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"Grandfathered" mainland parcels


Mar Scarmon
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A friend told me that many parcels on the mainland are "grandfathered", meaning nobody pays tier on them and the listed owners may be long gone from SL.  This makes sense to me because in my many years of exploring mainland SL I have noticed quite a few parcels with antiquated builds, that never ever change, and never seem to have any activity on them.  I have also sent notecards to many of these owners inquiring if they were interested in selling and I never get any response.  This leads me to believe the owners have long since departed SL, but then I wonder who is paying the tier?  Apparently grandfathered parcels were given away to certain people in the very early days of second life.

 

Do any of you have any insight on "Grandfathered" mainland parcels??

thanks

Marz

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as @Sylvia Tamalyn said you could buy a lifetime account back in late  2002 and I think in 2003. 

The account was 195 USD at first and 250 USD later.  

http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/3/bb/2993/1.html

 

"The world you have created is about to be born! With great excitement and our deepest thanks, I am pleased to announce our upcoming commercial release, pricing for Beta Residents, and some future product development plans.

Second Life will be released to the public in just a few weeks, and starting today, Beta Residents and Early Creators will be able to take advantage of special discounts on Second Life. Discounted rates for Beta Residents include a reduced first month's rate of $9.95, in addition to a fixed lifetime option at $159.95. Click here to view all membership plans and convert your account right now!"

 

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1 hour ago, Soull Starlight said:

Wow! If they did that today, I'd purchase a 'lifetime account' in a heartbeat, event at more than $159.

What price do you think would be fair? 

I'm guessing that it would be $1000 USD +

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16 minutes ago, Feorie Frimon said:

I had no idea this was a thing - what terrible news! :(

That means there are large massive swaths of mainland that will never be updated or even accessed again aside from the moment it was first purchased - over a decade ago…..
 

 

Why is that terrible? Can't be any worse than what is already on the mainland now.

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42 minutes ago, Feorie Frimon said:

That means there are large massive swaths of mainland that will never be updated or even accessed again aside from the moment it was first purchased - over a decade ago…..

Not that large, though, and mostly on the older parts of the Sansara continent. The earliest regions have some content that might be described as "of historical interest" at best, and those are likely to stay unchanged for as long as there's a grid. Some folks appreciate that "legacy" even as inspiration, but it's not a great setting for a conventional new build.

Fossils are not fashionable, but they're a specialized interest.

Certainly some of those founding residents stuck around long enough to spread content to other continents too, and some are probably still active.

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1 hour ago, Feorie Frimon said:

I had no idea this was a thing - what terrible news! :(

That means there are large massive swaths of mainland that will never be updated or even accessed again aside from the moment it was first purchased - over a decade ago…..
 

 

I think there is plenty of room in SL for the old historical builds, as ugly as some might find them to be, along with all the newest up-to-date meshy stuff. For those that feel the urge to go out and improve everything, I see no danger of abandoned land running out anytime soon.

I like @Qie Niangao's use of the word "fossils", because that's how I see the ancient items found here and there. Are they pretty by today's SL standards? Nope, but they are sure interesting to quite a few residents (including myself)! Not everything should be updated. :) 

Edited by Sylvia Tamalyn
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1 hour ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

I think there is plenty of room in SL for the old historical builds, as ugly as some might find them to be, along with all the newest up-to-date meshy stuff. For those that feel the urge to go out and improve everything, I see no danger of abandoned land running out anytime soon.

I like @Qie Niangao's use of the word "fossils", because that's how I see the ancient items found here and there. Are they pretty by today's SL standards? Nope, but they are sure interesting to quite a few residents (including myself)! Not everything should be updated. :) 

That’s true. But I guess I don’t agree with keeping things for the sake of keeping it - especially if no one looks at it, experiences it, or has an interest in it. This isn’t like the RL - if a tree exists in SL and no one goes to look at it for 5 years, LL still pays for its existence. 
 

And that ancient build that is a ‘cool fossil’ (that no one looks at or visits or honestly, even cares about) literally creates abandoned land around it because no one wants to live next to it. 
 

I’m not saying mesh everything, but come on, guys…. How many ‘fossils’ does SL really need? 
 

One of my favorite spots on mainland is that old Volunteer Spot with the ancient prim robot    - amazing prim work on it and this cool statue in the back.
And it’s a cool spot with loads of history - but no one ever goes there and the info is out dated. That doesn’t look good for SL. I don’t think we should keep it just cause it’s old, you know? 
 

Actually @Patch Linden - you mentioned awhile ago that you guys would be open to ideas for repurposing land. Is this a good example of that? Would this be a good example of something someone could submit a JIRA for to do something else with for the greater SL community? 

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Sorry, but personally I do not want to see all of Mainland leveled and rebuilt to look exactly the same from one region to the next. It's incorrect to say that "nobody" enjoys or values the old builds, and to be honest, I don't enjoy a lot of the "improvements" I see people do. It's all very bland and generic to me. 

I miss the days of "Your world, your imagination". :( 

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1 hour ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

Sorry, but personally I do not want to see all of Mainland leveled and rebuilt to look exactly the same from one region to the next. It's incorrect to say that "nobody" enjoys or values the old builds, and to be honest, I don't enjoy a lot of the "improvements" I see people do. It's all very bland and generic to me. 

I miss the days of "Your world, your imagination". :( 

I agree with this! :) I think there is a place for both. It’s one of the things I like best about the mainland. 
 

I think finding a way to merry the two is the only way to help the mainland move forward. 
 

In the example of that Volunteer Space that I love - what if we just updated the links and notecards to go to the right place? What if we added some new trees or information that talked about these old builds - I know I’d love to learn about how that giant robot was built.
 

I don’t think we need to level it , but let’s just help make it current and informative. Dead links look bad for everyone. 

Edited by Feorie Frimon
Typos - on my phone :)
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4 hours ago, Sam1 Bellisserian said:
5 hours ago, Soull Starlight said:

Wow! If they did that today, I'd purchase a 'lifetime account' in a heartbeat, event at more than $159.

What price do you think would be fair? 

I'm guessing that it would be $1000 USD +

Far more than that, I'd guess.  The monthly tier for a 4096 is $22.00 US.  The $1000.00 would not even cover 4 years worth.  

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On 4/4/2022 at 10:39 PM, Mar Scarmon said:

A friend told me that many parcels on the mainland are "grandfathered", meaning nobody pays tier on them and the listed owners may be long gone from SL.  This makes sense to me because in my many years of exploring mainland SL I have noticed quite a few parcels with antiquated builds, that never ever change, and never seem to have any activity on them.  I have also sent notecards to many of these owners inquiring if they were interested in selling and I never get any response.  This leads me to believe the owners have long since departed SL, but then I wonder who is paying the tier?  Apparently grandfathered parcels were given away to certain people in the very early days of second life.

 

Do any of you have any insight on "Grandfathered" mainland parcels??

thanks

Marz

I know exactly what you mean, and these are NOT the "Lifetime Accounts" because they are not 4096 in size, but generally only 1024 or 512 in size. You see their owners have disappeared from the People List, yet if you enquire if the land is available and actually abandoned (but maybe the Lindens somehow didn't notice yet), they say the land is "supported", a strange term to be sure.

So my theory about these parcels, which I have expounded on before in other threads, is that these are industry giveaways, that especially back in the era of "big business" in 2006-2007, the Lindens gave away a lot of free accounts that in a sense were like the "charter accounts free for life" but not marked as such as they were just their friends in Silicon Valley that they wanted to write reviews of SL, or bring into SL in some fashion for business. And there's nothing wrong with this. Except most if not all of those people didn't stay. Or another possibility: If they are staff alt accounts, those staff are long gone and don't care any more.

I kept asking about a certain parcel in the middle of a sim over and over for years, and finally one day I saw it suddenly abandoned formally and asked for it. I don't think that some rich programmer bought himself five years of membership ahead or forget a credit card that kept billing annually or event monthly. I think it was an industry freebie, but as with most abandoned land, the Lindens decided to move it on out and get it under tier. So they may beginning to end some of these "free for life" industry freebies. My theory anyway. Yet some do persist.

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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On 4/6/2022 at 10:17 AM, Feorie Frimon said:

I had no idea this was a thing - what terrible news! :(

That means there are large massive swaths of mainland that will never be updated or even accessed again aside from the moment it was first purchased - over a decade ago…..
 

 

There actually aren't that many Charter accounts out there. What happened is that some oldbies would get a string of alts with the 4096s, put it together to make up a sim, and flip it, as that would be a sim free of start-up costs -- back in the day, buying a nice waterfront sim on the auction could run US $1000 or even $2000 (Ravenglass was $1501 on the auction). But I only saw a few individuals do that because even with the tier for free, you still had to buy the land inworld or on the auction, which was still a cost. And the Lindens, for this reason and for reason of "first land" abuse on multiple alts, limited the number of alts on premium accounts to five only back in the day (a limit they have since removed).

Those oldbies who still remain are in the old colour sims or the early sims of SL, few of them went beyond those sims. Those more enterprising ones might have bought, say, land in Brown that was very expensive, and have their land to this day but never log in to change their house from 2007 or even earlier. But there aren't "whole massive swathes" because the population was small. I don't know what the concurrency was in 2004-2005 but I wouldn't be surprised if it were under 5,000. And the world itself was far smaller so it was a known quantity in certain sims.

The window for buying and selling obviously closed -- you can't get those accounts any more, although you could apply the tier to any new land. I have some tier donors to Ravenglass that put in their 4096 for island parcels, for example and still remain although they seldom log in. It's not a factor for the Mainland land market, in my view.

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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8 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:


If you want the Lindens to pay attention to the Mainland, I can think of 100 other tasks I'd rather have them spend their time on than removing old builds that aren't tended, either resident-run or their own. Start by fixing or rebuilding roads. Put roads where they are needed, for example around those weird billboard teleport road "solutions" in Sababurg and other sims. Police the obelisks and ad farms better. Etc....
 

I agree with this. Instead of just abandoning the mainland, I wish LL and the Moles could update it a bit. I left Heterocera for Belliseria in part because I couldn't stand the old prim trees, scruffy weeds and ugly old prim builds that don't rez well. Linden Lab can't change the builds other residents have made on mainland, but they could update the roads and plants. Then maybe they could drop some new Linden neighborhoods into some of the mostly empty and abandoned mainland regions? It seems to me that nearly empty regions are an expense for Linden Lab that they could turn into regions that would pay for their existence on the servers.

What about the mostly empty older Linden Home regions too? Is there some way they can be consolidated?  Are there incentives LL could offer the residents there to get them to move to the newer Linden Homes regions? Giving them nice roads and double the land impact doesn't seem to be enough. Yet, most of those houses are empty, just burning up space on the servers.

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2 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

 

What about the mostly empty older Linden Home regions too? Is there some way they can be consolidated?  Are there incentives LL could offer the residents there to get them to move to the newer Linden Homes regions? Giving them nice roads and double the land impact doesn't seem to be enough. Yet, most of those houses are empty, just burning up space on the servers.

I think a lot of people would freak out if there were more incentives to moving to the new Linden Homes regions. 

I’m more about a plan to make the mainland more desirable - not the Lindens Home regions. Nothing against Belli, ya’ll - it’s nice, but the Mainland needs some love. ❤️
 

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  • Lindens

It's too bad that this couldn't be a friendly and productive discussion. It has now been locked.

Interpersonal Disputes are never appropriate for the Second Life Forums. We would prefer if you did not engage at all, but if you must please keep it to the DMs or inworld IMs instead of subjecting the general populace to your disputes.

Please take this opportunity to review the Community Participation Guidelines: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/403538-community-participation-guidelines/

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