Sooooooo I was about to write a blog about Linden lab and the way they have mismanaged real estate on the mainland. Today they posted a new blog about how they intend to fuck over estate owners too. So let’s have a look at what the hell is going on and ponder what is happening in Jack Lindens head. Here’s is my quick synopsis.
“Oh dear the mainland is too expensive its putting people off. Lets release lots more land because that will help balance the market. Hmmm why stop there; let’s drop the prices of estates also. Even better we double the prim allowance on open space sims, cut their cost and allow people to buy one at a time instead of four…………………… Oh shit the mainland is now worth nothing and we can’t release more sims because we need to charge this amount but they are only worth a fraction of that. Shit well lets pay people a pittance to create content for us then make special golden estates that are mainland, we’ll talk these up big style so people pay well over the odds for them. Ah shit they realised our game and mainland is still worth jack shit, let’s jack up the prices of the open spaces that killed prices in the first place.”
So the situation we have is that there is no stability. As the platform becomes more stable the one thing that separates it from the other opensim based projects is the economy. Now the economy is taking a shafting. So what does Linden Lab want?
Ok so let’s concentrate for a moment on the mainland situation. To keep this simple Second life has two types of estate, private estates which we will call islands and Linden which is known as the mainland. The mainland is comprised now of nine continents, sort of I shall explain. The first two “Sansara” and “Heterocera” are the cradle of life in SL. This is where it originally all expanded from, typically the lands are more interesting, they have more topographical features and anomalies and more Linden content. So you will find info hubs, Linden builds etc, basically an infrastructure, roads, rivers, railroads, places of interest. Then there are continents three to six which are basically slabs of digital wilderness that were dumped because people were buying them. Then continent seven which under a new program “Linden Department of Public Works” has a road almost running around it. Then continent eight was started but there was such a monumental fuck up in land prices that it just comes to an abrupt halt. Continent nine is a miniature and is called “Nautilus” this according to Jack Linden who manages the linden estate is not really mainland it’s a sort of special area, special in that they promised no new mainland and had to put a spin on this so it could be released.
The mainland has faced and still faces many problems, one in particular was ad-farming, and the practice of fucking up someone’s view so they would pay you to fuck off. LL attempted to sort this out in February 2008 when they made it an offense to extort via harassment (why it was ever cool is beyond me) so then they changed tack and basically fucked everyone off until October when LL finally had the balls to do something when they saw hundreds of pissed off residents. This in turn leads us onto the improvement of mainland and the beautifying of the place. So an elite band of moderately skilled and pitifully paid residents were banded together to start a project of building roads and adding value to mainland. There first act was to build a new city area which had double prim allowances and attracted phenomenal prices at auction for Linden Lab. Mainland residents were not served in the slightest buy this as the lands were mostly gobbled up by virtual real estate magnates some of which made their money in the afore-mentioned extortion rackets. Then they knocked up a half finished road on continent seven and added more content to the already brimming second continent. As I sit in my office in the shadow of the great wall, I can look over my garden across the SLRR (rail road) and see a newly built gas station and road. If the department for works was for the public why the fuck were they not building roads for the thousands of neglected customers who have bought land and been paying tier for months or years?
Ok so threes the quick history of it all, now let’s go back to last week, ok imagine this is Sofia from the golden girls. Picture this, its Second Life, mid October, mainland prices are at the lowest you can remember, whole sims are traded for 2.9L$/m 512m plots are selling at 2.3L$/m. You flick over to the official Second Life blog and read that Jack Linden has just “discovered” a new continent. You know this must be wrong because for months when you have asked about the dismal price of mainland you have been assured that no more will be released until the average hits six to eight linden dollars per meter. So you toddle off and visit this newly discovered continent and yes there it is, in all its glory yet another new project by the LDPW while the rest of mainland lays in waste, unloved (no fucking infrastructure) and unwanted (can’t fucking give it away).
So I went to office hours with Jack Linden and I asked some questions. Some questions the normally vociferous “financial sector” should have been asking instead of whingeing that we were all communists.
[11:01] Jack Linden: so how are things? who has something they would like to talk about?
[11:01] Ewan Mureaux: why you said no more mainland then released more
[11:02] Jack Linden: Ewan: the basic ‘no new mainland’ through the normal route continues, these city regions are unusual and don’t happen regularly
[11:03] Ewan Mureaux: especially when the week preceding prices dropped further and since you released more mainland, back door or not, prices have plummeted
[11:03] Jack Linden: If Nautilus follows the way Bay City went, it won’t have a lasting effect, Bay City had an impact but only briefly
[11:03] Ewan Mureaux: Bay city was dropped when the lowest price was what, 7?
[11:03] Jack Linden: Timo.. Nautilus is about 8 regions maximum, of resident land
[11:04] Jack Linden: Within 22 or so, Linden owned regions
[11:04] Ewan Mureaux: completely different times now as it has been engineered to make the rest of mainland worthless
[11:05] Ewan Mureaux: What is the point in continued efforts to improve and beautify mainland when it has no value, if you pay buttons for something then you have less time for it than something that is worth its value
[11:05] Jack Linden: we will continue to work on the entire mainland, and even during building Nautilus we had more Moles working on other stuff than on that **Ewan adds – this is the new stuff at Bay City
[11:10] Jack Linden: Average Mainland price has dipped slightly, to L$5.8, so we’ll watch it closely
[11:10] Ewan Mureaux: jack can we get a mean average and not a median
[11:10] Ewan Mureaux: because 10,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,1 doesnt make the average price 5.8
11:11] Jack Linden: that was a Mean average. I can also get you the median
[11:12] Ewan Mureaux: so the extortion plots help pull that up and make everything rosey
[11:13] Jack Linden: no, we discount those at each end of the bell curve
[11:15] Ewan Mureaux: so you didnt want to release more land until the average was 6-8 and now a direct consequence of more land being released using your figures has dipped the average below 6
[11:16] Jack Linden: No Ewan. this happened pre-announcement of Nautilus.
[11:17] Ewan Mureaux: theres a more convincing argument for not releasing more land there then
[11:17] Jack Linden: As I said, we will watch it closely, if it seems to be having an adverse effect we will back it off again.
[11:18] Ewan Mureaux: I’m not trying to give you a hard time for the sake of it jack, just when given a straight answer to a direct question for weeks then that answer has caveats and loop holes, it leaves me frustrated
[11:19] Jack Linden: Ewan, we don’t mean to frustrate, but we are also a business so we have to blance out decisions. And many people really want these areas, they want that choice of experience
[11:20] Ewan Mureaux: we have the land, why not focus on making it more useful
[11:21] Ewan Mureaux: there are abandoned continents, all the sanitised new areas do is cause ghettoisation
…………..
[11:23] Jack Linden: And obviously we have to balance that with supply/demand and the current market
[11:24] Jack Linden: Nautlius is a drop in the ocean compared to the volume of land traded each month, it just happens to be very visible
I’ll make the full chat log available there are some excellent points from people who own a shit load more land than I do, including Sarah Nerd, Timo Daehlie and Chaos Mohr. So then this weekend parcels for nautilus went for sale at auction and started garnering bid of 40KL$+ or in real terms over $150 USD for a 1024m piece of digital real estate. Some of those sold are already up for sale at L$175k. So this public department that was set up to enrich mainland and the user experience of existing customers is now working for minimum wage creating new sanitised estates that are sold for amounts well beyond the means of normal residents or casual gamers. The other area and info hub that “the moles” are working on is yet more content surrounding the ghost town that is Bay City to try and give that the value to match the hype. Not that it matters when people are attempting to buy up exclusivity when LL is just discovering new places. It’s a simple plea here, dear Linden Lab as a fee paying, tier paying resident I would like to see a decent level of service and the area I have been paying hundreds of dollars for to come in for treatment. All they appear to be doing is causing old mainland to become a ghetto and encourage “white flight” to their extremely expensive new areas. To summarise, they fucked up the land price, they lied about releasing more land and they laid that there would be a team of residents creating content and building roads for the benefit of the community as a whole.
Now a lot of virtual real estate types got really fucked off with mainland. Prices fell apart, whole continents left to ruin, residents were tired of it. A lot of real estate types focused more heavily on private estates, especially as open space sims were made more accessible. In essence an Open Space is the same size as a normal region but sucks donkey dick for running scripts. They used to be limited to supporting 1875 prims but when they were made more accessible, the prices and conditions dropped but the prim allowance went up. Open Space sims run fine with a few avatars and buildings on them. They suck ass big time if you start trying to do script intensive stuff and it not only affects your sim but your core neighbours on the processor. So if you’re the type of retard that goes an opens a script-heavy club on one you lag yourself and your neighbours and you should be shot. Admittedly your realtor should be explaining this to you so you know what you’re getting.
The prices dropped and people went crazy for OS sims. They sold like cakes that were hot, seriously. This helped deflate mainland prices even more. Then today Jack in his infinite wisdom decides to move the goalposts again. Yep if you just bought a fuckload of these you can pay more or lose them. This isn’t a couple of dollars more this 67% increase on the price. Now, they aren’t beefing up the hardware any to match the demand put on them. Imagine this situation, I own a petrol station, I raise the price of fuel 67%, it doesn’t make your car drive any faster but you sure as hell might use it less.
I think my biggest concern about this whole land mismanagement fuck up debacle is the absolute inability to responsibly manage the estate. People want a steady ship and unfortunately in Jack Linden we have a one-eyed, hook handed, drunken pirate with vertigo at the helm. He’s fucked and he’s fucking us. Gambling was supposed to be banned in Second Life but you can hop on the roulette wheel of land ownership any time just remember that nothing is certain, prices will never be steady and your land may be at risk if you do not keep up your tier payments.
I think that is all I have to say at the moment.
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