A-Voiding The Issue

A glut of new mainland continents, islands at slashed prices, and now $250 perfect cybersex units surrounded by the void...

Void sims, or "open space sims" as the Lindens have taken to calling them lately to sound like they are competing with Opensimulator and Central Grid and other opensource projects, could well kill off the internal Second Life land market, and send the inworld economy spiralling further. The Lindens and the e-lite creators and Metaversati, the scripters and code kiddies and outworld bizes and Metanomics chaterati won't care. But everyone else should care because unless you have many diverse levels of easy entry to the market and easy entry to creative expression from amateur to professional, you don't have a sustainable world. You can visit RenFaire; you cannot live there.

All of this is coming to a head now due to the Void Sims -- which are having consequences that it is hard to tell were intended or not, given the black box that is Linden Lab.

For a long time, void sims were merely totally empty patches of water parked between sims to bridge continents and hold a view -- hence the term "void". In the newer continents in recent years, the Lindens stop putting in void sims -- why not sell a server and get tier off it instead of creating yet another free Governor Linden Protected Land sim?

It was Adam Zaius who figured out that he could put these things in and make really nice landscaped areas for his continents, double prim up some sims nearby, and then put these voids in front to serve as the waterfront or park. We noticed that he started putting down batches of them on the map, and it was Anshe who began to ask, hey, what's up? Does he have an inside special deal? He did in fact, and she demanded that deal from the Lindens, too -- and soon, the Lindens enabled anyone to be able to buy batches of void sims in packs of 4 if you owned islands -- this was about 2 years ago. They only had 1875 prims on them, and didn't work very well, not bearing up under script loading -- they were class 4s.

Then, class 5s were put out, Havoc 4 began to be tested, and it wasn't long before Anshe was the first to offer them with double the former prims at no extra cost -- 3750 -- because the Lindens suddenly increased the number and didn't charge more. Odd, that.

Then, the Lindens crashed land prices in April, after suffering a terrible month of less sales and hours, offering mainland sims for $750 opening bid (formerly $1250, and before that $1000); and offering islands for only $1000 (they had been $1695, and $1250 before that -- follow that pricing history to see that first the Lindens drained land barons of as much cash as they could muster, especially Anshe, then crashed the prices so that their land wasn't worth what it was).

Then they added the final blow: they flooded void sims into the market, now making them available for only $250 -- and now, you no longer had to have them in packs of 4, you could just buy one, as long as you were owner of an existing island. Enterprising land barons quickly bought huge bunches off their one island (you don't even have to place them right next to your island, but can put them anywhere), and flipped them, reselling them for complete estate controls to very eager buyers who didn't worry about the risk -- still not as great as people imagine -- that their island-owning friend would seize the land back, which of course he could at any moment.

Why eager? Because void sims are the perfect cybersex unit (uh, yes, I realize they are the perfect uh business prototyping tool as well). One prominent land baron calls them "humper bunkers". They have privacy -- wide open space all around. They can be totally surrounded with water, so that the rest of the land baron's continent isn't in your face, especially annoying if he allows security orbs or ban lines that bounce you around. The void sims now can handily compete with an 8192 or 16384 parcel, the old preferred cybersex unit (1875 and 3750 prims, respectively). That previous mid-to-high market for mainland and island rentals ensured land barons at least $16 profit, because you as a bulk owner paid tier to Linden of only about $25 on them, whereas Linden itself charged $40 to the individual user, so you could charge that much rent -- if not more -- in fact, you *could* charge more because people were saving on the monthly premium fee by renting from you.

At less than a cable bill or DSL line bill, the old $40 cybersex unit was very popular, but with huge increases in the price of prefabs, skins and even whores, the market could only welcome the fall of the cybersex unit price to $25 to enable content purchases.

BTW, this is one of the reasons the Lindens want to flatten tier -- why let land barons make a profit from their big jump between tier levels, when they could be capturing those customers away from land barons, now that they have a huge and largely automated customer service department).

Many people still blanch at the idea of spending a month's rent in real life on a simulated virtual piece of land, but $250 for an entire 65,336 island seems like merely a movie and an expensive dinner out for two. After that, they pay $75 in tier -- it's bearable to some, and many chop their void sim even further into quarters, keeping one end for themselves and renting out the other quadrants.

THEY WORK JUST FINE

But wait, you say. The Lindens say on their land portal site that these sims aren't meant for heavy use with builds and scripts? They are meant for light use? They aren't meant for rentals? Of course they are: the Lindens are selling them like hot cake to get tier from them because there is a huge market demand for them. They work fine. The Lindens cover themselves, but in reality, everyone on the Concierge list know that most of them don't seem to have problems, even when the average person puts boats, sex balls with numerous scripts, scripted houses and scripted security systems all over them -- which, they can now do LESS of, because they are completely alone with no neighbours or landlord and they can just shut the whole island off from teleports. If there were complaints -- the way there used to be bitter complaints about private islands back at the dawn of time when the Lindens first invented them, scaring off purchases -- we'd be hearing them, and they wouldn't be selling.

Rightasrain Rimbaud has figured that a lot of the supposed "new islands" being sold are actually people with single islands reverting them to 4 voids -- I would tend to agree, but it's only anecdotal evidence and we need the Lindens to provide more granulated statistics.

And with the price crashes in general, and the glut of mainland sims spawning new end users, it's the smart thing for any landlord to take an island, where he has to cope with people being next to each other and bitching about each other, even with builds under his rules, and chop it up into 4 humper bunkers so that no one ever has to see another human being except their mutual masturbation partner.

HUMPER BUNKERS

Contrary to what Philip has said a number of times, that most people glut out on cybersex and then get sick of it and turn to Zen, most people try cybersex, try some more, and then try it with 2 and 3 and 4 people, and then furries and Nekos and things with tentacles and masters with cages -- and they often have so many different alts and lives going, that they need to keep their lives very separate -- hence, the perfect cybersex unit.

There are so many humper bunkers on the market now, that even though a land baron has to pay $75 a month to Linden, many people are renting them, especially to friends, for only $76, a dollar above tier, or even below tier. (I have one for $19,500 a month or $71 if you are interested : ) They are swapping and reselling and reverting like hotcakes, bringing the number of islands up as follows, as RightasRain noted from the Statistics page:

3/31/2008 1,093.42
4/30/2008 1,193.01
5/31/2008 1,429.65 = 18,019 islands

Add a few thousand more for mainland -- which is about 15 percent of the entire land mass now, of which some 5 percent is likely Governor Linden land, and you get the idea.

PREMIUMS PLUMMETING

My question to Zee Linden was: what are the premium sign-ups now? The numbers were taken down off the website for several months after they plummeted under 100,000. They plumetted, the Lindens say, because they only offer L$300 a week in the stipend now and people can buy island parcels without premium accounts. They also plumetted, I could add, because of the 5800 people or more with severe billing problems who couldn't seem to pay the Lindens even with valid payment forms -- I don't know how many are resolved.

More to the point, they plumetted due to Windlight, crashing, and concurrency ceilings.

Today, the number stands at 88,000 -- it's now displaying if you dig into the raw Google docs -- which doesn't explain where all that glutted mainland went. Where did it go?! If there really were all these people buying the sims for US $750, and they even sat without bids, wouldn't see be up over 100,000 by now?

Guess not, because baby barons chopped them up and are still waiting to sell them. Some long-time barons began to scream and howl to the Lab as land sunk to $2/m.

I always watch Sarah Nerd's liquidation offer: it was $2.8/m last week, and nudged up to $3.7/today because finally Jack Linden turned off the land spigot. Likely too little, too late on that one, because many people, once they have the bolt of fear in them that their "investment" in a mainland sim or island can't be recouped even for cost due to a saturated market, are reluctant to take on the challenge.

RESIDENT 'INVESTMENTS'

Jack, for the first time, mentioned something about "residents' investments" in this post (!) -- by which I'll bet he does not really mean businesses, but end users expecting to be able to resell at cost (that has been impossible to do for many people who began SL during a huge land bubble in 2006-early 2007 when there were gadzillion sign-ups and huge amounts of advertising).

The mainland auction may be closed until July 1st, but who buys mainland? The land portal is doing the proverbial land office business in void sims; the Lindens, after whipsawing the land market and beating down the land barons for years has finally found the perfect unit for its product, and it can now hook many people who would have only spent $40 a month -- because it might take them $250 in the old days to buy an 8192 -- will now pay $250 for the entire island and pay $75 tier happily ever after. The Lindens' servers are no more strained; they put 4 of them on a server I believe and they seem to work fine.

All that's needed now to ensure the Lindens' bottom line but finish off the land baron class is for the Lindens to give up the requirement that void sims can only be purchased by those owning an island, and as there is no technical reason for this, they will likely drop that requirement. No doubt squadrons of socialists are now being trained in barcamps to drop the meme on the blogs and the forums that it is "evil" of land barons to go on "keeping the People in thrall to rents" when they could all own their own humper bumpers. All Power to the Humper Bunkers!

It will be interesting to see how well the grid does when the tens of thousands of islands begin to break up and turn into these 4-void unit sets -- because that is the next natural progression for Second Life.

WHITE FLIGHT

Over the years, I've watched how the dream of communitarian living has died due to the extremism of communitarian notions that everyone should "get to do WTF they want on their land". First, oldbies took their tier-free-for-life 4096s and strung together alts or formed small groups of very likeminded communities on the colour sims and places like Luskwood and Taber to try to create peace and order among the sandboxes.

Then people fled up into the sky from the mainland problems induced by Lindens' failure to install even a light form of zoning early on -- and to get privacy from the clueless gits that kept flying into their homes. When Lindens put in free accounts, more and people fled to the islands -- like suburban white flight -- when they began to face too many griefing incidents and ugly signs and ban lines. Now they are fleeing from island rentals, where, if they rented, they had to see other people next door, out to the humper bunkers, where they may never see a soul if they block entry. Hey, any more private than that, and you'll be back in real life!

Meanwhile, those still humping it out on mainland have the enhanced ability now to go to 4096 m2 with skyboxes, unlikely to be viewable even by the most persistent peeping Tom.

BOTS 'R US

I'm puzzled why RightasRain is concerned at the land market crashing or the increase in void sims, unless that leads less people to come to his PG sims, but he seems mainly bothered by the concurrency ceiling and the increase in bots.

Many people believe strongly there are 20-30 percent bots on concurrency log-ins. Lindens swear there is only 10 percent (BTW, that tells you that either a) they *can* tell a bot from a human being upon log-on or b) they can't, so it's a lose/lose, because if a) they can tell, they should license them in separate, paid accounts and c) if they can't tell, they need to revise their estimates upwards -- anybody standing in any infohub can usually see a stuck chorus of bots jangling around and they are on every major shop and club to infuse traffic.)

But more to the point, concurrency is "stuck". It is at a ceiling -- this is where Andrew Linden's throttling theory has to kick in -- you need a FIC, or you need very expensive land, or you need higher tier going to the same people on void sims -- *something* to prevent new aspirations, especially given the Lindens' determination not to remove free accounts and not to block log-ins to paid-only after the Herald and others bitched about it last month and the entire gaming blogosphere went into hyperdrive.

RightasRain has a wish list involving fixing the REG API, making it more available, having it skinnable (I thought it was already, but maybe only the Sheep were licensed for that), having corporate avatars (I thought we already had those with last names and Lindens not caring if multiple people log them on in "violation" of the TOS), etc.

None of that will do any good if concurrency has now hit a ceiling, i.e. the Cat in the Hat now has as many plates, knives, and cups as he can possibly get spinning, even using his tail, and we're done.

If Opensimulator didn't exist, the Lindens might have to invent it right about now. Oops, I think that's what they're doing by having favoured son Adam Zaius lead the charge and being superhelpful to IBM making its own firewalled version of SL.

ZONING

I have a different wish list, of course which is:

o enforce policy against ad farm extortion AND over-ostentatious signs as spam, and permaban those repeatedly found in violation
o sell new sims without the ability to cut below 512, or with policies that they cannot be cut
o zone by name on the auction and allow any old mainland sim with a unanimous vote from all owners to re-zone (various problems have to be resolved like mandate for vote, i.e. not 32 16 m ad farm extortionists; and no-shows who don't log on for a year and hobble their sim's vote).
o stop intermingling PG and M sims and create a separate mini-continent of PG for educators, non-profits, etc. -- allow any sim with unanimous vote to change rating
o build Linden roads and protected waterways
o stop building Bay City, and scatter Linden mini builds more widely through new continents -- it's a marvel that when the Lindens started this game, they didn't put New England type town squares in the middle of every sim to encourage communities -- oh, I guess it's because they're from California...
o lots of other stuff I'm tired of writing about over and over again

RightasRain of course follows the typical corporativist incitement of hatred against land barons (he doesn't rent out his land, but gets ads to cover subsidized builds and events) by claiming that void sims give the land baron a fabulous new cheaper waterfront option (i.e. 16 waterfronts instead of 4). But...he's not realizing what a glut there is of these, and how *people don't need land barons to get them*. They have one island already, or they have a friend with an island they get to anchor the void sim attachment. Helping *a few* land barons corner the market in cahoots with the Lindens doesn't help the rest of the barons -- it kills them. In fact, the mainland auction, with sims in dollars and parts of sims in Lindens, and the island prices, enabled a more egalitarian and democratically-accessible land market that ensured "land barons" in fact were not real-life rich people but people from all walks of life, students, housewives, retirees, disabled, in addition to old and young people very new to business. Now only a few very nimble and wealthy land barons dominating the void sim market will succeed, putting others out of business.

And like all bubbles, it will burst given other factors of no new members, ceilings on concurrency, Windlight woes.

HOW'S BUSINESS?

I've noticed a rush of new customers this week, after a very barren last week and last month where I really had to hustle and spend way more on advertising AND lower prices to keep occupancy up. So I have new tenants from France, Germany, Japan, and the U.S -- however, they're in the cheaper rentals.]

Meanwhile, a few even long-time tenants are moving out saying either a) they must cut their SL expenses to the bone to pay RL gas prices in the US b) they are getting a void sim -- but from a friend.

Such people used to be replenished by the newbies who had come in the month before, or other midbies and oldbies selling land and renting, or starting a shop, or a relationship -- and the replenishment came from new sign-ups. Now there are less sign-ups -- and with a concurrency ceiling, we may see a huge churn.

I personally have never built my business out to keep up with resident growth because it always seemed to me to be a very hollow arc that could not be sustained -- I saw many, many people use their profits to buy islands to meet pressing demand from customers -- only to crash out due to that mystery formula I always warn people about: 80 percent occupancy means 50 percent revenue.

BTW I tried a big sign board in a commercial district in Bay City, thinking there was all this traffic there. I got a fair number of clicks, some from curious FIC and hecklers who tried to find "hyprokrisy" in the idea that I'd have a sign, when I oppose ad extortionist signs. Um, maybe that's because I oppose ad extortion on little 16s on prime waterfront and grasslands and quaint residential cobblestone roads, but I am very much FOR advertising and I think billboards in a commercial district on a store's land is a great thing -- and I especially advocate the Lindens renting out ad space on billboards and kiosks and signs in welcome areas. For me, the Bay City billboard didn't produce very many clickthroughs to sales tho -- it was mainly for brand recognition.

CRASH

I think we will see the land market crash much, much more. I already see swathes of abandoned land from overambitious baby barons and newbie end users who went from $25 to $75 too fast and then dumped when their spouses saw their credit cards. Rentals are going as low as $1.4/m, when $2 is usually what many want to make a decent profit (I have always had it at $1.6-7 to keep full occupancy which has always been more important I thought).

Do the Lindens care if their land market crashes? Well, they don't, really. THEIR land market won't crash, only the resident-to-resident market. They will go on selling bulk amounts to educators, non-profits, and businesses -- and end users.

The land barons' lament that he takes care of customers for LL doesn't wash any more -- Linden Lab has turned off absolutely all means of any resident reaching a Linden directly, and automated the entire thing, from the blog to the customer service interface, so they can provide as much -- or as little -- customer service as they like, and solve concurrency overload by providing less.

Of course, there is the long-term impact on the economy. I believe without real estate, you cannot have a world, because it is a visible means of retaining value and independence from Governor Linden (up to a point), independence from the coder and creator classes which always seek domination, and independence from the vast non-spending or even griefing free accounts. Freedom is important to make civil society; building a middle class is what makes civilization.

The Lindens don't believe that, however with their extremist copyleftist/anarcho-capitalism/singularist/humanist/extropianist/wikinista views lol. They think that creation of items will save the economy, that 2-10 percent at the very apex of a triangle that they encourage -- and also restrict -- will carry the load of making consumers out of the other 90 percent who will never demand any of their own freedoms and amateur creator rights if they are kept happy with optimal humper bunkers -- and maybe they're right about this. It's sad.

Comments

[Eris]

To be pedantic - it's not four Open Spaces per server, it's four per CPU and each server can have as many as 4 CPU's. Yup, it gets crowded in there...

Standard sims are supposed to run 4 per server - one per CPU, but i think this was disproved some time ago when LL were found to be CPU-sharing quiet sims.

[Ciaran Laval]

I was beating my head against a brick wall with rentals and then got five new tenants overnight. Not sure what's going on with rentals but when I see Steve Mahfouz selling two islands and Sarah Nerd converting an estate into open spaces I sense a shift in the whole market.

Desmond of course has a waiting list as long as his arm, I think the time to panic will be when Desmond mentions a downturn.

Openspaces are undoubtedly popular and if they were sold to people who aren't estate owners already, then there would be one hell of a rush for them, even though Jack still keeps mentioning that they are for light use only, the increase in sales surely tells him that residents don't agree.

However I did hear about a French Orientation Island that was placed on an Openspace being told that they can't use it for that purpose.

Zoning concerns me, I'm all for zoning on new sims, how it would work on existing sims is where I get concerned. People purchased unzoned land, that needs to be respected somehow. If there's unanimous consensus to zone a sim, then I'd have no objection to that.

The concurrency issue is something that needs looking at sooner rather than later. I'd be all in favour of one account one login at this stage. I don't object to camping itself, I do object to someone running camping bots to the detriment of the grid as a whole, which undermines the economy.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ciaran, there are quite a few people who purchased entire mainland sims, or painfully, painfully put together full ownership of entire mainland sims back when it was much harder to get a full sim on the auction (they didn't put them out!) -- only to have a 16 m2 ruin the entire thing. That's not fair either. Getting technical about "unanimous" gives cutters and extortionists a veto on the rest of a sim -- that's wrong.

Your concern about this isn't warranted if some kind of mechanism is created for those who WANT to zone to be able to petition it if they a) own the entire sim or b) own most of it but face only a few ad farms or c) there is unanimous opinion.

So it's very simple: allow it for those who petition, don't install it as a blanket thing. There's no need to hobble people who WANT zoning by your fears that someone will interfere with your freedoms.

I think cases where there will be neighbours divided over zoning will not be large in number, and cases where somebody owns an entire sim but it blighted by a few ad farmers will be huge in numbers.

If the Lindens have a better way to deal with the devaluation of people's property by ad farmers, I'm happy to hear it -- I myself have put up 3 or 4 proposals on the JIRA of how to deal with this.

Anyway, the idea that the Lindens will ever allow residents to decide among themselves anything about land is probably completely unrealistic as they hate the idea of people doing that, precisely because there is always some of them who say exactly as you do OMGODZOR FREEDOM WILL BE SUPPRESSED. And it's that invocation of that fear that in fact keeps everybody ELSE suppressed endlessly -- and we're tired of it.

[Prokofy Neva]

Eris, if that's true, and they can stuff 16 of them on a server, so much the better, it may work out more rationally, because now, you have loads of empty islands or islands with only one person on them as people are constantly in quest of absolute cybering privacy, and if they can get it in their cybersex units, but the Lindens can still stuff them 16 to a server, great for the Lindens, great for them.

[Princess Ivory]

Bravo. Well said. Very well reasoned arguments. I am sorry to say that I have to agree with you. I unloaded most of my land several months ago when I saw this coming. I only kept a small parcel of oceanfront that I am very attached to, and wanted to continue to call my home (It is owned by a group consisting of my husband and myself). I took a beating even when I sold, but when I look at where prices have plummeted to now, I'm very glad I saw the handwriting on the wall as early as I did. Now I must decide if I want to renew my premium membership for another year when it comes up for renewal next week. I think not, as long it it doesn't interfere with my group owning the land.

Excellent article.

Princess Ivory

[Ciaran Laval]

I'm not anti zoning, maybe I didn't make myself clear. I also have parcels next to 16M plots set for sale for L$9999 complete with ban lines to deliberately annoy me, so I'm well aware of the grief they cause. I'm also well aware of the economic impact of said parcels because I've moved on rather quickly when i've seen parcels owned by ad farmers, even when they're not for sale. I know what they'll do once I purchase the adjacent parcel.

My point on zoning is that I don't want to see my commercial customers (obviously some self interest here) moved because the Lindens decide the sim they're on is too nice for commercial purposes and should be residential only.

Zoning, if handled correctly, will be a major boost to the land market. It's a big if though.

[Gigs Taggart]

I think you give them too much credit. I really don't think the Lindens understand the market dynamic as well as you or I do.

When I mention "openspaces are the only way to get real privacy for a reasonable price" to most Lindens, I'm met with surprise or "hmm I never thought of that".

I really don't think they are as in touch with what's going on, and the consequences of their policy decisions, as you imply.

[Prokofy Neva]

Gigs, you talk to coders and script-kiddies who don't care about these things. Jack Linden and Cyn Linden know exactly what it's all about. They would hardly be saying "I never saw that" when they are totally familiar with not only the privacy requirement but the 4-fold increase in waterfront, since most of the sims they lay out on mainland don't supply that but put waterfront suddenly to become "waterbehind" because of the next sim they're putting, out, and that forces people to islands.

[economic mip]

Actually, my strange theory is that it would be far better if the Lindens put out a lower premium level that allowed 256 sqm of ownership. Many newbies are looking for a place they can "own" but think even a 512 is too big. Also, light use is in terms of users on the region to my understanding. Try putting many more than 30-40 users on a void and you will surely crash it. However, few places are that popular, and I do not know the exact user number that causes trouble.

[Prokofy Neva]

It's interesting to see that some luxury rentals/sales are charing bunches more than $75, even $100 or more in tier, because they landscape and provide other amenities:

http://reachisles.com/?page_id=47

[Prokofy Neva]

Economic, I don't know where you got this crazy idea that newbies want 256 m2 with only 60 prims. I've never seen such a thing in all my born days. I've even offered them -- they would not move, even to tinies.

No, the demand is to have more prims, so a 512 m2 really needs to have 150 prims or at the very least a few more than 117. You can't even barely put out a house.

I have apartments with 100 prims, and they don't move, there has to be more. I keep some available because yes, there is the occasionally new person who only wants a very small place but by and large, people want prims, as many as they can get.

No, light use refers to scripts, too, not just people. I see huge numbers stacked on them, as people put stores and clubs on them now too. They are going to take a beating, but it's too late to consider all that, people just read past the Lindens' caveats and saw the price tag and the privacy options and grabbed it.

There's lots of these around now. And, the interesting thing to see is whether people will be able to resell them.

[Jolly Jedburgh]

"...the interesting thing to see is whether people will be able to resell them."

Exactly, the whole idea behind ownership is that some day when you can move on to bigger better things, you can re-sell your bloved piece of digital sand. Well , look what happened to those $25000 corner 4096 parcels now. People are screaming "cheap corner parcel $10K" and others reply "you must be mad! I can buy an Openspace for that"

[Nicholaz Beresford]

Well, unless you aim for something that packs the most possible people into the least possible place (conferences, dance clubs, etc.) open sims are are the natural choice.

You get (if I'm not wrong) the same number of total prims with four time the space. Especially with rentals I guess people would be nuts if they didn't prefer to get their prim allowance in a less crowded setup.

[Ann Otoole]

All of this entire topic is moot if Linden Lab fails to replace it's existing staff and does a complete rewrite of Secondlife and discards the infantile notion of open source.

As it stands SL is dying and is in a fast death spin now because the grid has become unusable for the majority of the time.

SL is going down the toilet and the leadership of Linden Lab is totally oblivious to reality or this is an intentional death spiral and all the people that claimed to have inside info telling everyone to bail out indeed did have real info and LL is trying to kill SL off via attrition.

Linden Lab needs to reassess it's entire culture because it doesn't work. The entire system needs a rewrite by serious professional engineers and architects sans external coder groupies and strictly in accordance with requirements and project plans.

If Linden Lab fails to wake up and replace the entire staff with real professionals all this conversation is totally moot because SL will not exist in a year at the rate it is imploding now.

Kapor better have something serious to announce Sunday or he will be a total laughing stock.

[melponeme_k]

I would like to have mainland property if it wasn't so ugly or unzoned.

I have to admit a private island for only $75 tier is attractive. But on the other hand, being next to neighbors is nice as well. Even though the neighbors I have near me on AC land are practically never present.

The push for private islands leads me to wonder if LL just doesn't want to play landlord with mainland anymore. Everyone is pushed off to their little private spaces in which the upkeep is totally upon themselves. I suppose mainland will continue to be gobbled up by ad farms. They pay tier and require no landlord intervention. The perfect customer for mainland. The abandoned, redundant land can just be deleted.

[Chav Paderborn]

I got very annoyed when I was hit by a log-in throttle on concurrency issues. I was all "angry customer" because I pay premium and tier and weren't they going to lock out free accounts first? Is that elitist?

If I didn't have land I probably wouldn't be premium. I make more Ls selling stuff than I get from stipend, which is really absurdly low if they don't cost LL any money to produce. But I like having land on the mainland without any tenancy rules to stick to. I co-own 1/4 of a sim which I know isn't much compared to some but it's enough for me to do all the stuff I want to do. (No, not cybersex.)

Islands and rentals do kill off the main reason for becoming premium, and the Lindens aren't offering enough to tempt the paying customers. You get the entire world for free and you can buy Ls as long as you have payment info. I don't know what they could do to tempt more people, but maybe they make enough just from tier and island/mainland sales?

[Gigs Taggart]

Actually Prok I do talk to Jack and the concierge a good amount.

[Darien Caldwell]

Another point to consider is the resale of all these Void Sims. At a cost from Linden Lab of $250, you would be lucky to get an offer of $150 trying to resell. And given the Transfer Fee is still $100, you are left with a measly $50. In some cases it may even become a wash. I'm sure LL loves this, because the abandonment rate for Void will be huge should the market for them tank.

[moo Money]

This article terrifies me. I miss the good old days. There are so many islands now that you can't even find people.

I'm all for growth of SL, but do we really need 100 islands themed differently but with the same 20 stores in them? Did barons really need to open up 50 sims at the same time before even one was completely rented? I fully agree that if Desmond ever has problems, the sky is falling.

As for prims, they don't want 100. A lot of people won't even buy anywhere other than double prim land now. They want 2000 prim houses that have huge footprints, with poseballs in every room in the house, so they can play husband and wife, with prim babies all over.

[Prokofy Neva]

I agree that i find it sad and even terrifying, especially because such a nation of humper bunkers is so easily controlled by totalitarian movements.

I often wonder when I see the various tropical paradise continents offering all these community things like pools, jet-skiing, picnics, mountain-climbing, restaurants, even, whether they have any takers.

Most people are in their bunkers, and the last thing they want to do is come out and jet-ski or mountain climb I would think. I never see anybody having fabulous pool parties in these paradises, the green dots are all paired up or tripled up or whatever.

But the owner of the tropical paradise makes all that stuff in part because it's fun for him or her, but also because he feels the vestiges of the old world where people did come out of their bunkers and socialize with other human beings and would then want a pool or a restaurant.

But since they are fake, and you can't really enjoy the reality of a real swim or dinner, people go to real life to the restaurant or health club, and then come back to the bunker in SL.

I make all kinds of community areas an a lot of it goes unused but it gets used enough to justify it, and it helps the look of the community.

I also tend to have more mixed neighbourhoods that have people actually wanting to socialize or play a game or shop or have a business or they like landscaping or building or decorating and just chatting over the fence with the neighbour, it's enough to satisfy them, it's a kind of suburbia and that's ok.

There are more people than you might realize from all the humper bunker talk that actually play SL pretty PG and care more about interesting meetings, self-expression, socializing in a more general way. Still, there's a very solid majority humping, and that's human nature and that's fine.

Still, it's a disconcerting landscape, all that blinding white sand, the elaborate BDSM hardware to torture your avatar, people demanding in increasingly whiney and irritable tones whether they can lock, skybox, ban, security orb their way into oblivion. Ugh.

I personally don't think I'd have the heart to preside over a 70-sim empire of humper bunkers, it would discourage me, and just flipping the bunkers and making money would seem tawdry to me. I guess that's why I don't make very much in SL.

I think barons do have to keep opening up new continents because revenue streams and constant flow of customers is what keeps them afloat. Turn away even one customer, and you've turned away 3 or 10, the only way to stay afloat is to try to keep meeting customers demand, and if you don't want to risk growing too fast and big, niche and niche some more so you stay occupied without turning away lots of new people.

[Blaccard Burks]

The ad farm work around that ROBO Marx has been pulling is what needs to be addressed. Its quite alright for people in my opinion to cut up parcels as little at 16m2, because as you know sometimes you need to make small cuts to create parcels. The rule should simply be that no individual should be allowed to put a group of 16m2 to 64m2 parcels for sale. Robo buys land, cuts out what he wants and dumps the remainder at a loss because the sale of a few 32m2 at 900 Lindens covers the loss. The sign people can't help themselves any buy them. Since they are not selling these lots an ad farm can appear legally!

I don't know what is worse.The poorly designed new mainland sims with "protected roads" with tress in the middle of them with piss poor terraforming or the signs that sometimes make it look like a road is suppose to be there.

[rightasrain]

5,225 new islands added since beginning of May out of 19,822--is it only a prim shuffle to feed people seeking waterfront/privacy? Are there any new land sales? If so who is buying if new registrations are going down??

May saw 14mm square meters auctioned, and June only 8mm--anyone wanna guess at July?

[Prokofy Neva]

The drop in mainland sales is due to the Lindens closing the mainland US dollar auction for a month. It reopens July 11th.

I bet most of the 5,225 islands are either reverted private islands becoming open spaces, or new open spaces sold to previous customers of 4096 or 8192s rentals or mainland.

[rightasrain]

is sorta funny then--is more islands and maybe fewer prims on the grid. 4 voids are in total less prims than 1 full sim...so the grid may have shrunk in some respect.

[Dirk Talamasca]

Prok: I bet most of the 5,225 islands are either reverted private islands becoming open spaces, or new open spaces sold to previous customers of 4096 or 8192s rentals or mainland.

I agree with Prok. I think it is only right that LL post open space regions with a separate metric so that we are given a much clearer view of the state of the economy. Transparency should mean just that. It should not mean that real numbers become INVISIBLE. Lately transparency and invisible have come to mean one and the same and I think we are all pretty sick of that.

And if that weren't rub enough, here is another.. If you want to sell one of the open spaces you have converted out of a full sim to another landowner (they must own a full region already), you are required to pay the full 100 dollar transfer fee to make the sale. So now you have reverted a private island into open spaces that will get an extra 300 dollars ripped out of your pocket should you decide to sell them. The seller being required to pay the 100 dollar transfer fee.