnt make it a point to screw over people on errors ect for pure greed.

Someone mentioned a private tradeing useing bots. Iv actually metioned this to Elanthius Flagstaff a few days ago my self.

Its bigger then one person could do I think.
In the end it would come down to trust of the owners/administators.



Another idea of a bot project that might be worth undertakeing at some point is a publicly funded replacement for first land. The prices would have to be higher, but it could be a desent discount. Things would have to be a lot more strict then what thay where when LL ran it though, as funds would be limited.

Well there's an idea.

Sarah, and the others, set up bots, that looks for land set to sell to their bots.

They post weekly (or whenever) what their going rate for buying a certain parcel size of land is.

Then a third party could aggregate these lists when updated, so sellers could see, at a glance, the price at which buyers they want to sell to are willing to pick up land for.

Then the bot could just aggregate lists if land available to sell to that buyer for them, so they could look and see if it's a land that they could work with to develop into a worthwhile sale.

The key is, for reputable sellers, treat your bots as an automated resource gathering tool, and not as an automated money making tool, because anything just designed to make money will be able to be gamed.

Just a thought.

Yeah, there's the difference - a bot that can buy and mark up a property so fast that it overcharges a human trying to make the decision - that's ugly.

I think just about everyone can see the huge ethical issue with that. It's fair to call foul on such a thing.

All I can say is karma gets you in the end.....

/smirk

Oh and LL don't give a rats ass as long as they get their cut so don't expect it to be fixed this year or the next.