Effective immediately, the supply of cheap First Land parcels by Linden Lab will cease. Premium accounts will still be able to own up to 512m of land as part of their Premium membership package as they do now, the only change is that we will not be supplying the discounted parcels as we have done in the past. The website and knowledgebase will be amended to reflect this change shortly.
The First Land program was put in place to encourage land ownership for those moving up to Premium membership. Increasingly we have found that these cheap L$1 per meter parcels were not benefitting those people as intended. Because of the low price, they were being immediately sold, or bought via alts, purely for profit.
We have discussed many methods to ensure that First Land is used as intended but have decided that there is no way to do this without significantly impacting on resident freedoms. Therefore the First Land Program will no longer be provided. It may still be possible to find cheap land for sale, for example small parcels that have been abandoned and recycled by us, but it will not be sold specifically as First Land. Our hope is that through much higher levels of mainland expansion, market forces will act to bring resale prices down over time, for example the new continent being brought up to the east.
You may ask what, without First Land, is the value of a Premium account? Well consider that the L$1200 stipend per month (around USD$4.50) plus 512m free tier per month (around USD$5.00) means that the monthly premium account essentially pays for itself. We are actively looking for additional ways to increase premium value, and we would love to hear any ideas the community has on this.
As always if you have any questions or feedback on the First Land issue itself, please email the concierge team at concierge@lindenlab.com.
Official Second Life Blog 
way to go, this supports your land barons even more. I bet you 512 that anshe chung is dancing about this now….
More ways to increase the value of a Premium account?
Here’s a biggie: Premium/Priority Support.
Yay.. NOT.
This is no surprise to those of us who have been following SL and LL for a while.
I do hope, however, that this will not mark the end of Mainland growth and expansion after the new eastern land.
“It may still be possible to find cheap land for sale, for example small parcels that have been abandoned and recycled by us, but it will not be sold specifically as First Land.”
Land sold by you may be very cheap, but the odds of anyone who isn’t running a land-purchase bot getting it is slim, surely?
One of the things keeping land prices low is the steady trickle of people selling their first land off quickly when they realise they don’t have the faintest idea what to do with it…
First, you raise prices for new islands, then you screw up the database and networking so badly that no sim can operate without massive lag. Then you make it impossible for people to teleport anyone not in your own friends list. Now you show that you only want people with lots of money.
Linden Labs, you are sell outs! Your people you hire as liasons cannot any questions, none of them help one bit. You have bad ratings by the Better Business Bureau and your customer service line not only never gets answered, but instead puts you into a voicemail system.
Go ahead Phil, we know you think you want that metaverse to go through Linden Labs, but with the way your networking and database crash regualrly, your dreams will blow away quickly. Stop chasing the money and start fixing the issues that you all are creating each week and never fixing. I think Linden Labs needs to have their own place rolled back to a previous time when it worked!
Makes sense.
First Land was irretrievably broken once unverified accounts were allowed. And as the population grows, it’d only be harder and harder to keep up with demand.
Dicker Hax Says:
February 20th, 2007 at 1:17 PM PST
way to go, this supports your land barons even more. I bet you 512 that anshe chung is dancing about this now….
Actually the fact that realitors pay so well for brand new land makes percect sence not to give it away to noobs..why give away a sim when someone will pay 3000usd and up? ..i’m suprised it took this long 🙂
Oh. Great. I just joined yesterday, on advice of an academic colleague, and paid for a year of premium and was waiting to buy land until I felt I understood the system a little bit – maybe a week.
One day and a rug gets pulled out. Does this happen often? Am I going to regret paying for a year of this in advance?
so with all this new land coming up in the east, and if it is not being offered as first land, at what price is LL going to sell this land? i’m curious what LL thinks land is worth.
Wow, pretty shocking news. I remember when I started even paying 512sqm for L$5000 at that time was a crazy thought for me. Who would buy land that’s not even real for around $20? That’s insane. If LL want’s to ease people into SL this will make it hard for people to grasp the idea of spending real money for virtual things.
You know, you could just abolish premium membership and the concept of tier, and just make everyone pay a flat per server charge, distributed on a pro rata basis for existing mainland sims. What exactly are premium accounts *for*, anyway? It’s not as if you make any significant amount of income from them – as you point out, it’s just a package of things that could be bought individually.
What is the status of those who’ve bought premium accounts for the advertised first land benefits? Is it strictly legal to advertise something and then withdraw one of the advertised benefits without offering those affected refunds on the remaining time of their premium accounts?
There wasn’t any mention up until now of the difficulties of getting first land while signing up for premium accounts.
“Well consider that the L$1200 stipend per month (around USD$4.50) plus 512m free tier per month (around USD$5.00) means that the monthly premium account essentially pays for itself.”
So does a free account when considered that way … can’t build anything of value on 512m, have to buy or rent more land. might as well have a free account and rent from the land barons as try to build something for oneself
I’m sorry; this is a serious error. The problem is that many residents signed up for premium memberships when the ability to buy First Land was part of the deal; by making this change, you have removed value from their memberships RETROACTIVELY. At current land prices, the land price discount is worth at least US$20.
A more fair move might be to have a final release of First Land that people who were premium members before today (and who have never exercised their land buying rights) would be eligible to buy. New premium members (those who join after the change is announced) would not be eligible to buy the reduced-price land.
😡 I was waiting for a nice First Land parcel and i didn’t buy land to wait for it… AND NOW THIS?
Thanks LL, REALLY THANKS.
In reality you guys should at least offer first land to all current premium accounts if they haven’t bought one. It’s only the fair thing to do, otherwise it’s grounds on false advertising.
Why not setup a temporary program so that all current qualifying residents can request First Land, then have their land be assigned to them. This was how it was ‘way back when’ and it worked fine. Once the list of eligible residents is exhausted, close the program for good.
It’d help stem the tide of resentment and missed entitlement.
Its pretty discouraging I actually wanted to build on my 512 if i could ever get it. every time i went the land was being scooped up by bots run it like a homestead where the account has to hold it for a certain length of time before flipping it that would discourage the bandits. I just want some land I can live on without haveing to pay 50-60$ US for vapor.
give us back our 500 stipends a week, and better support and FIX LAG
I have to agree with Shirley. Dropping the axe on First Land with no warning whatsoever is a poor approach to those who were considering the purchase of their first parcel.
I know it took me a while to experiment with prim counts, landscaping and building on my First Land before I moved to acquire more.
Shirley posed an excellent alternative. A final release of First Land for those who became Premium members before today.
Well, there goes any chance of me upgrading to premium.
However, I do see the point that they’re just being flipped for a profit.
Linden Lab will do away with any system that gets gamed. It happened with rating when people were gaming that system to get more L$, it happened with the developer’s rewards when people were gaming that system to get more US$, and it’s happened with first land.
Is it a shame that a bunch of bad apples have to ruin it for the whole bunch? Yes. But don’t blame Linden Lab; blame those who are abusing the system and new residents that have caused this action to be taken. Linden Lab isn’t at fault here; consider blaming those who are using bot run throw away accounts to swoop in, purchase first last, and resell it.
Go nuts double everyones tier continue to ignore live help request close the phonelines, but please for my sanity and others FIX THE GAME first! can we make it enjoyable for all before we crank prices and do away with the things the majority of the long time players pay for wether it works or not? It like selling a CAR WITH NO WHEELS .You can sit in it radio works great engine humms like a kitten but you cant go no where *shrugs*
Right on!
“First Land” areas have always seemed like toxic waste dumps… like sandboxes with no auto-return set. Land barons get a few parcels and then put up monsterous eye sores to get their neighbors to sell out cheap and move, giving the land baron a nice big swath of land to sell at regularly market rates.
Not to mention the confusion that seemed rampant between “free land” and “First Land”.
I would have thought that you would give a 512 piece of land with every premium account, it would ensure constant expansion and growth by premium accounts. Goes to show how the marketing people that sink companies think, I’m watching this as a case study, I have never seen a company with so much potential, shot itself so many times and so often.
Without the availability of any type of First Land, there is LESS incentive to become a premium member. Tier then only becomes useful if you are a member of a group which does own land and needs the tier donated. Returning the stipend to the L$500 mark might help make up for the loss of this account feature.
I have been doing regular searches for first land since joining in order to gauge the availability (none) while deciding if I should go premium. First land does not have to be so far below market price that it immediately gets turned over. Set a reasonable price around 3 to 5 L$/m2 to make it affordable after collecting and saving stipend for less than one quarter (of course while NOT spending in the rest of SL’s economy).
Just how will the newly created land be sold?
Damn … I have been trying hard the last 4 weeks to buy first land …. now they cancel the whole thing ?
How will be able to get our cheap land as advertised ? Please give some land to all of us who have a premium account and have not been able to buy First land.
Fair is Fair !
I have “bought” land on a private island, (since good First Land was unavailable) so the “free tier” included with premium membership is of no use to me. I think you’ll find many people in a similar situation — you should figure out a way to make Premium membership attractive to this segment of the population.
I’m not against premium membership, but it would cost me money. I’d rather buy lindens, and earn lindens from content creation, than become Premium.
The suggestion upthread about special tech support for premium members would be one thing that would be very attractive. Another would be raising the stipend so that the net in lindens is closer to the real-world cost.
BOT’s cannot buy first land .first land can be purchesed once by a new user once thats it bots have nothing to do with it.the new user can set it for ten time what they paid its completely up to them and has nothing to do with realitors or BOTS of any kind.
I’m glad this happend. I dream of the day land on the mainland returns to resonable prices that makes owning land and creating things enjoyable. It’s nice to make money in SL but what people have done to completly exploit the generosity of LL is sad and the people who actaully deserve land to create at reasonable prices was once opon a time. i’m hopeing there will be rules on the ammount of Sale signs people can garbage up SL with. That is a complex topic but one can only hope.
well is there no way to have “new residents” apply for first land and then them be assigned a lot. Yes they would have to take what is given to them but at least linden labs can give first land to premiums who are originals somehow? I dont know credit card info is usually a pretty good indication of who is an original or not ? Anyhow this was predictable given the large amount of complaints. I just think there is a way to give out first land to people who pay for a premium. Say they can apply only after being premium for 90 days. They submit a written application to linden labs via this website and the support team goes and reviews their info for “originality” and then if they qualify for first land give them a parcel and then its theirs. Its better then removing it altogether I would think?
Whilst it’s not perhaps a popular move, it is a good one in my opinion. Fair enough, I doubt I would own land now if it wasn’t for First Land, but the land buying process/economy was being corrupted beyond belief.
Maybe if First Land had been available for a 512 Linden fee, and had no resale rights … meaning that the owner could live in it, as a Premium Member, but the land would only be able to be abandoned to Gov Linden if the owners wished to leave it (meaning it would go back into the First Land market as a newly available plot).
This would even stop renters, since the person who owned the land would need to pay one Premium account per plot of land. The economics of renting to people without premium accounts wouldn’t make it worth doing. The person who is renting would be better of buying their own plot of First Land, even if they only stayed there for a month before abandoning the land back to Gov Linden.
I think the idea is there, but the execution is perhaps lacking. Maybe a solution was discussed, and seemed perfectly viable, but was deemed to be a waste of resources … when there are many bugs to be ironed out, and features to be added during this crazy period of growth.
Who knows? 🙂
I am not happy to read this. First you told me “come on, be a premium and you will get your firstland to make it your home”.
No you tell me that this was a joke? No you make me homeless, or victime of the impossible prices what i have to pay for a little place.
this ist not fair. It is not my fault when you allow speculaters to make their deals and destroy the environment with their “for sales” things. Nobody wants to leave on a place like that. So at the end why do you dont restrict the acting of those speculators?
Ah, yes, i forgot, they make monney, and they help you make more monney too.
I can tell you what you can do to make me forget my angry. You can increase the free tiers per month to 1024.
You know, I was a premium customer at one time. I had my first land assigned to me, I thought it worked well. I mean sure, I didn’t get much of a choice who my neighbors were. However, there was a system in place (created by the residents) that allowed for trading of that land to someone else.
I dropped this premium account a long time ago. Why? Put simply it’s because I found it was much easier to rent, then having to pay for my land AND tier fees. The stipend is not enough to warrant having a premium account, and since you’re taking away first land (without replacing it first with some sort of feature), I see many more accounts dropping to free status.
Also I’d like to point out that many of us had predicted that unverified accounts would ruin things for people. I think it’s not only the cause of land profiteering, but also a lot of griefing, not to mention the overgrowth of the sim population. (27K users, may as well not even log in). I still fail to understand why they are allowed.
Don’t get me wrong, I love second life.. But I think LL needs to listen more to the customer base.
I have to agree that this benefit has been abused by people creating multiple alt accounts simply to create profit, but a grandfather clause for all existing Premium Members really would help ease the transition. Otherwise it really is a slap in the face of newbies who were counting on First Land as a motivation for upgrading.
As long as you’re cleaning house, can you get rid of traffic counts based on camping? That would be a positive in the quality of SL life.
I’ve been messing around in second life for the last week or so, and was actually looking at the “register for a premium account” page (jI was ust about to register) when this announcement came out. This change, and the problems I’ve had (being repeatedly logged out, not able to teleport and so on) have made me reconsider. I enjoy the second life approach to virtual reality very much, and would like to find another virtual reality similar to second life that I could go to instead. Can anybody recommend one for me?
Gee thanks, guys, I’ll never own land now unless I want to buy it at the price of an average used car in USD. Not a chance. I doubt I’ll ever upgrade now.
The only premium service I care about right now is the ability to LOG IN!!
You set up a ‘RESTRICTED’ option a couple of days ago but have yet to use it, even though we are running consistently over 30000 users when the system can’t support more than 20000 effectively. Result? I spend 20 minutes trying to log in , over and over again…Precisely how long do you think your premium members are going to tolerate that, when every day we see more and more griefers getting on with free accounts screwing up sims and basically being idiots, because they know that nothing is getting done to stop this behavior? This place used to be fun – now its becoming more work than its worth…
I tried upgrading to a premium membership in order to get land before. this is nothing new. It was impossible to own land if you weren’t rich or a land baron already. I have no desire to pay so much for something like that. Maybe you could just GRANT land to new premium subscribers. land that can’t change hands to identified land barons. Hopefully this will end up better in the end.
I am one of the users that upgraded to Premium because I wanted to purchase First Land. I upgraded a week ago and was under the impression that First Land was difficult, but not impossible, to obtain. I searched and searched and searched for days. I joined the First Land Finders group.
I’m not going to scream about oh, this isn’t fair or this is false advertising (both of which may be true, but anyway…) I guess I’d just like to voice my disappointment. I was excited about being able to get “into the game” the way others have, with First Land.
It would be nice if those of us who upgraded and were not able to take advantage of First Land could maybe have the chance to at least have first crack at the new land coming up, even if it is sold at a higher rate than First Land.
Thanks for listening.
Gutted.
As Micah said “I have been doing regular searches for first land since joining in order to gauge the availability (none) while deciding if I should go premium.”
As I’d not seen any land, I thought upgrading to Premium could wait til after payday at the end of the month – no huge rush I thought. How wrong can a girl be?
I now have no incentive to ugrade to Premium. I can buy the Linden Dollars I need and I can’t possibly justify paying market value for land I don’t know how to use – it’ll probably take a lot of practice for me to learn how to build.
I’m a regular reader of the blog, but this is my first post – I feel that strongly about it.
Hi there just a thought and not sure how it would work out ….
What if you kept the idea of having 512 sq m of land for new users and would give then full rights to that land just make it not avaliable to resell. After all there is not addtional charge for for a 512 parcel anyway. Then if the residnet decides to get more land then they would intern donate back the 512 parcel for another new user. But now that i think more about it … peeps may not want to upgrade to a lager portion of a sim but you could always donate that 512 for the 512L like before for a specfic amount of time and this will gain new customers to join as well as give them an option to stay in game and decide if they truly want to purchase their own land etc. and will give back the sq m to linden labs for new customers …
Not sure if this type of support would work but may give new users a taste of SL
Hope that made sense
I fail to see how market forces will bring prices DOWN when databases are so lagged that searches are mostly out of date by the time they reach your client…………..
Sad news for the little guy.
Wow. I agree that first land should not be available to anyone not premium before today, but should still be permitted to purchase… within a 60 day window or so. That means that you, LL, would need to get it out in a fair and timely manner. It is not fair to the people who signed up with the hope of getting first land in mind to should have the possibility taken away.
Although what this will do to the economy… well, it might be good for me since I rent apartments. 😉
I agree with most of the posters that, advertising a service and then just withdrawing it is plain wrong and deceptive. I upgraded to premium to find a first land. I know it was scarce, but I heard of people able to acquiring it.
How will you guarantee that the new land will benefit the new persons?
It would have been much better to make a ruling that first land could not have been sold for about 3 months or so. I specifically searched for just a 512 m2 parcel. Not intended to sell it.
So how are you going to refund me?
Or will you increase the stipend so that we can afford land at these higher prices of land?
Premium accounts have been growing less and less in value..heh. For those newer residents that don’t know, you used to get a $500L weekly stipend for your premium accounts, then it went to $400L and now $300L. Now, no more first land…wow, you really know how to put the choke on people LL. But that’s okay…I’ve survived almost 3 years on my basic account…pay $10US for a lifetime basic account you said and that’s all I’ve ever needed. You keep making premium accounts look like crap…why would I ever want one heh? I’ll just continue to survive on making my own $L and using it to pay for my large plot of land…why get a premium account when I make more off my money that sits there in my Ginko account collecting interest yay!
Really…get your crap together LL
I understand why you did this. Now, just make it right for those of us who BOUGHT AND PAID FOR the right to purchase first land before today.
Perhaps a lottery to randomly distribute lots to those of us in that situation. Or maybe just notify people of land sales in the order they PAID for their premium account? The easiest? A partial refund. I’d accept 3000L.
As representative of the First Land Searchers group I truely feel sorry this descision has been made. The reasoning behind this ruling is also questionable, and probably arguable from a contract point of view.
1. Current Land Searchers, for the larger part, have seriously been looking for a parcel to own themselves.
2. The unavailability of First Land has not been the result of huge speculation, but of the incapacity of Linden to address the problem of land-bots.
3. Premium account members have INVESTED in the expanse of Second Life based upon the contractual promise to right of ownership of a parcel of First Land.
Taking into account that there are thousands of premium membership owners who have signed up to pay $ 5,- a month for the right to hold First Land, it brings thousands of dollars of venue for Linden Labs this is easy money.
Cutting on the First Land allocation in this fashion will not achieve the goals intented. On the contrarry, it will work counter productive. It leaves thousands of frustrated users who will no longer support the ideals and growth of SL, it will fend off new upgrades to Premium accounts and will only end in a new surge in landprices.
The promise of finding alternative ways to make premium interesting again is not a substantial offer. Over 90% of the users have upgraded to premium solely for the purpose of owning First Land, and the only way to compensate this would be to increase the monthly stipend enough to enable us to buy a regulare parcel.
Additional Efforts that could be taken:
1. During transition phase premium account members receive enough L$ to purchase a normal lot.
2. Linden delivers enough first land for current premium account holders to fullfil the contractual First Land promise.
Rulings that could ensure First Land usage as intended:
1. First Land buyers take a contractual obligation to hold the First Land parcel for at least 1 year.
2. During a planned transition phase only existing parcels can be traded and auctioned. New parcels can only be sold if they originate from new regions.
Let us negotiate a transition phase
I truly hope there are some laywers out there with a copy of the original terms of use and premium membership rights that will make an effort of this issue in a RL court of law.
Its about time.
Obviously this had to happen. It is impossible to have regulated sectors in a desperately free economy like the one in SL. We all saw it coming. The only question was when.
On the other hand, I am sure that many people did go premium because they thought first land was available. I did, and did not discover the true situation until I started to search for the promised (first) land. It is a little unfair towards us, since we were newbies at the, and could not know.
Oh well, we will survive.
Thank you to all those who abused this program for pure greed and profit and ruined it for everyone. Way to go!
It is a shame that they didn’t make a comment in this blog about what they ARE going to do with new land that gets created, because they’re not stopping expansion right.
So come on Linden, how will you decide the price to sell it initially, will it be based on market averages, or location or what?
I’ve come to teh conclusion that this gradual stripping away of specific benefits for the premium accounts is a softly softly means of doing away with the entire concept altogether. Any premium account paid for yearly and receiving 400 L$ a week or more (ie teh older ones) is a loss leader for LL, and it makes sense for LL to do their best to maximise profits by minimising the number of people on these accounts. Moi, cynical?
Obvious that LL should pay attention to the current Premium Members and offer them at least a last opportunity for Firt Land. Just to prevent some nasty law cases…
Besides this point, it sounds to me that LL found another way to generate more money for themselves: restrict First Land, hence reducing available land for sale by the ppl in SL and monopolize their own position. Nice way to get a fuller wallet…
If First Land is a problem by being sold at high prices, you have to ensure that there is enough contraweight for this by supplying more land and act against land buying robots etc. This would benefit both LL as the members who want to have First Land to use or sell…Let the economic market work its own way, dont restrict it to your own benefits!
Well, I can see where this is going.
Thank you for your concern for our well-being. After all, offering inducements to sign up for premium membership isn’t necessary when you offer such stellar customer service and such a lag-free and inventory-safe grid, hm?
Linden Labs, you really need to honor first land for the primum accoutns that havent exercised that right. it is only fair, At the very lease, you should put some sims up and only ALLOW those accounts who have the right to buy the land as first land the ability to do so.
This doesnt impact me but there alot of people out there who have been looking for first land and havent been able to find it. Help them out and make them a priority,
As someone who upgraded to a Premium account earlier today, I am somewhat irritated.
My only feeling would be that if you are going to make this retroactive, then some form of compensation should be offered to those who’ve been prevented from exercising their Free Land option. As land prices will (temporarily at any rate) go through the roof, I’d suggest that those people who haven’t bought should be given an ex gratia payment of the average market value of the free land they would have been entitled toat the point at which the free offer ended.
Otherwise it is incredibly unfair that – without warning – anyone upgrading should be stripped of the major benefit of having a Premium account.
It ~would~ be nice if Linden Lab explained somewhere (because I sure as hell can’t find it) that owning land on a private island does NOT require premium membership, and that premium membership is only an advantage if you want to own mainland land.
Hmm, if they get rid of the free land program, then what exactly do they do with land that has been abandoned by people that no longer pay to play the game? Where does that land go?
Ok, what if you get land what you *can’t* resell it?
Just land what you rent from LL instead of buying?
Ever thought about that?
As someone that paid for premium from the get go, I have found that there never was any first land to be had. However, if you wish to make premium accounts helpful to those of us who have just joined, all you need do is make it so that only FIRST TIME BUYERS may purchase the land, and can only purchase ONE parcel and it MUST be inhabited/owned by that person for a period of at least one year. Very simple to to, put a cannot resell on that parcel, and restricted to one parcel only at the 512 free parcel. This way, if a land baron wants the parcel, he has to wait a year and hopes that whoever doesn’t get the land abandoned. Just an idea.
I was just wondering….how much will it be for a 512m plot of land now? Its good to see the tier will still be free for 512 and of course the 300L stipend per week; but what will it cost to get the 512 from Linden Labs?
I am surprised some kind of rule was not put into place that would not allow users to resell First Land for perhaps at least 30 days. Even then, maybe after 30 days the land designated as First Land could only be sold for the original price or given back to Linden Labs. Would that work? The copybot was stopped with code wasn’t it? Why can’t something be done about land bots?
=[*.*]=
i WAS thinking about signing up for a Premium membership, just for the new land… but lucky for me, i didn’t yet.
It’s too bad Linden forgets his newbies in landownership…
How difficult can it be to just make newland non-transferable over a period of time ?
buy new land? keep the new land! want to sell? back to Linden labs…
easy as that.
this is just pushing the land-prices up even more!
-sigh- bad decision
to make a premium account more value?
easy. get ride of all the lag creating free accounts!
stop to let everyone in SL for free this will stop the damn issues and the lag and bring things back to normal.
i remember when i started it was 5000 ppl online and SL was great now all is a big mess nothing works really.
30 day trial like other web services have it too, then premium account or out! ende
I recently upgraded to a premium account so I would be ready to purchase first land as/when it became available.I was quite happily renting as a free member,now I feel totally ripped off,as I have just paid a full years subscription in advance(what a mug).Now I have to wait a further 50 weeks before I can downgrade and that is going to cost me a further $10(what a bigger mug)
I usually try to see both sides of the story and try to find LL’s reasoning behind things they do. In this case, I can’t. This is going to get pretty ugly. Instead of trying to come up with a way to keep the First Land system from being gamed, LL just gets rid of it.
New users have much less of a reason to go premium now. In fact, I can no longer think of a reason to be a premium account unless you’re going to be a land baron. Renting land is easier for normal residents, and it’s easy to move to a new location without worrying about selling your land. The premium stipend has shrunk to an amount that is just not enticing anymore, and now there is no great deal on your first piece of land. There is no difference in support. By phasing the things out that made a premium account enticing, LL is phasing out premium accounts as no one will want one anymore. I went free, and I am never going premium again until LL screws the free accounts. At that time, if my SL music career is still as lucrative as it is now, I guess I will be forced to go premium. If not, I’ll be moving on.
I guess making transfer of the land after 45 days – 90 days, as was done in Blumfield, would significantly impact resident freedoms?
coco
I’m so disappointed to hear this news. I remember how pleased I was when I got my little patch of first land and I remember full well the joy many new residents had when they got their first land. Now it’s all gone. How sad. It would have been far better for Linden Labs to assign a patch of First Land to each new premium account with the stipulation that it couldn’t be sold for 90 days. Oh well, c’est la vie
This does not surprise me although I know for a fact that there were plenty of new people who took advantage of this program to have their first land, it was not all barons. I know many would also expand too. While I can see your resoning for eliminating the first land program, I encourage you to still do small plot sales. Do them at regular sim costs but give people an anvenue to still buy a small plot of land like the first land sims. This way you will still give people an easy way to get a start in SL, even if it is more expensive the 512L, and you won’t have to care who buys them.
@38
It’ll likely go up for auction now.
And you wonder why I say the greatest move I made was to stay Basic.
Everything I’ve seen since my decision to stay on a FREE account (yep, I’m a post-1.7 Basic, so no cash outlay at all) has just reaffirmed my decision to stay that way.
I, too, am a renter, and keep my expenses low enough (and now my revenue high enough) that my L$ balance is consistently growing (and is already large enough to ‘live’ comfortably).
Congrats, LL, for souring yet another potential US$ spender here.
The only reason I got a Premium account was to get my first land. A little home of my own in SL. I know people who did the same thing. I’ve brought people into SL as paying members because they liked the idea of having their own little plot of land.
One of them hasn’t bought her First Land, yet. And now won’t be able to, even though she has bought a lot of land for business. Sucks to be a paying member now. If I was new, I’d never become a paying member, I can’t see that it would be worth it. I will no longer be encouraging my RL friends to become paying members.
Gads, how awful to be treated this way. I’ve heard WOW is very fun….
Face it people, LL wants to make money the fastest way possible. They’re not doing this for any other reason. They think they’ve reached the point where their game can generate $$ value with offering less benefits for more profit. They may be right, I don’t know, I’m a new player and was waiting for First Land to play around with.
It doesn’t make sense to get into the complexities of real estate and valuation of holdings and economic factors, etc, etc. We’re all a bunch of people sitting in front of a monitor typing on a keyboard. The information going back and forth is irrelevant. This is not a ‘metaverse’, no one is living anywhere else other than in front of their PCs and the priority here for LL is how to put more $$ in their bank account.
That’s all.
… Well, all the new Premiums who listened to your “More land is coming, more land in the east” are just effective immediately made serfs in this lovely World you’ve built. We’re just too much bother, to assign land to, eh? Certainly the financial interest of Lindon Labs is to those who give them the most money – your barons, who squeeeze it out of the poor, desparate for just a little plot of one’s own… And you are so sure all the people, landowners and serfs, are so addicted to your universe that we won’t find some other playground? You are betting your future on interesting assumptions.
RE:32
amen!
If this is a move to eventually discontinue premium accounts at all. They’re in the right track. I don’t think many would like to have a premium account when they decide to rip it from all benefits. No L, no land tiers. And the new continent? I bet rich barons already own half of it. so… *shrug*
Talarus Luan Says:
“More ways to increase the value of a Premium account?
Here’s a biggie: Premium/Priority Support.”
How about any support? As it is now support is virtually non-existant.
I’ve been trying to get a response to my dozens of requests for a trading tier review for months now and even going as far as snail mailing the entire board of directors has not provided any results.
If you want to add value to the accounts of people who are paying thousands of dollars to you how about you stop ignoring them?
Man, that sucks. I just bought a three-month premium account ONLY so that I could buy first land. I looked on the land searches everyday for two weeks and never found any, and now the program is ending. 😥
I wish I had had some warning that LL was going to do this. I understand the abuse problems and I hate to cry unfair, but this just really sucks for the rest of us who just wanted to get our own little virtual home without running up the bills.
The important benefit of premium isn’t the low price of the land, it’s the free 512 of tier that you get with it. Obviously if you have enough money to afford a premium account, you should be able to drep a bit of linden on some land. It may seem like the little guy is screwed in the short term (and that may be true) but everything will even itself out, like it always does.
Well, I can see the point about first land being flipped (I was offered $L 9000 within five minutes of getting mine) but I still think its sad. I’m glad I got mine when I did. Please LL grandparent clause the program for premiums who did not manage to obtain some, at least for a grace period. 😦
As a land trader I’m partly responsible for this, as well with everyone else who purchased First Land from resell. I’m not denying that at all. It was all part of the game. Buy land when it’s set low and sell high. If a newb sold their 512 for 1024 we’d pile in to get the 50USD 30USD profit. The newb would go away happy for doubling his investment and so would we. It was part of the beast.
It got really ugly once we started asking newbs if they wanted to resell. I remember the first sim we did this with, if you go there now it’s nothing but a waste land. We took a perfect sim and gutted it. Reflection took me away from that part of the game. First Land helped me establish my own path inside of SL and here I was taking that opportunity away from others. I stopped being a vulture.
Prize Pyle has been creating communities with the sims he won in auctions. Even though he has a grudge against me, I think what he has done to his sim is excellant. They are built like little communities, with roads, parks, even train systems. They are clean and bring a sense of neighborhood interaction that has been missing for awhile in the First Land Program.
I upgraded to Premium and spent much time day and night, trying to catch a First Land opportunity. Thanks a lot. I wanted a place where I could explore and practice new skills, build a house, play with the land. Now you’re taking that opportunity away. There are many new members who don’t have large real life bank accounts available to tap into so they can purchase SL land through Real Estate Brokers. I had suggested weeks ago that you make land available to members who’ve been waiting and who joined believing this would be a wonderful benefit.
I feel you’ve violated an unofficial contract you had with all of us who believed the First Land Hype we heard when we first began and I’m terribly disappointed. How do I cancel my Premium Membership?
Hame on you.Linden Labs.I signed up for a premium account specifically to buy fisrt land. this is a classic bait anD switch. offer first land option with your upgrade and say oh you can’t get it now.Linden labs you should be ashamed of yourselves, the least you should do is live up to your agreement or compensate for your change policy.
RE: #41:
Well, I just paid for a full year premium, like last nignt, after being basic for about a month. I have been looking for first land seriously for about two weeks – it is one of the main reasons I went to premium. Now – guess I should have saved my money for one more day. 😦
I agree, if you were premium before LL cut the first land program (as I am, thogh just barely), you should have the option to get your first land, even if it is assigned, and you can’t resell for 90 days, or whatever. Once it was announced, it is real, but to announce it and make it retroactive just doesn’t seem fair. I want to buy – but I don’t think the prices being asked for are reasonable right now.
Sorry. LL, I think you might have goofed big time on this one.
Gray
eu adoraria jogar second life
A good point was made on SC – LL promised premiums First Land (until used) for life.
Thumbs up for this step. I think no one was ever able to get his first land anyway for 1L per qm. Now this step will make profits for those land moguls shrink a bit (I hope), as they could buy 512qm for 512L and sell it for maybe 35.000L, which just sucks a lot.
Now make a cleanup in the SEARCH for land, too… disallow RENTED land in the LAND FOR SALE list, or make a new category in there. Because if you try to find land, it is pretty hard to find land for SALE.
Thank you! =)
i like second life
I guess this isn’t really surprising. I’m just glad I got my bit of First Land, all 117 prims worth of it, when I did. The only reason I did was that I happened to log in and search at exactly the right time, teleported to the site immediately, and grabbed the first parcel I could. A few minutes either way and I might still be landless.
Hand raised here in support of the idea, mentioned several times, of allowing current premium account holders to buy First Land if they do not already own some.
BTW, I would sell my First Land parcel for a reasonable price if I could find a 2048-4096 parcel at a reasonable price and if I could even make my way through the hell of rentals and covenants and bad deals that currently makes up a Land search listing. I’m not holding my breath.
This is the way it should be done. First land is issued with your premium sign up. no matter where it is. no looking for it. it is just a given… later if they want to sell ok then…. That would take care of that. Some people dont want to own land. and are in this for the money. Money is what this game is about. They do have the right to sell their first land, no matter what LL’s idea was for it in the first place.
The rules for the game Monopoly have not changed or ever changed in the middle of play…..and that seems to work just fine.
I’m relatively new to SL. FIX THE GAME FIRST. get more servers and reliable servers. The load has increased more that double since I signed up.
This happens to any game or ISP that is not prepared for the amount of new customers signing up….
For the problem of people reselling First Land immediately for money, why not forbid First Land resale for a certain time after acquisition, in the year or a few order would seem fair.
Wel … Since 2 weeks in SL, i signed a premium one week ago because of the low price of first land ..
For sure, as everybody, I got a “not found” each time I was looking for the “promised Land” 🙂 [ With Sense of Humor please ] .
Then, as never a 512 parcel was available, I finaly buy at Heavy Cost my Land.
Perhaps Linden can make a “BEST EFFORT” and give back some money to people in same situation as me .
Why not a 512 L$ … It s not a heavy charge for Linden, and it s the equivalent as the 512 ² we ‘d have for 512 L$ ?
Let s know about the idea . [ 512 L$ is just for a symbolic gift from LINDEN … I bougth 12000 my land …. ]
Wanna increase memberships?
Or you wanna decrease memberships?
Looks like a decrease to my way of thinking.
My renewal comes up April 1st.
Now I wonder should I or should I not?
Hummmm?
Tillie:
Funny how you were writing at the very same time as I was about the very same thing: the awfulness of the Land search. I hate that rentals are in there.
Ok I am confused. If a person is getting something for free like a basic account and is to cheap to help LL keep the grid in good shape by paying the small 5.oo a month fee. What are they complaining about? Not paying for a premium account and renting is just a way around helping LL keep the grid running. The only people who have any right to complain are the paying customers.
This is an absurd decision and completely false. I have only been a member for a few days, but requested a membership purely so that I could by First Land. This was still included in the information on the day I joined, and there has been none available the entire time. In fact, there are now businesses developed around the hunt for first land. If the plots were not being used as expected, than require first landers to buy and keep the property for a minimum time period, and to participate in some way for “x” hours per month.
As it is, there is no cost effective way to buy land and attempt to enjoy this Second Life. As an online marketing exec, I know how important traffic and loyalty are. This move promotes the real world’s capitalist extreme, seemingly defeating the purpose of a “Second Life.”
Who’s running Linden Labs??
Greed seems to be the right answer.
*Remember: Greed is one of the 7 deadly sins.*
Praying for LL’s future,
Korneilius
Tillie, I was able to get my First Land fine.
It wouldn’t be hard to prevent abuse of the First Land program by flippers and alt-bots, but apparently any effort to make premium memberships attractive is just too much for LL to make.
(50) WrestlingHulka – thanks for being so honest. Appreciated.
(53) Veronique – copy that, same reason I got mine. You can still have fun with 117 prims 🙂
It seems unreasonable to deny premium residents who have not yet taken up First Land – many waiting until some was actually available – the chance to do so. Many will have taken that promise into consideration when making the decision to purchase a premium account or not. These people should be given the opportunity to buy some sort of First Land, even if sale is then restricted by one of the measures already suggested to prevent rampant profiteering by alts.
Smart move – I expected this move some time ago. It was being abused, and as you say, wasn’t really benefiting those it was supposed to.
“Is it a shame that a bunch of bad apples have to ruin it for the whole bunch? Yes. But don’t blame Linden Lab; blame those who are abusing the system and new residents that have caused this action to be taken.”
As someone noted above, I cannot see how disallowing fast first land flipping for profit would significantly impact resident freedoms.
A less disruptive approach would be to disallow any selling of first land, only abandonment to be handed out to the next person in the queue. This requires no complicated “is this a land flipper?” questions. It doesn’t even require a discount, just give the bitty parcels to first landers so that they don’t loose anything when they tier up.
My guess is that they didn’t like the administrative costs of the first land program and so have shot themselves in the foot to spare themselves from the overhead.
I think its best to lower prices for sims and accounts… When they take something away from what makes people upgrade then they have to sacrifice something just as important. Who benefits really? LL/SL should basically come out and say who really benefits from this. I think people like Anshe Chung will benefit alot… they should be making it more fair and even, not increasing the odds.
@56: “Not paying for a premium account and renting is just a way around helping LL keep the grid running”
Sorry, but that is a load of crap. The rent I pay to my landlady is in turn paid by her to LL for the ownership of the sim. Such a lame argument, and I don’t know why it is constantly regurgitated.
Want to increase the value of a premium membership? How bout this…MAKE IT WORTH THE THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS YOU ARE MAKING. For gods sakes you guys are making a killing supplying essentially nothing but server space. You continue to let the numbers of online users rise, while the stability and speed of your servers does nothing but get worse. If it wasnt for the friendships Ive made, I would say screw it all and send your completely unreliable program packing. Im glad I dont try to make a living off this, god knows how upset I would be.
It’s regurgitated because people have a hard time following foodchains. 😉
This is a good move…….but, something should be done for those people who went premium and have been waiting for their first land….I understand there was a shortage and they couldn’t quickly get any…….give 30days to those premium member who signed up before today and never owned land previously……..
Hmmm it appears that the “powers that be” at Linden Labs didn’t learn much from their last “effective immediately” fiasco – you remember that one – the private island pricing and tier plan ?
I’d agree that first land rights are being abused, however, i also agree that Linden Labs used the concept of First Land as a lure for premium members and does need to uphold that committment.
Using the abuse as an excuse to get rid of the program is a transparent ruse and not worthy of the mission statement of Linden Labs or the vision that is so frequently communicated to the 4th estate.
I don’t think i’ve ever seen a company with such great ideas do such a poor job of marketing and support since Datapoint was in business.
Another sad day in SL, to be followed tomorrow by another update. Wonder what will be broken this time?
I suppose that this action is setting up for privately-hosted sims and land, but if it’s not I don’t see the benefit of it.
This could be a way to increase the value of a premium account:
Premium scripts!
just give scripts in premium accounts a little priority over standard-account-scripts.
Coyote Momiji: I don’t care about First Land anymore, anyway. I have bought some 4096qm main land and 8192qm on an island. I am happy now. If they think about an alternative benefit for premium accounts, good. Maybe that will be helpful/useable/fun then.
Which benefit I’d like now is: less lag, SL recognizing my 16:10 screen (it always goes to 16:9 on restart), less crashes and no bugs when creating items (jumping or invisible prims are quite annoying). 🙂
They already have made it possible to remove the rentals from the land search. Limit your search to “For Sale – Mainland”, and you’ll get what you want.
What FlipperPA said.
I opened a premium account up last week with the hope of getting my own plot of first land. Really disappointed…
(50)WrestlingHulka, your land griefing wasn’t partly responsible for things getting ugly, was it?
For those of you who think this is a good move because first land can be gamed: so can scripting. Are you also in favour of scripting being removed, or would you think that at least the slightest effort could be made to FIX it? I don’t see this as a move to stop abuse, I see this a purely money making move, and I smell Zee.
Ever since I joined in October, LL has had a statement (I think on the Knowledge Base or FAQ pages) that there would be significant changes to the First Land program in the near future. Not quite what I was expecting!
Alts, Alts, Alts…
Maybe time to do away with the free accounts and start charging your buddies with the multiple bots/alts.
You seem to be going about fixing the problems completely backwards.
You would rather have the false resident numbers then support the paying customers. Make these bot/alt users pay!
Tiberious,
As Jack Linden said, the monthly premium account pays for itself.
And more so, accounts that still get L$400 weekly stipends can make a profit margin if you are considering the 512 free tier with a possible land resell.
So I don’t know how staying Basic has any advantage to you but being less trusted, being likely subject to lower quality support and potentially being restricted from the grid in case of a contingency measure deployment.
Let’s put that way:
A premium account used to be profitable.
It is now essentially FREE based on a premium annual rate!
I’ve waited for almost a year to buy and use my First Land option. I currently rent, paying the sim owner for the privelidge to love in an excellent sim. When I joined, the concept of land ownership as explained in TOS and by the wiki was confusing. I was a squatter for the first few months, asking those that owned land to clear up the muddy water about the land ownership. The fact that that 512sm plot would have no tier was lost on me. That’s why I waited. If that had been perfectly clear, I would have made my purchase months ago.
I’ll have to think hard about renewing my premium membership. I know if I do, LL will do away with the stipend next.
This is such a big surprise to do this un-announced, even though I’m sure a few of the land barons who make more money from SL, than LL, either knew in advance, or maybe even suggested this tactic.
Money talks……bulls**t walks…..Fix the game. No wonder so many have gone and spent their time online in WoW.
I had to delete what i just wrote it was unprintable !!!!!!!
lets just say what a shame, and what a bad decision, which is second only to letting people into sl without payment info.
The root of all evil 😦
LL/SL will probably start losing money from this area, but get a alot more from private land owners etc
It tells me that they aren’t caring much for us “paying” customers. I waited about maybe 5-6 months before i even got my first land. tell me? I wonder who has waited longer?
Hey thats great you helped some other person pay their monthly tier which would be paid wether you rented or not.Now how about paying LL by paying the small monthly fee and Giving LL the resources to keep this game alive. I am a strong supporter of the basic being a 30-90 trial period to see if SL is everything you wanted it to be. I guess I grew up not having everything handed to me. I went and paid the market value for my property and when I sell it I will make a profit like the person who I bought it from.
Well done LL, I think most people would accept that this is the correct thing to do in the circumstances, a very vocal minority excepted.
Wow that most dumbest thing Ll has done now, can’t even get 512 lots for cheap anymore with land barons around.
Broken econ even more now.
I can understand why LL is doing this, but agree with everyone saying that the current premium residents who have never purchased firstland need to be compensated somehow for this change.
I LOVED my first land and lived there happily for 6 months or so (until I became a prim hog
).
I’m not going to waste my time asking for alternatives, I know once LL has done something they aren’t going to change it no matter how much we gripe.
I will request this, on behalf of current premium signups who have not gotten their first land. Grandfather it, open up a big last round of first land, it won’t kill you. Many simply could not find Linden owned First Land. Give them what you advertised when they signed up or be prepared for accusations of fraud.
You probably are planning to do this anyway, I’ve seen this game before, slash something everyone likes then give back a little so people think you are being generous and “listening”. Meh.
Hmmm, rather than actually take measures to prevent these exploiters from buying and instantly reselling first land, a problem which could be solved very easily, (and MANY ideas have been brought forth that would work) you decide to close the First Land program altogether. And the whole reason this is even a problem in the first place is Linden Labs decision to remove verification from account creation. Wait, who is running LL again? I haven’t seen an administration make this many bad decisions in such a close time frame since that whole “War in Iraq” thing. (I think that’s still going on too)
Is this REALLY the reason First Land is being discontinued, or is it just an excuse? It really says a lot about the people that make these kinds of decisions, that this is the FIRST idea they go to, to try and solve the first land issues. While you’re thinking about all the land resellers that you’re foiling, maybe you should think about the LEGITIMATE customers you are taking this service from, and think of a better solution. Or continue shooting yourselves in the foot, personally I find it funny, considering I don’t use First Land.
From what I understand and what I’ve read, the situation was this: People were originally granted First Land rights as part of their Premium account. It was sold at 1L per square meter up to 512m. At that time, the stipend for the account was 500L a week, which both gave the Premium member a way to pay for their land, and still shop in SL, allowing them to enjoy their status.
The idea seemed to be to draw people to create accounts of this type, and buy and maintain land, perhaps expanding (because anyone who onws 512m of land with neighbors knows privacy is at a minimum; your neighbors might as well be in your room or house with you.) This concept was defeated twice I think; once when free accounts started, and again when it was made even more mainstream. The free accounts were abused to death, being created, used to buy the land, then resell it at massive increases in cost (accounts, not bots). Then, once their usefulness was over, these accounts were essentially abandoned, creating clutter and stealing away the cheap first land from those who should have gotten it.
The stipend lowered, and then lowered again, making the expenditure for a Premium account seem less attractive… most SLers tend to be poor, unless they can create something on their own and sell it, or spend money directly into SL (which few of them can do without some form of payment registered). Combined with the now insane prices for First land, and Premium accounts had become something of a joke now.
And now here we are, with even the possibility of first land being removed. Someone made a suggestion that I think is a good one; let those people who are eligible for First land at the time of this announcement get some of it on the new continent, or choose from reclaimed land parcels elsewhere. Then shut it down, stopping further trouble. Another idea I offer is that you make a sweep of your member database… millions long, I know, but there is an increasing number of people (seen by myself in group lists) that haven’t been back into SL for over 2 years. I think it would be safe to assume that these people aren’t coming back, and that you can remove them, freeing up their land for use by the more active players.
Lastly, I suggest that, also as suggested above, you try to read the undercurrents of these posts, and see that more and more, people are growing dissatisfied and worse, disinterested in and unable to use SL. If things aren’t taken in hand soon, both as far as keeping the people happy and tending to the various problems, you may soon smooth out the land problems by simply having no land owners but a few mega land barons… and no one at all willing to buy any of it.
Well, congratulations, Linden Labs, you have now succeeded in ostracizing your current Premium members who haven’t yet gotten the First Land they were promised. Whatever happened to truth in advertising? These people are entitled to their First Land as promised.
I, for one, see no purpose in having a Premium membership anymore. At the current price of land, I might as well just rent. You say there is a new continent? Well, then show it to us. And you will have all that extra land, but still won’t meet your promises for the current Premium Members still waiting for First Land? Shame on you!
The FIRST thing I am doing now after writing this is CANCELLING MY PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP. I hope other other people follow suit. I am pissed. I am insulted. I am mad. Linden Labs, thanks for screwing the little guy – real smart move.
Dropping the First Land program doesn’t hurt much in reality as it seems that LL hasn’t offered any in months. So what does it hurt to drop something you don’t offer?
None of my three premium accounts qualify for first land… my main account was able to buy it in December I think, weeks after going premium. The other two and my SOs premium accounts never got the chance to buy first land even though they all were opened at the end of November 2006. Out of frustation, we’ve purchased land a full prices.
As such, I’ve turned my original 512m2 into almost 5,000m2 in two regions with all but one 512m2 lot purchased at current values. This is in addition to 16K m2 on a private island.
So let’s see… if I sell my mainland land, all four accounts can go back to basic, we lose ~US$225 a year in stipend but don’t give LL US$360 a year in quarterly membership fees, just saving US$135 a year or almost two month’s tier on my private sim’s 16K m2.
So that’s LL, you just saved me a ton of money! LOL
Then again, at the rate SL is going, it won’t be worth even logging on.
I read this announcement with a little sadness — I’m one of those Free accts (bought hundreds of thousands of L$ on LindeX, so no grief about being a “freeloader” please), and continually tempted by the Premium acct ‘advantages’ (steady income, First Land…). Now it seems one of the major attractions of Premium (even given the difficulties of actually _finding_ First Land) has been removed, I’m afraid it seems even less likely now that Free accts will “move on up…”, especially given the ease of renting etc.
Oh, btw, “market forces will bring the price down”?? NFL! _Very_ little will be allowed to cut into landbarons’ profits… how many times have land prices “tumbled” IRL, without some catastrophic event to trigger it? Just not going to happen, I’m afraid :(…
Here’s hoping tomorrow’s upgrade goes smoothly… (>_
Gee, I just upgraded to Premium a couple months ago and have been spending considerable amounts of time trying to figure out how land purchases work and how and when I can get my first land. I upgraded bc I read alot of the blogs about premium members negative feelings about “free” memberships and I wanted to really “get on board” with SL and do the “right thing” by being willing to invest and do my part to support SL ……so Im feeling pretty ripped off now. You could have told me when I upgraded, or before I wasted HOURS looking for land. Where’s MY first land that my premium membership promised me?
Land prices in SL have collapsed on several occasions actually. A year ago, snow land was going for less then 2L/sqm, a fraction of what it cost it the auctions.
People only remember the very recent history.
I am very disappointed with this news, it means I won’t bother with becoming a premium member.
My wife and I are both new non-premium members, we have payment info on file and my wife spent close to $100 US buying lindens, which she has been spending on land rental and clothes.
My wife lost her ability to qualify for first land when she rented because the landlord set up the rental as a sale and she didn’t know any better, being new. The only reason she rented to begin with was because she read somewhere (on the blog I think) that first land wasn’t going to be available for a while.
Since joining SL, I have been waiting for some first land to come available, checking for it every day, then I was going to go premium.
Two days ago, I decided to sign up for a 1 year premium account so I would be ready when they finally started releasing first land – lucky for me, at the last minute I changed my mind and decided to wait a little longer.
I think that every premium member should be given the 512 plot of land for free when they sign up for premium, not to ‘own’ and resell, but to ‘use’. The land would not be able to be resold – ever, and if they downgraded to a non-premium account, the land would revert back to the real owner, linden labs.
This way new people who pay for premium accounts could have some land to live or work on.
And premium account holders who don’t want land, or who want a bigger plot? Give them some bonus instead.
Otherwise, I will never upgrade to a premium account, just on principle.
And I don’t understand how people can blame this on free account holders, WE CAN’T BUY LAND, how on earth can we cause abuse of first land?????
I don’t want to rent, I want my own property, but it’s just too expensivethe way things are now.
Hey Lindens,
Little sad about the First Land thing, that was one of the things that got my friend convinced to join SL period, but I understand.
As far as premium accounts, maybe a bigger stipend would be nice, ya? An increase in our allowance would be very very nice. Or maybe the option to make land access for ‘Premium Accounts Only’.
Insane. Simply insane.
Just when you think LL can’t do something even dumber, they go and do it. There are half a dozen great ideas in this thread on how LL could have fixed the robber baron problem, each arrived at in probably minutes.
When oh when will the (soon to be) former LL employees break away and create neoSL? I’m so ready to take my wallet and follow them. Until then, I’m certainly NOT renewing my premium membership.
I do agree with the alts, I have a free account at the moment, but if LL did away with the horrid lag, I would definetly upgrade to premium, now that LL has done away with first land, I really have no reason to upgrade to premium, I can just rent land, and save myself the extra 10 bucks
I’m not sure what to think about all of this. I guess I’m glad I didn’t get a premium account, although I am a free verified account.
I was, kind of hoping to struggle up the ladder of success and afford a premium account using in-world earnings and get a small piece of something that I could build on and not have to worry about a sandbox being cleared at the worst possible time ( it always seems to happen just as I’m about to link everything together 😦 ).
Now I’m wondering if I just totally wasted my 7 weeks here learning the ropes and how to do-and-build things?
I was willing to put up with a lot. The hangups, the crashes, the griefers, the sometimes abominable lag, the 1 hour newbies slamming into me and getting in my face, the loosing money after viewer and sim crashes.
And now I have to ask myself: was it or is it still worth it?
It just doesn’t seem fair. 😦
“It may still be possible to find cheap land for sale, for example small parcels that have been abandoned and recycled by us, but it will not be sold specifically as First Land.”
This is a false statement. It is NOT POSSIBLE to buy cheap land (particularily if you are a newbie) because LL is taking a “blind eye” approach to land bots.
LL might just as well set the land to the ninjas and save everyone the effort to search for land and alleviate the stress to the database, which are being hammered every second by his bots.
Elanthius made more than 200,000 Lindens today before lunch, while everyone else made nothing.
It’s niether fair and certainly does not build community, to permit monopolies to prevail.
For once I hope Linden Lab actually listens to what its users are saying about something. This is a huge error. It doesn’t affect me because I’m not a Premium user, but my SO, who has been looking for First Land since he joined, *is* a Premie, it’s one of the main reasons he upgraded his account, and he’s more than a little bit ticked about this — and I don’t blame him. The stipend is middling, at best. L$1200 a month doesn’t go far, guys. I should know, since I’m spending close to six times that per month. The actual value of a Premium membership, in terms of perks, wasn’t all that much in the first place, and now you’re eroding it even more — at a time when the public outcry against free and unverified accounts is at an all-time high. What insanity is this, anyway?
Let me tell you how to make First Land work, since nobody at LL seems to be able to figure it out:
1) First Land needs to be available only to the *first* account of a Premium user. This eliminates the problem of alts sucking it up and reselling it, but see point #2, below, as another way to eliminate the multiple alt land grab.
(OR)
2) First Land cannot be resold, subdivided or joined — only abandoned to LL or, perhaps, sold back at the same price it was bought. This eliminates the possibility of *anyone* utilizing First Land as part of a coordinated land grab scheme and also keeps First Land in circulation as members upgrade to larger plots.
3) Any owner of First Land who uses that land in any way to turn a profit (renting it, putting a store on it, etc.), will immediately forfeit it back to LL.
4) An option would be to *give* a 512k plot to every Premium user who applied to it or sell 1025k plots to Premium users at a reduced price if they would prefer larger plots. Now you’re talking about some added value that will help people decide to upgrade their accounts to Premium status.
There … I *know* your coders are smart enough to work out the details of how that can be done.
And just as I was considering upgrading. Now there’s no point.
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Well, guess I can sell all the land I now have and not renew my premium account when it comes due. As the rest said, rent is simpler and cheaper.
What about the folks that purchased a premium account based upon the fact that they were eligible to buy first land? LL, you must grandfather this for them.
This doesn’t surprise me one little bit. First Land has always been abused, and is now abused on a grand scale. I don’t blame LL at all.
Tha’ts amazingly lame. You could have just said people couldn’t sell their first land for six months or a year or something. I got my first land several months ago and I was elated. You really screwed up.
Bring out some kind of partnership option for buying a complete sim.
1. Say 10 users want to share 1 sim, they all pay a share.
A bit like a private sim, but initial outlay shared by 10 would not bruise your pocket.
And maybe each user must state what they intend on using it for.
Most people I know just want to sell and be creative.
There really needs to be some kind of option like this run by LINDEN, at the end of the day with 512 of land you can’t do a lot with the prim count, it’s just there for pure profit on Virtual land barons.
I look forward to a overall beneficial way of accumulating land for all the creative users that would like to sell there creations and make SL a little more enjoyable.
As new continents are created, how will Linden Labs decide how much to sell the newly created land for?
An idea for added value on premium accounts… make support actually work for them. Like instead of just leaving messages on answering machines that are never answered or sending emails into the black hole, hire some support staff to handle premium accounts problems. Would that be so hard?
I joined SL with a premium account, paid in advance, specifically because of the First Land opportunity. I have NEVER been able to find any listed and it’s the first thing I check whenever I sign in.
I feel cheated.
First Land is the main reason why most of us upgrade to premium. Who cares about the holdng allowances now that residential land will be priced at outrageous levels that only a gaming fanatic would pay?
And who cares about the miserly stipend in a platform which is so laggy that making a purchase in any of the larger outlets now requires a wait of many hours to rez–if it completes at all!
> Jacques Groshomme Said:
> “First Land was irretrievably broken once unverified accounts were allowed. ”
True. And look how many underage hookers and their pimp lowlife have been taking full advantage of the fact by packing into SardineLife ever since.
The future of SL will be a virtual porn platform where unverified teenagers are exploited for a handful of L$ by barons using unverfied sockpuppet accounts connected through a network of proxies (Clue: they are probably the same creeps who are spending big bucks in USD buying islands to build their laggy, bling-laden palaces of sleaze.) The Lindens *KNOW* this–hence the recent change in the TOS permitting them to pass members details to the authorities if required…indemnifying themselves.
So it is becoming clear that geeks who want to quietly cultivate their virtual gardens in sl residentials, and hang with other geeks–are the new personae non gratae here.
Quote:
“First, you raise prices for new islands, then you screw up the database and networking so badly that no sim can operate without massive lag. Then you make it impossible for people to teleport anyone not in your own friends list. Now you show that you only want people with lots of money.
Linden Labs, you are sell outs! Your people you hire as liasons cannot any questions, none of them help one bit. You have bad ratings by the Better Business Bureau and your customer service line not only never gets answered, but instead puts you into a voicemail system.
Go ahead Phil, we know you think you want that metaverse to go through Linden Labs, but with the way your networking and database crash regualrly, your dreams will blow away quickly. Stop chasing the money and start fixing the issues that you all are creating each week and never fixing. I think Linden Labs needs to have their own place rolled back to a previous time when it worked!”
I loved this game in June/July, come June or July this year, Linden Labs will not be a bill on my credit statement.
I am very upset with SL. Gameplay has gone down… Not to mention the cut of support for the teaching. Schools like TUi were helping people actually be able to learn how to play this game instead of flooding live help. Now, no one wants to pay to learn how to play a GAME they paid to play.
I’m sorry.. but unless LL buckles up, I will not be on SL much longer.
Musimba – “As new continents are created, how will Linden Labs decide how much to sell the newly created land for?”
These sims will be auctioned. Prices will be decided by those estate people. Therefore LL make more money for them, less money when selling first land to first landers.
I am not surprised to see the First Land program shut down. However, I am disappointed it was not simultaneously replaced by something else. It is hard enough for new residents to get a sense of connection here. Having a small plot of land was one way to grow roots. We all know that the First Land program was hard to understand, poorly implimented, and gamed to the point where it wasn’t helping new residents. But there were a lot of ideas expressed by the community that could have made it better, or gone into something new. I think this is a net loss for the community, and for Linden Lab. Without a sense of connection here, people will not stay for more than a few weeks. I don’t see how that is good for anybody.
Seems to me that there is no money in mainland land. The future is island sims. LL have always said that they want to be a ‘platform’ providing the world and the tech to facilitate a 3D universe. They get their money from islands, the mainland is just somewhere to concentrate the potential island customers until they rent or buy an island/plot of their own from a private, paying sim owner.
Premiums are unnecessary, frees are the way – high turnover, money to spend.
Islands i suspect will become gated communities – no pay, no enter. so like it or not, frees will have to pay just to join in
Enjoy it while it lasts, and watch where the money is going. Ive got a Premium acc because its simpler for me and i get 400 a month which covers my costs. When it stops paying for my fun i just have to decide how valuable SL is and how much Im prepared to pay for it. No different than anywhere else.
Owning anything in SL is an illusion, especially land. When Third Life opens, the valuable stuff will be clothes, buildings, anything portable, just as it is in the real world. You cant take your land with you. LL owns that.
And you can expect them to charge a transfer fee too.
Linden Labs is not a community service, they dont owe ‘us’ anything, they want to make money cos they have bills to pay and investors to keep happy. Ok so the customer service not up to standard perhaps, but thats life. We get exactly what we pay for and in my opinion its a good deal at the moment cos its the only deal available.
When another company opens Third Life nothing will be free, It might be better, but it will cost more than a meal out a month to play.
Well this action dosent surprise me at all. I have been in SL for aver 1 year now and during that time I have watched LL make it harder and harder for one to become succesfull in ANY type of business in SL. I had invested in quiet a large amount of land in SL and had several large stores and even a popular club…but because LL keeps insisting on knocking everything down over a period of time with there updates and bugs and policy changes it just made it harder and harder for me to justify staying in here. So as a result I have sold everything I have and closed my stores down and have left SL…..it became more of a daily battle to figure out how to make it in SL than it was fun. I wish all of you the very best here in SL and hope what happened to me dosent happen to you..ALOHA
I didnt wait to buy first land. I was so enthralled by SL that I went immediately and paid a good bit of hard cash for a nice piece of land on an estate. While my family thought Id gone insane I argued that I pay over £75 for some crappy playstation game for my kids who get bored with it after a few days and they dont think twice about that. Its a wonderful set up and the pleasure I get from doing different styles of build on the land, and the time spent in SL is more than worth the money for land and tier fees. (PS I dont have a lot of money either)
Can we get rid of traffic numbers now?
This is a system that has been thoroughly gamed, and in its current form, really is beyond worthless.
@Musimba: They won’t. It’s auctioned to “realtors”, who decide the selling price based on their cost, their intended profit and their sense of folks interest in the land.
LL: Premium accounts are dead. I know you like to say they pay for themselves, but most users aren’t really interested in land ownership and get a better deal renting from other residents. I think it’s time the premium account be redefined as a base-tier land ownership account. Perhaps even drop the stipend in favor of allowing residents to set up a weekly automatic-buy from the LindeX, offering the average user better control over their spending in SL. Just my humble opinion.
Actually getting rid of First Land does make a lot of sense, and if any thing will make it harder for the Land Barons.
However not allowing people who had already signed up for premium accounts but hadn’t yet purchased their First Land to still be able to seems like out and out fraud.
I’m not Premium so I’m not affected, but fair is fair.
Ive ben here two weeks now on a premium account and have been looking for 1st land everyday. the promise of 1st land is why i signed up for the premium account. Im not much a chater,cyberer, or imaginary dancer. i injoy the building part of the program and if i got to spend more time in the god forsakin sandbox another week with explodeing phones and raining storms of babys think ill just give this place up. and not without a call to the BBB myself for your poor service, lyes and false advertiseing. Make this right to the people youve promised.
Eliminating First Land is one thing; changing the program retroactively is another. LL needs to make First Land available to everyone who was eligible as of today. To do otherwise is deceptive and unethical–and very likely illegal.
Pingback: Linden Lab says no more First Land » VTOR - Virtual TO Reality
Overall, I think it’s a pretty good idea. It really is the only way to stop the abuse.
I do think that a free 512 plot, in a newbie village, run by lindens, for new premium account holders would be an even better idea, of course that land would default back to linden land if the account holder bought another parcel, in a sim of there choosing.
Once I got a taste of owning land I was hooked. I think first land was an important part of my positive experiences in SL. Besides it may even bring in more income with by increasing tier income (I know 1024m, was my next purchase.).
BTW, what’s this about a 1200$L per month stipend?
I realise that this was a hard decision, and my first reaction to this message was shock, but I have to say… this is possibly the only thing you could have done. The best idea I’ve come up with… limiting First Land based on unique IP address… is at best a hack. The other suggestions I’ve seen people make are equally hackish and would pretty much destroy the value of First Land as anything but a specialized set of sandbox sims.
In the past I have been critical of the way you have dismantled other incentive programs, and I still think you should consider the possibility of bringing some of them back. I have mixed feelings about this decision, too, and I wish you hadn’t made it… but I can’t honestly see any simple tweaks that could have resolved all the problems without opening up new problems.
To all the people saying that what LL is doing is illegal… it is not, as it states in the firstland blurbs that it is subject to availability… in other words “firstland was never guaranteed”.
But is is desceptive and unethical? Yes, I believe so. I feel bad for the people who went premium and have not yet picked up their firstland.
#104 (Jonnyfx) and #105 (Carl): Good point. I Am Not A Lawyer, but in my completely unqualified opinion… some kind of compensation for the people who had gone premium in the last few months but have not been able to buy First Land yet would probably be a good move – just to keep lawsuits away.
Yaaaaaaaaay can we have some bug fixes now instead please?
My suggestion for making Premium accounts worth something… change the way traffic is calculated, so that only Premium accounts show up in the traffic ratings. Force people who want high traffic to create something that people who don’t desperately need a few L$ an hour will spend time doing.
Then let the *market* come up with a way to make premium accounts worthwhile.
I have a suggestion now that your elemanating first land why not increase the bonus lot to 1024 instead of 512? This would keep premium accounts valuble and worth buying. Also how about upgrading mainland sims to class 5?
I totally agree with those who said that the people who have already upgraded to premium accounts before the cut off point should be offered First Land at the advertised rate in order to justify their upgraded membership. Like most others that was the only reason I became a premium member and after about one month of searching and not being able to find first land I gave up. Then I learned that you could also get cheap land from private (non Linden) owners for the same value as LL land. Now that 1st land is over will the Lindens let the noobs know that they can own land and pay a cheaper tier through others or will they have to learn the hard way like I did?
That is SO not funny!!! I only became a member five days ago and turned premium yesterday and thought okay, I’ll go and buy some land today after getting used to all the stuff in SL, and then THIS. I am NOT AMUSED.
Raven Welesa, I agree with 1,000%. There are many Linden suck ups in Second Life. Most them are there just to fit in like thug and kids in highschool wanting to be rappers.
Linden Lab has being cheating people from day one.
They following are ways Linden Lab is scam company cheating us
1)Pyrrha Dell owned 7 Island without payment information. I mean, I know they are a cropration most likely paying LL to play with no payment information so they wont get hacked. O yes, ask them why we can’t be without payment information and own 7 islands. Check the Secondlife Herlad an article about it in there.
2)The hack on 9/8/06 left many peoples Credit Card information and put some in debt. Get this if you forgot your security question, you accounts was over. I bet the paid players only got service on the LL hotline. O yes, and that was a violation there own TOS at the time, its called privacy.
3)Front Nation is still in Second Life and they are racist group….I remember when a black gang called the sl crips was on sl they got kicked off for attacking people. Seems like front national attacking muslims is different…………wow….big scam comany we have here
O yeah, I am not flaming just stating opinon, I mean Front National does it right?
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!! JACK LINDEN!
Finally the releazed that abuse in this area! And its just not about how Cheap LLAbs is getting! its the fact that How people are just takingthe land selling it closing the account and starting doing this abusive thing over and over again! I sorry to see it going in a few ways, but its what had to be done!
All I can say is WOW! Even more astonishing are the number of people who’ve congratulated LL on an ‘Oh, so bold’ decision. I’ve never seen such blatant sucking or stupidity. I guess I can spot the members of the BDSM community! Yes Sir, May I Have Another!
I must say, the one reoccurring good idea I’ve seen here (and previously repeated in other earlier forums) is the thought of assigning First Land with a no-transfer option. I guess your marketing morons were too busy cooking up this latest little gem to bother getting their jobs done for free by the community. I’ll bet if this issue isn’t resolved within a week to the satisfaction of the paying customer, that even smarter people will discover the use of the class-action lawsuit! This should be really fun to watch while my last month as a Premium Account customer withers on the vine.
Oh, and I just want you to really, really know – I’ll be holding my breathing waiting for the promised eastern continent which will somehow magically lower land prices to appear. NOT!
Ouch! Yes Sir, May I Have Another! And this time, use the watermelon launcher. After this latest, thoughtfully packaged, LL gift, a watermelon should just slide right in!
Second life or some one should set up a HUD or welfare program for people in need for land or a loan for new residents Liden labs or the owner of the land for go to the HUD. the person say I will sell reduce land for this price and contact some one on the list who needs land the person who put up the land will not get the deed until the land is paid off but have the right to use the land as the owner with the exception of selling the land. but I think second life needs a bank or a welfare system
First Land was so difficult to obtain that I had to pay retail for my first
parcel. Who cares if a First Land owner makes a profit? SL is all about capitalism. If the possibilities of making a buck in SL were hopeless…the premium accounts would be useless. Ponder that for a moment LL. Ohh, that parcel that I paid retail for back in Nov. I sold it 2 weeks later for double. Supply & demand were the only problems with First Land. Had LL been able to keep up with the demand..then the land prices wouldn’t have sky rocketed they way they have. If you question this, look around at all the mainland that has been set aside as mainland roads…yet there are no roads built. LL needs to stop trying to grow so rapidly by offering free-loading accounts which burden the system’s resouces…and finish what they started. I love SL..I spend hours on end here, but somethings got to give. Yet First Land shouldn’t be done away with..free-loaders should. All of us premium members are paying for the resouces the free-loaders use. Talk about a redistribution of resources…those are our (paying members) resources they are giving away.
All they need to do to stop people using throw away accounts to flip First Land is put a time limit on it. No sale of first land for a month or two. This will stop those who are just using the account to flip it, because now it’s not as profitable, it will cost them a couple of months premuim instead of $10.
Of course, LL doesn’t want to “restrict the freedom” of it’s residents that way, lol.
Yeah, riiight.
More big parcels up for sale to the land barons to carve up and resell at a profit, win for them, win for LL, loss for everyone else.
what a waste of the last three months of my SL/RL life and time looking and waiting for first land spending 15 hours a day hoping and praying that papa linden wood grant me to be in right place at the right time,all for nought it seems imm reassessing my options after i too was conned into upgrading to premium
have a nice day PAPA LINDEN
One, question that may have already been asked and answered. If so jus point me in the right direction.
Will folks, like me, that have parcels that have had the first land 512 grandfathered into the expansions lose that 512 or will be still be able to use it .. My fear is if it is taken away then my tier may get all thrown for a loop and as a result have to pay more … lets hope not!
Why should I want to become a premium member now?
The strategy is flawed. Fatally … first you cut back on the first land supplies … then abolish it.
And that after you cut the stipend for new premium members fist from L$500 a week to L$400 then to L$300.
You need to do something about the ALTS not residents who have not yet bought land.
You want to ENCOURAGE people to become premium … this has the opposite effect.
This issue could have been solved by simply making first land unable to be resold for more than 512L in the first 32 days.
>>Because of the low price, they were being immediately sold, or bought via alts, purely for profit.
This quote is very revealing. The creation of alts that illegally seize First Land is not the users’ problem, it is Linden Labs’. If you can’t control who is purchasing First Land you can’t control security.
As to the second part, this is FAR worse. So doing things ‘purely for profit’ is somehow wrong? I’m sure your investors would love to hear your reasoning.
This attitude reminds me very much of an incident a few years ago. A group of leftist politicians got together and used taxpayer money to improve rundown housing and sell it at massively reduced prices to poor people. Some of those people immediately flipped the houses for a handy profit. The elitist politicians were outraged! How dare these poor people make a profit! How dare they dispose of their own property as they see fit?! They’ll just blow it all on some drugs that aren’t popular in my social circle!
Revealing…and reprehensible.
“You want to ENCOURAGE people to become premium … this has the opposite effect.”
Beatings will continue until morale improves.
On the plus side, we hit 32,000 people tonight, and i gotta say, i didn’t have any inventory problems and the lag really wasn’t that bad!. In my home sim it was perfectly fine
So they are doing something right 🙂
…I wish I HAD a home….I just can’t afford one now….
so what is the point of premium membership now if you renage on the 512m2 for 512 Linden deal. How do I get my annula sunscription of 72 USD back?
>Increase the value of premium accounts
Read the feature suggestion forum much?
Here’s a few links on various suggestions:
Login preference for premiums:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=165632
Added benifits for preumium accounts:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=165995
so how do I ever get my 512m2 to build on now?
I too was waiting to see if more First Land would be released before going to a premium account. But understand the reason for taking out a ‘feature’ that is being abused and not benefiting the community or the game. But if we are going to talk about features like this I agree with WAKE UP.. I’d like to see traffic numbers taken away. There has to be a better way to show off popular places.. like word of mouth. The camping that goes on to get higher traffic scores does nothing but lag anyone that wants to visit your place.
Why will people keep buying premium accounts now? Because people want to “own” land, not rent it. That will soon be the sole reason to have a premium account… with no other perks.
I would like to remind everyone that those of you who are pating yourselfs ont the back for staying basic will be locked out when the grid goes restricted, remember?
That right there is the value of premimum membership. So thank you besic members for your steadfast contribution to removing lag.
well i will add a few premium perk suggestions I suppose although I’m not sure how “perky” they really are
– premium only ingame services and resources
parks, sandboxes, place to hold events/parties has to be scheduled in short premium only “public sims” that basic accounts can’t physically use
– raise the stipend back to 500 at least
– silly things like christmas gifts would be nice for the “premium only skating rink” and the “premium only ski slopes” this of course is all programmed stuff that would be run by Linden labs but it would make the premium account more valuable and those that just own a house and not huge parcels of land would have a place to go with lower lag with other premium members
anyhow well maybe those ideas are dumb but they dont feel dumb to me 😛
And this is to all the goofies who are going on about First Land flipping: When have you ever seen First Land available in the last several months?
I’ve seen ONE crappy First Land parcel appear in the last three months. 20 AVs were looking at it and it was so awful it lasted for more than an hour before finally being purchased!
And the legalize about First Land is only valid if there is an actual meaningful availability/offering of First Land. You can’t promise a feature when available if you never offer meaningful availability. Car salesmen are spanked all the time for similiarly deceptive advertising.
Something stinks and I thinks it’s going to smell even more when the sweaty lawyers get involved.
I’m surprised that so many alts…err..people are upset about this. It seems that the citizens of SL brought this on themselves….by creating the alts to pull this off. It wasn’t ALL land barons that did this.
Perhaps a better idea would have been the strategy of not allowing a “supposed” new account to sell or transfer their newly bought land for a minimum of one month or so.
altogether disappointed in the service, the realiability and continued lack of care for your customers…..
Honestly folks. Noone who knows anything about land should be surprised by this.
512 sqm of land routinely sells for L$7000 today. The incentive to buy First Land for $512 and flip it for massive profit is just too great.
Although I was able to buy first land, I have a friend who has been waiting for some and no matter how hard she tried has not found some. She missed it “by seconds” sometimes. The system was broken – and was not working.
As for the alternatives, I would like to see all existing premium accounts who qualify offered some land, sort of like “one last chance”. The other idea I had was basically forcing First Land to be held for 1 month before it can be sold, which would be a huge disincentive for real estate flipping.
And one more idea while I’m at it. How about adding a % fee for selling land. The current situation is I can buy land and sell it for $1 more and make a profit. It shouldn’t be that easy.
BTW..I should mention that all the land I said I had sold back in comment #101 i sold for the same price I paid for all of it and some even less..I NEVER once bought any land for profit..I bought it purley to provide services for others and for the enjoyment of others…but LL made it clear with all there “enhancing the SL experience” that this wasnt going to happen………SL is a battle ground now.. not a fun place that it used to be..so if any of you think for one min like I used to think that providing somthing in SL for others to enjoy is going to happen..forget it..it wont…they will kill it with some update or policy change or whatever like they did to me…this is why I sold out and left SL
This sucks. I was waiting to find some First Land (there never seemed to be any available) to upgrade to a premium account. Now there’s no need. I’m not shelling out $100’s of dollars a year to own land.
I had paid for a premium account months ago with the intent of getting some first land for myself. I always wanted first land. Not for any other reason then it was FIRST LAND… it was special. I didnt want to resell it, I wanted to actually use it and always keep it.
However in the 6 months or so that I’ve been a premium account holder I have NEVER been able to come across First Land to purchase. I knew it might be difficult but I always assumed at some point I’d be able to actually find a piece, any piece for myself.
I understand to an extent why this program is being shut down but honestly, I cant help feeling betrayed by Linden Lab to a small degree over something that fundamentally was at the heart of what Second Life was supposed to be all about.
Zayn Till
If it’s over, then why not take all references to First Land off the website. If I had been a new user, following the Welcome to SL links, and eventually gotten to Land, it would mention First Land, as if it were still available. You gonna take it from us, then take it off the website too. Prevent other new players from being taken advantage of. This is why people are upset, that’s deceitful.
am I missing something here? how come LL can’t tell which premium accounts have not had their first land parcel and how come they can’t allocate each one at random? then the market could do the rest. Also a simple bit of IM or chat could be used in each transaction to prove if it was a ‘bot or a real person in the act of purchase.
I love it! Yes, do this, and enjoy the class action brought by those thouseands of premium residents who have not yet bought their first land! That wwill certainly hep with your ability to capitalize improved infrastructure and obtain needed staffing. Bravo!
In addition, despite the new continent, I imagine that I will now easily sell my contiguous 4096 in Saengseon at my ask of L$2,500,000. Just wonderful.
Also, my usability in world is nil to to none, and so this will still permit me to have prfitted from my pomonths of membership, which is what I came here to do.
Removal of this incentive is sure to really boost premium membership sales, and so, with the 60k residents who are now supporting the system financially, There is bound to be a quick resolution of the grid performance issues with no new membershoips being sold. Not to mention that the inflation we are about to see should drop procductivity to nothing in the world economy.
Statistically now, in an economic forcasting tool I developed in college and proved in business you are now in an unpredictable standard deviation indicating imminent failure, (Out beyond 6-sigma)
Didn’t you ever think to maybe hire an economist for $35k a year?
Best of luck!
I remember a time back in maybe early October when I considered buying my bit of First Land but held off till I could find the right plot. Then all First Land seemed to disappear, gobbled up by the carpetbaggers scheming for a big profit. I n recent weeks I have looked without finding anything … no First Land! So now my patience is to be rewarded with … nothing? I’ll certainly be thinking about this when my premium membership comes up for renewal! Guess that expensive plot of land on a private sim wasn’t such a bad deal after all!
Anyone remember Shermerville? It was a handfull of Linden made, suburban themed sims, all nice and neat and divided up with roads and parks and such.
Each lot was 512, which was perfect for the newcomer to experiment and learn building, but not so big that you could do anything substantial with it.
The way the lots were divided was so that really all it was good for was a newbish residence, even if you did manage to buy out adjacent lots.
Maybe that idea should be revisited with a no transfer option?
Just a thought
So precisely when are these “much higher levels of mainland expansion” going to happen? We’ve been hearing about it for a while now, but the reality is after a very brief drop when you announced this the last time, prices are as high as ever. And essentially unaffordable for users who aren’t yuppies with high levels of disposible income.
I keep waiting for the bad times in sl to end and for it to go back to an enjoyable, usable place. You guys keep proving that this may never happen. Those abondoned land deals you mentioned will instantly go to the owner of the landbot, anouther issue you havent addressed even though you can clearly see by the feature vote thats close to 3000 votes http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2783 This needs fixed!!! Start showing you care a little about the premium members who pay your salary.
The usual practice with most businesses is that if you buy a package deal, you get better value than “essentially pay[ing] for itself”. A month-to-month membership is, ATM, worse value than buying on the market anyway, in terms of L$ (which, incidentally are officially worthless anyway). Given that land now costs so much, and additional tier can’t be bought without being premium, the “right to own land” looks a lot like “the right to spend more money in SL”, which seems rather silly.
It’s pretty clear to me that this “change” is essentially meaningless, and that new premiums expecting first land were being shortchanged for a while now due to lack of first land anyway, but I’m still rather disappointed at how this is being handled. While the TOS may say things about changing the rules, if I was a new premium member, I would have to consider this to be dealing in bad faith. Certainly anyone who recently signed up for a premium membership should be offered a refund!
I find it funny that every time something is abused, LL just takes it away. Instead of really trying to find a way to make it work, they throw their arms up in frustration and say “Sorry, but it sucks to be you.”
I’m sure there are a few ways this could be done to ensure that first land parcels weren’t all being bought up by the alts of land barons. Perhaps this would violate “resident freedoms” but then why should I even bother to become a “resident” if the initial opportunity is denied to me at a reasonable price.
I think LL needs to take a good, hard look at what’s really important; Continuing to please the people who have been around for the longest, thereby enabling a stagnant, elitist society. Or making every effort to keep opportunities open for the newcomer, which in turn keeps the Second Life world fresh and full of new ideas.
Think about it.
Wow, read many posts.
I like the suggestion on support. But how about we get some first. Personally I have called, tried ingame support ticket creation and NOTHING happens. I had to escalate an issue to someone and after 3 weeks, still no resolution.
And for some of the comments about them cant take it away. They covered that VERY nice in their terms. However, those using paypal can contest charges. I am not encouraging folks to do that as I have and won. I would rather see the Lindens work this out.
Facts:
1: Game is growing VERY fast.
2: Lindens having a hard time keeping up.
3: Perception is that SL is making money and screwing some.
4: The game literally rocks.
😉
134 Watermelon,
hahahhahaha so abusing the first land is ok in your eyes?! Please
Finally LLabs did something that was worse the ending the bonus weeky pay! This makes perfect sence that LLabs stop this jokery of what alts and fake newbie taking first land turning around and selling it and duming the account as well…….. This happened over and iver again and again! Atlease paying accounts are now getting alittle more repect then they had before its a step in the right direction.
It is sad that you are ending the First Land Program. When I first signed up as a premium a few months ago, the First Land was one of the things that made me like the game so much. Someone was finally doing something for the new guys. It is sad that LL has apparently stopped caring for the new guy.
Make changes if need be, but I feel that it is just wrong to end it all together.
I think taking away the opportunity for first land is unfair. When i joined the premium account you gave first land as a benefit, why can t i get it anymore? I signed up for premium account after three months of being in SL because I wanted to own land. I wanted to belong to something I thought was great. What you did is not right. Those who signed on believing they would get first land should be able to have it.
If you wonder why continetal land is more expence than island land keep in mind that continetal land has now covents. People pay more for what they want. The only way to bring down land prices is to make more land avalible.
We need to bring up the quaility of full accounts. If not why even bother being full members. The abuse of alts, etc. Just caused this to end this way. We all saw this happening just like Rate Bonus,DI, educational event teaching pay etc…….Each one had to have the cheaters, and those that wants money without doing much effort. Look at the state of the game now, we are still inthe darkages with money chairs/dance pads(sort of free money but not really). We need to learn from our past before we move forward.
Standard LL reaction: “you abused it, so we’re taking it away”.
Wonder how long it’ll be before they just say “users are the source of the abuse” and just lock everyone out. As logical as any other decision they’ve made in the last two years.
CP Costello said:
“BOT’s cannot buy first land .first land can be purchesed once by a new user once thats it bots have nothing to do with it.the new user can set it for ten time what they paid its completely up to them and has nothing to do with realitors or BOTS of any kind.”
That is just about the most dishonest statement that has been put forth in this series of comments yet.
Bots can and have purchased First Land. “Realtors” have spoiled the land market for the rest of us. These are facts. I will support any and all measures Linden Lab take to box folks like you in, including discontinuing the First Land program. Surely there’s a more sane way to go about it, and most certainly we don’t have the entire set of facts here.. but First Land was being gamed to death by the likes of you. There is no doubt about that.
So now, it’s dead. Hopefully traffic will be the next target.
Here’s another fact, to all you Second Life “Realtors” out there: We don’t need your “help” purchasing land. We’re perfectly capable of doing so directly with the party interested in selling. You do not in any way provide a “service” to the community, you simply exploit a opportunity on the platform, and take advantage of inexperienced players, to pad your own pockets with cash, with no regard for who gets screwed. This is the truth of the matter, and you bloody well know it.
zk
This is my first post. As someone who recently upgraded to premium acct. (after being a resident since 06/06) First Land was the biggest incentive for me to upgrade. However, I have been unable to find any available First Land since I upgraded. I found one reference to the “scarcity” of First Land in the knowledge base, and now, without warning, we’re told it’s going away because it wasn’t supporting those it was supposed to be for.
Per the blog post here: “Increasingly we have found that these cheap L$1 per meter parcels were not benefitting those people as intended.” Okay then, how does removing that help those it was supposed to be for then? What sort of benefit will you be replacing it with? As so many here have said, LL is going back on a promise it made as part of the premium package, and unless there’s some sort of grandfather program or some other way to compensate me for the fact that I paid for a premium acct specifically for something that that was never really available and has now been taken away.
Linden says the value of the premium membership is in the stipend and the 512 of tier that’s “worth” $5.00 — I ask, if basic accts cannot own land, and all premium accts are granted the 512 of tier, how this can be considered “worth”? It’s not as if basic accts have to “pay” for the same 512 of tier, because they cannot own land! Or at least, that was how SL always explaind land ownership! Now I’m hearing that free accts can own land on private islands?
And as for this “new” continent LL has mentioned.. Where is it? Am I blind? Is the map so beyond working? When will we be seeing it? Will the market value of land stabilize? Seeing as how trying to afford the $7k-10k+ for 512m2 cost on -just- the stipend is ridiculous..
Like so many others, I feel as if a carrot was dangled in front of me to get me to upgrade to premium. I currently rent (as I rented before I upgraded) and rent still because there was no sense in stopping renting until I could actually get the piece of land that LL said I was entitled to, and now that carrot has been pulled away. I feel like I’ve been deceived, and I feel LL is trying to take some moral high ground by saying “Well, it didn’t work and it wasn’t fair.” Except they’re NOT ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING TO FIX IT.
They’re not trying to make it right to the people that they say it wasn’t benefitting.
I’ve been steadily losing faith and confidence in LL. This is seriously going to make me reconsider my membership. How long before we can’t trust anything said on this website? How long before we can’t believe anything LL has in writing because it could disappear any time they chose? How will you continue to alienate residents?
After a month-plus of daily searching for first land, I now find a key element of my “premium” membership “benefits” is retroactively withdrawn. Shame on you.
I can understand the problem with “alts” and land flipping; what I do not understand is the way this is being handled. If Linden Labs is unable to handle the alt accounts grabbing land, why not do as has been suggested and assign land that cannot be sold? Believe it or not, there are some of us who think it would be fun to experiment with a little plot in the metaverse … and maybe some of us would move on to buying and developing larger properties.
Any thoughts I previously had about building a corporate presence in SL are gone if LL management cannot hold to a very simple agreement and will renege without warning.
A lot of interesting discussion, some of completly inaccurate, some of it very good.
Even though it appears to be a dead issue, I would like to offer my suggestion anyway. First the issues:
THE INACCURATE INFORMATION:
1) While I am totally against unverified accuounts (free is fine with verification), they have no effect on 1st land. You must be a premium account memeber to purchase 1st Land, that means payment info on file, or verified.
2) Bots do effect the 1st Land issue. While they can not actually buy the parcel, they can alert, automatically, someone who then immediately goes there and offers the nube 5 or 10 times the price of the land to sell it, or buys it using the strategy outlined below. The last 1st Land offering was gone in less than 30 minutes and most had for sale signs on them.
THE REAL PROBLEM: The problem with the 1st Land program as it existed, was that the land was immediately available for resale. I can create a premium account for $10, use a bot to find me a first land parcel, buy it, turn it, cancel the premium members and make $20 US for very little effort.
THE SOLUTION: Really quited simple – continue to offer 1st Land to all premium accounts. Make a decent supply available so it is not so scarce that new premiums can not find it. Breaking up confiscated or abandoned parcels is a terrific idea. PUT A 90 DAY RESALE RESTRICTION ON IT. Simply put, you are stuch with your choice for 90 days. That pretty much ends the instant scalping game, and takes the profit out of creating accounts just to purchase 1st Land.
I now own 16km2 of mainland, have been a premium member since day one ( 7 months now) and started with a 512m2 plot. I chose not to buy 1st Land in the end, because I did not like the offierings, but it was that program that got me interested at looking at land.
OKAY – NOW JUST AN OPINON: Since there has been very little first offered in recent months, and most was grabbed by unscrupulous residents who ONLY care about make Lindeys, killing the program makes sense, and really will have no impact on legitimate premium members. It was a virtual carrot at best. But, the program could be made to work, and could be a benefit to both LL and the new members. Why is that so hard to understand, or do?
DR Dahlgren
Well that sucks. I’ve been trying to FIND First Land for the last month. Checking the search everytime I’m on… Only now to find out that it’s gone before I could get some. This is very bad. Not impressed!
With Auto Returns making and build restrictions making it VERY hard to enjoy pets/cars/ships etc the world is losing much of it’s appeal.
A sad day indeed…
Well this is really a relief. Here I went out and bought a premium membership, after learning all of the wonderful things I gained by having it, like the respect of the community, the knowledge that I was proving that I was not one of those itiotes. and the right to find and buy first land.
Of course, it was not until after I paid my money that I learned that its not actually possible to buy first land; unless your Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
so thank you LL, for relieving me of that awful struggle and effort, I no longer have to spend hours each week striving for that chance, that invisible hope of actaully getting some first land.
I can rest easy now.
I just purchased my membership two days ago because I was going to take advange of the “First Land” but had not found any when I had searched. I think that is false advertising and breach of contract. Why should I continue as a “premium” member when the benefit I was sold was suddenly discontinued after 2 days?
Count me as a very unsatified customer.
I think it’s just as well. Too damn many opportunistic scumbags out there who would’ve raped the land for profit simply because there are no rules against it. And besides…how many people out of the thousands each day are really sticking around and going premium? Have you thought about that?
On the topic of raping land for profit…if you really want to make money, then make the effort to get into first life real estate, because it’s a lot more profitable in the long run and a lot more rewarding [if also challenging and tedious] than dishing out boxes of uniformly colored pixels for a handful of cash to desperate folks.
136 Usagi,
I said that the change is meaningless, meaning of course that first land was virtually ungettable before the change. I don’t care about abusers. I care about whether non-abusers get first land or not. I see essentially no change on that front.
Draconian measures call for Draconian repsonses.
Linden Labs should remember who it is that provides most of their content. Does anyone read history anymore?
“The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered American colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies despite a lack of representation in the Westminster Parliament. One of the protesters was John Hancock. In 1768, Hancock’s ship Liberty was seized by customs officials, and he was charged with smuggling. He was defended by John Adams, and the charges were eventually dropped. However, Hancock later faced several hundred more indictments.
“Hancock organized a boycott of tea from China sold by the British East India Company, whose sales in the colonies then fell from 320,000 pounds (145,000 kg) to 520 pounds (240 kg). By 1773, the company had large debts, huge stocks of tea in its warehouses and no prospect of selling it because smugglers such as Hancock were importing tea without paying import taxes. The British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly, thereby allowing them to sell for lower prices than those offered by the colonial merchants and smugglers.
“There were protests in both Philadelphia and New York, but it was those in Boston that made its mark in history. Still reeling from the Hutchinson letters, Bostonians suspected the new Tea Tax was simply another attempt by the British Parliament to quash American freedom. Samuel Adams, and others of like mind, called for agents and consignees of the East India Company tea to abandoned their positions; consignees who hesitated had their warehouses, and even their homes, attacked.[1]
“The first of many ships carrying the East India Company tea was the HMS Dartmouth arriving in late November 1765. A standoff ensued between the port authorities and the Sons of Liberty. Samuel Adams whipped up the growing crowd by demanding a series of protest meetings. Coming from both the city and outlying areas, thousands attended these meetings; every meeting larger than the one before. The crowds shouted defiance not only at the British Parliament, the East India Company, and the HMS Dartmouth but at Governor Thomas Hutchinson as well, who was still struggling to have the tea landed. On the night of December 16 the protest meeting, held at Boston’s Old South Church, was the largest yet seen. An estimated 8,000 people were said to have attended.
By actions such as this, Lindens are facing public resistance.
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard ’round the world.”
Do you really what a bunch of embattled farmers on your collective asses?
Think about it.
Be afraid.
Seems like the easiest way to solve the first land problem is to include a 512 parcel with a premium account. You don’t get to choose where it goes. It’s chosen randomly by the SL. And don’t allow it to be sold. You have that piece of land until you are no longer a premium member or you buy more land (i.e. island) At that point, the first land goes back into the queue to be given to a another new premium account.
what about the tons of people that were waiting on getting first land?
they should be grandfathered.
*** Oh, btw, “market forces will bring the price down”?? NFL! _Very_ little will be allowed to cut into landbarons’ profits… how many times have land prices “tumbled” IRL, without some catastrophic event to trigger it? Just not going to happen, I’m afraid :(… ***
This is a particularly silly comment. Last I checked it had been a while since the Supreme Being auctioned a new sim on planet Earth.
If they make enough land, the price will come down. Take econ 101 some time.
Cool, no need to keep my accounts as premium any more. Back to basics.
The first land program was abused. Just like dwell payments, it needed to go. If you want cheaper land then DO NOT BUY until it gets cheaper. Trust me you who is paying nothing can afford to wait out the barons and landflippers who are paying alot in tier to hold the land.
Why don’t you just eliminate the whole concept of Tier, and Premium accounts, and everything you find to charge more for, and just charge everyone who connects per-minute? I mean, look how well it worked for AOL*
(*in 1997. This doesn’t work now, but that shouldn’t stop LL from trying it with their current track record.)
Nice work LL! You couldn’t figure out how to keep people from gaming your system (despite the MANY requests for a 90 day freeze on purchased first land) so you’re going to take away any chance a player has at getting a fair deal on a first parcel of land.
Land prices are through the roof and without the check and balance of first land they will continue to go up. A better move of good faith would be to take your Lindex earnings, buy as much expensive land as possible and re-sell it as first land, freeze that land ownership for 90 days, rinse and repeat.
Make a good decision for once please and re-instate firstland with some measures to make it more difficult to game your system. All you smart people out there and nobody could figure out a way to stop the gaming? I just don’t buy it.
Very disappointing….very. I just don’t understand why you keep making decisions that you know will get NOTHING but negative responses…
hmm i see my blog was pulled because i used the word conned into going premium
If you’re ending the First Land program, then you’d sure as hell better put a stop to the landbots, otherwise you’re going to be giving all your abandoned land to one player for L$1 per m2 when his bots grab it before any human possibly could.
This saddens me. I just purchased my premium account a couple weeks ago with my husband. (Two premium accts) We have been clicking for first land every half hour. Spending hours in game waiting and waiting. I thought maybe I should try and get a loan so I can buy some land selling for 7k L Someone told me to be patient and hold out for the first land. So I have been waiting.
Wish there was a way we could own our land and if we were to choose to upgrade and want more land in the future, we could do so by selling our first land back to LL for the price we bought it for.
Seeing what some others wrote here today, my luck would be going out to buy some land and then having LL decide to give a last chance to purchase first land for the premium accts that have never owned land.
Should I wait or should I buy?
Linden, this action is highly unfair to customers that joined and upgrade because of want you promised them as part of the parckage. I upgraded my account last week because you promised to give me the ability to own 1st land at a price of 512 L$ for 512 m2 additionally u would pay stipend. IT IS A BIG SHAME TO YOU LINDEN THAT NONE OF YOUR PROMISES HAS MATERIALISED.if you are doing me or any other new premioum member a favour you will give us the 512 m2 land on our joining or at least give us refund the joining cost.
I just bought a premium account membership and now I just saw you cancelled first land. Not very nice, now I will have to pay at least 7500L for a small 512 plot because everything that is sold below that is directly sniped by the scalper bots and put up for sale again.
You could take care of this issue very easy:
You only offer first land to people who buy a 3 month subscription or even only to the ones who buy a half year subscription.
Buy premium membership for 6 months and get 512 metres of land.
Buy a yearly premium membership and get 1024 metres.
Compare this to some magazine who gives their yearly subscribers a free video game or something.
Client bonding it’s called.
I just read with dismay about your changes to First Land policy. While I can appreciate and understand your concerns, I don’t necessarily believe you have fully examined the problem. Currently, the prices of land is shooting out of the stratosphere. Newer players don’t have a chance to own anything and you’ve entirely left them at the whim of unscrupulous individuals who are continuously pushing up land values to insane levels. In some cases renting, always an option fraught with problems and peril, is cheaper than owning… even in the long run. This is a strange situation to say the least.
If you find it absolutely necessary to remove the First Land option, a mistake in the extreme in my opinion, I believe it becomes incumbant upon you to somehow control the overall price of land and to keep it to a reasonable and relatively stable level so the rest of us can actually afford to get our own start here without laying out great deals of money. Perhaps the problem doesn’t rest with First Land itself but with the SL economic system.
By actions such as this, Lindens are facing public resistance.
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard ’round the world.”
Do you really want a bunch of embattled farmers on your collective asses?
Think about it.
Be afraid.
My first reaction to this announcement was outrage. I have been trying for months to find available “First Land” only to find none. My immediate bootstrap analysis of the ramifications is that this decision, if it does not include a provision for those of us who have already upgraded to PREMIUM, is that it involves fraud. It matters not what the actual initial intent of LL was when it offered FIRST LAND, what matters is that did not deliver what they promised. There are 2 sides of a contract and it would appear, without the benefit of further research, that LL is in violation of thier agreement with thier own customers who may number in the 100 of thousands.
What Linden labs needs to do in order to avoid some serious fallout from this is FIRST:
Grandfather ALL premium members into the FIRST LAND program as it was prior to today 2-20-07.
Second: Change all advertisements and promotions to reflect the new policy so that new members (post 2-20-07) know CLEARLY that FIRST LAND (however elusive in the past) is not a benefit they will receive upon upgrading. It’s bad enough and as I mentioned above, probably fraudulent, that some people have been premium members for a year or more and have never been able to find FIRST LAND
Third: Make FIRST LAND, as promised, to Premium members, available IMMEDIATELY, regardless of what it costs you. Said members have been remarkably patient with Linden Labs given that the FL program appeared to be a scam early on coupled with the new policy of ditching it without notice after millions of dollars in fees were paid without delivering fully on the advertised benefits of premium membership.LL failure to deliver on the TOS agreement smacks of bad faith, which is the kiss of death for any defendant in legal actions initiated against them.
Fourth: Refund all fees, minus stipends paid, to all premium members who have not (been able to) buy first land to date. Do you expect your vendors (e.g.) your landlords, Employees, Telcom and IT providers, domain registars, Food Service and office suplly providers etc to provide products and services at agreed upon terms after you fail to meet the terms of said agreements? Further: would you continue to provide agreed upon service for customers (members) if thier payment was not recieved by you?
Fifth: Make some recompense to the FIRST-LANDLESS premium members in additon to the above in exchange for the inavailability of FIRST LAND prior to 2-20-07. Many people like myself, were counting on FIRST LAND to test drive a business idea that may have expanded ,with the benefit of low cost FIRST LAND, to test drive it on.
Sixth: Hire lawyers because I think you are going to need them when some enterprising young lawyer smells a class action suit that could line his or her pockets with LL money.
I say this with gritted teeth and the sincere hope that this does not happen becauise LL will see the light and do the “right thing”.
Second Life is a very creative and groundbreaking development but it is also a business and it must be conducted as such if it is to survive. One of the first laws of business is to deliver what is prmoised at the agreed upon price and on time. LL excuses (e.g) “”the members are at fault for LL’s failure to deliver””, are frustrating, sad, an unstable ( at best) model for continuing the business and most likely, actionable.
Suppositions and reflections:
Linden labs is clearly encouraging new membership in order to increase thier market share in a hot new market. Membership has increased well over 100% in 3 months while the service provided has decreased. This is a common scenario in business. Does anyone recall what happened to AOL in the mid 90’s when they gave away memberships and then discovered that many of those new members could not access the service because AOL did not invest US dollars in infrastructure? Does anyone know what has happened to AOl since then? They made a ton of money with the Time Warner merger and then lost, not only money for the combined companies but most of thier paying customer base because they failed to get off thier high horse long enough to see the writing on the wall of change. Now AOL is a totally free service. Thier own Arrogance maimed AOL and may eventually kill it but the killers at the top still squirreled away millions of dollars.
As a business man, I am aware that entreupaners (sp) must have an exit strategy if they are to profit from thier
start up ventures. There are many companies on this path: Invent and launch a new and intersting service or product; promote the heck out of it, gain many new customers in order to acheive market share in favor of actual earnings and then sell out to the highest bidders.
See “Youtube”… which has already dumped an immensely popular and very unprofitable web site into the deep pockets of Google with a terrible cash flow and a rash of legal issues that will eventually cost Google much more that the 1.6 Billion it paid three guys that started and ran the company for a mere 18 months.
“Vonage” is another case in point. They are so desperate to gain market share that they slash thier prices against a growing field of monster sized competitors in the VOIP business in order to grow and maintain market share, so that when they sell out to one of the big boys like ATT, they (the owners of, privately held VOIP provider, Vonage) will make many millions of dollars when they sell out, yet because they (SAVE MONEY) by shirking thier responsibilities to thier existing customers. It seems that few people are “in it” for the long haul any longer. Pump and dump is the order of the day.
I further speculate when I say that Linden Labs is undercapitalized but instead of taking on equity partners who could provide the funds needed to make good on thier agreements with customers, they choose to go it relatively alone so that when they do sell out, fewer insiders will profit more from the “pump and dump” busines model.
Unless something dramatic changes at Linden Labs soon, they will either be “out of business” or owned by someone, some company that may have less imagination and passion for the business than LL but will find a way to make money without increasing the value to the members (customers).
Some suggestions on benefits for premiums:
To get people to sign up for premium you need to add special features that makes peopl want to sign up, here is some ideas…
– A special customer service line that gets answered quickly
– Special objects every month created by LL. (pack of items per month for free for premium people)
– a button you get on your profile to show your accomplishments such as LL sponsored contests and how many years your with SL. (old players get gold metal)
– Chance to enter a monthly raffle hosted by LL, $100k prize or have your own island for a month!
– Maybe a lottery available for premium members only, that is hosted by LL, where people can purchase lotto tickets with $L
– Exclusive grid for premium members when SL is down for maintenance, so instead of waiting premium members can continue their SL experience(BIG ONE)
– Create a LL hosted forum for premium members only
If you are going to remove the First Land feature for Premium accounts, give the premiums something they can use? such as higher prim limits for physics vehicles? Priority on Support calls? Immunity from parcel bands? free tickets to Sl based concerts? I’d prefer the new one.
Now you’ll do away with the $10 fee to go from premium to basic account, right?
I wish they REDO this stupid blog! I HATE SCOLLING FOREVER reading novel like replies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you like small tight places IN IN A CAVE! DON`T SUBJECT US TO THIS NIGHTMARISH BLOG DESIGN!
I have to agree with Raven’s comment.
You guys are getting WAY to greedy with you’re money.
Way back in the day you guys PAID for US to hold events..we got a fair bit of Lindens when we first signed up and now what? We’re lucky to get a tablespoon of butter before u ask us to bend over our desks and for what?
Lag…bugs..sorry downtime cuz our network sucks?
You guys need to get you’re business together or else you will lose it all in the end.
GL and start fixing you’re ‘game’.
142 Watermelon,
well there is hope there is always is. being a neg thought is always easy….But looking for the future looks a hell of brighter NOW then before! The abuse to this issue over and now its time to move on!
The Future is now and i support LLABs stands on this issue. I never owned Firstland I went start int to ownership. And now will the future users.
You still have the issue of unfettered land speculation that doesn’t contribute anything to the community. Second Life needs a capital gains tax on land, and it needs it now.
Has anyone noticed that there has been two blog enteries since this “breaking news”? We go for days with the same blog at the top of the list and suddenly we get two planted on top of probably one of the biggest entries of the year? In the span of just a few hours?
Someone’s trying to bury this.
Funny thing…if nobody buys land the prices drop dont they?
So maybe thats what is going to happen. No way im giving 30 or 40 thousand linden for a 512 sqm plot of land…its ridiculous and crazy, specially when you also have to pay tier on it.
The greedy ones will fall by thmselves and sooner or later the prices will drop substantially, because residents are not going to take it.
Anyway, who needs a virtual home?
Any bush its good enough to change clothes…
I agree completely with all people who said that stopping the FL program without warning is not correct. I also have held back from buying land and waited till I could find a parcel of FL. And I know a lot of people who did the same. It would only be fair to allow people who already pay for premium membership and are trying to get a piece of FL to still find such a piece. I love SL, but this gives me a bad taste in my mouth.
That would be different if we actually would have been ABLE to get first land the last weeks. Then you wouldn’t here from me and many other people I think. But to offer something as part of a membership that’s nevere there, and then after a time stop offering it just is not nice!
I’ll send my dragon familiar Cupelix to LL to speak things through, he is known for his bad temper regarding injustice….:)
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LL hasn’t done anything wrong IMHO.
They warned us back in November that all subsidies would be eliminated eventually once the economy took off.
Quit bitching that the soup kitchen has closed before you got to the head of the line.
Mkay?
Have a nice day. 🙂
BTW, I never did find a first land to buy since I signed up and went premium. But you don’t see me griping, do you?
The first land program had some benefit to all of us in SL. Namely to keep land prices down.
Every time there is an influx of first land other land drops in price and helps us all.
While first land wasn’t uses as intended instead of just abolishing it maybe offering cheap land. Not 1$L for anyone who hasn’t bought land before but auction restricted to those who don’t have any land right now.
Another thought on adding advantage to paid accounts:
Voice chat.
Voice chat is a populare thing in MMOs but it’s usually offered as a third party thing. That works for guilds and teams when going into a combat situation but it’s not so effective for SL.
Offering voice chat as a paid advantage could encurage more people to pay for SL.
Due to the bandwith load voice chat would create it couldn’t be reasonably offered for free anyway.
The free users could hear what is being said in voice chat but can’t actually speak.
Additionally it should work in the way text works. Only good for people close enough to hear you and block it for people who don’t want it.
Note to Lindens. Please read this post. These are what i think could help boost the value of premium accounts. http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=1414590&postcount=72
I signed-up for a premiun account last week solely for the purpose of owning first land. I was excited about having the experience of owning and using my new SL home. After looking for first land parcels several times a day for over a week, i realized that it might take some time to make this dream come true. Now this! I feel that SL has broken a contract with me and i will not renew my premium account unless equal benefits are offered. I just hope that the USA dosn’t decide who can own land there,,, like Mexico did in the 1950’s.
Argent, making *any* limitation based upon unique IP address is untenable in this day and age where entire families share a single IP even though the may have multiple computers online at any time. In our home, for instance, we have seven people. Two of us have SL accounts. A third is seriously considering getting one, and a fourth is “interested”, in his words. This means that, conceivable, four of us could be online simultaneously, but SL will see only a single unique IP (our LAN sorts it all out on our end). You idea would result in only one of us being able to get First Land.
Misterbear, let me say … um … OK. I’m a member of the BDSM community. I didn’t say “Yes, Sir, may I have another”. I coded red on this one. 🙂
DigitalJoe, I have a better idea. Instead of getting rid of us “freeloaders”, how about Linden Lab banish all Premium accounts to your very own, lag-free, and almost barran and lonely Grid, where you can congratulate the ocasional premium resident you meet online on just how much better you are than the rest of us?
Wow. This is really lame. I don’t know much about land ownership but when I have looked, prices in the hundreds of USD really shocked me. I don’t know who these ppl are that are buying land but I’m never going to be one of them. I actually considered upgrading to get First Land but now? What’s the point? So I can pay you to pay me $3 a month? What a joke! Bad move. And the blog entry was very condescending and arrogant. I have only been here for a few months but I’m seeing a definitely slide in QoL. Lame, Lindens. Lame.
@wuvme karuna
Great ideas! I hope they are seen by Jack and taken into consideration.
Cheers
Here’s a big surprise … so LL went ahead and released two parcels of abandoned land at L$1.0 per m2 tonight, land that they would have given as first land previously. BOTH were immediately snapped up by Elanthius Flagstaff’s bots. Yes, I agree it was a shame that some people were scamming first land by creating alts. So what does LL do to fix the problem? They give it all to one player.
Vote for Proposal 2783. End automated land buying!
http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2783
You may ask what, without First Land, is the value of a Premium account? Well consider that the L$1200 stipend per month (around USD$4.50) plus 512m free tier per month (around USD$5.00) means that the monthly premium account essentially pays for itself.
Not if people can’t AFFORD the land USING said tier. 🙂
We are actively looking for additional ways to increase premium value, and we would love to hear any ideas the community has on this.
A selection from me:
* Bump up premie stipend 🙂 🙂
* Bump up “free tier” cutoff point to 1024.
* Login priority would be nice
* Live Help from someone who doesn’t treat me like I’m a
clueless newbie would be really nice 😛
As far as the ‘dead’ first land program, not that I expect you to change your minds, but some folks have mentioned two possible solutions:
* Assign a random 512 parcel to current premie holders
(obviously, those who have not owned land yet…)
Those that have been WAITING for First Land and have
been unable to get any are quite understandably
feeling a bit cheated.
* Force a 30, 60 or 90 day holding period before resale
-only- on First land parcels.
Our hope is that through much higher levels of mainland expansion, market forces will act to bring resale prices down over time, for example the new continent being brought up to the east.
Only if the land is being made available as rapidly and regularly as possible.
‘Cause right now? They’re still sky-high prices. 😦
Its all nice and funny , closing logins to free accounts when the ammout of 34K login reaches, and weekends.
its all nice and funny to skipp the first land opertunety.
You can all do it, destroy the fun for lots of people
but i think this is not really the te solution.
you know what you should do …
1: close the free accounts
( since you go for restrickted logins already when there are to much logged in ) give them 30 days to attach a Creditcard or paypall and if not run a script and close and delete all free accounts ( dont get me wrong i started as free!)
2:Make signup back as it was in 2005 Payed 10 USD a month by Paypal or CreditCard.
3:Make a bigger diffrence between the diffrence of pay accounts ( not only discount and able to do things when you pay for a year who you cannot do when you are only paying a month)
What good does it do:
– the heavy database loads disapair because
1: No freeaccounts i bet that is 70% of the 4 miljoen residents ATM
2: If people need to pay for signup , Lindens will make more money , More money to pay more people to make sure the preformers of SL can contineu and stuff ( im not stupit they have money enough but hey need to explain why i think this is the solution)
3:If you want a Reality view over how many residence you have , Send out a mail to everyone who has a free account. Say that they have 30 days to make there account payed. if not there account will be deleted.
– this solve the heavy loads
– the griefers
– I just readed something here in the netherlands about Childsporn on Secondlife and how to Punish that.. well Kids dont have a CC card so it also helps against the Damage that can be caused through SL and it reduces this grab.
and i can fill this list more in if pleased but i think like you say on the blogpost about restricked the logins to free’s “you want everyone to enjoy and be happy with SL” If you do this people will enjoy , be happy and will recommand everyone to play SL.
think about this
i think lots of people have agreements and disagreements with what i write here , but hey atleast this is my view and i know its is of many others since the day the accounts were free to signup!.
SL dont have 4 mil citesensm they have 3 mil , grievers, whiners ( free accounts whine the most) , ect ,ect.
Good by for now
Yuna Gandini
Nice to see how all First Land references are being removed from the Knowledge Base. Here’s what used to be written there, from Google’s cache:
“Second Life’s “First Land” program allows Residents to purchase their first parcel of land below the current market value. Parcels are 512 square meters and sell for L$1 per meter to those who have never owned land.
What you need to Purchase First Land:
An active Premium Account
Never have owned land previously
Never have donated land to a group in the past
Please note: First Land plots are subject to availability.
To Find First Land
Login to Second Life and click on the Search button
Select the Land Sales tab
Select First Land from the pull-down menu and click the Search button
When you find a plot you like, click the Teleport button to teleport to it
Purchase it!”
I went Premium just a few days ago with the understanding that I had at least a chance of purchasing First Land. If that chance is now gone, it is indeed false advertising.
Money back, please.
1. LL is blamed for something done by people who abused the system. Nice. While you’re at it, why don’t you go “buy” a parcel on a private sim that YOU will never own.
2. First land has been rare for some time now because those same idiots were going around buying it all up then selling it for 3-5k. I’ve came across a number of them personally so they were still out there, you just had to look harder. Endstate is complaining about finding L$512 land is like complaining about an empty money tree when you rarely visit it.
3. Restrict credit card use? Yeah, screw those that are married and use the same card for both accounts. Let’s see, punish those who are fairly/appropriately contributing to the economy & keep the obvious land exploitation just so you can have your first land? Perhaps not the best option.
4. No more 1st land = less griefing skyscrapers/billboards. Yay?
Whether a real invidual person owns land or a land baron owns it, LL is still making money off of the land tier. There’s no reason to hold back the screaming mobs of barons wanting to buy land, since it is just more money in LL’s pocket.
Bringing servers online as fast as possible and giving the barons all the land they want is the best thing LL can do for themselves.
I see an easy way for LL to make money:
– when installing new servers, only use them for upgrading existing long-standing users.
– reuse the old slow machines for new land. Most barons/squatters don’t do much with the land they are trying to hock, so it doesn’t matter if it runs on an older, slower simulator.
I have a cunning plan….
How about a sign-up sheet for those who want first land. After they’ve been a Premium account for more than 60 days, they have up to 90 (or whatever number) more days to prepay for a 512m parcel, which will be assigned to them one at random on a first-come basis 30 days after they pre-pay, or as new parcels become available.
Along with a bit of education about how their investment can keep gaining value, and shouldn’t be “flipped” for quick cash, that should provide new Premium subscribers an incentive, prevent alts from grabbing land (too expensive this way – they’d have to shell out more than the land is worth in premium fees before they could get the land), and put a dent in “land grabbing” by the land barons. Also, this method shouldn’t disrupt the prices of existing real estate.
Further, BLOCK AUTOMATED LAND BUYING, whether by “bot” or by “radar”.
I belive that Linden Labs has a responsibility to stop automated process that make the game truly unfair. Automated land buying is simply griefing with money – it makes it impossible to get a “good deal” without access to those same bots. And then you end up with a bot war. No fun at all.
Recently, I got rid of a piece of land to reduce my tier. I started to break it up into 512m parcels and price them at L$3,000 each, which is what I paid, so that hopefully people who were new land buyers would have a crack at some “cheap” land, since there weren’t first land plots available.
Then I realized, duh, the barons would simply swoop in and buy it, as it would show up on their “radar” instantly (I nearly lost a parcel because my group was selling it to me for L$1 – I had two “real estate agents” there in about 5 seconds, maybe less…I had just enough time to click click the buy button). So I rejoined the parcel, and set it to sell for a good deal less than the surrounding land, but not too far for the barons to swoop on it, I hoped. It worked, a neighbor bought it instead of a baron.
Automated land buying is killing the market – the land barons can buy all the “cheap” land before anyone else can even see it in the list and travel there to check it out.
BTW, I’m installing World of Warcraft as I type this. I’m told it’s as much fun as SL, and cheaper. If that turns out to be the case, I may have a good deal of land to sell very soon, as well as all the stuff I own that can be sold.
Ok, so you create a first land sim with 116 x 512m lots. To be sold, even to alts, means creating 116 premium accounts at $1160 US. If they are retained by the owner, they don’t generate an additional tier but we know that does not happen as people sell, lots get bigger, and inside of a few months it no longer looks like a first land sim and most of the lots are generating tier fees. The very fact that new first land sims are constantly being created keeps prices down with a typical resale 512m lots going for 2500 to 5000L. That was a few months ago.
Now we have a totally new landscape. I seen 512s selling for 10 to 15k. I have also seen almost vacant new sims with no buyers. Does anyone really think these prices will come down?
I started out on a first land and when my neighbor’s sold, I expanded. I started a business, I expanded the lot again, and again, and again, till it reached into the adjoining sim. Then I sold it all and moved to an island.
I don’t know what would have happened had that first land program not been available. I am not so sure I would have bought land, and more land, and started a business. That first land was a good start and I still look back to that time on that land in my first house as a good memory.
Personally I can’t see how LL is losing in this deal and if land sales can only be had by the sim, I am afraid a lot of people will never have the opportunities that I had in making SL their home.
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I did it the way Loniki (above) did, too: got first land, which I could afford in RL terms, and when neighbors sold over the next several months, bought those parcels at a “reasonable” amount. Now I have a successful “bar” that provides a lot of people with a lot of fun (pity it makes no money for me, doesn’t even pay for itself, but it’s fun).
If I had to do it today, it wouldn’t happen. I might be able to justify upwards of US$20 for a 512m since I wouldn’t be paying tier, but that would be it. I don’t see how I could justify the kind of expansion at todays prices that I did six to nine months ago. The RL $ simply become insane when you start talking about aquiring 1024m. Even a 512m now is at least US$20 in the sim where I own land. When I bought, it was US$9 to $12, and I cringed at $12, and said that’s enough.
Looks like SL is turning more into RL every day. Crime and pollution (griefers), runaway real estate prices, corruption (see past blogs re: LibSL, et al). Any time now, I expect to see the residents of one sim invade and subjugate another sim. It’s about the only thing that hasn’t happened to mirror RL.
Did I mention my year’s premium subscription ends next month? That’s why I’m installing World of Warcraft. I’m finding it harder to justify the expense of sl.
With automated land buying, a crippled search function for land sales listings, and now the end to the first land program, all of the little guys will be forced into the greedy claws of the land barons like never before. Is becoming premium worth it? I don’t think so. Not unless you have the extra cash to line the pockets of those who control the land market.
The feature was abused but it DID allow the new residents who sign up to get their first plot of land cheap. The majority of the land bought was maybe bought speculatively (and LL should possibly have looked at ways to address that…), but considering the number of sign ups to SL and the slower but steady increase of premium account holders, they are cutting off the real new players from getting their first land at a reasonable price. 10-20 LL per sqm makes a tiny 512sqm plot a very expensive proposition now.
As a new resident back in 2005, I actually enjoyed waiting for First Land to come free and trying to grab a plot I liked. It was a simple mechanism. I would NOT have wanted to have to start comparing rental baron prices and have to figure out who allowed what on their land and who would still be around in a few months.
And once the land around me became such that I wanted to move, I had taken my first step on the property ladder. So I had something to sell to help me pay for the more expensive 1K sqm plot of land I eventually found elsewhere.
SL is already overwhelming enough for newbies. First Land was a cheap encouragement to go premium and helpful for first time buyers.
Just my opinion.
Wendel
Ive been looking for 1st land since last october with no luck.Gone back to a free account now,with all the crashes and glitches lately,now no 1st land there really seems little point.I am not paying the over inflated prices for virtual land.I doubt lots of others will.
Raise tier to $295 a month (island rates) for anyone who owns 65,536m of Mainland or more.
Then watch the land prices.
I’ve been watching the map for months now and see so many of the same lots still for sale week after week at the same artificially bloated prices. Or they go from one land baron to the next.
I also like the idea of some sims, for those Premium accounts that never got their First Land, where the lots cannot be resold.
LL – but have decided that there is no way to do this without significantly impacting on resident freedoms
REALLY??? HOW ABOUT WHAT BOTS ARE DOING TO THIS WORLD. I think it is time to end bots. While there may be legitimate uses, copybot, the land bots… these are truly taking away some of the fun and freedoms. Either restrict their abilities, or get rid of them.
NO MORE AUTOMATED PURCHASE OF ANYTHING!!!
One last thought, if you want to sell land and keep the likes of Elanthius Flagstaff and other bot users from grabbing it, try this:
Set the land for sale to a specific individual, use yourself. Put a sign with an IM link on the parcel. Interested people will IM you to purchase, and bots can not. The land will still show up on the map as for sale.
DR
About the first land resel issue: wasn’t it LL forcing the busines idea instead of the game and community idea?
To pay the insane land prices now one must be nuts or try to get the money out of other one’s pockets. This way mainland may more and more die.
Again about the free accounts: there are people contributing to SL content, that _cannot_ have a credit card or paypal account. And those accounts really have nothng to do with the land issue as they cannot have land on mainland. Those ruling the land market are premium accounts!
Restrict land resale, please and make it possibe just to give back the land for the price one bought it from LL. And – maybe – remove the ban line possibilities from mainland. It is nuts, when parts of Mainland are nearly only reachable by TP like private island.
What about the community idea and a better world? Nothing left? only business and the poor one is nothing worth like in RL?:
“cadaei wilder Says:
What is the status of those who’ve bought premium accounts for the advertised first land benefits? Is it strictly legal to advertise something and then withdraw one of the advertised benefits without offering those affected refunds on the remaining time of their premium accounts?
There wasn’t any mention up until now of the difficulties of getting first land while signing up for premium accounts.”
A great point!
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Sheesh, when are you going to get it that Unverifieds are the problem? Yet anther part of SL ruined by allowing Unverifeds. Wrong response to the problem.
I and other premium members joined up under the Terms and Conditions offered by Lindens. One of those was the opportunity to purchase First Land when avaiailable at a reduced price.
Lindens have broken their agreement and therefore should still continue to offer this First land to those Premium Members who joined before today. If they are unable to honour this agreement then they should offer a refund of their fees with immediate effect.
First Land was the sole reason why I upgraded to premium. Now it is certain I will not continue it when the three months I paid will be over. I bet the weekly stipend is next to go.
As a fairly new user, I must say I am disappointed how customers are treated here. Especially paying customers. You get 300 stipend per week, and that is about all that a paying customer gets now. Never would have I upgrade, if I had known this was coming. False advertisement all the way, and in the country where I live, that would definitely be a legal issue. If you advertise something, and then take it away and do not compensate customers you have received through the advertising, that is simply bad business. It does not make happy customers.
But as has been said before, this may be the culling of those who don’t have lots of money to spend to the product. Woe to us little people indeed.
This response is for Amanda Ascot.
Way to go! I’m always surpised when someone reads a post. Your response was excellent!
Though I am not a member of the BDSM community in RL, my living depends on it. Some of my best friends are into BDSM. This of course is the ultimate cliche response which I hear every day in RL and our combined community.
This was a specific post listed to garner a response and antagonize. I’m glad you read it and am even more thrilled that you responded. I hope everyone takes as much time in response to my lame post as they do in ragging the Lindens. I’m sure my customers at the local Portland Leather Alliance will cackle with glee at my provocotive stance and alluded insult! Huzzah!
@144 “Mark C” (is that a valid account name?)
> “This is a particularly silly comment. Last I checked it had been a while since the Supreme Being auctioned a new sim on planet Earth.”
I wasn’t aware that planet Earth had alts, or automated bots buying land, or upgrades every Wednesday ;-).
> “If they make enough land, the price will come down. Take econ 101 some time.”
This is the problem — they can never make enough land to satisfy the greed of those with auto-purchase schemes in their pocket (and enough spare L$ sloshing about to buy). Haven’t they been making land available “in the past”? Has the price ever come down? How about taking SL 101 sometime, or reading all the informative posts in this thread?
Okay, let’s follow your suggestion for a moment — a massive new continent comes into being “in the East.” There’s lots of land available… assuming nothing else changes in SL (eg same level of lag on the new continent, and the land purchasing suggestions in this thread don’t get implemented), then who’s going to be the first to buy up most (all?) of the land? You can bet your bottom L$ it won’t be newly forged Premium Accounts getting their First Land (or equivalent).
I am frankly baffled at the relentless hostility toward LL that this move seems to have caused. Let us not forget that in effect, LL is at worst only rubberstamping a situation that has been ongoing for months, in spite of what some people might say (quoting 171 Wendel Gascoigne, but I could easily have picked a dozen others):
> The feature was abused but it DID allow the new residents who
> sign up to get their first plot of land cheap.
I hate to call anyone a liar, but this has to be one of the more blatant untruths I have read in quite a while. Last fall (what, three months ago? four?) I started looking into the possibility of upgrading to premium and buying some land. I started searching for First Land and found zero hits. Over and over again. None found. None found. None found.
For (at a conservative estimate) 100 days, I searched for First Land at least 4 times a day. That’s a sample size of 400, which statisticians usually regard as fairly respectable. During this time, the grand total number of First Land parcels I turned up in search amounted to 0 (zero). Let’s face it: LL didn’t close down First Land just now. The land barons did it months ago.
Now if LL does *nothing else* about this, I might start complaining. But pulling the plug on a massively abused feature was clearly a first step that was long overdue. Let’s hope it clears the decks for some constructive alternatives to be worked out.
O btw, yes I did buy a 512 sqm plot just the other day. It was not First Land, but I loved the location and the neighbors are nice. I was sick and tired of waiting for the Promised First Land that never showed up, and I probably would not have gotten nearly as nice a plot anyway.
As for the endless and frankly tiresome bashing of free accounts, just a little reality check here: NOT A SINGLE FREE ACCOUNTHOLDER HAS *EVER* BOUGHT A PLOT OF LAND, First Land or otherwise. As 167 Random Blankes rightly remarked:
> Automated land buying is simply griefing with money
Enough already with all the dumping on free accounts. As for “freeloading” I seem to recall reading somewhere recently that more than 90% of the money injected into SL is contributed by free accounts. Of course, the money being siphoned *out* of the economy goes mostly into the pockets of the griefing land barons, but that’s OK, *they*’re premium, so they have to be OK, right? So are they all, all honorable men….
(I am not dumping on premium accounts in general, after all I’m one myself now. But I have been a free accountholder for most of my second life, and in my constant experience, the worst griefers have *never* been free accounts. It’s the rich fat cats that are ruining SL, not the little folk.)
I’m sure this has been said in one of the posts above, so apologises if I’m repeating what’s already been said.
I’m a new member of SL and I’m pretty cautious about paying for something I might not actually end up enjoying. So far my experiences with SL have on the main been good. However, I’m just not ready to have a premium account, but I was looking forward to the day I upgraded and got my First Land parcel. I’m not saying that this decision will stop me upgrading, but now there isn’t much need to do so anytime soon.
I wanted to learn some aspects of modelling, texture fabrication etc before I upgraded, I wanted to create something on my land that was personal to me, I don’t really want to buy other peoples stuff. I’m 48, so my learning curve is more like a slight incline these days, that together with problems I have staying in SL long enough to actually do or learn anything. So now I just don’t know were I’ll go with SL at all.
One solution is that the present system stays in place, but that if a player wants to dispose of their First Land parcel, they can only do so if they have other developed land elsewhere, if they don’t then they have sell the land back to Linden at the original price they paid for it.
Ehh, Dood, Children can Take the Credit Cards From their Parents. O.o
Wow major slap in the face after six months of searching for first land now to find i am not ever going to get it. You want suggestions, well heres one we can all applaud, and i can see the land barons of the game lining up behind me now, .How about 1024 of tierless land……… I have two premium accounts and if i cancel both i save two bucks a month, by buying linden on the lindex,,,,to replace the stipend. I don’t understand big business, but i do understand this,,,,,u make premium attractive to 3 million ppl, i bet that could generate allot of capital in terms of monthly account fees.which in turn will generate more land fees when ppl can realistically buy land it is a win win situation. I have a month to renew, if this issue has not been resolved i can guarantee my two will be free, and i have many friends who plan to follow suit.
Hmmm No use commenting on the first land issue. I’m not a premium member and have no interest in land so far. Maybe if I ever manage to reorganize my financial flows, a whole sim (maybe together with some people) would be nice, but land? …
Well you were asking for ways to improve on the premium accounts. Here are some suggestions:
– get rid of having to pay for ratings for premium members
– get rid of enforcing payments for uploading stuff for premium members
– increase the stipend so that a premium account actually pays for itself
– login priority
– support priority
At least these things would make sense to me.
And people willing to pay so much for Land… should maybe think of sticking together to buy a whole sim 😉 ((With land prices rising at some point the sim will be easier….)
hmm. i dont know much of what is possible for LL to do, but what if, first Land my not be resold, or may be resold but can only sell for the same price as it got purchased. so, bought for 1$L/sqm, sell for 1$L/sqm.
I think then no alt account would buy the 512 lots and try to make money with selling it.
if this is a bad idea, forgett what i sayd. lol. cu all inworld. 🙂
I do agree that First Land should be replaced with a viable alternative. What about a Last Land scheme? $512L for a 512 plot for an avatar’s final week. It might coax new sign-ups to stay with Second Life six more days, now there’s little point in them hanging around. What about a Flagstaff Land scheme, where you just dispell the illusion of a fair market and sell entire new continents to the guy that would have got them anyway.
I look forward to the new drop down boxes. Thanxies.
Toneless Tomba Says: Wow, pretty shocking news. I remember when I started even paying 512sqm for L$5000 at that time was a crazy thought for me. Who would buy land that’s not even real for around $20? That’s insane. If LL want’s to ease people into SL this will make it hard for people to grasp the idea of spending real money for virtual things.
People pay $30per month to kill virtual orcs…………
Andl I guess when so many residents refuse point blank to contribute a single RL cent to the running & progress of SL, you need to make money where you can.
Zebadee Says: Yaaaaaaaaay can we have some bug fixes now instead please?
NO! Updates make the grid unstable…………………. 😛
We all know that SL is a cutting edge and a very dynamic enviroment. But the original aims of the world have now changed beyond recognition.
I beleive it is time that LL issued an up to date and honest mission statement so that all of us know where SL is going.
My premium account is due for renewal in June. I am fortuate that I can afford $72 for the year so it is not the money that makes me think “should I” …it is the fact that LL can change direction and the rules randomly without warning meaning that in July I may not want to be part of it.
A dynamic “alive” new world is excellent but one ruled by virtual dictators who act (on what they themselves call “residents”) without consideration is not the dream metaverse infant that SL started out to be.
Come on LL, back-2-the-Dream.
Quant
Killing “First Land”?
This seems a totally backward solution. As already noted, nothing will stop land baron bots buying cheap land even if it isn’t first land.
Premium and free users are still blocked from buying cheap land.
The only potential gain is long term and messy.
Eventually only barons and the desperate are buying land at hopelessly inflated prices. No players will pay the prices, so no short term profit. The market levels at a rate people are willing to pay.
So what is the market willing to pay?
Well I’d put up somewhere between L$2.3 and L$4.7 msq with no tier or rental costs. I wonder if prices will ever drop to that level without bots buying it first?
Either way. The land isn’t the problem. The bots are.
I think how Linden should have handled this is:
Notify that any new premium account users won’t benifit from new land offer.
Allow current premium account holders that have not had chance to get premium land the oppurtunity for next 8 weeks, and make sure there is enough for them to obtain.
One thing linden does annoy me with is how fast they swamp the market currently with land. They need to reduce the rate in which they do this. When I look at the map, most of it is yellow, so there is plenty of land to be bought. Adding extra sims all time must be adding to the lag problem and other issues.
First…thats a really nice place for virtual meetings, communications, funny places and events.
But i can´t understand why we pay our premium account within your offer for free land (512) and also the stipendium (your offer sounds @ all pages ) and now :
– you told us that the “free land” dont work anymore ?
– week for week more freezes and crashes ?
– inventory items are lost ( where we payed also for ) ?
– network performances are bad ?
So it would be nice and correct when you spend your focus on the premium members in the future.
So here are my ideas:
– premium accounts can buy land for special prices ( ?% premium discounts for land & taxes ). This must be titled and signed as “premium land” at the ground and can not purchased from free user or landbarons for this special prices. LL only can offer that within a special market place. The offer comes only on times, it is restricted by sizes ( maybe 5120 ) and is not conferrable. Next land must be buy from LL for normal prices or from estate agents.
– if a premium user has purchased land on the normal way, because no “free lands” was available, so it would be correct to give the discount for the next planned purchase.
– as we know that we have heavy landbarons who offer land also for exorbitant prices i suggest a restriction for that. It can´t be that they buy land from LL for cheap prices and after that they offer the same land for exorbitant prices 5min later.
And know that landbarons have all scripts to find out lands who are not used or fresh @ this times and collect them like berrys. So a “normal” premium user does not have any chance to buy a nice land.
Yes …some user are here to make money…no problem…but pls. give the normal “premium user” the possibility to have a land to feel good.
Sorry for my poor english. But i hope you can understand what I mean…..
Cheers and have a great time ….
Cheehan
138 Zaphod Kotobide Says:
February 20th, 2007 at 6:22 PM PST
CP Costello said:
“BOT’s cannot buy first land .first land can be purchesed once by a new user once thats it bots have nothing to do with it.the new user can set it for ten time what they paid its completely up to them and has nothing to do with realitors or BOTS of any kind.”
That is just about the most dishonest statement that has been put forth in this series of comments yet.
Bots can and have purchased First Land. “Realtors” have spoiled the land market for the rest of us. These are facts. I will support any and all measures Linden Lab take to box folks like you in, including discontinuing the First Land program. Surely there’s a more sane way to go about it, and most certainly we don’t have the entire set of facts here.. but First Land was being gamed to death by the likes of you. There is no doubt about that.
So now, it’s dead. Hopefully traffic will be the next target.
Here’s another fact, to all you Second Life “Realtors” out there: We don’t need your “help” purchasing land. We’re perfectly capable of doing so directly with the party interested in selling. You do not in any way provide a “service” to the community, you simply exploit a opportunity on the platform, and take advantage of inexperienced players, to pad your own pockets with cash, with no regard for who gets screwed. This is the truth of the matter, and you bloody well know it.
roflmao .. I wish they would give IQ tests as part of a requirement to Join SL *cracks up*
Ever hear the phrase “Bait and Switch” hon? Did whoever make this decision not bother to run it past the lawyers? Or miss that they were using irony when they said that it’d be a great idea?
The DECENT thing to do would be to announce that all new premium accounts are ineligible for First Land. If you wanted to grandfather it quickly, have “unlimited” First Land available for a month, then close the program.
#84 @ alphaTest03 Yohkoh,
“basic economics” has already been proven to ring true even in the virtual world. Ask the residents who were around in 2004, 2005. At that time there was a similar increase in the price of land. Then, LL introduced the southern continent and the prices dramatically went down.
Another example is a few weeks ago when 40 sims found there was to the Auctions page. Prices went all the way down to 6.0 for the first time in 2 months. Why? Increase in supply.
Greed has nothing to do with it. I choose to become a land trader. If I didn’t make a profit then my decision to become a land trader would have failed. Just because I’m buying below market value and selling above market value doesn’t mean I’m greedy. It’s called a successful business model.
Sure, the land traders could flood the market with 5.0sqm land, but we’d be losing over half of our investments.
Mr Linden,
Your actions on this matter make it obvious you have no regards for your current paying customers. This is surely a case of a pot calling kettle black; if Linden can opening cheat new premium members knowing full well that they are entitle to the discounted first land as part of their package (even if it is just a hope). Then tell me what moral right Linden has to say Landlords are cheating in the game by selling the first land at a much higher cost. You Linden can not right a wrong by doing wrong yourself.
Quantum Daikon you have an excellent point! Where is the incentive to keep paying for a package that is changed regularly without notification to paying customers?
Linden it will be honourable for you to fulfil current premium member’s package agreements, enforce the new rule to people that are just upgrading or joining is fairer because they we will be aware of the new rule before they commit to joining.
There are so many other steps you could have taken (and can still take) Linden to prevent the unfair pricing of first lands by owners, I will list some ideas here for you:
1. Provide different types of land; that way your will be covering both ends of the market therefore acting as a price regulator.
2. Cap (i.e., set a limit) the price for which first land can be sold for … this will reduce if not stop excessive gains.
3. Regulate land transfer by implementing minimum duration land must be held before it can be transferred to another resident.
4. Make Linden the only buyer able to purchase land that have not reached this set duration; this will cover the extreme situations where owners have emergency and so must sell.
5. Set a fair and reasonable price for the lands you buy back.
6. Limit how many land individual account (which should include their associated additional accounts) can sell in a week/month/year.
In the above blog message you mentioned that “it may still be possible to find cheap land for sale, for example small parcels that have been abandoned and recycled by us”. How do I know when this happens and where do I find information so that I can buy those type.
Regards,
Keisha
Well, i wanted to upgrade to a premium account today and then ive seen that there is no first land anymore. For me that was the only reason to upgrade to Premium. I wanted to learn building on my own land etc.
Now I am very confused as a SL beginner. It looks like they stop developing and supporting this game… whats up with SL?
No interest anymore in Premium users? The result: I will wait what will happen in future, wont spend any mony in SL and i dont know if i will play it… the reason why i want to play the game is gone for me. why spend lots of real money for nothing real?
Confused.
@WrestlingHulka
Greed has everything to do with it. The only value or service land traders offer in SL is higher prices.
@tristan
Self-interest does not equal greed. Running a no-profit business is doomed to fail, and lose money on investments. Again, the higher prices are attributed to Linden Lab’s supply of land.
I am really disappointed about this. I signed up about two weeks ago, and yes, the promise of First Land, or owning any land at all, was what prompted me to go premium. I have been searching for any land at all for under L$10/m2 and have not managed to find any before it has been snapped up by other people (most often, a certain real estate group that seems to use a bot to find land.)
First Land was probably my one hope of getting land for under US$20 for a small parcel. With my chances of getting any reasonably priced land almost nil, as far as I can see, what reason do I have to remain premium?
Elli
My only reason for getting the premium account paid out on a quarterly basis was First Land. The stipend is not worth my time since I can make that in game in just an hour as a club host.
I can promise that if previously upgraded users aren’t given the chance to get land, I WILL be going to a free account before my next payment hits in a couple of weeks.
I know I won’t be the only one.
Please reconsider your position for current premium members who have not yet had the opportunity to acquire First Land. Since I upgraded to premium membership, there has not yet been a day in which First Land has been available thhrough LL…
What was the intention of the 1$L Parcels? If the problem was with “$1L” Land Parcels being sold for profit why not simply remove the option to sell the land parcel?
A replacement for “First Land” might be workable like this (I’ll call it “Newbie Land” or NL)
1. NL could only be purchased after an account has been Premium for one quarter (90 days). At quarterly billing prices, a speculator would have to put about L$6000 into an account (L$8000 at monthly rates). Even though they would get about L$4000 of this back in stipend, it would still be a significant amount to tie up in several alt accounts. This would also allow true premium members to get the feel for SL before grabbing any land.
2. NL could not be sold for another quarter (90 days) requiring more cash outlay by land speculator alt accounts. If the account is downgrades or canceled before 90 days the land reverts to LL and is made available again as NL. Again, this would allow the new landowners to understand the economics of SL and the value of their new land before accepting any offer from a speculator.
3. Set a higher price for NL which would be adjusted from time to time to match the lower end of the open market. Perhaps beginning at L$10/sqm to discourage the speculators. This would not be the nearly free land grant system attempted with First Land.
4. Use a lottery of interested accounts for each parcel. One account – one lottery entry at a time. Combined this would make it more difficult for speculators to acquire large parcels when the alt accounts do participate in a land transfer. I would think 24 hours of sign-up time for each parcel would be reasonable. At the end of the 24 hours, the lottery is held and the new land owner notified.
You could still offer First Land but if the land is sold in less than a year, slap the owner with a capital gains tax. Thats how its done with investment property in RL.
Yes I’ve bought and sold my first land already months ago. I think that first land should be given to those who were promised it as a benefit of signing up. Also you should make that they can’t sell it for 90 days to cancel out the profit margin as well as bringing more first land online to match the influx up people that are coming into the game.
I do not wish to hear the Big Brother like hiding behind TOS of saying basically we take your money, but the rule is that the rules can be changed at anytime and you can’t stop us because you agreed to TOS.
Let’s see… you want me to PAY you to be a premium member for the “rights to own land”… then you want me to pay to buy the land… then you want me to pay you a tier to maintain the land.
There is zero benefit to being a paid member now – since LL caters to the land barons and private sim prices are sky high.
GO ahead LL – chase off all the end users with this garbage you keep pulling… run it into the ground…
What are you going to tell all your “Corporate Accounts” when they ask “why arent your SL citizens staying around?”
Its just like real world folks… you live in an area that i s overtaxed and abused and run down(aka buggy and lagged in SL) guess what, it doesnt take long till you say “Im moving somehwere else where the government isnt as corrupted and run by thieves”
So LL.. keep taking things away from citizens… keep catering to the land barons… keep pushing price increased…
Then when it all crumbles…read your history and econimics books and see how your mistakes modeled real world civilizations that crumbled due to poor government and wishwash economics/politics.
Viva la revolucion!
IF you owned SL would you rather give a sim as first land or sell it at auction? ..here is the reasoning .. a sim cut into 128 parcels and sold to new accounts is 512 lindens per parcel wich equals 65536k lindens wich works out to some where around 200 usd in there pocket! or would you rather put it in auction and let it go to the highest bidder wich currently is standing strong at 14.5 permetre(950k lindens)wich works out to around 3500.00 usd..Its all about money and it starts at the top of the food chain .I don’t think it right to blame someone who is trying to make a buck playing this game .That is why most of the people are drawn to the game in the first place.Even if you add the 5 dollar account charge its not even 1000usd. At one time sims went at auction for 1000usd wich made it comparable and not a hit to SL now its just bad business to give it away. 😛
I am not a land trader but I have to agree with WrestlingHulka in the sense that most landtraders are just virtual business’s, I am sure that some are more greedy but in general everyone has a right to run a buisness. There is nothing in the TOS that says you should only run for profit businesses .
Do those that attack land owners also state that SL shops should not make a profit, or content creators should not make something for the time they spend in world.
A big difference between SL and RL is that you can opt out of SL if you do not like it.
Quant
I do not beleive that
I saw Philip Rosedale in this months issue of Entreprenuer…
Im thinking he should have been featured in “Crime Watch” instead.
This is insane. SecondLife is quickly becoming less of a civilization and more of a corporate mogul medium.
Land prices are already out of touch for many citizens since the recent price gouging.
LL – why not get out of the land sales business arena completly and just sell servers in bulk to Anche?
I don’t mind, I spend all my money on clothes, I will gladly live in a box.
Problem & Fix
–Problem–
I signed up for a premium account 6 months ago. It was just as imposible to get first land then as now. RealEstate agents buy it using an Alt all the time. I have watched one buy first land as an Alt and set it for sale to their real account only.
–Fix–
RENT LAND! Govenor Linden can rent vacant land to Premium account holders who don’t own land. They can pay an establishment fee of $512L. And then land is theirs until they BUY land. Once they Buy land somewhere else the rented land reverts to Governor Linden again.
Rented land cant be sold, so estate agents cant take it. Alt problem solved!
All abandoned land could revert to Governer Linden Rentals and become available to premium account holders whoe don’t own land.
–Implemenation–
It is easier to scrap first land. Sad but true.
Actually it is disheartening to read all these people moaning about sl, why not moan about the inequities of rl instead, some people don’t know they are born, wheras I am just happy to have life wherever it may reside : )
First land not to resell.
Its easy. First land is not to be resold but sold Back to Linden LAB.
They should have had a governant about that on all first Land.
And maybe allso a limited ime ownership.
It could be done on new land, which is needed if land prices are to be keept down
Anyway its just the beginning as things are rocketting her in Monypoly SL. 🙂
As always give a newbiee a 10 or 100 $L. :-))
lol what a bunch of f@#k ups the lindens are. You were warned over and over and over again but hey libsl oops I mean linden lab knows best.
Pretty sure this is breaking several laws as it stands, but u lindens keep plugging away without a clue.
On the off chance a linden with any say does happen to read this, how about you stop listening to a small group of people that only care about themselves and start listening to the majority of members that want SL to continue and grow in a productive manner.
I have a premium account, and I was lucky enough to find a First Land plot a few months ago. I lived there for a month or two and then sold it and bought a better place.
But while it doesn’t affect me, this move is boneheaded and just plain sucks, and is not fair to premium account holders who (by choice or not) have not bought First Land up til now. This is akin to robbery (or at least, false advertising) in that it takes away the value of a purchase made with certain assumptions.
I have several friends and coworkers who have either basic and premium accounts who were considering upgrading to premium and/or buying First Land. Now, they will keep their money.
Way to go, Lindens. It seems LL really is only interested in pumping up its bogus total resident count, and not in responding to its supporters. If it were truly interested in accuracy, transparency, and fairness, LL would 1) get rid of unverified basic accounts or at least time-limit them, and 2) work to *increase* the value of premium accounts to encourage people to take some ownership in SL.
At the very least, LL should offer the option of buying First Land to existing premium account holders who have not done so, and assign the land to them.
Slip
why LindenLabs doesn’t set the right’s for the firstland that the only way to sell own Firstland is to sell it back to LL for 512L$???
Bibi Book Said it!!!!
NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY —
Its just that annying Away with those lines from mainland !!!!
Moving around your own land and seeing your naighbours ban linies make one crazy
NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY —
Who steal in SL. Bad people can be banned singel not everyone..
If you want privacy move to an island. Remote and secluded it is.
NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY —
I only lock my SL house when i really need privacy,! In the old days people didnt even lock there RL houses. I can remember that a a child out on the countryside.!!!
NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY — NO ENTRY —
after over two most enjoyable years as a premium resident i must admit that this last decision has caused me some personal unrest.
Not because it affects me as a member,but because it has made me at best look foolish..and at worst a liar.
Over the past three weeks i have convinced two newby members to transfer to a premium account..first land being a major incentive,and since then have spent time working with them trying to find the “promised land”
Only yesterday i contacted “help”and asked what was happening,to be informed that the first land option still existed,and that Lindens were about to open a new sim so not to panic..(check the help logs Mr Linden).
Its a sad state of affairs when voluntary helpers inadvertantly lie to residents who use the “help”option.
In the past i have always tried to support chsnges for the better,and hopefully those that will eventually make our lives here all the more enjoyable.
My only suggestion to Lindens is to be very aware of the number of online worlds that have ceased to exist over the years …i would even dare to suggest that within a short period of time our world here will be threatened by new and perhaps more user friendly game programs..(just check how many members have flocked here from Moove and other such programs)
In the meantime..mmmm i own 12,000sq mts..thats 24 500sq mt lots rented to newbies at L1000 per week..whooo hooo great decision.
Please ban those next lines:
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I am not too happy about this, I myself had upgraded my membership to premium and have just cancelled it because of all of the problems in finding first land. I think it was a nice thing to have the first land but yes it was abused, I don’t think it should be taken away. To be honest though it has felt that it has been taken away way before any of this and the reason why I say so is because no First Land has been released in a very long time anyways. Since I was unable to find my first land and there was still no better support that is why I cancelled my second life premium account. I would again in the future think about coming back to a premium account but not unless things were drastically changed. I think mmore things should be offered like better phone support or better priority. Some things that can’t be accessed by new people. Just would be nice to see all of that. Anyways that’s what I have to say on this.
way to go LL.. been waiting for first land for a long time.. now i gotta pay 9000L and up for a 512..lmao is it even worth it being a premium member? LL, maybe you should crack down on the ALTS and take all the land away from them. you shouldnt even allow ALTS there, thier the reason were in this position.. one member per IP…
LL, u guys really need to fix this .. this is total bullshit.. do away with the ALTS LL.. get sum balls and do the right thing..
As a number of people here have said, I would like the First Land program to continue for existing Premium account holders at least for a limited period.
My suggestion on what would make Premium accounts continue to be attractive is an increase in he amount of land you can own before tier fees are applied to 1024m2. 512m2 was never really enough to actually use long term which just made people more likely to sell it. With 1024m2 you can have a bit more privacy and enough room to build a reasonable shop or house.
The real problem with load at the moment is the landbots and speculators buying up all the cheap land. Perhaps people with alt accounts should be required to nominate just one of them that is allowed to buy land.
Perhaps account holders wishing to buy land could also be required to attend an inworld Land Ownership course and be certified by an instructor as being a real user and not just some piece of software that’s continually connecting solely to buy land and not participating in the community. Existing education organisations such as NCI and ASL could apply for the rights to run these courses and as payment they could be given their own islands where lag might be less of a problem and they could then improve the other courses they offer.
You are telling me first land even existed in the first place?
The best thing that Linden Labs can do for the SL economy would be to be steady and consistant. It is the best way to bring SL to more people.
Large Real esteate brokers are useful to linden because they reduce risk and facilitate growth of Linden and the internal economy.
Hulka… trust me it’s not just prize pyle that has a grudge against you! As for you not being a vulture – I would challenge that you the same as the rest of us – a deal is a deal – stop trying to improve your image through self-righteous statements.
rant over.
50 WrestlingHulka Says:
February 20th, 2007 at 2:34 PM PST
As a land trader I’m partly responsible for this, as well with everyone else who purchased First Land from resell. I’m not denying that at all. It was all part of the game. Buy land when it’s set low and sell high. If a newb sold their 512 for 1024 we’d pile in to get the 50USD 30USD profit. The newb would go away happy for doubling his investment and so would we. It was part of the beast.
It got really ugly once we started asking newbs if they wanted to resell. I remember the first sim we did this with, if you go there now it’s nothing but a waste land. We took a perfect sim and gutted it. Reflection took me away from that part of the game. First Land helped me establish my own path inside of SL and here I was taking that opportunity away from others. I stopped being a vulture.
Prize Pyle has been creating communities with the sims he won in auctions. Even though he has a grudge against me, I think what he has done to his sim is excellant. They are built like little communities, with roads, parks, even train systems. They are clean and bring a sense of neighborhood interaction that has been missing for awhile in the First Land Program.
That’s really too bad this ended. Having started in SL last fall, I could never find any First Land to purchase, no matter what time of day I checked and logged on. An easy fix for this issue would have been to simply do this: Once a premium account is set up, a user is given the option right then to purchase the next lot in line for $1L/sqm, Sight unseed, just the next lot of “First Land” open for sale. User has a week or two to purchase that land or pass. This would stop big land grabs since the “First Land” could be at any location on the map. Land that’s been abandonded could also be recycled this way as first land. Other than getting the $L stipend every week (that weekly amount dropped after I started), the 512m free tier per month works only if you’re buying Linden land. If one purchases Anshe type land that perk does not apply and thus, does not ballance out with the premium account price. There needs to be an incentive for users that own (or rent) none Linden land to hold a premium account. I know a lot of folks who drop their premium account once they own(rent) non Linden land. Offer some incentives to these valuable folks who already invest time and money in SL and you might have more people signing up for, and keeping their premium accounts.
Since it costs $10 to CANCEL a premium membership and downgrade it to a free account this will be a significant short term cash cow for LL I guess.
When I signed up my premium account two month ago it was under the agreement with LL that I’d get a minor stipend and 512m2 of first land. Reneging on that agreement and charging me $10 to change to a free account rankles badly, LL.
I’ve spent a month looking for First Land and had not one bit of luck, which was already pissing me off. Now to find out they aren’t going to even TRY to fullfil their commitements to me really irritates.
/me sighs.
Doing this without increasing the stipend or something is just short of a slap in the face, LL, to those of us who signed up for premium accounts instead of just sucking the free account tit.
There were better ways to handle this Lindens, many of which have already been mentioned here. You gave no advanced warning about this major change, gave no one time to prepare. This is a prime example of bad customer service and relations.
You should have provided compensation for the removal of a premium incentive BEFORE caneling the First Land program.
All future land purchases should be made to premium account owners only and from LL. Unless someone is buying a sim, there should be a limit to how much land can be bought per month. Land can only be bought from and sold to LL. This would put an end to Land barons. Land owners can rent their land to others but cannot sell it to anyone but LL.
This would give LL control over the land and by reinging back the land barons profits, LL can gain more money through fair land transactions which would ultmately increase tier sales and provide stable income for LL for use in bettering SL.
just my 3cents
Three weeks ago i upgraded to Premium BECAUSE chance for First Land. Three weeks i’ve been search First Land continuously finding nothing.
I DEMAND First Land for me!
just another way to make money if you ask me
its supposed to be a virtual world how can second life grow when yall have so many restrictions and a nother thing i aint usin the new first look viewer untill yall fix yor bugz and i wont be going preimum now ……its like this why shud i pay whats in it for me ? a couple of hunder l a day wow
Im not sure if this has be mentiond but.. I’d just like to say that the only reason people act like this to the “free” land is because its very rare.
I am newer to SL than many and am a premium account holder. I did so because I EXPECTED my FL as PROMISED .. period.. Now prices are averaging L10K+ for 512??? thats nearly $40 us.. I feel like I was taken..
Now, If I downgrade, I take a chance of not being able to log in because I am not a land owner or a premium account holder??
I am simply here to enjoy my SL experience and hopefully build myself something simple that I can enjoy.. I am willing to pay for that priviledge within reason..
However, you are making it harder and harder to justify for the average joe player..
I do understand growing pains and know you have a fair share of them.. hope you can work things out before this and the numerous other issues sink the boat..
Just my two cents..
I’m very unhappy about this…I was waitng to buy my first land with the thought that there would be a fair ‘starter amount’, so, I’ll save my Lindens for a wide array of prims…Well, now that scuppers my plans…It begs the question “Is it really worth me having a Premium Account at all?”.
I appreciate nothing lasts forever…but, will prices, in general, start creeping up? There seems to be a fair amount of greed in both First (and now) Second Lives…..!!!!!
Boy all this over a tiny lot. Has anyone out here owned a 512 lot? Or should the question be when you bought your 512 lot how long until you bought a bigger lot. I started out with a 512 lot on top of a hill in alua. Placed a house nice deck had a real nice view. next morning my view is blocked on two sides by houses that sparng up over night and the glare of the restricted access shining through my walls and windows becuase the lots are so tiny the houses must sit next to the property line. So how many of these land flippers are simply people who got fed up with their view being blocked sold and bought a larger parcel so they can have some space as well as room for a view not to mention enough prims to put some nice things in the house.
I do like the idea of expanding the no tier size to premium accounts to a 1024 lot but im sure LL needs to keep it the same so us land owners can continue to pay and support all the free accounts out here.
Offer each person with a PREMIUM account that doesnt have had the CHANCE to buy first land a piece of first land at the rate YOU PROMISED!
So set up one extra piece of MAINLAND CALLED “FIRST CONTINENT” or something with First land only and offer everyone that has Premium land of 512m2 for 512$.
And if some people to decide to sell it, let them, its not up to LL to decide! If I pay once a year for a weekly magazine, its also not up to the publisher to decide whether or not I can sell the magazine to someone else! And if I dont get the magazine, I can get a refund!
I think people that have PREMIUM accounts should stop paying. That is just the same as LL is doing right now by never supplying the first land. It really stinks!
SO FIRST LAND OR REFUND and lower prices for premium accounts since you get less!
You know, I just upgraded to Premium…and I read this. I believe that LL is located in California is it not?
How about a class action suit based on the state’s Deceptive Trade Act? Or maybe a federal one?
It may shut them down, of fix it. Bait and switch. Sounds like maybe been to the Microsoft School of Business to me.
heh, it may not be a popular opinion, but wtg LL for getting rid of first land 😀
It was abused, and quite frankly, the sooner LL gets the message that they have to seriously reconsider how they manage the mainland in general, the better.
and no, unverifieds are NOT the problem here. People were gaming the first land with alts long before unverified accounts appeared on the scene. Unverifieds can’t buy land on the mainland, never could, still can’t. Unverified accounts can only “buy” land on private islands!
If anything, the people who could possibly profit from offering cheap land to new account holders may very well be the land barons managing private estates. They can sell land to ANYone, including unverifieds 🙂 And I already see that Anshe and some others have such programs for new people.
Land bots, now that might really be a problem, and it still IS a problem… but I guess this white elephant that is the mainland has to be eaten one bite at a time. 😀
I signed up for the premuim account after reading several articles and after being under the impression that i could buy land for myself cheaply. there are no longer any benefits as to why i would want to keep a paid account now because i can’t even make enough money in the game to own a piece of land that i thought was only going to cost me 512.
you need to take into consideration the people that signed up for second life with a premium account under the impression that they could do this because it is simply not fair.
Hey Gang, Yes I know, I’m a land Trader but in very small quantities and the majority of my land is not for sell but use by myself and other businesses to earn lindens through rentals, retail, etc…
First Land Banished??? LL that is really a shame and on comments 24 and 28 those folds have very good ideas that the cit’s here echoed over and over to grandfather the premiums that did not get a shot at it and put restrictions on first land for resell…newbies that go premium can have new land, play, get used to SL, and guess what??? Some or even many will want more and sell the first land back to SL for same cost to be resold to another newbie premium account eligible for first land purchase. (Recycling is a wonderful thing)
Wrestiling Hulka – You Rule 🙂 We even had a land trade with each other and I applaud your input…I also like to trade land although I don’t think I’m on any scale as the “barons” and I most like to buy 16sq and join them together. Your explanation of free enterprise and buy and selling land is right on and can be accomplished with out the spoilage of first land.
LL The abandon land has been in my favor once in the past but only to expand an existing business not for resale. Please consider the abandon land for the first land program and even the expansion of Mainland to inlcude some first land mixed with your higher value land for sale. This would give first land buyers a good opportunity and other players that have earned thier Linden and not eligible for first land a shot a bigger parcels. Yes there will always be buying and selling of land as it is based on free enterprise…
But using the fantastic Idea’s in this commentary with common courtesy everyone can feel kewl with the changes and transitions
For those of you who are looking for land it has been my experience is to search and fly about first thing in the morning for the best prices but that I guess depends on what part of the RL World you live in. I for one would not know a land buying bot if it hit me in my av but I certainly think if they are out there they are not as much fun as looking for land purchase as I do in Person/AV 🙂
I am curious also about what will happen now with land sales now that the cheap land is gone. Example in jonestown the all the available land was sold for about 31k per 1024 and 15 per 512. Watching the land around me go back on the market i watched the same 512 lots go for 35k and a 1024 go for 50k. These were swooped up in a matter of days after being put back on the market. That means there is a great demand for all land out here. So will that now make the cheap base for a lot now at 15k per 512 and stay the norm that every one is used to paying? How long with the demand now will it be that a 512 becomes a normal market price of say 35-50k? Demand drives the market so lets see what happens next.
You know, all this hype about abuse of first land is somehow familiar. Sounds kina like how they do it in real life. The difference is the speed at which it is taking place in this young and and TOO rapidly developing community. So here’s my 2 cents:
Keep first Land. Make a requirment that if you buy it, you have to invest a minimal in building on it. In addition to that, why not just forbid selling it for the first two years?
I learned very early on that flipping 512m (first land) was a great way to make a profit, and I pretty much had everybody I knew that was buying first land do it. Holding on to first land is dumb as far as I’m concerned. There’s better land out there!
First land was easy to sell and then go and find better land in a better sim. That was the reason for selling the first land in the first place. (Quite frankly first land is a quick injection of cash for a newbie, not a bad deal.)
It used to be (back in the day) that the only place to buy land was mainland, so a premium membership was required if you wanted to own land at all. With the advent of so many private islands renting, premium membership is little more than an exclusive club for those that are left in it.
I see no point to premium anymore. Mainland is laggy, its ugly in most cases, and anybody and their dog can buy land there as it is uncontrolled.
I have stopped buying mainland, and never will again. We are on a private island now, one that we rent part of from friends. There is zero lag and its a great place to run our business.
The way I see it Second Life is turning into a giant private island. As more and more private islands pop up Linden Labs is going to have to figure out a way to keep up. Controlled Mainland?
New users will simply go rent on private islands where they can pay tier through paypal without buying a premium account. The money they would spend on premium accounts will now go back to the private island owners and mainland will slowly become a thing of the past.
My question is, is that what Linden Labs wants?
Okay, I see this is inevitable and that the land barons and their bots have to be stopped, but I became premium so that I could get cheap L$1 per meter land and and have simply never been on at the right time to catch any up for sale. Months I’ve been trying, and no joy. Probably because I’m GMT, but that’s a different gripe entirely.
Any chance those of us who have never bought land (though not through lack of trying) can still get it at the previous (L$1 per) costs? If not this sucks, and changing the T&Cs on us like this is a damn poor show for all the time, money and support we put in to the metaverse.
Clarify this please.
nick: Cielo Starr
Hi there,
I am a premium user and had a first land :)) I was so proud about my lil own spot.
Why i did not use it long was because of the so small prim. I then turned to Dreamland who offered 1024sq.m lots for a small prize with a lil more prim. Well meanwhile i have 12k land.
Ideas to benefit premium members:)
a.) weekly instead of 500L.. 1000L or
b) monthly a giftcard for 500-1000L to use in any store in SL lol of course all no transfer!! otherwise it would be used to profit or
c) invitation to a monthly special, like a Ball ( Candle light, special theme etc, a concert, or one or more Linden Cinemas with one or more specialy new Movies. or
d.) a monthly special Item made exclusively for prem. users. ( of course for free and no treanfer)
like the House of the month..
Dress of the month
vehicle of the month etc
I as premium user would enjoy these things 🙂
Thank you for your hard work and i hope i was a bit useful with my ideas :))
Greetings Cielo
swiss_miss2004@yaoo.de
@Minnie
someone is paying tier on every inch of mainland .when people stop buying it up at auction there worries will start and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Why did I upgrade to Premium again? I can’t get First Land, so all I can get now is a stipend that “almost” pays back in L$ what I paid in real money for my account. I, and probably many other newer Premium members, feel totally betrayed. At least introduce new incentives for people who are paying YOU $72/year for almost nothing now…
Noa Pinion says:
– there is a great deal of disappointment expressed
– there is plenty of understanding for the rationale behind the decision
– there are very strong views that a more equitable resolution could have been arrived at
– would not Mr Jack Linden reconsider?
Noa Pinion has no personal viewpoint
NUTS ! You HAVE to give firstlands to members subscribed to premium BEFORE you decided to avoid that right ! You shoulda think BEFORE about it not now, it’s too late, you cannot deprive members of their rights established BY YOU ! Force us to upgrade to premium to own firstland on mainland and now revoking our rights it’s CRIMINAL !
What?!?!?!?!?
I purchase premium memberships for myself and my wife, so we can be good residents and support the system.
I spent dozens of hours trying to buy some first land so I could have a place for my wife and I to experiment with, program scripts, and work with prims and NEVER found any first land for sale. I invest in a search program that will ONLY notify me if any comes up, just so I can try to obtain the first land when it comes out…
Now I find out that there is none!
Very, very disappointing and a bit unfaithful on the part of LL.
I’m a noob to SL. One of the reasons I got a premium account was to buy First Land so I could experiment with building and scripting in my own piece of the world. I’ve been waiting and checking every day for a 512 parcel to show up in land sales, and now it’s no longer an option.
I agree with the previous posters: a final offering of First Land for us noobs before shutting it down makes sense.
Jack Linden wrote:
“You may ask what, without First Land, is the value of a Premium account? Well consider that the L$1200 stipend per month (around USD$4.50) plus 512m free tier per month (around USD$5.00) means that the monthly premium account essentially pays for itself.”
What 1200$L stipend per month????
I’ve never received such thing…
Guess it is time for me to downgrade….
rgds
Aero
Sorry to hear this. I was just about to become a premium member to have an opportunity to start more serious building and creating and have a place of my own. Now I will have to wait untill the economy of SL is settled, so that I can afford to do so on my income with selling or working in SL. In the meantime, I will be sleeping and camping on beaches and casino’s. What a life for a poor vagabond. -:) A sad stap backwards, appearently due to some shrewd people screwing it up for all the rest of us.
In Orwell’s “1984”, citizens of Oceania had their chocolate rations reduced – then the media trumpted the “triumphant increase of chocolate rations.”
LL, you’ve taken away the biggest incentive you offered to sign-ups – a bad move for a growing concern. The problem isn’t land flips – it’s the alts gaming the system. Simple solution, and you’ll need to do it eventurally: all accounts must be verified with a credit card. Sure, there’ll still be some alts, but greatly reduced.
Examining the hurt/benefit of this new policy reveals only hurt for new premium members; plus reducing the supply of First Land will increase the price, further removing an incentive to upgrade. Revenue into LL will thus decrease, meaning less RL resources for improving the grid, service, etc.
Seems like a good time to sell L$.
…Free expression ? Heuu ???
I post yesterday evening, being very polit, without abusive or fake or any plaint ..
I just purposed an idea to give a fee in feedback to all those which were unable to gain and have thier 1st land ..
So … I just see now My post was recently deleted …
Then :
–> was it “abusive” to be constructive and to purpose a compensation ? ( 512 L$ for the 512sq² we didn t had) .
Thank s to let me know WHY the post was removed …
It isn’t so much this individual decision that bugs me, but the manner in which it was conveyed. LL needs some world class professionals in management with a good sense of PR – how to effectively communicate with the residents (Torley and Pathfinder are excellent communicators, btw!)
Let’s look at the phrase ‘effective immediately’:
“Effective immediately, the supply of cheap First Land parcels by Linden Lab will cease”
“Effective immediately all orders placed outside of the Land store (by phone or email) will be charged at the new price. ”
And another chestnut:
“we are unable to receive phone support calls on a consistent basis” and comments closed in the same post.
The overall impression is that not much thought is being put into how things are conveyed on the blog. It’s as if the Lindens think they are talking to a utopian community of, say, 100,000 users (a la The Well), as opposed to a much larger population of at least 500,000 unique residents.
One pines for some competition. A metaverse service that is professionally run, and not so obsessed with being cool or utopian, would be very welcome. In the meantime, one would hope the Board of Directors would step in and make some long-needed changes.
6I agree with Jacques Groshomme might need to go back to pay account
hi we are stopping putting engines in our cars. In the end the saving you will make from not having to use gas will more than enough pay for the car you purchased
I have only been on SL for a couple of months and had looked forward to buying land without a premium account. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have a premium account and have thought about doing so to have the benefits to go with the account. However, as much as I love playing the game, the numerous times that the game has crashed while I have been playing have caused me to wait and see what happens before purchasing a premium account. Right now I can find no justification for doing so.
“I see no point to premium anymore. Mainland is laggy, its ugly in most cases, and anybody and their dog can buy land there as it is uncontrolled.
I have stopped buying mainland, and never will again. We are on a private island now, one that we rent part of from friends. There is zero lag and its a great place to run our business.”
what Minnie said, my sentiments exactly.
Goodness I have 1024 of free tier and I own no mainland. I didn’t even flip my first land, I got it via the Shermerville first land for everyone experiment, which I may add, flopped. It was an empty sim, most of the people, no unverifieds allowed at that time, never used the land they were given for signing up, and most of the Shermerville sims were eventually closed by LL. I was made to move into a different Shermerville sim because I think there was only two of us actually in it, and LL closed it and only kept two sims out of the original nine. Eventually I sold that new plot to a neighbor for a reasonable amount of money when I was tiering down my mainland – not exorbitant, and not to a land flipper.
But gotta say… it was great to have that land in Shermerville when I was new, unlike most first land sims, it was lag free and empty, a great place for me to experiment for a newbie mad sci like me. But understandably, LL can’t afford to just give a couple of people what amounts to their own private island to start out in SL 😀 And that is what it felt like there!! Hee 😀
Im cancelling my account.
oh and I might add… people weren’t allowed to sell the land in Shermerville in the first 30 days of having it. Most of the people never even bothered to log in to sell the land they were given for free before it was reclaimed.
@205, 207
Minnie, cp: It’s true that someone’s paying tier – how long will that last if buyers dry up?
While I do say (@209) that initially land prices will increase, with more incentive to stay Basic and less to upgrade, new members will be driven away. That’ll drive prices back down, but will it be enough to encourage buying or new members soon enough?
Basic members and land barons have more incentive to stay that way now; basics can rent from barons. Fine for them, not so much for LL as growth will shrink.
CP,
My point is people are going to stop upgrading. Coming in now, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t upgrade, and neither would anybody here unless they intend to make money buying/selling land. There is no reason to. The only people that truly need premium memberships are those buying/selling mainland. The rest can go to private islands and be fine.
I realize that mainland is full at the moment and I also realize that the new continent will be bought, sold, and ruined fairly quickly too. People snap up new land on new sims/continents because its low lag and pretty for the first while. Once the first huge club moves in next door though it ruins it for the rest and the people that were originally there leave and more clubs/camping chairs/lag move in.
I will be downgrading my premium account. There is no reason for it anymore. It’s got nothing to do with first land either. The only reason for premium membership, in my view, was land ownership. Private islands have done away with that need. The $500L stipend doesn’t mean much. That wasn’t a factor either way for me, still isn’t. Our business pays our tier now, without that $500L a week, won’t miss it.
In my view, the only way to keep premium memberships going is to give premium members some benefit or right the others don’t get (stipends and land not included). There has to be some reason to pay LL that $75USD a year otherwise why bother? I can rent land on a private island, I make L through my business. What do I need premium membership for?
Linden has decided to end the First Land program and I doubt they will reverse their decision.
If you need a 512 sqm of land, you now have basically 2 choices.
1) Sign up as a Premium user, pay US$9.95 per month and get back L$1200 (worth USD$4.35) a month. Pay L$7168 (worth USD$25.97) for 512 sqm of land. (based on current market rate of 14 L/Sqm)
or
2) Sign up as a Basic user, Rent a 512 sqm land for US$5 a month or L$345 per week.
For option 1, you are effectively renting a 512 sqm land for US$5.6 per month and on top of that, you have to pay for the land which is worth USD$25.97 based on current market rate of 14 L/Sqm.
Which is better?
The thing is they *DON’T* fix everything that gets gamed. This is just another incentive to start more land wars using more bloody camping chairs to make sims unusable by the normal residents, selling their plots for less than they are worth.
It isnt happening? Have a look around at the number of sims with a “casino” in the corner, stifling trade in the rest of the region, no trade and you sell or go bust. Great!
When something needs fixing they dont fix it, or rather they are reluctant to fix it, after all these people are just running a business…yeah.
The business they are running is getting land at a lower price than its worth. The “casino” bit is just a legitimizing front for what is otherwise a bullying/intimidation tactic!
I’ve come across many new residents who intended to buy 1stland for the sole purpose of reselling it at a profit. Sure, this will stop flipping, but actually, I think that process worked in LL’s favor, as non-tier bearing land was converted into tiered land by barons.Tier costs essentially render initial purchase costs a non-issue, as the recent island cost increases make perfectly clear.
Firstland hooked me into land owning, but I would’ve bought eventually anyway. ( only wish I’d moved when islands could be had for $1250/ $125/mnth!)
I agree with most of the above statements. I became a premium account holder three weeks ago with the sole purpose of buying my First Land and have a small place to stay. Taking away the program is rather depressing also adds to the frustration that I’ve NEVER once saw a First Land parcel pop up in my search box. LL, you need to establish some other gift for premium account members…as your numbers rise, the proportion between new premium account members and new freebie account members is going to get worse. Suggestions? Go through your database, message all the premium account holders who joined before this annoucement, assign like 4 completely “regions” and give out a 512 piece of each of us…
MAGIC SPEEL !!
My first answer (54) came back …
Greetings, i am so very disapointed in the fact that i know have gotten my family involved with SL as a very nice way to pass away the winter blues.My wife and i both now have premium accounts, and she was waiting to buy find first land which..SURPRISE…none was available for a very long time..i myself own a large piece and was planning on starting a bussiness in SL but now that you have taken my wifes ability to own her first land away like it shows when she signed up, what else are you guys gonna do to us.
I truly think if you plan to change your rules you should at least allow those who have purchased the premium account have their first land, or as stated above it was false advertisement.
However if you guys still want new comers like my family join ,why not still offer the first land but under the basis that it cannot be sold but traded for another 512 thus making the person still hold onto a place to call home.
I know i have not brought many ppl to the game only about 20 or so by the means of one following another but we all enjoy SL. But you guys have taken the whole concept of SL to a different level and one that i am not sure i would have bought into at the time.
So i ask..Please allow those who already have a premium account have thier first land like stated in the agreement when signed on for the premium account or i am sure it will cause many problems.
Just to let you know yes i do still have my first land and i have been adding to my piece bit by bit and taking a raping over it..But i will never give it up even though i have a casino and a sex garage next to me thus not allowing transports of my friends to our home..BE WELL and think this one over please.
BTW,
I do agree that LL should compensate people that have upgraded premium memberships in the last few weeks. Its unfair to simply pull the rug out like that!
Became Premium account holder to get land. Suddenly being told “you ll get no land” is a contract break in my opinion. I feel totally cheated!
I call upon LL to give out the 512 parcels to all Premium account holders NOW!
Demonstrate in SL en masse! go to LL sims and stay there!
I personally am glad that first land is gone. I do agree though that is was not done due to people flipping the land, it was done form the fact that Auction sims are going for 3500.00. For those that are complaining about land barons making a profit off of land, the last time I check that is how real estate agents do it in real life. Being a land baron is not difficult research prices for land, risk some of your money to buy a sim at auction, turn a profit, that is what I have done. Don’t have 3500 for a sim, I risked putting it on a CC to see if I could do it, and 6 sims later I have almost paid off my initial investment. Can’t afford the $3500 then being a land baron isn’t for you, try creating stuff instead, that takes no investment but time. Don’t get mad at the land barons that can afford to risk $3500 to buy a sim. Just make sure before you risk that type of money you do your home work.
I have dealt with both, Martin and Prize, and are both very pleasent people to deal with.
It is really disheartening to here of this development LL I have a spent many days and hours since signing up for a prem.. account looking for first land to no avail. It seems to me that market forces have as you say won out in terms of real estate, there is money to be made!!! Making cheap land available creates more supply and therefore lower prices. I seems that this should have been considered prior to advertising it as a benefit to the prem.. membership. I would support the comments about developing a temporary programme for land sales for current account holders that have not bought first land yet.
I TOO WAS WAITING FOR A NICE “FIRST LAND” PLOT… HMMM SINCE I DIDNT BUY BEFORE TODAY, WHAT IS THE MEANING NOW OF MY PREMIUM ACCOUNT PLS. IF I WERE ELIGIBLE FOR FIRST LAND WHEN I SIGNED UP FOR MY PREMIUM ACCOUNT THAT “PROMISE SHOULD BE HONORED NO MATTER WHEN I DECIDE TO BUY. WHY TAKE THAT AWAY, AND WITH LIKE VIRTUALLY NO NOTICE I’VE NEVER USED IT NOW IT’S GONE….. SIGH…
I’m amazed at how many people in this comments thread are reacting. LL retroactively eliminates a benefit of the Premium accounts, leaving as many as thousands of people who purchased Premium accounts unable to ever get the promised First Land. So how do people react? They blame free accounts or Land Barons.
What the ____?!
Free and/or unverified accounts (often not the same thing) never bought First Land. Any one who bought first land using an alt was using a paid, verified account! As for Land Barons—they only exist in their current form because LL made the decision NOT to sell mainland in less than one sim increments (save for auctions of reclaimed land).
@217
Excellent suggestion, Elissa. I’d go a bit further: first, require verification; then extend this offer for two weeks. They’ll get an amazing number of signups.
About those reference to “realtors” on SL… in RL the term “Realtor” is a jealously guarded service mark for real estate agents who belong to the National Association of Realtors. And you can’t join the association without meeting fairly stringent requirements.
It might be useful if such an organization existed on SL. But it doesn’t.
218 comments and counting…
But has anyone actually emailed the address at the bottom of the announcment yet? I, myself, am skeptical… being jaded, but have you received a response more than auto-reply?
This will be a popular choice for people who rent their land. That’s about it.
Now, the masses won’t be looking for first land, the’ll be renting.
I agree with extending First Land to all existing Premium account holders who do not have first land holdings. The only reason I upgraded was to get First Land. This is very disappointing.
After reading the comments on this page. I have split thoughts. I can see why LL did this. Coming from a Coding aspect and a server aspect, to keep up with the supply and demand, they would have to code 24/7/365 to keep up with the amount of people joining SL and becoming premium accounts.
I also see this from the side of the people who set an amount of USD to spend on this game, and then work in world to make their money. Through all of the comments, most people have commented about reselling of the land. My thought on this, is maybe not resell per-say, but raising the prim levels. It is hard to have a nice place on 117 prims. Especially since a house fit for a 512 plot is a minimum of 30 prims. Plants are usually 4 prims a piece, and furniture can range from 5-100 prims. Maybe if LL would up the prim limit on land, people won’t be so hasty on selling it, to make money to buy bigger plots. It took me 3 weeks to find the last piece of First Land at the time. I also traded with a friend for a 512 she had for my 512.
At this point, I have seen a lot of regions open up, right before my eyes, and instead of being set as First Land; LL decided to set them up for auction. 12 new regions, enough First Land to satisfy people for a while, all set to auction.
I am just hoping that LL is using the massive amount of money they have received on these auctions, to upgrade their servers, and maybe switch to a phone company that is local for them, and not a VOIP.
yeah Minne i know what your saying but mainland is still cheaper then island living and there is a massive need for more ,The lame 8 sims a day thats being put out in auction is’nt even budgeing the market,What you pay lindens for your premium account is eatin up to island owners for rent and its more then mainland no matter how you look at it the only advantage i see is privacy. I just recently moved back to my island I have rented and taken back half to work on some projects ,the half i rent there covers the 300usd to lindens b ut the people renting from me could live on mainland for much less.
I agree with extending First Land to all existing Premium account holders (before the date of this announcement) who do not have first land holdings. The only reason I upgraded was to get First Land. This is very disappointing.
No bad on the barons; like I said, they create the market. And they provide rental space for those of us who don’t want to spend our time SL managing our land. That’s a sign of a healthy economy.
Taking away the incentive to participate hurts economies; this one needs growth to survive.
After reading the comments on this page. I have split thoughts. I can see why LL did this. Coming from a Coding aspect and a server aspect, to keep up with the supply and demand, they would have to code 24/7/365 to keep up with the amount of people joining SL and becoming premium accounts.
I also see this from the side of the people who set an amount of USD to spend on this game, and then work in world to make their money. Through all of the comments, most people have commented about reselling of the land. My thought on this, is maybe not resell per-say, but raising the prim levels. It is hard to have a nice place on 117 prims. Especially since a house fit for a 512 plot is a minimum of 30 prims. Plants are usually 4 prims a piece, and furniture can range from 5-100 prims. Maybe if LL would up the prim limit on land, people won’t be so hasty on selling it, to make money to buy bigger plots. It took me 3 weeks to find the last piece of First Land at the time. I also traded with a friend for a 512 she had for my 512.
At this point, I have seen a lot of regions open up, right before my eyes, and instead of being set as First Land; LL decided to set them up for auction. 12 new regions, enough First Land to satisfy people for a while, all set to auction.
I am just hoping that LL is using the massive amount of money they have received on these auctions, to upgrade their servers, and maybe switch to a phone company that is local for them, and not a VOIP.
~The Purriest DJ
My analysis: First land was abused; and thus no longer relevant; it is a good move. It makes life simple.
BUT I have a very big but.
BUT PEOPLE… any time we react to Linden Labs we must stress PERFORMANCE. Not first land; not support; not my second life; not anything. Any time Linden is talking about such things — we should direct them back. Talk about databases; speed; reliability. Then we will trust you more. (and you have done an amazing job until now — but you are building an economy here /me begs Linden to make the system work).
One more thing, why not try to do in SecondLife what you would do in First life to get the government to change something.
It would be pretty simple to set up and organize a boycot and protest at the Linden Village. It might even give the premium users who feel jaded by this something to do with their SecondLife.
Here’s an idea: how about charging people for their No Entry fences? We get charged for Rating other avis, we get charged for uploading textures, why not charge us for fences (which in addition to reducing the value of the grid to everyone else, must put extra load on the servers)?
My first comment is still “awaiting moderation”. So it probably won’t be seen anytime soon.
I signed up for Premium on the 18th. (was basic for about a month). I’ve been looking for first land for about two weeks. Two day after signing up, I get told “Sorry, no more first land”. Not worth it to downgrade again – LL already has my money and won’t give it back. Plus to downgrade will cost another USD$10.00.
Guess I look like a sucker. I hope they get a big cavity …
Hi Lindens, I joined when there was a onetime fee, before the 512 first land and weekly stipend, I recently went premium to be able to own land hoping for some first land to have a nice lil place to reside or open a nice lil shop. Since i have gone premium I have searched daily for first land, to only find out hey guess what you stopped the first land. Thanks for letting ppl know who signed up looking for First land. as someone said can be called false advertising. but i also know how things in a vitural world can change rapidly. Just dont forget the players who pump money into your world and pockets
LL: “Our hope is that through much higher levels of mainland expansion, market forces will act to bring resale prices down over time”
Meanwhile, how will your revenues fare?
I have to wonder if this is a preemptive move on Linden’s part for releasing the open source server. Once anyone is allowed to run a sim on their machine, land is no longer a finite resource and looses much if not all of it’s value. Imagine how pissed off people will be who spent their L$ on their land only to find that some high school kid is giving it away.
Yes. I have to agree the First Land program was broken. I’ll shed no tears at its passing. However, your proposed solution appears to be counter productive.
The fact is that SL property taxes (tier) are so high that purchase price is nearly irrelevant. If land is held for any significant lengtrh of time, the cost of taxes far outstrips the acquisition cost. This point is not lost on new residents. I have encountered many who are willing purchase a premium account in order “own” land, but change their mind when they consider the taxation.
So, how does Linden Labs propose to increase the number of premium accounts? By deliberately manipulating market forces with the avowed intent of devaluing existing land holdings. To put it bluntly, by giving their best customers the shaft.
Many real world companies have failed because they arrogantly assumed their customers were stupid. Linden Labs may yet see the light, but I’m not sure I’m willing to bet any more real money on it.
Montgomery Steiner
If the Lindens are serious about wanting premium members to own first land the simple answer is zoning. If the Lindens are the government for the world of Second Life, then they have the ability and responsibility to impose regulations and restrictions on how land can be used.
Such as, areas can be set aside only as 512 parcels without the ability to be joined or separated. If a small parcel can never be combined into a larger parcel, it will forever limit its use and appreciable value.
Why areas are not already zoned commercial and residential is beyond me. This is most basic distinction on how land use is determined. No one wants to live right next door to a Wal-mart in real life. In Second Life, I dislike having a casino building right up to the property line move in right next door to me after I have worked so hard creating a pleasant environment.
Zoning, Lindens, zoning!
What about a maximum limit on land owned?
I agree with post 226 about the fences. I use a security orb that gives a 10 second warning but does not obstruct the view of my neighbors. I have no problem with keeping unwanted guests off your property but it would be nice if LL could have a feature like the show property lines but on the red no entry fences. To be able to hide them if you do not care to see them. Or another quick fix. Talk to your neighbor if they are not bothering you and will be willing to respect your boundries add them to your access list for the sake of not seeing the fence.If you think your are getting any privacy by the fence think again about how far your cam can travel and through walls etc. If I can do it shopping then people invading your privacy can use it. A point to ponder and knows your neighbor might be your next friend.
I agree with cadaei wilder. I purchased a premium acount in order to get some first land and do what this game was designed for. Start a second life. Now I find that I am going to have to pay outragous amounts of money to get land? This is outragous. If you want to fix that problem it’s simple. Put a time requirement on how long you have to own the first land before you sell it. That will stop people from buying it just to turn and sell it for more money.
First land was never promised, it was a first come first served basis. Which it stated right on thier page about upgrading to premium. Sure, first land would have been nice, but it wasn’t a GIVEN and never promised as an absolute truth. I don’t understand why …. oh nevermind, you’ll just read into it what you want anyway.
I for one am glad they’re getting rid of it. I don’t own any mainland property, or will I ever unless they put some sort of zoning in place. I rent on a private island, have hardly any lag, and am very happy renting… and getting a lot more for my money than owning on mainland anyway.
You Know I have been trying to figure out if going premium would be right for me. I been going over this with my wife who is also wishing to go premium to own land. While in a way I can say she whats to own land to sell it. I want to own land to have a place to go. I liked the fact First Land gave me the chance to build a small home for the cost of the lindens given to me as a bonus for going up. Alright with that being said Still I ponder on the premium all systems can be corrupted any plans with loops in them. Should the masses be punished I say no only giving way to deeper pockets which i really don’t have. Maybe ill go premium and hang around a few good ploders so I can pay for land. Which really sux for me to think of it 😦
Like many have said, I’m not likely to upgrade to a Premium account (currently free/payment info used) now that the chance of getting some First Land to build on is gone. Sure, it would only have been a tiny 512 sq. m. plot in the middle of skyscrapers or porn shops with a woefully low prim count, but it would have been mine to experiment and build on, to learn from, and to whet my appetite for a larger, nicer plot somewhere else. Time to go look for a rental, I guess.
I noticed just how bad land pricing had become over the weekend. I decided to sell the 1024 plot I had and upgrade to a larger amount in a nicer area. The price had doubled in the 3 months i had bought . I bought my new land Sunday night and within 2 hours of buying my 2048 plot, the 2 plots behind me had gone from 14,000 for 1024 to over L$30,000. That is unreal and I am glad I got there a little earlier to get mine at a lit cheaper price.
Heres something to chew on..if your ever bored go to the sim named hughes its a snow sim I recently aquired .I decided that i had’nt did many 512 plots for some time (I usually maintain 1024s to avoid sign stackers and 16m plots) so i cut over 50k metres into 512s and priced them at 13.9 very close to bottom of list. oh yeah they sold well to everyone but the peeps looking for 512s the ones crying theres no first land or 512s available .. that sims is a bloody mess in a matter of hours ..go look if you dont beleive me..Then when your done i will take you to several sims ive owned since new and maintained above average prices..NO signs NO mess nice homes nice comunities. I don’t think i did anyone a service by priceing land at bottom of list. you get what you payfor you want a good place to live dont cry over 500lindens cause in the long run the sim your buying in is likely to stay nice if I have anything to do with it.
Bad News! Sort your 2nd Lives out people!
I joined several months ago, and spent some time exploring as a virtual vagrant, then I rented, waiting for my First Land…. WHAT FIRST LAND? I never found any yet. Nor met anyone who has.
The landlord doubled my rent overnight, for a tiny plot with so few prims I could barely function. So I looked around, WOW, EXPENSIVE!!!
I couldn’t even figure out how the land thing worked based on the info on the website, my choices? Buy a whole island or wait for 1st land.
I went premier very quickly and bought a modest plot for L$14,000. At last my own little virtual home.
Then someone told me I should have been more careful because the plots come in just over 512, so you get jumped up a Tier. (Why can’t I buy by the metre?) I pay virtual dollars for the land, and real dollars for the privilige of “renting” it from you.
Why not give new Premiers a decent sized patch with a decent number of prims and make the covenenant a fixed price for future transfers to prevent undue profit-making on First Land?
What about tier prices for “Residential” as opposed to commercial? I would like a little house, but I found myself in the middle of a shopping mall that sprung up around me, then some git built a giant castle next to me, and then “bang goes the neighbourhood”
Land prices in the Real World rise because there is a bigger population using a limited acreage that is still unpolluted, but in Virtual Reality, you just click a button on a server and extend this non-existant plane as far as the data can go.
Some VR systems have limited (30 day) trial membership, perhaps you could go that way, (though 30 days is not nearly enough to get a grip on SL as it is so “sophisticated”) Maybe X amount of free hours, before insisting on some kind of payment. By all means tiered, but please, please, PLEASE …invest the money in new servers and a decent support.
The number of times the server has been down is getting just too tedious. (and again right now, still down, after the promised end of the temporary shut-down)
(Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed it gets laggy around the 23,000 users mark?)
How come you have over 2,000,000 users but only 23,000 actually online. How many dead accounts are there?
At least with a restricted period of free access you would clear those out… or don’t you want REAL statistics?
I don’t mind paying, if EVERYBODY pays… then re-invest the money in a BETTER system.
Hey, set up a totally new server farm and call it a different Nation/Country/Continent, and start all over again. Then have a limited inter-national teleport or funds transfer or postal system for inventory exchange. Take off the local load.
You wouldn’t believe the number of times I have tried to introduce new people, raving about the virtues of SL, only to find it has gone down, or is having a rolling restart.
Surely, theoretically at least, the expansion of the virtual world is unlimited… if properly managed.
Don’t you already get income from all the money transfers? Why hit the premiers?…, especially the ones who have been on a long time.
And, hey, don’t we residents “build our own world” If we all just stood around and didn’t help newbies or fill in blogs and wicki’s and invest in entertainment centres and events… you wouldn’t have a product at all. Look at the 12,000 freebies I picked up that make this VR so much more attractive than some of the competitors.. and the avatar shaping. You have some great features, but don’t squeeze us for money without improving the service. It is bad business.
We are your product as well as your customers, treat us more like partners than a resource and give us a fair deal. If you think about it a well-organised rebellion could really mess you right up.
Why not offer an amnesty, and upgrade every current member to “Full” Membership at a reduced rate, then from that point charge the incomers after a reasonable free period?
And, anyway, after all that…why can’t I drive round in SL when there are roads? Coz I can’t rez objects on public land. Silly.
http://www.there.com has a big interest through vehicle sports, even if their Sim is so limited it is like lego-land.
If you don’t change something fast, I will indeed be revoking my membership at the end of the year I paid in advance. Like the guy said earlier, what a Mug!
Don’t make us feel like mugs! You need us and our Dollars, and our goodwill and publicity.
Ah, it is finally back online now, so I can stop complaining and get on with my 2Life.
… *goes away sobbing in frustration*
Again, I look over the actions of Linden Labs, and I am amazed how they manage to do some things without any common sense, and mostly no care for whoever plays their SL. And I honestly cannot yet say if they are like Microsoft itsself or not, as the *only* thing they care about is to make money and be rich, and if they loose the smallest cent they walk over everybody who plays here to get it back. Also, allmost every important news they give us is alwais a bad one for the residents, but alwais benefits the company. Also, I have not seen them doing anything more for sl then fixing small bugs once a week and adding a new feature like “a small line in the corner of the screen that jumps you to another window easier”. It is very sad that something as beautiful as SL is run by people who act in such a way. I am sorry to say this, but it is the truth. And the pure truth is that “SecondLife is ruined because Linden wants more money”. For me right now, they are just like any other buisness company. Sorry if this seemed rude, but it is the truth, and I don’t think Linden denies it, even if they alwais say that “everything is ok”.
I have thought about getting a premium account too myself. At first i did want to get just the 512m’s of land, but after that thought i could just buy an 1024 or bigger parcel with the 512 free m’s included, so this wouldn’t be a problem for me. I have given up on the idea though as, like I said, I am very dissappointed by the way linden labs treat us.
OMG just reading these posts is funny. Kinda reminds me of a RL company called Subway. Remember those little stamps? You paid them for a sandwich and they gave you stamps. ya get 8 stamps and buy a drink and viola you get a free sandwich. But then people decided they were going to cheat the system. Make their own stamps, beg people for their stamps. My point is that as with the Subway issue, LL did promise their premium customers something. a 512 parcel at a cheaper price. but then people that knew what they were doing came in and took advantage of the new person with this incredible new land, turned around and sold that land and made a huge profit. That is NOT was LL offered first land for. And just like Subway did with the stamps, LL is shutting down the first land program. People whined and complained about Subway as they are doing right here in this blog about LL. But Subways sales still kept going up and up. Why is that? Because they had something that nobody else could match. LL has created this awesome place for all of us. Our real Second Life. To some its fun, to some its business. But as much as we whine and complain, you dont see us leave do you? If I had a US dollar for every time someone said they were mad at LL and leaving SL and didnt, I bet I could probably buy a sim on every open space on the land store. Quit whining and complaining because LL is a business and they will make decisions on this based on business needs. You cheat the system and the system will bite back. End of story.
There isnt much point complaining about the Lindens, they will do what they want when it suits them and not before. Our breath should be saved. We have all had bad results from trying to deal with Linden Labs , I just got a reply to a support email after 19 days ! The only thing that will influence them is money, and the need to raise it. If people arent happy paying a premium account they should close them and go free, and on the subject of free account holders being a problem ( which no payment info on file certainly is a big legal problem, as most of them are children ) land owners should ban them from all properties. Very easy to do, I have, and once they get tired of bouncing off the walls everywhere they go, they will either pay up or log out. If people feel badly done by because there is no longer first land, perhaps premium residents could form groups of 128 at a time and buy regions from Linden Labs at a discount. That would on current mainland prices be around 6,000L per parcel, but with a wholesale discount that could come down to at least 3,000L, which wouldnt take long to save. Its just a thought, but as I said Linden Labs wont hold our hands, so if there are problems, we have to deal with them ourselves. Community and co-operative efforts will make a big difference.
Kudos LL. Once again you deliver bad news! Like many others’ comments posted, Yay to NOT renewing to a Premium.
Even CP who calls himself a land baron has lowered his “vulture” status will have to “search” just a tad harder for his prey. Now if only the Dreamland staff would park their red rulers where the sun doesn’t shine.
IF my premie account is/was paying for the “live” help we never get any answers from is anyone REALLY surprised by this news??!!
For those who said rent was the way to go, you bet it is! If only some of the “barons” would follow Bill Stirlings concept of living in world we wouldn’t have so much crappy, laggy and REALLY ugly sims.
I thought that there would be First Land available when I signed up, but now I have found that there hasnt been any for months.. When was the last batch of First Land released?
I think I might have been mis-sold an account – I know that ‘First Land isnt Guaranteed’ but if there was none at all… – its shoddy – Its like raffleing a Mercedes and saying ‘a win isn’t guaranteed’ and not actually having a Mercedes to raffle. Fraudulent?
I searched and search for first land, and eventually paid 19200 for 1312 of hillside in bradmoor, and 25500 for 1024 of waterfront in Jota – because I wanted to build permanent structures – there was no first land available.
Now, If SL releases lots of land to bring the prices down, they are devaluing my land, so If I do want to sell, I will lose money. All landowners will.
This bugs me, but not as much as seeing new land go up for sale on the search engine, but when I teleport there, it has sold instantly – or earlier. It seems that the only people getting the good land deals are people that know how to program landbots – and ones that beat the engines.
Just a thought…
In the UK, we have Stamp Duty (tax) on all sales above £130k (GBP) and then there is another higher tax on more expensive property.. – I think £250k (GBP) – its unpopular, but we have to pay it if we want vastly large houses..
Why cant we limit the purchase and sale of land to say; 10 per month – it would be fair to say that anyone who trades more than that is a broker and should be taxed fairly… and only one account per bank details/ip – or would that put the prices up too?
I appreciate that Lindens do have to make money – there would be no point doing it otherwise, but with the Lindex, they have probably already ‘squirreled’ our money (everything that we hold in our SL pockets) into some high interest paying unethical RL account – probably (no guarantees tho’!) something involving Chinese children in labour camps – like I believe a certain trainer and sportswear manufacturer might.
Ouch – I wonder of this will be deleted ’cause of that last comment?
Thank you Zachary! I’d already put a ban on non-verified users on my properties in all three regions. I’m surprised that more don’t do it.
BTW, has anyone else noticed that the economy in Second Life has tanked big time?
It used to be every day that the US$ changing hands in the past 24 hours was over a million. Been that way since I first signed up in November of ’06. From what I hear, it was that way when there were only 500,000 residents too.
Then a few days ago, I noticed it was only about US$750,000.
Then yesterday it was ~US$350,000
As of this morning it was under ~US$200,000.
LindeX activity doesn’t seem to be hurting but it sure sounds like people are spending less money. Not me, I dropped another L$8,000 last night.
I need to add a further point about land parcels. There is no easy in world tool for land subdivision. It should just be a case of select whole region, select number of equal parcels, and one click to finish. If we can put men on the moon, then we can one click divide land ! And yes the post about region zoning is very important. The mainland has to be zoned or subjected to some sort of covenant, then all the little houses can be in one place and all the big commercial stuff in another. The mainland has become very ugly.
At least this page kept me busy during the time the grid was down for maintenance. Good reading guys and some good ideas. Hope someone at LL reads it too.
I can somewhat understand why LL wants to discontinue the First Land program, however, I don’t understand what benefits of the premium membership are without the First Land program? For example, I don’t own a business, I don’t plan on starting a business in SL anytime soon, would like to own land but can always find a place to rent instead….so why should I pay $9USD/month (plus any tier fees) to LL for a premium membership? There has got to be some perks…..
I was going to sign up for a premium membership next week but I guess I won’t be now.
Good bye, premium membership.
The stipend does NOT pay – getting linden$ fromLindex gives more for that amount then premium membership does and buying land from linden ist far too expensive. AAncheChung & cie will be happy for this decision.
If the 512-tier connected to the preoium account should pay, Linden must sell land – at alst as cheap as the land barons do.
For someone who when Premium just after Christmas, with the intention of finding a little patch of land to build a nice, uncomplicated home base for my av, this sudden removal of First Land is deveistating. First Land was the reason I paid my subscription. I have been looking every time I logged on for First Land, I congratulated those who arrived and purchased before me, anticipating the same joy and pleasure they were having. It was already almost impossible to find First Land, and when it did appear, the sim would be full within seconds.
There were suggestions as to revisions made on another blog, way back as far as September, however, none of these appear to have been followed up, certainly there were no Lindens giving any feed back to the suggestions. I think just about every suggestion that has been posted here was also posted on the other blog, so the ideas were in the public domain for a very long time.
I am disapointed, and let down, I would appreciate some recognition of this from the Lindens, but I doubt it will be forthcoming. Prove me wrong, Linden Labs….
And CP, that’s exactly my point.
Why would I pay something (land), albeit cheap, that I can’t use due to lag and bad neighbors?
I’m going to pay more because I want controlled land, low lag and less hassle. That said, anybody that wants to build a giant lag inducing club is going to love mainland because its one of the only places in SL where one can build that sort of thing and get away with it.
The unfortunate thing for LL is that moving onto the more expensive private island means that I no longer need my premium account and LL will no longer get the money from the premium membership fee.
However, should LL make paying for premium memberships worth it again, I will begin paying. But until that day comes, I’m withdrawing that form of monetary support from LL.
I would say the only way to get my premium membership back would be to offer cheap controlled mainland where I’m not going to have a lag inducing club next door. Is that going to happen? Not likely.
Costs me $10 to downgrade from Premium to Free account. Very nice, very nice!
I lose the main benifit from my decision to have a Premium account (though in over a month was unable to find how LL was going to honor the obligation to me to make First Land available to me for purchase) and I have to PAY them more money to cancel the “Premium” part of my account.
Thank you, LL. Thank you. Next time… lube please?
Well I have been waiting for First land for a long time. I really never expected it to become available so never upgraded to a premium account. Looks like my expectations came true.
So then, for people who do not need or want land, what is the incentive to become a premium member?
Answer this: WIIFM? That’s the key question. Right now the answer is nothing.
Oi, why must people bash the freebie account users? None of them can buy land, so their effect on First Land doesn’t come in to play. And for those that call them free loaders… I bet if you could look at LindeX stats you would find the vast majority of people BUYING lindens are freebie accounts. Without them, all the paid accounts who have businesses in SL….well, would have a hard time making a US$ profit, no? Now….unverified, thats another story…heh. And for the record, I AM a paying account holder and have been here in SL since 2005.
Now, I know that First Land program has been broken for awhile, but again this is a case of LL taking the easy way out. And increasing their profits on the way. I’ve seen a few people ask about how mainland will be sold now, so let me break it down. I know a few people have mentioned, but…
Essentially, new land is sold in full sim alotments, for US$. Its an auction process, so the final price varies. Pretty much it comes down to what people think their profit margin will be when they resell it, and so they bid accordingly. Which is why when LL first announced the new continent to ‘help ease land prices’, I couldn’t help but laugh. If the going rate now is 20L/meter….you can almost guarantee anyone buying sims will bid with that number in mind. So it only furthers the expansion of the high priced land.
If they REALLY want to impact the demand for land, they don’t need to add more. Just change the land. Right now, they bill the Class 5 servers as being able to hold 100 avatars. And since there are what, at least 3 sims per server… Why not drop down the number of avatars that a sim can hold, and boost the prim alotment. I guarantee that 100 avatars is a greater system drain than say, 30,000 prims on an island. And really, most people buy land for the prims not the space itself. So, if prim allotment were say doubled….alot more people would likely buy less land. Which in turn would mean less is needed.
Of course, what it all comes down to is profit. Much as they try to act sympathetic, the LOVE the high land values. They make more on sim auctions. ALOT more. And people buying with lindens? Well not too many people make enough profit in SL to afford tossing 45K for a lot. So they buy them. And LL makes money on both ends of Lindex exchanges. So don’t expect them to willingly try to change this trend.
Bah, how I miss the days when LL was a community experience. LL events. LL builds. LL infrastructure. Good times.
@Winchester: Interesting legal argumentation. While I might disagree with some subtle points you raise, there is indeed always the option of having a young and reckless lawyer jumping at LL because of this issue. However, I don’t believe it will ever happen; LL’s ToS gives them pretty much freedom to do whatever they please with the “offers” they give. I’d say this is much more of an ethical decision than a legal one. Legally, LL can do whatever they want. Ethically, they’ll have to fight for a reputation of being “honest”.
@Random: What you describe existed before First Land, it was called “Land for the Landless”, and existed around mid-2004. You signed up on a forum thread showing your willingness to get a plot of land. You had to wait 6-8 weeks until someone at Linden Lab saw your post and got you your plot for L$512. This then became automated after the Big Land Scarcity of Summer ’04. I did sign up for that programme, then gave up after a month or so, and bought some non-snow 512 m2 of land (snow was the rage at the moment… for a while) for L$6000. Needless to say, this was one of my worst investments ever — land prices dropped constantly, only to rise again in late 2006.
After reading all those posts, I can’t possibly fail to notice that we’re talking about less than 60,000 premium accounts, compared to the 3.8 million or so free ones. The AOL comparison is not completely unreasonable to make. However, I would like to point out that LL (perhaps unlike AOL in the past) is not really expecting “more Premium accounts”. Instead, they’re expecting that the existing Premium accounts expand their ownings, and rent part of it to the Basic accounts.
Why does this make sense from a business perspective? Well, we can all grief and complain about “putting it all in the hands of monopolies held by land barons”. The truth is that the long-term land barons compete ferociously among themselves — and have done so for several years — and have no choice but to offer added value. You don’t just buy/rent/lease a plot from them — you join a planned, organised community, and you get protection from griefers and nasty neighbours. How well each large land baron does their job will reflect their long-term success; it’s obvious that many are doing well and will continue to be around.
On the mainland, the tiny landowner is a nightmare to manage — from the point of view of Linden Lab. A whole sim full of First Land plots, where you have to deal with your nasty neighbours every day without having a way to call for help is a nightmare. What happens? People pack and go — very often, to rent/buy/lease land on an organised, planned community. So, although I can understand why people can be furious for not getting their “promised” First Land, let’s be honest — you wouldn’t be holding on to it for long. As soon as you got an offer, you’d move out (probably with your friends and friendly neighbours) and go to a planned community or a rental business.
First Land, with a few exceptions, are the slums and wastelands of Second Life. People getting them will have fun for a few hours. Then they will face the naked reality of what it means — griefing, “physical” and mostly “visual”. You won’t be living on a “nice” place, but very soon you’ll see that there are lots of nice places around in SL to live in — and all rather cheaper than being a Premium Account and a tiny 512 m2 plot.
So what is LL accomplishing by abolishing the FL programme? Well, let’s ignore the deal with the “abuse”. It’s a comfortable excuse and a side-effect. But the real reason is purely economical, and, surprisingly, an encouragement to make SL look better. Let’s assume, for an instant, that from those 60,000 Premium Users, 10,000 abandon their plots, in disgust over LL’s new policies. These will be bought up by ‘bots, start-up land baron wannabees, and short-term capitalists. But they suddenly see that they won’t be able to sell them so easily, since the number of Premium accounts will decrease slightly, as people “tier down” and go to live on private islands.
What will happen next? Well, there is some inertia in the system — they will hold to their land and expect the next wave of freshly-minted Premium accounts to arrive with their pockets full of money. However, these “new” Premium accounts will not expect land to be cheap (ie. no more First Land, so…). They will expect it to look good. And where will they turn to? Very likely, planned communities organised by the long-term, established land barons.
So the quickly-bought-for-a-huge-profit ex-First Land will remain on “wasteland”. For a while. To make a profit, land barons who just buy & sell land, without intention of improving it and adding value, will need to do it quickly. But in the mean time — Linden Lab will roll out more land on the next continent. On the auctions, for US$1000 as a base price. Who will buy these? The established land barons again. And they’ll get it for a reasonable amount of money, improve the plots, and sell them for a profit … but at a much lower rate than the land baron wannabees are able to set.
This definitely means that the “former wasteland” will slowly need to have its prices dropped. Without encouragement to buy small, cheap 512 m2 plots, and a decrease in new Premium accounts, all that land hold into the hands of the wannabee land barons is pretty much worthless. What will they do with it? Sell it to the rental businesses, very likely. They will still make a rather reasonable profit that way.
So you see “aggregation”. Less premium accounts holding more land in larger sizes. For Linden Lab, this means less technical support calls. It also means that the 60,000 paying customers will pay far more than just the bare minimum, since they will hold large tracts of land for their own rental businesses. The number of free accounts will only increase, and buy/lease/rent more and more from the established land barons/rental managers/mall owners. Yes, this means more concentration of power and money in a larger number of people — capitalism at work! — but that’s exactly how it works in RL as well, isn’t it? 🙂 But for LL, it also means less work — land barons will continue to buy whole sims and plan them, and tier payment will be handled by a small group (well, 60,000-big) of people, who will also manage most of the more common issues in their communities and rental businesses. Providing added value that way.
So, does this mean that I’m for LL’s decision? Well, it sounds to me that it would be inevitable. Consider the following: it meant a lot of support calls, way over what people pay for their tier zero Premium accounts. It meant a lot of time planning the landscape for the new sims, from talented LL designers that are always overworked anyway. It meant large areas with griefing of all sorts — physical and visual. It was abused in all possible ways, mostly because people don’t know exactly how to set/manage their land (I know I don’t). It allowed for hyper-inflation on those areas.
All that is now gone. Makes a lot of business sense for LL. And who suffers? Perhaps 10,000 or so Premium users who feel “cheated”. Well, 10,000 in 3.8 million accounts is not really a huge number, isn’t it? After all, we all know that LL is not making any money from the Premium accounts… just from tier and lease of private islands.
My bumhole hurts. I was just about to buy first land. Thanks for the heads up though. Now I’ll NEVER invest anything in SL. Just wait till your bigger badder more CUSTOMER ORIENTED competitor comes along because they will come and leave you face down in the ground. Way to go!
I just learned of the perfect solution for premium members, amazing what u can find when you read the wonderful second life website. I will not pay u to cancel my membership instead I am donating my 512 of free tier to a group, and i suggest all premium members do the same if they are not using it. Then if linden labs plans to honor there advertising, then u can get it back. No my two will have no impact on Linden labs, but i can guarantee if this idea catches on and from the amount of anger this has generated it can and will have an impact i totally agree protest, demand your rights as a premium account holder. Like jack linden stated above you pay for 512 of free tier why are you not using it :).
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Quite a few very good and viable suggestions for keeping the First Land program afloat.. The one thing I don’t see, however, is my comment –posted yesterday– asking whether the $10 cancellation fee will be the next thing to be disposed of.
I see the need for a revamp of the First Land process, not a complete obliteration of it, since the only real benefit to being a premium member was land. First land being the jumping off point for anyone –from land baron to (multi) parcel owners like myself.
Now, I ask you this: Why in the world would anyone want to go premium now? I see no point, since land is the only reason anyone *would* go premium.
You can rent, you can be a nomad. The so-called “stipend” that’s been reduced over time is barely a reason.
I’d think that the residents would be consulted when a decision of this magnitude were being considered, but then again, why buck tradition?
Considering the lag, the inventory issues, along with numerous other issues, I doubt sincerely I will allow my paid subscription to renew come August of this year. I can only hope that (as my mysteriously disappearing post said) the cancellation fee is also removed by then.
If not, $10 isn’t going to kill me as much as the fees I’m paying already.
Before this entry is bashed, keep in mind I’m writing regarding my opinion and experiences here. Not trying to “convert” anyone to it!
I’ve read many individuals taking pride in the fact that they do not pay any Linden tiers by renting on private islands.
But listen carefully. The rent you pay via paypal or through in-world payment methods go into the pockets of the estate owners who in return use your rent money to pay for their 295USD/month tier of owning the private island.
It’s true that private islands are fantastic if you want low lag and a controlled atmosphere. But if you are renting parcels on private island to avoid LL tiers, think again. Most of your rental payments go straight to LL.
I love SL. I find the economics of our virtual world fascinating. The first week of February was even more fascinating because LL inserted a dramatic surplus of land in 24 hours. Although people panicked and some financial losses were made, the economy made a quick recovery.
Robin said some time back when I asked on the now-defunct Linden Answers forum about the $10 cancellation fee that there WAS no such fee.
Are you guys saying that there is? Do you know for a fact you have been charged $10 to downgrade from a premium to a basic account?
coco
Here’s an idea coming from a high schooler:
Instead of abolishing the First Land Program because of abuse, why don’t you guys establish sims that are specifically dedicated to First Land. When a resident would upgrade to premium, they will have the option of receiving First Land or attempting to buy their own. If the Premium member decides they would like First Land, they will request it and LL will designate a 512m plot of land in one of the First Land sims. The First Land they receive cannot be sold, bought or traded. The only way they could get rid of that First Land is to cancel the land with LL. By creating system like this, LL will receive the land if the member decides they do not want their First Land anymore and it would be virtually impossible for any form of abuse because of the prevention of non-LL groups selling or buying the First Land. This will also continue to entice Basic users to upgrade.
Try that and see how it works!!!
Gosh, cry, cry, cry, there will always be first land. Just the first land may and probably will be, more expensive and it may be larger then 512. So come on folks, relax and breath deeply. Everything will be OK.
Proud Second Life member for 4 years and still have no plans on going no where. Keep working overtime Lindens Lab and bring us one of the best year yet!
>quoted>A more fair move might be to have a final release of First Land that people who were premium members before today (and who have never exercised their land buying rights) would be eligible to buy. New premium members (those who join after the change is announced) would not be eligible to buy the reduced-price land.
OMG yes, because this is exactly why i subscribed for the entire year JUST LAST MONTH… I’m trying to find a nice place where the neighbors seem stable and nice, and POOF you took away the reason i signed up… a nice little plot of affordable land where i can have a little virtual house. NOT FAIR, you should honor the original offer to the accounts who are NOT freeloaders.
How could you do someting like this without giving us some kind of warning!?
>quoted>Go through your database, message all the premium account holders who joined before this annoucement, assign like 4 completely “regions” and give out a 512 piece of each of us…
Hey, i’m not even asking for a handout, just a chance to do what I hadn’t yet done. I don’t know who this Chung guy is, but it sounds like he’s abusing the system as well. Are there no rules about monopolies here?
i’m very angry about this… I do hope that the Lindens (who, i understand, formerly referred to themselves as GODS!) will do what benevolent dieties responsible for their people would do…. that is, do the right thing.
I’ve read many individuals taking pride in the fact that they do not pay any Linden tiers by renting on private islands.
But listen carefully. The rent you pay via paypal or through in-world payment methods go into the pockets of the estate owners who in return use your rent money to pay for their 295USD/month tier of owning the private island.
It’s true that private islands are fantastic if you want low lag and a controlled atmosphere. But if you are renting parcels on private island to avoid LL tiers, think again. Most of your rental payments go straight to LL.
I love SL. I find the economics of our virtual world fascinating. The first week of February was even more fascinating because LL inserted a dramatic surplus of land in 24 hours. Although people panicked and some financial losses were made, the economy made a quick recovery.
Ever since I joined SL in late November, the land prices increased dramatically and like all things nothing lasts forever like early February. So, why doesn’t LL start releasing 50 sims or more/day periodically to shakes things up in our world. It would be similar to what happens in the real world. We need this period of instabiltiy to stablize our virtual economy. Mind you, I love making money as much as anyone else, but I think we need a pop of the bubble every now and then.
After the crash, I’ve seen some names disappear and new ones emerge; however, the experienced land traders recovered well and are making good profits. It shows that even when times get tough in SL, the individual who do their research will be able to survive whereas the people who are out to make a quick profit will get hurt.
Like Costello has stated, releasing 8 sims/day hasn’t done anything to the prices at auction.
Cheers.
Unfortunatly, it looks like first land was broken and removing it was the lesser of two evils.
I would hope that LL does offer some sort of alternate benefit to premium accounts, especially a one shot benefit to those accounts which never used first land for one reason or another.
I’ll offer some suggestions as time permits, for what they are worth.
Actions speak louder than words, LL. I went basic quite some time ago when the top-heavy landlord economy went out of control. Today, rents and market prices for mainland parcels are completely absurd, way out of line with the way the economy ran for years. SL was a way for a lot of us to own our own little corner of the world, pathetic as that may sound to RL land owners. You tout building and land ownership in your marketing materials, but these are now pipe dreams for anyone who doesn’t have a substantial RL disposable income or substantial free time to devote to earning enough of your bogus currency to pay land use fees. Congratulations on failing to manage First Land intelligently, then cutting your losses.
SL is increasingly dystopian. It is not “imagined, created, and owned by its residents” as you loudly proclaim. If we are to be completely honest, it is imagined, created, and owned primarily by a tiny minority of social parasites who run all of their affairs like business. I used to enjoy Second Life as a creative escape from the ugly, cutthroat, top-heavy nature of the real world, and I suspect many others enjoyed it for the same reason. There is now hardly anything to distinguish Second Life from reality. Everyone who doesn’t spend what it takes to own a sim or more is a Second Serf. Three cheers for Linden Labs, bringing you cyberfeudalism at its absolute finest.
Please be honest in how you market Second Life. A world “manipulated, defaced, and heavily taxed by a wealthy power elite while blind gods capriciously cavort” would be more accurately descriptive of the typical SL experience.
As a solution to the land bot problem, why not implement any of the following simple solutions?
– Allow land to be flagged as “for manual sale”, listed in the land sales search, with a suggested price, but not able to be bought automatically. The buyer would have to actually converse with the vendor in order to buy it;
– Introduce a captcha test, or some other process requiring human input, as an extra stage in the purchase process;
– use the unique machine hash that you apparently generate to stop one computer producing massive numbers of alts.
First, as a premium member, and a first land buyer who now owns multiple adjacent parcels, I think your decision to eliminate the first land program SUCKS!!! I suppose I shouldn’t care because I already have mine and am not affected by this stupidity. But as a resident of SL and a regular participant, I believe that I, as well as all residents, should have a vested interest in the viability and success of Second Life. I am, quite frankly, surprised and dismayed that the bright people at Linden Labs have not been able to devise a plan to deal with this particular problem more fairly and effectively. To dust off a couple of approporiate cliches, this move is akin to LL’s cutting off an arm to stop the bleeding from your finger and is one more example of shooting yourselves in the foot so many times that it’s hard to find your feet.
Let me summarize what I’m sure is the perception of most residents:
1. The problem is caused by a relatively few greedy
speculators looking to profit at the expense of the
majority.
2. Without the “benefit” of purchasing First Land at a
cheap price, there is no incentive to become a
premium member.
3. The people who you really screwed by this move are
those who you sucked into buying a premium account
but were unable to find first land to buy because there
hasn’t been any available for weeks. Now you lower
the curtain and say the First Land show is over. (Great
customer service move!)
4. The Griefers, transients and the flood of Alt accounts,
enabled by your previous stupid move of allowing new
free accounts with no verification whatsoever, who now
make up a large part of the daily log-ons, are not
affected by this move at all because they never
intended to buy a premium account anyway.
5. This move does nothing to encourage the growth of
second life fueled by talented, interested and
commited residents. What it does encourage is the
continued profiteering by speculators and land
barons. The only difference is that it will no longer be
at the expense of new premium members lured into
selling their first land for a quick but small profit. The
only growth will occur as LL sells more island sims at
higher profits and land in new continents to people like
Anse Chung or through the more profitable land
auctions.
One thing that I am puzzled about, and wish that someone could explain, is the statement made in the notice that “Because of the low price, they were being immediately sold, or bought via alts, purely for profit”. As I understand it, an alt account is, by it’s nature, a free duplicate account without premium status. Unless Linden Labs accounting and admin. system is totally flawed, buying first land with alt accounts shouldn’t be possible since said accounts would need to each be paid premium accounts. Is there something here that I’m missing or is there more to this problem, and LLs “fix”, than they are willing to admit?
Some Reflections : When I registered my account and paid a years fee in advance the stipend was 500L$ per week, First land was soposedly available to be purchested, And I was happy.
Linden labs has not done away with first land today, they stoped making any more first land months ago, funny it was the same week the raised the prices on Islands and islands being more profitable became the priority, I have an alt that is a registered account that has been trying to find “first land ” none has been available for the last two months. Looks like LL did away with first land over two months ago, not today, They just picked today to admit that its gone and nothing the PAYING accounts can say will be considered.
I will further bet thaty at least 95% of any new land that is made available will be bought up by the land barrons at LL’s price.
O and as an aside the Steoind I recieve has been cut along with all of the others I now recieve 300L$ a week Not the 500L$ i signed up at.
So I ask Are thw customers getting SCR–ED How about a little KY next time LL
VERY BAD MOVE!!!!. free enterprise has it’s OWN checks and balances but the second you make something unavailable it does only one single thing…RAISE the PRICE! Have you people not learned a thing? The supply will continue but NOW will ONLY be available to the rich… pretty much the opposite of what this entire experiment was intended for.
You use big words like tolerance but commit the worst infraction of all by segregating the wealthy who can own and the poor who now have a very small chance to own.
How about simply not allowing the sale of an initial amount of land EXCEPT to a land fund where it can be made available AT COST with no markup and ONLY to those who have not yet aquired their initial parcel?
Being a virtual world there is NO reason each and evey citizen should not have at least a homestead and a chance to participate in the community in a tangible manner. There will of course always be differing levels of wealth but to deny ANY holdings initially is to create an entire segment of a society who will never own their own…
I guess the Linden folks “have theirs” as for the rest “Let them eat cake”.
I have been waiting for First Land to be available since I initiated my account on December. I had intended to become Premium at that time. Every day for almost a month I looked and looked and never saw it. I will stop looking now… and will not become Premium. Frankly, I have had a real good time in SL without owning land. This makes things much simpler. Thank you 🙂
I emailed LL support back around Feb 14th expressing my frustration with obtaining First Land. Fortunately I saved the response I received. My response back to them is at the end.
_________________________________________________________
Friday, February 16, 2007 5:11 AM
Varas Linden via RT
Hello,
Thanks for your e-mail.
Second Life’s “First Land” program allows Residents to purchase their
first parcel of land below the current market value. Parcels are 512
square meters and sell for L$1 per meter to those who have never owned land.
Checklist – What you need:
* A Premium Account
* Have never owned land previously
* To have donated no land-holding capacity to a group previously.
Please note: First Land plots are subject to availability. A snapshot of
the available land can be viewed by:
To Find First Land * Go into SL and click on the Search button
* Select the Land Sales tab
* Make sure the checkboxes for the sq. meters and L$ cost are “unchecked”
* Select “First Land” from the pull-down menu and hit “Search”
* When you find a plot you like, teleport to it and buy it on the spot
More information on Finding and Buying Land:
http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=146
Yours
Varas Linden
How’s my driving? Rate Second Life Support:
https://secondlife.com/account/csr-survey.php
__________________________________________________________
My Response
I know what first land is and I know and have done all of what your
instructions say – many times a day. I even attended a class on first land. I also attended “office hours” with one of the lindens just to discuss this. Please read my initial note more carefully. This is a major topic of discussion in world. There is so much hype about this program but in reality it’s rarely available and when it is hundreds of people fight over it. I have a premium account, have never owned land, and have never donated land to anyone. This you could have checked before sending me a standard answer. I upgraded my account specifically so I could accumulate some money so that
when I got this first land I could start growing. If it’s rarely available
then please let people know that.
As has been mentioned many times (I’m just standing to be counted), you really ought to hand out first land to anyone who went premium and still hasn’t taken first land.
I am not going to repeat the arguments against this latest ridiculous decision by LL, but I did want to post to stand up and be counted as another premium resident unhappy by this situation.
I do think that those who have paid for premium accounts in the hope of finding first land and have spent months waiting and searching have been misled. I do hope LL are able to offer something to these landless premium account holders.
Personally, a couple of months ago I was fortunate to be able to purchase first land, fortunate because a friend who knew I was looking for my first land was searching and found some plots had just become available and I was lucky enough to be in the right place and the right time to TP and purchase the first plot I landed on. I have no intention of selling this land although I did notice that many adjacent plots came up for sale within minutes at greatly inflated prices. Within minutes a speculator was offering to buy my first land … I was offered 2000L$, needless to say I refused.
“cp costello Says:
February 21st, 2007 at 9:27 AM PST
yeah Minne i know what your saying but mainland is still cheaper then island living and there is a massive need for more.. ”
CP, you are correct in saying that Mainland life is cheaper in the long run. But as Minnie said up there the zoned living and overall upkeep of Islands like Dreamland maintain make the cost difference well worth it. Many people here are saying LL needs to justify the premium rate with more value. Some Island outfits (I use Dreamland because that is the only one I have ever used) offer much more value for the money, even if it is a little more. I have had many dealings with the “Angels” of Dreamland. Even when stressed to the limit they always come through for me. Sometimes I have to wait a day or so.. but it is well worth it to know I will be answered. LL even closed the Land Questions area on the forum where Guy always eventually handled a request.
Island living may cost a tad more, but the value is there. It is worth that difference for the quality of living I get. 🙂
Wow… so there really WAS such a thing as “first Land”? I thought it was some mythical paradise that people only talked about. Seriously… I have been here for almost 6 months now… and not once did I even get a glimpse of a first land parcel.
But as for the decision to do away with it… I think its s good thing. Everyone knew that they were just being snatched up by real estate groups and resold at huge profits. I tried finding first land before I bought my first 512… and after a week of waiting and searching, I just said to heck with it, and made the best deal I could. Kindof like you do IRL… you dont see land developers handing out plots of land to people who have never owned a home before for dirt cheap just because its their first purchase.
I agree with this move, and if anything, it may actually ad some stability to the land market.
Just another degradation in the ever downward spiral of the game. Why dont you fix the basic game engine instead of doing such silly things. I dont think you people will ever learn. The mini update today has wrecked the game again.
THANKS for taking a perfectly good game and turning to caca
Heeeeere we go again!
One of the previous times LL tossed out policy changes with no (public at least ) forewarning got them DEEP in the kimche.
A legal eagle resident threatened them with some sort of action, and they had to make good on promises made.
(telehub land fiasco, for those who were around)
So I’m waiting to see if the Divine Ms. Moonflower will smack LL upside the head with Da Legal Cheeze yet again.
WHEN is LL gonna realize they can’t just promote their product a certain way, and then just arbitrarily change things without FIRST setting in place transitional measures to ENSURE that promises made, are promises kept.
As for all yall cheering cuz First Land was gameable and all that: ever stop to think that LL could have prevented that sorta crap quite easily? Yes the could have, but they didn’t.
Now they think this (pretty much illegal) move is gonna fix the prollem.
I wonder how many feet Linden Lab has left? They done shot off a whole bunch over the years. Eventually they gonna come crashin down, having shot they last one out from underneath themselves.
(Go git em Katyy! This move is seriously screwed up!)
Yep, I am a Sucker. I too went Premium a year in advance and have been on for almost two months and have yet to find (well, was too late on one) First Land. Was beginning to think it was an Urban Legend. Now I believe I was right.
So, unfortunately, my “first land” will be a rip-off, I will have a more bitter taste in my mouth, and if not for the fantastic people I have met (hmmm…none of them having the last name of LINDEN), I would just hang it up.
I bought it, folks…hook, line and sinker. What a social experiment this has proved to be.
Your friend the Sucker… Meg Box
I feel totally cheated by you about the First Land Program and Premium membership. I started the Premium memebrship with your promise of supplying a cheap land to start ownership. Every day for 7 weeks I tried to reach the promised land; the search always answering “None found”. I had the hope that new continent will be a way of letting the Premium members get what you had promised. The ending of the program is not a fraud? It may be not in actual legal terms, it’s absolutely a fraud in terms of ethics.
I’m really disappointed. Taking into account that I have payed one year in advance I feel really upset about your business practices. You may change your rules for new members, I think it’s totally unfair as a business practice changing rules for current members without having fullfilled their expectations.
I ask to reconsider your unfair decision. If not you will have to cope the rest of your business existence with a lack of confidence from your customers.
I’ve tried daily for a month to utilize my allocation of First Land, but have NEVER even seen any available. The offer of First Land was a key part of my decision to subscribe to to a year’s premium account.
Do I feel CHEATED? ABSOLUTELY. On two counts.
1. No mention was made of the difficulty in getting First Land.
2. Retrospectively withdrawing part of the product that was offered when I signed up amounts to nothing more than BREACH OF CONTRACT.
I am pissed off, and will not be recommending SL to my friends.
@446
No, Andrea… but in RL you DO see the regulators in charge (that is, the USA feds) offering special packages to first-time and low-income home buyers. Why can’t LL adopt something like that?
It is unfair to yank first land.
Just as it was unfair to force those who did qualify for first land to purchase land from
others because first land was NEVER available. I did my share of spamming for first land
both when I had a free account and as a premium user, and I too came up with ZERO hits like
countless 1000’s of others. I also have seen many 512 lots owned by linden not be put on the
first land list, they still exist today. It was like they were holding them on purpose.
Maybe because of the automated land buying issue, but still no first land was ever available
and there was also never any statement as to why. Just as there is no statement or warning
as to why it was first land was yanked without warning.
In my opinion fist land should be grandfathered in, and IN ADDITION anyone who qualified for
first land weather they exercised that right or not due to lack of availability, should be
awarded first land even if they are currently a land owner. Any bots, or freebie accounts,
or any other means used to acquire additional land in accordance with the T.O.S should be
investigated and dealt with accordingly, and if any outcome of that investigation results in
an account cancellation, then said land should be recycled into the first land program.
There are many great suggestions for making it worth while. Proper scaling of services and
benefits from free, to monthly, to quarterly, to yearly accounts should be implemented.
There have been many great suggestions to make premium membership worth it and should be
applied immediatly to exsisting premium accounts that is of a benefit.
-raising the stipend (be sure to adjust this accordingly for the grandfathered in stipends
that exist now)
-raising the free tier allowance to 1024 or better yet scaled accordingly for monthly,
quarterly, and yearly subscribers, and perhaps having free land tier for monthly, and
quarterly, but first land only available to yearly subscribers to verify they are legit
users.
upload fees as well as similar fees should scale down the more membership you sign up for.
It is unfair to subject land to these wild swings. Speculation on land pricing was the only
way to beat automated bots or organized groups along with not buying from said groups or bot
owners when possible. Yanking how land is issued or weather it is issued at all, makes
legitimate investors steer clear, as well as legitimate buyers. Bots can’t speculate, people
can. I’m not for letting the price get out of hand for new players to buy land, but people
that have been with the game and use their land for legitimate purposes should not lose
their long term investment even if the price was inflated.
Protect your loyal users, while still protecting new subscribers and direct this attention
to the people who are violating the game rules and deal with them, their accounts, and their
land appropriately.
There are lots of solutions and suggestions on here as well as the forums, solutions and
ideas thought up by those that count.. The end user.
@414
Yes, but even Subway, when they discontinued the stamp program allowed a grace period after the announced closure for people to use what stamps they had saved up prior to the stopping of the program. They didn’t just say, “Oh, and those cards you saved up? We’re not going to accept them.” They stopped issuing the stamps but continued to allow them to be redeemed for a peroid of time.
As @447 mentioned, there was no transition. There was no announcement. There’s been no announcement of, “Well, we’re stopping it but we’ll continue to honor the arrangement for those who were already premium and looking and waiting.”
I wonder how many residents who don’t read the blogs/news pages etc. even -know- about this?
Okay instead of royally FUCKING EVERYONE OVER, you could have just made it so first land could not be sold once bought, or only sold back to Lindens.
Thanks to this I will never be able to get land. I was GOING to join premium the next paycheck but not now since you just screwed everyone over.
I can’t buy mainland or estates because they are like $12+ per meter.
Great job!
The barrage of sniping at the wrong people continues. If LL can be faulted for anything, it is for not foreseeing that the First Land system would turn out to be a resource more readily exploited by speculators than by the people it was intended for. Can we really blame them for this?
We are charting unexplored territory here, people. There has never been anything like SL before, ever. What we are really doing here is rediscovering some of the sad truths of evolution in action: Any readily exploitable resource will be sequestered by parasites to the limit of its carrying capacity. We are now finding that this is true in SL as well as in FL. (I make no apologies for calling automated land grabbers parasites, by any reasonable technical definition that is exactly what they are.)
Again, in FL as in SL, a good short term response to parasites is to cut them off from the resources they are draining.
@336 Penolope:
> You [LL] gave no advanced warning about this major change,
> gave no one time to prepare. This is a prime example of bad
> customer service and relations.
Bad customer service or not, it’s sound immunology. Morally and ecologically, if not technically, automated land buying is an exploit. In that sense, the present move by LL is just a response to an exploit. And prompt responses to exploits are unquestionably a good thing. To continue the biological metaphor, it’s the equivalent of running a fever in response to a microbial attack: In the short run it makes you sicker, but it’s a quick response to keep things going while you work on a longer term solution.
And as I noted before, I am not going to trash LL until I have seen what long term solutions they roll out on this issue. If they turn out to be inadequate, *then* we can start complaining.
As for some of the proposals aired in this thread, any of them that target free accounts are not worth the pixels they are written on. Free accounts *CAN NOT* buy land, so they have *nothing* to do with this, and blaming them is vicious, stupid, and downright hypocritical.
As for some of the other proposals, I could get behind some of the proposed restrictions on the resale of First Land parcels for a reasonable term. Say if you buy First Land, you can’t resell it for 90 days, or if you have to dump it in an emergency, you can only sell it back to LL for the price you bought it.
Regrettably, I suspect that these might be some of the options that LL considered and discarded bacause they would “significantly impact on resident freedoms.” Like, say, Minnie Trottier (@350), they have not yet shaken the illusion of the level playing field. The problem is that, as in FL evolution, the parasites have changed the rules.
@439 Fibonacci:
> SL is increasingly dystopian. It is not “imagined, created,
> and owned by its residents” as you loudly proclaim. If we
> are to be completely honest, it is imagined, created, and
> owned primarily by a tiny minority of social parasites who
> run all of their affairs like business.
Congratulations, you have just looked into the face of the laissez faire monster. I am not disagreeing, merely pointing out that if one creates a complex system and then lets it run its course unchecked, these kinds of evolutionary phenomena *will* occur, unless certain checks and balances are built in. Someone once said that organized crime is the purest form of laissez faire capitalism.
Grossly oversimplifying things, there are two main possible reactions.
1. You can say that all this is fine and the way things should be, and try to become the meanest kid on the block. This is essentially what Elanthius Flagstaff and his ilk are doing. (Has it ever struck anyone else as ironic that the picks in Elanthius’ profile are all SL beauty spots of the kind the parasites are likely to eventually destroy? The monster never sees the monster in the mirror.)
2. You can say there should be some checks and balances, which is much the harder choice, because they have to be designed very well to avoid “significantly impacting on freedoms” while at the same time being less exploitable, because you can bet the family silver the parasites will *immediately* start looking for loopholes. But at least there’s the possibility of fairness.
Do we want 1 or do we want 2? I believe that in a very real sense, the future of SL depends on answering that question very carefully and with much thought. And sorry, no, I have no easy answers, because as the continued sniping at free accountholders (that other favorite scapegoat) shows, easy answers to big questions are all wrong.
If you feel a little upset about that, here in lieu of consolation is an easy answer to a small question:
@397 Timothy:
> Here’s an idea: how about charging people for their No Entry
> fences? We get charged for Rating other avis, we get charged
> for uploading textures, why not charge us for fences
Timothy, I hope you pour this into a feature voting proposal, because I am so voting for it. I would even transfer my votes from proposal 1811. It would be nice to have banned parcels be less secretive, but to charge for using them (especially all those absentee landlords making such beautiful places as Nakiska utterly impassable) would be a step in the right direction that uses far less server resources. Personally, I would say a fee of 100L to set your parcel banned to all would be fair (same fee as for creating a group).
Consumers as a group have more power than those sucking in the cash. If you truely want change to occur, then stop feeding the beast. Close your wallets, spend no more money and watch how fast the customer service returns to acceptable levels.
Okay instead of royally SCREWING EVERYONE OVER, you could have just made it so first land could not be sold once bought, or only sold back to Lindens.
Thanks to this I will never be able to get land. I was GOING to join premium the next paycheck but not now since you just screwed everyone over.
I can’t buy mainland or estates because they are like $12+ per meter.
Great job at losing customers.
I joined while LL was still promising the 512 Linden land parcel, but at no time did they actually make that land available through their interface, and now they have changed their policy retroactively.
That is not the way a reputable company behaves.
Well this royally sucks,
So here I am, on my premium account, searching for weeks to find a First Land plot so I can make my little home in a corner of SL.
My stipends been shrinking, but, thought I niavely, it’s okay, I’m a premium member so that I’m allowed to buy land, it won’t matter too much because I’ll save money on my First Land.
Oh, except now I can’t. My little dream is shattered.
So now, why in the heck should I pay LL $9.95 for $4 worth of L$?
Hmm, no, really, why?
Rapidly taking each and every reason I signed up to premium membership, so what am I paying for now?
Why shouldnt I just freeload like the vast majority of accounts?
I have to admit, I waited to pay a yearly membership, Then I finally did and I never got my land. I tryed you live help, never got anyone who could give me a st8 answer. Then trying to call your 1800# was hard, no picked up, and it krept taking me to voicemail. No onew rtned my phone calls I called 8X in 2 days. After that I gave up, I want my $$ back!!
I don`t think that its the right way to punish serious people who signed up to a premium account just for having their own small CHEAP FIRSTLAND.
Is it my mistake, that there are a lot of SL-premium user buying FIRSTLAND only to sale it immediately to make their fast proffit???
Its not ok that are a lot of “estate agents” who sale 512 sqm parcel for 7000 Lindendollar and more. I didn`t sign up for such injustice.
And if i want to quit SL i ve to pay 9,95 to downgrade??? It realy SUCKS. I totally agree with tristan Eliot youre right
Re Tristan’s comment.
Exactly my thoughts, I have my last plot for sale now…well when the land sales search updates! 😦
I will keep my Premium account going because I am on the 500L$ stipend so that more than covers the $72 anual fee. but I am not putting any money into SL until it stabalises and LL start to treat their “residents” like residents. I have sold up before and re-bought but not this time.
I have 4 months of this years premium fee to run so I will see what happens then.
Quant
Amen tristan!
@449:
Sorry no. Game players gaming the games they play and taking advantage of exploits is NOT new territory.
LL plain and simple has not bothered to research and forsee what types of things people might do to hack, grief and whatever all else with their “platform”, and set measures in place to prevent and counter those actions.
Other companies are and have and continue to do all that. LL chooses not to. Instead they toss people into The Cornfield (glorifying the perp) or issue slaps on the wrist that pose no deterrent whatsoever.
They only bother to take any action when AFTER the fact things are extremely horrible. Case in point the Big Hack of yalls Info last September.
The scale of that was incredible. And preventable.
What others might be feeling, maybe not YOU is that a company that barely looks ahead to the next week, is not the one to be positioning themselves to be the next internet – no matter how much pot philly smokes and keeps dreaming.
From land griefers to information hackers, you gotta run a tight ship, and all LL has shown us is they leak like a damn sieve. While the CONCEPT of Second Life (MIGHT still) be cutting edge, any sharpness is ruined on the dull edge of complacency, laziness and mismanagement.
Its as clear as day.
Jack Linden,
Surely you cannot ignore 400 of your customers respose to what we all see as a cheat and unfair withdrawal of advertised product package we all signed up for.
This issue can not be brushed under the carpet with all the other outstanding issues. Give us some answers soon! Or give us our membership money back.
Keisha.
Catastrophe for me too !
Unfortunately I changed my account to prem. last week as may did.
And now : No chance for my own land on a fair manner ?
What a disaster !
I dislike those double agenting and faking land brokers in any life !
Payed shortly my “neewbie amount” on such a person !
Result: I have no money – I have no land !
I am not willing to offer more than twenty times the bucks for the land than it’s offered by the true owners (LL -> 1 L$ / sqm !).
Each premium member should receive his 512 sqm land dircetly after he joined without beeing faked and double-agneted by ugly brokers.
Please Linden Research …
Please do so and insure this small piece of sweet home land to each premium member from the scratch !
I guess if you set the start money down to lets say 250 L$ this would be fair and taken from everybody.
All existing premium members should get the chance to participate on this too (of course 😉
However we must be more constructive and I understand LLs position also. The “land catastrophy” topic is not only caused by LL !
I was sending a separate e-mail to your concierge pb for more detailed suggestions and to offer help to solve this ugly problem.
So, let’s get this straight. In order to support SL, I upgrade to a premium account. I don’t own any land, but I get a small stipend, and the chance to buy land cheap. Fair enough. Worth a shot, I decide. So I go for it, even commit to 3 months to get a “discount.” I spend two weeks searching and searching for First Land every 30 minutes to take advantage of the advertised “First Land Deal.”
I visit a Linden helper, and ask them about First Land. I’m told to keep looking, more’s being made available all the time!
Then a few days later, BAM, it’s gone. Never a single chance for me to own it. I’m told “don’t worry, the premium account pays for itself.” Let’s see, $13.50 worth of Lindens for $22.50 per quarter? Over-inflated land prices, combined with zero First Land to get me started, means no land, means the $5 fee tier is worthless to me. And not even an apology from LL! “We have no choice,” they somehow say with a straight face, despite evidence they COULD limit the sale of First Land for 30 days, if they chose this much simpler option to fix First Land.
Now let’s see. I want to cancel my account. If I do, not only will I NOT get a refund – meaning I have to keep paying towards my “$5 free tier” I won’t be using – there is a $9.95 “downgrade fee” to go back to Basic? Total cost: $32.45 for $13.50 of Linden Dollars and nothing else! I feel scammed >_
@ Keisha
Yes they can (at least until it suits them).
I keep hearing rumours that other companies are working on virtual worlds, (has anyone heard of anything solid?).
When they come along, LL will pay the price to acting without consideration to their residents. I am genuinely sorry that it will happen because LL will have been the pioneer … but as always the pioneers only set a benchmark and other then build on what has been started. LL have mishandled the rapid growth but we should still be thankful to them for starting the ball rolling. 🙂
Thx Quant
Please remove rentals from the Land Sale search. Or at least offer a filter.
ta
Quantum,
Virtual worlds have been around for awhile. Linden Lab took it to the next level yes – but they aren’t the first in the ballgame.
At the rate they goin, the ones that are constantly improving are gonna overtake them, and those that are in development are gonna wallop them right over the head and snag customers like crazy.
Check out these other virtual world/3D spaces:
http://www.activeworlds.com
http://www.outerworlds.com
http://www.moove.com
http://www.there.com
http://www.cybernetworlds.com
http://www.cybertown.com
Myself, I’m waitin for Spore to get finished.
http://www.spore.com/
@ Brace
Brill & many thanks for the list,
I will check them out and I accept that LL didn’t actually start the ball rolling but as you said they did step it up a gear.
Thx
Quant
I signed up for a premium account 2 months ago. Over the past time i have at least convinced 3 new members to take the premium account so they or we can get first Land. We constantly checked for FirstLand every day, but it hasn`t been available. Now it is gone totaly without compensation.
In our view, the only way to keep our premium memberships going is to grant us premium benefit or some rights the other Users don’t get.
We think about downgrading our premium accounts or not to further keep the Premium Status if its due to extend. There is no reason for it anymore. And it has (necessarily) nothing to do with first land issue either, because 512qm ist very small.
So LL listen to your Customer Base, please
Word
I started in April of 06. When I decided to buy first land I had a choice of plots on my first search. I added to that plot over time and eventually owned a rectangular patch of almost 20ksqm of the old home sim, which I kept largely undeveloped, tho well maintained. I left it open for the use of my nieghbors and the oocasional fly by.
I resisted the offers to by it, but eventually I had an opportunity to buy some better land and I went for that. It was IMMEDIATELY cut into 1/2k plots and resold to sther flippers. Now, its mostly a patchwork of ugly builds, for sale signs and red fences.
I don’t blame LL for what’s been going on. Maybe they could have imposed restrictions on sales, or tracked account holders better, but they have had reasonable explanations for everything they’ve done, and if thay don’t make money, there IS no game.
Maybe it seems I don’t care because I saw the end of the “Golden Days.” and I got mine. But that first 512 was such a small fraction of what I paid to purchase land and what I pay in tier that it doesn’t matter to me. maybe LL should act faster to eliminate exploits, but, one restriction just leads to another, and I hppen to like the openess of SL.
I’m not going to read 400+ queries. I support LL removing First land. I totally disagree with the way it was done. You should have, first, announced from this point forward, new premium accounts will not get first land option. Then, state the date you will cease to offer first land. Finally, put out some first land for those waiting to buy it. As it is, you have promised new premium accounts first land, then reneged on that promise. I think, they should be allowed a refund. Or, better yet, bring back first land for all premium accounts that have been promised it. Or at least, provide them the opportunity to get some.
Otherwise, it makes sense to get rid of First land. Just, your execution was poorly planned (was it actually planned?)
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Not that anyone will read this at this point in time… but I found this in LL’s “Official Guide” to SL that they just published. From chapter 6 on inventory control, it encourages you to open an alt account and make it a premium one.
“As explained in Chapter 2, this gives you two shots at buying First Land at the rock-bottom price of one Linden Dollar per square meter.”
It then goes on to say “… or you can sell one parcel and keep the other–as noted in Chapter 2, practically all First Land can be sold immediately at a healthy profit.”
So basically, in their official book, Linden Labs encouraged the gaming of the First Land program and the flipping of it to land barons.
Guess they better recall all copies of the official guide and re-publish removing the first land stuff…
Seriously though You should e-mail that to the concierge e-mail above asking for an explanation! I will too!
And with that, we conclude episode #5739574 of our continuing series of
“How to kill a promising product without hiding it”
Perhaps they could pay the eligible premium users market value of a 512m plot minus $512L. But only to those people who were eligible for firstland before the program was terminated and only for a very limited time.
I think that those who speculate that LL will be eliminating Premium accounts altogether are probably closest to identifying the real, underlying deal here. If offering Premium accounts were anything but a holdover to an earlier era, LL would be aggressively trying to add value to the proposition, rather than taking pieces of it away.
However, from a business / economics point of view, this may be exactly the right thing. As some of their other recent major moves indicate (e.g. open-sourcing code, etc.), I think LL is focused on becoming a SOFTWARE company, not a service provider (a la AOL – remember AOL?). In this, they’re doing exactly the right thing. The services (building, hosting and running sims, currency exchange, real estate “development”) will become commodatized, over time, and to go down the long road of trying to maintain a monopolistic lock on these services would mean SL would share the same fate as, e.g. AOL. Closed playgrounds never go beyond being, well, closed playgrounds. To paraphrase a well-worn bit of folk-wisdom: give a person a proprietary, closed environment, and she plays for a day; give that person an open, competitive, commodatized environment, and she plays for a lifetime. And brings her friends, too.
If SL is to succeed as a truly new and revolutionary technology, this is 100% the right choice for LL. I hope it represents the trend I’ve attempted to identify above. I can say this, despite regretting the loss of “brand intimacy” (being a Premium member myself). Best of luck (re-)creating the world, Lindens.
Wouldn’t it have been a better option to make first land available only to premium account holders on ANNUALLY paid accounts?
LL & the ToS strives to protect LL’s ability to dynamicaly change the workings of SL and the content provided (in order to be able to develope SL). On the other hand, they do allow residents to create and own property in SL.
My initial impression — AND THIS IS AN INITIAL IMPRESSION — is that contractually, LL may change or modify the services offered and not be in breach of contract unless the change or modification affects or deprives a resident of their property right. I believe that the ability to purchase First Land in Second Life is not one of the property rights granted by LL, i.e., an ability to purchase land is not ‘property’. [Fn. 1.]
Residents who purchased premium accounts while the website still offered first land as a benefit of premium membership when in fact LL was no longer offereing FL (between February 21st and 22nd) could have legal claims based on false advertising and related laws. However, LL is pretty responsibile and would most likely provide a refund to that relatively small group of people thus avoiding legal claims.
As to folks who purchased premium accounts prior to the 21st and who were unable to find First Land, I don’t think they have legal claims for breach of contract (the contract does not guarantee the availability of FL) or property (land for sale by LL isn’t property owned by a resident under the ToS). What could change this analysis are facts that no first land was being made available long before February 20th and no notice was provided that FL would no longer be made available.
At some point prior to the 21st, FL became very difficult to find. When I signed up in October, FL was generally available at least once every three days and I didn’t have trouble finding FL sales on four occassions within a few days of actively searching for FL. Since February 1st, I have been searching for FL with the same dilligence as before and unable to find any.
As to the reasons why FL is no longer available, it seems to me to be more due to the conduct of residents and LL’s need to change the services offered by SL in order to continuing developing SL. I am not convinced that revoking FL is a good move for SL, but, the experts determined that was best, and, it was within their power to do so. It is my understanding that Esalaneous’ ninjas were looking for land being sold for less than market value, but not, FL. I am unaware of Bots being used to purchase FL. I, and many other residents who wished to profit off of FL are party to blame. I purchased a premuim account in early January so that I could buy FL. I set up an office on the land and used it .. but, at the same time, I put the property up for sale at an amount I figured would deter casual attempts to buy me out yet at the same time provide me with a signficant profit opportunity. When my FL sold for $28k LD, I was unhappy about losing a lakeside lot in a nicely developed neighborhood with Linden road access, yet, was excited about making $28k to spend and use in SL.
For various, and probably wise, reasons, LL doesn’t want to regulate resident affairs (i.e. transactional matters, properly boundary disputes, and ‘where residents do not see eye to eye’) and leave the governance of SL to the residents. If residents are concerned about the effect of other residents’ use of bots or how realators and land speculators are inflating land prices to the point where land ownership is not a realistic option for those of us on a camper’s budget (e.g. noobs), its a matter residents need to resolve for themselves.
Residents should have the ability to make enforceable laws for the regulation of their own affairs. As difficult Prokofy Neva is to get along with, his idea of a seat on the board of LL is a good one, but, should be expanded to provide a seats to represent premuim ‘landed’ members, free account members, and the premuim landless class. Some form of metauniversal resident government is necessary and if you don’t like the way things are, you should become more involved with SL politics.
Perhaps, to show good faith, LL could make it easy for folks to obtain a refund OR CREDIT if they purchased a premuim account and were unable to find FL.
Fn. 1 – This is not to say that residents who own property in SL would be without recourse if LL decides not to provide SL servers. Such a move would raise profound legal issues.
Little Gray
Little Gray Law Office
SL ACLU
Ok, this is a long thread.
I don’t know if this was brought up, but I have one idea…
Why not have several servers that have non-terraformable land, presumably mostly flat, spaced out in square 512m2 parcels with a couple of meters of no-mans-land in between that are alotted to new members as first land. This land would be non-resellable, it would come dirt cheap to the player, but (s)he could not sell the land, could not rent it out, or lend it out. It would be “his” land. If (s)he would then decide to buy some other land elsewhere, (s)he would be able to return the land to the first land holding system for a refund equal to the fee paid for the land initially.
That way first land would always remain first land, the moguls would have absolutely no say and no influence over the land, and people would still have the possibility to “own” a parcel of land to call home.
I would seriously advice against leaving the land available in the hands of the moguls alone ( as seems to be the case at the moment ). I left Second Life because of the grief I felt the moguls caused me back in 2005 and gave all my land (some 4000m2) to charity. I am happy to see that the land is still part of charity, giving new users the possibility of getting things for free and learn about SL, but I strongly feel that new users WILL miss out on SL if they have to pay the outrageous prices collected for parcels of mogul-owned streams of binary data.
This is my feelings. Some here may share them. Make yourselves heard 🙂
/Wishie
hmmn. Interesting that the drop-down box on search / land sales still offers a ‘First Land’ option …
Thankfully I managed to buy my first land allowance about a week after I bought my premium (annual) account last year, but I empathise with all those recent account purchasers who feel that they were sold a pup.
Many other online games and sites (LJ comes to mind) prioritise their fee-paying members over the free ones when allowing people into game or in the speed of the system response they get. At the moment I can’t access SL but clearly others (including my free alt I used to code testing) can, despite not paying towards the costs. The recent stats suggested that there aren’t that many paying residents as a proportion of the total. Maybe priority access to the grid is something that should replace the right to first land?
The abuses mentioned in this post could have been fixed another way. Without thinking too long, I came up with three approaches:
LL could track the Credit Card information used to create an av and allow First Land to be purchased only ONCE per Credit Card rather than once per av. I doubt people would go to the trouble of opening hundreds of credit card accounts just to buy up first land…nor do I think the banks would allow this.
Another approach might be preventing first land from being sold for 90 days. This would make it less palatable to bot avs and land barons.
Another approach might be only offering first land to premium accounts that have purchased a full year. Again, it makes it too expensive for a land baron, but doable for someone who wants to build.
I bought my first land long ago, so this change does not hurt me directly. However, I feel strongly that land ownership is crucial to establishing a sense of community. Taking away First Land makes it much less likely that people will buy land. Fewer land owners means less community, less creativity, and less reason to be part of SL.
Please reconsider this policy change.
awww come on guys…u know this thing called database and timers? make it a rule that when 1st land is purchased it cant be sold or change owners for a specific timeframe or it defaults back to the linden labs. surely it cant be that hard to do after all it is on your system and run by you oh and in oz any company guilty of blatant false advertising is fined $20,000 per offense what makes u think there isnt a bunch of lawyers somewhere grinning at what your doing and rubbing their hands togeather like predatory sharks hmmm?
If people are concerned about the land barons, they should not complain but do something about it. I have a voting proposal listed as proposal 2887 Limit Sim Ownership, in which I state that no person, group or company, should be allowed to own more than 20 sims at a time. People that do should have to relinquish them. We CAN control these people, but not by just complaining. The first land situation will only make things worse, and although some people try to help ( I just listed a region cheaply, but people fly in, buy the plots and then relist them for twice the price ) we need more widespread support. And the network is out and I have my left shoe on my head again. What fun.
@Martin Squeegee, I’m sorry you view my being honest as a bad thing.
@Brokklamath, One man’s art is another man’s trash. It’s a shame you can’t distinguish the two.
@Zachary – Most “land barons” only have 512sqm to 3 sims worth of holdings. This proposal wouldn’t fix what you perceive to be a problem.
@Wiz – Have you heard of the prepaid mastercards that you can buy at any Post Office/Mall?
http://www.goldengatebbb.org/commonreport.html?bid=57373
Go Figure.
I read an article about the genesis of Second Life. Mr. Rosedale was quoted as saying (paraphrase) that he got the idea for the model for second life from some hippy/new age event in the desert where the participants “do whatever they want”. This would suggest that his idea ( for SL) was to create a sort of Utopia wherein all residents had freedom and were not ruled in a dictitorial fashion. No mention was made of progressive democracy model. It was more anarchic or at least Libertarian in tone.
This is certainly not the model that SL is operated under. Nobody votes on anything and there are very stringent rules which smack of facism.
I have no issue with someone running thier business in whatever way they desire as long as it is lawfully.
I do think someone shoud be able to hire whom they want, at what salary they want and to choose whom they want to do business with. However, in RL, there have been movements away from that model since the 1960s because of new laws forbidding or discouraging them to do so.
LL prides itself on it’s policy of “inclusion” which is very nice, for some, very progressive. They (SL) claim to poll their employees about many decisions, including major ones, like whether or not Phillip Rosedale should remain the CEO of Second Life.
I don’t know if they actually do this or whether or not they act on internal issues in favor of the majority but I do see them trying to position themselves similarly with their members, who are their customers.
The problem is that they seem not to listen to thier member/customers’ compaints and then they make far reaching, sweeping decisions that effect huge numbers of members negatively. They announce them perfunctorily and then ask for our thoughts after the deed was done? What is the point?
If LL truly wants to be progressive and a model of RL, why don’t you present your case, ask for debate on the topic and then use the feedback as the will of the people or even allow voting to effect the outcome? And by all means do not violate RL laws and ethics since you and we are living and contracting in real life. The underlying agreements are between Second Life in RL and it’s customers in real life. Linden needs to understand and remember that even though the world and inhabitants are “virtual”, the parties to the “Contract”, allowing participation in the virtual world, are not.
I have been a businessman for a long time and I have never: Violated one of my contracts, failed to satisfy the needs and concerns of my customers while accepting thier money or been reported unflatteringly to the better Business Bureau.
Linden Labs, stop with the “effective immediately” implementation. You need to listen to the feedback from your customers and reconsider your decision (especially if, as some people have suggested, it violates truth-in-advertising laws.)
A wise administrator asks for feedback on a plan BEFORE forcing it on everyone.
A thought
If LL cease to provide any premium accounts, support services, and eventually any actual land themselves they will become a provider of hardware and software not of any content at all.
Leaving large scale land owners and businesses to effectively provide the virtual world while LL have controlled income streams from the big guys.
I don’t know whether this would be a good or bad thing (what with market forces etc) but it is not the Eutopian blueprint that it started out to be.
First land has been ended because of flipping, what happens next will start to define the direction that SL is going and given that LL will not state that direction we will just have to wait and see.
Quant
@Quantum #497
I think that is probably a correct assessment about the future of SL. I believe that the FL program was on the chopping block for awhile. We all saw how scarce FL became. The only thing they had to do to discourage flipping was to only offer FL to premiums with quarterly and yearly memberships. Simple as that. It would have taken any profit out of flipping the land and maybe some of the FL buyers would have held on to their land a bit longer, reducing the demand for it.
No big deal, never saw any First Land for sale in the last two weeks.
I think the logical move should be to remove the Linden->US dollar part of the game. If one can’t convert the Lindends to real money, there would be much less reason to go to the trouble.
Hi Jack
500 comments on the land issue and many about how the FL was stoppped without consideration to those that have recently signed up expecting FL.
We all have the option of leaving SL but choose not to because we like (what was) our virtual world. I and many others genuinely hope that SL continues but this sort of dictator like treatment of residents must stop. Yes stop FL but for Gods sake at least compensate premium accounts who have not exercised they right to buy. (I bought mine when I 1st joined so I am not stating this for myself)
If not when another company brings a similar world online LL will pay the price.
Quant