CHANGE to Abandoned Land

[Qie Niangao]

Thanks to an article in Inara Pey's fabulous blog, we learn of a significant change to how abandoned land is handled, reportedly already in force for the Magnum RC channel. In the past, the (non-group) landowner, after abandoning the land, had some interval (usually 24 hours) during which they could repurchase it for L$0. I think that was to make it easy to correct an accidental abandonment.

Anyway, the updated wiki article suggests that this won't necessarily happen anymore.

Perhaps more importantly, as best I can interpret the wiki and Release Notes, the practice of automatically setting abandoned land for sale to everyone for L$1/sq.m. is also stopping.

[Nefertiti Nefarious]

I abandoned land (mainland) yesterday and was given the "You have 24 hours" notice.

All the Release note says is: "Changed abandoned land behavior: parcels abandoned on the Mainland are no longer automatically made available for sale."

I would interpret it as meaning that after land has reverted to Gov Linden as owner (after the 24 hours oopsie time) that LL will be looking at land to decide whether to set it for sale as is, or if it makes sense to subdivide, join parcels, clean up boundaries or shut down that sim.

[Triple Peccable]

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Nefertiti Nefarious wrote:

I would interpret it as meaning that after land has reverted to Gov Linden as owner (after the 24 hours oopsie time) that LL will be looking at land to decide whether to set it for sale as is, or if it makes sense to subdivide, join parcels, clean up boundaries or shut down that sim.

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I interpret it to mean that all the yellow on the map makes SL look bad, like everyone is leaving, and Rodvik is on a quest to cover up all things that might make SL look bad. The closing of public viewing the JIRA is a good example of this.

 

I suspect these forums are in his gun sights also (reference to gaming pun intended).

 

[Qie Niangao]

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I would interpret it as meaning that after land has reverted to Gov Linden as owner (after the 24 hours oopsie time) that LL will be looking at land to decide whether to set it for sale as is, or if it makes sense to subdivide, join parcels, clean up boundaries or shut down that sim.

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You may be right that only the automated set-for-sale part has changed, but it's very difficult to tell. The change, whatever it is, should only be effective on Magnum sims at present, so unless you abandoned on a sim running that RC, I don't think we have any data. I don't know what the Knowledge Base article said before, but I thought it would have said something about that grace period, and it currently doesn't.

[jwenting]

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Triple Peccable wrote:

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Nefertiti Nefarious wrote:

I would interpret it as meaning that after land has reverted to Gov Linden as owner (after the 24 hours oopsie time) that LL will be looking at land to decide whether to set it for sale as is, or if it makes sense to subdivide, join parcels, clean up boundaries or shut down that sim.

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I interpret it to mean that all the yellow on the map makes SL look bad, like everyone is leaving, and Rodvik is on a quest to cover up all things that might make SL look bad. The closing of public viewing the JIRA is a good example of this.

 

I suspect these forums are in his gun sights also (reference to gaming pun intended).

 

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yes, you and some like you who want to harm SL and LL always see everything as being some nefarious and brilliant conspiracy on the part of LL, unless you see it as being caused by sheer stupidity on the part of LL. The two are of course mutually exclusive but in your sheer hatred you fail to realise that.

[Inara Pey]

I did blog about this in more detail on Thursday, but in updating a number of blog pages, forgot to hit the PUBLISH button. Silly me.

The details are now available here.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Some were using the buy back option as a way to game tier.

Personally I think that such tier gaming was legit, but I can see them using it as a reason to remove the automatic buy back.

 

The notion being something like this:

I have 4096m of land, next to me is a plot that is 2048m of land. I have 512m of tier left.

I abandon my lot, buy the 2048, slice out the 512m I want, abandon the rest, and then buy my own lot back. Happy me.

- But LLs wants me to have to pay for having had 6144m of land - even if I only have the excess for 1 second.

 

That's my theory at least.

Good to know about this, because I am in this exact situation, but with a different amount on the land totals, and was getting ready to abandon one lot in order to grab the other and slice out the part I wanted... Now I'll just pass on that extra land.

 

It IS however good to see that they plan to flip auto-return on after a week. That will help reduce squatting, griefing, and clutter.

[Qie Niangao]

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The notion being something like this:

I have 4096m of land, next to me is a plot that is 2048m of land. I have 512m of tier left.

I abandon my lot, buy the 2048, slice out the 512m I want, abandon the rest, and then buy my own lot back. Happy me.

- But LLs wants me to have to pay for having had 6144m of land - even if I only have the excess for 1 second.

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This sort of thing can still be done without being able to reclaim abandoned land, using landowning group(s). In the example, you'd deed the already-owned land to a group, then withdraw all contributed tier, leaving the group "overdrawn" for as long as it takes to buy the 2048, subdivide it, and abandon the unwanted parts, then either restore the group's tier contribution or buy-back the original land as an individual.

If they ever change it so land in briefly overdrawn groups is immediately lost, I'm completely screwed. Not counting the times I've done that by accident, it's the only way I know to shift land from one group to another, which I do all the time.

[Atashi Toshihiko]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

Perhaps more importantly, as best I can interpret the wiki and

Release Notes

, the practice of automatically setting abandoned land for sale to everyone for L$1/sq.m. is also stopping.

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I can confirm this seems to be the case. There was a plot of previously abandoned land next to my land in a region that's on the Magnum RC and on Monday someone bought it and immediately abandoned it (perhaps to test this). I'd been eyeing the lot myself but was holding off due to the tier-bump it would have caused.

Anyhow, the land was bought then abandoned on Monday and it did not automatically show as for sale to [user], nor has it reverted to for sale to anyone. Instead, the parcel name changed to include the date it was abandoned along with saying it's abandoned, and the parcel description includes the name of the resident who abandoned it, and has a link to the article in the knowledge base.

So no more automatic abandoned land for sale at L$1/m which is a bit of a shame IMHO.

[Curious Hazelnut]

On several occations I have expanded my land holdings buy purchasing parts of abandoned land that was adjacent to my existing holdings. I simply submitted a ticket requestion that the adjacent land be sub-divided so that I could buy the size and shape I wanted. The Lindens generally turned this around in a couple of days. No overdue tier payments. No abandoning land. it has been a while since I've done this but the last time was after the auto-sale feature was added. Despite what reading these forums suggests, I was very happy with the support I received from Linden Lab and land management.

[Hugsy Penguin]

As a part of making changes to abandoned land, is it possible they're automatically changing old 0 auto-return land to 5 minutes?  The reason I ask is this:

Years ago I owned land in an adjacent sim.  There was a 8m x 8m notch in the land – half owned by an old ad farmer and half owned by the neighbor.  The old ad farmer land was abandoned but had no auto-return.  I found a 10m sphere underground left behind by someone.  It was underground and not bothersome but made me decide to fill the rest of the land with tree trunks.

Like I said that was years ago.  Today I log in and get a message that those objects have been returned to me.  I went to investigate the land and verified that my objects and the underground sphere are gone.  Also, 5 minute auto-return has been set.  And here's the kicker:  the 1,056m² of land that I used to own is abandoned, for sale, but was NOT joined to the 32m² abandoned land that was just changed.  And, the 32m² land was not terraformed back to default like they always do.

Had a Linden actually come out to manually fix the land as a result of a support ticket, they surely would have joined all the land together and terraformed it.  I highly doubt they would have missed that.  And given the slow turn over of land in the area, I highly doubt anyone ever bothered to send in a ticket in the first place.

And, wow, I just noticed that my neighbor abandoned their land about 14 hour ago.  It's well-within the old 24 hour buy back period, but it's not for sale to anyone.

[Qie Niangao]

Yeah, something has changed about auto-return on existing abandoned parcels. Within the last week I, too, got a bunch of Linden trees back to Lost&Found from a parcel that had been abandoned before the auto-for-sale thing came into effect.

Checking around further, I found something I've never seen before: I have a little Mesh build planted firmly on another abandoned parcel from before auto-for-sale; the parcel recently got auto-return enabled; yet my build remains there and I have no idea how. [EDIT: Oh, never mind. No mystery here, the object was actually rooted on my parcel, my earlier (errant) inspection notwithstanding.]