Eliza Wrigglesworth

I've done that twice now, and in both instances the Linden that took care of it set the land for sale to me for 1L$ per meter.

Soen Eber

I think if you have 3 common borders with the abandoned land LL will sell it to you at the $1L/m price.

Eunoli Rain

After dumping my sims a while back I was able to go abandoned land shopping and had no trouble finding several abandoned plots on the water without many neighbors. I bought them, joined them and now have a really nice little area that is fairly isolated, mainland-wise.

DrFran

In Linden World, that's exactly what you did.

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bladyblue

Mainland was viable when the FIRST LAND program was working and before land flippers used newbie alts to grab all of the first land and sell it for premium prices.

Try to make the first land program work again and the mainland would work again.

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Qie Niangao

I'm actually not sure First Land would save Mainland at this point. A lot of other things have changed since then. At that point, SL was growing very fast. And there were no more attractive options for new people who wanted their own little parcels. Now there's Linden Homes, for one, and whatever that try-it-free thing is that Anshe is managing.

For that matter, I don't think there were even Homestead, née "OpenSpace" estate sims back then, although those don't matter so much now as they did for a while.

Seems to me that the Lab has been inventing new Land products to try any which way to attract more tier-payers, systematically undercutting its Mainland product.

As a result, Mainland addresses an ever narrower niche of the land market.

Giving away little parcels of nondescript Mainland without initial cost, as First Land did, seems barely distinguishable from the current situation, given the negligible cost of nondescript 512s now.

bladyblue

When I was noob and got my first 512, I instantly had a connection to SL and a reason to log in to set up my little home.

The other noobs that moved in all around me became my community. I could walk over, lean on their fence and have a neighborly chat. One guy was goth, another had a log cabin, I had a garden and beach set-up. IWW didn't have to join groups and find cliques to feel like we belonged to something in SL.

We all eventually moved on to other things in SL, but we kept those friendships and cherished those 'pioneer' experiences.

Being forced to search for an island that will accept you is not a good change for SL and retention of new players.

Qie Niangao

Isn't that what the Linden Homes sims were explicitly designed to do?

I do remember that there were dozens of us, all brand new landowners, in each First Land-parcelled sim. It was exciting because everybody was new at building, and lots of people were around most of the time, playing with their new land. There were so many newbies -- not just fresh alts -- all at once that rez dates over a year old seemed rare.

It's hard to imagine a growth rate so huge that such an experience could ever happen again.

Naiki

I like Mainland as it is..... If I wanted a themed area I would live somewhere like Adeon, if i want super themed I would go to private land... But I like the chequer board neighbourhood I live in...

Pie Psaltery

When you say "will get them to bring it to auction" ... what does that exactly mean?

I'm asking because a week or so ago I noticed that my sim had been mostly cleared off and the land had been not automatically set for sale at $L1 but had been listed as "auction" purple. But going to the Auction page of the SL site yielded no current auctions. Granted I didn't check every day, but I know earlier this week it was listed as "Auction" and today it is owned by LIFE Land Holdings and set as not for sale.

So ... how'd that happen? The land had been several smaller parcels owned by different people to being two larger abandoned (? - I'm guessing there) parcels owned by Governor Linden, to being two parcels that showed up purple on the map, to being owned by a Land Holding group - all within less then 2 weeks.

If it actually did "go to auction" - where the heck was the "auction" and why bother setting it to "auction" in the first place if a land baron had already had dibs on it?



Anyway, here's my favorite song about the Mainland for the last 8 years:

Qie Niangao

Yep, auctions happen pretty quickly now. Usually within two or three days after it shows purple on the map (which is when it gets an auction ID assigned) it will be listed for bids on the auction page for 48 hours, then if anybody bids, it's sold and changes hands in about an hour.

(The Map doesn't update immediately, so it may stay purple for a few days after the auction--just on the Map.)

Things don't go to auction automatically. Some Linden (often if not always Guy) has to manually revert the land, set the permissions, and decide what bits to include and how to divide or join parcels. I think they generally try to form the largest possible sensibly shaped chunks with whatever abandoned land is involved.

KT Kingsley

Aren't Openspace sims a different class of region to Homestaed, rather than a different name? Something like 10 avatars and just 1000 or so prims? Pretty much only useful as fillers. I've no idea if they still exist.

Tyche Shepherd

They are now - but originally Openspace was the name given to what are now Homesteads
There are about 110-120 Private estate Openspace regions - LL tend to use Homesteads for Mainland fillers (water sims etc) rather than Openspaces

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Couldbe Yue

I remember that time, it really was remarkable. When I finally got my first land I stuck a tower and trees on it. I only went premium to get the land because I really wanted that tower and needed somewhere to put it and I was so incapable of working out how to install the teleporter I had to drag the poor creator over to help me... The bonus for her though was I managed to convince one of my neighbours to buy one too. I loved that tower for years and each time I moved it was the first thing rezzed on my new land.

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Totem Flow

I'll always have my mainland....

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Naiki

Is that meant to be a sort of swipe at LL? Cause you say it an awful lot.

Kara Spengler

I highly doubt LL would ever go for that as nobody would give them premium fees anymore! For what? Premium-only sandboxes and the occasional freebie?

Oh, I am sure LL will claim the support. As everyone laughs at them saying it.

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Kara Spengler

I would love to see zoning but it will never happen. A few in our immediate area worked on creating a rural area theme. Rustic roads when they were paved and so on.

Then we soon learned it only takes one new person to move into the area to destroy the work of years by the entire neighbourhood.

Much as I dislike resident associations in RL maybe they would actually be useful in SL? Do not give them the power to do petty complaints against someone who used the wrong shade of white, but give them the tools to keep up a theme in their immediate area.

Beebo Brink

I'd love to get 1024m as the Premium land bonus.

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Lord

Oh, come on, y'all...LL isn't going to do anything about Mainland for another year... or two...they are waiting on the next wave of users to 'discover' them and buy it all up...think about it...what incentive would the big land barons have to buy up Mainland if they didn't think there would be a new 'wave' of users coming...or of LL steadfastly refusing to change the tier structure...it's simple, they think there is a new wave coming...my guess is that it is tied to believing that when it becomes easier for less-than-stellar-graphics capable computers to run SL reliably, coupled with new mobile applications, there will be more users and therefore no need to change anything...oh, except for the possibility someone will come along and engineer a better working virtual world...but that wouldn't happen...would it ?

Kara Spengler

It depends on the Linden. Some do not know about it, others ignore it, and some are blindly follow it when it does not make sense.

One 16 that Robo abandoned next to me (guess what it used to be for) I wanted to add and it took at least 2 tries to do so. Why? Because I did not own 3 sides. Attend this configuration though:

1 side was a sim border

2 sides were me

1 side was a protected road

You would not believe how much effort it took to explain to LL that I was the only viable potential buyer.

Jack Belvedere

A friend was trying to trade out her linden home and it kept telling her for over a week they're all sold out.

If I had set up the Linden Homes, I would have made them with more infrastructure--roads, common areas, interesting landscapes. Right now they're not very conducive to community because there's nowhere for neighbors to gather and have events that could foster little communities.

Mainland is difficult because I think the majority of problems lie in that there's too many eyesore areas, not enough infrastructure, not enough visually appealing landscapes. Don't really know how you'd fix that at this point. The newer continents are the worst. I really enjoy the areas with more theme and infrastructure too. I'm hardly logging in these days for unrelated reasons but someone would have to hold a gun to my head for me to sell my little Bay City plot.

A friend bought a really nice parcel in Chartreuse, though. Some of the older areas are still pretty nicely maintained. (she got contacted by someone though accusing her of tearing down a pagoda--whatever that is lmao--that had been there apparently since 2003 which she didn't, the land was empty when she bought it, people are insane)

I guess if I was running things--and you probably don't want me running things--I'd probably slowly transform mainland as it was abandoned, making the areas more visually appealing before making them available again.

whyroc

The value of virtual land is related to plain and simple, avatar density, The amount of people using it per square meter in-world actually logged in and chatting/playing . At some point in 2007-8 SL totally jumped the shark as it were and shot themselves in the foot assuming that 'any old empty land' is what the market wanted. That whole eastern continent was not needed. SL land prices tanked and with it the history, themes, magic and value of the perception of 'owning virtual land'. Another company i was involved with did exactly the same thing (to my screaming and kicking). Just because actual server space is cheap, does it mean that the value of virtual land is zero?

SL has only one option in my mind.. to not re-sell abandoned land for a while. They need to pull up the bootstraps for a year, and make effort possible to shrink the virtual world smaller both in navigation and physically (well avatar physically).

A big opportunity is to stop the free linden home crap, put these new people into the abandoned parcels.. hire some SL people to build up these areas with nicer apartments, small homes etc that fit with the theme of the area.

LL actually has done a decent job of 'nicifiying' the sims in some areas of the mainland. As resident of Bay City I can say there is lots of stuff to check out for the new person to SL around where I am.. this could be built up easily in other areas of SL.

The mainland is about history.. SL needs to bring back the mystique of owning a piece of something that is evolving, not necessarily growing at this time.

A huge factor would be to really shore up vehicles and sim crossings, i think some work has been done on this. You can drive for a pretty long while on the mainland (old side).

What if LL made a statement saying 'they were not going increase the size of mainland' this could in effect drive the average parcel price up into something respectable. It's like interest rates, if there's no profit in it for the little guy to speculate on the value of the commodity, then there is no action and no 'fun' in it.

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Couldbe Yue

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Aki Shichiroji

The mainland is history.

There are a couple ways to read that sentence.

LL did slow the sale of abandoned parcels after a while... it didn't really work. If anything, the dearth of inactive and permanently cluttered parcels could have driven people away.

I agree it didn't help they tried coming up with their own separate housing project (Linden Homes), in effect competing with themselves.

I would like to see more incentive for people to take on the Mainland. If the cost of land to LL is truly so low that they can afford to have such a huge percentage of land sitting around empty, then certainly they can make being premium more worth it and start the ball rolling for users who just need that initial nudge to get their prim addiction rolling.

In addition to that, I would like to see the bulk of the empty regions either get consolidated (and useful and reasonable content added) or removed entirely. The ridiculous addition of sims '09ish really drove mainland in to the ground and while water-side parcels on the two old continents still do well, almost anything on the others has difficulty selling.

With that said, this topic comes up every couple of months and we all come up with the same kind of feedback. It's been like this for years. Even if LL were to commit to move forward with some changes along these lines, I would say I'd believe it when I saw it.

So...

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