World gone mad!!! & a few questions about land

Hello, I’ve not played SL for about 18 months and, WOW what a change! Not sure if it’s a change for the better, but the world and its residents are so different to the last time I properly visited. Anywho, I have a few questions that I’m sure you knowledgeable people can answer.

1)What is the average price to rent 10000 sqm of land on a class 5 server for a commercial project? Is it just a monthly/weekly payment to the owner? Does it affect my teir?

2)Same question as above but for 10000 sqm for residential? Any price difference generally

3) I can see the obvious advantages to rental away form the mainland, i.e. less lag, zoneing to keep sims nice and shiny but are there any real disadvantages to rental?

4) Please give a brief explanation of renting on private sims/islands. I assume you couldn’t buy a parcel from the owner of a private island. Do owners even rent lots out on private islands? What is the acceptable average price to rent land on a private island to use for commercial purposes

6)The world is really really laggy for me now. I have a top of the range PC and 10 MB connection so pretty sure it’s server side. What would be my best option for obtaining land (buy or rent) to set up a business that would be lag free?. Require a reasonably large plot and cannot afford to buy my own island or private sim.

7)For residents who have been around since 2005 what are the major changes that have taken place in SL? I was active for 6 months so had a good grasp of the game. Already discovered the massive increase in land prices so no need to cover that. Maybe list the 5 events that have impacted SL the most over the last 18 months for better or for worse.

Thanks in advance for your time and help - Swobbly

Welcome back.




Time Travel

Short of that - do your work when the online populaton is under 25k. Its more like the old days then.

Im not sure its at all land related - Basically Lag gets extremely bad when the population goes over 35k. When the population is low the world seems a lot like it did in 2005 lag wise.




Well first the Rescent Developments -

1) Restrictions on Sexual Ageplay - It can no longer come up in anything others can see (profiles, groups, parcels, ads). Pretty much like Nazi Icongraphy, KKK, etc. have always been, Any Ageplayers are required to do it in private seclusion.

2) Restriction on Casino Advertizing - though Linden Labs seems very slow to enforce this one, its no longer allowed to advertize Gambling, including Parcel names and Descriptions

3) No One with any say is even willing to even play lip service to you having any Privacy any more. Theres a lot of support for that sentiment among some the more Technical minded of residents who want Second Life to just be a 3d Web. Those of us who support privacy are considered deluded and worse.



4) Automated Land Swooping. Gone are the days when Humans would obsessively click on the land search in an effort to get an extremely underpriced or mistakenly priced parcel and Quickly teleport it and buy it before anyone could stop them.

They have been replaced by Land Flipping Landbots - which do this job with an efficiency no human could begin to match. The Landbot can swoop your land faster than you even realize its there, and can reprice it and move onto the next plot without even an automated villian laugh.

5) Even more automated fun. Bots are popping up with more and more "fun" functions. Like scanning all your rezzed Belongings and listing the ones for sale on a third party site, or automtatically inviting you to groups for third party sites with lists.

6) Removal of Ratings. But thats okay LL is offically endorsing third party sites which either organize gossip or Shared Ban lists.

7) Land prices have gone through the roof. Some blame landbots. First Land is also no more. Anyhow, Land is more than double its once fairly consistant value.

Less Recent Developments -

1) Removal of Dwell - Dwell payments are gone. Traffic is still gamed though, to an Art like never before. People have multiple alts for this purpose. The Camper Zombies remain permanently logged in to collect a handful of lindens an hour. Theres even reports of Chinese Camper Zombie server farms.

2) Unverifed accounts - on the infamous 06/06/06 Linden Labs dropped the verification requirements and annyone and their brother (literally) could create an account with no payment details at all. This has led to huge numbers of signups. As well as even huger numbers of Alt Accounts.

3) Land controls based on Account status. You now can control access to your land based on whether someone is Verfied or not, due to concerns about age of non verifieds and Griefers.

4) Reductions in Stipend. the 50L stipend was removed for Basic accounts created after the Unverifed mess started. The Premium Stipend has been reduced twice from the 500L to 400L to 300L. Those who remained Premium dont lose their old ammount however as long as service is uninterupted.

5) Loss of Innocence - Somewhere along the way some people like myself became much more jaded about the way many things dont seem to be getting better. Some of this might be reversed perhaps if there were more people who saw Second Life as a Virtual World and Community and less saw it as a 3D Web Prototype only useful to make money.

Im sure I missed some things, good and bad, but that should help catch you up to speed.

Average price. . .varies, but up to about 4k sqm, you'd pay about the same as you would pay the lindens in tier. After that, the profit margins decrease, so the prices tend to go up. If you are renting, it wouldn't affect your tier. Island owners have a variety of buy and pay "tier" or rent to own or just pay rental equivalent to tier.



Like I said above. . .prices are set by the owner. Not much difference that I've observed in residential versus commercial.



The reason why I like mainland is kind of moot in a world of instant transportation--you can walk or fly to other sims. Can't get off an island without TP.



I can only talk about the one I had for a while. I bought land from another player, but before I could do that, I had to check a box that I'd read the covenant, which told me I had to go to a web site and sign up for "tier" before I could do anything (that is, sell it) with the land. The sim owner came by and set up a rental box which I paid a not inconsiderable sum of lindens to each week. I COULD have opted for deductions through Paypal, but elected not to.

It was not a bad arrangement. Tho, I didn't set auto return to my land, and one night while I was not around, some griefer left loud obnoxious objects scattered about, which prompted the islands concierge to come by and clean it up--charging me L1K for the "service call" Frankly, I considered that meddlesome and usurous, tho I'll admit the covenant DID urge me to set autoreturn.

When I finally sold the land, I had to make sure the purchaser understood that it was necessary to go to the web site and sign up for tier. She didn't do that and that caused issues with my ex landlord when the land immediately changed hands. I'm glad it occurred to me to save the IM log to a notecard.

"Owning" that property didn't affect my linden tier at all.



When I started playing just about a year ago, there were typically 6k or 7k people on during prime time. 20K people logged in for the first time New Years day, and, we've since passed 30k and hit 40k--tho only once from what I hear. If you are setting up a business, your best option would probably be a commercial island with property for rent. But pay a visit during prime time



I'll take a stab at this one, even tho I've only been here for a year

There have been a HUGE influx of new players in the past 6 months or so. (I count it as beginning when a certain well known mega land baron announced that "she" had made/earned one million real american dollars trading "land" that only existed as a concept on some server farm. That seems to me to be the time land prices went crazy.

For better or worse, LL has released the source code to the viewer. There is also a project that has apparently reverse engineered at least some of the code to create zombie "bots" that do things like dominate camping chairs, buy land set below market value and set it for resale quicker than a human can react, and catalog any rezzed items that may be set for sale, anywhere in game.

LL claims to be making a lot of "back end" changes from proprietary code, to more mature and stable industry standard equivalents. Whatever they're doing, I feel they ARE making some progress, since I KNOW the game I started playing a year ago would not be able to handle 30k people logged on at once--which is typical now.

LL has eliminated dwell payments, cut the stipend on premium accounts from L500 to L300, and eliminated it altogether on basic accounts. Accounts no longer need to be verified with a credit card. LL claims this allows foreign players w/o access to credit cards to participate. First land is gone due to the abuse that began when prices went crazy.

Certain sections of the forum are gone. Seems to be those that tended to be most critical of LL and SL, or took the time of LL employees to tend to. Live help is going away, if it's not gone already.

LL seems to be backing away from gambling. At least, they won't allow references to gambling in advertising. They maintain that it's your responsibility to obey the laws of your country.

Support seems to be suffering. A LOT. it's harder and harder to get a linden to respond to any sort of help request. At least, that's been my experience.

More players of languages other than english. if you are running a business, you'll want a translator.

Between bots, grid lag, and bugs, there seems to be more ways, by accident or design, for "bad things" to happen. In the forums, you'll find dozens of posts from people who've had land bought out from under them because they were clumsy or neglectful in setting the sale parameters; people who've had big ticket inventory items bought because it happened to be accidentally set for sale. Inventory gets lost in sim crashes and transfers all the time. I haven't experienced much of that. I suspect that at least some of it depends on the quality of your computer and internet connection. YMMV.

Hope that answers your questions.

In self defense, is there a script we can use to scan all of our rezzed stuff for things that are for sale?

I beleive there is Scan Foo from Crystalshard which will do that.

Of course since the bot is going to scan you, whether you agree or not you can just go to the website and look up what items you have "for sale" on it.

I think we have another somewhat significant change expected on Wednesday - Ratings are due to vanish completely.

-Atashi

Thanks for the info! I picked up a copy of Scan Foo.

You can go to search.sheeplabs.com and do a search for your SL name--Along with all your alts, and if you like, your friends. That will tell you what you have for sale that's rezzed.

There's also a link to place where you can opt out of the program completely.

Every day I get more and more convinced that when things start straining, they break in Texas quicker than in California. So my advice would be to find land on a sim hosted in Cali. Then when people are clamouring over failed rez, failed transactions, failed TPs, you'll still be happily uploading, buying, rezzing.

And the removal of Live Help/Help Request .

So to summarise, in the last 18 months pretty much everything has turned to shit!

Did you hear Weird Al Yankovitch's mother died?

You forgot an important update to the Client..... wait for it..... we now have tear off menus , wasn't it worth coming back??

I also think TX is less stable than CA but don't have any proof. Just sorta seems that way.

Problem is that LL can (and has in the past) shuffle around which server a sim is on. Just because a sim is located on a server in CA today doesn't mean that it'll be there tomorrow..

Well, Collete was first to post and after reading her thoughts I am pretty aprehensive about reinvesting my money back into SL. Carry on reading the rest of the thread and Im finding it hard to pick out the improvments that SL has made over the last 18 months. LL seem to have introduced a few new tools such as convenants and improved the way groups work etc and they have added a few new features i notice such as local lighting and flexi prims. But these are all dwarfed when compared to some of the problems and issues you have mentioned. I also cannot really see the benefit of being a premium member again when I could accomplish my goals as a renter. To be honest, it was the massive population increase and the virtual goldrush as reported in the media that has enticed me back. But its apparent from what I've learnt the last few days that LL has not kept up with influx of new players and that the grid and is struggling. I am also concerend that they have release the source code for the viewer which has enabled the rise of the bots, although I suppose that was inevitable and would have happened evenetually even without source code, saying that, i suppose it has worked out well for firefox.

So thanks for your comments. i was pretty much ready to invest a fair few hundred dollars back onto the game straight away, but now I wont, I will hang around a bit, get a feel for the world again and experience some of this issues for myself before finally making a descision.

Thanks allot!

Being careful about investing hundreds of dollars is a good idea.

The One good thing I and all the others left out that REALLY matters to business is all these new people equal more customers.

Somehow my own business' sales has remained relatively flat for over 18 months Even though the number of competitors in my niche (shapes) has SKYROCKETED. I can only attribute this to the increase in the overall population.

My business is really a new player type of thing, although mine are rarely the first shape(s) somone buys, Im still have a new player freindly type of product.

So on a lag situation, etc that you had asked about - no things are not better.

Business wise it very well could be much better.

As far as the ammount of money spent shopping - It has scaled fairly well from my personal observation. Many of my freinds who sell more lucritave content have done even better - Being able to open islands, etc. Due to consistant and growning saels.

There are definitely far more Private Island based businesses, etc. as additional circumstantial evidence.

porky sums it up in one nice chose word! it seems pretty bad these days.