Selecting and buying "Land for Landless" parcels in-world

"First Land" is designed to replace the "Land for the Landless" program.

Placing the "First Land" process in-world makes land more accessible, gives the user a choice of land, and uses less Linden staff time.

A snapshot of the land and the parcel data can be viewed by selecting Find, Land for Sale, and checking a box labeled “First Land” and hitting "Search".

When a user starts to buy the plot, the system checks to make sure they are a premium user who has never owned land. If user is not a premium then an error message is generated that explains that they must be and tells them they can do it at https://secondlife.com/account. If they have owned land before, then an error message explaining, "you are disqualified because you owned land before" should pop up.

As soon as a parcel is purchased, it is removed from the list in the Find window.

When does this come inWorld?

is this by av account, or by user (cc or mailing address)?

Great idea. 3 thumbs up.

Yeah. Good question.

On the one hand, just because I happen to have land doesn't mean my roomie does, but if he does use the same connection and IP address, and I got him his account with my CC..?

On the other hand, can my 40 alts apply?

How DO you distinguish what is legit and what isnt? Since it's well known that you have previously blocked access for more than one person for suspensions etc?

And does that land ALWAYS remain First Land? So presumably they can let it go for it to return to the First Land availability list, but can't profit from it's sale?

The land will be resellable. We considered creating non-sellable land for this program but the main downside is that we thought it would be very confusing to have to explain a new type of land.

This is unfortunate. If LL sells land for one-third the market price under certain situations, it will be gamed by many people. Right now, Land For The Landless has some real barriers to entry. You have to go to the forums, post in the thread, and wait... Okay, so it's really not a huge barrier, but the knowledge required and effort involved acts as a sort of filter. You have to deal with a human, at least indirectly, to get LFTL. Remove that filter, and I predict things are going to blow up badly.

I've posted this before in another thread, but even if you don't allow alts to buy First Land, anyone can tell their friends: "Hey, it only costs $10 to get a lifetime account in this game, and I'll even pay that for you if you give me your First Land allocation."

There are other bad scenarios when Free Land is resellable. I think it's inevitable that new users will be harassed, too. "Are you going to buy land? No? Well, go buy this lot, and I'll pay you five times what you paid for it!" Or, "want some quick money?" followed by the same pitch. (And forget about the "one-third" figure I quoted earlier. Speculators will get land for one-twelfth the market price when someone else covers the premium account fee.)

I understand the goal behind the Land For The Landless / First Land program, and it's an admirable one. I'm just pointing out the biggest problem of it. Letting anyone who wants it to have land to build on is good. Creating a loophole where speculators can buy very cheap, resellable land, bypassing market forces, is bad.

If describing a special kind of land is too difficult, what about describing a special kind of sim? If all of the First Land were congregated in special sims, it might be more consistent from the user's point of view. Land For The Landless plots can be grandfathered in and remain resellable.

I am against a one-first-land-deal-per-credit-card policy that many have advocated, just because it's so easy to get around, an the most unscrupulous people will be the ones to take advantage of it. But if the kind folks at LL decide that First Land is going to be resellable, there needs to be some sort of safeguard built in... perhaps a two week waiting period before new accounts can buy land?

What about a one-week waiting period before the land can be sold?

Since a single CC is only allowed to support 5 accounts max, this can't be gamed for too long. Sure, most people have more than one CC, but they are likely to all have the same account holder name and billing address. And they are probably all connecting from the same set of IP numbers. Linden Lab can easily detect this sort of crap and axe it.

This sounds like a great system, and would let a new player start the day with the sign-up form on the web, and end it with a plywood shack of their very own.



That, again, would be a new "kind" of land. Starts to get confusing.

If you don't make "First Land" special it's not going to serve its purpose. Any temporary safeguard, like "can't sell for one week", helps a little, but in my opinion is ultimately just a band-aid over the real problem. The non-automated nature of Land For The Landless is a big band-aid, and the blood is going to come gushing out when we remove it.

Tiger Crossing, I don't see how or why Linden Labs would "axe the crap" that their rules and Terms Of Service allow. People can get land from all four of their alts, make US$100 worth of profit, and cancel their alts. Salesmen are going to hit the new users and ask "are you going to use your First Land"? Neither of these actions are illegal, and you could make the case that they're not unethical (though I believe that they are.)

This post is dangerouly close to just a repeat of my previous post, so I'll stop posting in this thread and give my opponents the last word. But the problem I'm talking about is real, and sticking our heads in the sand won't make it go away. First Land for landless users is a wonderful goal, but land is a limited commodity. Every First Land plot that goes to a profiteer is a First Land plot that doesn't go to a new user who just wants to build. None of us wants that.

I believe this is definately a step in the right direction. Bravo Lindens!

Haney:
One suggestion - add a time limit of 32 days BEFORE someone can sell their parcel.

[EMAIL=oioioioioioio@hotmail.com] write me

bonjour,

I'm frisio in SL and I don't know how to get in the SL world.
do I need a disc?
do I need some help?
thanks,
frisio

My suggestion...

Do not make it resellable, explaining a new land type is alot easier than explaining why all the First Land plots are being resold at 20L$ per meter right after purchase. I'd say put it back into the First Land catagory, this way you also recycle that land and save yourselves some sims, it may not cut down drasticly, but it'll cut down some on having to keep adding new sims for more First Land plots.

I know this handicaps first time buyers and makes it so they can't resell their first plot, but it also drasticly cuts down on alts buying land just to resell it.

Other than that, its a fantastic idea.

Frisio, you need to download the client http://www.secondlife.com/download I believe, or you can contact [email]support@secondlife.com[/email] if you have any other troubles.

I wonder if having a new non-resellable land type is a good idea? If you can't resell or join land to other parcels, it's forever "newbie" land -- it will never become a normal part of the sim.

This could represent a serious problem to the normal development of a sim. It would block attempts to create themed areas, because half the sim would be full of plywood boxes -- forever. It would be like putting the Lusk suburbs in every sim.

The real issue here is not the assignment of land or the land type, but the ability to regulate how many accounts each person can have. If that problem is solved, then there's no problem with Haney's automated newbie land plan.

I think allowing new residents to sell First Land back to LL for the same price they bought it for is good, however I also see the problem with sims never growing up past the plywood box stage. So, I propose the following: First Land is First Land until LL decides to auction it after x number of rotations thru the FL program. Either that, or FL plots go directly to auction if a resident sells/releases them back to LL via the uber-cool public land auction idea in another thread.

Hmm, yeah I thought about that problem, but didn't really address it.

I like Taun's idea. Maybe 3 rotations per plot? Then it auto goes to auction.

I can't even find button/toggle/drop down/box to go along with


Am I too much of a noob? Is this *not* accessed by the in-world map but somewhere else?

The only mild complaint I have about SL/Linden, is they make it *really* hard for people to find info that's above 1st-grade level and below college enrty exams......You're getting a *lot* of noobs - don't drive us away because we can't find a proper "dictionary/encyclopaedia/how-to" book......

I don't think the feature is implemented yet, it sounds like it's planned for the next release. Hit this thread for the current Land for the Landless program

Ah! Thank you [smacks head] D'oh!

I tend to agree with the waiting period. Forcing a one-month delay before sale at least forces people to pay the $10 for the plot.

It's easy to abuse other systems, like CC tracking (I have 3 cards myself, my check card, a PayPal card, and a real credit card).

Locking plots in as "newbie land" is also patently unrealistic and a bit unfair. However, people who are going to truly contribute to the game shouldn't have a problem waiting a month to upgrade... after all, it'll take them that long to scrape together the dough to do it anyway, right?

I've seen some of the stuff that goes on in UO with the limited real-estate. I've lived in real life counties where prices tripled in 10 years. I'm watching prices in my area go up by about 1/3 in the last 3 years. This is the nature of real-estate. Some people play the market to get rich, and others just play to live (or have a place to live, rather).

As long as Linden keeps adding servers and keeping the user/land ratio reasonable, I can't see the problem. You guys have it a LOT better here than in UO, where I bought a house for over 2 million gold... and that house was only about 20 feet on a side... I gues that makes it less than a tenth of the size of a 512m plot.

And have you SEEN the 512m plots? I looked at them when the new land mass went live yesterday. It's the size of a small tract house in Surburban USA... not too large. Without combining or reselling it later, there's not a lot that can be done with it aside from having a small vendor booth and doing some construction in a sky-base.

Personally, I'd love to see something different. I'd love to see people have optional off-line capabilities to play with their characters and do construction work. The client would be running in a virtual space on your own computer. You could decorate it however you want, test scripts, and generally work much like you were connected to a real sim. When you get the bugs worked out, you teleport back out in to the real world and show your ideas to the world. This would also eliminate the lag at the sandboxes. I remember the trial download of Everquest did something like this; there was a training ground that ran entirely off-line, where you could get acquainted with your character.

People could then rent space at malls and vendor booths, kind of like the car lot near the Cordova sandbox. Perhaps the landless could receive a free booth until they've acheived a certain net worth (or sold a certain gross amount).

There are a lot of complexities to this issue, and no game that has offered land ownership has been able to competely satisfy everybody's needs in that respect. Just like in the real world, it's often necesssary to have your own "home base" to work from, because at some point, there's just no way to carry everything you need in your backpack.

But given the facts of real-life realestate, you have expensive areas, and you have cheap areas.

In real life, the land I own is half of 180m2 ( 2 apts ontop each other, a small garden ). That land is valued by the government for around 3.6mil ( ~50.000 US ) since it's downtown.

Yet, I can get land, 36 kilometers from here for less that 1mil ( ~14k US ) and even further away, where small towns are trying to increase population, I get PAID to move there.

In SL however, the trend I have seen is that ALL land is considered a high-value asset. That is wrong.

Now, what REALLY is wrong in my opinion is WHY people are trying to get more land. There are two main reasons:

1) You don't get enough prims on a basic plot of land to build AND decorate your simple little cottage. ( buy more land in the same sim, get more prims )

2) Your land is to small to hold your masterpiece ( a truly valid reason to get bigger land )

Reason #1 is the one that should be addressed first and foremost. If a user can create the masterpiece of his dreams on a standard 512m2 plot of land, the demand for land would drop drastically.

Of course, the 'landlords' wouldn't want that, since then their land would fall in price ( there will be posts contradicting this argument with load on servers etc, but I wouldn't buy those arguments unless they came from a Linden employee ).

Second, there should be SOME governing from the Lindens on how and what ought to be built. Like in small town areas you shouldn't be allowed to build a 180 storey skyscraper. That kind of control would diversify the land prices, so that big town centrals ( with a higher prim count than normal ) would be more expensive since big buildings should gain profit in form of rental fees and revenue of markets, while small towns would be a cheaper living place, due to distance and regulations.

It's doable...

I love this idea Taun! 3 or 4 rotations sounds fair before it's sent to auction.

Thanks Princess and Oz I hope LL will like it too