Supreme flock of lan = Cheating land scalpers

Torley Linden:
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Conversation here tumbled into a downward spiral; please keep discussion civil, there's no need to snipe at each other, and "naming names", including specific groups, isn't allowed either because it results in much subsequent airing of dirty laundry and unproductive attacks.


I have been trying to purchase some land in the past few days, I kept a close eye on all new land that has been offered for a low price = below 10L per metre.

I came to the conclusion that all the spots are bought instantly within seconds by land scalpers but one of these scalpers which hides under the group name "[EDITED]" caught my attention. This individual manages to get his hands on about 90% of the cheap land parcels.

While I and many other people have to teleport all around sl to check out land that is offered at a fair price this scalper who hides behind a group just modified the open viewer coder to snipe all the cheap land and resell it with a profit marging of 80% and higher.

You stopped first land because it was abused but I saw that you put some linden land on the market yesterday at 1L per metre. Despite this effort these parcels were also sniped again by "[EDITED]".

When I became premium 5 days ago I was told that LL would offer me first land at only 1L per metre, now you stopped this, I understand you had to halt the abuse, don't have a problem with that.

I do have a problem you sit back and watch how some land sniper with an altered viewer abuses your system and takes all the cheap parcels below 10L and you aren't doing a thing about it and leave 100's of your premium paying clients with no other option than buying land from land barons or perhaps even that same land scalper.

This person is perhaps making 70.000 L per day with his modified viewer. If you can do this perhaps it's worth to contact a programmer and have your own little tool developed.

Isn't it in your TOS you can't use the so called "landbots" or alter the viewer software to abuse the system?

Hi Count,
You have a legitimate concern and if you go to the blog you may get more of a look at, I am not a fan of them myself but I know the Lindens are less inclined to repond here than there.

I don't have a problem with 90% of what you wrote except a couple of points.

a) It's totally laughable to claim I hide behind my group actually I'm very public and open about what I do.

b) The TOS specifically states the exact opposite of what you describe. It very clearly says that you may connect to the servers using any software that performs any subset of substantially similar functions to the viewer.

Oh lastly, there are 11 million meters of land for sale right now. I can assure you I'm not buying a significant proportion of it and so you should be able to find plenty that suits your needs.

Yeah until everyone is able to get their hands on a land bot i think the Lindens should release land at market value. They are essentially giving land away to one person now if in fact he is the only person using a land bot.

I don't buy any land from the Lindens except at auction where I can assure you I'm paying fair market value. All the land I buy comes from other players who willingly want to sell it at the price they set it for. Sometimes people want to sell under fair market value because they're in a rush or whatever and those few and far between plots are what this whole discussion is about.

*edit: Correction it is true that I bought two small plots from the Lindens the other day at L$1/sqm. it is indeed a mystery why they don't auction off these tiny plots but I guess they figure they're so tiny as to not be worth the effort. They've always released a couple plots a week at this price though so it's nothing new.

They have always released 512m plots for that cheap to anyone? I thought all the 512's they released were always first land only in the past.

I've bought land directly from the Lindens before now, that wasn't at auction and wasn't first land.

Those who have no conscience, no sense of community, no wish to participate in anything other than their own tiny world.

Some of them gain at the expense of others, some of do not. All of them justify their actions.

Just because someone justifies an action does not make that action right by community standards.

In RL these people are often brought into line by courts and government, as they have no idea that what they are doing is against the the better interests of the community, or if they do, they have no self control with which to curb their behavior.

Sometimes the community takes matters into it's own hands.

The lindens have provided a means for abuse reporting those who fail to understand that living in the community means abiding by community standards.

A read through http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php under the heading:

CONDUCT BY USERS OF SECOND LIFE

4.1 You agree to abide by certain rules of conduct, including the Community Standards and other rules prohibiting illegal and other practices that Linden Lab deems harmful.

Scroll down to stalking.

What this particular psychotic is doing is stalking land buyers. He knows that he has an advantage in that his software can buy land at under market value faster than any user can.

He has admitted this. He is not using this software to gain land for his own personal use, he is stalking you, the person who is.

Furthermore, he has modified his client to do so, which also breaks the TOS under section (v):

(v) take any actions or upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content that contains any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, spyware, time bombs, cancelbots or other computer programming routines that are intended to damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate any system, data or personal information;

If you come into contact with this person in a land deal, you should abuse report him, quoting the sections above, and give the lindens a chance to deal with him.

Nubee~

Again, 90% fine with what you said. Certainly community standards should be developed. My feeling is that my actions have absolutely zero affect on any member of the community other than my direct competitors. You are free to disagree. Certainly LL seem to agree with me since they recently changed the TOS heavily in my favour. But your claim that I'm stalking anyone or uploading virusses is pretty ridiculous and I think even you would agree with that.

To reply to point A: Good that makes it more easy to judge you.

B: This is in the TOS:

You may not charge any third party for using the Linden Software to access and/or use the Service, and you may not modify, adapt, reverse engineer (except as otherwise permitted by applicable law), decompile or attempt to discover the source code of the Linden Software, or create any derivative works of the Linden Software or the Service, or otherwise use the Linden Software except as expressly provided in this Agreement. You may not copy or distribute any of the written materials associated with the Service. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you may copy the Viewer that Linden Lab provides to you, for backup purposes and may give copies of the Viewer to others free of charge. Further, you may use and modify the source code for the Viewer as permitted by any open source license agreement under which Linden Lab distributes such Viewer source code.

It's very clear you messed around with the viewer, made changes to it, so you decompiled it, changed the code so you could implement this sniping function in the software. It's very clear you abused the viewer's open source. You aren't alone, there are a few more people who did this and are abusing the system this way to snipe the cheap land parcels.


Even if you coded your own software to connect to the servers you are still in violation with the LL terms of conduct:

Global Attacks
Objects, scripts, or actions which broadly interfere with or disrupt the Second Life community, the Second Life servers or other systems related to Second Life will not be tolerated in any form. We will hold you responsible for any actions you take, or that are taken by objects or scripts that belong to you. Sandboxes are available for testing objects and scripts that have components that may be unmanageable or whose behavior you may not be able to predict. If you chose to use a script that substantially disrupts the operation of Second Life, disciplinary actions will result in a minimum two-week suspension, the possible loss of in-world inventory, and a review of your account for probable expulsion from Second Life.


You disrupt the community, you exploit the system by using malicious software or an altered viewer to scalp all the land that is offered for sale by residents at a price below 10L per square metre.

On top of this you also scalp the land that is put into the market by "Linden Land" to help new residents get started. By doing this it is very clear your disrupt the community. There are several hundreds of people who spend time searching for a modest price but of land.

The rule on this should be: Who gets there first by teleporting and buys it gets it.
Nobody can be faster than a bit of software that connects directly to the server so you have a very unfair advantage.


Yes you sniped the 2 parcels two days ago that were listed by Linden Land at 1L per metre.

But on top of that you sniped at least 10 more parcels that were sold by other residents below 10L per metre. You must make a ton of money by doing this, how much? 300 USD a day? or 500 USD a day?

I have no problems with land barons, they buy at auction, they resell, make profit, that's a normal economy. I also would not have problem with people buying cheap land and resell it again with a bit of profit if it happens in a fair way. In RL this happens all the time but it happens in a fair way.

I do have a problem with the way you and a few other people are doing this, it's a form of stealing. It's also hurting LL because people who become premium are forced to pay up a lot of money to a scalper to get some space to build there home or whatever. LL tries to offer gestures to new residents by dumping some very cheap land on the market that was abandoned but this gesture towards their new premium paying members gets directly abused by you and your altered viewer so you could make 500 USD a day.


About the 11 metres of land:

Of course you don't buy a large portion of it, you only buy the cheap bits that you can resell with profit margins up to 1000%

First land has been cancelled because of you, see the blog what reaction this has caused. People are downgrading from premium to basic membership plans again because of you! You are costing LL money, those 3 to 500 $ should not go into your pocket each day but in LL bank account so they can keep improving the game.


The Lindens will have to deal with this, perhaps they won't care and leave you doing what you are doing but if this doesn't open their eyes well I don't know what will.

This isn't auction sniping like connecting to ebay's servers to let a script place a bid in the last 3 seconds. You could also debate about such a technique but what you and a few others are doing is something totally different.

You may not charge any third party for using the Linden Software to access and/or use the Service, and you may not modify, adapt, reverse engineer (except as otherwise permitted by applicable law), decompile or attempt to discover the source code of the Linden Software, or create any derivative works of the Linden Software or the Service, or otherwise use the Linden Software except as expressly provided in this Agreement. You may not copy or distribute any of the written materials associated with the Service. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you may copy the Viewer that Linden Lab provides to you, for backup purposes and may give copies of the Viewer to others free of charge. Further, you may use and modify the source code for the Viewer as permitted by any open source license agreement under which Linden Lab distributes such Viewer source code.

Funny how we can both draw different meanings from the same passage.

First land was just cancelled, they just started to dump some cheap parcels directly on the market and yes you sniped them. I only have been watching the land market for a short period of time but the pattern is so obvious leading to you.

It is not a mystery why they don't auction these tiny parcels. The answer has been written down in the blog:

We have discussed many methods to ensure that First Land is used as intended but have decided that there is no way to do this without significantly impacting on resident freedoms. Therefore the First Land Program will no longer be provided. It may still be possible to find cheap land for sale, for example small parcels that have been abandoned and recycled by us, but it will not be sold specifically as First Land. Our hope is that through much higher levels of mainland expansion, market forces will act to bring resale prices down over time, for example the new continent being brought up to the east.

Now that you are informed about this you also realize you did scalp the land yesterday that was intended for newbies and not to fill your pockets.

Hint hint!

Over the last several weeks we have been adding land to the mainland at a fairly slow rate (4 new regions per day) while we complete the delivery of islands ordered at the end of 2006. The result is that pricing has been creeping up steadily and is currently about double what we saw per m2 in November. In order to meet the increased demand, our plan is to start to increase the rate at which we put mainland regions online.

Look for a substantial new continent to begin to appear off to the east!

This increase in land supply should also help to offset the impact of the use of ‘bots as high speed land scanners to skim off the lowest priced, and generally smaller, less desirable parcels. In addition, we’re looking at adding a step to the purchase process which should make it more difficult to use ‘ bots in purchasing land.

Count, it is also against TOS to harass other residents and flame people in the forums. If you're going to preach about TOS to other people, maybe you should abide by them yourself.

I wonder if Mr. Ford felt like this with regards to the assembly line and industrial automation.


The only thing that Elanthius is exploiting is an economic inefficiency. Automation is highly efficient for problems that can be solved by logical correlation. The barriers to entry to automation for viable competition are small: http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/


The main complaint I see in this thread is that the maingrid land market has high general barriers to entry. As it stands today, it is an economy of scale, with potentially high sunk costs controlled by a small fraction people which possess market power. If you want to blame someone for the high price of land, look no further than the monopoly supplier of it. I'll give you a hint, its not Elanthius Flagstaff or any of the other land brokers in SL.


Flipping first land for a tidy profit has been going on for a long time. Many of the "how to make money" notecards as far back as January 2005 advocated the quick resale of first land as a way to start an initial supply of L$, well over a year prior to Elanthius' join date. So the accusation that there is any connection to the first land program being discontinued is tenuous at best.

I only express my opinion

Your subject line for this post indicates otherwise. It's downright libelous. I'm not saying this in order to defend Elanthius's business practices - just noting that expressing your opinion in this fashion is inappropriate and violates TOS.

Anyway, this thread has been reported, and if the Lindens or moderators choose to do so, it will be closed. That's pretty much all I have to say about that.

If there is a lie in the title feel free to point it out, also remains the fact there is both cheating and scalping involved. I agree I made an accusation towards the supreme flock of lan by launching this thread, I have a problem with this so I expressed my opinion in a direct way.

Thank you for reporting this thread by the way.

I agree with count, Elanthius and his supreme flock of land ninja's group is a menace with the auto buy bot's. I have actually been purposely going to plots of land put on the list under market value just to see that the bot has bought them and then ive abuse reported every one of them. It's easy really, abuse report every single plot of land owned by the supreme land ninja's group with numbers for a title. The more reports LL gets the more likely they are to look at them.

I admire your commitment but I'm not sure that's a very good idea.

and why is that

Because if he is indeed not breaking any of the TOS then LL could see your actions as harrassment.

That is a possibility, one that I have considered also. But, I see my actions as those of a person defending the average SL player who is being cheated out of affordable land by Elanthius's actions, in regards to that, I file reports, I have 2 ad's in game, in classifieds about it for all to read, and I will continue my campaign in protest.
If LL actually look at the storm of complaints surrounding this issue there wouldn't be an issue, it's their program, they could just add something to the client to stop this from happening, instead of quoting TOS everyone should just protest in any way possible.

It has always been the case that anyone selling land under the market value would have it quickly bought up by a land trader and resold. This isn't new at all..

Exactly. If you aren't willing to click 'search' ever single second (you can actually beat the landbot this way), suck it up and pay the market price. You're whining that you can't get land for say 9L/sqm when there was land available for 13/sqm earlier today... There are some people in life that just expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter. Teach yourself to program and make yourself a version of the bot if a <$8usd on a 512 has you all worked up. The rest of us will just continue buying land as we used to. I'm really sick of all this bot bashing. The only people it's hurting are "bargain hunters".

I would imagine you're the same kind of person that would be infuriated that people were selling PS3s for 2000+ when they were new, despite the fact that they fetched 1/4 of that in the store. You're angry, but at the same time, too lazy to wait in line for up to 2 entire days which is what that other guy had to do.