Disadvantages to buying a used island?

Are there any disadvantages to buying a used island (as opposed to just getting a new one set up by the Lindens)?

Thanks.
Tyg

There would be two, contingent on the offer of the old seller:

1) Renames cost $50 USD
2) Moving a sim costs $150 USD
(more info: http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=098)

So if you plan on doing either of those, I would bet these are not included in the price the seller quoted. Just also make sure you read the section in the link above about transferring an island so you make sure you get what is necessary and don't get jacked by some lamer.

Other than that, I don't see any big problem in a used sim. *shrug*

MM

Other than the possibility of buying, say, an old class 3 server, you are probably going to be okay.

I'm not sure if there are any more class 3 servers out there - possibly Neufreistadt is still one of them?



From the August 2006 private island guide (I get these in my email whenever I buy sims):



"Can I sell my Island to someone else?

Yes! Second life is all about change and innovation, and if you are ready to move on, we can make that happen.

In case of an island transfer, Linden will charge the current owner US$100 to transfer the island to another resident."



"... the new owner picks up the billing on whatever day of the month it normally bills."



"For the new owner we can..

Rename the island (free)

Move it to a new location (free).. we can also restore the terrain to its original state if necessary."

Ahh neat, I forgot about this. So instead of $200 USD for rename and move, you get em for $100 USD. Or you can leave the island in the same place and with the same name and still pay $100.

Good tip, Des.

MM

Thanks for the info, everyone. If anyone has anything to add, please do.

Tyg

According to http://neighbours.maxcase.info , NFS is, indeed, on a class 3 server - which is why it only runs two sims. (BonnyDoon and NFS, according to the site, although the info is marked as "stale".)

That said, a class 3 shouldn't have any worse performance - theoretically - because it IS only running two sims.

Interesting - is there anything definitive regarding equal (or unequal) performance?

That's a question I have... I've shied away from even considering used class 3 servers for lack of information in this regard.

I considered buying a 2nd hand island at one point. I ended up getting a new sim from LL instead.

The reasons were as follows :
1) Whilst the person who was offering me the sim seemed trustworthy, I was a little hesitant at paying so much money to someone I've never even talked to before and who could, as far as I know, simply disappear and leave me unable to recover the money at all.
2) The prices that this person was offering the island for were about 975USD. The lowest I have heard an island resell for was about 950USD, though I am not sure of those are inclusive, or, as I suspect, exclusive, or transfer fees. This is about a 30% discount at maximum, and some people will try to sell you second hand islands for 1200-1700USD. So the prices are not hugely different.
3) New islands ordered via LL may be "alone" on their host server for awhile until another server is allocated to their host. This means that they will run faster, and be easier to sell land on for a short time after buying. The odds of this happening are decreased if you buy a used server which is probably already sharing a host with 3 other servers. Disclaimer: I am *not* sure of this information, this is GUESSWORK on my part.
4) Some people who buy/sell private islands will do things like ask you to pay with paypal (paypal have overcharged me and done things I strongly disagree with in the past, so I refuse to use them and urge others not to use them either). Or they'll quote you a price, but then say "oh yeah that's exclusive of the 100 USD transfer fee". Or they'll change the price on you after you say "that's ok", trying to get as much money out of you as possible.

In short: the dangers of buying a private island resale are :
* you can't get your money back (IIRC, guesswork!) if you're a victim of fraud, because you have no way of tracing the person.
* you may end up on a sim that uses an older, less up-to-date/reliable server. (again, guesswork!)
* residents of the sim being sold to you may bitch at you thinking you're to blame for their sim closing, when in reality, it is the seller who closed and resold the sim.
* price may be highly variable ($950-$1700, depending on the sim) and what "extra services" you buy with it. Price may also depend on time-limited offers which don't give you time to think.

All in all, if you're considering buying a sim second hand, I would suggest you ask yourself one key question : "is a potential saving of $200 maximum worth that much potential hassle to you?". In my case, the answer was no, however I appreciate that it may be different for other people (and that my facts may be wrong, I only tried a few people before opting for buying a new server from LL, so my facts as to how island sales work may be biased, out of date, etc...).

Sims don't stay on the same servers, LL moves them around as needed.

Check out Sim Neighbors at http://neighbours.maxcase.info/

While most of this post is guesswork, it's mostly incorrect. Not trying to be mean to Angel in anyway, just stating from knowledge and the knowledge base. The only thing that is correct is the variant on prices.

As for getting schemed out of money, if you buy with Lindens, then from there Linden has to take care of it. IF you buy from paypal (which I have known a few to do), then don't buy unless they are business verified, because then they have connected a credit card, which eBay can trace and take legal options from there. Once a purchase is done, it's legally binding, however it may not take just 1 week to fix, it could take a few months. If you are buying from a first time seller, then I'd say, uh no. That's just common sense. Most of the sim owners reselling are doing so through auctions and L sales through SL and therefore can easily be traced, tracked and if you lose your money and this person disappears, LL can take over the sim and give it to you.

Resis complaining can happen with anything at any time, they will always complain. I've seen them complain at a brand new sim open up, so that's inherent in owning a sim regardless.

No new sim is hosted alone. They are constantly shifted around and split up with each new server LL acquires. If a server gets overloaded, then it moves to a new server and then sales are made from there.

~Seola~

Where do the "large islands" fit into this picture? (US $780/month, 256K sq. meters)

Is it a more powerful server computer, with greater concurrency (400 simultaneous avatars instead of 100)? Somehow I doubt that, because then it would make sense to hold concerts or seminars or town hall meetings there.

So are they just a package of four sims, nothing else? Are you at least guaranteed that no other sims share your server? The fact that the setup fee is not discounted in any way ($5000 = 4 * $1250) certainly suggests that they're doing setup four times (or overcharging).


Regarding private island resale, surely you could use some form of escrow? If LL doesn't offer this, perhaps some RL online service like escrow.com could do it for you. Although that might involve seller and buyer having to reveal RL names.

Okay, here's a resident talking about how LL does it's thing, so most of this may be hogwash. It is taken from previous conversations/arguments with LL staff.

As the Lindens have tried to state on a number of different occasions, the SL server software was not written to take advantage of multiple processors on a single machine and under normal operation doesn't access the hard drive (there have been previous bugs where some sims have started thrashing, which is a Bad Thing).

Because of this, it doesn't really matter that much on how many sims are running on a specific machine, other than that it hints at the class of server that it is running. Each class of server has a certain number of "slots" (i.e. processors) on it to be able to run sims, and no sim running in any one slot has any effect or access to the other slots. Asking for a sim to be alone on a machine is either asking for the rest of the slots to be unoccupied (hey, you wanna pay for three void sims?) or for the sim to be downgraded to a lower-class server that serves fewer sims (which *would* be a performance hit).

If you had four contiguous sims on the same machine, then walking from one to another would probably look the same as if they were on different machines, as the sims have no special status or special ability to communicate with each other.

Myself, I would be strongly interested in knowing if/when they can change their server software to be able to run on more than one processor, this would allow the kind of "super-sim" that you are describing here with no visible borders, as well as allowing better load handling (sim being overloaded? take an additional slot!) but I assume that this would be unlikely in the near future.

'Large Islands' Are nothing more than 4 sims. 4 times the set up fee, 4 times the monthly fee. I would suspect that LL would set them all up one one server at once initially, but this would not likely stay that way since, as other people have said, sims move from server to server all the itme. I really don't know why LL puts this on the webpage.

My tests indicated Class 3 performance was substantially worse than Class 4.