Shedding a Tier

I'm trying to decide how the economy is doing but I don't have enough information. Some think the economy is tanking, and they even blame Windlight -- and I agree. But...we don't have enough information. That is, we have all these statistics, but not information. Because they aren't contrasted with other periods. 1.2 million logged on in the last 60 days? But you would have had to have been following this game since last year to know that it was 1.7 million before around the middle of last year. I know because I have issued regularly newsletters with the statistics.

The "Positive Monthly Linden Flow" businesses (now does that sound like a Kotex commercial or *what*?!) were down in July, which I noted, but now they're creeping back up.

I don't get what has happened to the islands, they were showing last month a "negative 393" as if the island world shrunk by people abandoning. But now it merely seems to say that half as many islands have sold this month as last, with 11 days still to go, so down somewhat. Certainly the market is awash in low-prim open space sims, although the thrill is wearing a bit and some are now nervously trying to get them sold -- and discovering that people would rather rent.

I often see the log-ons at 63,000, which is improved, even on a Sunday afternoon in summer. Expenditures in world is now up to 400,000 something, which is up from 350,000 (that's number of people who spend more than a $1, which is how you measure in a sense the real people who really come back).

The traffic at the infohubs is up somewhat, but it so damn hard to follow, because of that idiot randomizer that doesn't load balance because some idiot scripter is overly fascinated with the abstraction of how "randomness" works (it doesn't).

I've noticed some new customers, and some returning customers, people who left SL even for awhile because they didn't have money or time, and were in the gas-price shock stage. Now, perhaps they aren't driving anywhere, so they come and do SL, I don't know.

Still, everyone talks about how sales are down -- by "everyone," of course I only mean "our gang," that is, English speakers in the Concierge group, and the 2 percent of people who talk on forums or blogs. So that isn't really accurate.

In fact, I suspect that sales aren't done for the green and growing tips of SL, which aren't about English, but Polish, Spanish, Japanese, etc. Those people have traffic even without bots (Polska Republika has 13,000 most days with no botting or camping from what I can tell, just mainly compatriots).
So your sales are down, theirs aren't. Welcome to globalization...

You have to work very hard to bring in an international market, not even foreign-language ads work because yours will inevitably be badly spelled or contain bloopers or nonsense and theirs will be savvy. But still, that's the basic thing you have to do. And also be willing to be patient with translators. You aren't going to be a subsitute for a compatriot -- and that's the story of the economy now. It is atomized among language groups and nationalities, most of whom turn naturally to their fellows for merchandise, entertainment, rentals. So you have to compete with people who are better -- way better -- than you merely because they can do customer service in a native language.

But also no need to suffer fools lightly. I spent an hour or more on Sunday trying to help a Spanish guy who wanted my high-prim lot but wanted me to take my house off and put his own on. That's all good, but then he tries to put out a house way too big, that has even more prims than mine did. I keep trying to explain this to him, and he keeps ranting that I am attempting to cheat him when I keep telling him that the prim count must include the house, any house, ours or yours, it's in the lease, read the lease.

He has a perfectly good translator device; much of the time he's speaking English. Yet rather than focus on a simple sentence telling him about prims (and he isn't born yesterday) he prefers to play the macho game of accusing me of lying and cheating. I really loathe having to come across these sorts of macho male cultures in SL (and there are certain types of Americans who are no different). I wouldn't stand for it, even in a buyer's market. I send them on their way. Ditto the weepy manipulative female who feigns ignorance or oppression by a partner who ostensibly dumped her (which is why you have to do all the thinking and doing for her now) in order not to understand a simple basic like "join the group to set prims". It finally occurred to me, struggling with a person like that for an hour, that she was probably on drugs or drunk, because there was no way that you could be that stupid as not to be able to click on my profile or click the ground to pull up an open group to join. I find this is a good explanation of a lot of the idiocy of SL: people are drunk or high, they drink and SL.

The ones I really dislike are these $150/150 big spenders who are tapping their foot and demanding hotel concierge-like service, asking for a hundred things to be changed or rules bent for their tiny expenditure. I try to be helpful to all newbies who can be demanding, but there's a certain type that you can tell is just an alt, too many groups and savvy sayings for being only day one, and demanding that land that isn't in search, that isn't advertised as ready yet (er, because it's rented already? because the previous tenants' stuff is there? because it just expired like an hour yet and they didn't get their one final notice yet?) be instantly cleared and that doors magically spring open.

Desmond likes to incite landlords to fight each other for customers, it's a spectacle he gleefully watches as a spectator sport on the mainland.

But I frankly don't care if it is a "buyer's market" because I have no reason not to value my time, or not uphold my rules. I tell people very frankly, to stop wasting my time, and find the rentals they do like, where they can have their maximum security bunkers and orbs and red lines. Because I will not be supplying that.

Some of them argue and argue and argue, especially that sort of under-educated 20-something Middle American male who suffers from the same sort of macho culture as other distant lands with more of an excuse to do so. I keep telling them to move. Refund. Move. Bye. They keep arguing that I am not professional, that I don't know how to run a business, that I need to allow orbs, ban lines, no-access, and rolls of saran wrap to completely engulf their pose balls so that no one will ever, ever, ever, EVER have sex on their precious poseballs while they are not home because after all, they are PAYING GOOD MONEY FOR THIS LAND (yes, I'll try not to go wild with my $19.21 US a month, thanks).

You would think, again, that when it's time to chase every last customer, that I'd drop these requirements and scamper around playing "may I help you?" But I find that if I in fact make short work of those rude, aggravating, annoying, entitlement-happy freaks that seem to populate the low end of the rentals spectrum in particular, I'm only saving aggravation and freeing up the space for someone nice. Often those macho types end up shooting people, swearing, bugging other people around them, etc. so it's good riddance. The wheeping energy-draining gals are often of the type that call you in the middle of the night to tell you a tree is waving *a smidgeon* on their property and giving them the vapours...

Meanwhile, no question that business is slower, even though I sense it is picking up, and, well, I just don't wish to wait for Jack to fix the many problems of the mainland. So I decided to tier down a half tier.

I reached the conclusion that this was a good idea for a number of reasons:

1. I seemed to have too much extra tier, due to a fortuitious land sale, but to buy more land would be a risk -- paying too much, ending up with blight, it's too hard. Shopping for land is hard. The land sale list sucks. Designed to thwart bots, it stops humans, not bots, because bot squads can take turns surfing it at high speed until it jams on each one of them in the herd. So I didn't want the tier to go on land, in the end, and renting out the tier wasn't paying enough.

2. I realized that I didn't have to sell a lot or land to make up that half tier, really, just try to identify those areas that weren't renting or were in hopeless blight situations, and cut my losses. It was time to surrender on situations like a beautiful parcel that tragically had this ridiculously high and stupid wall backing in next door, on a completely idiotic and stupid "electronics" store (er, you need headphones in SL lol?), built on a once-pristine white sandy beach with a spectacular view in all directions, and say, well, who needs this shit?

My other neighbour had creatively tried to turn his side of the other wall into a kind of Greek garden/stairway effect, but you know something? I'm done with scraping the burnt parts off the cake and putting it in the cupboard in the hope it will spring back like in "The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew". Something there is that does not love a wall. Nobody bought it at even reduced prices, and I finally had to risk botting it -- but then I realized there was no longer a worry about chopped up land and hideosities because...I would be gone, and my other property on that sim was completely out of this site line. Another tenant who sized up the situation hardened my resolve. He said, "He's put up the wall to ensure that he always has the wide ocean view, because you'll never be able to rent this." OK, done.

3. I also realized that Jack wouldn't keep the spigot off forever, and if any land was going to sell above market in especially nice places, it would have to sell now, rather than some other time, so I decided to bite the bullet on a few prized possessions because...I don't enjoy them, really, I'm not there. Tenants enjoyed them but...they didn't happen to rent this week. They're on sims by themselves, so it's not really a loss. OK, done.

4. One smaller lot put out to sale at a fairly high price drew several calls which indicated that some neighbours really wanted more land. Good. They can have it. I have plenty more where this came from. Done. Chatting with some other long-time tenants, I discovered they dreamed of buying their land. Ok, it's yours. Done.

5. Another place on a sim blighted by spinning for-sale signs, ad towers, ugly neighbours. That goes to the bots, and who should show up but SL Mentor Chaos Mohr to pick it up, claiming he refreshes the page. So rather than helping newbies, this mentor is out cadging released land, in between sessions also promoting opensim lol.

6. I also made a calculation I had not made before. That is, I had some time ago, when I used to keep a trading tier open and sell land more as a strategy. It just got too nerve-wracking or time-consuming, however, so I didn't get into it. But the calculation is one that every true land baron knows. There's the price you can sell this land this month, before tier is due, when it will cover your margins from the auction, before tier falls and make a profit. But then there's the price next month, when you have to begin paying tier in earnest. And then it begins to be a drag -- two months of it sitting there, and you abandon your price.

By figuring out how much tier you are cutting down, and subtracting that from the price you wanted, you can see what it could still reasonably sell for.

That is, I always insisted as my own personal goal never to buy land for over $7.5 or sell it for less than $7.5. It's not really a rational number, but just a sort of leftover number from my early days in SL. In fact, land won't sell for that now; or it will, but only after long waits, or in certain places. So waiting past a tier date makes no sense. Hence, calculations of what tier you'd save if you aren't willing to go on paying the tier, and it becomes easier to sell for $4 or $5. As it happened, by a combination of selling way above market for prime land and waiting about two weeks; letting some pieces go for $4.5 to bots or Mentors; and selling to good neighbours for $7-10, I was able, interesting, to reach my goal, selling the entire total of 18,128 meters at $7/meter, and be able to tier down half a sim. A remainder of 5120 or something I can cover with inworld rented tier, cheaper than the Lindens, and work on some more sales.

It's sad because some of that land would rent if I waited another few days...few weeks...but I'm not interested in doing that because I don't think it will pay off anymore. There were times in SL when it seemed worth "gutting it out". This isn't one of them.

Comments

[Dirk Talamasca]

They've fucked us all, Prok. They fucked the landowners, they fucked the community and now they are getting ready to roll us over.

[Tammy Nowotny]

"And then it begins to be a drag -- two months of it sitting there, and you abandon your price."

I know that feeling... I amassed about a quarter of a fair-to-middling sim (specifically, Zakarisz) on the northern continent, and paid tier on it for about three months waiting for it to sell (and even bought more from my fellow speculators.)

Eventually, I sold it all in the course of a couple weeks. I lost about US$100 on the deal and felt like I had made a good deal, considering market circumstances.

[Prokofy Neva]

Tammy,it's everyone doing that, that keeps the economy afloat. And then people get sick of doing it.

[Sean Williams]

Hate to break this to you Prokofy but people really CAN be so stupid as to need an explicit invite into a group or to not even be able to navigate their own computer.

I've worked with and dealt with people like that: No drugs on them at all.No booze in their systems. Just sheer stupidity.

[economic mip]

Well it seems like most people are decreasing their land holdings in Second Life at the moment. I am just glad that selling the bulk of my holdings worked out so that I have enough in my account to pay for the rest of my land through January, or else I might just cut and run at this point.

[Khamon]

I'm waiting to see if mono reduces my script load enough to move Fate Gardens to an Openspace sim.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, half the time the invitation doesn't work. By sending people invitations, you risk them never getting them due to lag or glitches, especially if they are offline. When they get invites like that, they also fail to go through the steps needed to see the JOIN and ACTIVATE buttons and realize how the tag appears on their head, and then keep dogging you with problems.

From very long experience, I've found that having people join an open group is the absolute best way to get them to understand how a group tag works, and to ensure that they join without any mess-ups due to lag or crashes or glitches.

Khamon, my prediction for Mono is that it will play havoc. Hold on to your hats. I think we are in for a very rough ride. I think we will see it totally malfunction worse than the decision to have Windlight, which the Lindens still stubbornly claim can be "turned off". I base this claim on no fact, just sheer intuition based on the LL track record. You heard it here first.

It will launch, have glitches, relaunch, have to be rolled back, launch, and utterly mess up stuff, etc. etc. for weeks on end. Another good reason not to buy land now.

[Darien Caldwell]

I tussled with LL over getting openspaces tested under Mono, but finally was able to get a few on the preveiw grid, although on class 4 hardware which didn't give me a true sense of what they will be like on Class 5.

But anyway, Mono will improve Openspaces a little, but I wouldn't expect much. At least they aren't going to be worse :)

I disagree about what will occur with Mono. I have spent a great deal of time working on Mono, i've been part of the Beta testing since January, and I am proud to say it's been put through the wringer and gone over with a fine tooth comb. I do not expect it to be a flawless deploy, nothing ever is. And the changes are significant. But I honestly will be surprised if it's anything more than a small bump over the next few days.

[Ciaran Laval]

The land market does appear to be in terminal decline, ironic really when we have all these people screaming "It's just hosting space" that even Linden Lab now realise they have to offer plenty more than just hosting space, people aren't rushing to buy sims and the last bust in the boom and bust cycle seems to have left land in the bust position.

Rentals are so so for me, just when I think they are getting too low I get a rush but I don't feel the security in the model that I felt six months ago, everything seems stretched too thin and I fear the elastic band will snap.