There Ought to be a Law........

[Rufferta]

Are some property owners subdividing the land around them into unusable parcels and then abandoning them to reduce tier but discourage new neighbors? Perhaps I have a suspicious mind, but I visited several sims today where there were  some older occupied properties surrounded by a lot of smaller parcels that all seemed to have been abandoned on the same day.

Not to give anyone ideas. If this is deliberate it is uncouth. This is sorta like the guy who takes the middle of two parking spaces for one car, or the person who sprawls across two seats on a crowded bus.

For example, one of these properties was a 512 parcel surrounded by a larger parcel that had been split into 55 smaller pieces that were each on their own pretty much worthless. Surrounding the occupied 512 were four 192's and a 1024 that seemed to have been split into four pieces* separated by the 192's. Surrounding those was a ring of 52 16-meter parcels, and that in turn was surrounded by a 960 "donut"-shaped parcel.  

I was feeling particularly curmudgeonly today, so I bought as many of the 16-meter parcels as I could afford, rejoined them, and planted mushrooms. When I am rich or have more tier I hope to buy all of the 55 pieces, re-join them, and then subdivide them into usable parcels, for what it is worth.

I realize that part of the problem could be that tier is too high, and the way it is calibrated it is tempting to chop off a small piece of land to avoid going into a higher tier bracket. If you look at the abandoned land for sale you will see that a certain amount of it is little bits and pieces that you can't do much with. I don't know if changing the tier system at this late date would help much. 

*I really can't figure out how someone did that, but when I clicked "about land" the 1024 showed as four separate parcels.

 

 

 

 

 

[SinfulPrince]

When I lived on the mainland, and I did for a bit, I felt like I lived in a garbage can. Forget about the  random trash next to what I was trying to have as a residential parcel, but everything was "right on top of one another".  For me, had  I done what you're describing, it would have been to create SPACE between parcel "a" and parcel "b".  For my opinion, I feel like LL should have orchestrated it that way themselves. 

 

Just my .02

[Dora Gustafson]

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SinfulPrince wrote:

 For me, had  I done what you're describing, it would have been to create SPACE between parcel "a" and parcel "b".  For my opinion, I feel like LL should have orchestrated it that way themselves. 

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LL did that in some places, in Nautilus City for one, and it works great:)

 

[Qie Niangao]

There actually is a "law" against landsplitting. It was the last (I think) of the rules put in place to curtail adfarming. I have no idea where (or if) survive Jack's old blog posts that detailed the anti-adfarming rules.

The landsplitting one was always subject to interpretation. The cutting of deceptive "donut holes" in privately for-sale land was always pretty obvious, so any such shenanigans would likely get an enforcement response of some sort (probably just disabling the sale of all the land in the sim owned by that seller). Abandoning, on the other hand, is probably a grey area, and Lindens with governance responsibility are sufficiently libertarian / lethargic / apathetic to likely ignore ARs about that.

On the other hand, I have several times gotten Land team response to Support cases recommending that a cluster of abandoned microparcels and weirdly misshapen crap be glued together into usable parcels for sale. I recommend that approach, over buying up the microparcels oneself (although I've done that, too, on occasion).

[Rufferta]

 

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SinfulPrince wrote:

... For me, had  I done what you're describing, it would have been to create SPACE between parcel "a" and parcel "b".  For my opinion, I feel like LL should have orchestrated it that way themselves. 

 

Just my .02

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I agree that having a bit of space between you and your neighbors makes a nicer environment. I think that is why a lot of people prefer land bordered by 'protected' maintenance land, roads, or water.

The first piece of property I bought was a 1024 rectangle that was protected on three sides. I always regret that I traded it to a realtor, because she promptly split it into two skinny 512 parcels - I'm assuming to maximize profits. I think that is why I am so sensitive to 'micro-splits'. ("This cake serves 24 people, but you have to cut it with a lazer.")

What is a good distance between properties? Road width? River width? What other ways are there to avoid feeling claustrophobic on a small plot of land? I know people build skyboxes, or put 'landscape murals' around their property, but I guess I'm old-fashioned - I like to build on the ground with a view of what is actually around me, for better or worse.

I'm thinking that when I get all the 16-meter bits together, I can sell it as a small racetrack....

"Restore the Mainland. Buy my property."

 

[Richie Kanto]

Yes... and let's add there should be a law against putting trash on a parcel next to someone's nice build (and don't tell me about one man's trash is another's treasure... we've all seen how people ruin land value just so someone will buy them off the parcel).

There should be a law against LL creating more and more land, which just ruins the value of land already existing and sitting empty on the grid.

There should be a law against LL taking weeks or even months to respond to tickets asking that objects overhanging your land are removed when the other land owner refuses to even respond to nice requests to do so (or is no longer around in SL).

There should be a law against grieving SIMs just to make them lag and crash... then endlessly being able to change to different alts when finally after days have passed of having "fun" at everyone's expense you finally get your account suspended.

There should be a law that says LL should follow their own rules, and not decide all of a sudden to make up a rule that allows them to sell to someone else a Linden road (protected land) that used to go to your property until they sold it to a private individual so he could shut it down and have it end on his/her parcel.

And these are just minor annoyances... how about a law against LL destroying the marketplace with misguided and counter productive "fixes", or a law against charging for "tier" at a rate many times that of other grids, or a law against charging different people different prices, then keeping it a secret from everyone and denying you have a preferential "atlas program" in existence at all?

and sure... there might actually be laws or TOS rules against some of this... guess there should be a law that says laws should be enforced and not arbitrary. Good luck with that one.

[Hugsy Penguin]

If you're going to tier down by keeping some land and getting rid of the rest, you'd want to sell what you're getting rid of.  If you end up having to abandon it instead, I suppose there's various way you could go about that.  You could abandon it as all one piece.  You could split it into as-useful-as-you-can-get parcels and abandon each.  You could split it into as-least-useful-as-you-can-get parcels and abandon each.  Or, you could split it all up in 16s and abandon each.

What you're describing seems like a blend of the least-useful option and the all-16s option.  This is curious because the least-useful option seems like it could work to keep people away but the all-16s option seems to invite people to buy the micro parcels (perhaps just one and then something ugly gets put there).

I could see someone cutting everything up into 16s before abandoning thinking they're being the “nice guy”.  The thought is this:  with everything cut into 16s, the next buyer can buy exactly which bits of the abandoned land that they want right now.  They won't have to ask LL to recut the land (and possibly be denied).  This is assuming the buyer(s) will want to use the land in a community conscience way so it's probably a bad idea.

[Rufferta]

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Richie Kanto wrote:

Yes... and let's add there should be a law against putting trash on a parcel next to someone's nice build (and don't tell me about one man's trash is another's treasure... we've all seen how people ruin land value just so someone will buy them off the parcel).

There should be a law against LL creating more and more land, which just ruins the value of land already existing and sitting empty on the grid.

There should be a law against LL taking weeks or even months to respond to tickets asking that objects overhanging your land are removed when the other land owner refuses to even respond to nice requests to do so (or is no longer around in SL).

There should be a law against grieving SIMs just to make them lag and crash... then endlessly being able to change to different alts when finally after days have passed of having "fun" at everyone's expense you finally get your account suspended.

There should be a law that says LL should follow their own rules, and not decide all of a sudden to make up a rule that allows them to sell to someone else a Linden road (protected land) that used to go to your property until they sold it to a private individual so he could shut it down and have it end on his/her parcel.

And these are just minor annoyances... how about a law against LL destroying the marketplace with misguided and counter productive "fixes", or a law against charging for "tier" at a rate many times that of other grids, or a law against charging different people different prices, then keeping it a secret from everyone and denying you have a preferential "atlas program" in existence at all?

and sure... there might actually be laws or TOS rules against some of this... guess there should be a law that says laws should be enforced and not arbitrary. Good luck with that one.

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I agree. I live in the hope that things will be better in the future.

 

[Rufferta]

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Hugsy Penguin wrote:

If you're going to tier down by keeping some land and getting rid of the rest, you'd want to sell what you're getting rid of.  If you end up having to abandon it instead, I suppose there's various way you could go about that.  You could abandon it as all one piece.  You could split it into as-useful-as-you-can-get parcels and abandon each.  You could split it into as-least-useful-as-you-can-get parcels and abandon each.  Or, you could split it all up in 16s and abandon each.

 

What you're describing seems like a blend of the least-useful option and the all-16s option.  This is curious because the least-useful option seems like it could work to keep people away but the all-16s option seems to invite people to buy the micro parcels (perhaps just one and then something ugly gets put there).

 

I could see someone cutting everything up into 16s before abandoning thinking they're being the “nice guy”.  The thought is this:  with everything cut into 16s, the next buyer can buy exactly which bits of the abandoned land that they want right now.  They won't have to ask LL to recut the land (and possibly be denied).  This is assuming the buyer(s) will want to use the land in a community conscience way so it's probably a bad idea.

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I'm not sure what the purpose of the sub-divider was, although I have to admire the intricacy of the way he or she split the property. It is almost as if they were trying to split it into bits that could not be merged into useful portions unless you bought the whole thing.  If I'm doing my math correctly the land could have been split into nine 512 parcels, or six 512 parcels surrounded by a small border of abandoned land.

I am inclined to believe that the person who occupies the center of the abandoned land is the person who did the subdivide because 1. He or she acquired the central parcel a long time before the outer land was split, and 2. His or her build exactly fits the irregular 512 in the portion.

I'm still stumbling around in Second Life, but I realize from some of the previous posts that this kind of thing is a minor problem compared to others and I should worry about more serious things.  We are living in interesting times.

[Hugsy Penguin]

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Richie Kanto wrote:

Yes... and let's add there should be a law against putting trash on a parcel next to someone's nice build (and don't tell me about one man's trash is another's treasure... we've all seen how people ruin land value just so someone will buy them off the parcel).

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I think the better way to handle this is to add derendering options.  I'd like to derender by object, parcel, and owner.  I'd like a sensible GUI to show me what's derendered and easy options for rerendering.

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Richie Kanto wrote:

There should be a law against LL taking weeks or even months to respond to tickets asking that objects overhanging your land are removed when the other land owner refuses to even respond to nice requests to do so (or is no longer around in SL).

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You can return objects that are overhanging on your land even if the root prim is not centered on your land.  This was added earlier this year.

[Phil Deakins]

There's another possible reason for sub-dividing land into unuseable chunks and then abandoning it - to discourage anyone from buying it, so that LL doesn't get tier on it.

In two steps, I went from a whole mainland sim down to a quarter sim plus the 10% group bonus. I abandoned the land I got rid of so that LL would earn less tier. If I'd sold it, LL would actually gain tier, so I abandoned it. I hadn't thought of also cutting it up into unuseable chunks to discourage people from buying it or I might have done it. Yes, I do dislike LL the company that much.

[Dora Gustafson]

Who do you benefit  by depriving LL tier???

Not me or anybody actually using SL:smileywink::

[Qie Niangao]

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[...] I hadn't thought of also cutting it up into unuseable chunks to discourage people from buying it or I might have done it. Yes, I do dislike LL the company that much.

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Yeah, but Phil, some meddling do-gooder (we know who we are) might notice the yellow mess on the map and get LL to glue it all back together anyway. Moreover, if it's big enough, they'd then likely send it to auction instead of leaving it for sale at L$1/sq.m., and they're much more likely to get a sucker buyer for the land at auction, who'd then pay tier.

[Phil Deakins]

Yes I knew that my efforts wouldn't last all that long but, from my point of view, every little helps It took a while, but all the land is gone now. At least I deprived LL of some income for quite some time.

ETA: Correction. Loads of the land still hasn't sold. It's not set for sale and is still owned by Govenor Linden.

[Phil Deakins]

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Dora Gustafson wrote:

Who do you benefit  by depriving LL tier???

Not me or anybody actually using SL:smileywink::

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My drop-in-the-ocean actions didn't deprive any SL user of anything. But it did deprive LL of some money for some time, which was my intention.

Why would I want to do that? Because of LL's unscrupulous actions against their own paying customers, of which I have been one for almost 6 years.

So the answer to your question, "Who do you benefit by depriving LL tier?", is me. I benefited me.

[Knowl Paine]

I'm guilty, it was me.

 

I don't want a wrecked angle, I wanted a square.

 

The last person to touch the land (a linden), thought it would be a good idea to revert 22,000 sqm on a hill side, rendering most of the surrounding land unusable. The only way to make any sort of flat area, is to purchase the surrounding land, edit terrain, and then abandon it. 

When editing terrain, it is sometimes necessary to subdivide some land sections, because of the way the land shears differently at each adjacent property line.

No sane person will buy that 22,000 sqm, I have no idea what the Linden plan is, somebody (LL) needs to chop that into useable peices, and bit the bullet on the fragmented plots.

I know what some of you are thinking; SL has plenty of insane people. I agree, but do they also have cash?

 

Land preservation and reunification, is a noble, but misguided effort.

Monies, time and effort, would be better rewarded in a private region, with an enforceable covenant, providing surety in investment.

 

 

 

[jwenting]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

There's another possible reason for sub-dividing land into unuseable chunks and then abandoning it - to discourage anyone from buying it, so that LL doesn't get tier on it.

In two steps, I went from a whole mainland sim down to a quarter sim plus the 10% group bonus. I abandoned the land I got rid of so that LL would earn less tier. If I'd sold it, LL would actually gain tier, so I abandoned it. I hadn't thought of also cutting it up into unuseable chunks to discourage people from buying it or I might have done it. Yes, I do dislike LL the company that much.

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typical hater response. If you hate LL so much you want to "punish" them in such a way, why do you keep your premium account, why indeed to you stay in SL at all and don't vote with your feet by leaving us all in peace and taking your business elsewhere?

You're just as much a griefer as those kids launching lag attacks to crash sims.

 

[jwenting]

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Knowl Paine wrote:

I'm guilty, it was me.

 

I don't want a wrecked angle, I wanted a square.

 

The last person to touch the land (a linden), thought it would be a good idea to revert 22,000 sqm on a hill side, rendering most of the surrounding land unusable. The only way to make any sort of flat area, is to purchase the surrounding land, edit terrain, and then abandon it. 

When editing terrain, it is sometimes necessary to subdivide some land sections, because of the way the land shears differently at each adjacent property line.

No sane person will buy that 22,000 sqm, I have no idea what the Linden plan is, somebody (LL) needs to chop that into useable peices, and bit the bullet on the fragmented plots.

 

 

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Most likely the last tenant before LL got it back made that weird shaped parcel by abandoning pieces around it at one time or another, or by buying parcels around his/her initial plot and combining them all until that shape was created, the other owners in the sim may have refused to sell until after the land was abandoned and left in that shape.

Maybe LL could go over abandoned land and manually divide and subdivide it into nice shaped parcels as much as possible before putting it up for sale, but that's labour intensive and they just don't have the manpower.

 

[Rufferta]

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Knowl Paine wrote:

I'm guilty, it was me.

 

I don't want a wrecked angle, I wanted a square.

 

The last person to touch the land (a linden), thought it would be a good idea to revert 22,000 sqm on a hill side, rendering most of the surrounding land unusable. The only way to make any sort of flat area, is to purchase the surrounding land, edit terrain, and then abandon it. 

When editing terrain, it is sometimes necessary to subdivide some land sections, because of the way the land shears differently at each adjacent property line.

No sane person will buy that 22,000 sqm, I have no idea what the Linden plan is, somebody (LL) needs to chop that into useable peices, and bit the bullet on the fragmented plots.

I know what some of you are thinking; SL has plenty of insane people. I agree, but do they also have cash?

 

Land preservation and reunification, is a noble, but misguided effort.

Monies, time and effort, would be better rewarded in a private region, with an enforceable covenant, providing surety in investment.

 

 

 

---

Knowl Paine, the land that was dissected was flat; however, your explanation of why you split up land in order to do better terraforming makes perfect sense, and I will try to remember it next time I'm trying to bulldoze property on a slope.

As for ..."SL has plenty of insane people. I agree, but do they also have cash?" I have to answer that 'yes' based on some of the builds I've seen. (Though some might think my builds the work of someone 'differently normal'.)

As for "Monies, time and effort, would be better rewarded in a private region, with an enforceable covenant, providing surety in investment." I partly disagree. I rent a small parcel in Caledon, but it is far too civilized there for me to mess around and experiment. While I try to respect my neighbors on Mainland, I don't feel so bad about leaving the cement mixer out overnight....

Thank you all for showing me that there may be many reasons for subdividing land into odd bits.

 

[jwenting]

thought of another reason to subdivide: You've bought a weird shaped parcel because you liked the spot, and cut off some of the weird bits you can't use because they're just small, narrow, spikes for example, which you subsequently abandon, using the tier resulting to buy another adjacent parcel (if there is one) to extend your property and keeping a nice rectangle (or roadside triangle).

[Phil Deakins]

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jwenting wrote:

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Phil Deakins wrote:

There's another possible reason for sub-dividing land into unuseable chunks and then abandoning it - to discourage anyone from buying it, so that LL doesn't get tier on it.

In two steps, I went from a whole mainland sim down to a quarter sim plus the 10% group bonus. I abandoned the land I got rid of so that LL would earn less tier. If I'd sold it, LL would actually gain tier, so I abandoned it. I hadn't thought of also cutting it up into unuseable chunks to discourage people from buying it or I might have done it. Yes, I do dislike LL the company that much.

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typical hater response. If you hate LL so much

you want to "punish" them in such a way, why do you keep your premium account, why indeed to you stay in SL at all and don't vote with your feet by leaving us all in peace and taking your business elsewhere?

You're just as much a griefer as those kids launching lag attacks to crash sims.

 

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I don't hate anybody or anything. Whatever gave you that extreme idea? I dislike LL a helluva lot though. That's the company, not each individual employee.

You ask why I don't just leave SL. Simple. It's because I've been making a load of RL money from it for years. However, I did decide to leave SL at least 2½ years ago and one of the two big reasons was my great dislike of LL. That was when I started to let the store run down so that, when it was no longer financially wothwhile, I would close up and leave. I'm still waiting for it to no longer be financially worthwhile. As I said, the store made me a load of RL money every month so it's taking a long time to run down.

Apart from that, disliking LL a helluva lot is no reason for anyone to stop enjoying SL itself.

[Triple Peccable]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

Apart from that, disliking LL a helluva lot is no reason for anyone to stop enjoying SL itself.

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Wow, I wish I had an attitude like that. My problems with LL have left such a bad taste in my mouth that when I do log in (only when needed for customer support) I look around, and the first thing that strikes me is how all the goodness and wonderment is gone. I log back out as soon as I can.

[Phil Deakins]

The way I see it is similar to Sky TV. The 'Murdoch factor' (the dislike of Murdoch) is great enough to prevent some people from signing up with Sky. Some other people sign up with Sky in spite of their dislike of Murdoch, because of the personal benefits. And other people don't dislike him.

There are things in SL that would outweigh the dislike of company and keep some people in. RL profits, for instance, but mainly people (users). Many people would stay in SL because of the socialising they have in it, in spite of their dislike of the company that runs the system.

The "wonderment" fades for eveyone over time. Much of the "goodness", which I interpret as enjoyment, need never fade, regardless of LL.

[Rabid Cheetah]

Well, it's sort of like trying to sell a used box of Lego.

 

You can try to sell the entire box.

 

You can try to mush a few pieces together into standard shapes, and sell the clusters of pieces.

 

Or you can sell each little piece individually, and tell folks to mix and match as they choose.

 

If the first two methods aren't selling your Lego, then it makes sense to try the third method of 4096 little peices each measuring four inches by four inches.

 

Then, when even that doesn't sell, you drop off the box of Lego peices at the local thrift shop, and let the customers ponder why none of the pieces are stuck together...