First Land OMFG How hard is it to GET?!

I suppose I just can't see how, when looking for first land, searching for "first land" in a category other than "land" is in any way obvious enough to be equivalent to picking up a spoon or "not being coddled".



What does it matter? They'll draw their own conclusion. They're already feeling excluded, do you want to tell them that they are wrong, too?



But many players have full-time jobs, and just can't spend as much time watching the land market as other people, no matter their time management skills. Do they deserve to get worse land as a result? Especially when having full-time jobs means they have more money, and thus potentially more money to spend on SL, provided they decide to stay as customers?

There are so many points of view to this, and as in RL, every point of view comes from varying levels of experience.

My original point is that First Land in dangled as a carrot for Premium Upgrade. It is very difficult to find, and reading everyones comments, it has been much easier in the past. So my point (1) OMFG How hard is it to get; Well that seems a valid point. It IS much harder now than it used to be.

From this, I take some offence to old hands coming into my thread and start slinging great ideas about and making everyone else feel stupid for not thinking of them. And to those who feel that a quick "stop whining blah bla, you noob, spoonfeed etc", well thats equally useless information and you may as well shut-up. Thats probably more useful to everyone concerned.

My second point is that the Hype is valid. It DID create an expectation for me that this First Land was easily available and that it was my right to pick it up and was part of the premium package.

My gripe is that it was not explained how difficult it was to get it, and as a participant in other online worlds, I was not planning initially to spend multiple hours per day just checking the Land Search.

As for those of you who think we'll just turn around and sell it....So what if I do. That wasn't my intention, I am going to build on it and learn the game, but if I sell it, what its to you.

However, I now see that the biggest problem in this game is that of Land Speculation and it seems to be taking over the game. Real Estate markets in the real world always bring out the worst in people, and it seems that it is also doing that in SL.

I just wanted to know why it was so hard to find the First Land that was sold to me as part of the premium deal. Simple question, very long, off-track answers.

But i know the answer now. Linden is overwhelmed by new premium accounts and they ran out. Fair enough. But a little communication to fix this would help.

And less "Im so smart, I ve been in SL for a million years. you are an idiot for asking".

We'll just have to disagree on that.

I said I was working outside of my real field, not that I wasn't working full-time. But my personal finances aren't relevant here, and really, neither is anyone else's. It doesn't matter how many hours you're working or what you make in the real world. What matters is your priorities. People who make First Land a priority will spend more time and energy on it than those who don't and will reap the rewards (limited ones at least, since there is still an element of luck). We all have 24 hours in the day, so no one has more or less time than anyone else -- we just choose to use it differently, according to what our priorities are. If someone puts more aspects of their RL ahead of SL, that's their priority and their choice, so yeah, they "deserve" less (in SL) than people who rank their priorities otherwise. I don't think you'd claim people who spend their workdays goofing off and using their office computers to access SL "deserve" the same real-life rewards as people who actually work at work, so why should the reverse be true?

Plus, as I said in my first comment, we're not talking about huge amounts of time here. It doesn't require huge amounts of time, it requires wise use of time. I spent maybe 12 hours max, reading the forums here and the blog comments, and maybe an hour max in-world (and that includes the time spent waiting for the database to load), all spread out over about three weeks. That's not a lot of time to spend on something you've made a priority -- it's only a lot if you'd rather spend it elsewise. And that's always your own choice.

Lars, the short answer is that a perfect storm of challenges hit within short order and the result has been a land crunch for the past few months. The first part of the storm was the explosive growth that SL has seen in the past 6 months since they opened registration up with no verification. This was followed by SL finally moving into the mainstream with a lot of PR; new sign-ups swelled while LL scrambled trying navigate the ship away from the looming iceberg in the database waters.

Add into that mix, back in October LL announced (in a badly handled debacle) that there would be a set up cost and tier increase for Private Islands. This created a massive land rush of island orders that expanded the land mass of SL by 30%. The thousand-some-odd islands that had to be delivered between Nov 15 and the end of 2006 totally consumed available inventory for adding new mainland and first land.

The upshot is that what you are seeing right now is an anomaly, land prices may never return to the $5 -$7 sqm that we previously enjoyed, but they have to come down because this pricing isn't sustainable and will cripple the long term growth of SL. First land will get easier to find and LL has to solve the problem of land scammers and bots ripping off the first land system.

Lastly, you are absolutely right that a little communication would go a long way. Unfortunately, communication is one thing that LL has always done badly; it's just one of their flaws.

Isblan, thanks.

Another thoughtful explanation. I appreciate that.

It doesn't seem fair to accuse people of lack of effort for not taking an action that is counter-intuitive and that they may have no idea was even available. They may have expended just as much effort but never happened to think of that option!



Um.. because ranking RL ahead of entertainment/virtual worlds is almost always healthy and ecological, but doing the inverse may not be, and thus care needs to be taken encouraging it?

Lets face it Rihaana is a fanatic.

And to quote Winston Churchill; "A fanatic is someone who won't change his mind and won't change the subject."

Lets change the subject...lol