Supreme flock of lan = Cheating land scalpers

Nope the original poster did not mention the person by name though he probably shouldn't have mentioned the group. They guy came in here and spoke up on his own opening himself to comment.

Was hoping that the new land sales would eliminate these bastards but apparently the new open client gave them a new option he is just the first to take adavantage of it. Land isn't worth buying now to anyone but land barons. Eventualy they will only be able to sell it to each other.

I really don't mind polite discussion about this. It helps me and you and the whole community if everyone hears many sides of the story.



http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

45 million meters were sold so far this month so I guess at least a few people are finding it worth while to buy. 3500 different people have land for sale right now. Sounds like you aren't one of the (tens of?) thousands of people who think land is worth buying though. There's only 50,000 premium members I wouldn't be surprised if over half of them buy or sell land every month.

You keep missing the main issue here. What you (Elanthius) have done is not customise the viewer, what you have produced is not a viewer at all, it is a bot.
Furthermore, SL is open source, you've gone and modified it under this agreement, so where's your code? Where's your custom client for everyone else to use?

Neither GPL nor BSD require me to release my code. I only have to distribute the code if I distribute the binary for GPL code.

I was reffering to the act of filing multiple ARs when the TOS had not been broken, maybe you didn't read my post properly?

Man oh man, I haven't seen this much whinnying since I sold copybot, and copybot was meant to be the "end" to SL. Such a shame, I loved SL pity it's gone now, oh wait.

I can buy land at fair market value right now. In fact I can buy buckets of good quality land at FMV right now.

Elanthius doesn't control all the land, it would be impossible to do so. While he might "control" the cheap land, that doesn’t stop people from buying land.

Get over your selves, crying wolf every time some one does something you think is unfair wont solve the "issue". All it proves is that you are incapable of adapting to change.

This "issue" is simple, adapt to change or get left behind.

Marcus

The meek will inherit the earth, lolz, nah Elanthius bots will.

There's a proposal, number 2783, up for vote calling for the elimination of automated land buying. It's currently only 61 votes away from being the highest voted proposal of all time. Please go to http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2783 and add your support!

You can also email Philip Linden (philip@lindenlab.com), Robin Linden (robin@lindenlab.com), and Guy Linden (guy@lindenlab.com) and complain directly. I urge you to do so.

"This has basically shut off land buying for every other player in the game unless they're willing to pay whatever inflated price he dictates."

You joking right? You actually believe this, come on, see my post above. Its imposible to "shut off" land buying unless your LL.

It amazes me how many ludites are on the internet these days. And this is just a sorry testament to the knee-jerk reactionaries in SL, 2993 votes/464 voters.

Marcus

Burn the witches.... ahhhhhhhhh!

You don't seem to understand how the market works.

If there are no products for sale below some artificial "fair market value" there's little pressure driving prices down, and the market settles out at a higher level than it would if all players were operating on a level playing field. It also settles out with less variation in pricing, and thus less opportunity for profit.

Given the amount of land that's been dumped into the market over the last month, I'd say that "market value" is at least 50% higher than it would be if Elanthius wasn't running his bot. Maybe more. There's more new land on the market than I've seen in a year, but the average price is at least half again as much as it was six months ago, and the entry-level price is more than twice as high... and the gap between "starter land" and "good land" is negligable.

I'm just not clear that this is "how the market works". SL has a very strong force driving prices down - the fact that land traders have to pay tier on all their holdings.

If people do not like the land prices, don't buy it. Then Elanthius and others will start losing money on the tier from holding the land, and they'll have to lower their prices.

If there is enough land selling at the listed prices that the land traders (and LL) are in equilibrium then.. well, that's what a market price is surely!

Removing land buying bots won't remove this. All it will do is to move it over to the even bigger land traders who can afford to hire people to monitor the Land Sales panel 24 hours a day.

I'm no economist but since I sell absolutely every plot I own it seems a lot like eliminating me from the market would have no affect on prices whatsoever.

Or putting it nicely into a visual form:
I don't know what FMV is right now, so the pseudo-bellcurve is going to be off, it's just an idea.

Price varience of all land (no bot) and amounts available, per sqm.

1         10          20          30+    [price]
|---------------------------------|    [varience]
...................................
    .........................
        ...............
           .......
             ...
              .

Price varience of all land (with bot) and amounts available, per sqm.

1         10          20          30+   [price]
         |------------------------|     [varience]
         ..........................
         ...................
         ..............
          .........
            .....
             ...
             ...
             ...
              .

It truncates the lower portion of the market and puts it back at FMV. What the bot's cutoff value is (seen here as 10 and FMV as 13-15) dictates how much of that lower market is truncated.

But at least those people are human, a cost to the employer, and can be competed against by anyone. The very real danger is that a landbot makes those employees redundant, thus anyone with a landbot and a sufficiently large influx of funds could monopolise and dictate land-prices.
Anyone who tries to compete by selling land more cheaply simply has it bought up by the bot and sold for the same price as everywhere else.

Odd, I haven't seen you at a single one of the dozens of sites a day where landbots have instantly purchased land far faster than any human could. I haven't seen you there a single time when a landowner had his or her land stolen by one of the bots when he accidently listed a parcel for public sale while trying to transfer it to a friend or alt. I haven't seen you at any of the public meetings concerning this issue. But I have seen many of the people who have subsequently voted for proposal 2783. I guess by "Luddites" (the correct spelling, by the way) and "knee-jerk reactionaries" you mean those who have first-hand knowledge of the issue, unlike yourself.

---------------------------
Vote for Proposal 2783. End automated land buying!
http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2783

65536sqm of land costs US$195 in tier, so the best possible tier rate per sqm is 195/65536 = US$0.002 = L$0.79/sqm. So if you undercut the current market price by less than this amount, it becomes impossible to buy the land and resell it, because the trader will inevitably have to pay tier on the land at least once, and when they do, they'll lose money. So if you have a 1024 parcel you can always undercut by up to L$798, on a 4096 you can undercut by L$3194, etc..

Just to show that this works, suppose a land trader buys a whole sim worth of 4096's (16 of them) that are sold at L$3194 less than market value. They can sell them all for L$3194 * 16 = L$51104 in profit. But at an exchange rate of L$267/US$1, this is only US$191, and the tier costs them US$195. So overall they have made no profit and have lost US$4.

True, on the supply side, but that doesn't tend to lower prices very much overall... since you don't have to drop your prices much to get a little more sales. And it's a double-sided force, because they have to *make* tier on the difference between the purchase price and the sale price, and if *they* can't buy cheap land they're not going to be able to make tier.

Elantius doesn't need to sell at as high a price as everyone else, because his price of acquisition is lower, so *he* isn't going to be the one going out of business.

That's a market price for a particular market... one that is distorted by the land bots. It's a higher price and one with less variance than the price in a market where all buyers, big and small, are competing on an even basis.

Which costs money, which means that people who only check for land occasionally and grab the occasional bargain still have a chance, and they'll (in turn) sell for less. Also, if you have people actually visiting the land before buying it, less desirable parcels will not be bought for as high a price as more desirable ones... again increasing variance in prices.

Not true.

* The same "tier" can be applied sequentially to multiple parcels.

If they flip a parcel in a week, then they're only paying 1/4 of the monthly tier for that parcel, at most.

* They only need to pay tier on that land if it puts them over a tier limit.

If someone has 50,000 square meters of land, their marginal cost for tier on a 1024 square meter parcel is zero. So they can buy trash parcels and flip them for any higher amount and still make a profit so long as it doesn't put them into a higher tier category.

There are also people who "rent" unused tier from premium users who don't own land, and benefit from the group bonus. If someone rents 512 square meters of tier for L$300 a month then they get 560 square meters of tier, so their costs for tier are less than L$600 for 1024.

That assumes that they went up a tier level to buy that sim's worth of parcels, or that buying it prevented them from buying more profitable parcels elsewhere, or prevented them from reducing their tier in the following month because it took longer than (on average) two weeks to sell half the parcels in the sim.

I suspect that land traders try and keep their tier in bounds, but are quite happy to flip five or ten parcels a month on the same tier.

1. He would be the last one of all the land sellers to go out of business, since he buys at incredible low rates compared to the other land sellers and traders. He makes up to 1000 % profit on a parcel, how many of the land traders make that kind of money? That is the whole point behind this post. He doesn't trade in a fair way like most land sellers are, by using altered software he has a very unfair market advantage compared with everybody else.


2. If everybody has a fair chance at buying the cheap parcels there is no problem. If certain people press that search button 1000 times a day to find cheap land and are able to purchase land this way by teleporting to the spot like every single person has to do they have every right to buy up the cheaper parcels. That is a fair system just like in the real world.

Count me as negative 10 votes. Oh wait you can't.
Having a high vote count doesn't mean this policy proposal is voted to be better than the alternative, or opposite propositions. It simply means this is a popularly-viewed proposal. Those who visit and approve of what it says have a chance to vote. Those who don't approve of it don't get a say.
Just thought i'd point that out.
Good luck with your ahem "vote".

landbots are becoming a everyday thing on sl. You can tell they are by land borons because they have payment online with no groups or profile......I wish LLabs would stop this greedy underhanded and just outright cheating by these people.



Usagi

Hit the nail on the head!

Can't imagine why everyone's argyin with him. Sellin copybot tells us everything we need to know about the way his mind works.

If they're selling at market value, they're in competition with all the other people at market value, and have no guarantee that'll happen. If they're selling below market value to sell fast, that will pull the market value down.

However, it might be desirable to ask for this rule to be changed, so that tier is charged on the total land ever owned in a month, not the maximum. This would strongly rebalance the land market.



No, if they have 50,000 square metres of land then they are still paying for 65,536 and so part of that US$195 is being wasted and they'll have to charge a higher margin on the 50,000 in order to repay it.

So long as they never buy enough land to increase their tier, they don't need a guarantee, as they sell parcels they can buy more, and if they can buy *good* parcels that will sell well over the minimum value that Elanthius triggers his purchases at (like, say, parcels near nice builds) they can still make a profit.

That would royally screw over everyone with only a small amount of tier. If you're at 1024 tier, and you want to move, it's scary enough transferring the parcels without going over tier as it is. This would basically guarantee that you'd go over tier if you ever wanted to move.

That doesn't change the fact that their *marginal cost* on the additional land is still zero. Do you grok "marginal cost"?