SL, why U <3 me so much I can't standz it…

What happened SL? Why U ❤ me everywherez?
For years I wanted to have land on Nautilus. Beautiful layout, all double prim, nice grid, etc. But then the Heart Baron arrived, in force… The blight of SL…

This is all over SL too:

The problem is not just in the map blight, Heart land builds tend to be very intrusive, blocking the view for all neighbors:

Back in my day (adjusts corn hat, shakes granny fist at you kids) we kept this kind of a build to a skybox.

There is actually a train moving in a circle inside that glow up there, but I think that might be the person behind the Heartland plot here… This is just one example – and in this case Heart is justified. But this kind of build is also often found all by itself, in the middle of a river, by a road, or whatever.

Polite people don’t litter the ground level up like this.

You wanna do big blightly builds that destroy the view for 2 sims around you… do it in the sky, where nobody else cares.

Its why the outside of my skybox looks like this:

Because its over 3000m up, and up here, I can be like that and put my business all up in your business because your business isn’t up here anyway. 🙂
(OK, I did just do this this week… It used to just be solid black)
This is my way of saying – the lady in that box is weird, give her some space up here. I take pains to put my skyboxes at heights none of my nearby neighbors are actively using. And if I get one who feels the need to start rezzing near me after I put this here, those walls get magenta and glowing… 😛

At ground I give my neighbors this:

Because I want to give them the respect of being able to enjoy their land.

 

But heart baron doesn’t respect Second Life, or its users. They clutter up the place with ugly builds that destroy the experience of everyone around them.

They even often have banlines up:

Sigh… Last time I came here most of the parcels around had banlines and it was tricky moving around unless you walked on the road. This time it was just this one, but it comes and goes. Usually unrented Heart lots have banlines on… But that policy might have changed. I hope so…

Thankfully thus far Zindra is only lightly infected by this plague:

I don’t think there is anything that can be done about this… but it is very frustrating nonetheless to see SL stuck down this path. A failure in vision to have better zoning rules, and a lack of rules about blotting out the map (as far as I know), has led us to this point.

Over the last year, I’ve started seeing more and more mainland competing land barons use the same tactic: blot the map, put up walls around your lots, and raise banlines…

It is leaving much of mainland looking rather ugly. It has only made limited inroads into Zindra though. At least so far.

Who would ever have thought Zindra would be the ‘nice respectable looking’ part of Second Life?

 

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About that dead land market in SL…

… I just won an auction today for a 512m lot, for L$14,510.

Ouch.

But if you think I’m crazy, three other auctions for lots smaller than 1000m on moderate land went for over L$100,000. I didn’t bookmark them and don’t know how to find recent auctions once they end – that’s the rate they were at 30 minutes prior to auction end when I stopped looking at the general page and focused in on just my lot.

So yeah… the market is completely, totally, utterly, no qualms about it, dead.

Right?

That’s what we keep hearing.

So what gives?

Well those three pricey lots were in Bay City, on a little finger of a peninsula. If you got all 3, you’ve just won 4 sides protected in Bay City. If you got the one at the end of the finger, 3 sides. The middle 2 sides, the other end 3 sides (one side of which being road).

My lot? water adult land that my existing land wraps around… no idea how it went from owned to for auction without ever passing through abandoned. But to whoever did give it up: you just lost $14,510L that you could have made off of me.

LLs got it instead.

And I bought it for the sole purpose of not building much of anything on it other than probably extending my collection of water lilies… 🙂

Meanwhile some lots went for rock bottom prices, and I’ll bet there were a few that didn’t even sell – I forgot took though I must add that I thought they all had at least 1 bidder this time (sometimes they don’t).

What has happened to land in SL is that its become particular. Land with value has well… value… protected, water or water side, roadside, hilly (flatland is more for new users, and today those people get linden homes), good shape, and so on.

Look at all the abandoned lots around mainland. Go and really look at some of them. There tend to be two trends:

First you will see the obvious: rows of bad cuts or flat land in a grid. People abandon bad cuts for the obvious reason that they are bad cuts. As in, the lot is hard to use for anything, too skinny here, zig-zap shape, or whatever… have to get very creative to build a building. Sometimes so bad (like a 256m long, 4m wide strip) that not even a creative person could use it (when Zindra was new I saw a 128m long 4m wide strip used by an ad-farmer, who had to suffer daily ARs as a result – just in case anyone is getting that idea right now).

The second seems baffling: very large posh looking pieces of land. They control all the key points around them – protected, maybe water, maybe road, maybe a pleasant hill or cliff, and so on. The reason is there, but its something many miss. Too big.
– Bite off more than you can chew… and sooner or later it gets you.

These folks could save themselves by slicing it up properly and selling off in pieces – but ego or refusal to accept less than they paid results in them instead giving up and accepting back none of what they paid.

I got out of Campion, where I had just shy of 8000m of land, by slicing off most of it and selling it for rock bottom to the bots – then sitting for a while on the exclusive mountain top view until a buyer who wanted it enough showed up. It took longer than it should have because I failed to cut out a perfect tier breakpoint for the exclusive part. I also held out despite repeated offers of 10L/m, I waited until I got about 20L/m – but probably lost the difference in the extra month of tier.

I did this because I was ambivalent about selling in the first place
– pro tip for the ‘not a pro land seller’. If you are not in the business of flipping land, don’t try to be. Don’t sell to sell now… set your land to sell before you actually want to move out… Ok yeah, how will you know that…
– But I have found that I have only done well in moving when I did it at a time where I did not feel a crisis of ‘must move now’ but rather felt a ‘I’ve lost that loving feeling with this place, but maybe I can get it back.’
– Set for sale then… and if nobody buys maybe you will fall in love with your land again and take it off market… but if they buy, you are just enough over it that you can move on… and because you weren’t in crisis mode, you haven’t yet resorted to bot prices. Or maybe like me you used bots to cut off the chaff and leave yourself with the wheat over which to be ambivalent.

Land flippers will call that insane. But then that is because they move volume. Land users on the other hand… if you try to swim with those sharks, they’re going to see a seal in the water… Better to sell when you have time to wait it out, and in pieces that look ideal after you shave off the chaff.

My oldest friend in SL is also currently one of the largest land flippers in SL. When I speak to this friend and hear how they talk about land and choices they make… I realize that this person could absolutely crush me like a flea if I tried to compete in their business – not just in terms of reserve capital, but more importantly; in terms of know-how.

(And I also have an idea of how rough it was for this person to enter the business – you basically have to jump in as a seal in a pool of sharks, and grow teeth before they, often very politely, finish you off.)

Which points to another thing: a lot of that abandoned land you see… that’s sometimes the seals after the sharks are done with them.

Mainland versus Estate – which is the better bang for your buck to Linden Lab?

A not entirely complete thought here. But one I’m working on.

I’ve seen it written many times by residents of Second Life that estates are the land-profit center for Linden Lab, and the loss of estates while mainland is growing is a bad thing for the health of the grid.

I’m not convinced. But I am open to seeing numbers that show me where I am missing the point.

Here is how I see it:

Volume is what is key. Better to have a lot of low paying customers than one higher paying one.

This is both good in raw profit numbers, and stability.

Show me the the money:

How many mainland residents does it take to equal one estate?

If we assume the average mainlander owns 2048+base 512 (probably they own less, but some own vastly more…) for $15/month – and if we assume every one of them paid annually (the lowest rate – $6/month)…

Then a full mainland sim holds 25.6 of them.
(65536m / 2560m)

They pay LLs $(15+6)*25.6 = $537.6 per month.
– For every mainland sim’s worth of land LLs manages to get occupied, that’s what it makes. And unlike estates, this does not have to be contiguous (together) – it can be here and there with mole builds and abandoned lots between (see below for how much unused land they can afford).

An estate pays $295 per month; regardless of its occupancy. So the question is, how empty does mainland need to get to start making only $295/month per sim?

So lets empty the mainland sim a little…
295/21 = 14.05 mainlanders to pay the same in per month as one estate holder, burning up 28774m (44% of a sim). All mainlanders after this are added bonus.

To me, that implies that premium accounts make more money for LLs than estate accounts. Walmart philosophy.

Estate is a courtesy service – a model that assumed premium accounts would be unpopular. It attempts to shift the revenue elsewhere. However estate sales is simply unable to raise as much as you cannot convince someone to pay for an estate what they pay for mainland.

The less land each mainlander has too… the better for Linden Lab this gets.

The difference is small, but it is there. Its the old model for any service like this: the less each customer uses, as long as they keep paying, the better. But in this case… its actually, the less they buy, the better. Its the idea that you can make more money selling a candy bar for 99-cents than you can for selling the same bar for $1.50, because you’re more likely to sell 2 of them.

If all mainlanders owned only 512m of land… paying 6/month. Then 49.2 of them would be one estate account, but they’d only burn up 38% of a sim – all remaining land on that sim would be added bonus.

– Translation: from half to 62% of mainland can be empty, and still equal the money made from an equivalent amount of estate land.

Think about that next time you lament abandoned land and mole builds. Yes, it’d be better to move that abandoned land, but until it hits over 60% of maninland being in Linden hands, its no crisis.

The above factors out the $1000 setup fee, as that’s not a regular cost, and probably largely lost from buying / installing the server.

For mainland, that $1000 is made up in the first month or two of higher revenue than estate – and most mainland was set up years ago…

At the same time, mainlanders can be given minimal support, and all you need to do is keep the power running on their servers. Go use your Live Chat support sometime, and compare it to the support given to an estate holder – yeah, its costs more to support estate land… People paying $295/month expect something more than answers read from a script. People paying $15/month expect it to, but if they don’t get it, who cares? they do, but they (self included) don’t matter as much individually…

Which leads to…

A bed of nails is better than lying on a single spike:

All of the above stated – how much harm occurs when one mainlander quits, moving on to whateverville…

Its all about gaming the odds. Walk into any random Walmart and think about how much business they would lose if you plucked out one customer and sent them next door to Target. Now go to some exclusive shop, like the little golfing antiques store at Pebble Beach where the average item on display costs about $10,000… Take away one of their customers…

Ok… so the obvious response to my points above is that I have just proven that it hurts Linden Labs everytime an estate holder quits.

Yes, it does. That’s why its better off not having these customers in the first place.

You’ll note that way back in the good old days they built up a lot of mainland and sold folks tiny plots here and there. Then new execs come in and tried to Tiffany-up the place and sell us all estates. We bought a lot of them… so other execs came in and said it was time to become exclusive and corporate… We bought some of them…
– Then we got sticker shock and started dropping them.

Those execs got pink-slipped, and they brought in one who came from the business of selling people little video games and CD-Roms full of virtual goods (The Sims – you know you bought that expac with the new designs in 2.5D kitchen tables… cause it was -cheap-).

So they’re back to promoting premium, and have been for about the past year and a half.

Why is this? Not just the numbers above…

But it hurts when you lose one of those estates. It hurts so much, that for the larger ones, Linden Lab is now somewhat hostage to their whims. Imagine if say… Caledon packed up tomorrow and rage quit Second Life.
– Who do you think would drop a dime first? Desmond, or LLs?

OK, maybe that’s borderline. Is Caledon isn’t big enough yet. Play that game with Anshe Chung? She’d probably get a personal visit from Rodvick in a bathrobe, champagne bottle, roses, and a ‘how can we help you?’

But think about why Caledon is a reflex for me for a moment. Becuase I’m a mainlander. To me, as an ant in a hill of ants, Caledon is like Atlas holding up the world. To Anshe Chung… Caledon is like ‘who, oh did I get something on my shoe again?’

So image if little old me cancelled my alt’s premium account.

I know what I’d get – cause I’ve done this before when I switched off my old account. I’d get an automated email… It might not even come to the right address… 😉

It would take 49 of me quitting Premium for them to feel it as hard as it takes a one sim estate owner quitting.

Answer: I can’t hurt them the same way. By intent or not – I’m a less risky investment as a customer.

I’m a hoodrat. Nobody cares about hoodrats. Trust me. They only care when writing their Master’s thesis in social work.

Walmart can lose thousands of customers to all manner of reasons and not even need to keep a record on it. But that golf shop, it loses one; and the owner’s kid doesn’t get to go to college.

That’s why we see the push on premium, and why we shouldn’t care so much when estates seem to be going down in numbers – especially if there’s a like timed rise in mainland.

The more mainland SL gets, the healthier it gets.