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interesting abandoned land changes in the works


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I like this idea for selling abandoned land and believe if LL would also takes steps to lower tiers, especially for the people with smaller lots, this would invigorate the mainalnd.

Change tier levels to:

1024m       0.00usd/month

2048m       8.00usd/month

4096m     15.00usd/month

8192m     27.50usd/month

16384m   50.00usd/month

32768m   95.00usd/month

65536m 179.00usd/month

and give a 25% Group Bonus

Mainland would sell because Price does sell !!!

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Robin Ivory wrote:

I like this idea for selling abandoned land and believe if LL would also takes steps to lower tiers, especially for the people with smaller lots, this would invigorate the mainalnd.

Change tier levels to:

1024m       0.00usd/month

2048m       8.00usd/month

4096m     15.00usd/month

8192m     27.50usd/month

16384m   50.00usd/month

32768m   95.00usd/month

65536m 179.00usd/month

and give a 25% Group Bonus

Mainland would sell because Price does sell !!!

 

Your numbers are a bit off for the 65536 level, that should be approx US$150/month based on the numbers above it.

Aside from that, yes, I think dropping tier prices a bit could be a major enabler for growth and ultimately boost revenue from tier in the long term.

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If LL dropped tier then people would simply grab a little more up to their existing limits. What people are comfortable paying in disposable income, and SL is 100% disposable income (because nothing in SL actually exists), does not change if the prices are lowered. Just more stufff is got up to the same disposable income level.

For LL to do remarkably better requires the world economy to improve. Period. An unlikely possibility given the midievalites are going to take over the world and put Earth back in the stone age.

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Ann Otoole wrote in part:

If LL dropped tier then people would simply grab a little more up to their existing limits.

Right, but that "little more" is critically important at the transition from 512 to 1024 sq.m.  The problem is that Linden Homes turned out to be too "sticky" and  a cruel dead-end, instead of a way to draw residents into land ownership.  As it stands, to move out to a regular Mainland parcel, a Premium member using their 512 bonus on a Linden Home must lose primcount (those freebie Linden Home structures carried by the Governor's tier).  Hence, many Linden Home owners are stuck with their little piece of Nascera, never moving into the Mainland market, nor from there into Estates.

It would be good business to remove the penalty for graduating into the mainstream market by upping the bonus tier to 1024sq.m., and keeping Linden Homes as they are.

Above that first, bonus tier level, I'd agree that adjustments in tier pricing wouldn't have much effect on LL's revenue.  Nor, ultimately, on landowner satisfaction.  Whatever the prices, landowners will always want more.

 


It worries me a bit that Kelly thought viewer changes would be necessary to make the set-to-sale logic give preference to neighbors.  I'd have thought that it would be quite tractable to simply find that neighboring owner who shares the most non-Linden-owned perimeter, set the land for sale individually to that neighbor for, say, a week, and send an email to that neighbor alerting them to the sale. If they don't buy after that week, put the parcel for sale to Anybody as with the current plan.

It's a little messy when the "best" neighboring owner is a group; perhaps the offer goes to the largest tier contributor to that group.  In the less common case where two neighbors have equal "perimeter claim" to the parcel, perhaps go ahead with the "Anybody" approach right away.

Even if they didn't do any of that, it might work to just set the land for sale but exclude it from Search listings for a week, so neighbors might notice instead of bots.  I'm not as confident of that approach because manual flippers might still jack up the prices for neighbors, and also, we really don't want to create an incentive for grid-scouring landbots to replace the relatively less lag-inducing Search-scouring versions we have now.

 


ETA:  I created a jira with a variant of this proposal that might not be too difficult to implement, if it gets enough support.

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Ann Otoole wrote:

If LL dropped tier then people would simply grab a little more up to their existing limits. What people are comfortable paying in disposable income, and SL is 100% disposable income (because nothing in SL actually exists), does not change if the prices are lowered. Just more stufff is got up to the same disposable income level.

For LL to do remarkably better requires the world economy to improve. Period. An unlikely possibility given the midievalites are going to take over the world and put Earth back in the stone age.

Yes, some would stay within the same RL cash upper limit, but I think a lower tier overall would help retain people as tier payers for longer, and encourage more people to become tier payers

 

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Ann Otoole wrote:

If LL dropped tier then people would simply grab a little more up to their existing limits. What people are comfortable paying in disposable income, and SL is 100% disposable income (because nothing in SL actually exists), does not change if the prices are lowered. Just more stufff is got up to the same disposable income level.

This is true for existing customers.  But lower costs to hold land should attract some new customers.  They will be forced to lower tier eventually if Opensim grids keep getting closer to SL in features and performance.  The latter already win on price by a large margin.  Servers in general, like most computer stuff, gets faster and cheaper with time.  SL seems to have defied that trend, even increasing prices, when you would expect prices to go down as costs go down.  The only explanation is "monopoly pricing".  They have such a large lead compared to other virtual worlds, they can get away with charging whatever they want.  That will not last forever, though.

On the setting for sale system topic: A reverse auction allows whoever is most interested in the land to get it.  Simply set it for sale at a high price, then drop it a little every few days till it sells.  That gives neighbors time to notice, and bots are useless in that case.  If no neighbor will pick it up at 4 L$, there is not much reason for a bot to pay that price.  Who would they sell it to?

 

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Qie Niangao wrote: 

........

It worries me a bit that Kelly thought viewer changes would be necessary to make the set-to-sale logic give preference to neighbors.  I'd have thought that it would be quite tractable to simply find that neighboring owner who shares the most non-Linden-owned perimeter, set the land for sale individually to that neighbor for, say, a week, and send an email to that neighbor alerting them to the sale. If they don't buy after that week, put the parcel for sale to Anybody as with the current plan.
....

I should have though that simply putting the parcel into the auction queue automaticaly would have been the easiest thing to do.

 

That would leave the neighbours with a chance to bid - against each other if necessary - so fairer.

It would also put an obstacle in front of the bots - which may have been why that method was not used.

 

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Sling Trebuchet wrote in part:

I should have though that simply putting the parcel into the auction queue automaticaly would have been the easiest thing to do.

Yeah, but a land sale is pretty much "fire and forget" for the Lab.  From what Jack used to say, I gather that prepping land and putting it to auction is only the start of a labor-intensive process.  And plenty of suspicions about Linden land auctions have been expressed in the past. 

They could have invested the time to fix all that and keep it running for as long as there's Mainland to be abandoned, but I suspect they see it as not enough benefit to justify the cost of ongoing operations, let alone any up-front development.  Just setting the stuff for sale and letting the market find the right owner likely seemed simpler.

Of course, we've been around long enough to know that in the SL economy, the invisible hand doesn't know what the other one is doing. 

If botrunners run reverse auctions to turn over the penny parcels they buy--and some will--it's much the same effect as a Linden-run auction... except, of course, there's a potential windfall for the bots (as long as they don't end up paying tier on the inventory too long).   But we've seen enough market-distorting behavior by some land flippers to know what pricing to expect of bot-bought land.

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I can understand why they want to dump the abandoned land back on the market.As has been said here ,the reason it is there in the first place is the cost of tier.

The RL is in crisis, countries are failing and everybody is tightening their belts.And this company seem to think they are immune...I don't think so.

If they want to kick start this place ,drop the price sooner rather than later when most have already flown the coup or downsized so much that the place becomes a ghost town.

I think the writing is on the wall  and somebody needs to read it  fast.

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Qie Niangao wrote:


.....  From what Jack used to say, I gather that prepping land and putting it to auction is only the start of a labor-intensive process.  ....


 

What's to do?

The current process is:

A. When Mainland is abandoned, the Gov becomes the owner and the land Description is amended to "Abandoned by <avatar name> on <date>"

B. Eventually, an auction ID is assigned in the land description (and the land is cleared).
That seems to trigger the land showing as purple on Map.

C. Some time later the parcel is entered into the auction system.

D. The auction takes place

E. The winner gets hit with the tier and the cost. The parcel becomes owned by the winner. The logic for accounts and sim is as if the winner had gone to the sim and bought the parcel at the winning price. If that involves a tier jump, that happens automatically. The winner is assumed to be aware of the implications for tier levels

 

The current non-automated actions would be B,C and E.
The auction system is a customisation of eBay.

(B) and © could be done in a single process.

(E) simply simulates a purchase on the ground.

 

How difficult is it to create a programmed interface to the auction system? It doesn't even have to be a direct database interface. A software package can simulate a user interacting with a system.

Someone would need to keep an eye on it, but they would be watching for exception conditions only - as opposed to driving it along.

 

 

 

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I gather that step "E" often fails; maybe the charge for additional tier doesn't go through or something.  Somehow there's supposedly manual intervention often required; I know that sometimes the next-highest bidder gets offered the land for whatever they bid; maybe sometimes it goes back to step "A" or "B" or I'm not sure what.  I agree that pushing the land to auction shouldn't need to be more difficult to automate than setting it for sale in-world.  It's the auction apparatus itself that I suspect the Lab would like to shed, at least for small-scale parcels (i.e., the ones typically in the L$-denominated auctions).

Sometimes I think LL considers Mainland an obsolete product, or one that doesn't generate enough of their margin to worry about.  On the other hand, the Moles continue to work, which is about the most encouraging thing I see in SL right now, so I try to put those Bad Thoughts out of my head.

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3 days seems unduly short. Maybe not for the initial grace period, but it biases toward people who connect every day. In the real world of legal notices on abandoned property, one reason why they use longer periods--one instance I know of is 28 days--is because people go other places. They have accidents which put them in hospital for a few days. There's all sorts of things.

Getting the balance right is difficult, but I had a patch of abandoned land across the road from my little 512, been unchanged for around 15 months, and that is way too long. At least it was clear ground.

The Lindens have just put a volcano on it. Doesn't look like they expect it to sell.

 

 

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The 3 days is actually pretty generous.  It will keep the land unmodified, not return any objects, and give the former owner a chance to change their mind, in case they abandoned in a rage, drunkenness, by mistake, or similar.  If I correctly understand what Kelly & Andrew have said, this automatic process only kicks in where someone chooses to abandon their land, and is there to both remove the support load of tickets from people who want their land back for whatever reason, after choosing to abandon it, plus the load of processing the land back onto the market.

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For all abandoned parcels, set land for sale back to original owner for three days. Good idea because it saves a lot of administrative hassle.

The current system of auctioning abandoned 512m2+ parcels is perfect. Don't change this.

For abandoned parcels smaller than 512m2, these should be offered to neighboring parcel owners (after the expiry of the 3-day grace period). This can be automated as follows (based on Wildcat's earlier post) in the following order for a period of 7-days per candidate:

 

  1. 4-sides neighbor at L$1 per m2
  2. 3-sides neighbor at L$1 per m2
  3. 2-sides neighbor, older parcel date at L$1 per m2
  4. 2-sides neighbor, younger parcel date at L$1 per m2
  5. 1-side same-sim neighbor, oldest parcel date at L$1 per m2
  6. 1-side same-sim neighbor, second oldest parcel date at L$1 per m2
  7. 1-side same-sim neighbor, third oldest parcel date at L$1 per m2
  8. 1-side same-sim neighbor, youngest parcel date at L$1 per m2
  9. 1-side out-sim neighbor at L$1 per m2
  10. open market to same-sim landowners at L$5 per m2 (remember, the max size would be 496m2)
  11. open market to SL at L$10 per m2
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I like the idea.  The current idea of putting it for sale to everyone after 3 days


Deltango Vale wrote:

For
all
abandoned parcels, set land for sale back to original owner for three days. Good idea because it saves a lot of administrative hassle.

The current system of auctioning abandoned 512m2+ parcels is perfect. Don't change this.

For abandoned parcels smaller than 512m2, these should be offered to neighboring parcel owners (after the expiry of the 3-day grace period). This can be automated as follows (based on Wildcat's earlier post) in the following order for a period of
7-days
per candidate:

 
  1. 4-sides neighbor at L$1 per m2
  2. 3-sides neighbor at L$1 per m2
  3. 2-sides neighbor, older parcel date at L$1 per m2
  4. 2-sides neighbor, younger parcel date at L$1 per m2
  5. 1-side same-sim neighbor, oldest parcel date at L$1 per m2
  6. 1-side same-sim neighbor, second oldest parcel date at L$1 per m2
  7. 1-side same-sim neighbor, third oldest parcel date at L$1 per m2
  8. 1-side same-sim neighbor, youngest parcel date at L$1 per m2
  9. 1-side out-sim neighbor at L$1 per m2
  10. open market to same-sim landowners at L$5 per m2 (remember, the max size would be 496m2)
  11. open market to SL at L$10 per m2

 needs to be changed.  I hope LL is listening to this thread. 

I would think that steps 10 and 11 could be offered at $L1/sqm.  If none of the owners in the sim want the land during the first 9 steps, then let it go to anyone that wants it.

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Starting to sound good. Maybe some tuning to the times and prices. Sure makes sense to give priority to the people who have older parcels. Problem is that when we cut parcels the parcel dates get messed up. Hopefully somewhere in the databases there is real info about when the parcels were claimed.

Edit: Yes, to same sim neighbors before looking to other sims. I have a feeling Deltango Vale meant that?

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I don't agree with giving out-sim neighbours a bite at the land before same-sim.  People in the same sim may be struggling for prims and have a greater claim over it, in my opinion.  I also think with so many levels to the process, 7 days is far too long per level and makes the process cumbersome.  If such a process were to be implemented, the need for longer times per level could be mitigated by making each level inclusive of previous levels (i.e. at level 4, anyone from levels 1,2, and 3 would still be eligible).  I also think that this should apply for all parcels up to and including 1024 sq.m., with larger parcels going to the traditional auction process.  Step 10, the open sale to same-sim owners should also be L$1/sq.m., there's no reason that they should be hit with inflated pricing.  The final step should be a reverse auction, starting at L$10 and dropping L$1 every 48 hours, until it bottoms out at L$1, introducing a system where those who feel it's important to them can jump in early, but otherwise it steadily drops to minimum and avoids taking excessive L$ out of the economy (remember all L$ paid here is lost from the economy, unlike normal resident to resident land sales).

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Pauline Darkfury wrote:

I don't agree with giving out-sim neighbours a bite at the land before same-sim.  People in the same sim may be struggling for prims and have a greater claim over it, in my opinion.  I also think with so many levels to the process, 7 days is far too long per level and makes the process cumbersome.  If such a process were to be implemented, the need for longer times per level could be mitigated by making each level inclusive of previous levels (i.e. at level 4, anyone from levels 1,2, and 3 would still be eligible).  I also think that this should apply for all parcels up to and including 1024 sq.m., with larger parcels going to the traditional auction process.  Step 10, the open sale to same-sim owners should also be L$1/sq.m., there's no reason that they should be hit with inflated pricing.  The final step should be a reverse auction, starting at L$10 and dropping L$1 every 48 hours, until it bottoms out at L$1, introducing a system where those who feel it's important to them can jump in early, but otherwise it steadily drops to minimum and avoids taking excessive L$ out of the economy (remember all L$ paid here is lost from the economy, unlike normal resident to resident land sales).

I agree with you Pauline.  I guess I misread the first steps thinking they were all same sim owners.  I agree that the parcels should be offered to the same sim owners first.  First to the owners that the parcel connects with, then to other same sim owners.  If none of the same sim owners want the land, then and only then put it up for sale to everyone else.

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@ Liisa,

The order is correct. I feel that adjacent neighbors should have priority. After exhausting all same-sim neighbors, the out-sim neighbor should have priority over same-sim, non-adjacent owners. From long experience, an immediate neighbor trumps distant prims.

@ Everyone

Seven days is fair considering many residents log on once a week. As I mentioned earlier, I believe the parcels would sell quickly in the overall process. I would expect roughly 25% of parcels selling within the first week, 33% by the end of the second week, 50% by the end of the third week and 75% by the end of the fourth week. Most will never get to the open market.

Remember, it is impossible for an out-sim neighbor to be on two sides. By definition, an out-sim neighbor can only be on one side. Remember too, most parcels will not be on the sim border. Most will be interior parcels.

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Deltango Vale wrote:

@ Liisa,

The order is correct. I feel that adjacent neighbors should have priority. After exhausting all same-sim neighbors, the out-sim neighbor should have priority over same-sim, non-adjacent owners. From long experience, an immediate neighbor trumps distant prims.

@ Everyone

Seven days is fair considering many residents log on once a week. As I mentioned earlier, I believe the parcels would sell quickly in the overall process.

Same sim neighbours do indeed have a good claim and should be given priority.  Off-sim neighbours have absolutely zero claim over it in my book, and I feel it's overall harmful to give them priority over same-sim but distant people, as that needlessly damages the ability for existing landowners in the region to expand their max prims.

7 days would be fine if the process was vastly shorter.  WIth 10+ steps, 7 days per step is far too long, and 2 or 3 days per step would be far more appropriate, since the people who have priority have had 3 days grace period after the abandonment to notice that it's going to be coming up for sale, and considerably longer if they are further down the list.

 

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@ Pauline,

I added this before you posted:

Remember, it is impossible for an out-sim neighbor to be on two sides. By definition, an out-sim neighbor can only be on one side. Remember too, most parcels will not be on the sim border. Most will be interior parcels.

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Deltango Vale wrote:

@ Pauline,

I added this before you posted:

Remember, it is impossible for an out-sim neighbor to be on two sides. By definition, an out-sim neighbor can only be on one side. Remember too, most parcels will not be on the sim border. Most will be interior parcels.

Yes, agreed, the off-sim case only applies to a minority of cases, even if this proposal was to be expanded to <= 1024 sq.m (I think it should be).  Whether the size is <= 1024, or <= 512, I really don't see how an off-sim neighbour has any legitimate priority claim over a same-sim landowner.  They do have a marginal claim ahead of "anyone", but not ahead of same-sim where the extra prims could make a big difference to an existing landowner, even if not adjacent to them.

 

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It is, of course, a matter of opinion. The best way to approach it is to ask yourself which situation you would prefer:

 

  1. You own a parcel on a sim border. There is an abandoned parcel adjacent to yours across the sim border.
  2. You own a parcel anywhere. There is an abandoned parcel far away in the same sim.

My experience after four years in the mainland business is that most people would identify with 1. I'm not hard and fast about this. It can go either way. I guess much depends whether someone has built an ad farm beside you just on the other side of a sim border :smileywink:

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