"Land Speculators will Kill Your Game's Growth"

[Prokofy Neva]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I had thought each subsequent half-region would be charged about the same per square meter as the first full region, so holding a second region would cost pretty much exactly the same as the first. I swear there used to be price information to that effect on the Land Use Fees dashboard but I don't see it now, and (for me) the linked Land Pricing table doesn't go beyond a full region (which is what I currently pay). If I tease the dashboard estimator with a region-and-a-half, it responds with a modal dialog warning:
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball!

So as you said: "Just what does that discount schedule look like farther up the stack?"

If there's a big price break now that wasn't there before, some folks just might buy-in if they knew about it. Or maybe Marketing is smart to keep it on the down-low. (I remember negotiating discounts with the cable company. Good times.) I'm pretty sure something has changed here fairly recently.

I never recall any announcement or flagging in any MonCierge meeting (which I attend only sporadically), it just appeared magically one day. If Ardy had group land with the 10% bonus, he may have made savings of a tier jump, we'd have to hear from him about the amounts.

With the discount in place now, one you have more than a sim, you would pay just $44 to jump up a quarter sim tier, not $67 as on the initial tier ladder, a savings of US $23.

Then it seems to me there is one other jump later that saves you some $9 or something, I'd have to go check. They do not make it easy, as they don't publish the full charge from start to finish, with an entire two ladders of tier, they only show you your tier level on that account. But the only discount you can get other than this on Mainland to my knowledge is the group discount, which essentially gives you one sim of tier free for every 10 sims you own.

I'm not getting what the "$195" is. On the charts in the US one sim is $175. Is that in Europe, with VAT?

The Lindens hide this light under a bushel. I'm not sure why. 

As they also hide the fact that you can now make partial payments and not just the full payment. It seems to me long ago, you could pay any amount on the account, but this changed even before Tilia came in. Now they have made it possible to put down money on an overdue account. This may not enable you to log in if you are overdue 60 days. But it will enable you to get your stipend and sell Lindens although I have not tested what happens after 60 days, I don't want to risk it. A big complaint of land barons who have gone under is that they had hundreds of thousands of Linden dollars on account to pay tier, but their account would be closed before they could put the Lindens to sale, or before they sold, if put on a level not instantly selling. 

So now that situation isn't completely cured, but eased. I guess with COVID, the Lindens had to become pragmatic about this.

What they never want to do is make it easier to tier up just by a small amount, to buy small packets of, say, 1024 in tier, without making a jump to having more tier than you need. This seems so unnecessary, except to force sales of higher amounts, which ultimately lead to abandonment. They never have been willing to re-visit this issue, forcing people to either rent tier from land barons for higher amounts, or do with less, or abandon. Or get another premium account for its "free" 1024 but that's really not cost efficient, as that adds the $11.99 to the tier burden.

[Quistess Alpha]

4 minutes ago, animats said:

You can't grant an easement to Linden Lab and make a right of way permanent, which is what you do in real life.

Has anyone tied abandoning easements and seeing if the lab puts them up for auction?

[Prokofy Neva]

2 minutes ago, Quistess Alpha said:

Has anyone tied abandoning easements and seeing if the lab puts them up for auction?

They won't auction easements that are only 128 or even multiple 64 or 128 easements. I have asked them whether they will allow 128s to be purchased from abandonment so that ad farmers will get them and they say "no." But what they WILL do is bundle up odd amounts of abandoned land, even if putting in those odd microparcels makes for very odd shapes, and auction those messes now. This is really causing havoc in some areas and leads to more land cutting and ad farming ultimately.

Edited January 5, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I'm not getting what the "$195" is. On the charts in the US one sim is $175. Is that in Europe, with VAT?

I'd forgotten how long ago this change happened, and just now fetched the Knowledge Base reference in the Wayback Machine: The full region tier fee was $195 per month until March 14, 2018 when it dropped to $175. Apparently that was also when the half-region increments dropped to quarter-region for tier larger than a full region.

[Feorie Frimon]

2 hours ago, animats said:

One problem is that user -owned roads are not permanent. We just saw this at ERIA, where roads and a major suspension bridge disappeared, leaving roads ending in midair at parcel boundaries.

You can't grant an easement to Linden Lab and make a right of way permanent, which is what you do in real life.

Really? You can’t donate land and/or build to SL? 
 

Edited January 5, 2022 by Feorie Frimon

[Prokofy Neva]

3 hours ago, Feorie Frimon said:

Really? You can’t donate land and/or build to SL? 
 

Of course you can -- if you are in like Finn. There are entire sims of builds that have essentially been taken over by Linden Lab. Their sensitive creators, even being RL game developers with presumably adequate salaries, didn't want to pay tier, so the Lindens took it over. Then it seemed to change hands. Some of these historical stories are murky. We can remember when  a Linden became co-owner of a mall that a group of people had a fight over, and the insufficiently FIC'd fellow got kicked from the group. These things can happen. There is no process or routine for taking resident donations, of course, because there's be a million of them and LL doesn't want to tier your land for you, you're supposed to tier it. 

The proper thing to have done was to have had the government, such as it is, in the form of Linden Lab, make the roads and easements at the get-go, not forcing various resident groups to cobble this together, and appear and disappear as they do in a certain place where you can stravaige across the burn...er, now just abandoned land, a former burn...

It's still not too late to do this, but for that, the Lindens/Moles would need a top-down executive decision to devote attention again to the Mainland which they don't want to do. As you know, they have different plans and strategies. So -- sponsor a road like they do in some of our RL states where you can donate for part of a highway and have your name go on a little post.

[Katherine Heartsong]

On 1/4/2022 at 12:33 PM, Quistess Alpha said:

LL should make yearly premium 102 USD and set a fixed fee per m2 of land held rather than the awkward and confusing Tier system.

Yes, please.

[Paul Hexem]

On 1/3/2022 at 8:54 AM, Qie Niangao said:

So the point is that tier is too damned low?

I would say the bulk discount is too low.

If there were no bulk discount, people would go broke waiting for someone to pay their silly, outrageous prices.

[Qie Niangao]

4 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

I would say the bulk discount is too low.

If there were no bulk discount, people would go broke waiting for someone to pay their silly, outrageous prices.

Yeah, it sure seems there must be bulk discounts above the full-region Mainland tier. I've just never known anybody to confess that it's the case (in contrast to the "Atlas Program" of Estate bulk discounts).

Perhaps one could argue that even just the full-region tier is priced too low, at least compared to the smaller tiers. It's certainly confusing and complicated to have the varied pricing per square meter (hence calls for a "flat tax" instead of "tier" for Mainland ownership), and maybe it's also bad business to have quantity discounts even at this small scale. 

At the full-region tier level myself, though, it would seem difficult for the Lab to unwind the tiering structure. If they cut the per-square-meter costs of smaller tiers down to that paid at the full region level, they'd give up a lot of revenue, at least until those owners decided to buy more because they could afford it and it's so much simpler now. If I had to pay more per square meter, I'd definitely reduce the amount of Mainland I hold.

But I think it would be even worse, at least for folks that perceive money the way I do.  If each square meter I shed reduced my costs by some increment, I'd have no discrete steps below which to stop cutting, and so I'm genuinely unsure I'd have any Mainland left at all by the time I quit squeezing down. Not entirely rational, I suppose, and maybe just idiosyncratic of me, but I bet there's a Marketing theory here somewhere.

[Paul Hexem]

10 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Yeah, it sure seems there must be bulk discounts above the full-region Mainland tier. I've just never known anybody to confess that it's the case (in contrast to the "Atlas Program" of Estate bulk discounts).

I'd even argue that the price for going above a single mainland region should go up- exponentially. It would discourage a single person from holding most of the grid (like we see in Zindra) and encourage them to actually price their parcels in a way that will actually sell.

Let them make their profits on quick flips, instead of holding a parcel for years with a stupid price on it.

[Qie Niangao]

18 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

I'd even argue that the price for going above a single mainland region should go up- exponentially.

I think they'd just create more accounts with different billing information if it were worth their while to do so. I'd rather raise the tier fees for land that's for sale, as I suggested somewhere recently. It's tricky though: to avoid penalizing normal market activity it would be better if the fees rose over time as the land remains on sale, but that would be gamed by flipping among alts, one cure for which might be a "sales tax" on each transfer, and pretty soon it's all more trouble than the problem it's supposed to be solving.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Qie Niangao

[Paul Hexem]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I think they'd just create more accounts with different billing information if it were worth their while to do so. I'd rather raise the tier fees for land that's for sale, as I suggested somewhere recently. It's tricky though: to avoid penalizing normal market activity it would be better if the fees rose over time as the land remains on sale, but that would be gamed by flipping among alts, one cure for which might be a "sales tax" on each transfer, and pretty soon it's all more trouble than the problem it's supposed to be solving.

That's an even better idea, yeah.

There's a reason I'm no one's financial advisor. 

[Lexbot Sinister]

The tier is too low? What the....

 

[Feorie Frimon]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I think they'd just create more accounts with different billing information if it were worth their while to do so. I'd rather raise the tier fees for land that's for sale, as I suggested somewhere recently. It's tricky though: to avoid penalizing normal market activity it would be better if the fees rose over time as the land remains on sale, but that would be gamed by flipping among alts, one cure for which might be a "sales tax" on each transfer, and pretty soon it's all more trouble than the problem it's supposed to be solving.

That is some serious commitment. I mean… how many bank accounts/billing ways can you feasibly have? 

[Qie Niangao]

11 hours ago, Lexbot Sinister said:

The tier is too low? What the....

Right. The thread started with a concern over land speculation in other games, with a quote including "If there's no cost to holding onto this scarce asset that everybody needs and wants, and this asset will predictably rise in value, speculators will just sit on it and watch the price shoot through the roof and anyone who wants to use land will have to pay out the nose."  

That "no cost to holding onto" land doesn't seem all that familiar to SL, does it? 

I'm not even sure that it's a real problem if Mainland's largest owners do get a big bulk discount. (I have no evidence that they do; it just looks as if they must or they'd be losing an awful lot of money on so much slow-moving inventory.) It's possible the Mainland market could be improved by an extra incentive for sellers to make a sale in finite time, but there are enough other ways for users to have SL land that overpriced "speculative" Mainland wouldn't seem the urgent platform threat heralded in that Game Developer article.

9 hours ago, Feorie Frimon said:

That is some serious commitment. I mean… how many bank accounts/billing ways can you feasibly have? 

Fair. I have every faith in fintech to screw things up, but yeah, hiding RL "billing alts" from Tilia should be hard—almost as hard as hiding them from Treasury.

Another possibility: parcels when set for sale are tiered individually, separate from any other account tier. So if a regular landowner wants to sell their one parcel, they'd still be paying the same to hold it, but if a mega-owner has a hundred 1024s up for sale, that month the fees are a hundred times the 1024-tier fee.

That would also add cost for moderate scale landowners to sell off a slice, but maybe that's okay... or maybe exempt no-minimum resident-to-resident auctions when they return, if there's some way to keep it from being gamed with repeat fake bidders. Like a land transfer fee. Ugh.