The financial dangers of island living - LL complicit but shirking all responsibility

Burgundy, I'm sorry to hear of your troubles. I admit I have not read the entire thread but it would be great if you could be reimbursed by the sim owner. Of course, I would not hold out much hope for that.

It's also a crying shame that island land cannot be bought and sold as easily as mainland. If there is a technical reason for this, I'd like to be educated. Minus a valid technical explanation, I suspect the real reason is it's easier for LL to hold one person accountable (and more profitable). Your situation is one of the reasons I do not "sell" my island land. If I have an extended hospitalization or, god forbid, death, all of my "landowners" would get screwed just as you have. Good luck to you.

/me winks at Raymond and agrees. It is ferociously complicated, with each estate owner free to create their own business model. I still agree with all you previous posters' point that something could/should be done with land search and the land purchase process to at least give buyers a HINT of the major differences between classic mainland and estate buying.

Oh, and teh SOX WON!!!!

My condolences to the worthy (and doubtless shocked) residents of the mile high city.

God and she likes sports too...

If ever there was a team deserving to be called a champion...

I agree, this is a start, but do you think that this will stop these kinds of complaints? I think not. Only a person who is careful to educate themselves prior to buying land will know the difference. The only way to stop the complaints completely and not be "complicit" in the view of some is to eliminate certain business models.

When are people actually going to understand that 'buying' estate land is exactly the same as renting? I don't think it's gonna happen until it's listed as land for rent instead of land for sale in search. I can't understand why it's allowed to be listed as for sale at all when the terms and conditions are exactly the same as renting. Until that happens I can just encourage all to read the terms, compare estates and mainland and find out what the differences are BEFORE you make any decisions to 'buy' or rent land. I would never buy anything but mainland personally.

The downside of mainland is that it unfortunately looks like a junkyard in most places and I think actions should be taken to find a way of preventing the 'junkishness'. In the future I wish for some kind of terraforming and landplanning from LL's side, nice roads, woods, canals and paths and lots of different sizes of land plots in between them to build on. Limits in how high you can build can easily be made by making prims return to the inventory if they are placed above a certain level. I think it should be impossible to build between 50 and 250 meters. Under and above that is ok. LL could also make it impossible to scatter prims around too much without linking them together to units. This would also prevent people from putting one prim here and one there, a lot of big and small objects in a huge mess on their land. Rotating, too bright, or excessive particle throwing objects could also be sent back to the inventory automatically and we would suddenly get rid of all those ugly, rotating for sale signs.

What I don't want to see in the future are complicated LL covenants and 'policemen' walking around deciding what looks good and not good, like estate land works now. No, it should all be possible to handle anyway with building limitations. I'd also like to see more space between the parcels and roads or waterways in between them. This would more than anything else, prevent the scattered junkyard look of the mainland today.

I have a couple of more ideas. Offer cheaper land for sandbox builders at a fraction of the price today, where people are allowed to build the way they can today on the mainland, experiment with their prims and scatter junk around the way they want. Make A, B or C rated land where C would be land with no building restrictions, beautiful terraforming or space between the parcels.

A totally different idea from the one above, is to make alot of small islands instead of todays mainland, with enough space in between them to make it impossible to see the junk on your neighbours land. This is the best solution I think, to make neighbour land invisible. This solution needs no building restrictions or anything. It just needs a change in how the grid is built up graphically. The islands should be from 512 sqm up to full sim size. You would also get alot of other benefits from this solution. Scripts on your neigbour's land would for example never risk to affect you, even if he/she places security orbs, greeters, monitors etc on the land and adjusts them badly. The land value would also increase when your land doesn't risk to be fenced in between the red ban lines of your neighbour, displaying 'no entry' whereever you turn. And hey, think about it, you'd be able to sail, row or swim between the islands. What a beautiful paradise that would become!!!!

Yep, the only difference between renting estate land and buying it is how much you pay up front.

Somebody earlier in the thread suggested 2 ways by which the sim might not be there anymore. There's actually a 3rd, more likely way - they sold their island and the new owner renamed and moved it. The new owner may or may not have been aware of any existing residents.

I've actually been offered islands myself where there are existing residents who believe they own the land, and I've refused them. I only run rental-type agreements (by which I mean a nominal upfront fee) in order to avoid precisely this issue.

Also, everybody wondering why they're in the same list - originally, only mainland land was listed there. Then a well-known German-resident self-proclaimed millionaire (ahem) petitioned LL to include estate land in the list. Then after complaints, the dropdown was expanded to include options for estate and mainland only.

Another way of looking at Mainland is that it's just another estate that happens to be owned by LL - if they ever went away or stopped paying their bills, Mainland residents would lose their land...

I'm very much for LL giving a warning to land "owners" on a private island about the pending termination of the island, and returning all the stuff remaining after a week. There is no technical reason that they can't do this as auto-return works fine on private-islands, therefore it would work fine in this case.

Sure, this can happen but the difference is that if you own the mainland you have yourself to blame if you lose your land if you haven't payed your tiers or your premium fee. If you 'own' (read rent) estate land, your estate owner (read landlord) can leave the land, abandon it or stop paying the bills and you lose your land because of what he/she does or doesn't do. If LL themselves stopped to pay their bills, yes then we would of course all lose our land and possibility to be in this world at all.

No, what I meant was that LL are your landlord on the Mainlad, and if they stop paying their bills to their hosting company, you lose your land because of what LL have done. It's unlikely, i know, but the principle is there.

Or they could just take it off you for some perceived breach of the ToS, just like an estate owner can take land back off you.

You only own mainland for as long as LL is willing and able to allow you to own it.

Well said, even in the case Mr. Zenith notes (post #31) of LL mediated transfer of sim "title". LL is already involved in a sim transfer and it couldn't possibly be difficult to "return all" on the sim as part of the process (of course this still has the problem of unreturnable group-deeded objects which I'm ignoring for the moment).

An interesting question is why doesn't Linden Lab attempt any - even partial - equitable restitution to the evicted sub-lessors? Probably foremost is that they, by their own rules, don't have to. I conjecture that players whom have already "invested" significantly in SL sub-leases will not generally just walk away and will thus buy more L$ to sub-lease more land and replace their lost goods. If so, LL materially benefits by these shoddy business practices. The OP claimed "complicity" by LL: here lies a strong motivation for LL, if not from direct revenue then at least by positive economic churn.

Many posts in this thread have concentrated on ways of making the sub-lessor "rights" more clear to the player, few have concentrated on whether LL should screw their indirect customers this way. I don't think they should. Can anyone think of a way for them to reform themselves in this matter? Maybe we could arrange for an island sale to an age-play monger and get the German press interested?

Since LL refuses to get involved in disputes which their rediculous system of purchasing parcels of land on an island causes, I think they should remove the ability to sell land on islands.

This way people will either rent on an island or do whatever arrangement the island owner requires for paying them a lump sum up front (which could be as if you "bought" it)
It will be much more obvious its a private deal and not a true purchase if its not through the land buying tools

People who have already "bought land" on islands could either retain ownership or will hopefully have their leases honoured by the owner as if they paid the owner manually. Yes I know it will be worrying for them until the owner makes a statement, but we dont want more people in this vunerable situation.

Whose bright idea was it to allow buying parts of islands in the first place?

Which is why I have nothing to do with private estate land now-a-days. And that is after two good experiences renting land on private estates (well, I never did get build rights for one of the rentals, but as it was a nice changing room for a great music Sim, I still saw it as a good experience). Just too confusing.

I doubt this will happen, since that was the original condition and they specifically added the ability to buy parcels on Private Islands in the manner you can now.

The problem is that the ability to purchase the land is useful in an estate rental situation too - when people rent from me, I let them "buy" the land for 1L$, I make it clear that this is not giving them outright ownership of the land (as I can reclaim it if needs be), however it does allow them to do things like set media urls, access lists etc.

Personally I don't know why people "buy" private estate land, when there is so much of it for rent with no upfront purchase fee. You can then pay week to week and not be too put out financially if things turn out bad. Also more freedom to move if something better comes along.

See above.

This sort of sale is a great idea. My rant is against paying large sums to "buy" estate land when there are so many deals like the sale for $1 availiable.

I agree with the spirit of the problem illustrated here.

The 'land buy' mechanism is dangerously misleading, as are the words 'buy' and 'own' which I think should be removed utterly from the grid.

Listing estate land alongside mainland - also a mistake, I think. It's to the point where people don't even know what mainland is, and can't tell the difference.

I 'own' 30 sims of various types directly, but do I really? I only 'own' them by continuing to pay 5095 USD a month. As for residents with deeded parcels - 'ownership' is the last word I'd use to describe the situation.

And indeed, some warning if an island was to be wiped would be a good thing.

It's a nightmarish system. Even if you are trying to do things the right way, it's still a mess.

Yes, I appreciate I'm hardly unique in this I was actually making this point to the person stating that the ability to sell land on estates should be removed, as this would also impact on people who are genuinely renting.

Perhaps the solution is to offer different wording for people operating estates as rental businesses, to call the people who are living the occupants or tenants or something instead of owners. And to call the initial fee a downpayment or deposit, or setup fee, rather than the price of the land.

I remember that when I started it wasn't possible to "buy" estate land, SL just didn't allow it. I think I remember that Anshe was charging an upfront payment though anyway, but that had to go through PayPal which probably put a lot of people off and it would be a lot harder to claim it's "buying" since it's handled out of SL.

The only people who benefit from being able to buy estate land are sim owners. Being forced to buy also makes sure tenants are "locked in". It's easy to revise the covenant and make sweeping changes when you know your tenants can't/won't just pack up and leave because they don't want to loose their initial purchase price.

It's one feature that really should just be scrapped and go back to how things worked a year ago.

(To be fair, there's plenty of potental abuse with pure rentals as well)

That's what group deeded land is for .

estate land needs its own search tab. at the top, on every page, the blurb about what is at risk.

if someone chooses not to read, then they are fools.

Actually not really.

When I first started I let land for no fees up front.

The sim I'd paid 1250 USD for and let out for *no* up front fees was then 'sold' parcel by parcel by some residents, to other residents.

By:
- getting a parcel from me for $L 0 up front,
- paying a few thousand $L of tier while they stayed,
- then 'selling' the parcel they got free to someone else,

...in some cases they made several tens of thousands of $L.

I 'benefited' to the tune of losing several hundred dollars like this, and ended up essentially paying people to enjoy the sim.

the guns in SL aren't real. neither is the rope.

I've never bought private estate land so I don't know; but does the covenant pop-up when you purchase the land? Really it should, along with a message saying what the deal is with private island land, things like "The estate owner can reclaim the land and their discretion, and if the simulator is remove all content may be lost blah blah"

But if you deed the land to a group, you're transferring ownership, which is exactly what I'm doing except you don't need the group.

Yes, it does. You have to agree to it before you can "buy" the land. However, some covenants I've seen are nothing more than a price list.

The main problem that I've seen with having to accept the covenant is that people who don't speak English just accept it without reading or understanding it. I intend to have something along the lines of "Important: If you cannot understand this covenant, please do not agree to it without a translation." translated into some of the more prominent languages in SL, and inserted at the top.

I'm actually going to add a section about the risks of renting, content loss etc based on your comment.