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Current Land Bot Threshold?


Haravikk Mistral
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Apologies if this is covered somewhere already, but I can't find it (I'm not too happy with the search on these forums).

 

It's been a long time since I last sold land, but back then all I had to do to sell quickly was find out the current L$ per square metre target of bots and price my land just under that to have a bot show up and buy it within minutes.

Looking at land sales however I'm seeing a huge range of prices for similarly sized plots, so I'm not sure whether that sweet spot exists anymore, or have the bot-based monopolies fizzled out?

 

 

The land is in a nice quiet sim, 3,536 square metres of plain grassland. I'd appreciate any advice on the current market for selling land like this, should I set my expectations low?

 

I'm mostly doing it to tier down rather than make tons of L$, but anything I can make on the sale can be used to pay that lower monthly tier for a while so… it's always nice to get something if I can.

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bots are illegal these days  (Thanks pixel God!)

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Bot_policy

 

If you want to sell your parcel fast , then sell it for the lowest price you can find at this moment in SL land search.

There are spesific buttons to check to have the price shown at  low/ high

If no one buys it for that price, call a person who buys lands asap.

You can find those persons at the descriptions of their parcels for sale.

And also in the SL search. Their rate as far I am aware of is 0.3 per meter. way less than 0.5 which is a "decent" price for someone who wants to get rid of their parcel.

You coud try 0.6 or 0.7 if the parcel is in a good location and Im sure it will sold in a jiffy

Good Luck!

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these days?? where have you been :)... 0.5  and lower are "normal" for some years now

of course you can try higher but if it's a normal basic mainland parcel you will hold it till eternity. Only oceanside/view and themed will go for better prices.

Sometimes roadside will go for slightly more too, but don't count on that too much.

Lot of land is still overpriced. As long you can get for 0.5 or less... asking more won't be selling fast.

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I think my last land purchase and sale was over six years ago ;)

Shame, I've seen outfit and avatar combos that sell for more, seems strange that land has such a low value when you still need it to actually keep things rezzed. Is everyone renting now or something?

 

I missed the deadline to sell and tier down anyway (I got the date wrong, yay!) so I guess I'll just keep dropping the price till it goes, or abandon it if I'm at risk of paying the higher tier for another month, as it doesn't sound like there's much to gain by holding onto it.

 

I guess it's just lucky the prices weren't this low six years ago, or I'd probably have even more land I need to get rid of.

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Haravikk Mistral wrote:

Shame, I've seen outfit and avatar combos that sell for more, seems strange that land has such a low value when you still need it to actually keep things rezzed. Is everyone renting now or something?

Take a look at Zindra and Bay City on the world map and see how many parcels are for sale in these once popular regions and you see why. There were twice as many parcels for sale there only a month or two ago and few if any of the ones that have gone from the market have been sold, they've been abandoned by the wannabe sellers.

Then take a look at a few mainland sims and see how many parcels are for rent and how much abandoned land there is.

The bottom has dropped out of the SL (un)real estate market. The private island owners can cut their losses by closing their sims, and they do (124 sims gone last 30 days) but very reluctantly and even there you'll find a lot of vacancies. So far Linden Lab has chosen not to scale down mainland. It may not be long before they'll have to (the Blake Sea sims are most likely to be the first ones to go) but right now there is about twice as much land in Second Life as there is demand for.

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Geez, I hope it doesn't come to that. IMO it would make more sense to cut the tier prices in half (or double their allowances) and run sims two per (virtual?) core; the vast majority of sims are lightly loaded anyway, so as long as high traffic sims aren't sharing the same CPU resources that would allow costs to be slashed without having to reclaim land.

With people able to have more land at the same monthly tier cost that should encourage sales again without downsizing. I mean, downsizing sims would be a pretty tricky proposition anyway given that a sim could be half empty but still populated with beloved virtual homes etc.

 

I've been trying to read up on the Project Sansar thing and I wonder if LL will be using more of a cloud computing model to manage it, as systems like OpenStack would allow simulators to share resources a lot more efficiently and fluidly. If they are then it would make a lot of sense to move the current SL sims over to the same platform (may not actually be that hard). Either it would mean they can repurpose existing SL hardware as hardware to start their own cloud, or they can transition sims away from the hardware and discontinue it/sell it off so they no longer have to manage hardware of their own (if they end up using an cloud computing platform like Netflix has done).

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Haravikk Mistral wrote:

Geez, I hope it doesn't come to that. IMO it would make more sense to cut the tier prices in half (or double their allowances)

Ebbe Linden, answered that at one of the Lab Chats. The way LL sees it, there is no guarantee they would compensate the financial loss from lower prices with higher volumes and he is probably right.


Haravikk Mistral wrote:

...

and run sims two per (virtual?) core; the vast majority of sims are lightly loaded anyway, so as long as high traffic sims aren't sharing the same CPU resources that would allow costs to be slashed without having to reclaim land.

It doesn't work quite that way but the principle is a good one. Today sims are assigned computer power according to which of three classes, full sim, homestead or open space, they are classified as. There are several sims that could be reassigned to a lower resource class with no problems at all (if anybody from LL happens to read this: Ruthenium, Rhodium, Palladium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinium, Campus, Terraform Me, Linden Estate Services 2-4, Hippo Hill Island, Loch Linden, Ruth's Retreat, Prima Point, Plain Plains ... those are the ones I can think of right away). There's not that much to save this way though.


Haravikk Mistral wrote:

With people able to have more land at the same monthly tier cost that should encourage sales again without downsizing.

The question is, what would people buy more land for? Most active SL users today are well established and already have the homes and land they want. They're not interested in scaling up their SL involvement. Quite the contrary, many want to downsize. With no recruitment of new users worth speaking of, there's hardly any demand for new private home land in SL.

There are still almost 25,000 sims in SL and the land used as private homes for active users probably don't add up to more than 3000, certainly not more than 5000 sims. It's always been that way really, although probably not quite as pronounced as today.

Most of the land in SL is - and always was - used for other purposes and that's where the real decline has taken place.

Much is used (or rather unused but still rented out and paid for) by passive users, people who kept their land because they thought they were coming back some day, people who just faded out of the scene and forgot to cancel, people who keep their place here just to visit once or twice a year. There are fewer and fewer of those because today, when people leave, they leave for good and they know it.

Stores take up a lot of land. Most serious SL merchants still keep a store inworld for various reasons but they're scaling down. Instead of a full sim they find a nice little spot where they can place their redelivery terminal, where people can use the gift cards and where they may catch the eye of the occasional passerby. In a way this is an advantage to mainland since a parcel near a Linden Road is more suitable than an isolated island for a store like that.

Privately owned clubs, sandboxes, rp sims and other public access land... well who's gonna volunteer to do the work and pay the tier? Fewer and fewer people are willing to do that.

The bottom line is, there is a huge overcapacity of land in SL, the existing owners and renters aren't interested in expanding or moving and there are hardly any new customers.

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LL recently lower the fees for to get a private ful region from US$1,000 to US$600

To my eyes thats maybe good for future users but really bad for the old ones..

Lets compare it with a Mercedes Benz.

Someone buys today a Mercedes Benz for US$100,000

Tomorrow morning the company decides to lower the price for the same model to US$60,000

How the owner who pay 100K will feel?

Does they will ever trust and buy another model of that company? I dont think so...

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beethros Karas wrote:

LL recently lower the fees for to get a private ful region from US$1,000 to US$600

Yes, they obviously did that to stop the sim death and maybe also to see if a price reduction would turn the tide.

It's too little and too late of course.

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ChinRey wrote:


Haravikk Mistral wrote:

Shame, I've seen outfit and avatar combos that sell for more, seems strange that land has such a low value when you still need it to actually keep things rezzed. Is everyone renting now or something?

Take a look at Zindra and
Bay City
on the world map and see how many parcels are for sale in these once popular regions and you see why. There were twice as many parcels for sale there only a month or two ago and few if any of the ones that have gone from the market have been sold,
they've been abandoned
by the wannabe sellers.


Please share with us the locations of these abandoned double-prim lots so we can ask for them to be auctioned off. Are these the "abandoned lots that don't look abandoned because there are buildings on them?" Has it occurred to you that the lots may have been only on sale in the first place to try to take advantage of the ridiculous Bay City land-boom that has since cooled off?


ChinRey wrote:


The bottom has dropped out of the SL (un)real estate market. The private island owners can cut their losses by closing their sims, and they do (124 sims gone last 30 days) but very reluctantly and even there you'll find a lot of vacancies. So far Linden Lab has chosen not to scale down mainland. It may not be long before they'll have to (
the Blake Sea sims are most likely to be the first ones to go
) but right now there is about twice as much land in Second Life as there is demand for.

Could you explain your reasoning for assuming the first regions to be shut down will be low-maintenance, largely open-space regions that are frequently in use and surrounded by lucrative private regions?

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beethros Karas wrote:

LL recently lower the fees for to get a private ful region from US$1,000 to US$600

To my eyes thats maybe good for future users but really bad for the old ones..

Lets compare it with a Mercedes Benz.

Someone buys today a Mercedes Benz for US$100,000

Tomorrow morning the company decides to lower the price for the same model to US$60,000

How the owner who pay 100K will feel?

Does they will ever trust and buy another model of that company? I dont think so...

Then imagine how they felt during the time that Linden Lab waived the startup fee altogether.

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Yes, I can imagine how it was, but lowering a price of an item after many years when so many people bought, in my eyes its a big mistake. Simply for the reason I mention above. All these people who bought it they will feel like they lost their money. Like they bought a diamond of 1 million and now cost only 600 thousands.

It isn't a correct politic for a seller to reduce the price of an item, it has been proved many times in the past that is completely wrong and tents to a failure of the company. At least that's how they teach me that in my business years IRL

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Please share with us the locations of these abandoned double-prim lots so we can ask for them to be auctioned off. Are these the "abandoned lots that don't look abandoned because there are buildings on them?"


Buildings like these you mean?



But interestingly, you're actually right. Seems all those parcels that were taken off the market just before christmas and look empty on the map now are not abandoned, they're still owned by somebody. I checked the parcel details for some of them. Most had a few prims but only one took advantage of that extra Bay City prim quota. So obiviously they're used as perfectly ordinary skybox anchors. Not sure what that means.


Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Could you explain your reasoning for assuming the first regions to be shut down will be low-maintenance, largely open-space regions that are frequently in use and surrounded by lucrative private regions?


Sure. Lots of sims (they're homestead sims btw, not open space) that don't generate any income directly. Obvious choice to be the first ones to go. If you look at the big picture, they would be the absolutely worst possible thing to do - makes it even more of an obvious choice. It was meant as a joke of course but actually, I wouldn't be completely surprised if I turned out to be right ;)


Edit:


Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Please share with us the locations of these abandoned double-prim lots


I would love to have a place in Bay City too, although 45 L$/m2 (the lowest price I could find) is a bit too much. It's a lovely area with a lovely theme and for the most part it still retains its integrity. But that double prim quota shouldn't matter anymore. This is 2016 after all. If you build sensibly you'll run out of space long before you run out of prims even on a Homestead parcel.

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I think the biggest problem with the up-front private sim cost is that it hasn't been justified for a very long time. It might, might, just have made sense back when SL was small and machines had to be provisioned especially to meet demand for new private sims, and it wasn't clear if SL would take off long-term (i.e- it was more of a risk to buy a machine, so the up-front cost helped to cover that). However, as SL grew the machines became used for a long time, especially with LL making better use of them through load-balancing, so even if someone got a private island and gave it up after a month, there would still have been a good chance of someone else wanting it, so the hardware wasn't wasted, i.e- no up front cost was needed to offset the risk as it was pretty much guaranteed to be utilised by someone.

The cost is justified even less now if demand is dropping, because it means that there is a bunch of machines that are going to be wasted otherwise; in terms of maintenance it makes more sense to have as many private island owners on those machines as is possible, as their monthly fees will then pay for any hardware fixes, power consumption, data charges etc. In other words, if a private sims close and leave a machine with no sims on it, then that machine isn't making any money at allto offset its original cost, or the cost to keep/maintain it.

At the very least the private sim setup costs should have adjusted to reflect the land market or something, but really the up-front fee has been a total rip-off for a long time now IMO, especially with a private sim costing so much more to own anyway, just to get more control of terrain height and appearance, and a fairly basic set of estate tools.

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Yes, I could agree with all of what you say and I understand how many servers needed for to run such a big virtual world.

I have seen other worlds closed because of no profits and because of wrong management ( Watch there.com)

But...

The customer doesn't know anything of that and actually doesn't care. Who knows how a Mercedes Benz gets set up? Or how many people work in their factories? Nobody cares. All they care of is the horse power, the bright colors, the stability and the price. etc etc.

To my eyes a purchase fee is not bad. No mutter how big it is. But it has to stay as it is, to keep the value of the product ( a sim) steady. The last years people who wanted to sell their sims they was asking US$500 for them and sometimes they was lucky to sell them. Those who wanted to get rid of them sims was asking 300 and was selling them in a jiffy.

I haven't seen anyone - at least posted in forums - to offer their sims for sale lately and I wonder how much a sim price will end up these days. Perhaps us$100.. 

Also there was another big step LL did. they allow to keep the grandfathered tier when such a sim is sold. I guess that's a way to relief all those old landlords who own hundreds of sims and so they could ask a really good price close to what they had pay and so take their money back. There is a big demand for those sims. Well, of course one day it will be common and with a lower price again. But so far makes individuals with 1 -2 sims earn lots of money by selling them and maybe new members ripped off, because big landlords don't sell them because they want to have them rented out and meanwhile LL earn nothing.

Thats how I see things

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ChinRey wrote:

But interestingly, you're actually right. Seems all those parcels that were taken off the market just before christmas and look empty on the map now are not abandoned, they're still owned by somebody. I checked the parcel details for some of them. Most had a few prims but only one took advantage of that extra Bay City prim quota. So obiviously they're used as perfectly ordinary skybox anchors. Not sure what that means.

I need to go back and check the history of Bay CIty land statistics. It's handy that the Alliance gets those counts weekly. If my recollections are correct, you may have been misled about the Bay City land market. I mean, like all of SL, it's not what it used to be at peak, but... well, coincidentally, last night I sold a 512 for L$180 / sq.m. -- although that was in Nova Albion, which isn't exactly Bay City, but it's the same relatively rarified land market.

(That parcel was on the market about a week. I don't sell land that often -- I owned that parcel for years, but finally got bored of it -- so if I were actually in the land business, it may have brought more.)

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Qie Niangao wrote:

I need to go back and check the history of Bay CIty land statistics. It's handy that the Alliance gets those counts weekly. If my recollections are correct, you may have been misled about the Bay City land market.


Yes but the fact is, right now there are 121 parcels for sale in Bay City, that is in the sims west of the Barcola Sound. It's a bit more than it was about a month ago but considerably less than what it was throughout most of 2015. In addition there are a few vacant rentals, don't know how many.

There are some buyers of course - I did eventually find a parcel that seems to have changed owner recently - but I honestly can't imagine there are as many as 121 people in Second Life who'd be interested enough to leave their existing place, pay 75000 for a 1024 m2 plot (that seems to be the average asking price right now) and start over again.

It would be very interesting to see the Alliance's statistics if they also keep track of changes in land ownership. But what I think happened was that many wannabe sellers figured out they couldn't sell at a price they were comfortable with but they are reluctant to abandon land they paid so much for in the first place so they hold on to it, using it as general SL land without taking advantage of the unique qualities of Bay City. It also seems some land has been temporarily taken off the market to reduce the overflow. I stumbled across one completely empty not-for-sale parcel owned by a land trader group who also happens to have several other parcels for sale at Bay City.

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Looking back at the BC land stats, I don't see anything more dramatic than a somewhat lesser form of the general grid-wide decline. Here's a graph from some BCA minutes I had handy:



Coincidentally or not, the main upward trend seems to have started mid-2014 -- just when Ebbe first revealed the new platform that would come to be called Project Sansar -- and ran for about a year. And it seems the G-rated Westside was more affected than the older, M-rated Eastside.

(Don't get too excited about the "noisiness" in 2016; I just used all the weekly data for January, but only roughly monthly samples for earlier years, cuz gimme a break.)

Also in passing, I don't see any reason to think BC land is being held off the market to prop up prices. That same claim has come up repeatedly in the history of SL's land market (notably in Zindra) with never any actual evidence. Hanlon's Razor applies: land dealers can be sloppy, lazy, forgetful, distracted by RL, etc., etc., and ascribing some sinister market-manipulating motive to what can be accounted for by mere sloth is where conspiracy theories come from.

 

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Qie Niangao wrote:

That same claim has come up repeatedly in the history of SL's land market (notably in Zindra) with never any actual evidence. Hanlon's Razor applies: land dealers can be sloppy, lazy, forgetful, distracted by RL, etc., etc., and ascribing some sinister market-manipulating motive to what can be accounted for by mere sloth is where conspiracy theories come from.

That's not sinister at all. You have a large quantity of something for sale, you don't put it all up at once, you spread it out a bit. Fairly standard and perfectly acceptable marketing strategy.

 


Qie Niangao wrote:

Looking back at the BC land stats, I don't see anything more dramatic than a somewhat lesser form of the general grid-wide decline.

Yes, and that's where this digression started. I used Bay City as an example how the mainland population as a whole is declining. As far as I know, the only thing that makes Bay City different is that it's more noticeable on the map there. You don't really see it as clearly elsewhere since so many parcels in other parts of mainland are abandoned already and that doesn't show up on the map.

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ChinRey wrote:

Qie Niangao wrote:

Looking back at the BC land stats, I don't see anything more dramatic than a somewhat lesser form of the general grid-wide decline.

Yes, and that's where this digression started. I used Bay City as an example how the mainland population as a whole is declining.

Except what you actually said was: "There were twice as many parcels for sale there only a month or two ago and few if any of the ones that have gone from the market have been sold, they've been abandoned by the wannabe sellers."

And then when that turned out to be wrong, you doubled-down with "Seems all those parcels that were taken off the market just before christmas and look empty on the map now are not abandoned, they're still owned by somebody."

But according to the statistics, there never was anything remotely like "twice as many parcels for sale" so there's nothing to explain, let alone anything needing the elaborate explanation of "not abandoned but kept off the market."

And this isn't the only place you've been throwing shade on Bay City:


Bay City is a ghost town. Last spring more than half the city came up for sale and remained for sale to the end of the year. Today many of the sellers have given up and abandoned their land there but there are still lots of parcels for sale if anybody are interested. I don't know if there have been any buyers at all so far but it there have, it can't have been many.

Except, again, there's actual data, and nothing like this ever happened.

I don't know who's been giving you all this misinformation about the Bay City land market, but one has to wonder if they can really be this ill-informed or if they might have an axe to grind.

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Qie Niangao wrote:

Except what you actually said was: "
There were
twice as many parcels for sale there only a month or two ago
and few if any of the ones that have gone from the market have been sold, they've been abandoned by the wannabe sellers."

And then when that turned out to be wrong, you doubled-down with "Seems
all those parcels that were taken off the market just before christmas
and look empty on the map now are not abandoned, they're still owned by somebody."

 Yes I was wrong there.

 


Qie Niangao wrote

I don't know who's been giving you all this misinformation about the Bay City land market, but one has to wonder if they can really be this ill-informed or if they might have an axe to grind.


Both this thread and the other one you referred to are about the decline of mainland and Bay City is very diagnostic there because it is so strong. It was a very well made themed area to start with and it had and still has a strong organisation protecting its integrity. In many ways Bay City is the last bastion of Second Life mainland (Blake Sea doesn't really count in this context since most of the Linden owned land there is not for sale or rent).

Second Life's decline didn't start in 2014, it started as early as 2011. Actually it started as early as 2088 but LL was able to find a way to turn the tide temporarily. In any case, Sansar is not the cause of Second Life's problem, it was Linden Lab's attempt to solve it and find a way forwards. It may not have been the right solution and it may have gone off on a tangent from the original intention but that's a completely different discussion.

Bay City is important today because even it is struggling now. Your graph only goes back to 2013 and of course statistics of how many parcels are for sale only tells part of the story, but I'm quite sure if we go further back it will turn out to have been quite stable all the way since 2011 while Second Life as a whole was slowly but surely going downhill. At least it seemed so. Not anymore.

It's time to wake up and face the facts. I do believe it's possible to turn the tide and revitalize Second Life. But you can't solve a problem unless you have the courage to face it. Denial - Lindenial or the regular kind - never did anybody any good in the long run.

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