Where is the water?

I just spent a not insignifcant amount of REAL moeny to buy a property that was bordered on one side by ocean. I get there today and find it has been filled in with land. WTF is up with that? Is this some kind of SL racket. I am very pissed.

I visited the site several times, and there was no indication that this was going to happen. I feel totally ripped off.

Land in Second Life can change in a flash. Generally speaking, there is no reason to think that any parcel outside of your control will stay the same from one day to the next.

In some cases you might be in a privately owned sim where the users have land shaping power but are supposed to maintain a certain theme, or in some cases the users are suppoed to maintain a waterway along the property line. If that's the case, it should have said so in the covenant. In a case like that you might be able to speaking to your landlord and get something done about it.


You could just wait and see what happens or try to find a better place and move.

Actually, it could have been that the OP bought land at the edge of the current continent, and a new sim was added next door.

Ametrine, could you move into the area where the water was before the land was put there?

When people buy waterfront property, I always remind them that "If you want to control the view, own the view." If some other Av owns the water your property is in front of, they can build something there at any time to block your view. If you're lucky, they'll just build a floating platform or dock and a boat or two. Frequently, however, they build some artificial land (if they can't just terraform it to raise the land above water level anyway) and put up a 3-story "waterfront" club with 40 camping chairs.

If Linden Maintenance owns the land and it is clearly a channel (e.g. a strip of water running down the center of the river or in one side of a sim and out another) I do consider it unlikely that that will be converted--but it is theoretically possible (a good gamble if you ask me). If your land comes to an abrupt end above sea level with a 90-degree drop-off at the edge of a sin, I consider it a virtual guarantee that more land will soon be added there in continuation with yours.

My favorite way to own oceanfront property is to own my land and the water all the way out to the sim edge. Then even if LL adds land next to my sim, I know I'll still be waterfront at least.

I see many land barons buying edge-of-continent sims and describing the land as "waterfront," when I believe they know full well it is only "waterfront" for a few days until the next sim is added. Making it even more unethical, many of them will then carve up the sim but leave the description unchanged, so that parcels far from the water are still described as "waterfront." There remain numerous parcels of land in landlocked sims described as "waterfront."

This couldn't be the missing water bug that can be resolved by clicking on region/estate in your world menu could it?

If you haven't done that, you might want to try it.

Glad to know thats a known issue. I been killing myself trying to figure out why half the time we have Venice with empty canals LOL.

This reminds me of another issue that sprung up lately with graphics. I've seen where the ocean can refuse to render in a sim. Even my home estate. You can walk below water level and it turns murky but there is no water. O.o

I'm finding this almost compulsory now. I don't think any sim I've been in lately draws the water without a kick in the butt! ... sorry for the pun ... no I'm not!

Ocean in SL is only "real" ocean if it is supported by a sim (ie, you can fly out over the ocean).

"Ocean" which appears beyond the edge of the map isn't real ocean, it's just void space, and can be filled in at any time. AFAIK, land bordered by this type of ocean should not be described as "waterfront".

I'm sorry you got stung

I had that happen to me twice.

My parcel was on the edge of a sim, looking out onto an unbroken "sea". But there was really no sim there. I couldn't go past the edge of the sim into that "water", because it was just a void area, drawn as open water so I didn't see a blank empty space with nothing at all in it. That parcel lost the water access suddenly when a new sim got plunked down right next to it, added by the owner of my sim. Suddenly my "sea" was a flat grassy field. So much for "waterfront land".

Another time I had a parcel that was next to someone else's land, also just over a sim border. The other land owner had formed a pretty harbor there, and didn't mind if I occasionally rezzed a boat there and sailed out into the neighboring waterways, so I shaped my shoreline to match his, and put in a cute boat dock. A few weeks later, someone else owned the land, and it was filled in again. My dock now faced onto a narrow puddle at the edge of my parcel.

Bottom line: If you don't own it, someone else can change it, and you can't do anything about that. Period. The changed area in your case may not even have been within the control of the landowner that you bought your land from. They may have had no idea that would happen.

Thank you for all the responses. My bit of land was the last one for sale with a border on the water. I feel like they were just waiting for it to be sold to some sucker who thought they were getting a water view. Within hours, the new land was up. This seems very deceptive on the part of LL and really a snake oil tactic to get people to buy land. I would not have bought this parcel except for that water border. The new land is not owned by the person I bought my land from. It is owned by Governer Linden and is not for sale.

So I can't really blame the seller, though they may have known what was up, but really LL is profiting nicely from these tactics. I wonder how many angry letters they get every time they do this. It's just low.

I should have gotten a clue about this by just surveying the SL landscape. A "town" rife with gambling, prostitution, a various con games going on all the time. Not that I care much what others get up to in their virtual reality, but I should have taken a clue that LL is not really about making a quality place -- just keep signing people on and selling land to make more money in whatever way they can --They proudly boast about how many users and how much money is being generated on the front page. But really quantity is nothing to be proud of, it is quality that counts, and I know for me personally, the quality of the place just went down tremendously.

Unless you bought the entire sim at auction, the "they" to which you refer is NOT Linden Labs. LL employees are not lurking around the sim waiting for you to buy land and then yelling "Gotcha sucker!" Once the sim is sold, it's not within their control.

The previous owner of the land, IF they described it as waterfront, is the culprit. If no one, not even the previous land owner, described this land as waterfront, and you just *assumed* it was, then it's a damn shame but not the fault of Linden Labs or even the owner who put it up for sale.