What's the typical hammer price for a mainland sim? Are they value for non-resale?

I've been thinking about the Island price increase and wondering that perhaps (gasp) it's not all to do with the big evil corporations (although they probably bear the blame for a part of it)..

Under the new scheme islands will be tiered at $295. Since $295 / 4 is $73 or around $75, that essentially means they're being tiered as if the tier discount progression had halted at the $75 / 1/4sim level. Since there seem to be quite a few sims that are split between 3-4 people, it's entirely possible that this was intended to allow LL to retain the same tier payment when a person moves from mainland to a shared island.

As a question to anyone who's owned half a sim or more on the mainland, for reasons other than resale: is there a substantial value loss from not having access to full terraform and Estate Tools at that point?

The other issue is the upfront cost, which is about L$7/sqm at the current exchange rate - what was the typical hammer price for a mainland sim? I know land often went for L$5 to L$6.5 and I can see an auction getting to the equivalent of L$7 as a result of barons bidding..

I can only tell you what our family experienced. We had just a bit more than half a mainland sim before we bought Dragon Isle.

1. Estate tools rock for figuring out exactly which objects are causing the most lag. You can pull up a list of the script times for every object on the island which lets you exactly pinpoint problems.

2. Not having neighbors seriously cuts down on lag problems. No draw distance related lag from whats visible in other sims. No Child Agent lag from the party in the next sim. etc.

3. Auctions for Islands do often go up to $1100-$1200. So the difference in initial cost prior to the recent price increase was negliable. Time will tell if mainland auctions will go up in keeping with new island pricing.

4. It is not safe to assume that mainland tier on the sim size level will not in the future go up to match island fees.

Hope this helps

Thanks for replying Paul!

I know that mainland tier isn't guaranteed not to increase, but I was thinking in terms of how the values arrange right now. At the moment if you draw out a chart of tier (just tier) comparing mainland prices to the new island prices, islands are cheaper (= less valuable) up until a 1/4 sim, after which they're more expensive (= more valuable). (Under the old system island tier was always cheaper.)

So I was wondering if there really is, in practice, a value threshold at that point? The most I've ever held on mainland was a 1/4 sim, but it was split between several parcels, so I'm not sure how it would turn out. Certainly owning bigger amounts of land steadily increases the chance you'll have a sim edge border, and increases the probability that when you expand, you're going to need a new sim to do it in. But I was wondering if there were other factors involved, such as the bigger land areas being harder to manage without the estate tools, or the probability of an awkward baked terrain feature showing up on your land increasing if you owned a lot of mainland.

The price of mainland sims varies a lot depending on what it is. Flat inland areas typically go for 1000-1050, waterfront land with interesting topography easily can go over 1600.

It can be extremely frustrating not having estate tools on the mainland.

Prices are about 1000- 1200 US$ at auction.

Plot expansion can be difficult, there are often little parcels not yours in a sim and terraform can be a nightmare.

Having said all that. Even before the price increase, I would not have owned a private island over an available mainland area.

The very nature of the frustration makes it a creative challenge.

Land values, The very fact that you can split or join (without the covenant) makes it much easier to divest unwanted land, be that in small 512 - 4096 parcels or in larger chunks and in general terms the larger plot (over 1/2 sim) is worth more when split into smaller peices down from 8192 to 4096, thereafter the marginal difference is again the smaller pieces become less valuable.

Other considerations on the mainland, which don't necessarily apply to PI are edge of world, water access, protected land and of course land texture and profile, all of which impact on land value, but may also have a detrimental effect on the actual use of the land.

The biggest issue, is use of land by other sim owners. It only takes a 4000 odd sqm to get away from you and you could find yourself in a club or casino sim, with no access due to the sim being constantly full.

As far as buying additional land on the sim to expand. Not a defninate of course, but there is quite alot of movement and plots do come up pretty regularly on many sims.

The key piece of advice I would offer if you are looking at a large piece of a sim and not the whole sim is 'Check the neighbours' Try to get a perspective on what may happen in the future, difficult to do, but you can at least give yourself half a chance.

You make a good point. I and my friends did exactly as you describe when we were looking for land at the same time - we teamed up and got an island.

This points out a new negative consequence of the island price hikes. It discourages groups of friends from buying an island together and living happily in their own community.

I can understand LL wanting to raise money money. Heck, they might not even have a choice about it, the venture capitalists might be demanding it. Problem is that increasing tier on islands is going to either harm or kill many community-lead projects... and you've just helped explain why (it makes 3-4 person community land holdings less likely to form an island community).

What we really need is some OTHER workable proposal for how LL could raise money that doesn't involve damaging the community.

Speaking for myself and others who have "natural wonders" projects, the terraformability is a huge issue. Terraformable land is very limited on the mainland and when large chunks of it do become available, rellers price it excessively high (and then they end up sitting on it for months only to subsequently lower the price...) Right now a huge portion of Maroon is up for sale, but at $20 sqm. Anyone with that large of a project who needs terraformable land is going to buy a sim at around $6 sqm where they can control the land textures as well as have full terraformability and have all the estate tools at their disposal.

Had all that land in Maroon been priced affordably, I would likely have grabbed it and stayed on the mainland instead of buying a sim last week, but it is what it is. When estate prices rise next week the calculations will change, but right now:

Maroon 3/4 of a sim tier: $195 purchase price: over $900,000L from your local land baron

Estate sim full sim tier: $195 purchase price: around $350,000L from LL.

So, right now the math is strongly in favor of estate sims.

This was exactly why I was investigating this. I know that Philip said to Reuters that when a person goes to an island, off the mainland, "the community loses out a bit". I thought this was quite ironic because from what I've seen, very many islands are communities. Even the islands which are named after businesses are often communities of sellers where one of them has a famous name and has been happy to use it to pull in traffic for the others.

Where community doesn't work is on the mainland, because you can't be sure to be next to your friends, and you can't reject anyone. Now I'm all in favour of inclusion, but a community can't really work if rejection isn't even an option - well, there's a document someone wrote called Geek Social Fallacies that discusses that much better.

The point is, I could very well see Linden Labs saying, "if people are getting together in 4's and buying islands, they get a big boost from the fact they get extra powers and their own community, so why do they need cheaper tier too?"

Under the old pricing plan, $75/month for 4 people would not just pay your share of the tier, it would also pay off the island downpayment within 12 months, which is a pretty big bonus. So again, I could have seen LL setting the price of an island equal to that which a non-land-dealer resident would have to pay from a land dealer for a similar amount of mainland but from what I can see it's higher - either that or the land dealers are now bumping their prices.

I owned 90% of a mainland sim until I relocated to an island (only one other land owner without much traffic). Lag is no issue anymore; the mainland sim started to noticably lag when only 5 people were around. It even lagged when no one was around but the adjoining sim had lots of visitors. Now I barely notice 15 visitors at once. I'm also rid of all the skyscrapers, rotating logos and flashing shop signs in adjacent sims, and the +-4 meter landscaping limit. Selling the mainland parcels (I had an additional 8192 sqm in another sim) already paid for the setup fee.

If I consider the administrative tools in addition, I can see that islands really offer a lot more value than mainland. And as your calculation example shows, the future island tier isn't really higher than a mainland sim pieced together by 4 land owners.

Yup. Few people have the $ or movtivation to get an island just for themselves. So, the logical thing is to sub-let it. Who do you sub-let it to? Well, your friends with similar interests, to form a protected, cohesive community.
Try doing that on the mainland... someone can buy the parcel next door and ruin your whole day.

It's at : http://sean.chittenden.org/humor/www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html - or at least I think that's it.
It's an interesting document, I'm reading it now!


And the residents would reply :
1) Because mainland has 'tiers', and isn't charged fairly with a flat fee per meter, as it should be.
2) Because it's the only way to get any real security in SL - parcel bans (until recently) were laughably ineffective. Remember the time you could just float 100m or so above them and drop bombs on people still in the parcel, even after they banned you? It was a joke. An absolute joke. Estate-level banning isn't perfect (landmarks bypass it and let you teleport there, even if you are locked in a corner on arrival) but it's MUCH better.
3) Because we want to have a real community rather than just a bunch of people who happen to live together. We want to have our own rules for our own space and have members of OUR community, not distant Lindens, enforcing the rules of our space.

There's always a counter argument to everything, I find. Not saying they're always good, but they almost always exist.

Not sure about Land Dealers bumping their prices. Perhaps they are having to in order to stay competitive what with all the sims being bought and sub-rented right now?

Perhaps LL know each price increase is major drama, so they want to avoid having them often...

Sure. But for having an island, and getting this extra security and community control, you should pay less tier? Not even the same amount, but less? I mean, thinking about it that way it, the increase starts to make a lot more sense to me.