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Please Change Homestead Ownership Requirements


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1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

That's interesting. It's been years since I was involved with a Homestead we rented, and back then we weren't made Estate Managers, a role reserved by that Estate exclusively to trusted employees. I can see that with Estate Manager powers as a tenant, it would be almost as good as buying it from the Lab, with only the one remaining business risk of the Estate shuttering without notice, taking my payment and leaving me with no standing to deal with the Lab to re-up the region. I'd still pay something extra for that, but yeah: not as much as that plus the Estate Manager role.

This "massive betrayal" is what I meant about "Linden loyalty" to their Land sales channel, the Estates. So I agree that the Lab shouldn't completely undercut the Estates, at least not without a fundamental change in the whole Land business model.

But anyway I'm still confused - I'm apparently missing another obvious thing - about how it encourages "land baronry" to make Homestead sales available to Premium-Plus subscribers without a normal, non-Homestead Estate region. Is it just that Homestead-only Plus "barons" would offer (even) less customer service than they would if they had to also own a non-Homestead? Is the concern that there'd be a whole lot of Plus mini-barons, each subleasing a single Homestead?

Just to be clear, I was stipulating that these Homestead-only purchases from the Lab by Plus subscribers would come with higher monthly fees than the true Estate owners pay. What I was thinking was that, post-Uplift, Estates would all get the current grandfathered rate for Homesteads while the current non-grandfathered rate would apply to these Homestead-only Premium-Plus owners. (I hadn't really considered differentiating the market by region sale price as you suggest, and that would be another option. I guess the Plus subscription cost itself is a kind of recurring fee that could be considered to raise the effective monthly fee, but I think the Estates would feel better if that additional cost were actually part of the listed monthly Homestead tier charge.)

Well, remember what happened. They used to be for sale like that. And barons bought up hundreds -- thousands. Some were flipped to one person who had Estate Manager. Some were chopped up to 16 and rented and functioned horribly. I already wrote above about how this led to flooding Linden CS with the customers of absentee landlords, but more to the point, enabled land barons to make money from these hotcakes that Linden did not get. Those customers were not theirs.

Making it for premium only (although islands have never required premium and that will be a problem for them), making it more expensive -- the analogy is making 4096 or 8192 cost more for a single end user at that level than it does for a land baron who already has at least one sim, so that he begins to get a discount. I just think if they keep within the model of their own system, they can't make this a premium perk, they can't just make it a higher fee; they have to have a throttle on it. So they do, requirement you buy one full sim.

 

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4 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The point is that the land baron indeed books the homestead as a "sale" (in fact a rental) and the "new owner" then has almost all permissions on it (except for re-sale, really), but then he is secondary in the Lindens' eye because he is not the owner of record paying tier. The original owner then does no CS and dumps it on the Lindens. I don't know what you mean about Linden loyalty.

But I think they are not motivated to let land baronry ever get larger than it is just to pay their bills. They want to move away from this model as I keep explaining. The sale of homesteads makes land barons able to make money on a product and not the Lindens. The barons buy 100 of them for $99; they resell them for $125 and $150 and do no customer service; the Lindens get none of that except the cashout fee. It's not enough for them to allow this pancake baking where they have to put on the maple syrup all the time.

If the Lindens made homsteads sellable to end users without private islands, they'd have to have the sale price high enough to discourage land baronry. Let's say they make it $200. People would buy them. And private islands then are marked down -- land barons will howl because they have just faced a massive betrayal. They had to pay a huge entry cost to enter their game; they suffered content and staff costs and market woes and CS; now the Lindens devalue that product and allow a new class of people to come in and step on them. This happened with the grandfathering issue, which the Lindens brought on themselves by first trying to sell grandfathers only to their insider friends, and then getting caught at it (I was the one to break the story). You can't do things like that and expect the mass of customers to remain happy and content. So reluctantly they let anybody buy a grandfather and ate that cost, then retaliated later in other ways (like allowing me to be griefed for the rest of my life with inaction, but more widely, forcing Linden Homes and other competitive products on the market to undercut their land baron customers).

Qie, when you rent a homestead, you *are* the Estate Manager. You are made Estate Manager. You can do everything with that sim except re-sell it. In my system which is rentals not sales, you can't do that, but you can still control the land on everything but sales, banlines, and re-sets. 

Griefing is a real problem for some estates as banning doesn't work or runs out of space. So the secondary "Estate Manager" wants that ability in his hands. This is why I was forced to violate my own system-wide policy of no ban lines or "group only" and closed groups on my homesteads, because otherwise, griefing couldn't be controlled. 

I still think the answer to the desire for a homestead is to rent one rather than creating market and service problems for Lindens and enriching a class of no-show slumlords. There are enough options out there to satisfy even a brisk demand. I have 1/3 of a homestead for example available again.

 

 

I'm confused. Are you saying that if anyone could buy a homestead without owning a mainland sim first, that there is a whole class of potential land barons just waiting to move in on this new rule?

I would assume that any land baron already has as many homesteads as he wants.

The market for homestead rentals would be eliminated if anyone could buy one directly from LL at the same monthly cost of renting from a land baron.

Of course you'd prefer to keep a model where people "buy" through you instead of from LL direct.

I still say cut off mainland land barons at the knees by subdividing the entire mainland into 1024 and 4096 plots, and selling them for $1L each.

 

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59 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

I still say cut off mainland land barons at the knees by subdividing the entire mainland into 1024 and 4096 plots, and selling them for $1L each.

am not sure chopping up mainland into smaller plots would have any effect

Governor Linden already has swathes of mainland which nobody wants at any price. On the region I just moved too, I got a 1024m roadside for L$1 a meter from Linden by put in a ticket for it. About 75% of the rest of the region is abandoned in a number of different parcel sizes

the region on the boundary north of my parcel is 55,808m abandoned. The one north of that is 55,296m abandoned. The region to my west is 47,856m abandoned.  The region to my east is 33,264m abandoned

if Linden did want to start getting more tier from mainland then I think they would be better off to have Governor/Lando Linden start chopping roads and pathways, leading to cul-de-sacs and open spaces, in the interior. Lando Linden doesn't need to do anything more than chop and assign to Protected Land.  LDPW will come along one day, some day. and do some landscaping as it worked in the olden days. Until then people will see that it is Protected Land and will be a bit more inclined to buy, pay tier for the adjacent land

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2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Well, remember what happened. They used to be for sale like that. And barons bought up hundreds -- thousands.

Ah, maybe this is the confusion: I don't remember they ever sold Homesteads to anybody without requiring them to also own a normal, full-primmed Estate region -- that is, as I recall, Homesteads were always only for sale to existing Estates, and it wasn't possible to be an Estate with nothing but Homesteads. I remember the whole crisis being caused by the Lab seriously underpricing Homesteads and not implementing realistic avatar limits. (I think prims were always limited -- kinda the distinguishing feature of "Homestead" product -- but I'm even fuzzy now whether or not that was reduced, too, when the prices were raised.)

So if I'm misremembering the whole Homestead debacle... well, then I guess I wouldn't know what I'm talking about. Wouldn't be the first time.

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9 hours ago, Mollymews said:

 

if Linden did want to start getting more tier from mainland then I think they would be better off to have Governor/Lando Linden start chopping roads and pathways, leading to cul-de-sacs and open spaces, in the interior. Lando Linden doesn't need to do anything more than chop and assign to Protected Land.  LDPW will come along one day, some day. and do some landscaping as it worked in the olden days. Until then people will see that it is Protected Land and will be a bit more inclined to buy, pay tier for the adjacent land

That's part of my grand plan, run roads thru the center of each sim, parcel out 8 4096's along the road, and set each for sale for exactly $1L.

Fully sold, that generates the monthly tier equivalent to a full mainland sim.

The land behind the 4096's could either be parceled and set for sale at $1 L per parcel, or kept as LL greenbelts.

Of course subdividing parcels on those sims would need to be disabled, to prevent ad farmers buying 4096's cutting off the roadside  and abandoning the rest.

Heck they could have made 1024's and built Linden suburbs like that new continent. It made no sense to bring 100's of new sims online to complete that project when there is an aggregate total of abandoned land on existing mainland at least that great, not to mention all those 512 sims with the old houses.

The effect would be much more interesting than that blight known as Bellisseria

Only when buying a mainland parcel is as cheep and easy as buying an estate parcel will you find a mass return to mainland. 

Just my opinion. 

 

 

 

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I think land group bonuses should be replaced with something else. I believe this is a part of the problem, with small parcels that will never be sold.

But group bonus and Mainland has nothing to do with this thread, that is about homesteads.

There are many residents that will never have any change in Mainland, it would be the ultimate betrayal for them.They are so many that they are real power, LL could drive it through, but can they afford to see them quit SL? I don't think so.

It is better to think new, and let Mainland be as it is.

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On 9/9/2020 at 6:06 AM, BilliJo Aldrin said:

I'm confused. Are you saying that if anyone could buy a homestead without owning a mainland sim first, that there is a whole class of potential land barons just waiting to move in on this new rule?

I would assume that any land baron already has as many homesteads as he wants.

The market for homestead rentals would be eliminated if anyone could buy one directly from LL at the same monthly cost of renting from a land baron.

Of course you'd prefer to keep a model where people "buy" through you instead of from LL direct.

I still say cut off mainland land barons at the knees by subdividing the entire mainland into 1024 and 4096 plots, and selling them for $1L each.

 

You keep not getting it simply because you were not here in SL when this ALREADY HAPPENED.

When you could ALREADY BUY THEM without the hobble of having to buy a full sim.

So that you didn't face a) the much higher set-up fee then for full prim islands b) the tier then every month for that island. All costs that the baron who can "buy as much of them he wants now" has to face, and which is a deterrent.

In fact, you're in such a kneejerk reaction to what I write that you can't see the obvious: that if you think *I'm* advocating people "buy through me not from LL" THAT IS WHAT WE HAD. THAT IS THE POINT. (They didn't rent/buy them through me as I didn't get into that business; I have only one. I am a tiny landlord compared to these people, which you may not grasp through your seething hatred of capitalism/landlords/"rent-seekers" blah blah.).

The people who want this system back speaking on the forums are end-users who want one, or maybe 6, but not 100. The land barons would love a pancake flipping farm like this are staying out of the conversation because they know either the Lindens will never do this, or they will pressure the Lindens, but not look like they caused it.

Because what happened when there was no restriction and no penalty cost, landlords bout up zillions, flipped them to renters who had estate manage powers -- again, read what is written -- who had estate manager powers as if they were owners -- but then didn't do any customer service, leaving it to the Lindens to fix griefers, crashes, etc.

The glut on the market also made it impossible for some to get even 80% occupancy, they couldn't make tier, they went bankrupt, leaving people who had paid a lot of money to "buy" a thing that wasn't there holding a big bag.

You're just not hearing is that WE ALREADY HAD ALL THIS and THAT IS WHY WE DON'T ANY MORE -- it was too great a burden on the Lindens. This has nothing whatsoever to do with me as I RENT MAINLAND. I do not "sell" islands.

It's hard to see where your seething hatred of landlords and capitalism -- especially on the Mainland where it is more like share-cropping that baronry -- such that you would wish to cripple this normal business that provides many people a low-cost alternative to islands and Bellissaria, and for very little remuneration.

In fact, land bars were already cut off at the knees because -- WAIT FOR IT! -- land already sells for $1 a meter to anyone, i.e. as abandoned, and if there were more of it, the Lindens might even mark it down to $1 per 1024. Land barons were at their peak when the auction had NEW sims that were a different texture and landscaping every time so it was thrilling. Land barons could make money when abandoned land for $1 and Bellissaria didn't compete. Now it does, so there are less of them.

But the Lindens won't mark it down because it doesn't sell, ikeeps losing value, and even at that price, it wouldn't because purchase price isn't the issue; tier recurring is.

It's hard to have these conversations with people so ideologically hide-bound, so blinded by hatreds, that they can't see the facts on the ground here. So I'll leave you to have the last word and hope all the high-fives of your friends will give you a feeling of accomplishment. Meanwhile, it's all barking nonsense.

 

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8 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You keep not getting it simply because you were not here in SL when this ALREADY HAPPENED.

When you could ALREADY BUY THEM without the hobble of having to buy a full sim.

So that you didn't face a) the much higher set-up fee then for full prim islands b) the tier then every month for that island. All costs that the baron who can "buy as much of them he wants now" has to face, and which is a deterrent.

In fact, you're in such a kneejerk reaction to what I write that you can't see the obvious: that if you think *I'm* advocating people "buy through me not from LL" THAT IS WHAT WE HAD. THAT IS THE POINT. (They didn't rent/buy them through me as I didn't get into that business; I have only one. I am a tiny landlord compared to these people, which you may not grasp through your seething hatred of capitalism/landlords/"rent-seekers" blah blah.).

The people who want this system back speaking on the forums are end-users who want one, or maybe 6, but not 100. The land barons would love a pancake flipping farm like this are staying out of the conversation because they know either the Lindens will never do this, or they will pressure the Lindens, but not look like they caused it.

Because what happened when there was no restriction and no penalty cost, landlords bout up zillions, flipped them to renters who had estate manage powers -- again, read what is written -- who had estate manager powers as if they were owners -- but then didn't do any customer service, leaving it to the Lindens to fix griefers, crashes, etc.

The glut on the market also made it impossible for some to get even 80% occupancy, they couldn't make tier, they went bankrupt, leaving people who had paid a lot of money to "buy" a thing that wasn't there holding a big bag.

You're just not hearing is that WE ALREADY HAD ALL THIS and THAT IS WHY WE DON'T ANY MORE -- it was too great a burden on the Lindens. This has nothing whatsoever to do with me as I RENT MAINLAND. I do not "sell" islands.

It's hard to see where your seething hatred of landlords and capitalism -- especially on the Mainland where it is more like share-cropping that baronry -- such that you would wish to cripple this normal business that provides many people a low-cost alternative to islands and Bellissaria, and for very little remuneration.

In fact, land bars were already cut off at the knees because -- WAIT FOR IT! -- land already sells for $1 a meter to anyone, i.e. as abandoned, and if there were more of it, the Lindens might even mark it down to $1 per 1024. Land barons were at their peak when the auction had NEW sims that were a different texture and landscaping every time so it was thrilling. Land barons could make money when abandoned land for $1 and Bellissaria didn't compete. Now it does, so there are less of them.

But the Lindens won't mark it down because it doesn't sell, ikeeps losing value, and even at that price, it wouldn't because purchase price isn't the issue; tier recurring is.

It's hard to have these conversations with people so ideologically hide-bound, so blinded by hatreds, that they can't see the facts on the ground here. So I'll leave you to have the last word and hope all the high-fives of your friends will give you a feeling of accomplishment. Meanwhile, it's all barking nonsense.

 

Actually, I'm 100% pro-capitalist, I always have been.

Its good if LL sells 10,000 new homesteads to whoever wants them, barons or individuals.

From LL's point of view, it makes no difference who owns them, tier is tier.

I'm all for greed, but I don't think greed should be subsidized or maintained with protective rules. 

 

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Probably unrelated, but might coincide in time: the Lab must plan to eventually re-enable resident-to-resident auctions of Mainland parcels. Not sure I even knew exactly what went wrong when it was enabled before. Somebody must have "gamed the system" somehow, I suppose. Anyway, at one point I thought resident-to-resident auctions would dramatically change the Mainland market and ownership patterns. No idea how / if this could affect the market for Homestead-only sales, or Premium Plus in general.

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15 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Probably unrelated, but might coincide in time: the Lab must plan to eventually re-enable resident-to-resident auctions of Mainland parcels. Not sure I even knew exactly what went wrong when it was enabled before. Somebody must have "gamed the system" somehow, I suppose. Anyway, at one point I thought resident-to-resident auctions would dramatically change the Mainland market and ownership patterns. No idea how / if this could affect the market for Homestead-only sales, or Premium Plus in general.

What happened is that the Lindens ideologically conceived of this as an end users' game, like Animal Crossing in a way, where little woodland creatures would trade parcels to each other, perhaps adding a few little acorns for tea into the bargain. 

Instead, what happened is that because handling land is often poorly understand; it is a learned skill and punishes you brutally if you mess up (by tiering you up or causing the loss of your land); because people are just kind of scared of all that, they don't want to learn anything hard, they just abandon it. After all tier, a recurring expense is the problem; not land purchase cost.

The auction might have soaked up some of that pent-up demand if people could post a parcel no one could see in the vast Mainland, and find a willing buyer.

But naturally land barons swooped in. As they always will when there is this kind of setting with Linden indifference to education and monitoring post-deployment; public fear and reluctance; lack of incentive. So it's way easier for them to kind of pose as an end user looking for other end users on a kind of mass sale. I don't know if the Lindens every put in any brakes on that use of the system -- I never got it to work and gave up.

If you have a relatively free economy, one that's even more like Russia or China than America, but still... -- you can't build in all sorts of rules especially if you can't enforce them. If you say only individuals not groups can sell; people just make alts. If they IP track alts, people will log in with an anonymizer or another browser; if they try to stop that abuse, people will wail and pretend they are in the same apartment building in Kenosha. And so on. It's hard to do this stuff on line, and they only substitute is organic, real-time policing and engagement.

One simple mitigation I always thought (which they used to have!) was a simple function where the RESULTS of the auction are POSTED. Then we can see Anshe -- and the alts that we can now detect! -- is scooping up all the telehub land. We can see her alts because we can see now who is behind the sale and what the signage is. We can see that time and again she or Blue or Adam or whoever their latter-day equivalent are has jacked up a big margin for themselves by bidding on land they don't even want or can't even take, just to keep the price high.

When you have that publicity, you learn to see which companies jack up prices; you then avoid them in favour of more friendly ones.

The Lindens tried to mitigate this -- again -- by forcing you to have money in your account, and tier available (I think) before you can bid on an auction. Before that was not necessary and heavily abused. Someone without tier could buy and flip and auction win buy undertiering a group for 12 hours or even 24 hours and Linden couldn't catch them.

Now I think that loophole is closed, but not completely when it comes to group land.

To be honest, I don't need an auction. I need a system that enables me to bid on land that is abandoned in my sim, not competing against land barons who don't live there and will jack up the price again for me. I just had that happen again on a sim and I am really furious. If you do something like just go to bed at night for 8 hours, which you have to do, someone can dump land while you are asleep and it can be available to be ticketed and handed out before you wake up. Yes, tickets have been going that fast! Now I see more of a brake on them, 3 days at least. Now I see some willingness sometimes for a Linden to IM you or a neighbour and say hey, do you want this land that is next to you? To give you first dibs informally. But that's time-consuming. We can't expect them in a world with 5000 sims to do that in every instance. So that's why I can wake up and see 3 waterfront parcels that my neighbour was not willing to sell me or tell me she was abandoning already in the possession of a land baron selling them for $15/m. Not so high, but still, back-breaking. There's nothing that can be done about this until the Lindens can automate the process. And I have no idea if that is hard. That abandoned land triggers a status for 30 days where only other owners on that sim can see a colour of it and a for-sale status that only they can buy.

One downside of such an automated system is that it would raise the bar for rapacious barons to scoop up 16ms anywhere on any sim, such as to be poised to grab that "same sim owner only" piece. Yes, the Lindens could code in that it has to be 512 or greater. But then someone with a 448 trying to eke out a bigger spot will be stymied.

I can only say that to make any land thing work at all, the Lindens need to deploy dedicated staff in the way they did with Jack Linden and his staff in the day. This means not a Moncierge meeting which I have discovered are utterly useless. They are to blow off steam or file suggestions but they are feel-goods. They don't have the rigorous practicality and results and action that the scripting and server meetings do, truly. And their answer is likely, but we did that. We have Patch Linden. We have the Moles. Look at how insanely busy they are. 

To which I can say that there's the rest of the Mainland. And at this point, as Belli increases, as abandonment does not improve, "the rest of the Mainland" may not be compelling to the Lindens to bother with.

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On 9/9/2020 at 6:49 AM, Qie Niangao said:

Ah, maybe this is the confusion:

It takes a little bit of digging to understand how this all came to be, but starting here with a Knowledge Base post on open spaces written by Rand Linden is a good start. Knowledge Base In 2009, there was a change where most, but not all, open space regions were converted into Homestead regions. This was a result of the now infamous misuse of open spaces. But even from the beginning, no one could purchase an open space without owning at least one regular region. Perhaps the confusion is that the owner of a single region could own more than one open space. So some region owners had multiple open spaces or homesteads.

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6 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

But even from the beginning, no one could purchase an open space without owning at least one regular region. 

Thanks; I'd begun to doubt my memory.

One thing surprised me in that Knowledge Base article:

Quote

You may optionally convert four Openspace Regions into a normal Private Region or you may convert a Private Region into four Openspace Regions, provided that you will have at least one normal Private Region afterward.

This despite (as it says) "New Openspaces are no longer available for sale" -- as I'd understood. So I wonder if this is still done: An Estate needs more true Openspace regions, so buys a full region and converts it to four Openspaces. I don't think I see Openspaces much anymore, and for what they support they're a bit pricey (US$60/month), but they'd seem to have some appeal for roleplay settings.

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1 hour ago, Digit Gears said:

So.. how bout they just put a limit of how many homesteads you could own then?

One homestead per person unless they have a fullsim too.

Maybe even throw in an account age limit of one or two years to deter wanna be slum lords from making an army of burner accounts.

Let's wait for the move to aws, LL already does not have the servers to host new regions.  

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1 hour ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Let's wait for the move to aws, LL already does not have the servers to host new regions.  

I hope they have finished the move this year, so maybe we get a Xmas or New Year surprise? 😊

I am ready to get more land. But I have so much hope for Premium Plus with a larger (read: HUGE) increase of land/prims... I will surely be disappointed...

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