Lack of First Land is killing SL for me

OK, I'm new to all of this. I've been teleporting around for about a week, learning to build in sandboxes, and maybe deciding that I want more than just the free membership. But now I just found out that "First Land" has been discontinued, so where is there any incentive to get a Premium membership now? I think LL is killing SL for newbies. (Yes, I know about the $1000L and $300L/week, but that isn't going to pay for land at the current rates)

Here is my problem. I'd like a small 512 plot of land. I'm willing to pay LL the $10US/month for a Premium account. I do NOT want to pay rental to someone else (who might leave the game or change the rules...I want land from LL that I can *own*). But the prices I'm seeing for 512 meters of land is just outrageous! As a Basic member, I don't have any L$. And I'm not about to pay >$100US for a small bit of virtual land.

The land search tools seem useless. There seems no way to distinguish between BUY vs RENT without visiting each property. The Search tools have no way to tell you how much the individual covenants really cost, so the cost figures in the Search tool are mostly worthless. The cheapest 512m2 plot I was able to find in two days of teleporting around that wasn't a rental was $30,000L, which is about $100US, which just seems outrageous to me.

From what I understand, the "First Land" used to be $1L/m2, so that would be $512L for the initial 512 m2 plot. This is well within the amount of $L that you get with the Premium account. But now that this is gone, I don't see how I will *ever* get any land in this game without paying *serious* real money.

It's sad to see something with so much potential as SL being ruined by greedy land barons and bots. I have seen a lot of potential in the past week, but I have also seen a bunch of bad and ugly stuff (and bugs, and performance issues, and broken Orientation and Help island stuff). All of this seems designed to kill the growth of SL and prevent it from becoming a huge success.

Maybe LL is happy with their current level of "success", or maybe they already have as many servers as they want to deal with and are already making enough money. But as someone who was really interested in giving SL a chance, I'm pretty disappointed now. If I've missed something obvious, let me know. Otherwise, I doubt I'll stick around very long, and I probably won't be recommending SL to anyone I know.

Kyler,

Your math is wrong. Many 512 plots are around $5500 or $20 USD.

Also you can weed out the rental plots by doing a search with the "for sale-mainland" tab selected in the land search window. IM me in-world if you need further help.

Kyler - it is a shame that first land has gone but it HAS gone.

You say that you are happy to pay the US$10 per month to be a premium member, and presumably you have a biggish computer and broadband connection to be able to play.

A 512m plot at todays prices is about US$20 - yes thats more the US$2 which it would have been with First Land - but is it really 'too much'.

Its how the game is today. Tomorrow who knows.

If the first chunk of land you buy works out you will want more and then you pay at the same rate to get it and pay tier as well.

In my view the costs are not excessive - no real point harking back to what was - it keeps changing anyway.

Sorry that you feel that you can't continue - but at least justify it in your mind fully rather than pretending perhaps that someone has stolen something from you - that just isn't true.

Hope you stick with it - it IS worth it.

This will get you a list of the cheapest small plots that are actually for sale, not just for rent.

1) Open the search window

2) Select the land sales tab

3) Where it says "All Types" in the top left, select "For Sale - Mainland"

4) Put a check in the "Price" checkbox and enter you top amount, maybe L$10000 (keep it low to avoid seeing large parcels)

5) Put a check in the "Area" checkbox and enter the smallest land you are willing to accept (512 is most people's minimum for a home, but I've made nice homes on as little as 240... and it's much cheaper!)

6) Click the "Search" button

7) Wish upon a lucky star that the databases are actually working today

When the results come up, click on the "L$/sq." column header to sort by price per meter (you may need to click again if it sorted the most expensive first)

Using this method, I usually come up with pages of cheap 512s. Well, at least the cheapest currently available... at the moment that is L$10.2/sq, or about L$5200 - L$5250.

Thanks for the responses (especially the details Ava). I didn't realize the difference that the Mainland search made (Yeah, I said I was new). I didn't know that it was only the islands where the land was all rented. Since I couldn't filter the rentals out, I was just randomly clicking on yellow for-sale plots in the map view and teleporting...that's where I found all of the high prices.

Once I filtered the search for Mainland only, and then sorted by price, I was able to find some more reasonable possibilities. I have no problem with $20 for a piece of land. I just wasn't able to find this price until now.

So, it's looking a bit better. But I'm still a bit worried about the future of SL with LL continuing to change their policies to make it harder and harder for new people to join. And making Premium Membership less desirable just seems like a bad business move. Seems like LL should be doing everything they can to encourage *more* people to upgrade their subscription.

I actually think I'll wait a bit longer to see if SL is really something I want to invest a lot of time and energy (and money) in. The mature content doesn't bother me (it's even amusing at times), but all of the campers and casino stuff bugs me. The "Popular" places search tab is basically worthless. I can tell it's going to take a lot of time to really find the fun places to hang out in SL. And I should probably wait on buying land until I have a better idea where I want to hang out.

Ava, I'm going to make a notecard of your explanation for future use. I wish I could have explained it that well, but I was tired.

Kyler, you are making a wise choice to wait and search around a bit. Maybe use these threads which list attractive sims as starting points:

/327/45/165669/1.html

/327/14/176949/1.html

Happy hunting!

Kyler,

Take your time looking for land and when you do find something you really want switch to premium then at the annual rate which is $6 per month but paid in a lump sum of $72. I have 5 premium accounts but they get either L$500 or L$400 per week so are in effect buying L$ for L$361/1 or L$288/1 where the best rate I have gotten on the LindeX lately was L$277/1. I sell all the excess L$ on th LindeX for effectively L$276/1 after the commission so actually make a small profit on those sales. At L$300 per week you are buying L$ for L$216/1 if you ignore the free 512 tier you get with the premium account but that 512 tier is worth $5 per month so you in effect get 1200 L$ for $1 every month when you own land.

Second land is reasonably cheap at the moment, if you can't afford $5200 for a block then chances are you can't afford $10US ($2660L) per month to be premium either

Try this land search site too it rocks try and get in a sim with as much water & road as possible because this means fewer neighbours so probably less lag.

http://www.sllandlist.com/

Also don't buy against the border of a sim if you plan to buy more land later because it gives you more sides to purchase that can be linked.

Kyler,

I always use the map when I search for land. That way I can look in the area that I prefer.

Open your map and tcik the box for land sales. All th eplots for sale will be in yellow. You can then click on the dollar sign to see their price.

So using the map , you can quickly find a location and price. If the two look like something that you're interested in, then TP to the area and check it out further.

Mark

I've had much better search results just typing in "512" without quotes with the All tab selected. The Land Search has been taken over by landsharks who mostly market cheap land with high tiers.

I don't understand your reluctance to rent. Yeah, I guess the landlord there can disappear but the tradeoff is that the private islands seem to have a higher quality offering and can be cheaper. Cheaper? Yes, beacause you can drop your premium membership.

I no longer pay $10/month to Linden, I pay $9/month to my landlord who gives me full use of my 1024sqft parcel. I can even terraform.

Zero tier.

And I don't see any ad farms.

Happy? You bet.

Wake

Although First Land was technically L$512 for 512sqm, what you have to bear in mind was that a) in practice it was almost impossible to actually get, so the price was moot (and that was before the current LandBot situation); and b) many people who got it wound up having to move fairly quickly because the plot was surrounded by everyone else's First Land, thus they had no guarantee whatsoever about the neighbours, and no guarantee of being able to expand if they wanted to.

The unavailability of land to the new or casual user is a major quality-of-life problem that I hope Linden Labs addresses soon. After addressing many other priority problems.

However, look at it this way when you buy your land. You can always re-sell it when you get tired of it. You lose money between the cash-in and cash-out rate. But, assuming that there isn't a huge land price fluctuation, if you pay $20 USD for your land, you can probably count on getting back about $17 USD when you decide you want to sell it.

Like purchasing land in Real Life, do a lot of homework before putting your money down.

I joined when First Land was still available, in practice as well as theory.

In retrospect, I probably should have bought the first parcel I spotted, then turned around and sold it for a profit. (Although I have never understood how a newbie doing this is an improvement over having a bot or land baron do the exact same thing, other than spreading the wealth of land abuse just a little bit farther afield.)

Truth is, I hated every parcel of First Land I saw. Even at the bargain rate, I couldn't work up any enthusiasm for a tiny plot sandwiched between casinos or other ugly builds.

So I never took advantage of the First Land option -- I went straight for land ownership of a 1024 parcel on a mountainside. I loved that bit of land and it made my first few months of SL a delight. Eventually I sold it to buy a much larger parcel, but I made a good profit.

To a large extent, SL is what you make of it, and I just don't see how losing the First Land option would have such a devastating impact on the whole experience. If you can't buy land you like, then you can easily rent something that is MUCH nicer than any First Land plot would ever have been.

I agree with the OP...there should be some 512's priced so that a new premium member with their shiny new $1000 L should be able to get land with that money...right now they can't Instead they will have to save for a good 3 or 4 months before they can get land...

He was not aware you could get land for $20 USD (see his second post in this thread). Even my six year old son can earn $20 in RL in a week if he sets his mind to it.

Or they can immediately start renting, which is a better option for newbies anyway. Renting gives you the chance to get acclimated to SL, define your interests, and figure out exactly what how much and what kind of land you need, if any.

I wanted a place to call my own where I could just to try on skins and clothes, if nothing else. Renting for the first few weeks was a great way to immediately gain a little privacy without committing myself to an expensive land purchase. For many residents, renting works perfectly well in the long term, too.

It does amaze me sometimes how some claim not being able to put any money into the game to buy stuff (as opposed to not WANTING to, which is more of a gameplay decision). If you can afford a machine new enough to run the program, and the braodband connection you can throw in 10 or 20 bucks every so often to buy some Lindens. Most of us are adults with jobs. For some it may take cutting back on Comic Books, Red Bull and McDonalds.

It's not a poverty thing though, it's a value thing.

Building your own scenes with Gary's Mod: US$9.99 forever.

Building your own personal space on MySpaces or FaceBook: free.

Playing a fighting game and also setting up your own house on Anarchy Online: free.

So US$20 plus $9.99 a month is always going to be a rather hard sell, unfortunately.

I agree with most things said so far. But let me point out, First Land IS needed at least as a transition for newbies so they get a feeling of land ownership and to establish a First Home. Yes, First Land farms were ugly and crowded at best, almost like a flea market. Regardless, LL should bring back First Land, by dedicating a small portion of every new sim to this. Sort of what large cities do in RL, by offering limited amounts of affordable housing for low income families. This First Land would only be able to be resold at the same price, and then only to those who have never owned land. I think this system would be simple to establish with our current tools. Unfortunately, LL has decided we're not worth the trouble.

That's a great idea, and really would stem the abuses that rendered First Land effectively dead before it was formally dropped.

Agreed, but the concept of value varies from person to person.

Gary's Mod? No idea what that is, of no value to me. Not interested in My Space or Facebook, again no value for me there. Anarchy Online? never heard of it.

So it's a personal thing. Value = enjoyment/resources invested (time and or money).
If Second Life doesn't offer much to a person, that's fine. but if it does draw you in, as with most things, you get back what you put in.

I've not only bought Premium for my main and alt, I've bought 8k of land, spent probably over a hundred US$ worth of pocket money over the past 6 months, and purchased a new computer system that would run SL well.

So the thought of throwing in $15-20 for some land just doesn't even register any more.

Mind you, I didn't start out this way. It was a gradual decline in my moral values, starting when I toked that first prim....

Wow, I never expected to get so many useful replies! Thanks to all.

I'll reconsider renting and take a look at what's available. I mainly didn't like the idea of the land owner going away and logging in one day to find my land gone. But I guess if I kept backups of my house and stuff, then I wouldn't really lose anything. And if I can rent 1024 for less than the Premium membership monthly fee, then it definitely is something to consider. The "Second Land" group looks interesting, since they also give the same $L300 a week that the Premium membership does.

I still stand by my original newbie argument, however. I think there are many ways the problems with "First Land" could be solved (some have been mentioned in this thread already). And I still think you'd retain a lot more people and get more Premium members if you just gave them a 512 plot of land, even with a cheap house on it. After all, if you are *inside* a house, then the neighbors are not as annoying (especially if the gambling halls disappear)

Think of the joy of a new Premium user getting a house and lot that they can actually use as a Home right away. Gives them a lot more incentive to start playing with building, or to go buy better furniture. Right now a newbie has to go find a Sandbox to even start playing with building. Let newbies get a nice start with it, and then later move into a better place on some island somewhere. (Yes, I know Help Island has a building area, but don't get me started on all of the problems with Help Island)

As I said, maybe LL doesn't *want* to attract more players. Maybe they are swamped as it is. But I can think of dozens of things LL could do to make SL more attractive to new players. I've heard some people call this a weed-out learning curve to get rid of the people who can't handle the rest of SL. I don't agree with that. If you want the world to grow, you need to make a world that is more helpful to new users. It's those new users who might someday go on to create one of the best sims in SL.

Anyway, sorry this got to be more of a rant. Because of my real-life job, I consider myself somewhat of an expert on MMORPGs, and am really intrigued by the possibilities in SL. But it's just so sad to see so many mistakes being made with new users. I hope it doesn't kill the long-term future of SL.

We are in a similar boat. I signed up went premium a weel later, rented for a month, spent 8500l on my property. Since January, I have put about $500 in to SL, not counting what I just spent on 2 Gigs of memory, the other day to improve it. From that, i have received countless hours of Fun and entertainment, made several friendships that are as satisfying as any in RL, and just enough frustration to keep it all in perspective. In my case, there is no question of value here.