Which supply will run out first?

The supply of sims or the supply of buyers?

I vote sims.

LL is not going to release sims indefinitely. They will once again run into server availability issues or throttle back for various other technical reasons.

Meanwhile new intrepid buyers appear every day. Or deep pocket folks come back every few days for more Mainland munching.

What do you think?

Also, am I missing something? Isn't it cheaper to buy Islands? why aren't more people doing that? Is it the fact that you can't divide ownership or that they are not readily available? What's the advantage of Mainland versus Islands? Lower tier?

I think LL is already working on a way to allow users with their own servers to have Sims which can be incororated into the main grid. Once that comes about, LL will no longer be the sole provider of land in SL, meaing the price of land itself will change, but also that the world of SL will be able to constantly grow and change with or without LL's direct action.

Conversely however, LL may decide not to do this, as they would lose thier monopoly on land, and thus a very large means of gaining revenue.

Wow! whilst initially a great idea I suddenly wonder what would happen when Fred Bloggs' server goes down where does everyone go? Simply get logged out? And would groups hold land on Fred's *and* LL's? Would store owners on Fred's get compensation for downtime?

Hey! so a sim for the South of France might actually be in France? heh heh.

Errr, what happens when Phil Linden's server goes down? We all have to log out anyway...

This is an idea fraught with peril and uncertainty, and has been hashed about once or twice already. People are leery about using an open source Client,would you want to TP into a non-Linden SIM? Who knows what code may be lurking there, to steal all your L$, transfer all your inventory, and leave you with N00b hair and a flexi-5-foot phallus?

Max

Feeling FUDdy today...

yep, kinda answered my own question there didn't I?
I showed a chum SL at the weekend. He's more into software than I am. I'm a hardware guy.

Software I left behind with the Sinclair Spectrum. Networking? forget it! Protocol? Bog off! But he asked a question I couldn't answer and so I pass it on.

With an Open Source Client AND non-Linden owned servers, just how safe would SecondLife be? Couldn't the whole shebang be brought down with a virus?

I could survive my avatar being 'modified' .. but SL going down would be a disaster .. bringing my PC down too even worse!

Bilbo99 being FUDdy too

Security questions ran rife about the web too when it first opened. And oddly, those questions haven't been answered or solutions found. Using any website is risky--viruses lurk in the most unsuspected places, and phishing, hacking, and other scummy practices continue to be a concern for users. But defending the user has gotten easier. Webbrowsers continue to improve, providing increasing security against phishing, hijacking, and other scams. Anti-virus software has become readily available for most operating systems. And most importantly, users are far more saavy about security on the web than they were 15 years ago.

It's part of the growing pains of any platform. SL is no exception. If and when the server code goes open source (sometime in 2008, I'm told) there will be scumbags who will use it to steal credit card numbers, passwords, and Lindens. But there will also be people who think in terms of more longterm profitablilty who realize that ultimately there's more profit in writing programs to defend users computers against security breaches. I mean, think about it. Who's got more money? The guy in Nigeria who wants your bank account number, or Peter Norton?

Kam

The Paranoid Hobbit has had his lunch ... and bows to 'those in the know'

To answer Raymond's question on why we don't buy private islands? The upfront fee. With mainland sims, you don't have to have the upfront fee, although in my case, I couldn't afford the monthly payments right now either.

*shrugs* I would buy one in a heartbeat if I could afford it!

Heh showing your age there! I still have my zx spectrum in me mums loft with copies of Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner and all the old clasics. Recon its a collectors item by now.

I can't help but compare an open source SL with the web as we know it.

First, servers will become commodities, available for little more than cost. You'll pay more for land on a high-bandwidth server with extra bells and whistles such as terraforming, custom security, and sim-wide scanning for orphaned objects.

When Fred Blogg's server goes down, nobody will much care. Right now nobody's hosting anything on Fred's server (too little bandwidth, too much downtime), and in the future nobody will want to buy land there either. Fred and one of his friends from work will be about it. But it will be cool for Fred and lots of people like him to actually run their own server. Most of us will just shop around for a good deal from professional sim servers and pay standardized rates.

We'll worry about the security of non-LL sims about as much as we worry now about non-CERN Internet sites (yawn). And proprietary server software will be as "dominant" as proprietary server software is now; most people, even commercial server hosts, will be using free open-source servers. Sims and clients will be hacked and viruses will be out there, but for most people it will only be something they have to deal with once every few years or so. I imagine our L$ will be about as protected as people's US$ are when they're typing in their credit card numbers, expiration dates, and security codes all over the Internet.

The sooner the better, I say. Going open source and providing business opportunities like this will be the quickest way to solve the current scaling issues.

I got together with friends to buy a private island for our stores. It's split into quarters, and cost each of us under half what mainland was costing. With $50 per month tier each for ~16000m2. That was in the rush for the old tier- even at $75 per month and $420 down, it's far cheaper than paying for 16km2 of mainland and tier. At higher tier values mainland wins back, but for the individuals at 1/4 island level, that's a big saving.

There are problems with this (not sure what's going to happen when someone wants out for example) but it's a lot cheaper than mainland if you can club together and trust one person to make the buy.

The other three could buy out the one who wants to leave, or you could find someone else to buy his share. It probably wouldn't be hard to find another partner, under the circumstances you describe. You'd want to check out the applicants to make sure they would fit into your business partnership. It might be a good idea for the four of you to contribute to an emergency fund to pay the rent for a couple of months, in case someone has to quit suddenly and the rest of you need a few weeks to find somebody suitable.

So are you saying Mainland sims have no upfront fees because you can sell them for profit before you have to pay for them?

lol, no one answered the original supply question...*wrestles mouse away from highjacker*

Jet Set Willy!!!!! wasn't that the one with the awesome-upon-awesome firework display at end of level? I broke into the code on that just to be able to show the fireworks without playing the game LOL



I guess to the newbie of tomorrow all will be made clear as to whether they're buying land on the state-of-the-art server rather than Fred's fan-whining 386

Okay, I'll answer your question. I don't think either will 'run out' so much as buyers will get used to these prices and stop buying so much. At least the end users. All the new people who come in to 'make money fast!' will come in and bid up the land and then end up stuck with it and whining that they lost their shirts. Then LL will get another truckload of servers and the cycle will repeat. But that's just a guess.

But before all that happens, I hope prices go low enough at auction that I can buy a big chunk o' land for cheap for myself. And what I consider cheap is cheaper than what they're going for now. If I wanted to pay that much, I'd buy an island.

Personally I think we will run out of buyers before we run out of sims, thus forcing land prices down. At the moment, interest and media attention is very high for SL hence the thousands/millions of people who have created accounts in the last 6-12 months. But it cant last. This level of growth is just not sustainable. I think the release of 'Home' on the PS3 will draw allot of the attention and the casual user away from SL later this year. It will look 100 times better and will be structured and regulated and offer the sort of environments that allot of people are looking for, i.e. those people who simply want to socialise within a 3D virtual environment. So in the long term I believe we will see an overall declne in the amount of online users, especially when all those people who were drawn here under the promise of making a quick buck realise that only a tiny fraction of the population have positive cash flow from SL. No, I really believe that in a years time we will be seeing a complete reverse in the land market, it will be a buyers market and it will be just like the old days when you could fly through sim after sim after sim without seeing a single green dot in the minimap because there will be such an uneven ratio between the volume of land and the amount of residents.

The futures not bright and its certainly not orange.

If I have $20, or $200 or $500 or ever $1000 them I'm SOL with private islands. It's quite literally impossible for me to buy one. Whereas it is trivial to buy mainland for those prices. That is the number one reason mainland is worth more. Not to mention the tier costs which are significantly more for a PI than for mainland. I don't want to rehash the buy/rent argument or whether or not PIs are "better" than mainland but you really can't argue with what I said so far I think.

Also, as for which will run out first. I agree with an earlier poster. Buyers will run out first. And I agree that it will be in a year, or maybe upto 5 years. That seems to be the normal lifespan for an MMORPG and I think SL will last the same sort of time. But if anyone is planning on waiting five years because land will be 50% cheaper then that's pretty stupid.

oops, sorry ... always doing that ... <sheepish grin>

Supply outpaced end-user demand months ago in my view, or the total amount of land for sale wouldn't steadily increase day by day. Looking over the new continent, even the first sims that were auctioned off there are still largely up for sale.

There doesn't seem to be any shortage of resellers though, whether on the auction level, or in-world level.

Exactly the same thing that happens now when the link between LL's colocations go down: you can't tp off the sim, and when you log out you remain ghosted on that sim, unable to log back on because SL thinks you're still logged in.

The last technical town hall was quite clear on the role of a sim as well: it's authorative for everything. If the sim says you just paid someone L$100k, then that's what you did, there is no central authority that verifies whatever kind of transaction to keep a rogue sim in check as soon as it's connected to the grid.

I took a long, slow, careful look at this once. You might not like my answer.

"Sims -vs- buyers" is too simplistic. Look at what succeeds over time, on its own terms, and what fails on any terms.

Success story: Ultima Online. What? That's nuts, you say? That old thing? That old thing is going on year TEN. And not gonna croak tomorrow either. There are other communities like that too - lots of 'em. How is that possible?

Community and culture.

How come people still listen to 1970's music? Even, gasp - PAY for it!? Because they want to, because they like it, because they identify with it, because it's theirs.

A HUGE chunk of the people on our grid today are going to vanish the instant Mysp4ce3D releases Infinite MegaPARTAY Allst4rz.*

Because they will get all the sleaze, porn and whatnot sooo much better there than they can here - who cares about building when you can upload a texture with your naughty bits on it?

So watch the grid go through it's own form of 'urban decay' - some areas will become better than they ever were, while others will become a sad reminder of the boom years.

We might see horizons of abandoned skyboxes still with their bdsm poseballs inside, desolate and mute testimony to the exodus to the 'next kewl thing' - at least until cleanup. So what will happen?

I'll bet the price of tier will come down sharply, until reasonability is found. It won't be 'worth it' to be a land baron any more, and the real raison d'etre of the grid - community - will still be here for those who value it.



* "Mysp4ce3D Infinite MegaPARTAY Allst4rz" is fictional, and purely a hypothetical example. For now at least...

My initial reaction was to chuckle with glee at the vision of herds of airheads migrating off to t3h next *BIG THANG* but then I had a thought... they're the same folks who spend megabucks buying up all the goodies content creators make. As for your fictitious 'Mysp4ce3D Infinite MegaPARTAY Allst4rz', it wouldn't surprise me at all if old shagger murdoch has something like that up his sleeve.

One last request: Phil, if you're really fattening up SL & Linden Labs for sale, please don't sell it to Murdoch. kthxbye.

Agree with Desmond but the one bit you forgot to add is that the community will get smaller and smaller over time until it completely dwindles away or SL decides they can't afford to lose money anymore. Exact same story for every over online game.

No problem, neighbor.

That is the funniest thing I've read in the forums in a month. Thank you!

Also, I think SL could have bucked the trend of the games that fade over time if when new users came in, they could have an easier understanding of what it's all about sooner, a smoother transition into the world, and performance that wouldn't get people (like a coworker of mine) so frustrated, they gave up before they even left orientation island.

I vote for buyers because the supply of lag won't run out.