Abandoned "Maintenance" Land - How much is out there?

[Chronometria]

I was on patrol, just flying about my land in Arah and I went over to Jarang. There was a nice big lot for auction, which surprised me as i rarely run into auction lots....and next to it, big chunks of abandoned land that would never cycle into the auction queue.

 

Since i came to the mainland, i`ve seen a lot of this. Numerous regions have this forgotten, abandoned land that the "maintenance" group holds and which will never go anywhere. It got me thinking - just how much is there in total. Are we looking at a whole abandoned *Continent" that simply isnt earning the lindens money or being useful to the second lifers.

 

New abandoned land is neatly set to auction and is ready for use pretty quickly, but this stuff is dead and will stay that way unless it is manually ticketed. Why cant it all simply be thrown up for auction? It does no good to anyone in its present state. Should we really have to ticket each and every piece to request this, when there surely must be an easier way?

[Chronometria]

What is the proper procedure for requesting that these be put for auction? An AR or one of those help "Cases"?

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

Newly abandoned land is set to sale, not auction (at least not unless there's a bug in the software).

Old abandoned land gets set to auction on request. And -maybe- they still have someone employed looking for it and putting it into auction over time.

I'd wager that the amount of abandoned land is probably over 5% but under 20% of mainland. It can look like more - but it also tends to concentrate around places that suffered 'griefer wars' between neighbors or places with notably ugly builds or have breedable pets move in.

While I'm beginning to see that new breedables do not destroy whole sims with the wag of a malicious paw... the old ones did, and so it is still a very common fear that can cause peple to just click the abandon button the moment they see one rezzed somewhere. That said, back a year or two ago - you pretty much had to abandon your land if a pet breeder moved to your sim. That, or hope they went out of business quickly while you temporarily went elsewhere and ignored your unusable lot. The days of the Scion Chicken Scourge were kinda rough on mainland.

- A bad economy has led to a lot of abanoned land, but this is where you find the scattered abandoned lots.

Where you see a concentration, you can be almost sure there was some kind of drama there in the past that LLs did not intervene in or was never even made aware of (a lot people will complain the lindens won't help or do anything - but never even ask for help in the first place, thus creating a self-proving theory. I've only had the lindens openly turn me down 3 times, explaining why each time, and that's with a LOT of filed tickets...).

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Chronometria wrote:

 

I`m still waiting on the case i have for that donut hole....maybe i`ll ask for it to be auctioned if thats quicker....

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If you ask for it to be auctioned they just might. And be prepared to lose that auction.

There are people who will buy it up with the purpose of extorting money out of you.

But... the time it takes to get a ticket for auction is pretty much the same as one to sell to you. 2 minutes to 2 months - I've had both extremes but mostly in the middle.

I'm still surprised that the linden who came by and removed the banlines in the abandoned donut and got rid of the marketplace box in there didn't sell it to you direct at that moment. That's what they usually do (have done for me in past). If the ticket that got them to come by for the banlines is still there but closed, re-open it and ask for the lot to be sold to you.

 I just finished about a week ago a process of re-opening a ticket a linden kept closing on me some 3 to 5 times, each time with an additional bit of something that still needed doing after the last interraction between us. They will do this. I've heard people claim they got threatened and told 'do no re-open that again or I'll ban you' but I doubt such claims are true - even if you get "short" with them in your ticket.

 

[Persephone Emerald]

I've bought more than a few abandoned lots by opening case tickets for them. Lately the wait time is around 2 weeks. I've never had a request turned down, though one has to be mindful of the workload the Lindens who deal with this sort of thing must have.

File a reasonable request in a sucinct, clearly worded case ticket.  After 1 week, keep checking the lot to see if it's been set for sale to you. Wait a couple weeks before complaining that you haven't heard anything back on your ticket.  If a case gets closed accidentally, re-open it.  If circumstances change & you want more land or a different parcel, add a comment to the case that's still open.  With a little patience, this is the easiest way to acquire land you want at the low price of $L 1/ meter.  

[Chronometria]

Mhm, workload is why i was thinking there must be an easier way for this to be dealt with. Maybe rather than releasing all legacy land, have some sort of trickle system that releases it slowly into the auction queue?

 

Thankyou for the responses. I am also in a super happy mood as Guy Linden kindly sorted out the abandoned lot "donut hole" in my property and gave me some nearby micro plots as well. Now to get building!

[Qie Niangao]

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Chronometria wrote:

I am also in a super happy mood as Guy Linden kindly sorted out the abandoned lot "donut hole" in my property and gave me some nearby micro plots as well. Now to get building!

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Guy is amazing.

Incidentally, abandoned land -- set with proper permissions and reverted to original terraforming -- is about the best neighbor you could hope for on the Mainland.  It's sort of like living next to a cemetary:  the neighbors are very quiet.  No crowd of avatars, no shouting genitals / lucky chairs / fake copybot detectors, no additional textures to lag the viewer, and no breedable critters to lag the sim.

 

[VonGklugelstein Alter]

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 

I'd wager that the amount of abandoned land is probably over 5% but under 20% of mainland. It can look like more - but it also tends to concentrate around places that suffered 'griefer wars' between neighbors or places with notably ugly builds or have breedable pets move in.

While I'm beginning to see that new breedables do not destroy whole sims with the wag of a malicious paw... etc etc...

 

You would lose your shirt in that bet because about a month ago it was nearly half of all Mainland that was Linden Owned, meaning.. abandoned.

[June Trefoil]

Ooooh, did I miss a Tyche Shepherd Mainland census?  The last one I saw was in January.  At that time, abandoned land had grown to about 7 - 8%.   I'm eager to see how that changed with the new abandoned land policy.  Oh, and Linden owned does not mean abandoned.

[Persephone Emerald]

 

Yeah. Linden owned land can also mean roads, water, & even parks.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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VonGklugelstein Alter wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

 I'd wager that the amount of abandoned land is probably over 5% but under 20% of mainland. It can look like more - but it also tends to concentrate around places that suffered 'griefer wars' between neighbors or places with notably ugly builds or have breedable pets move in.

 

You would lose your shirt in that bet because about a month ago it was nearly half of all Mainland that was Linden Owned, meaning.. abandoned.

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And the person who posted that census was shown by the other posters in that very thread to be full of it and making it up out of thin air. Their biggest flaw was that they claimed the number of mainland regions for sale as a number that was actually higher than the total number in -existance-. Oops.

 

One only has to look around SL to see that its nowhere near that high. Look here and there and you'll see a lot of land for sale, and a lot of abandoned land. But take a closer look and you'll see its clustered.

 

[VonGklugelstein Alter]

http://www.gridsurvey.com/index.php

 

The numbers of abandoned land is not reflective of what is actually happening. Abandoned land used to be purple and stayed purple on the map until it was sold at auction. Now they are hiding the amount of land that is unowned and only the actual parcels in the auction cue are purple. If they let the abandoned land show on the map it would be frightening... I see an incredible amount of land abandoned everywhere I look and I look a lot. I think Roads and other things like rivers etc only account for about 10-15% of all land owned.. but I doubt that we will ever find out exact numbers..

[June Trefoil]

Well, looking at that grid survey for Mainland, about 40% of Mainland is held by Linden Lab and of that, about 81% is protected land and presumably, permanent.    

Has anyone heard if Tyche will be doing another Mainland census? 

 

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

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VonGklugelstein Alter wrote:

http://www.gridsurvey.com/index.php

 

The numbers of abandoned land is not reflective of what is actually happening. Abandoned land used to be purple and stayed purple on the map until it was sold at auction. Now they are hiding the amount of land that is unowned and only the actual parcels in the auction cue are purple. If they let the abandoned land show on the map it would be frightening... I see an incredible amount of land abandoned everywhere I look and I look a lot. I think Roads and other things like rivers etc only account for about 10-15% of all land owned.. but I doubt that we will ever find out exact numbers..

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Umm, no.  Abandoned land only ever showed purple after it was assigned an auction id.  They seem to be fairly aggressively keeping the auction queue full these days, with as many parcels at auction as I can recall (at least since the time when the spare Zindra parcels were up for grabs).  The difference now is that (almost) all the freshly abandoned land shows as yellow because it is automatically set for sale at L$1/sq.m. shortly after it is abandoned.

Now, there is another way that land can be non-performing, even though it isn't strictly abandoned, and that's when the land belongs to terminated accounts.  There's a fair amount of that around although it takes a bit of effort to track down, especially if it's owned by a defunct or no-contribution group.  That won't be reflected in Tyche's statistics.

 

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... ETA: First, to clarify, the non-performing land I mentioned won't be reflected as Linden-owned, but will instead appear on the other side of that balance, as if it were still owned by a valid resident, even though it's not.

Also, to amplify a bit on the "protected" land: This has grown a lot in the past year or two because the Lab has added a bunch of water sims (some Homesteads, some full-primmed) to benefit sailing for Mainland and (some) for the private sims around the Blake Sea.  There's always been a lot of Linden-owned Mainland, though, including all the welcome areas, Linden Village, at least half of any double-primmed sim, various Mole-built destinations, sandboxes, event sims, etc.  The roads and rails are only a small part of the Linden-owned Mainland.

[Nefertiti Nefarious]

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Incidentally, abandoned land -- set with proper permissions and reverted to original terraforming -- is about the best neighbor you could hope for on the Mainland.  It's sort of like living next to a cemetary:  the neighbors are very quiet.  No crowd of avatars, no shouting genitals / lucky chairs / fake copybot detectors, no additional textures to lag the viewer, and no breedable critters to lag the sim.

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And you can put off-sim landscaping on them to make your place even prettier.