Anshe Chung is doing a pretty nasty and shitty thing -- in part out of spite, for which she/he is known, in part, out of economic necessity, which isn't pretty. I figured I could expect some retaliation for my criticism of Anshe Chung -- and I wasn't wrong.
The other day I get a notecard from one of the ever-changing ACS workers that in an effort to improve our Second Lives (har har, they pick up this kind of bullshit from the Lindens), we were now going to be forcibly relocated from our homes. Our existing home, on A'ksha Oasis, on a parcel with mountain, desert, and waterfront all in one -- quite unique -- bought more than three years ago, in June 2005, was to be forcibly moved to a neighbouring sim, whose name, A'ksha Mesa, sums up the problem: we were being moved from a beautiful mountain to a flatlands with textures nowhere as unique, and with no terraforming that was unique, as in A'ksha. (Customers are not allowed to terraform.)
Why? Well, there wasn't an immediately obvious reason at all, but I think the way it is being justified (so as not to look as if it is outright retaliation, which of course it is) is that the sims need to be "consolidated". After a neighbour moved out, a huge parcel on the sim went up for sale, at the usual high ACS price (other private islands have moved to $1/m sales, or even $0/sales, with merely tier up front, let's say. Not ACS, which collects both a hefty sale price AND the tier up front, and charges top dollar for the tier, too. I was paying US $29 tier to hold 5120 m2.
Meanwhile, on this A'ksha Mesa, virtually the entire sim, divided up into about 6 parcels, was for sale, covered in yellow, and had been in yellow for ages. So there's the problem: two neighbouring sims, formerly a beautifully landscaped area of some 4 or 6 desert sims making up a fabulous landscape, that simply can't sell. It always had a very hard time selling, because people are afraid of hills; they are afraid their tacky prefabs can't fit on them, they can't figure out how to build or place a house, so they shy away from them. They want flat pancakes where the house instantly fits. Sad, but there it is.
So in order to solve the yellow problem which was dragging on for months, ACS decided to turn two sims into one, dumping off the few people left in the one on to the other. In order to get rid of more yellow, ACS said they'd offer people to acquire more land on that new sim for $0/m cost (as a special favour to offset the sudden forced relocations with 2 weeks notice, although $0/m sale is the NORM on most other islands these days), but of course, paying the higher tier. There was no offer to terraform roughly the equivalent sim. Given that A'ksha had flatlands on it, there was no offer to move the one person on flat A'ksha Mesa over to the flat land of A'ksha; instead, the mountain dwellers of A'ksha Oasis (I have 4 people in the group now) were the ones to be shaken loose.
And there was no offer not to have any relocation at all, but to acquire the land on the sim for $0 to solve the problem, to work together to solve the sales problem. $0/m sale land on that sim probably would have cleaned up the yellow -- I personally would pay tier, but won't pay $61,000 Lindens to buy land.










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