Abandoned Land is Heading To 25% of the Mainland

[Qie Niangao]

10 hours ago, Cedric Brown said:

OFF TOPIC; Hi Qie, you seem knowledgeable on tech. Please help me understand why moving sim hosting to the "cloud" is different than what happens now?  My understanding is currently sim hosting is a computer server in a building that is running 4 or so regions on its hard drive. And my understanding of the "cloud" is again, a bunch of servers in a warehouse that run databases, programs etc. Just another server in a building. 

I don't have too much to add to what's already been said. Cloud-hosting sims certainly wouldn't improve performance. In fact, I wouldn't start with Mainland nor other sims with neighbors, even though the Mainland probably offers the biggest potential savings from shedding underutilized capacity. But as others have said, the idea would be to dynamically shift load so less used sims can be hosted many to a CPU core until their usage ramps up and they get migrated to idle capacity on some other CPU or server host. Obviously this requires some work to make the simulation cope with that kind of virtualization.

In theory that could be done in the Lab's own data centers, and I'm no expert, but I believe the cloud hosting services have some proprietary "special sauce" that makes it cheaper/easier/more reliable/more available/less onerous to administer/etc.

[ChinRey]

47 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

In theory that could be done in the Lab's own data centers, and I'm no expert, but I believe the cloud hosting services have some proprietary "special sauce" that makes it cheaper/easier/more reliable/more available/less onerous to administer/etc.

They have more servers and a wider range of customers. That means it's easier for them to reassing unused server capacity to where it is needed.

Or perhaps it's better to say they have access to more servers. Seems everybody are renting from everybody else in that business and according to rumours it's all actually hosted on an old Windows XP machine with a dial-up modem in Oblivion, North Dakota.

[Qie Niangao]

16 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

@Qie Niangao But that's not how you watch the issue, obviously, Qie, watching the Lindens to see that they put up parcels "pretty promptly" on the auction. That's the other end of the telescope.

Of course they put up their huge queue and backlog "pretty promptly" LOL. But there's a backlog! And most of it not in queue.

The way you watch this issue is to look at real sims. And as I never tire of explaining, I have land on 50 sims. That means I see 200 sims because of my land and all the land around them. And that's a pretty good sample. 

So I can only say, do you do that? You have contiguous land on 2-3 sims. Do you fly around and observe regularly what is happening elsewhere?

I do, and I see stuff that has literally been abandoned for years that is prime waterfront. It's extraordinary. I see the Lindens sometimes picking out what is more valuable, but other times responding to user requests and putting up stuff to frustrate that user because now he has to bid against flippers.

It's not a lack of demand. It's a LACK OF POLICY. You must never ask for abandoned land. I have hundreds of time. The Lindens do not sell it on demand. They dole it out on a discretionary basis.

I certainly don't have anything like as much land as you do, but at this point I have parcels scattered across about 30 regions and visit maybe a third of them most weeks, as well as checking out the occasional auction parcel, and I usually look around a bit on the map at least. But yeah: I'm not that diligent about it -- I spend more time scripting than land-observing -- so it's not at all comparable. And yet it's not completely irrelevant to your experience.

I don't recall coming across long-abandoned prime parcels, but I don't doubt they exist.

In fact I agree that, in general, it should be easier to acquire abandoned land on request. I just doubt that automatically setting land for sale when abandoned would be a net benefit. There's quite a glut and it's likely to keep increasing until the End Of Days. I guess I wouldn't really mind if the map filled with yellow, but at best it would help with what I see as the less pressing side of the problem, compared with ginning-up more demand for Mainland and SL overall.

[Prokofy Neva]

22 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I certainly don't have anything like as much land as you do, but at this point I have parcels scattered across about 30 regions and visit maybe a third of them most weeks, as well as checking out the occasional auction parcel, and I usually look around a bit on the map at least. But yeah: I'm not that diligent about it -- I spend more time scripting than land-observing -- so it's not at all comparable. And yet it's not completely irrelevant to your experience.

I don't recall coming across long-abandoned prime parcels, but I don't doubt they exist.

In fact I agree that, in general, it should be easier to acquire abandoned land on request. I just doubt that automatically setting land for sale when abandoned would be a net benefit. There's quite a glut and it's likely to keep increasing until the End Of Days. I guess I wouldn't really mind if the map filled with yellow, but at best it would help with what I see as the less pressing side of the problem, compared with ginning-up more demand for Mainland and SL overall.

Well, that's good, that's a good sample but then, I don't understand why you aren't seeing this. I can think of several just off the top of my hand and I could send you landmarks in world. Perhaps you've just bought this railroad land for your projects inland on flat meadow, and not near waterfront? But this is always the problem, the blind men and the elephant, and people see different parts of SL and can't triangulate or rise above their own experience. But Tyche does. She is making a survey that really does that. It doesn't matter if it's not perfect because she uses bots, or doesn't count this or that specialized Linden land, or whatever quibble somebody has. She more or less has it, in a way I'm not sure even the Lindens have it. They might understand better the mystery of why so much of it sits there but I think that it's merely because they have this rigid policy: no sales on demand, prime land to auction, dole out some fallow land for prims in small amounts, if it's a Tuesday and the moon is full, or whatever.

I think that the very first task is to open up land on demand, the end. This is not hard, it is not rocket science, it is not bedlam. Most people truly will not care. They could do this sim by sim, sending IMs to people as they go along, "Hi, would you like this land next to you? We're opening this up now" if they fear a flood of tickets. But there won't be.

After that, reassured that they have a bit more tier and the place looks somewhat better, they should set abandoned land to sale. They don't have to do this system wide. Why is it always 0/1 thinking on every damn SL issue? They could do one sim at a time. Or one continent at a time. Or whatever works to "throttle" the process. If it doesn't work it doesn't work. But it will siphon off some of it. If the first two stages are a success, then the next thing is to insert the feature that your abandoned land goes to sale. It could even have a 7-day cooling off period where you could get it back. like a KittyCat out of the Menagerie if you had second thoughts. Then it goes to sale, the end. Why is this so hard? You monitor it, and you have good will and efficiency doing it, and you solve the problem.

The new cloud server thing actually only enables the Lindens not to care about this even more deeply than they haven't cared the last five years.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/22/2018 at 9:58 PM, ChinRey said:

They have more servers and a wider range of customers. That means it's easier for them to reassing unused server capacity to where it is needed.

Or perhaps it's better to say they have access to more servers. Seems everybody are renting from everybody else in that business and according to rumours it's all actually hosted on an old Windows XP machine with a dial-up modem in Oblivion, North Dakota.

Really? I thought it was in the Cape Cod Room at the Del Prado Hotel in Ilium, Illinois.

I think I once saw the asset server behind Prok's Sea Food in Baileya.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/22/2018 at 9:12 AM, Callum Meriman said:

Mostly I agree, but this is a difficult one, as it doesn't allow for those who through computer fault, health, employment, or service to country reasons take an extended holiday. How would you feel if you bought 8192sqm at $90/sqm for some Blake Sea mainland (so almost US$3000) and you found real life called you away for 4 months? That when you came back your land was stolen and your US$3000 lost?

I played another game for a while - SOE's Landmark - it was a game where you could claim land, on which you pre-paid a rental in silver. Once your silver pre-payment ran out the land was cleared and other people could take it. The system was set up so you could only prepay 2 weeks of silver. A shorter time scale, but a similar idea to your brainstorming. The problem was that quite a few people needed to take breaks, and each time they did they lost their land. It caused a lot of resentment.

I'll throw an edge case at you, there is one sim where I have a fairly large statue of Jesus, surrounded by most of a region of abandoned mud on all sides. (I used to own the mud, but got tired of paying for bad ground textures, so abandoned that and bought a region instead). Thing is, and this is where I throw an edge case at you, one of my alts owns that land, and due to a number of reasons he hasn't logged in for ages.

Ah, but you say, let's talk about the RL person and not the AV, so, how do you know that ugly tower with the MIA for 2 years owner you mention isn't similar?

Yeah something needs to be done about abandoned land, but this one idea of yours is way too communist for me. I really don't think it's right that you want the state (LL) to be empowered to take someone's personal property, that's too much like what happened under Stalin or Mao.

Yeah, I realize that certain "likers" here think they have such a gleeful gotcha, "turning the tables" on old Prokofy, the inveterate anti-Communist. But...

You have chosen a poor hysterical hypothetical. Somebody who spent $90/m for Blake Sea wouldn't have junk on their land. They're more than likely -- if they were that kind of end user -- have a nice house, a dock, a yacht or something. They wouldn't have a sandbox with spinning junk. The kind of people who make pen1s towers and spinning junk are skiddies who buy flat land in "working class districts" as The Herald used to call the inner Moth continent for $0.5/meter. So let's not be children here. Cheap and junked-up land with those problems have people with legitimate health problems or tsunamis in their country, too, and deserve consideration (and don't always get it compared to the FIC). But why would that be an excuse to paralyze the value of ALL LAND around them for a quarter of the year or two years? Devaluing land people want to resell or rent. Making projects less attractive. Why do they get to do that?!

So often it's an issue of no autoreturn left on. The Lindens are completely loath to turn on auto return. What if a precious cargo's precious creation got returned to inventory and lost or wasn't linked up??? Oh noes! See you're thinking like a Linden, but not exactly, because the price you paid isn't what matters, or even the tier they aren't collecting -- which you think they WOULD care about but don't because it's trivial compared to their private island revenue -- but the PRINCPLE of F/U hedonism and creativity uber alles and all the rest. Freedom for me/totalitarianism for thee. The Lindens' creationism is really the killer of SL, ironically.

Obviously two weeks is not enough. The system you cited sounds like a game, not a world. Did they pay RL money for that? We do. And the no-shows did. But why do they get to devalue our land for years on end? 

Oh, I don't doubt that SOME land the Lindens fail to move on are alts of mains that own more land they do pay tier on, or alts in groups that are private so we can't see all their members, and the owner may actually be gone, and blah blah blah.

And I think you shouldn't hold that sim hostage with a giant Jesus like that just because you can. You don't even log in and enjoy it. Why hobble everybody else for miles with that eyesore? And I say this as someone who worships Jesus.

My idea isn't communist, it's capitalist. In real life, if you do not show up to maintain your land, and place the markers for its boundaries, in some states, like New Hampshire, the state will eye that land with an aim to take it, or to take some of its edges for easements, or whatever. True story. In many communities, there are zoning laws, and you can't paint your house purple and put spinning strobe lights on the lawn or roof. Real life has rules that prevent things like this. SL doesn't. Because LL hates governance, it's work.

You simply refuse -- like the Lindens -- to address the DEVALUATION of OTHER PEOPLE'S INVESTMENTS. That is capitalism, not communism. Communism is destroying their investment forever with totalitarianism -- nothing can change, nothing can be done, no vote or movement is possible because the Great Leader has spoken.

Stalin didn't confiscate land because rich peasants said that poor peasants had left eyesores on it and they could run it better -- which would be your analogy. He confiscated it to exploit all the peasants and kill most of them if they rebelled. Different.

The Lindens need to review these cases like normal grown-ups and return to inventory a) garbage, non-group and non-owner prims, like plywood boxes or empty dress boxes -- this is basic b) spinning junk or eyesores that doesn't seem to be an elaborate build or creation of value -- a giant pen1s or even your Jesus, if you didn't pay the tier, or didn't log in for a year, would fall in that category d) very tall builds that dominate the view -- a real problem on the Nautilus continent. Again, I cite you par. 2)c of the TOS: affecting the enjoyment of others' second lives. That's wrong. That shouldn't stand.

Example: I once filed tickets, as did others about a huge tower in a sea sim in the Moth Continent which blocked everybody's view on the waterfront. The tower wasn't enclosed, but had about 10 levels of plywood going up into the sky, with various half-finished little tutorial projects or whatever on each one. It was not on autoreturn so all kinds of sandboxers left plywood on it. This person wasn't Charter, just old. Their store on another sim also sat there forever unattended. A year went by when one could reasonably assume their Premium of $72, let's say, or even tier of that size, let's say 8192, might have been paid up for a year (unlikely). I mean, come on, kids. This person is not logging in, not paying tier. How could they be? You can see the members of their group -- their alts and maybe one real person I IM'd who said they had no idea and hadn't seen the person in more than a year.

Why does this person get to ruin the view for dozens of people on 3 other adjacent sims with this ugly, stupid tower? If she at least logged on and did her oh-so-important newbie tutorials so vital to the Lindens, maybe one could find some "social justice" in it; maybe one could reason with her to enclose her tower so it didn't so terribly blight the view. One could suggest that going up 500 m with her eyesore would mean she still had a workshop and didn't ruin the view, even if it means she couldn't have her panoramic vistas. But for those special moments, she could put a little chair in the sky at 250 m.

Yet SHE wanted a nice view of all the 3 surrounding sims that other people made at ground level, plus 100. SHE wanted to stand way up on the top of her tower, and look out to sea and shore in four directions to the view OTHER people made for HER, heedless of how SHE ruined the view for them. This just went on forever. Finally we convinced a Linden to clear the garbage at least. Finally she seemed to come back -- maybe a life crisis, the Lindens cut her slack, whatever, fine. But then guess what happened? A few months went by, and the land become abandoned. The tower then got sloughed off. Oh. And we couldn't have done that a year before that guys? Then the water sells on the auction. Really, Lindens? It took that long to come to this closure? There's another thing you can do -- give somebody equivalent land somewhere else, you know? Not demolish their inventory when they don't pay and don't show, if you want to cut slack but return their prims to that inventory. Why not?

I could tell this story over and over and over in SL, and so could others. It's wrong. The Lindens fix this by making organic, real-time judgements when they get tickets from enough people whose view is ruined. They return a stupid thing like that to inventory. After all, it's not the Taj Mahal, just somebody's 10-level sandbox made of boards with a bunch of little boxes on it.

Um, Callum, I give my tenants a lot of slack with grace periods, arrangements if they tell me of some life crisis, and so on, so I don't need any "how would you feel".

And when my son was in a coma after a terrible accident, the Lindens gave me some slack but not anywhere near as much as I've seen them give their favourites. I've seen them leave a half or full sim with a build on it "as is" for years for sentimental reasons, because an oldbie once made something on it That oldbie would even tell me in RL at some meet-up that he didn't log on to SL any more and no, hadn't paid up tier. Why can't the Lindens just make copies of sims and builds they're in love with and put them on ice? We know they have this capacity and I've seen them do this, quite frankly, in rare cases. They don't want it to be a feature; but for those special few they should do it, so everyone can buy that land or not have it wreck the view.

I do not get this. But then, I am not a big deal, not a creator, not anything except a nuisance for them due to my criticism. So I get it, truly I do.
 

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Would it make sense to turn some of the abandoned mainland sims into lakes, seeing as how waterfront property is still valued?

It wouldn't necessarily help with server concerns but it would make mainland feel less barren.

[iamyourneighbour]

They should give mainland owners more prims!  We are very heavily disadvantaged 

-Insert happy merchant face

[ChinRey]

14 hours ago, iamyourneighbour said:

They should give mainland owners more prims!

Noooooo!!!! I already have 15 sky paltforms at Coniston to make use of all the prims. There isn't room for more!

I'm only half joking. More prims means more load both ons ervers and clients. Linden Lab can increase server capacity of course, if they can afford it, but there is nothing they can do about the clients.