How to save Mainland

[Snickers Snook]

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Conifer Dada wrote:

This collapse in land prices doesn't seem to have hit waterfront mainland yet - I haven't found any waterfront that's abandoned and L$ 1 yet.  That's soemthing to watch out for.

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There's lotsof water sim land (technically water front) available for $1L. Every so often a parcel of water front (ocean facing) comes up abandoned. A 4096 came up near me in Alope. I almost bought it just to carve out a 1024 and abandon the rest but it would have cost me the big extra tier for the month. Maybe if LL charged a weekly tier you could get more movement on parcels. Or if they didn't charge tier on land held for 2 days or less? I dunno.

[Perrie Juran]

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Melita Magic wrote:

"I remember the Teen Grid when it was like this prices insane."

It still is insane. I'd like to own another parcel in the former Teen Grid but people are asking 150L/meter.

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I pointed this out to Rodvik in the SLU thread:

"Mainland. You have SIM's being held hostage by people who have no interest in SL beyond financial with exorbitantly priced micro parcels. Just like LL can step in and 'freeze' the Lindex if things get wonky, The Lab needs to step in and do something about this problem also. Because it really is an abuse of resources and it detours people from investing in Mainland and making better use of it."

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/73965-if-you-were-linden-6.html

[James Seraph]

I'm confused as to the value of mainland.  In the beginning when SL was very new, the feel of a 'real place' with highways, landscape etc. was intriguing and helped people connect.  The Telehubs insured that you had to spend a lot of time going to places and went by others. 

But that was wildly impractical.  Nobody wants to take a 5 minute crashy flight when they login just to see what other people created.  This is the web, and we find things we are interested in by searching for them.  The Lindens have put in a lot of features that do advertisements for "best of" content and I've occasionally visited those.  

If your content isn't "best of" then it might be of particular interest to me, and I might go there from search.  If it isn't best of or of interest to me, I don't want to ever visit it.

Private regions are the present.  The Mainland concept is the past.  The issue may be more how to deal with the deflation of people who held something that once had some value and now doesn't.  Mainland is just a bunch of odd shaped rentable parcels close together.  If people want to build a community they rent sims and *build a community* not a random agglomeration of shops, ads, and houses. 

SL is more suitable for large and small private sims than for the bizzarre melting pot of mainland.  I find it impossible to care about it or miss it.  I think the real edge of SL is the fantastically detailed close knit communities that have grown up in private areas.  Caledon would be a good example.   These Sims maintain thematic coherence in a way that mainland can't.

I can't think of why anyone would be interested in mainland, but it certainly isn't my duty to do anything about something that is ultimately just obsolete. 

[Knutz Scorpio]

A couple ideas on this.

1. Less insane tier steps

Don't know how many times there has been a nearby small parcel that I've wanted to buy to incorporate into mine, or just to prevent yet another ad board from popping up right in front of my home, or just for the added prims.  But in order to buy it I'd first have to double the amount of land tier yet again, in my case paying tier for another 2048 sq.m just to buy up some little 16 sp.m micro parcel.  So I just let it go keeping my fingers crossed that what ad board pops up isn't too ugly.

2. Some sort of zoning

If you're putting up a store chances are you're not that worried about what's around you, but if you're looking for a place to build your dream mansion you probably don't want ugly looking stores around you, and someone will probably be more likely to buy land if they are certain that if a neighbor moves out some ugly looking store isn't going to drop into its place.  Now I'm not saying all stores are ugly, but from what I've seen the majority of them appear to have been slapped up quickly to get merchandise out for sell as quickly as possible with very little consideration towards its outside appearance.  And likewise they are definitely some really ugly houses out there, but I feel the general home owner tends to want to improve their place as they are able, and having nicer looking homes around them would encourage that.

I'm definitely not suggesting another forced Zindra style relocation.  Maybe all that interior land away from roads and water that has sat abandoned for years could be given to business where the view doesn't matter because there just isn't much to view.  And as a last note on zoning make everyone put those skyboxes up out of view, something like 500 m above land instead of just 50.

3. Clean up and beautiful mainland.

I think that all of mainland would look more appealing if all the abandoned land was cleared of the junk left by previous owners, AND some vegetation was added.  It doesn't have to be an involved landscaping project, just tossing out some random trees and bushes and the parcel would look much better then the barren parcels I often see now, and it might make less obvious just how much of the sim is abandoned.

I know I'm going to get yelled at on this one but maybe come down on those with the most ugly looking parcels.  Those who really don't care how their ugliness is effecting their neighbors, or worse yet deliberately trying to impact their neighbors with their ugliness.  To me it seems to make more sense to risk pissing off that one person and risk loosing them as a customer then to just let that person drive off all their neighbors.  And extend this to other resources such as avatar connections and server memory for scripts, could just add code to the server that doesn't allow a small parcel to use up 99% of a sim's resources.

[Dillon Levenque]

I definitely agree with your first point, especially as regards small parcel owners like me. It seems to me it would be pretty easy to implement 512 increments at least up to, say, 4096.

On point two, while I have often thought it would be pretty nice to have sections zoned residential and commercial, I don't see any way at all that could be policed wihout a massive amount of LL work (just think of all the bureaucracy that's in place to accomplish that in RL—permits, assessors, commissions, etc.) and that would have to result in an increase in land fees. "My neighbor's running a club in his back yard!". It would, I think, be ugly.

On point three: yes, there are examples that just about everyone with eyes would agree are just too ugly. But I can't begin to imagine how you could come up with standards; without them there's just way too much room for subjective opinion.

[Knutz Scorpio]

Someone placing their business in an area zoned for residential, and vice versa, could be AR'd by the residents.

(/me hastily adds when hearing laughter in the background) And improving how ARs are handled would definitely help this and problems with ugly neighbors also.  I've read that some do see results of ARs, apparently it takes lots of time waiting and lots of people complaining.

[Six Igaly]

Not sure if it matters, it is just that i can't recall from my early years there was so much abandoned and for sale.

And i am happy for you that your mainland life is good. Really are. No matter where i settled on mainland it was always short term joy. Once even i was the very first owner of a new Oceanside sim, and within the month i had neighbors that started a club. 2 of them! Resulting in log in failures because of a over crowded sim. And this is just one example. But! That was mainland... stuff happened. 

BTW i think i am starting to think i mixed up a few things. Land for sale is not the same as empty dead land. And, mainland (or parts of it at least)  can appear dead to me, it might as well can be the darn timezone bug thingy. :matte-motes-big-grin:

[Six Igaly]

Well said :smileyhappy:

[Six Igaly]

1: Agree

2: Uglyness is subjective. But of course, everyone hopes the new neighbor is making something nice of it. Personally i don't care too much if a store is ugly. I'm there for the products. But! It is at least a bit odd if some merchant makes nice stuff to sell it in an ugly store. Althoug! Scripters for example, are not always designers (or better usually not) so the product can be worth the money.

I am sure some people really make the place as horrid as possible on purpose. But the most 'ugly' stuff, i believe, is made by people that are proud of their work since, for example, they never did creative stuff before. And so they can't see the uglyness.

3: Who should determine what should be deleted in a sim? But i agree so far, land that is abandoned already must be cleared from ugly stuff and turned in to rainforest or whatever.

[Dillon Levenque]

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Knutz Scorpio wrote:

Someone placing their business in an area zoned for residential, and vice versa, could be AR'd by the residents.

(/me hastily adds when hearing laughter in the background) And improving how ARs are handled would definitely help this and problems with ugly neighbors also.  I've read that some do see results of ARs, apparently it takes lots of time waiting and lots of people complaining.

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Yeah, I do realize that neighbor AR's would be the method of redress and I wasn't laughing, but I was thinking it would probably turn into a quagmire and definitely turn into a lot of unpleasantness between neighbors.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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James Seraph wrote:

I'm confused as to the value of mainland.

I can't think of why anyone would be interested in mainland, but it certainly isn't my duty to do anything about something that is ultimately just obsolete. 

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Not everyone is you.

I find estate land way too disjointed - isolated - and unpredictable. You never know what the policy wil be from day to day on a piece of land you get there.

You cannot explore estate land. You just can't. No ability to drive ot fly or whatever from sim to sim. To me, this makes it an odd impractical product. But I won't call that obsolete. I can accept that not everyone is me.

 

 

[Edward Towton]

You know what I haven't seen discussed here? What kind of land is for sale.

Based on my travels (no hard data here, sorry), it seems that land for sale is overwhelmingly General land and Moderate land in regions that are next to General regions. Following the merger of the teen grid and allowing under-18s to travel the wider world, SL residents over 18 have fled the General regions and nobody is filling them up again.

As a landlord, I have little interest in buying General land, as I have no desire to be a policeman to my tenants' activities inside their own homes.

The best thing LL could do to save the Mainland would be to bar teens from it once again. Even better, re-label most of the General regions (especially those with nobody in them) as Moderate. Then people might move back.

[Nuhai Ling]

The loss of mainland is a simple result of it being cheaper to buy and abandon than the cost of tier to maintain it. Here is how it works.

Resident A buys 4096M of land to build a home, business, or whatever at a price of L$1 per meter. While they own it, they pay $25.00 USD - or about L$6000 - per month in tier. After a few months the resident decides land ownership is not for them. Since so much land is available through Gov. Linden at L$1 per meter, the best the resident can hope to get is his initial purchase price of L$4096. The resident puts it up for sale and then waits until the day before his tier is due. If he/she has not found a buyer, it is cheaper to abandon the land than keep it.

This is the case for all tier levels.

When the mainland had a market (back in the old days) there was an incentive to hold onto parcels for at least one tier cycle (and often more) because there was a chance to recoup the sale price plus tier costs. For instance, in the example above the resident could break even if he/she sold her land at L$2.5 per meter or more within one tier cycle. This same price-to-cost consideration is what drove the mainland virtual real estate business until it was flooded with Gov. Linden land being sold below the threshold of monthly tier cost.

So the solution is simple; Gov. Linden needs to exceed the tier-to-land price ratio by creating a greater demand for land. To do this is a function of supply which means shrinking the total land mass and eliminating "free" housing programs. This would cause supply and demand to re-align and push prices high enough to justify keeping parcels on the market for at least one tier cycle. This simple economic model also explains why Zindra has the last viable land market. Without "free" Linden homes and a limited land mass generally assured not to expand, the market there sustains about a L$6 per meter price. This is well above the level required to entice residents to hold onto land for at least one tier cycle and support a virtual real estate market.

Sadly, in the five-plus years I have been in SL, I have never seen or heard Linden Lab consider its in-world economic health as important. In fact, looking at how little the linden and total land mass has fluctuated over time shows that it is being unnaturally supported as a corporate/socialist function rather than a free market. Doing so has made Second Life to what it is today and likely will doom it to collapse as a resident-driven virtual world.

 

 

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

I've been proposing zoning for a long time now.

I would do it in a limited stage.

Pick a continent and give it an 'anti-blight policy'.

- "Blight being that which would be seen as blighting an area by a reasonable observer."

 

People complain all the time that no one would agree on this, but when you look at what builds folks complain about, the vast majority is the same kinds of things:

1. Giant glowing structures.

2. Insane script spam.

3. Building way out of scale with their surroiundings, like a skyscrapper in the middle of a series of 1-story structures.

4. Spammy builds, offensive builds, and so on.

A quick read through land forums, and observing in inworld land groups - people pretty much do agree on what blight is.

 

Do it in one continent, and let folks who want it move there, and folks who don't avoid it.

 

Zoning is a bit tricky. It would have to evolve the same way as it did in RL, for the most part. Cities in older parts of the world have just had to come in and say "the majority of this area is being used for X, so its now officially X."

- And again, do this either on the continent above, or in some limited manner. Either together with anti-blight, or instead of it.

 

I only get tripped up on this where I feel the idea needs to have a place for all 3 ratings... so it would be complicated to find the part of Zindra that it would be tested on.

 

My suspicion is there would be outrage, followed by an eventual majority of people moving into it.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Edward Towton wrote:

You know what I haven't seen discussed here? What kind of land is for sale.

Based on my travels (no hard data here, sorry), it seems that land for sale is

overwhelmingly

 General land and Moderate land in regions that are next to General regions. Following the merger of the teen grid and allowing under-18s to travel the wider world, SL residents over 18 have fled the General regions and nobody is filling them up again.

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I mentioned a version of this in passing.

A-rated mainland is holding its prices.

But so too is double prim G and M land. Bay City's G rated area defies some of your theory - but it does so because its double prim and a well laid out structure.

A-rated holds its value because a lot of it is kept off market by land barons, who also very quickly grab up any lot that does get abandoned, and only sell for higher values. That in turns lets regular folks keep selling for higher value.

- This same activity once kept M an G land afloat. But those are too big now, for the number of land flippers left in the game, to sustain. And a lot of land that was once off market, abandoned land, now competes with the sellers there... collapsing any value.

 

You -do- see people avodiing some very nice land who's only flaw is being G rated. But there is still a lot of occupied G rated land, and enough available M land to absorb all of those folks if they actually wanted to leave G.

My opinion is that flight is over. What's left now is people leaving blighted lots. Most abansoned lots I visit, have some ugly build near them. Not all, but a striking number do.

[Triple Peccable]

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Knutz Scorpio wrote:

Someone placing their business in an area zoned for residential, and vice versa, could be AR'd by the residents.

(/me hastily adds when hearing laughter in the background) And improving how ARs are handled would definitely help this and problems with ugly neighbors also.  I've read that some do see results of ARs, apparently it takes lots of time waiting and lots of people complaining.

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AR's in a case like that are *completely* useless. I know first-hand. Read this horror story:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mainland/Farewell-Dobinson/td-p/1528457

 

[Perrie Juran]

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James Seraph wrote:

I'm confused as to the value of mainland.  In the beginning when SL was very new, the feel of a 'real place' with highways, landscape etc. was intriguing and helped people connect.  The Telehubs insured that you had to spend a lot of time going to places and went by others. 

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Dillon Levenque wrote:

On point two, while I have often thought it would be pretty nice to have sections zoned residential and commercial, I don't see any way at all that could be policed wihout a massive amount of LL work (just think of all the bureaucracy that's in place to accomplish that in RL—permits, assessors, commissions, etc.) and that would have to result in an increase in land fees. "My neighbor's running a club in his back yard!". It would, I think, be ugly.

 

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 It is interesting to note some of the original thinking behind the TeleHubs when they were instituted:

"A side benefit Linden Lab had hoped would be that telehubs would help in "urban development", creating more commercial centers around them, and leaving the outskirts of land further away from the "hubs" for residential-type land."

http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Telehubs

[Qie Niangao]

That's a very interesting observation: Zindra land values have stayed relatively intact, and there are no Linden Homes with Adult maturity ratings.

I'd quibble with some of the other points, though, because I remember the details rather differently. For example, others too have said that the Mainland real estate business (aka "land flipping") collapsed when abandoned land started to go to market automatically at L$1/sq.m. That's just not what I remember. The big dealers were gone long before that, with only a handful of bottom feeders remaining, and an even more select few trying to make a business with the very high-end stuff. The buying bots were already at or below L$0.5/sq.m. It's fallen further, sure, but I really haven't detected a qualitative change resulting from that auto-for-sale program. Rather, I think it's more parsimonious to attribute all the market effects to a steady slide in demand across the board (and not only Mainland).

Also, I very distinctly recall Jack Linden trying to manage new continent turn-ups to retain a viable average sale price for Mainland. For a while. He got ahead of himself a bit, chasing projected demand that never materialized. And then the Adult Content policy came, and suddenly the solution was to churn out a new continent. And then Linden Homes--and it's a matter of faith whether one believes that they were intended to drive up general demand, or a cynical attempt to drum up some more Premium membership revenue regardless of effect on value of Mainland and Estates (or even an attempt to GOM the whole residential land market--but the absurdity of that conspiracy theory is evident if one compares the paltry Premium fee with the income from Estate sims).

[Czari Zenovka]

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Millennium Sands wrote:

Looks like Satori to me.

Well, when you look at a whole continent, a view like that with lots of parcels for sale isn't that surprising. I think it was always like that.

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What I'm noticing now is a bit different than the past - instead of parcels for sale, every mainland region I've gone to in the last month (on a hunt and I have the habit of pulling up the map to check parcel prices) has a TON - sometimes the majority of the sim - with abandoned land.  In over 5 years I have never seen so much land abandoned.  It actually used to be fairly rare as most people would just keep lowering the price until a landbot grabbed it instead of walking away.

I have lived on the same mainland sim for most of my 5+ years in SL.  It is a nicely situated water sim bordered on two sides by Linden ocean.  (Where I live now is, imo, the prime spot in the sim as it is on the corner, thus surrounded on two sides by the ocean.  I gave up my Premium account and rent this land that was purchased by my landlord for mega-bucks many years ago...but I digress...)

People have moved in and out of the sim over the years, but at any given time, there were always quite a few parcels for sale.  For the last 6 months or so there have been absolutely no parcels on the sim for sale...but yet...I'm usually the only one there at any given time.  I found this rather curious.  Then I looked at the map a few days ago and WHOA!!!  3/4 of the sim was yellow with, yep, abandoned land for 1L per sqm.  If the tier costs weren't so high, I could own practically the entire sim...lol.  I noticed the next day the waterfront parcels had been purchased, cut up into 512 sqm parcels and are now for sale for 3.5L sqm (years ago they traditionally sold for at least 13L per sqm) but so far nothing has sold.

[Czari Zenovka]

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Snickers Snook wrote:

LL could start by making tier steps smaller and giving away the first 1024 to premium. You can't do much of anything on a 512.

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You hit the nail on the head, Snickers.  It's not the land price but tier that has historically kept more people from owning land, or deciding to keep it.

[Czari Zenovka]

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Conifer Dada wrote:

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Six Igaly wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

Abandoned land in the past showed as owned land when viewed from the map. Now it shows as for sale land.

- In effect, there is actually a lot -LESS- resident owned land for sale now than there used to be.

 

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It shows for sale now because when land gets abandoned it is dumped on the market for L$ 1/m very quick. Before, abandoned land just stayed abandoned for months. I'm not sure if it makes any difference if the available land is resident owned or LL owned. If none of it will be sold it is just as useless, regardless who tries to sell it.

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That's true, but it eventually it used to end up being auctioned at prices in line with the bottom end of land market at the time.  Looking round, with so much LL land on offer at L$1 per sq m, I see some land offered for sale by residents at less than L$ 1 per sq m - I even saw L$ 0.5 on one plot!

This collapse in land prices doesn't seem to have hit waterfront mainland yet - I haven't found any waterfront that's abandoned and L$ 1 yet.  That's soemthing to watch out for.

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Check out my post above.   Land was abandoned on the waterfront on my mainland sim.  Someone did purchase it immediately at 1L/sqm, cut it into 512 parcels, and has it back for sale at 3.5L/sqm.  There is a 512 waterfront parcel on an adjoining sim that has been for sale for at least a year, at 23L/sqm.  Good luck with that one...lol.

Also, in my sim-hopping and checking out the maps...I see other waterfront mainland abandoned.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Czari Zenovka wrote:

Check out my post above.

  Land was abandoned on the waterfront on my mainland sim.  Someone did purchase it immediately at 1L/sqm, cut it into 512 parcels, and has it back for sale at 3.5L/sqm.  

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Probably someone who read your post here.

If I'd had tier, it would have been me.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

That's a very interesting observation: Zindra land values have stayed relatively intact, and there are no Linden Homes with Adult maturity ratings.

I'd quibble with some of the other points, though, because I remember the details rather differently. For example, others too have said that the Mainland real estate business (aka "land flipping") collapsed when abandoned land started to go to market automatically at L$1/sq.m.

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Nod.

I didn't mean to imply that the abandoned land at 1L/m collapsed the land barons on G and M. But rather that it works to prevent them from returning. So, probably didn't word myself ideally above.

Several ZIndra Land barons have made attempts at G and M work - but they only seem to just 'test the waters.' with a few scattered plots here and there.

I think the abandoned thing was actually -intended- to prevent land from collapsing even further...

I thought it was a great idea when it started - finally be able to buy all this land here and there... But yeah, not so sure now - as it just keeps anyone with land from being able resell. Unless you have a choice lot - you're stuck abandoning or selling to a bot for super low.

 

[Czari Zenovka]

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Edward Towton wrote:

You know what I haven't seen discussed here? What kind of land is for sale.

Based on my travels (no hard data here, sorry), it seems that land for sale is

overwhelmingly

 General land and Moderate land in regions that are next to General regions. Following the merger of the teen grid and allowing under-18s to travel the wider world, SL residents over 18 have fled the General regions and nobody is filling them up again.

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The majority of abandoned land I see are in Mature-rated sims/parcels.

[Czari Zenovka]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

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Czari Zenovka wrote:

Check out my post above.

  Land was abandoned on the waterfront on my mainland sim.  Someone did purchase it immediately at 1L/sqm, cut it into 512 parcels, and has it back for sale at 3.5L/sqm.  

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Probably someone who read your post here.

If I'd had tier, it would have been me.

 

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You and me both