First Land is no more

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/20/first-land-program-to-end/

I wonder if this will inpact land prices at all.

Well, I just read the comments on the blog. (Which are piling up) People are not happy; I am very surprised Linden Labs completely did away with the First Land system. I thought they were going to make it harder to make a profit off of First Land as the "Land Barons" are reported to be doing by so many. What is wrong with designating a piece of land to be First Land and giving it restrictions?
1) It cannot be sold for up to 30-90 days.
2) It cannot be sold for more than it is worth as First Land.
3) It can only be sold to new Premium members as First Land.
Is there not a way to put code into place to stop bots from buying land? I thought code was put into place to stop copybot and replicators. I was wondering if anyone knows how much it will now be for 512m of land. The blog states that the tier will still be free for this amount of land. The 300 stipend will also still be continued. To be honest I feel this act has made the Premium status less attractive.

This has to be the worst news I've heard from LL in a long time. I brought some good RL friends into SL who went premium and have spent alot of time looking for their first land. Now they're reduced to being Land-Baron fodder :\ I feel dirty for having been an accessory in Linden Lab's bait-and-switch tactic. I know there's alot of new premium accounts who are going to be very upset about this policy change. LL could have easily assigned a parcel of first land to each new premium account with a stipulation that it could not be sold for a minimum of 90 days. Goodness knows enough people debated it to death here in the forums and over at Second Citizen
This is a sad day for Second Life. I really feel sorry for all those new premium accounts I saw with their 'First Land Seeker' group tag which they held to in good faith.

Linden Labs, you have betrayed the new premiums who took the account description at your word in good faith. Shame on you.

"...Increasingly we have found that these cheap L$1 per meter parcels were not benefitting those people as intended. Because of the low price, they were being immediately sold, or bought via alts, purely for profit...."

Hogwash.

Then don't let alts buy First Land. Who they think they're talking to, idiots? It's a private enterprise, we get it, they want to make money, but how can they lie so blatantly on their official site? That's disgusting.

LL wants to make money the fastest way possible. They’re not doing this for any other reason. They think they’ve reached the point where their product can generate $$ by offering less benefits for more profit. They may be right, I don’t know, I’m an SL newbie and was waiting for First Land to play around with.

It doesn’t make sense to get into the complexities of real estate and valuation of holdings and economic factors, etc, etc. We’re all a bunch of people sitting in front of a monitor typing on a keyboard. The data and information going back and forth is irrelevant. This is not a ‘metaverse’, no one is living anywhere else other than in front of their PCs and the priority here for LL is how to put more $$ in their bank account.

That’s all.

I have a new premium account and I am totally disgusted by this decision without compensation.I wanted to buy land and build a house. if it were not for the friends i have made here I would probably quit playing. Just another Classic bait and switch. I am truly appalled by your treatment of us, and this adverse decision.

Actually I think this is a good move, since the first land just simply are not benefit anyone. And people always say LL could put in some measure to stop this and stop that by adding code. Come'on people, the grid is in a poor enough shape now.. do you really want to add more and more code to monitor everything in the system to make it worse?? Why don't just put away with the whole thing and let the market drive.

As for the Premium account, as in the LL blog said, I do feel it does provide value. I join in Nov with an annual subscription, it break down to about $6 month, 300L per week gave me about $4USD
and all I need to make is like 540L to break even my subscription. With a 512sqm tier free land, I could buy land, try to build a house and add value to it and make a few hundreds L$ profit out of it every month, then I am break-even! or I could rent out part of my land to store. It's only limited to your imagination.

Another new premium member here, I was absolutely gutted to hear this news. I have been checking every day, sometimes every 5 minutes, for either First Land or ANY mainland land available at under $L10/m2. I hope that land prices come down soon, because not many new members can afford to shell out these ridiculous amounts to own their own land.

I really have no idea why I would keep my premium membership.

Elli

I agree it is good value..that's not the point though...many people signed up in order to get first land and now they're going to feel stiffed....rightfully so imho.

Maybe LL should have carried on stringing them along, letting them pay their premium membership believing they would get first land if they kept looking, all the while more and more people joined also expecting to get first land. That sounds much fairer to me.

Doesn't sound fairer to me.....sarcasm?

Noooooo.... I'm never sarcastic!

I absolutely agree, that the Premium membership would still proved value, but... only to someone who had planned to purchase L$, or to purchase land at regular rates.

But, the only reason I upgraded to Premium was for the opportunity to get First Land. The stipend is worthless to me, because I never planned to purchase L$ with USD -- and now I feel that I have been tricked into purchasing L$ that I didn't want. The free 512 m^2 tier is also worthless, because I was going to use that tier with First Land, which no longer exists.

I assume that the Terms of Service probably has a clause that they can change anything they want, with no recourse to the user for a refund of premium fees, for cancellation of membership?

All around the world we hear about "The Great (insert country name here) Dream" of home/land ownership.
In recent times, the price of land around the world has risen dramatically, pushing once affordable land out of reach of ordinary folk.
In desperation they buy and find interest rates (read tier) has risen. They lose again.
It seems it is no different in virtual life.

Having a stake in that dream is (or was) the reason many people joined SL because of the impossibility to get it in RL. SL's aim was to reflect RL, Now it is done.

The last bastion that was the incentive for new users has gone and with it will go many users. A US dollar buys about 270 odd lindens 'in the US' over here (Oz) a dollar buys about 210, somewhere else their currency buys a very lot less.

These are the "potential" customers LL will lose, not the well off. I think it will close the gate for a lot of people around the world who might have had a chance to get in on the act and create a niche for the future which will be ,something like, second life.

My guess is that land prices will not come down much and will rise again in the future just like RL. Remember the saying, "You can't lose on bricks and mortar"? It still holds true.

Here is the truth... they can take away firstland, stipend and any other perks from the premium account... BUT people will continue to get premium accounts because people want to OWN land. It is the only way to do so. Sure, you can rent from someone, but then you don't really own it. Just like in RL. People will always have the psychological need to "own" rather than "rent". LL knows this.

It'll be interesting to see how many people go premium in the future. But clearly, the First Land program wasn't doing anyone any good at all.

Meanwhile all the land barons had to do was wring their greedy little hands, keep flipping and snatching up what's left at a decent price and repricing it up, knowing sooner or later those people looking for first land would give up and come running, forced to pay because they wanted to make at least something out of their premium.

At least one land baron had the decency to take partial responsability for the erroding of first land on the blog. Maybe you should wait and see how a drop in premium accounts will affect your business before gloating.

The problem with that is that it suddenly got a whole steeper to make that step. Even with a shortage of first land for months, the literally dozens and dozens of posts on the forums alone showed that new people were ready to commit to a monthly payment, but not a initial rather high land price on top of that.

Those who decided not to wait, eventually gave up and did buy at the normal rate, but there was still a transition there. I wouldn't say that if there had been no first land allusion they would have ended up doing the exact same thing.

First land is a step towards tiering up as well (or abandoning it and going with a rental for that matter). I don't think a whole lot of people can really grasp of how big 512m² or what they can do with 117 prims, and I do know quite a few who after hours to days to weeks of getting their first land decided it just won't do and bought more land, which they obviously had to do at the going rate, but it was all a gradual progres.

What would be fair would for LL decide to not make this change reteroactive. Allow existing Premium account holders who are eligible for First Land to purchase it. Make sufficient land available for them to do so. Close the program to new Premium account holders. That would be fair. LL's abrupt change today is so manifestly unfair (not to mention bordering on a deceptive trade practice) as to make me think it was not examined at the higher levels of the company.

This is a disappointing failure of Linden Lab. Linden Lab can no longer control or hold accountable abusers of its policy. Rather than spend time and effort to fix a problem, Linden Lab turns tail and runs away.

There is no longer a benefit for newly created premium accounts. There is no reason to upgrade. The Linden Lab response is B.S. Yes, the account will pay for itself... if you don't buy land. But in that case, you're trading ~US$10/month for ~US$5 worth of L$. However, if you choose to buy land, at current rates (which will likely rise), you should expect to spend a one-time fee of ~US$50 for 512sqm/land!

Finally, I'd like to apologize to the nice person who called Live Help over the weekend to ask about First Land and the value of being a premium account. She was very excited about SL, and eager to get her first plot of land. However, she was willing to be patient and wait for genuine First Land to appear, because non-first land was way too expensive. After today's annoucement, everything I told her was wrong.

I assume anyone who upgraded to premium prior to this announcement would, by law, be entitled to their cheap first land plot? Otherwise, would false advertisement apply here?

You've been around since at least July, 2005 and you really think this decision was not examined by higher levels of the company? How much evidence do you need to see it for what it is?

This came directly from the higher levels...........dictated by them. It's damned obvious to me that management in Linden Labs don't care anything at all about the average resident of SL. In fact I actually think they don't even like us........we are a hinderence to their dream of creating some "metaverse". We are their test bed.......fodder that can be wasted as long as they get to do as they please and use our money to finance it. But we've become of next to no value now that they have multi-million dollar corporations buying in.

We all were lied to.........not just the new premium members. All of us. And it was no accident either.

It was Inevitable Given the Number of complaints we see on these Forums every week about people Abusing the system.

Angel.

So you "fix" it by eliminating it? The abuse of the system could be fixed........but they did not to make the effort and obviously don't give a rat's butt about fixing anything. Just drop it so it's not a "problem" anymore.

That's the way all good businesses do it.........until they cease to be a business anymore.

No, LL did not end the FL offer because it was being abused, which it was.

It was being abused with their knowledge, their tolerance, their indifference, their design and an absolute prediction of it happening.

This is a 100% controlled environment in terms of resources available for play. There is no random and unpredictable factor in effect. They may have been caught by surprise when this FL abuse started happening on such a scale but still, it was completely within their ability to control, manage and stomp out if they wanted.

The blog entry announcing the end of the FL program is a pathetic attempt at an excuse and a blatant display of arrogance. If anyone ever programmed an IF...THEN...ELSE statement they know how easy it is to stop the FL flipping situation. To pretend they were worried about the FL being abused is... flippant in and of itself.

My take on this is that LL is considering itself part of the Google types and the YouTube types and the handful of corporations in hi-tech content creation that generated multi million $ for their owners in record time and they're doing what they think will generate the most return for them as soon as possible so they can join the ranks of the hi-tech worshiped. In this case it's to get rid of the newbies who had an expectation of holding something that is more valuable to LL than L$1/sqm. It can't get any simpler than that.

It's their product, they can do whatever they want with it, but they could at least have some respect for their customers and announce the end of the offer in a more decent manner and not that "effective immediately" BS they're pulling.

The only immediate thing happening was the auctioning of the new sims to the protected pool of SL landsharks, but apparently their exploitation is preferred by LL because it comes with a substantially greater amount of hard cash than new players with a monthly subscription.

Profiteering is not virtual and they don't have to deny it.

I think we all agree that things needed to be changed in this program, but to end it all together without any notice or caring for what people think....

It is just sad...

I don't know why everyone seems to know what is able to be fixed and what is not...
But it seems there is a lot of people just think that something go wrong YOU CAN JUST GO FIX IT.

As a RL Software Developer, I know that it's is not true that everything can be fixed. You have to evaluate what is the best cost/benefit for your product and put priority on what to fix. Sometimes it just better to drop a features than just to fix it because the benefit of fixing it doesn't return enough to justify.

Form my point of view, LL priority is to provide a better and stable of environment for the general user instead of focus on attract new premium user. Given the sign-up rate of last few months, they probably figure out that even a without first land the could attract enough premium user.

Unless you can make enough users to stop playing SL, LL will continue the way how they to do business, just like Microsoft, a lot of people hate them but they still have 80% of the Desktop OS market.

No, "I" don't Fix it, Nor did i Condone, Nor Condemn LL'a actions, what i stated is a simple Fact.
I could see it Coming, Given LL's General Propensity to take the least complicated path to rectify a Given Problem. We've seen it done with Other Issues, so it seemed Inevitable that the Same mechanism would be applied here.
People here and in Other Forums, and Meetings Kept Demanding that something be done about the Abuses of the First Land system. They kept the pressure up, and Linden Labs Did something about the problem. It isn't an ideal solution by any means, but it certainly Caters to the Demands of "Do Something NOW!!!"

If you want my Opinion on it Now, My Opinion is, Yes, this is Very Unfair to those new persons who wanted in on thier First land, especially the ones who have been Trying to find it for Months. I Think LL should Make a Last Batch of "First Land" (Possibly on a Few New designated Sims) available to Anyone who created a New Premium account Before the date of the Discontinuation of the First Land Program. But, Pardon me if i Choose to Lay the Blame for this whole Fiasco at the Doors of those who Caused it. The Greedy Land Barons. LL Only Dealt with the Problem, the Land Traders Caused it.

Jack:

I have only a Little Training in Programming, and I Understand what you have said, and I've been saying the Same thing on these threads where they take up the "Just Fix It!" Chant. The problem is, Most people Think Knowing the front end of a Computer is Knowing Everything about a Computer system. They want Quick Fixes for something for which Quick Fixes can cause More Damage than the problems they are addressing.

Angel.