Kama City - so empty

[animats]

"Kama City is one of the 3 largest urban structures of the grid.  ... capital city of Zindra ... From all urban places, Kama City is the most populated of all." - Second Life wiki.

Kama City looks quite impressive at first. Roads, traffic signal, monorail tracks. But very few avatars. It's such an empty place. Where there are people, they're often in a skybox. Or they're dummy accounts running dancers or sales reps in empty nightclubs or stores.

The real estate situation is dysfunctional. Most of the buildings are empty dummies owned by Love Life or some other big realty agency trying to sell them. Nobody even rents them. Four abandoned parcels recently went up for sale. I bought one, a friend bought one, and the other two were bought by real estate flippers who immediately put up For Sale signs at twice the price. Next door is a large temple in a combination of Indian and Moorish styles. It's empty and for sale. Real estate is far overpriced for the demand. This makes no sense.

Maybe Linden Labs should adjust the tier rates to make land-hogging unprofitable. Don't offer discounts on tier for owning large amounts of property unless the properties are contiguous parcels. That would eliminate the advantage real estate brokers have, while allowing large projects to get a discount.

Anyway, I set up a small outdoor cafe in Vallone. It's a technology demo - you can knock all the furniture around, and when everyone leaves, it will all return to normal. Or you can just sit at a table and enjoy the fountain. Few people will ever walk by, but it looks nice.

 

[Klytyna]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Second Life wiki.

Several points I can make here...

The wiki/knowledgebase entries on locations in SL are, essentially, utterly useless.

For example there's a page that lists all the "known continents and major archipeligos", which mentions amongst others, the "Mare Lesbiana", a female avi only tropical paradise, with loads of corral reefs, sandy beaches and open waterways...

Don't bother trying to go there...

1 hour ago, animats said:

Kama City looks quite impressive at first. Roads, traffic signal, monorail tracks.

Yeah the Moles built a lot of Madlands style Prim-waste on Zindra, and so what...

1 hour ago, animats said:

ssive at first. Roads, traffic signal, monorail tracks. But very few avatars. It's such an empty place.

If you think Zindra is an "empty place" you must be looking at the wrong damn part of it, it's one of the busier Madlands continents, due to all the filth, depravity and smut...

1 hour ago, animats said:

The real estate situation is dysfunctional.

That's true of pretty much the whole of the Madlands, largely as a result of firm believe in the Free Market Fallacy by low talent aspiring Madland Slumlord Business Tycoon Wannabes.

They get conned into paying through the nose for some over priced virtual swampland ("Look friend, see the roads and railways and the mighty bridges and Traffic Stoplights! Well worth the 200% 'gullible greedy idiot' land price surcharge eh!"), then they add a tasty markup, and spend 6 months realising they will never find an idiot dumb enough to buy the swamp at a price that covers the purchase price let alone the 6 months tier on it.

You'd think anyone with an IQ larger than her bra size would spot the auto-fail in the wannabe-slumlord scheme straight off, but that Free Market Fallacy Faith kicks in, they REFUSE to give up gracefully, REFUSE to lower prices, because they would suffer the eternal shame of... "Negative Equity"... And the Blessed Saint Ayn of Rand won't let them pass the Golden Gates into Capitalist Paradise when they die...

So, stupid land prices for months, then they run out of money, and abandon the land, which sits empty till the next fools decide to try their hand at Madlands Auction Lotto.

1 hour ago, animats said:

Maybe Linden Labs should adjust the tier rates to make land-hogging unprofitable

Unprofitable for who... LL do quite nicely out of charging idiot land baron wannabes a pile of tier for unsellable parcels.

1 hour ago, animats said:

Where there are people, they're often in a skybox.

Yes it's true, many people in SL, actually stay in places where random passing people cant walk in the door while they are having sex and say "Hey r u bots".

 

[Hintswen Guardian]

3 hours ago, animats said:

Four abandoned parcels recently went up for sale. I bought one, a friend bought one, and the other two were bought by real estate flippers who immediately put up For Sale signs at twice the price.

I take it you both got them at auction, what prices did you pay if you don't mind me asking. 

[Qie Niangao]

Kama City has been a dismal failure from the very beginning of Zindra. The rest of the continent stays fairly well-populated, but the main Kama City sims have been a wasteland since they were built. The weirdest of all, IMHO, is that elaborate riverbank "stationhouse" in Mosh full of little 400sq.m. interior parcels that have flipped back and forth between real estate agents without anything ever happening inside.

I think the source of failure is pretty clear: if you look at the map, the sims that are almost completely yellow with For Sale parcels are the ones that are both "city zoned" (meaning no-terraform, no-join/split) and single-primmed. Looking around the edge of Kama City where the water-edge sims get double prims like most city-zoned land, the For Sale parcels are few and pricey by any SL standards, and of course the rest of single-primmed normal-zoned Zindra is more or less like the rest of Mainland with a bit of an Adult boost in price and activity.

That combination of single-primmed + no-terrform + no-join/split is pretty rare. It's used in the four M-rated, super-suburban Shermerville sims, which seem to be pretty successful. The two ancient G-rated suburban sims, Brown and Boardman, are single-primmed and no-terraform but allow join/split; they're so historically anomalous that I'm not sure there's much to be learned from them.

6 hours ago, animats said:

Maybe Linden Labs should adjust the tier rates to make land-hogging unprofitable. Don't offer discounts on tier for owning large amounts of property unless the properties are contiguous parcels. That would eliminate the advantage real estate brokers have, while allowing large projects to get a discount.

Well, I kinda hope they don't do that because my own land holdings are spread all over, supporting the Virtual Railway Consortium among other interests. If they raised my tier, I'd probably dump everything. That wouldn't be such a tragedy, for sure, but wouldn't advance LL's business objectives.

[Emma Krokus]

10 hours ago, animats said:

Anyway, I set up a small outdoor cafe in Vallone. It's a technology demo - you can knock all the furniture around, and when everyone leaves, it will all return to normal. Or you can just sit at a table and enjoy the fountain. Few people will ever walk by, but it looks nice.

 

Managed to find it... Too funny! Thanks... made my day, creating mayhem there

[MoiraKathleen]

19 hours ago, animats said:

Maybe Linden Labs should adjust the tier rates to make land-hogging unprofitable. Don't offer discounts on tier for owning large amounts of property unless the properties are contiguous parcels. That would eliminate the advantage real estate brokers have, while allowing large projects to get a discount.

Anyway, I set up a small outdoor cafe in Vallone. It's a technology demo - you can knock all the furniture around, and when everyone leaves, it will all return to normal. Or you can just sit at a table and enjoy the fountain. Few people will ever walk by, but it looks nice.

 

I think that changing the tier rates in the way you suggested would penalize a lot more residents than just the real estate brokers.  I've had parcels on different continents sometimes, just because I liked having a variety in terrain or locations (and enjoy setting up homes) and if I'm paying tier for a certain amount of sq. meters, than I like to get as close as I can to that number, rather than having a lot of unused but paid for sq. meters.  Even when I've purchased multiple parcels in the same sim for my own use, they haven't always been contiguous to each other.

I'm not sure that this would stop the land-flippers, anyway, if the glut of lands already for sale hasn't deterred them.  I also wouldn't necessarily say that the real estate brokers have any advantage, when the existing mainland tier structure applies to all who own mainland parcels. 

I don't get out to Zindra very often, but I will try to make a point to go out and visit your cafe  - it sounds interesting.  When I do go out exploring, I usually do walk around and stop at shops/businesses that I pass.

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

18 hours ago, Klytyna said:

 

Yes it's true, many people in SL, actually stay in places where random passing people cant walk in the door while they are having sex and say "Hey r u bots".

 

I got griefed for the first time on my mainland property last night. It was rather funny really, kicking and banning all 10 of them and watching them stand on the property line looking in. I then locked down the rest of the parcel settings. Eventually they got bored and went away.

Never trust an anime, they are pure evil.

*grins*

Edited November 29, 2017 by BilliJo Aldrin
cut down the quoted part