Prokofy Neva

Possibly because of living in poverty in RL in childhood, often in "multi-family dwellings" with the stairs on the outside of the house, then crowded communes and cramped NYC apartments. The Lindens used to say "you don't need land to have fun". But oh, you do. You need a home, a house, a place to decorate, a place to serve tea to your friends and show them what you're making. And more. The human desire for a hearthstone dies hard despite decades of Darwinian Internetization.

I can only think of two members of this Society still in SL and still active -- they were my pals way back in the Sims Online community called "Sim Arts". The others may have even died in RL, I don't recall. One I still see alive on Facebook but long gone from SL. There was another fellow active in this builders' social group (although not sure he was in the Society) who is long gone who once beat me on an auction of a 1024 m2 in Brown which went for over US $108. Today, I sold a similar Brown parcel (Brown and Boardman are the same kind of Linden-zoned sims although Boardman has been better maintained) for "only" $US 65. People hold land for sale there literally for years in the belief that this old valuation -- a Linden-zoned sim! A sim where no one can terror-form (terraforming is turned OFF)! A sim with suburban roads! -- still holds. It doesn't. I'm here to tell you PS that land in Brown rents poorly. It's in G. It's not really managed by Lindens anymore, who don't come running when you call to get lumps that show up in the non-terraformable land fixed (not like the Moles come running in Belli). Bellisseria has made all that old valuation obsolete. I remember when we implored Jack Lindens to take out the ugly buildings in the zoned marketplace area -- and the dead palm trees. I could never understand why Lindens deliberately put DEAD palm trees in the library. To his credit, he rebuilt the marketplace into something more sleek (for those days) and took out many (but not all) of the dead palms. I once asked a Linden why they kept that weird, awkward high-prim house made by Ryan Linden still out there (I never saw anyone live in that free house even back in the day -- it looks more like some sort of display case). Answer: TRADITION. I think no one could possibly object to a park -- there used to be parks and public buildings along with those FLW-imitation homes (some of which I still have in inventory).

You don't often find land in Sansara that has 40+/- terraforming ability in deep sea -- so you can make an underground grotto, mermaid cave, Jules Verne bathysphere. Here it is in Cub This parcel also has roadside at one end so you can live the dream of car/boat/submarine/helicopter. $65,500 or $16/m. You will not find a better deal, including on this sim, where another parcel is much more expensive.

Happy to interfere when others interfere *first* with the enjoyment of my SL and that of my neighbours. More than happy. This concept was at one time in the TOS under 2C "the interference with the enjoyment of Second Life" and was the premise under which land cutting and extortionate sale were at least in some forms criminalized.

No. The premise of the land baron market has always been "I can hold this parcel for months on end because the bulk-rate tier I pay for it will be more than covered by my final sale price." Except, the market is saturated, concurrency is stagnant, the Lindens' other products compete with Mainland significantly now, and the Linden dollar is devalued now to a wait-for-days 246. The golden age of land baronry is long over; the silver age is now coming to a close. After the Golden Age in RL history of magnificent palaces and realms came the Iron Age of mass replication -- Bellisseria.

The question I had last summer was: why would they sell it for $5/meter? Answer: the market is saturated. There is pretty much one monopolist who simply reached his limit, and it goes down fast when the ability to hold land for months on end and still make back the tier for all those months IS NOW OVER.

512 is what I said. No sales. When there are no sales, there are no builds. The Lindens should install their own ad sales network and displace the blight and extortion.

I don't understand what you mean by "fee-based income" versus "land free income". The Lindens make the overwhelming percentage of their revenue from monthly island tier. Bellisseria and Mainland together are significantly less than the number of islands. I'm puzzled by your notion that "someone else" will pay for the abandoned land. Who? It's on a region, which has to be maintained at AWS by LL. Virtual land is like what is said about boats: a hole in the ocean into which you pour money. Land is not an investment; it is a cost center. It is a frame around content and experience that is a fixed cost, not revenue. I think that's the basic lesson to be learned from 20 years of Second Life.

Indeed, if you follow this closely and fly around a lot as I do, and ask the Lindens directly -- they sometimes answer factually -- Belli is now likely MORE THAN Mainland under tier by residents, not counting abandoned or Linden land. There are 3000+ plus Bellisseria sims and more constantly added daily. Not sure why you are not mentioning islands, which are the chief source of revenue for LL -- there are some 28,000 regions; of these at least 20,000 are islands producing island tier mainly at the current, not grandfathered level. The tax from the MP can't possibly equal this -- look at "last items bought" and do the math. It's the jump we're talking about -- 2048, then 4096, then 8192, so that you are forced to tier up or tier down. Land should be at a standard price per meter.

The Lindens need to end the tier jumps. Despite all the workarounds people suggest -- and which you know as this is not your first rodeo -- the jumps kill you if you have less than a sim. There is no technical reason that I can see that they need to maintain this archaic system. There should be a standard per-meter cost.

Moth. Every single sim in Heterocera is named for a moth or butterfly. When you think it can't possibly be true, keep looking, there is an obscure or Latin or whatever name of a moth type creature behind it somewhere. PS This is the only sim that has "old growth" Linden forest, and I always wonder if that will last.

Re: I gave the entire Group and all its holdings to a land-cutter who promised to try and keep it going as it was, but ended up having the deal sabotaged by some of my 'friends/acquaintances' who thought they were doing the right thing by humiliating the new Owner... so he cut, dumped and sold everything he could to any interested current tenants or interested parties and disappeared. It broke my heart and I've not been able to go back there very often because it stirs up difficult memories of such a wonderful place becoming tarnished with anger and accusations, even though some of my very dear friends have kept the most beautiful parts of the Community intact and very active ♥ I'm going to note that this is your version of history and a lot could be said about this, but I'll just make two points: 1. Some of us knew this land cutter years ago and knew of his practices and publicizing them prevented more rip-offs. 2. Nobody at that level of land ownership who today, despite everything still owns at least 225,000+ meters, is going to "cut and dump land" due to "humiliation", i.e. someone has dissed their rep or said mean things. That makes no sense given the nature of the land baron business in general in SL. Cutting and dumping land comes from not being able to pay tier, and from not caring what happens to the land and the people on it or near it. It takes a particular form of hubris to take roads and easements that could easily have been combined with land for sale or even cut or dumped -- and wasn't. How do I know? I bought some of those very roads either at fire-sale or from the Lindens when abandoned, and I continue to maintain to this day, and should have my head examined.

I don't think there are many people like this any more. There used to be a ton of small Mainland businesses buying and selling -- and usually improving -- smaller parcels. Some people would make a decent revenue just from buying and improving abandoned land. They don't exist any more except a few clueless or persistent outliers. People who used to put their land to sale for some ridiculous price and say "some Japanese people who don't routinely calculate the cost of the dollar will buy this" -- well, Japan had a terrible recession and guess what, people aren't as stupid as you think, anyway. I see certain parcels remaining at extortionist sale rates FOR YEARS because somebody bought an annualized account and they never come inworld. There is never a reason to buy roadside for more than $1/abandoned, and the many cars you see passing by are autopilot load-tests for the Lindens who permit this sillyness, they contain no passengers and real human eyeballs.

Your business is what harms other businesses and what makes end users abandon land and cease paying tier, or not buying land in the first place. The Lindens need to put an end to the sale and rent of microparcels.

I don't think it's picking up from what I see, although I rent land mainly, and only occasionally sell parcels that don't rent. If there's a sale, it's to a neighbour you may have known for years who needs prims not to the general public. Or perhaps a highly valued piece of land, generally waterfront on pristine sims. Here's why: 1. I think Bellisseria has made a decided dent in Mainland sales in general, for both Lindens and residents -- their two products, which once I felt didn't directly compete, now in fact do. That's because they now have two features that make Bellisseria like the best features of Mainland -- choice and space: o If you get the Premium Plus account for $29.99 per month, you get $650 stipend, 2048 m2 -- and the ability to pick your Bellisseria plot. At the premium level, you can only take a randomly available lot, with 5 tries per day. There are now some 3000+ Bellisseria sims, from my estimation, as many as are under resident tier on the Mainland, which is roughly 5000 sims, with 20% abandoned and another 20% Linden land like roads and parks. o If you get the ranch size home with 2048 m2, you have 928 prims. That's plenty for a lot of people. o This type of account also enables you to get a homestead without an island. 2. The homestead-without-forced-island-purchase feature recently offered also cuts into Mainland sales. If you pay $40 a month for an 8192 in Mainland tier at the regular level, naturally you wonder why you shouldn't either pay a little less and make do with less prims or pay a little more and get a grandfathered homestead. 3. The ability to buy abandoned land for $1/m is part of all this, but we've had that for a long time. The Lindens used to never let waterfront or desirable land go to you directly because they had the auction. But the auction is overfull, and without bids on the worst pieces, and low bids on many, so you can sometimes even get waterfront directly. I personally think Bellisseria is a bigger factor now than abandoned, as there is still a lot of abandoned out there. I have multiple Bellisseria venues in the stamp game and multiple abandoned lots that I buy or let go myself so I have some experience to make this judgement. Bellisseria may feel bland and empty -- I never see a neighbour except -- oh, that one time when I saw a former tenant lol. But the lots are taken by people who must log in some time. 4. The value of the Linden dollow has declined with a cashout within a day or two at $246. 5. When I saw that Zindra was really soft this past summer and land dealers there were fire-selling, I thought we were in for a real "virtual world winter". Could it be that Linden has reached the saturation point for their adult offering? Could be, given soft new accounts and log-ins. 6. BJoyful has highlighted all the boons you can access, but they don't ultimately matter for a reason she knows all too well from her SL experience in running a community, as she outlined here and as we know from her long service and sacrifices inworld: vacancies. At 80%, Mainland vacancies already make an area a disaster because time, tide, and tier wait for no man. I simply don't buy the claim that "80% vacancy" is viable unless you put in your own money, or have other streams of rental like content sales, events, DJs, etc. That is, even if you "don't want to make any money" or "just want to break even". When people talk about "just making it pay for itself" -- as I do with the land preserve -- we're often not factoring in content purchases and our time. It's deceptive. While land-cutting is as bad as ever, and the Lindens sell directly to known land-cutters without batting an eye, and while blight from miles of concrete in the transportation games as well as ugly builds are a problem, a lot of Mainland is actually maintained well and kept up. But people can't last due to the inability to make back what they paid, and they do without or move to Bellisseria which is more stable. This is how I tried to describe the essential Mainland problem to a friend constantly scratching their head over Mainland rentals math: Let's say you had $2000 to invest. You could put it in some money-market accounts these days at even 5% but likely far less; perhaps there's some other risky venture you know of in RL. Let's say you head of a deal where you could get $250 on your $2000 or 0.125%, let's say through renting some store spaces in RL. So that's like SL -- if you rent or sell some lots and have 12 sims @ $166/mo which yields one as a bonus. You might wrest that $250 out of this venture. But imagine if, in RL, to get that $250, you had to deliver mail every single day to every single unit in a 20 block radius AND pick up garbage 3 times a week, keeping trash and recycling separate. Let's say you also had to physically move cars due to alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations. You would be huffing and puffing all day, going around settling the little problems at these units -- move-outs, late payments, vandalism. Getting your $250 that way would be crazy. That's what Mainland rentals are like -- the cheaper the rental, the more the work and the more the problems with over-primming, late pays, griefing. In RL, you'd be crazy to make a dime by having to get up at 5 am to move a car due to parking regulations -- in SL, you're up asking the Lindens to re-set a sim, you're removing somebody's excess primmage from group land and so on. No one is factoring in their time and labour on these ventures, and really, only large volume island dealers likely can make anything approximating "a living" and not even them. (There's a popular video on YouTube of an SL couple making thousands of dollars every month in rentals, quitting their day jobs -- but it's from like 2009. Today, one of those people is long gone from SL and the other has no business on their profile any more.) I personally find it a pernicious practice to put land to sale and also offer it for rent, because you do run the risk, if small, that a person will pay the box, and then another person will buy the land out from under them. On my rental boxes, you can refund, but that purchase would then lead to return of a paid box. So I only rarely do this because I can't be online 24/7 and don't want someone to get burned. It's true that putting land to sale to rent it helps defeat the badly broken search system on the regular viewer and the vicissitudes of the Land Store, so that's why people do it, it does lead to rentals by people flying around looking at the map. While residents can devise ever new strategies to rent out or sell land; while certain types can berate others for being poor managers or whatever, the reality is, the Lindens could fix this in a number of ways: o Ceasing the over--production of Bellisseria sims. I see numerous unclaimed lots. o Removing the tier "jumps" after 2048 and 4096 so that there are even 1024 increments for tier at a standard rate. There is no reason not to do this. If the original reason was "it costs more server power to run 8192 versus 4096," that can't be logical as all the scripts can pile up on one person's 4096, along with the 42 avatars. Now that the Lindens are at AWS, I don't see why these tier jumps have to exist. o Making good on their frequent threat to remove the old Linden homes. In doing the trick or treat game, I saw that MANY people are still in the trads. That's because they still enable them to be claimed and people failing to take a Victorian claim them. An offer for a month free to move to the newer parts of Bellisseria should sop up the excess and save the Lindens on server bills. o Ending their sales of abandoned to known land cutters. This isn't hard to tell; five minutes on the grid with a keen eye on the map will let you know who they are. An instant moratorium on all abandoned sales and a crackdown on the abusers renting and flipping microparcels would help. No one wants to move in next to a cut-up roadside or worse, inland. The Lindens could simply, via hard code, make it impossible to sell land under 512 m2 for anything except $0 (to enable it to be moved in and out of groups or traded among friends and neighbours). o Allowing the LindEx to float the value of the Linden higher. o Ending the practice of putting accounts on hold or default status for non-payment of tier, and permitting continued log-ins and sales of land and Linden dollars in order to pay tier bills, but adding a fine for payments past 30 days and 60 days, before closure. There's more, but I think this is about rearranging the furniture on the deck of the Titanic. I'm all for re-arranging it until the water rushes in.

A favourite of mine I've seen on the profiles of a few tenants: "I AM NOT HERE FOR YOU"

No.

If you don't care for adult content on SL, it's easy enough to avoid by steering away from adult sims and Zindra, and fixing your search parameters for G and M only.

Ridiculous. LL should do nothing of the source and won't, for the simple reason that Mainland produces more revenue for them than Bellisseria. Bellisseria may be equal to or surpassing resident-tiered mainland, but look at the sims -- they are half empty. A Mainland resident has to buy the premium account AND pay tier if he owns more than 1024 m2. And many do. Fly around and look at the large land holders. There is no question that the revenue from Mainland is significant, pays for the Amazon servers, and therefore is needed for LL's botton lines. Island owners and rentals give LL the lion's share of their revenue, but Mainland is significant. If the Lindens were to do anything, they'd push islands more by reducing their price if they meant to delete Mainland but when questioned about this many times, they insist that they are not going to do that. If anything, their plan is to delete old Linden homes. Lag is exaggerated and mainly invoked to serve island dealers. Plenty of people are driving around and enjoying Mainland nature and various venues, stores, and clubs that yes, are on the Mainland where rent is cheaper and tier to LL is cheaper than islands. The end.

The big dome stackers put all the tenants on the same top 40 station, and they don't hand out the right to change media settings, to prevent that sort of problem. People use those web-based radios or open up a shoutcast stream on their web and listen while playing SL. If your land is grouped, you need to deed any media or YouTube player to the group. You have to shut off the ability to move or sell group-deeded objects, or they are griefed by being shot up in the sky where you can't find them, or stolen if on transfer. So you then have to pick up and buy the item and return it to the tenant when they leave.

This is all good advice, especially when starting out to avoid complexities. But I do have some differences of philosophy. 1. I don't use Casper or any other commercial script because then I am dependent on them, they harvest my business information, and while rare, Casper and others do go down. Casper is pretty much the monopolist. I prefer an open-source script developed from the script Hank Ramos open-sourced some 17 years ago or whatever, which has been modified a dozen times by other scripters either voluntarily, or when I hired them. So you can get that at my store in Ross for free normally, but I've been reorganizing, can't log on now, and it will have to wait until next week. This script enables you to REFUND -- something a lot of scripts don't permit (or landlords don't choose that option). I think REFUNDS for a small cancellation fee are VITAL. 2. The account that is the owner of the rental boxes (only your alt is safe) and receives the cash rent should be DIFFERENT than the account holding the tier. That's as an emergency backup, in case your account is put on hold for late tier payment to LL, or hacked, or you can't get it logged on for some reason. That way, the account receiving the cash from the boxes -- generally only a premium account donating 1024 to a group -- can pay the tier by cashing out the Lindens to PayPal. It's more expensive than paying just from the web page (after converting to dollars, but not cashing out) -- but again, it's an emergency back-up. Make sure your alts all have clear markings that they are agents of your company. Note: if an alt account only has the capacity to donate 1024, it can't move more tier than that out of a group. The workaround is to "buy from group" with "contribute when deeding". 3. Include the price and prim description and any features on the land description and a lease card in the box. 4. Search/Places ads for 30L a week are nearly worthless now for the regular viewer, and somewhat helpful on Firefox, but not worth putting a lot of time and money into because search works poorly. Put up ads on the forums, in various clubs and furniture stores, etc. 5. I believe in keeping land settings open so that people can invite their friends over and they can rez things and show each others things they've purchased, etc. I have three levels in the group -- tenants, residents, officers. So anyone can join on demand and start decorating immediately without waiting for a landlord to log in. I don't believe in having a group inviter bot taking up an avatar slot on the sim. Use the group joiners that require three clicks in chat to join if you feel people can't figure out how to use search/groups. Most people use the group joiners. Then after you see they have paid on My Accounts, you add them to "resident" role which enables them to change the settings on the land -- they can put group-only build, object entry, and scripts if they like -- and they give them the assortment of rights you want, such as set landing, ban, invite others, etc. Only officers can buy and sell land and deeded objects and return group-set prims. 6. Make sure to turn off "avatars can see me". Most people want it off for privacy. 7. I view Classified ads as only marginally useful -- worth doing now and then but they mainly get loss under the very big spenders who can splash out tens of thousands of Lindens per week for ads. It's worth doing a cheap one for your main office, and then occasional ones of $1000 or $500 to feature some special or new location. Most rentals come from search/places as it happens; then classifieds; then store ads; then word-of-mouth; then picks. I survey each tenant to ask how they found the rental. If they refund, I always ask them if they had any problems. 8. "Owner makes contribute with deed" often glitches up and it seems like it wants you first to put the tier in, even if "contribute with deed" is suppose to accomplish this. So "buy for group" any land that you yourself bought as an individual or took from the auction is a faster way, but first you have to put tier in the group, which you may not have. This is a constant annoyance I find.

I'm afraid I don't have a handbook and I need to update my blogs with helpful hints. Groups cost $100 to make, no? I would avoid making a lot of groups, although some agents like Timo give tenants their own group that he makes or puts tier in their group. I don't believe in vertical stacks at all. With grouped land, you can put the prims anywhere so you can make a parcel even 256 m2 that will fit a skybox and add a prim allotment to it -- which is only done in writing on the rental lease, so you have to watch that the tenant doesn't go over. Most people don't.

If the Lindens can out the Marketplace online, they could put our inventories online, where they might lag us out less and be easier to work with, like a DropBox or GoogleDocs. I don't see them doing this any time. Meanwhile, I have stopped struggling with my 245,000+ inventory and do another thing: Search through the last month or three months of purchases under "My Accounts" online or even the purchases just under "Shopping" on the Marketplace, which usually are added to inventory in a separate folder. These are the real bugabears of inventory because they cause clutter and aren't embedded. If, when you click on a HUD or box with unpacker scripts, the folder appeared, but first paused with a little box, into which you typed the name of the folder you want it to go into, like "Lamps," that would be great! But I can't imagine that's doable or a priority. So instead, I open up two inventory windows (the work flow is now more annoying as the Lindens changed the interface again to do this picture pop-up, which I personally don't need, and I'm not aware of anybody asking for it). Then I search purchases on My Accounts up on the web site, which is way easier than struggling through a laggy inventory. I go back 3 months or 1 if I'm more organized, and put things into "Art Works" or "Couches". This is when I can look at a lot of those event freebies and throw them out. Then I will search a few common letters in names and delete those ridiculous 100X copies of calling cards, a strange glitch that started a few years ago and really adds to the numbers. This at least makes me feel like I'm "doing something". I then search for things named merely "Object" and whittle away at a lot of blank empty prims -- same for "Notecard" and "New Folder". I don't risk deleting them sight unseen. I have a system I've been using for awhile where I have the first, temporary cut for sorting which makes it go faster under one folder called "AAA SORT" which stays on top -- just 5 or 6 folders with "Furniture," "Clothing", "Scripts" "Animations etc. Those fill up, however, and I don't seem to get at them. But at least they're somewhere. I then try to force myself to the top of those ridiculous folders that merchants inflict on you and try at least to delete all their packing scripts that didn't delete and their landmarks, as well as TOS, usually which I already have copies of. For extra credit, I try to move some of the stuff in folders into their proper folders like objects/lamps. If I did 1,000 items per day, it would still take me a year as there would be a lot of days when I either didn't log on or couldn't do it. So it's kinda sad. But a benefit of the "My Accounts" approach is that you find things you bought and forgot, or you recall all those stupid event gifts, and you tackle them and either edit and delete them or put them out inworld or on yourself or whatever. I do have a system of filing boxes inworld where I put old system clothing and old sculpty plants or "Christmas Decorations" like I would a box in the attic in RL. But I worry these may disappear in a sim crash. Of course things disappear out of inventory as well.

1. Explore sims 2. Go to live music venues 3. Go to each other's houses 4. Do show and tell of various rare gatchas, pets, things they've bought 5. Discuss LL politics and SL gossip although not as much "SL relationships" of their own. 6. SL "car talk" e.g. how to make a door hinge or solve a texture problem. 7. RL "car talk" about how one's computer can be fixed or improved. 8. Discuss RL politics and RL gossip I think "shop" is not among the things, although vary rarely I'll see two men helping each other shop. I guess "live music" didn't stand out for you.

Speedlight works great. I don't need LL to make a mobile viewer.