No Land For New Members? Deleting SL now...

I'm a professional developer so the idea of Second Life sounded really interesting to me. A place where I could develop stuff and even sell it, wow!

Then I found out you have to have land to "sell" your designs, then I found out you can't even BUY land because it's a commodity and new members are not just given an unsellable parcel of land.

The "First Land" search shows nothing so I guess I'll just be deleting Second Life now. Pity, it sounded really cool.

From what I have read, First Land is available to all new Premium account holders on a first come first serve basis. You have to search for it, and because it says None Found, doesnt mean that some wont be coming up soon.

I have only been a member for a week and i was very disappointed in the way First Land was promoted....made it seem that you get it when you join, not that you have to hope like hell you happeneded to be logged on and searching just shen they release some more, so I can understand your disappointment.

Delete Sl or not. up to you. Im sticking with it a little longer, hopefully I'll get a land package at a reasonable price soon.

Any business requires an investment in order to turn a profit, in Second Life or first life. You have to have hardware, bandwidth, office supplies . . . things that cost money. But you don't need to invest in owning land in SL, or even a premium account. You do need to invest time and effort in learning about the platform and the community and SL-specific skills.

Want to get an SL business started before the next batch of First Land is put up for sale? You can rent land. You can work in a sandbox. You can rent a shop. You can sell your stuff on a site like SLBoutique or SLExchange, or even get one of those Mirada-go shops that you essentially wear. You can work for someone else or their company and use their land. You can do development work for clients who have land. EDIT: You can even buy a nice piece of land at the going rate (instead of First Land), which is what I did back in the day because I was too eager to wait around.

You do not need land to get started. If you don't have the patience or the time to invest to learn these things or to ask questions or to read the forums, that's something else altogether.

Aero-

Buying land is possible.

If you're going to try selling things, having a spec of 'first land' is going to work against you. Find nice land near something popular. It's possible. It may even be expensive.


In SL, the service is free. The land is not.

If that doesn't work for you... good luck in whatever professional development projects you persue elsewhere.

Well another approach is to buy or rent land not on the mainland. That way you don't use your first land and you still get land to use till first land is available.

Non-mainland land is a lot cheaper than mainland, often about first land prices and you may like it anyway.

Well, let's just say the whole deal has put a sour taste in my mouth and if I already don't like the way things are run before I even join, then why join.

I wanted to do this for the fun of it, not to make a million dollars. I never considered making any "real" money from this but it sounded fascinating to be able to make in game money by using my creative talents; not just crafting pre-designed armor, weapons, potions, etc. in some game like WoW or EQ.

I mistakenly thought of this as an open world, a place to exercise my creativity, a place without annoying artificial barriers. I thought I would be able to do things like make an amusement park and charge people admission. I wanted to make amazing rides and fun little carnival games that people could play and a have blast. I imagined this would be a fun place to try out some of my ideas for game development and get feedback from real people. But all that would require land and I just don't want to mess around with the whole land market thing. Real Estate is slimy enough, I don't want to deal with slimy Imaginary Estate too.

All in all it sounds really, really stupid to me that you can't just give people land to start on and THEN allow them to buy more based on their value to the economy as measured by their in game income. I mean it isn't REAL land, you can create as much as you want (as they ARE doing with islands), it's digital; I mean you're charging a monthly fee after all. I realize now that they could never do that because all the people that have bought "land" would feel like they were ripped off so this design is fundamentally flawed in my eyes. It may have been great when it started and land was reasonable with no land barons lording over everyone but now it just seems like a cutthroat, nasty business and I don't want to deal with that.

Don't get me wrong, I LIKE the idea of a truly economy based alternate world but I don't view my wishes for "free" land as unreasonable because it ISN'T free; I would be paying a monthly fee to Linden Labs. If I don't pay, they take my "land."

As it is the barriers to entry are just too steep and very user-unfriendly. I don't want to worry about being griefed by bots buying land before I can even possible get to it. I guess it is a reasonable argument that this is how some people want to play the "game" and that is what gives them enjoyment but I deal with overly aggressive people at work all day, I don't want to do that when I play. I also deal with a-hole programmers on occasion and don't enjoy it, why would I pay good money to be around the same jerks in my off time?

I certainly understand that you have to pay for servers, bandwidth, post-it notes, salaries do-dads, hoochamajiggers, and whatnots but again you are charging a monthly fee and you have to support n number of users anyway. Irrespective of where those users are at in the game world they can only see their little area of it and they can ONLY see that little area of it. Everything else is just 0's and 1's and hard drives are cheap. There are already limits placed on the number of players in any given location at one time so that shouldn't be an issue.

Oh well, this whole conversation is moot, one little person's disappointment is not going to change Lindon Labs whole business strategy. I guess I'll just have to find some alternative that is more friendly to new people while not screwing over the loyal existing people. It's a total bummer, I REALLY wanted to play in this world...

.

Well Aero -
If you REALLY had wanted to play in this world you could have used some of your creativity and imagination, maybe some questioning skills to find the plethera of Free places you can build things and experiment, newbie friendly venues offering free stalls for selling etc. Sandboxes are just the tip of an iceberg for building.
When I started I had no land, no one gave me any land and I was able to find places to learn, experiment, and build. SL is much larger now and the options are as well.
It sounds like you want that 'chicken in every pot' that was so oft promised back in the olde days. You are like a pioneer in a new land free to explore, not an indentured servant given your 5 acres and your lifetime to repay.

Welcome to Second Life, sorry your mouth is sour.

Aero, I was exactly in your situation.

I started building and developing skills for a few months, then I rented mall vendors to sell my products and a few weeks later, when i had suficient profits and good perspectives, I upgraded my account to Premium and bought my piece of land. Now I pay my premium account using the ingame profits so, my only investment was the first 10$, wich I recovered very soon.

You don't need to own land to start a business, public sandboxes gives you the place to build and the malls gives tou the sale points.

Well,
me and my mod team joined about 10 days ago.
Since we require a sandbox to get into SL and to work on we been looking for first land for hours every day. I seen some available once now, 7 spots, taken by the time I got there. Since then nothing. I believe that with the current popularity of SL, through the media coverage and the large amount of new registrations per day, linden needs to increase the first land that is made available quite a lot.

We rented a large peace now in a themed area to host our offices, stores etc, but the need for a sandbox is still the same as it was. Why should a new mod team that wants to bring content into SL buy land for min. 15000L$ if they could get it through first land for 1024L$.

Only people that gain from this are the estate and land brokers and it makes it harder for new people to get their foot down in SL to contribute to it.

Let alone the business practices of some of this estate firms...but that's a different story and would just upset me again.

If you really are building "amazing" stuff, someone will offer you a place to put it for free. There's an incredible number of patrons of the arts in SL who are thrilled to help out a promising newbie, as well as all of the folks who'd love to see some amazing content on their sims. I could name dozens and dozens of builders in SL who've been given the opportunity to hone their skills or put up builds on someone else's land, free of rent.

And jeez, I used to come across these monumental statues in the Cordova Sandbox . . . built by some guy named Starax.

It's interesting you should mention this because I know another user who wanted to build an amusement park but was stuck without land. What she did was to build a few amusement rides anyway in sandboxes, show them off to people, and then another in-world business sponsored her and she got most of a sim for free. It became one of the best known parks in SL.

Unfortunately, charging admission to anything is generally a bad business model in SL, and people seem to want to be empowered far more than they want to be entertained.



They can't just "create as much as they want" - every region of land requires a server, which is a US$ expense for them. And they can't use the model you describe because many people, even those who own a lot of land, don't earn in-game income. Some people are happy to spend lots of RL money buying a large land area for themselves and filling it with content they've bought from other users.



It's more because of the current land bubble and they're apparantly taking action on that.



The Premium 512 is "free" in this sense - it costs L$512, but you got L$1000 for free for going Premium.



Hard Drives are cheap but CPUs are not, and each simulator needs one too.

By far the easiest way of working around the land market is to find some other like-minded people, get together and buy a private island. The price is fixed, the land's completely yours, and you have even more control than you would on regular land.

Lots of professional developers in Second Life Aero so you're in good company if you decide to login, join a few groups and give it a chance. Some might even let you use their land or invest in your ideas if you're good enough. This kind of goodwill isn't even rare. It's very common.

Anyway, ignoring all the obvious stuff like:

* You don't need land in order to build stuff.
* Land isn't just a bunch of 1s and 0s costing next to nothing and created out of thin air.
* Many affordable land buying/renting options are available on REPUTABLE private estates. (Note the emphasis, buyer beware, etc., etc.)
* Private island creation has been fast, and mainland creation consequently slow, due to the great November sim-buying rush.
* You'd be lucky to get a single dodgem car on a 512 plot, never mind an entire fairground ride.

The point seems to be: Why don't Linden Lab provide an unsellable 512 parcel to each and every premium account holder?

Well, if the statistics (http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-graphs.php) are accurate and 48,000 premium accounts were active at the end of November, that means 375 sims (24,576,000 square meters of land) containing nothing but unsellable, unexpandable 512m square parcels would have been required (aside from all the existing marketable land) at that point in time. Given the stress on LL already, the maintenance of a continent full of inevitably abandoned parcels would probably be the straw that finally broke the camel's back and I suspect we'd all be waving goodbye to Second Life along with your good self.

--
O.P.

I was all over the place with my last post, let me try to be more succinct:

Everyone should get free land if they are paying a monthly sub.


To expand on that:

I have identified what, for me, is a fatal flaw in Second Life. I don't want to be beholden to someone else to host my creations while I wait to see if I can make enough in game money to buy land. I'm ALREADY paying someone to host them, Linden Labs. I'm not really interested in taking home any real money, but I did like the idea of an in game player driven economy.

I've just realized that SL is more of an economy simulator than a fun place to create, share, and interact with people. Looking at it that way SL is fine for what it is; that's just not what I'm looking for. It's a case of a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Time for this square peg to find a more suitable hole...

.

Excellent point. I guess I would want my land to be expandable, not tracts of land, but that doesn't really fit the model. Again, square peg, round hole.

The monthly "sub" covers tier for a 512m square parcel. If you buy more land that "sub" increases much like it would if you required more server space from the company hosting your website. The outlay for land could also be compared to a web hosting company's setup fee. You don't even have to buy land and pay that monthly sub to Linden Lab. You can seek out land on a private estate and pay that monthly sub to somebody else instead. Some will even let you pay entirely in $Lindens.
Your creations are "hosted" in your inventory free of charge and can be rezzed in-world at any time. You don't need a premium account for that.
If you think SL can be summed up in a single sentence you clearly haven't even begun to experience the diversity out there. Fun places to create, share and interact with people are the most accessible of all, from newbie zones and welcome areas to sandboxes and creative communities where you can 'live' and sell stuff for free provided you adhere to their rules.

(1) For what it's worth... In the RL the government doesn't give us land just because we pay property tax. We buy land from each other and pay property tax on it to the government. The model is very similar here.

(2) Not to be rude... but I would think a professional developer would be able to adjust and adapt when shown that certain assumptions were incorrect, not just give up. You give up too easily.

(3) Then don't rent land. Many people tinker and play in sandboxes or on friend's land until they come up with a REASON or NEED to have their own land where. Product development does not require owning or renting land. Selling or presenting a finished work while you're offline is the main purpose for owning or renting land. Don't rush the process.

4) "a fun place to create, share, and interact with people" is 99% of what SecondLife is to me, and for *many* people in Secondlife. The folks playing the money-game side of SecondLife may put a lot more effort into marketing however. There are a lot of different things going on in SecondLife.

If you throw up your hands and say "Sorry, can't be done" over this relatively minor technicality over buying land vs. paying for land allocation fees...

Of course, if you can't handle this issue, you should probably go some place where they spoon feed you more. There will be plenty of other technical frustrations and learning curves for you to cope with if you stay.

Sorry if that sounds unnecessarily harsh.

I'm confused. As long as I can remember, Premium Accounts can have 512sqm of land (or first land) at NO ADDITIONAL COST to the premium membership. Yep, that means freeeeeee! That's part of the way Premium accounts are set. So.... in other words.... you *do* get free land if you are paying a monthly sub. It is not given to you, however, you have to go and get it where you want it. And yes, you may have to pay a one time fee to get it (512L$ if it is first land, possibly more or less if it's not)

If someone were to come up to me and ask me for 512 L$ to get their FL plot, well, as long as I'm assured that is what it's for, and not to buy a box of griefer weapons, then I don't mind. Mind you, this does not mean everyone should run up to me and ask now, I won't say yes to just anyone. ^_^

I don't see what the fuss is about here. Save your stipend for a few weeks, do a small bit of camping, try some games where you can earn L$ like Slingo. Earn that L$512 and buy your land, and then you're SET. 512sqm doesn't sound like a lot but for a shopkeeper? it's huge! I've been selling stuff in SL for 3 years and I could easily get by in 512sqm. heck, I could fit everything I got in 256sqm ^^

I do not own land.

I am a partner in two businesses, and own a third. Plus I do consulting and do custom work as well.

I have made enough SL money to justify cashing it out

I tried Active Worlds - didn't like it - havent returned, I looked at Entropia Universe - nahhh - not for me. In neither case did I feel the need to seek out a forum and inform other users of the platforms that I didn't like it, it wasn't fair and I was going home...

What?! You didn't get FREE land? How terrible and so totally unlike real life. There's bad people in SL? Well, people are people whether in RL or SL, sinners don't turn into saints just because they log on to a computer - it may be a fantasy world but the 'residents' are real people. Everyone I meet is friendly and helpful - no-one has ever been rude to me - maybe just I'm lucky.

I'm gonna stick with the stimulating environment that is SL, I will continue building, designing, buying and selling land, learning, communicating... and I am only about 5 weeks old in SL terms.

There's lots of frustrations, a few inequalities, things that don't quite work how you feel they should, but hey, that's Life! (1st or 2nd)

Cat x

Hi all, first thing in first post said need land to sell things , not quite accurate. I have a free public Yard sale at Fhelzgud (we re-set this afternoon at 3pm). We have 5, 10 & 20 prim pads available and it is an excellent way to start building your business. There are no strings attached,. Yuo keep 100% of what you sell, no club to join, no fee(s) to pay We are not the only one.

All this over less than $2.00 US?

If they make it sound like you are going to get First Land (not free, but for $512) when you get a premium account, then First Land should be available when you get the account.

coco

When I went premium, there was no clear wording on the website that it came with any land allocation. It seemed I'd have to pay premium AND the first tier rate to get 512sqm of land. At least now the pricing and membership info pages are more clear on that point.

Even so... I see nothing that implies you "get" 512sqm of land by going premium.... in fact it seems pretty clear by the reatively slim information on the topic that you do NOT automatically get or are entitled to be given 512sqm of actual land for no extra cost with a premium account.

They should, probably, make more of a point of clarifying what "land allocation" is.

"A Premium Second Life account, starting at $9.95 a month, allows you to own land on which you can build, display, entertain and live.

...
Acquiring Land:

Acquiring land in Second Life requires a Premium Account. From a tiny parcel to an entire island, the pricing structure is extremely flexible to suit any need or budget" -- http://secondlife.com/whatis/pricing.php

Examples:
You hold 512 m2 of land -- or donate 512 m2 of tier to a group. Your monthly land use fee is US$0. You will need to buy the land, however." -- http://secondlife.com/whatis/landpricing.php

I definately conceed the point that many new people have the impression that First Land is included. At any one time, there are usually two or three people wandering around an infohub shouting "WHERE IS MY LAND?" I didn't happen to think this, but I have had my share of confusion since entering SL. I agree; it could be clearer.

I remember never finding any first land was really frustrating as a new user. Choosed to go premium cause I knew I would want to buy land, then nothing, and nothing. At least remove the rule that you can't buy land before you buy your first land.
This first land thingy really need to get revised, it's just pissing people off, really! In fact, people feel scammed. Not a very good introduction.