Help! Abandoned some land by mistake! Whitney? Help!

[Cate Foulsbane]

Needing to reduce my tier a bit, I abandoned SOME of my land a couple days ago. Tonight, I logged in and found a lot of my landscape items returned by Whitney because the items were on abandoned land. I checked to see why and where since I had carefully removed everything I owned from land I WANTED to abandon.  Oh no! A chunk of land I wanted to keep is now showing up as abandoned. How did that happen? What did I do wrong? Can I fix it? Can I get it back? Whitney is the LL person who returned my objects...and I don't know how to reach Whitney. What do I do? Help!

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

2 minutes ago, Cate Foulsbane said:

Needing to reduce my tier a bit, I abandoned SOME of my land a couple days ago. Tonight, I logged in and found a lot of my landscape items returned by Whitney because the items were on abandoned land. I checked to see why and where since I had carefully removed everything I owned from land I WANTED to abandon.  Oh no! A chunk of land I wanted to keep is now showing up as abandoned. How did that happen? What did I do wrong? Can I fix it? Can I get it back? Whitney is the LL person who returned my objects...and I don't know how to reach Whitney. What do I do? Help!

 

You are Premium, so tomorrow start up Live Chat and explain the problem.  They might have you open a Support ticket to be handled by the Land team.  Since it is only a few days, they might let you have the land back without even making you pay the L$ per sqm that they typically sell abandoned land for.

[Cate Foulsbane]

1 minute ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

so tomorrow start up Live Chat and explain the problem.

Live Chat? What is it, how does it work? I have no clue!

 

[Cate Foulsbane]

I finally calmed down enough to remember how to deal with abandoned land. Submitted a ticket, fingers crossed they let me buy it back..or at least explain what in the world happened!   But I still want to know about this Live Chat thing.

 

[Persephone Emerald]

Put in a support ticket saying you abandoned some land by mistake. As clearly as possible describe the parcel you want back and add an SLURL from the middle of it to your support ticket. One of the Moles or a Linden will send you an email telling you they've set it back for sale to you for $L 0. This might take a few days, but seldom more than a week.

Yay! You just did what I was suggesting while I was typing this. 🙂 

Edited January 20, 2023 by Persephone Emerald

[Rowan Amore]

47 minutes ago, Cate Foulsbane said:

I finally calmed down enough to remember how to deal with abandoned land. Submitted a ticket, fingers crossed they let me buy it back..or at least explain what in the world happened!   But I still want to know about this Live Chat thing.

 

At the bottom of this page under Connect with Us... support 

[LittleMe Jewell]

17 hours ago, Cate Foulsbane said:

But I still want to know about this Live Chat thing.

 

On the Support page, down near the bottom, is a link you can click that will popup the Chat window.  It takes patience to get past the Bot to a Live Person, but for some things it will be faster than a ticket.  For some things, they will have you open a ticket anyway.

[ChinRey]

17 hours ago, Cate Foulsbane said:

I finally calmed down enough to remember how to deal with abandoned land. Submitted a ticket, fingers crossed they let me buy it back

Unless LL's policy has changed recently, they'll just give you back your land if it's the first time you've had this accident. It make take a few days for them to process you ticket though.

[Henry Blackwood]

Abandoned land is kept in hand by LL for seven days in the eventuality that the owner abandoned it by mistake/changed their mind.

[Cate Foulsbane]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

they'll just give you back your land if it's the first time you've had this accident.

I have a bad memory, but I'm almost certain I've never messed up like this before. And it IS a mess. I had a large, oddly shaped property and wanted to get rid of most but not all. So, I tried subdividing it into smaller pieces and then abandoning those. Apparently, I forgot some step along the way and ended up abandoning the whole caboodle. Maybe it's karma coming for me...having to rebuild a forest is going to make me pretty cranky.  Thanks for the help everybody!

 

[Cate Foulsbane]

2 hours ago, Henry Blackwood said:

Abandoned land is kept in hand by LL for seven days

I sure hope I caught this mess in that time period. I can't remember when I did the deed and didn't realize I'd messed up til I logged on to find a ton of forest bits returned to me. Oh noooooooo!   Thanks, you have given me hope..AND made it clear that I'm not the first person to make this mistake.

 

 

 

[Polenth Yue]

One thing that can go wrong is that bits of unconnected land can end up in the same parcel, even though they don't touch. Suppose you had a long piece of land. You subdivide the middle to make a new parcel. The two ends are still the same original parcel, but they don't really look it as the middle parcel is between them... so it'd be easy to abandon one end thinking the other end was a different parcel. One trick to be really sure is to rename the bit you plan to abandon, then check the name of the bit you want to keep. If they've both changed, you know you messed up somewhere.

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Henry Blackwood said:

Abandoned land is kept in hand by LL for seven days

At least seven days. Usually it takes months, even years before an abandoned parcel is back on the market.

 

3 hours ago, Cate Foulsbane said:

AND made it clear that I'm not the first person to make this mistake.

You're not. I know because I've done it myself.

[Cate Foulsbane]

6 hours ago, ChinRey said:

At least seven days. Usually it takes months, even years before an abandoned parcel is back on the market.

The best guess I have now is that I made my mistake sometime previous to Jan 14...that's the first hint that something was wrong but I didn't realize it was a hint (if that makes sense). And now, after I have put in the ticket and await a response, I have found one piece of my mistake already sold and another, probably the most important to me, is up for auction. Good grief...blink of an eye.

 

[Qie Niangao]

46 minutes ago, Cate Foulsbane said:

[...] I have found one piece of my mistake already sold and another, probably the most important to me, is up for auction. Good grief...blink of an eye.

That does seem really fast. The one for auction, is it actually already listed on the auction page, or only purple-coded for having an auction ID assigned? At least in the past it's taken weeks for parcels to get through the queue and actually scheduled for auction (but only a couple days for scheduled auctions to open, and another couple to close).

Makes me wonder… the one that's already sold, is it owned by another landowner in the region? I'm wondering if a neighbor suddenly discovered abandoned land nearby and put in a ticket to try to acquire it, which will push the process along some.

 

[Cate Foulsbane]

27 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Makes me wonder… the one that's already sold, is it owned by another landowner in the region? I'm wondering if a neighbor suddenly discovered abandoned land nearby and put in a ticket to try to acquire it, which will push the process along some.

Yep, the sold piece and the auction piece..big surprise to me. But situated right on the Sea of Fables, in my mind a prime spot for somebody who sails.  If I get lucky, my bid will win at auction and I will have a piece that fits into what we already own. If not,, so be it. 

The GREAT news is that the magnificent GUY LINDEN, who has the patience of a SAINT, fixed the land  mess for me a few mins ago and I have the most important pieces of land back! Yay! I now can commence rebuilding my forest...maybe make it better than the one that got away. 

Thanks all who helped in big ways and little ways and in between ways!

[Phil Deakins]

Guy Linden has always been one of the very best Lindens.

[K9Mark]

It's always nice to see a happy ending to a story like this, and like you say, Guy Linden must have the patience of a saint. The rest of the land team are also really helpful as well

[Cate Foulsbane]

Apparently I made another mistake..this time, creating a new subject. Auction Bots. Either I didn't hit enter..or it got pulled. Trying to bid on a piece of property I lost by mistake, I bid 10 and before I can finish blinking somebody else had posted a bid for 11. Over and over. Either a bizarre coincidence..or maybe there is a bot reacting to auction bids. If this is true, then ordinary folks like me don't stand a chance when a bot is set in motion. I don't mind being outbid by a person.....but I do mind being manipulated by the sort who use bots. Grrrr.

[So Whimsy]

46 minutes ago, Cate Foulsbane said:

Apparently I made another mistake..this time, creating a new subject. Auction Bots. Either I didn't hit enter..or it got pulled. Trying to bid on a piece of property I lost by mistake, I bid 10 and before I can finish blinking somebody else had posted a bid for 11. Over and over. Either a bizarre coincidence..or maybe there is a bot reacting to auction bids. If this is true, then ordinary folks like me don't stand a chance when a bot is set in motion. I don't mind being outbid by a person.....but I do mind being manipulated by the sort who use bots. Grrrr.

You can set a max amount of Linden you are willing to buy the parcel for. This amount is hidden from others but if the person is out bid it will outbid in turn. It's not a bot but a feature on the site you can use as well.

[LittleMe Jewell]

14 minutes ago, So Whimsy said:

You can set a max amount of Linden you are willing to buy the parcel for. This amount is hidden from others but if the person is out bid it will outbid in turn. It's not a bot but a feature on the site you can use as well.

If the incoming bid was only L$1 higher than the bid Cate put in, then it can't be the auto-increment feature. The minimum bid increment for manual bidding is L$10 and the auto-increment value is a minimum of L$10 and must be a multiple of L$10 - per LL"s Auction info, anyway.

Then again, if the minimum manual increment is L$10 and the minimum auto-increment is L$10, how would any bid be only L$1 higher?   
Cate bids L$10 and next bid is L$11.

It must be that auto-bidding up to someone's already designated max does simply bump it L$1. 
I would still think the first increment over the initial L$10 would still have to be L$10 higher. 

Obviously I am not totally up on how these freakin auctions work.

 

Edited January 22, 2023 by LittleMe Jewell

[Qie Niangao]

It's a weird kind of "auction"—nothing like Sotheby's or an estate auction, but a blind auction intended to make it easy to set your own fair market value for the parcel and let the bidding proceed automatically up to that price and no higher.

The thing is, this doesn't prevent automated bidding at the very last minute, so even if you bid enough to pass all the other pre-set maximum bids of the moment, a bot can swoop in and bid more, automatically raising your bid up to that max and then surpassing it to win the auction away from you. So again, it's nothing like bidding at a regular auction because you're essentially never responding to other live bids.

[Cate Foulsbane]

6 hours ago, So Whimsy said:

You can set a max amount of Linden you are willing to buy the parcel for. This amount is hidden from others but if the person is out bid it will outbid in turn. It's not a bot but a feature on the site you can use as well.

If I'd not been having a tizzy, and had more time to learn, I might have figured out that bit. Thank you for explaining..it makes sense. This auction was like gambling, I guess, which is normally something I will not do when money is involved. In this case, it wasn't money but land I lost through my own stupidity and couldn't get back. Kicking myself a LOT and hope I can get past that point soon.

[Cate Foulsbane]

6 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

The thing is, this doesn't prevent automated bidding at the very last minute, so even if you bid enough to pass all the other pre-set maximum bids of the moment, a bot can swoop in and bid more, automatically raising your bid up to that max and then surpassing it to win the auction away from you.

I figured out who got the land and flat out asked him how he did it.. Was it a bot? He claimed not and said he thought such bots were illegal "now" which led my inflamed and quite paranoid brain to suspect he had in fact used a bot. Grrrr. But anyway, I guess whoever made the highest bid was, in the last seconds, outbid at last by the guy who now owns the property I lost out of total effing stupidity. Unless I manage to forgive myself and forget the incredibly bad feelings I now have about auctions, I probably won't ever do an auction again. ....grrrrrrr!..........

P.S. Thank you, all you lovely helpful people...you really did make this easier. It might not look like it, but you did. Hugs!

 

Edited January 23, 2023 by Cate Foulsbane

[Lindal Kidd]

1 hour ago, Cate Foulsbane said:

Unless I manage to forgive myself and forget the incredibly bad feelings I now have about auctions, I probably won't ever do an auction again.

Cate, please don't do that. Your frustration is simply because you don't understand how the land auctions work.

These auctions are like eBay auctions. In a sense, they DO have bots, but the bot is the auction itself, not bidders cheating. Here's how it works...

You see a parcel you want. You enter, not an amount a bit above the current bid, but the MAXIMUM amount that you are willing to pay. The other bidder, of course, has done the same.

Let's say the current bid is L$500. The bidder has capped his maximum bid at 950 (but of course, you don't know this). You decide you are willing to pay $L1200 and enter that.

Now the auction engine fires up. It conducts a lightning fast bidding war, increasing the bid from 500 to 955. At this point, you have outbid the previous bidder, right up to and beyond his maximum. Congratulations, you are now the leading bidder.

The first bidder might reconsider, and decide he's willing to pay more, in which case the bid now increases to a point just above either his maximum, or yours, whichever was lower. Or other bidders can join the party, of course.

The key to keep in mind is the MAXIMUM bid that you enter. Don't just bid a couple of $L over the current bid. Bid the maximum you're willing to pay.

Note: if you bid "too high", don't worry. You will not be charged more than your winning bid, NOT your maximum bid. If everyone else drops out at 955, then that's what you pay, not 1200.