No Belliseria Homes available?

[Remi Alpha]

Hello. Noob, kinda, so apologies in advance.

Am I correct in thinking that it's not possible to get a home in Belliseria at the moment? Or am I looking in the wrong place?

I am a Premium member and on the SL dashboard I am going from the "Your Premium Membership" page, and clicking "Go Now »" under  "Explore your Linden Home"

When I do that I see the attached screen. There is no option of the houseboats, caravans and so on. I assumed that these would at least be mentioned but marked as "unavailable" or something. Which is why I wonder if I am looking in the wrong place.

Do they just disappear from the list if they're all taken? Or is there another place for applying for these homes?

Thanks!

 

[Elena Blossom]

Hi lost, welcome to the forums. You have a perfect guide in this thread, really detailed

 

 

Edited March 1, 2020 by Elena Core

[Remi Alpha]

@Elena Core Thanks. 

So.. 

Quote

"Click the small arrow and look for 'Bellisseria'. If you don't see it that means there are NO Bellsseria homes available right at that very second."

This is a shame. But also very unintuitive! Surely they should at least be greyed out with some explanation below to explain why they are not available.

Anyway, thanks for the link. I guess I will have to keep trying.

[Elena Blossom]

Just now, lostware said:

@Elena Core Thanks. 

So.. 

This is a shame. But also very unintuitive! Surely they should at least be greyed out with some explanation below to explain why they are not available.

Anyway, thanks for the link. I guess I will have to keep trying.

There is a camper right now on the land page

[Remi Alpha]

2 minutes ago, Elena Core said:

There is a camper right now on the land page

Oh thanks. I thought I would have to wait till the next batch was announced on Patch's official thread. 

[Rolig Loon]

19 minutes ago, lostware said:

Oh thanks. I thought I would have to wait till the next batch was announced on Patch's official thread. 

No, usually it's a matter of minutes.  People abandon Linden Homes all the time in hopes of getting one that meets their own desires better.  We refer to to it as playing the Game Of Homes.  Also, LDPW is releasing new houses daily at the rate of at least a region per day, so there are always more houses available. If you follow the suggestions in the thread that Elena pointed you toward, you can join the game too.  It's not really all that hard. 😊

[811Lord]

34 minutes ago, lostware said:

@Elena Core Thanks. 

So.. 

This is a shame. But also very unintuitive! Surely they should at least be greyed out with some explanation below to explain why they are not available.

Anyway, thanks for the link. I guess I will have to keep trying.

maybe it helps a little

[Remi Alpha]

10 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

No, usually it's a matter of minutes.  People abandon Linden Homes all the time in hopes of getting one that meets their own desires better.  We refer to to it as playing the Game Of Homes.  Also, LDPW is releasing new houses daily at the rate of at least a region per day, so there are always more houses available. If you follow the suggestions in the thread that Elena pointed you toward, you can join the game too.  It's not really all that hard. 😊

Game of Homes 😆Hopefully I will not get killed off too soon !

I read a blog post a little while ago saying that there was a big waiting list for the new homes. But maybe that was out of date. It sounds like things have changed over the last few months and now it's more about people chopping and changing to get the best location. Good to know! I will read the rest of that post in detail.

Linden Lab could make the fact that the list might change when you refresh the page a little more obvious for us first-timers.

Anyway, thanks so much.

[Rolig Loon]

2 minutes ago, lostware said:

I read a blog post a little while ago saying that there was a big waiting list for the new homes. But maybe that was out of date. It sounds like things have changed over the last few months and now it's more about people chopping and changing to get the best location.

Yes indeed.  Linden Lab has pumped up their end of the Game of Homes quite a lot since last Fall, and residents have become more sophisticated about playing too.  Some of the most savvy players watch threads in this forum closely, watching for news of imminent releases or for hints that someone is about to abandon a prized parcel.  It's all a matter of supply and demand, which are nearly in balance these days.  And then, of course, LDPW occasionally releases an entirely new theme in a gigantic block of new regions. That throws things into chaos for a short time as current owners step up the pace of the game.  It's sort of like living in days of the 19th century gold rushes in California and Alaska or the Oklahoma land rush of 1889.

[Pussycat Catnap]

11 minutes ago, lostware said:

Linden Lab could make the fact that the list might change when you refresh the page a little more obvious for us first-timers.

A bit of the opposite is done actually. If you refresh too often you get a timeout (and there are tricks to overcoming that) - because at various points in time they get thousands of people spam refreshing that page to an amount that it has the same effect as if they were suffering a DDOS attack.

So for the greater good, they make it a little less intuitive and just let people slowly trickle in.

When the last new style came out, the Victorians - so many people were hitting that page and using some well known tricks to avoid the timeout that the system for giving out homes actually crashed a few times, for if I recall right, a couple of hours at a time.

 

Edited March 1, 2020 by Pussycat Catnap

[Remi Alpha]

10 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

A bit of the opposite is done actually. If you refresh too often you get a timeout (and there are tricks to overcoming that) - because at various points in time they get thousands of people spam refreshing that page to an amount that it has the same effect as if they were suffering a DDOS attack.

Yes I can see that they don't want lots of page refreshing (no web developer ever wants that). However speaking as a web professional it is bad usability – when considering a new user – that there is no clue offered that other options might even exist (even if not available now). Merely hiding the fact that you can refresh it is a cheap cop-out that doesn't really work – people can quickly figure it out from the forums. The only likely outcome is that some new users pick the old-style Linden Homes because they don't know that better ones exist.

With a little technical ingenuity they could build a system that auto-refreshes at a reasonable but limited rate, where refreshing the page itself gives you no advantage. Rate-limiting the API by IP / session and using client and server-side caching it could work a lot better AND show the unavailable options with a notice to explain that availability status will update every 60 seconds (or whatever).

In fairness it looks like this page hasn't been rebuilt for years! And also maybe my suggestion would spoil the fun of the now-established GoH 🤣

[*Source: I develop web/mobile applications that handle very high levels of concurrent traffic]

 

[Rolig Loon]

4 minutes ago, lostware said:

In fairness it looks like this page hasn't been rebuilt for years!

Yeah, the forums use a third-party package that was last replaced in about 2014.  It's a vast improvement over the several systems that preceded it, but it has its clumsy side. You'll find disagreement, to be sure, but I think most people agree that LL pays a lot more attention to forum maintenance and moderation today than they ever used to.  Considering the fact that it all has to be integrated with the accounting software, Marketplace, the wiki, and other assorted systems, it's doing pretty well.  

[Nika Talaj]

42 minutes ago, lostware said:

Yes I can see that they don't want lots of page refreshing (no web developer ever wants that). However speaking as a web professional it is bad usability – when considering a new user – that there is no clue offered that other options might even exist (even if not available now). Merely hiding the fact that you can refresh it is a cheap cop-out that doesn't really work – people can quickly figure it out from the forums. The only likely outcome is that some new users pick the old-style Linden Homes because they don't know that better ones exist.

With a little technical ingenuity they could build a system that auto-refreshes at a reasonable but limited rate, where refreshing the page itself gives you no advantage. Rate-limiting the API by IP / session and using client and server-side caching it could work a lot better AND show the unavailable options with a notice to explain that availability status will update every 60 seconds (or whatever).

In fairness it looks like this page hasn't been rebuilt for years! And also maybe my suggestion would spoil the fun of the now-established GoH 🤣

[*Source: I develop web/mobile applications that handle very high levels of concurrent traffic]

 

You could vastly improve usability without wrecking the GOH.

/me makes grabby hands at lost's resume, so she can wave it under @Patch Linden 's nose. Think of it!  S/he is already a user of the land page, so is already miles ahead of some generic contractor you could hire!

Oh, and lost, if you're not available, please don't shatter my little dream here by saying so!

 

Edited March 1, 2020 by Nika Talaj

[Remi Alpha]

37 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Yeah, the forums use a third-party package that was last replaced in about 2014.  It's a vast improvement over the several systems that preceded it, but it has its clumsy side. You'll find disagreement, to be sure, but I think most people agree that LL pays a lot more attention to forum maintenance and moderation today than they ever used to.  Considering the fact that it all has to be integrated with the accounting software, Marketplace, the wiki, and other assorted systems, it's doing pretty well.  

Ah by "this page" I meant the premium / Linden Homes signup process. I was implying that it would cost them $$$ to upgrade it massively, $$$ they possibly don't have allocated, especially given that the current system -works-, if not perfectly. And (natch) there's a good case to be made for any budget to go into SL itself as in IW stuff.

No real issue with the forums they seem to work pretty well (on desktop at least, not tried mobile)

[Remi Alpha]

12 minutes ago, Nika Talaj said:

Oh, and lost, if you're not available, please don't shatter my little dream here by saying so!

I do take on freelance development work, although I don't know what their tech-stack is and people (me at least) tend to be quite narrowly specialised these days.

[Polenth Yue]

1 hour ago, lostware said:

I read a blog post a little while ago saying that there was a big waiting list for the new homes. But maybe that was out of date. It sounds like things have changed over the last few months and now it's more about people chopping and changing to get the best location. Good to know! I will read the rest of that post in detail.

As a note, there has never been a waiting list system for the new homes. When a house comes up, the first to click gets it. Recently, the need to be someone with the reflexes of a demigod has been reduced as the number of houses increases. But it is still the same system.

[Rolig Loon]

3 minutes ago, lostware said:

Ah by "this page" I meant the premium / Linden Homes signup process. I was implying that it would cost them $$$ to upgrade it massively, $$$ they possibly don't have allocated, especially given that the current system -works-, if not perfectly. And (natch) there's a good case to be made for any budget to go into SL itself as in IW stuff.

I rather suspect that the real challenge there is in all the accounting that's under the hood, not the interface itself.  Somehow, they have to keep track of who owns which property, cross-check that against the resident's account, the permissions system, and God only knows what else.  This generation of Linden Homes is not quite a year old, so the whole registration system is still a legacy of the previous generation.  I suspect that there will have to be changes as the Lab gradually phases out first-generation homes, but that's at some unknown -- or at least unrevealed -- time in the future.

[Remi Alpha]

28 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I rather suspect that the real challenge there is in all the accounting that's under the hood, not the interface itself.

Sure, and none of that need change. Just a confusing interface if you're not aware of the context.

If refreshing a page *directly* hits a bunch of complex tech *and* there's an incentive to refresh it a lot then it's no big surprise it started falling over when it got busy (before they put in some kind of timeout limit). I gather they were a bit surprised by how popular the new homes turned out to be to be fair to them. Which is a nice problem to have, but hey  Hindsight is a wonderful thing etc etc.

[Remi Alpha]

36 minutes ago, Polenth Yue said:

there has never been a waiting list system for the new homes0

I meant unofficially, i.e. "a lot of people waiting to get one" rather than some queuing system (which evidently does not exist)

But yes my language was vague so worthwhile point.

[Chuckey Jigsaw]

Since everything got explained already I am wishing you good luck. Abandons can happen any time of the day, so just keep your eye on the land page. 🙂

[Remi Alpha]

6 hours ago, Chuckey Jigsaw said:

Since everything got explained already I am wishing you good luck. Abandons can happen any time of the day, so just keep your eye on the land page. 🙂

Thanks, I got one