Prokofy Neva

No, it's self-service, I try not to let it take too much time. My RL jobs take time. I don't post much but lately for various reasons I just think it's good to put developments on the record. It's not really important if anyone agrees or whatever. Some people may be looking for signs of improved economy -- maybe these are? But it's not a big sample and is easily undone.

They would have to be transferable to have them deed to the group and as far as I know they should sell with the land but you should try selling some tests to yourself. What doesn't return are copyable items but that shouldn't be a problem. In reality, non-copyable also don't return just due to glitches.

Most people want to get a house eventually, or find a community, and that's they they need those boards -- and they used to have them. It's not about me grubbing money out of poor new people, don't be silly. And PS, when you get off the train at Grand Central Station, there are all these evil grubbing people doing things like "selling you a newspaper" and "selling you a sandwich" and "selling you a tour of Times Square" and "selling you a hotel room" and even "a rental apartment". My God, the horror, the evil. How do you live in real life without sales people and businesses? Are you on a granola collective farm? SL should work the same way, and most people want it to. I don't run "slums" -- I have subsidized newbie areas that people appreciate What a ridiculous notion that people who want to promote ordinary legal and necessary business you know like THE LINDENS THEMSELVES DO in the real world are viewed as exploitative ruthless capitalists and slumlords? Huh? I don't need FREE advertising -- the boards the Lindens used to have FOR FREE in the infohubs (did you realize that!!!) could be RENTED. You know, like the ads you PAY FOR on the classifieds? Do you find that evil, too? Or you just like to indulge in cliches you took out of Marxist college textbooks. THE LINDENS THEMSELVES had free ad boards where you could advertise rentals, clubs, shops, events and they removed them when they removed the telehub system -- which they shouldn't have done. They turned them into infohubs -- but they could put the sign boards back there or at orientation. Good God, always, these horrible interventions from you.

Well, unless someone is desperate because the land auction is so terrible and they jack them all up to get their value up, and maybe default on some of them if they are the lone bidder.

This is just a simple observation, not about Sansar or conspiracy theories or anything weird like that, just about how hard it is to judge the economy and society when you have free press or democratic government. And by that I mean things like an auction where the names of the bidders and buyers are on record in city hall; the statistics for how many Premiums there are from LL itself; the statistics on how many people spent more than 1L in world that month (we used to get that); the last 10 purchases products (that's on the MP but that's not as useful always); the number of uniques monthly; the number of concurrent users, etc. etc. We have NONE of that anymore and live in the dark under molasses. As I often point out, the chief reason I run a rentals company and try to play virtual inkeeper is so that I can understand how society works in virtual worlds, and how businesses and civic groups work, and so on, and how our future will be formed when we all live in virtuality -- which I think we will. That is, you can't have "making money" as a chief motive for anything in SL in my view, and if you cover costs and have a little income to pay some bills, great, but that can't be your reason given the exigencies. So it's interesting to me with this "hobby" to have lots of cases, and information, and data points just in an informal way -- I'm not an academic and don't care to study it formally in any way. So I ask myself: Why Has Second Life Fallen Under a Barrel of Molasses? For a week, the game doesn't work, there are new patches, you are ground to a halt, you crash, you can't move, even to pay somebody $1 takes 15 minutes to "turn over"; you can't buy anything at a merchants' event even if the sim isn't that laggy -- the vendor won't turn over. You can't teleport, your items rez in odd places, you can't "see" things -- well the entire menu of annoyances all at once. Just sheer moving through molasses with lag and poor visibility and functionality. THAT this is a fact isn't disputable because ALL your tenants, friends, passersby speak of it like the weather. I used to have a group "WeatherReport" I may start again to post bulletins like "lag is just me? or?" or "did that sim not restart in the rolling restart?" or "is Blue Steele the channel that this thing works on because I can't get it to work on XYZ" If somebody want so do that come and join lol. So often they say it's your fault, your computer is old enough to go to kindergarten and so on. So when I see REFUND REFUND REFUND for several days or "I'm interested in renting can you tell me..." which usually leads to "XYX Resident Paid You" and now leads to NOTHING, you think -- the performance is hurting business. Oh, and that LindEx crash which is not cured IMV. I have a routine where I always ask every refunding or non-closing customer if they had problems. Sometimes their issue is they couldn't read the 5 ways they were told this and didn't join a group to set prims. Or they can't understand why they can build but not terraform yet. So when I collect dozens of this "I can't get my new computer to play SL" or "the lag is terrible" or "I can't even pay anything, I'll come back in two days" etc. etc. I know "it's not me". It's their software. THEY preferred to fix voice, and leave us all in the mud. I personally don't care about voice and I see a lot of customers don't even, they even ask to have it unchecked on their land. I have no idea if there are more voice or non-voice in SL especially on the mainland, I think not. I personally am happy to turn on voice and use but I find it cumbersome and laggy and not working sometimes and -- meh. So today I see like 6 refunds and after a week of Molasses I think "Uh-oh," worse. But then every single thing is different, or maybe one of them is lag/computer won't work but five are like this: "I'm partnered and he wants me to move in" -- that's great -- there's something about RL holiday periods that seem to kill SL romances and then they come back around Valentine's Day! "I'm buying a homestead." Wow, people are buying? They feel confident despite LindEx Sansar etc? Good. It doesn't matter if it means my loss -- it's better for the economy as a whole if more people buy especially on the Mainland and stabilize it. "I'm just moving to your larger rental." Good! We always like to hear that! "I'm moving to your other sim, that's more homey." -- A signal to figure out what's "not" homey on the sim they left. When I see these stories I think: signs of a pick up in life and the economy? Or not?

In the residents' infohub in Ross which is called "Memory Bazaar" we have big posters with land marks of various places. There are things like the Shelter, the newbies center with dancing and hangouts, and the Philosophy Club and the Ivory Tower of Prims. Some of the infohubs themselves in the Mainland are hangouts but they are usually attention-grabbing annoyers and griefers. Some clubs have their regulars and are really like community centers, not pick-up joints. But "community center" is not really a thing I could say anymore about SL except in some narrow circumstances, like language or country infohubs and such. I used to maintain these clubs myself, like the Council on Virtual Relations, the Society for Virtual Architecture, the Sutherland Dam Club, various churches, temples, a Tibetan monastery and market. And in every one of these efforts, some of which had long runs for years, my biggest challenge wasn't the cost of tier, or trying to keep the conversation going but poor and simple: Griefers. Every time someone tries to use SL for a serious purpose that especially involves any ideology that extremist leftist or rightist crypto kiddies hate, or the creepy adults that lurk behind them, they strike. The Lindens don't reinforce civil society against this. They laugh at you and some of the griefers have been their alts in the earlier years. It's hard to unpack that in a way that makes sense but casual griefing by day-olds who just cruise the events list and put out giant annoyances; determined griefers who just find it fun to heckle you and get a reaction -- and ejecting them doesn't work because they hang out on the Linden land nearby and taunt you from there -- people who come to the meeting but can't figure out how to behave and disrupt it casually or accidentally. It's work. And I find now that on a Sunday afternoon, real-life calls and I won't put in that work. The biggest problem of SL is that new people come and say "Entertain me". And they go away because they are not entertained. But earlier people who can accept that and work with that get tired. That is, many people say "I'm not here to entertain you" and provide low-level entertainment of clubs and the sex industry or shopping and say "entertain yourself". Those who understand that's unfair to say to people anywhere, even in RL, still wish they had more meeting them half way. They want more people who understand "to make a friend you have to be one" who start their own clubs, too. I see a few of those now and then like Saul Goodie but I know it's very hard for them.It's not just making the entry ramp-up easier and doing more basic things like making whiteboards that aren't about having the alphabet take up 26 prims and media o a prim being just a laggy non-collective mess anyway. It's really griefing as the most difficult thing. They have to shut off proxy anonymizers and they won't do that for ideological reasons. Some day they will have simpler solutions like anyone who has logged on with those proxies simply can't enter your sim because there's a check off box like "payment on file".

Well, it's like with the last names. They went through all those noble names of their own tech culture like Prototype, and then all sorts of names like out of a British novel like Fairchild and then sort of fairy names like Fallingwater and then they got all the Supreme Court judges in US history...rivers..mountains...inventors...scientists -- it was getting harder and harder. They had to make up thousands and thousands of names. I often wonder if they gave up on last names because it was getting harder but I always thought it was fun and I sometimes even wanted to make an alt with some fun new name -- I was one of the lucky people whose real-life last name came by and I grabbed it but of course so did 6 others who were griefing me.

I see cheap 512s now and then for not even .5 but .2. I even sell some of them that low myself if I trim tier! But then...there's the neighbours, and you don't think it's worth doing. Occasionally I will buy a 512 and put a little store/office on it to advertise my rentals and sell content. It can often break even.If there is some big event or thing or Linden shopping mall by it especially. It was a technique I used to use more, to have a foot in every continent. But after awhile, it's just too many mouths to feed -- if you go away for two weeks and don't visit your outpost, my God, it's surrounded by pirates and rock fortresses and communists and giant black dogs, and you had no idea. No wonder you didn't get any business. Things can go south very fast in SL...

LL made an info hub for Germany tho, I think it's still out there, a German castle built by Jauni Wu. And there is a large newbies' info hub that individual Germans have made, not Lindens. There were some Koreans in SL, I remember friends and customers some years back but for some reason it didn't take off. Remember, there was a time when LL started expanding internationally. They put an office in London, Amsterdam I believe, and was Seoul going to be the next one? I don't recall. It would be a very great choice as South Korea has blazing Internet and wi-fi everywhere, I was there once a few years ago and I was amazed. From the moment you land at the airport, on to the drive into the city, the hotels, getting quite out of the city, it's all good. I recall an 11-year-old kid who spoke English helped me log on at the airport. They also have an avid gaming, programmers, etc. community. But then there were set backs, pull-backs, they had the VAT crisis, where people didn't like paying VAT when it was put in; basically their user population and the interest in VWs in general, the recession, all kinds of factors led them to undo some of these outreaches and close them down. Many people turned to Facebook and Twitter as their virtual world in 2007; that was around the time the huge fascination with SL from media began to wane because the platform was difficult to use and had griefing and crime and all the rest. Sometimes the Lindens make things that have no relationship to any country -- like I have land on a sim named Tofalar, an ancient dwindling people of Siberia, they may have just randomly picked out the name from Wikipedia or something. They have all these sims with Russian names that they may not even understand, I don't know. They named a lot of areas for the Finger Lakes in Upstate NY where I'm from, but they are next to rivers, not lakes. Ravenglass, my first sim, is lake area in the UK. The real Ravenglass tourist agency even once rented from me there years ago. Remember when we had Estonia? A real outpost from the real Estonia, not exactly a consulate but leading to consular affairs in E-stonia. Beautiful build on it too. All gone.

I did this long explanation in part as a draft of a tutorial I'm working on trying to get this in place at the infohub where I have these sorts of stands to learn things in the "second level" of Second Life after orientation, i.e. land, business, griefing response, etc. I'd have to see what you mean exactly in-world, and what you mean "part of my personal allowance" -- i.e. if you mean "the 512 they give you with premium for free" (which isn't really free, it's just included in the cost of the account" or "a piece of land of X meters I don't have grouped." If you have 512 free and clear as a premium account, you can just type it into the box on the "land" tab of the "about land" menu and press save and push it in to be available. Sometimes lag can make it seem not to work; sometimes a misunderstanding about HOW it works seems to make it not work. If your "personal allowance" is already attached to a Linden Home parcel, some other group, or some other piece of land, it is taken, and therefore "not free to use" even if "in your account". You'd have to leave the Linden Home, or sell that first/other land, or leave that other group, to have that 512 pop out and be "free" now to apply to your next venture. This may be obvious, but it is so confusing for people because they are never really told that tier is what you put ON land and PAY for land, but is a separate stream, not the land itself. Tier and land are separate. The Lindens confuse this even further by starting to call tier "land credit" although it is nothing you borrow, not related to your credit card, just a chit that appears inworld as a function of paying a premium account and getting 512 "credits', like bottles you return from recycling, to use inworld on land. So "tier" paid at a level which generates "land credits" to cover land can't be tied up on a piece of land or other group and be available to do something else. That's the issue with tier. The next usage larger than that parcel will jack up your tier on the web page, and you will have to pay more. This can happen when you didn't intend to do that. So you need to plan and keep your wits about you -- I'm writing this just in general, not to you individually. So you cannot take your individually owned land as a single avatar, and mix and match that with your group land thinking it "applies" because it does not. That is, it applies under your full tier allotment, but your individually owned land can't help the group. To make it count to the group, you have to group it -- check off "set to group" then "make contribution" -- to have the tier that covers that land go INTO the group to cover it because it can't be left behind, it will only generate error messages and then press "deed" to make it happen. And it is at this juncture where the error messages keep happening, not only for awakening baffled brains but for people who have done this hundreds of times and even Lindens. While I am always trying to replicate this to try to see why it goes wrong, really the best way to deal with this final step is to have the tier you need to cover that little part of "your own" land or somebody's "individual avatar land" *already in the group*. That means you need a "float" -- you must have extra land (maybe just a 512 credit/tier) to cover these situations, or you must figure out how someone can temporarily put 512 into the group that won't jack up their tier -- it's annoying. That is, if you check off "contribution with deed" and "deed" both, why doesn't the contribution attached to your land you are deeding to the group fly into the group along with the land? It should, in theory. It doesn't. I'm sure greater minds than mind can explain the underlining coding issues here. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that even while sailing into the group, that tier attached to that land isn't really "there" -- it's still back at the ranch. And the group can't accept land "from the ranch" when it has nothing available to accept it *with* in real-time, inside its group state, which has not yet accepted that covered land. So four cowboys with premium accounts and 512 individually-owned parcels should be able to meet at four corners, each with a 512 parcel, click "set to a group" (to a new common group) and then "make contribution with deed" and "deed" all at once, and all 4 pieces should enter the group without error messages, then make one big parcel with all of them as owners/officers, all of them with premiums covering the parcels in the group, and no need for a 5th person with a 512. But it doesn't work that way. Maybe due to lag, to people not having reset their pages to reflect payments they made; maybe it's because of some not taking land off invididuals to put in the group, etc. etc. There are variables. But it is a common snag. And as far as I can tell it is rooted in the fact that "make contribution with deed" does not work as intended or perceived. It only kicks in afterwards once the parcel is accepted into the group with another floater to have covered. Comments/corrections welcome. After you try it yourself in world.

Yeah, I realize that certain "likers" here think they have such a gleeful gotcha, "turning the tables" on old Prokofy, the inveterate anti-Communist. But... You have chosen a poor hysterical hypothetical. Somebody who spent $90/m for Blake Sea wouldn't have junk on their land. They're more than likely -- if they were that kind of end user -- have a nice house, a dock, a yacht or something. They wouldn't have a sandbox with spinning junk. The kind of people who make pen1s towers and spinning junk are skiddies who buy flat land in "working class districts" as The Herald used to call the inner Moth continent for $0.5/meter. So let's not be children here. Cheap and junked-up land with those problems have people with legitimate health problems or tsunamis in their country, too, and deserve consideration (and don't always get it compared to the FIC). But why would that be an excuse to paralyze the value of ALL LAND around them for a quarter of the year or two years? Devaluing land people want to resell or rent. Making projects less attractive. Why do they get to do that?! So often it's an issue of no autoreturn left on. The Lindens are completely loath to turn on auto return. What if a precious cargo's precious creation got returned to inventory and lost or wasn't linked up??? Oh noes! See you're thinking like a Linden, but not exactly, because the price you paid isn't what matters, or even the tier they aren't collecting -- which you think they WOULD care about but don't because it's trivial compared to their private island revenue -- but the PRINCPLE of F/U hedonism and creativity uber alles and all the rest. Freedom for me/totalitarianism for thee. The Lindens' creationism is really the killer of SL, ironically. Obviously two weeks is not enough. The system you cited sounds like a game, not a world. Did they pay RL money for that? We do. And the no-shows did. But why do they get to devalue our land for years on end? Oh, I don't doubt that SOME land the Lindens fail to move on are alts of mains that own more land they do pay tier on, or alts in groups that are private so we can't see all their members, and the owner may actually be gone, and blah blah blah. And I think you shouldn't hold that sim hostage with a giant Jesus like that just because you can. You don't even log in and enjoy it. Why hobble everybody else for miles with that eyesore? And I say this as someone who worships Jesus. My idea isn't communist, it's capitalist. In real life, if you do not show up to maintain your land, and place the markers for its boundaries, in some states, like New Hampshire, the state will eye that land with an aim to take it, or to take some of its edges for easements, or whatever. True story. In many communities, there are zoning laws, and you can't paint your house purple and put spinning strobe lights on the lawn or roof. Real life has rules that prevent things like this. SL doesn't. Because LL hates governance, it's work. You simply refuse -- like the Lindens -- to address the DEVALUATION of OTHER PEOPLE'S INVESTMENTS. That is capitalism, not communism. Communism is destroying their investment forever with totalitarianism -- nothing can change, nothing can be done, no vote or movement is possible because the Great Leader has spoken. Stalin didn't confiscate land because rich peasants said that poor peasants had left eyesores on it and they could run it better -- which would be your analogy. He confiscated it to exploit all the peasants and kill most of them if they rebelled. Different. The Lindens need to review these cases like normal grown-ups and return to inventory a) garbage, non-group and non-owner prims, like plywood boxes or empty dress boxes -- this is basic b) spinning junk or eyesores that doesn't seem to be an elaborate build or creation of value -- a giant pen1s or even your Jesus, if you didn't pay the tier, or didn't log in for a year, would fall in that category d) very tall builds that dominate the view -- a real problem on the Nautilus continent. Again, I cite you par. 2)c of the TOS: affecting the enjoyment of others' second lives. That's wrong. That shouldn't stand. Example: I once filed tickets, as did others about a huge tower in a sea sim in the Moth Continent which blocked everybody's view on the waterfront. The tower wasn't enclosed, but had about 10 levels of plywood going up into the sky, with various half-finished little tutorial projects or whatever on each one. It was not on autoreturn so all kinds of sandboxers left plywood on it. This person wasn't Charter, just old. Their store on another sim also sat there forever unattended. A year went by when one could reasonably assume their Premium of $72, let's say, or even tier of that size, let's say 8192, might have been paid up for a year (unlikely). I mean, come on, kids. This person is not logging in, not paying tier. How could they be? You can see the members of their group -- their alts and maybe one real person I IM'd who said they had no idea and hadn't seen the person in more than a year. Why does this person get to ruin the view for dozens of people on 3 other adjacent sims with this ugly, stupid tower? If she at least logged on and did her oh-so-important newbie tutorials so vital to the Lindens, maybe one could find some "social justice" in it; maybe one could reason with her to enclose her tower so it didn't so terribly blight the view. One could suggest that going up 500 m with her eyesore would mean she still had a workshop and didn't ruin the view, even if it means she couldn't have her panoramic vistas. But for those special moments, she could put a little chair in the sky at 250 m. Yet SHE wanted a nice view of all the 3 surrounding sims that other people made at ground level, plus 100. SHE wanted to stand way up on the top of her tower, and look out to sea and shore in four directions to the view OTHER people made for HER, heedless of how SHE ruined the view for them. This just went on forever. Finally we convinced a Linden to clear the garbage at least. Finally she seemed to come back -- maybe a life crisis, the Lindens cut her slack, whatever, fine. But then guess what happened? A few months went by, and the land become abandoned. The tower then got sloughed off. Oh. And we couldn't have done that a year before that guys? Then the water sells on the auction. Really, Lindens? It took that long to come to this closure? There's another thing you can do -- give somebody equivalent land somewhere else, you know? Not demolish their inventory when they don't pay and don't show, if you want to cut slack but return their prims to that inventory. Why not? I could tell this story over and over and over in SL, and so could others. It's wrong. The Lindens fix this by making organic, real-time judgements when they get tickets from enough people whose view is ruined. They return a stupid thing like that to inventory. After all, it's not the Taj Mahal, just somebody's 10-level sandbox made of boards with a bunch of little boxes on it. Um, Callum, I give my tenants a lot of slack with grace periods, arrangements if they tell me of some life crisis, and so on, so I don't need any "how would you feel". And when my son was in a coma after a terrible accident, the Lindens gave me some slack but not anywhere near as much as I've seen them give their favourites. I've seen them leave a half or full sim with a build on it "as is" for years for sentimental reasons, because an oldbie once made something on it That oldbie would even tell me in RL at some meet-up that he didn't log on to SL any more and no, hadn't paid up tier. Why can't the Lindens just make copies of sims and builds they're in love with and put them on ice? We know they have this capacity and I've seen them do this, quite frankly, in rare cases. They don't want it to be a feature; but for those special few they should do it, so everyone can buy that land or not have it wreck the view. I do not get this. But then, I am not a big deal, not a creator, not anything except a nuisance for them due to my criticism. So I get it, truly I do.

@Theresa Tennyson Er, sweetcakes, both matter, and together, they are a disincentive for the little guy. You should ask yourself why you're so preoccupied with whether I "look like" I know what I'm talking about, and try to think beyond 0/1. There can often be dollars left over that are too small to be worth cashing out that someone might save to go a round on the LindEx. I can't imagine why anyone bothers to play the LindEx. But people do, and they tell me this. They buy low, sell high, you know, like RL. I once accidentally parked US $150 worth of Lindens on one account at such a low number/high value that it literally took 6 months to cash out and suddenly gave me a big surprise. I thought the Lindens were compensating us for down time or something, it was amazing until I looked at my records. Two points is a lot if it stays at that! When it was two points better for weeks! And when it becomes three and even four some nights or days like weekends! Hello! No one could know they would "come out ahead" because as I just mentioned, it could keep spiralling downward. Oh, unless they have insider knowledge. Hm. This isn't a very interesting conversation so you are welcome to have the last word. Meanwhile, anyone who would like to discuss the LindEx mysteries can always IM me inworld or leave a comment on my blog. I've successfully made the point that a) shopping in fact went up during the holiday season as it always does, despite what some people were absolutely convinced of, and told themselves stories about for some reason; b) that there wasn't a run on the bank or a huge crash because people either make too much money to care, or don't make enough money to cash out after tier, or instead of shopping, and didn't realize it (I bet that was the case for many); c) those that thought it was "prudent" aren't so smart because they simply can't know what will happen next; d) Sansar is undoubtedly a factor, and someone should track all the Sansar press releases and the LindEx, it would be interesting! There's this to ponder, too. Why did the Lindens raise the fees when they had months of a very poorly-performing LindEx (from the point of view of merchants, whose cashout was substantially less). Why squeeze their top customers even more??? It's odd...

Or those who simply use their revenue to pay tier, or shop inworld with the rest. Or those who make so much money they don't care about this. Or those who ouldn't know that they'd still come out ahead because they could have no idea how much the LindEx could go down with a thing like that.

Really? I thought it was in the Cape Cod Room at the Del Prado Hotel in Ilium, Illinois. I think I once saw the asset server behind Prok's Sea Food in Baileya.

Well, that's good, that's a good sample but then, I don't understand why you aren't seeing this. I can think of several just off the top of my hand and I could send you landmarks in world. Perhaps you've just bought this railroad land for your projects inland on flat meadow, and not near waterfront? But this is always the problem, the blind men and the elephant, and people see different parts of SL and can't triangulate or rise above their own experience. But Tyche does. She is making a survey that really does that. It doesn't matter if it's not perfect because she uses bots, or doesn't count this or that specialized Linden land, or whatever quibble somebody has. She more or less has it, in a way I'm not sure even the Lindens have it. They might understand better the mystery of why so much of it sits there but I think that it's merely because they have this rigid policy: no sales on demand, prime land to auction, dole out some fallow land for prims in small amounts, if it's a Tuesday and the moon is full, or whatever. I think that the very first task is to open up land on demand, the end. This is not hard, it is not rocket science, it is not bedlam. Most people truly will not care. They could do this sim by sim, sending IMs to people as they go along, "Hi, would you like this land next to you? We're opening this up now" if they fear a flood of tickets. But there won't be. After that, reassured that they have a bit more tier and the place looks somewhat better, they should set abandoned land to sale. They don't have to do this system wide. Why is it always 0/1 thinking on every damn SL issue? They could do one sim at a time. Or one continent at a time. Or whatever works to "throttle" the process. If it doesn't work it doesn't work. But it will siphon off some of it. If the first two stages are a success, then the next thing is to insert the feature that your abandoned land goes to sale. It could even have a 7-day cooling off period where you could get it back. like a KittyCat out of the Menagerie if you had second thoughts. Then it goes to sale, the end. Why is this so hard? You monitor it, and you have good will and efficiency doing it, and you solve the problem. The new cloud server thing actually only enables the Lindens not to care about this even more deeply than they haven't cared the last five years.

The number of people attempting to cash out $5000 at one instance is very small now in SL. And even for these people, there's no hard data that they rushed to the exits like a bank panic and drove down the LindEx.

Dear, did you realize there is a fee for turning Linden dollars into real dollars AS WELL? Even if you don't cash them out?! As for the fee to cash out for "real money cash," um, I know that, as I use the LindEx all the time and do that. I can't imagine why you are "schooling" me here on how the LindEx when obviously I use it all the time and discuss with others all the time. Maybe you haven't caught up with the latest -- the Lindens now cash out in record times. While they've raised their fees, they've compensated this somewhat by getting better at the cash-out, and reducing it to 3-5 business days. Once you establish credibility with you, they cash you out as which as the system allows. Given that it used to be routinely 7 or even 10 days, this is progress. And what it means is that you don't have to plan 2 weeks in advance anymore. A big merchant doesn't cash things out "early"; she just cashes them out in a schedule. Likely she has a tier date, that may or may not be close to the end of the month, and some of the revenue has to go to tier, and the rest she cashes out to real life bills. This is likely done as a routine schedule, and something like a one-percent raise in the fee, that will add $5 to a $500 cashout may or may not force her to act any different. The problem is -- you can't know that, and can't admit it. My point isn't that I know anything more, but that I can reason not everybody headed to the gates -- I didn't, nor did others I know, which tells me at least from a small sample that there wasn't a panic. And even if a lot did, SOMETHING ELSE happened to make it lose an entire two points for awhile, which is a lot, for any reason, and that means you have to look for other causes, like the Sansar announcement. No one thing may have caused it; it can be a cluster. Your theory that people are smart enough to consider the rate might go down, but then not smart enough to realize their own behavior will now make it down might be believable if all of human behavior was like your Pavlovian example. But most people "get it" about their own behavior on the LindEx. What some did was park large amounts at lower numbers that they knew might take a while to burn off, but that any big surge of activity, shopping or fee related, would build activity for awhile anyway, and their big park might burn off. Others just build up tier payment supplies with now-cheaper Lindens. Sure, people continue to cash out -- they have to. But given the high volume of shopping, the dropping of 2 points has some more explanations. The drop wasn't small. It was two points, even more. It's still two points from 248 -- which finally it got back up to in the fall.

But that's January 3, Theresa. January 3 comes AFTER December 17, when the crashing starts and continues through what should be the shopping system. And even if they have the NEWS of this before January 3 -- and they DID, as far as I recall -- the difference is NOT so great as to really be a driver for the BIG merchants who have huge volumes. Sure, I'm happy to say it had SOME effect. But doesn't explain enough about that drop. A one-percent different in cash-out fees just isn't that big a deal: $500 is $492.50 with 1.5% as a fee, and 2.5% is $487.50. I don't think the savings of $5 is enough. Because merchants aren't stupid -- they know that behavior only makes their next cashout which might be as soon as next week only worse for them. If your theory was true, we'd see this vast improvement after January 3, when -- going by your theory -- cashouts would "stop" because ohnoes, the sticker price. But it didn't improve by more than a point. It didn't improve in the way Callum just recalled from the Anshe episode. It just doesn't make sense. SL is in some sense "a nation of shop-keepers" with lots of small holders -- but the real movers of the economy are giant actors, with 100 plus sim empires made up of private islands, or created content that earns them in the tens of thousands of real dollars. You're also forgotten something about the little guys, and I'm really one of them. Why would I hurry to cash out my Lindens at "better" rates, when some of the purpose of my cashout is to pay tier! So, wait, instead of leaving my Lindens to cashout WITHOUT ANY WITHDRAWAL FEE to PAY TIER, I'm going cash out, save $5, but then have to use live money outside of SL to pay tier, not devalued Lindens cashed out as soon as they need to be? MAKES NO SENSE. The Lindens never tell us that figure of how much of this vaunted $475 million revenue in the hands of users in fact comes TO THEM AS TIER, but it is HUGE. But...Pay no tier before its time! Why leave live, real money up on the Lindens' web page for two or three weeks, not working, when I could at least have it in Acorn or some low-percent savings account, or paying RL bills so that penalties don't accrue. Makes no sense for me as a little guy, surely the big breeder bosses would think this way. I have often found out that even big name brands and big money-makers can be very clueless about how financial systems work and how their own finances should be managed -- it's all a game. Even so, somebody selling weapons or breedables for 10 years is going to be very savvy about how they do this. I agree with Callum's assessment that it is market manipulation at play -- by Lindens or big players -- with big stacks parked at various levels, blocking exits. These can be called to flood at any time, or called in to get better rates later, or left to get better rates. What makes people behave that way? Not the cashout fee, and not even Sansar but still more factors I am trying to find.

I agree about your three over-arching reasons -- less residents, and less Premiums, so less stability; more private estates now with more prims and more attractive, especially homesteads; and sure, Mainland is god-awful in places. But not everywhere. Large swathes are perfectly fine because people have worked at it for 10 years (not only me). Yes, their work can be threatened at the edges, but people work around. Sometimes they just flee -- they are the ones abandoning -- and go somewhere else to cheap land and start over -- at these prices, you have that flexibility to get out of bad neighbour situations you couldn't years ago. You're not factoring that in. Who can take a large tract of 5000 sims or whatever, and make some overarching "look" to them? Not residents, even in land councils cooperating across sims (there are a few of those but generally the idea couldn't take off because there were no automatic tools to encourage it and Lindens don't like policies if they can avoid them). I already said that the first step is land on demand from the contiguous or same sim. This is very basic. But I estimate it would only soak up 10%, say. That's because there are just too many giant tracts of land that are the result of failed malls and clubs that people abandoned because of copybotting, griefing, and low cashouts with more and more fees and a devalued Linden -- and -- and even bigger reason -- failed love affairs. The failed love affairs of SL are a big driver of mobility and economic failure. The Lindens' recap of costs with their cloud hosting is great for them, but it does nothing for us. It doesn't help the Mainland look better, it merely delays their inevitable decision either to dump it entirely or pinch it together. I don't know how to incentivize the Lindens on this. The extra tier from getting 10% or 20% of the abandoned land under tier may not be enough for them, give the administrative costs. Making new tools to enable people to create communities and vote on things like no-shows with ugly builds and no autoreturn, demanding that they be cleared if the person doesn't log in for 90 days -- these are too exotic and will be viciously fought against by forums regs who think this is middle-class Trump American Disney power messing up their sophisticated and underappreciated creativity. There are also issues we can't see, that the Lindens don't tell us. There are puzzlements as to why certain land devaluing everything for miles by spinning towers, where the owner hasn't logged in for two years for sure (you can see his log in dates in his groups), are not able to be abandoned. (Requesting that land become abandoned is another avenue of activity that I and others have been involved in, and this is an uphill struggle). Who would pay for a 1024 account more than $72 a year at a time? If they aren't labelled "Charter Member" (tier free 4096 for life) and aren't in a group, how does their build remain on their land for 2 years? The answer might be "Because that's our board member's son." Or "because that's a Linden who made a test alt to test server speed and we need to keep that." Who the heck knows! They aren't telling! Lindens do favours for their old friends and sometimes that's a good thing, if it means that someone with an elaborate build that had lots of visitors and appreciation gets to keep their build even if tier isn't paid until they can pay it in a few months. I've seen situations like that. But we're not talking about such edge cases most of the time...

As I pointed out in making this joke, I didn't consciously set a troll trap, but you two fell in any way. I saw in my post that I had addressed the pre-crash era more than the post. I thought, "the trolls will merely discount everything I say and hammer on my lack of information on the post-crash". But then I shrugged and said to myself, so what? If they do that, the answer is that a 7-year trend precedes it, and the rumours of 2012 -- and that IS the answer. It's like people who argue whether the Soviet Union collapsed because 75 years of Communism killed it, or because a few years of Western-style experimentation with something remotely resembling free markets killed it, and obviously it's the former. You don't say that a 75-year-old smoker who began smoking when he was 15 died because he smoked filterless cigarettes in the year before he died. This idea of "I was able to do it, so you must be wrong" is what is so laughable about the forums. (Marian McCallister is particularly hilarious in making all those types of claimes, which only tend to confirm that those who remain inworld for long periods and befriend oldbies and Lindens succeed LOL). Er, I have also bought from the Lindens, bought waterfront that they could have sold for more, and bought even non-contiguous land. Hello, I do have more experience in this and the Lindens at the end of the day don't care if I have a critical blog or criticize them on the forums (some of the departing ones would tell me that this was extremely important for me to have done and I should keep doing it). My point -- although it might sail right over the heads of anyone who once got some land from Guy -- is that you can't ALWAYS do this. You can't do this EVERY TIME. You might get it one or two times out of ten -- you just don't have enough repeats to see the trend. You haven't talked to frustrated neighbours. You haven't seen people move out of sims in frustration. You just don't have enough experiential data. The Lindens do, and they know full well if they published these requests it would reveal that what I say is true. Same for your "poor planning" concept. I've seen poor planning, too LOL. Like here's one: A guy buys some land that suddenly, for no reason in the world, after years and years of languishing, the Lindens put on the auction. Now, of course this was a fresh opportunity to wonder -- why don't the Lindens make ALL water in an enclosed pond of the type they have sprinkled over the Moth Continent Linden land so no one can grief it up, devalue the sim, and force abandonments??? They already hold so much land -- if they fixed their ponds from the start they'd save themselves a lot of cancellations. This has been a real wrecking ball on that continent. But, years of lying fallow suddenly seemed "too much," they put up that land, and a guy bought it. Then he looked around him and began to panic. Two or three adjacent parcels with nice waterfront had been abandoned, and not so long ago. Why? Well, few people feel comfortable owning a waterfront parcel that may become a water-behind parcel when the Lindens sell that water abandoned in front of it, and some idiot puts up a tower or a giant ship, which we'd had in that pond before -- they couldn't take their Titanic to a private island or a open waterfront, it had to overwhelm this little pond. So this guy began to worry and far from poor planning, he thought up a brilliant plan -- he put up "the Kawaii Mall" on that water he bought, put up gigantic, gaping mouth fish of the worst I've seen in SL, put huge spinning and glowing signs around, and pretended he was in the mall business. I had 4-5 tenants promptly move out of my waterfront looking at this horror, so I said, what on earth are you thinking? You couldn't find flatland in the middle of a sim for this stupidity and let people come from search? Then he told me his diabolical plan. He planned to ask the Lindens to put those 2-3 waterfronts on the auction. They surely would, he reasoned, then no one would bid on them because they looked out on an ugly Kawaii (!) Mall and he could thereby scoop up that waterfront for $1 or $2/m meter on the auction. I told him that if he kept this up, not only would I bid him underwater, I would put ban all around him so his land would become a prison. So he removed his uglies -- good neighbours are worth more than diabolical plans. And the reality is, he won those auctions any way and picked up those waterfronts but then -- poor planning again -- the tier became too much. He then offered me to buy the water. Now I have adjacent waterfront abandoned that at any moment itself could threaten my empty water, which I keep empty as a courtesy to neighbours and put things up in the sky instead. Sure, poor planning, but diabolical planning and also another thing -- spite, stupidity, and actual heedlessness. People buy stuff and do stay for years, but then their husband dies in RL, they exit SL quickly and don't return. These things happen. Looking at all the little stories I know of like this on dozens of sims, I don't see that "poor planning" is the issue on anyone's part except the Lindens. They didn't lay out their continents with much thought, nor develop rules for zoning or the minimum of effort to prevent conflict drivers like water for sale in the middle of the pond. Honister is an interesting story, though, not typical. It was abandoned by a long-time user who complained that the Lindens' "took away his power" and he abandoned all his land, including that whole sim of Honister. It IMMEDIATELY went on the auction -- funny, that. It immediately went to sale -- and the best parts of it sold to end users who made nice builds -- those Mainland islands weren't cheap. Then the seller put the water there to very high prices (to prevent them messing up the whole sim) and put the very large waterfront (8192 is large for this area) to $1.6. So like everything you claim, there's a larger context beyond the 1/0 -- I happen to know this situation intimately and I also can look at the map over a week and see the seller's strategy -- sell Mainland islands for a whole bunch, keep the water very high to reassure those Mainland island buyers, and set the waterfront next to them low so they'll be tempted to buy it. or so it will have a quick sale and relieve his tier -- while his little waters take their time to sell for a whole bunch. That's good planning, and you can't see it. I don't suppose an actual news article by SLHamlet with quotations from an actual CEO then, Rod Humble, would be enough to convince you that the rumors in fact had confirmation, but here it is. This article in December 2012 merely validates finally what quite a few people heard for months before, and took action accordingly. I know I did! For most people, that would be enough proof.

I wouldn't take this on any more for any money. Why? o I don't have perms on your house and can't move it or modify it if the customer wants it gone or modified -- the single most frequent request o I don't have full control over your land, so I can't remove, say, group-set prims or some other problem like terraforming if it gets upset. o I agree that you can add your own rental box and rent it yourself, it's easier than ever these days. AND you can take on the unpaid sweat-equity customer service time, too, thanks! I'll bet Iam doesn't pay himself a living hourly wage on his books as such, but considers the profit from the rentals "a nice thing to have". No one could, because the profits even from the most enormous 512 newbie far you could arrange across numerous sims cannot possibly pay US $8.50 and hour to you.

@Qie Niangao But that's not how you watch the issue, obviously, Qie, watching the Lindens to see that they put up parcels "pretty promptly" on the auction. That's the other end of the telescope. Of course they put up their huge queue and backlog "pretty promptly" LOL. But there's a backlog! And most of it not in queue. The way you watch this issue is to look at real sims. And as I never tire of explaining, I have land on 50 sims. That means I see 200 sims because of my land and all the land around them. And that's a pretty good sample. So I can only say, do you do that? You have contiguous land on 2-3 sims. Do you fly around and observe regularly what is happening elsewhere? I do, and I see stuff that has literally been abandoned for years that is prime waterfront. It's extraordinary. I see the Lindens sometimes picking out what is more valuable, but other times responding to user requests and putting up stuff to frustrate that user because now he has to bid against flippers. It's not a lack of demand. It's a LACK OF POLICY. You must never ask for abandoned land. I have hundreds of time. The Lindens do not sell it on demand. They dole it out on a discretionary basis. @Theresa Tennyson I need to get even better at laying traps for trolls by learning to do it consciously!! I'm scoring 2 for 2 already today. unconsciously. But I deliberately described things before the charts tank knowing that you or someone would jump on that and gloat. That's why I explained the later developments of Sansar, in 2012-2014, and consolidation of ad farm policy by 2012 (which you ignore because it doesn't affect you) -- hello! And long-term developments are important to understand for user confidence and the market long-term. You said "You can see exactly when this policy started and stopped by the aqua bars. Note that the total land for sale more than doubled at its height. However, this chart has the same time scale as the chart you posted. It didn't slow the abandoning of land; if anything, it increased it." Perhaps you'll admit now that the chart REALLY shows not "what happened when Linden allowed abandoned land to sell immediately" because a) they did that in early days in 16m chunks and stopped; b) they did this later and stopped fairly quickly then did that OTHER thing which was STOP it and STOP demand requests by ticket. THAT is the factor. Tateru Nino is never an authority for me on anything, anyone interested in the long version can IM me. Next? There are explanations for every single thing you cite that you aren't admitting: o 2012 events are a response to the previous 7 years of erosion of user confidence. And I mentioned 2012 as the start of Sansar rumours and that's WAY important. o People leave SL and don't have land to sell or even abandon AND they also don't buy new land such as to have it to abandon any more! People forget that when, say, capital flight reduces from Russia, it's because there's no more capital to flee. o Abandoned land increases because there is NO WAY TO BUY IT ON DEMAND. You can't. You've helpfully identified when the Lindens stopped automatic sale and therefore we know now that it's not that "abandoned land only makes more abandoned land" (your unsupported theory) but that the policy not to allow automatic sales anymore depresses that activity enormously. Thanks for making my case for me! o Private land sales is a different dynamic that has to do with higher prices and so on. o And thanks again for making my case for me -- enter Ebbe 2014, cue Sansar. So YOUR theory that "abandoned land only makes more abandoned land," like it's "poor project planning" (your concept) -- just unsupported. Thanks for admitting that, although you didn't, actually. You were there and you missed the obvious fact (because you don't have enough land or don't observe enough land to see how this cripples thing) that not being able to get abandoned land on demand in any form is a huge crippling thing. You cannot expand your holdings or beautify your neighbourhood or work with others. It's not that somebody sees abandoned land, and like copycot suicides, abandons their land, too. Doesn't work that way. @ChinRey but she's not spot on, because I first made that point, she didn't. She claimed that "abandoned land increases because of poor project planning" and other nonsense. Then when she was trying to "rebut" me, she made my arguments again. Oh, well. We know that Sansar rumours started in 2012, we all remember that who remember Rod Humble and various meetings in and out of world. So that's why I said the tanking starting in 2012 is THAT, and not silly things like poor planning and more abandoned land makes for more abandoned land. As @imyourneighbour points out, nothing could be better for a rental than a half sim of "easement" for your rentals community provided by abandoned land. Except...the Lindens won't let you buy any of it OR put it on the auction, as anyone who watches this on more than one sim knows perfectly well. @ChicAeon -- maybe the Lindens reduced performance and helped abandon land to increase, yes. But your idea of glutting just doesn't hold for the one principle and proposal I am making -- ON DEMAND land which you ASK FOR AND GET. I don't think you and others understand this. Hundreds of offers to buy land outright in all sizes go in. Tens of sale sets come out. Tens of auction sets come out. If you fix that, it's not a glut. It's conceding that there is pent-up buyer demand that will buy once you stop your ideological shilly-shallying. Giving land to end-users who request it isn't a "glut," but a tier revenue raise. Sure, some flippers may request it. But if they keep to their "contiguous" or "same sim" concept, they reduce that. From there, you can see whether automatic abandon-to-sale works. Perhaps on a sim-by-sim basis. Perhaps only for land of 1024 or less. All kinds of brakes on it can be conceived once you have a will to really fix it -- which is not there.

Yeah, I know. See above.

So from other threads, I noticed that some people, whether in business or not in SL, are absolutely convinced that "shopping behavior and sales actually decrease during the Western winter holidays" in SL and that this is "traditional" and "perennial". Those of us who know from greater direct experience that this simply isn't true can keep arguing, and citing all kinds of data points, like more stores rented and more prims rented because merchants sell more, and more tenants adding extra homes and prims because they decorate more -- which means they bought more -- but it won't be accepted. They will always find some argument, like "but people are using last year's Christmas decorations that they kept in a storage box all year". Or "but Prokofy, you think your business is the center of the Universe and what you see is the norm but you are living in a prim in the world as it was in 2007". I wish! The Linden was probably worth more then... But there's another thing you can do, which is just look at the Lindex right now, and click on "30 days," and see that, um, the volume of sales of Lindens went WAY up to past the 100,000 mark after December 17. THE VOLUME. Remember that. Oh well, facts are funny things. I'm going to put this on my blog because this view of the Lindex disappears soon, and becomes faintly visibly only under "all" where the peaks and valleys are hard to correlate to dates. But the LindEx -- which some of us watch closely and so know that something is "off" -- suddenly, during the height of the shopping season, devalued the Linden. VOLUME was high but not PRCE. It goes from 248, where it was for weeks, to 250 or 251 or worse (the higher that number is, the lower the Linden value because it takes more of them to equal the RL US dollar). Well, sure, volume should depress price, but not always, in this artificial setting. If more people are buying more Lindens, the supply -- if this was the "organic" and "natural" and "free" market that the Lindens claim -- would be tighter and the value would be greater. Sure, the signals of "more sales" prompts more people not selling to sell, but these explanations are not sufficient. We do know that the LindEx isn't that free thing claimed, or at least, not as free as claimed, although sure, it has its ups and downs in response to what you might generously call "normal" signals. The Lindens, seeing that eager Christmas shoppers are about to be frustrated by too-expensive Lindens on automatic buys, intervene, and devalue them a little, so that people get "the same" or "more" for their money (they are worth less, but will still go further inworld because most merchants won't have managed to change prices, even those with automatic vendors easy to change globally). So maybe they have Supply Linden -- yes, that's the name of the account, and he was visible before and isn't now -- inject some fun into the LindEx. Of course in RL, this isn't done except by tyrants like Vladimir Putin. But that's ok, the Lindens need to keep SL fun. They can't keep it TOO fun, however, as their real customers -- the creators and merchants of SL -- aren't happy when the value drops so that when they cash out -- and now with more fees biting into their profits -- they get less and less. Well, actually as I've discovered, that unhappiness can persist for a very, very long time before the Lindens will "react". So, you might find this a conspiracy theory, since you can't "prove it," although long ago, this was admitted by real Lindens, and even in public meetings, and there was more transparency on the whole issue. Oh, well. Let's pretend it didn't happen, and they never did that. And maybe they didn't! But...what else could make the LindEx tank? Only an internal or external event. What would that be? There wasn't more sim crashing than usual, there wasn't any huge new change to the platform or showstopper bug, all things that historically crash the LindEx. So...what was it? Again, people who use the LindEx frequently, who follow it closely, have no trouble acknowledging that "something funny happened" when it was finally 248 for weeks after a bad time, and then suddenly goes to 251 when it should be a good time. And the answer *might* be this dated December 19, right before the holiday season -- a new feature in Sansa, in VentureBeat, the most widely read media on Internet/gadget/VR etc. publications, about the competing other world Linden product -- involving designing and uploading clothes. That's of course a big deal, as that was missing before and the avatars are not all that. Sansar steadily improves, from that big disappointing slag heap we saw when they opened up the beta last July or whenever it was, and if there is a stay-at-home retired nerd who wants to sit and correlate LindEx rates with Sansar announcement, there's a job for you. Meanwhile, it's a good enough explanation for me, as two things might have resulted from that exciting new announcement: o People struggling to rez out their mesh on mesh and having it bounce as they tried to put up a Christmas tree, and struggling to pick which of one of many trademarked mesh bodies/dresses/accessories they won out of a gatcha would fit on their actual avatar with its expensive mesh body before going to their New Year's Eve party, would drop all that boring and frustrating stuff and run, not walk to Sansar! Fun! New worlds can eat up hours -- days -- of time and before you know it -- whoops, it's January 23, and your credit card statements are going to fall due any day now. Better not spend on SL! o People who don't do that stuff, but watch the larger trends because they sell the clothing or accessories or they sell the rentals for the decorating instinctively know when they see a RL media story that says "Sansar Gets Better!" that they must reach for the cash-out button as their business will soon be suffering and the LindEx will be devaluing. Some people may even have hooked up a Google news reader that delivers the stories to their Siri or Google Assistant or whatever she's called, and cries "Sell, baby, Sell!" So they do. And that flood of frightened merchant and landlord dollars into the LindEx reduces its values. Suddenly, too many dollars want to get out the door, so they queue up in millions and millions filling up each level...248...249...250 -- if 249 is at 16 million, who will park there? Um, yeah, merchants who made a lot of sales MIGHT want to cash out DURING the holidays so they can buy in RL! Hurray! That's what SL should be FOR! And they might want to close their books by January 1 if they are diligent. But I actually think that isn't what happened. If you make a lot of money in SL, and you see the LindEx is not at a good rate, you park at the more valued numbers because you can wait 15 or 30 days. Maybe if you need US $100 to do your last minute shopping, sure. But my point is -- the actions of those who make a lot of money are such that they make money not by suddenly cashing out in the middle of a shopping season as they don't need to do that to shop, they already have last month's cash out. More to the point: if that behavior -- merchants cashing out in the middle of the month, even before Christmas day when they might get a lot more sales, and even before December 31, when they might get even more sales -- were "the norm" in past years in SL, we would have seen it. I never recall seeing it. But maybe someone does. It's too bad there isn't an economist at LL who says to the PR people, "Hold off that announcement until January 3, so we don't kill our business in our first world, and when that world is shrinking due to RL credit card bills, we'll get some bounce over to Sansar." Or maybe there is an economist, and he says "Be sure to sink the LindEx on the holidays and put out a new shiny about Sansar so we can keep working at flushing out that old world." It's too bad there isn't an economist who says, "What new shiny can we roll out in BOTH our worlds so neither suffers at the expense of the other?" Sadly, the Lindens live in 2003 and still think a portal with them having a snowball fight in the first world is a "shiny" that will drive log-ins. Raise your hands, how many of you went to the Linden/resident snowball fight? I just don't know how all this works because they don't tell us. I'm happy to hear any other theories. Those theories cannot claim that this fact that shopping reduces when it doesn't. They cannot claim "all merchants cash out before Christmas" unless *they themselves did that* and can testify to that behavior *personally*. Because we have the traditional high volume of Linden dollar sales -- proof of shopping (unless somebody thinks people buy to store Lindens in a box until January). But we also have a non-traditional Linden devaluation which needs explanation. Cashout to RL by nervous SL merchants who are poor shoppers before December 25 cannot explain this.

Haha Alwin, you fell into a trap there. The SL and Firestorm viewers are identical on this subject. The variable is what the group owner decides to grant in terms of powers. On either viewer, he has the same decision tree. I'll take it you don't manage groups in SL and don't have your Mainland parcels in groups, then. Oh, well.