Anywho, I’m glad you brought this up! Quite a while ago when all this OpenSpace nonsense started I decided to spend some time and explore the Nautilus regions and the surrounding sims. Oddly enough, while poking around over there I had found quite a few full prim sims – brand new mind you – that were nothing but water. Empty voids. I remember thinking at the time what a waste! To spend one full server on just an empty sim. Now I realize what they were doing.

Check out Muta on the map for an example of what I mean.

Correction: The rate plan just described was rolled out in 2006 with the introduction of class 5 servers. Of course, pointing that out would deflate the idea that it was part of a conspiracy hatched during the last six months to cause an “exodus”, so, bonus points for making an “error” to support your conspiracy theory.

This sort of comment is vintage FIC:

“If LL looks at three service providers and after doing due diligence picks the Blue Company over the Green Company or the Red company they are making a decision on how to best get a job done. A journalist for the business pages of the local paper would not say that LL was showing favoritism, he would say, LL picked the Blue Company as the best partner to work with them on project X.”"

No, no, and no. In the Real World, companies don’t chose their partners with such haste, after first attempting to co-opt others, and with such curious love/hate bargaining, driven by panic, and they in fact actually really look at three prospective partners, or six, or whatever, and more often than not, they publish an open bid or request for proposals.

Linden Lab has done none of that. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that in fact they studied all these possible projects and partners, or looked at the vast landscape of opensim victims, which included educators, artists, non-profit communities, etc. as well as sailors, and made any kind of coherent choice. For example, there are educational or art projects they could have blessed with their largesse of moving them to the mainland or giving them some sort of cut rate or freebie or FICation — they didn’t.

Sure, the Lindens had a craven want here: to sell their Nautilus sims, which sold, but which then didn’t fill up and become “energized” quite as much as they’d like (a lot of it is still for sale by land barons who can hold the double-prim 1024 m2 parcels, i.e. 1024 tier of $5 instead of 2048 tier at $15, or pro-rated for larger sim owners, probably until the end of time, because all they need are a very few sales to make up their investment on the auction).

In the real world, you wouldn’t find a normal mature business scurrying hurriedly to first sidestep an existing big community and deal with others (remember that part of the story) as a way to sort of muscle the original community, then double back and give the larger community an offer it couldn’t refuse. Oh, you would, in the real world, if you were dealing with, oh, say, the Russian mafia in Brighton Beach and gasoline station dealerships.

Seriously, people who constantly play the “real life card” as an explanation for Linden Lab’s atrocious favouritism practices have never been in real real life, or if they have, it’s only in other cut-throat Silicon Valley tekkie start-ups where perhaps these practices are encouraged. They aren’t in the rest of normal America, seriously. It’s immature to claim otherwise.

If Linden Lab has had some sort of “epiphany” that they are no different than any other corporation that “can only build ghost towns” (rather an unsupported thesis, quite frankly), then, we’re not seeing that they are going about this in any kind of conscious and planned way. They could easily advertise on their forums for bids for such partnerships, and regularize them and multiple them effectively if that’s what they want.

The problem is the Lindens have been of two minds and argue about this among themselves. Some of them like to pretend they are just a platform and only involved in Lab Science making software, and the hell with all the life forms that emerge in the petri dish, study them, delete them, who cares. Software uber alles.

Others are more conscious that they need to sell land that has happy people staying on it who keep happily paying tier, and that means caring a bit more about content and community. But then those types lurch around like the funmeisters who drive you nuts on a Club Med vacation with clipboards in their hands, trying to get you to sign up for the bunny-hop and snorkelling lessons when you just want to lie on the beach. There idea of community tends toward the anodyne and PG and vapid building-for-building’s sake without respect for the amateur and his pace, or without respect for the professional who simply just needs the Lab to get out of the way. It’s painful to watch.

Remember Boardman? Such a big project, Jack’s first big push to beautify a sim and get a community of crack builders and designers to move in and make it a sort of consciously kitsch suburbia — and it worked for a time until they ran out of prims. Then those people like Barnesworth or Ingrid moved to these other sims — Demos and surrounding sims. They built a beautiful seaside community with activities and shopping but then Jack stepped on it by making the absolutely wacky decision to pull up to its seaside a new set of sims, which obliterated the “waterfront” which was really just void front. Plus, they could never deal with the lag. So that whole crowd sold their sims for a huge price and moved to their own private islands, Tableau, etc.

Or take Schermerhorn and those other suburban sims where they sold the land with prefabs, but people just deleted them and made the Linden-road-surrounded parcels humongously expensive — so that weird high-end land buyers bought and held — because again, they can afford to keep tier on such parcels and let one sale a year meet their margins — thereby destroying the community. (The same thing happened to Brown for the longest time, until some newbie German artists finally paid the ridiculously high prices of $100/meter demanded, pity.)

Then there’s Chilbo, an educator’s community that appeared and prospered without any Linden intervention, which would have only killed it — but then without Linden help on the basics, as you can find out from reading Fleep’s blog. It took way too much lobbying for way too long to get the Lindens on the ball with road repair and to end what appeared to be a practice of letting the parcels go for sale without proper auction queuing (I never understood how that could happen, it seems fantastic, and there has to be more to the story there.)

Of course, it’s always been a challenge for anyone struggling to make a full sim or contiguous sim area in SL on the mainland because one spoiler, not to mention all the ad farm extortionists, can utterly ruin it for you and make all your time and money go to waste. Yet the Lindens can’t seem to devise a policy to enable small parcels on sims like that to go to the community most vested when they become available, because they don’t wish to play favourites (it’s always when the Lindens very sporadically and haphazardly suddenly decide to stop playing favourites, against the backdrop of their always doing that, that they do their worst damage). So unscrupulous barons, knowing there is a group desperate for prims and view, grab the outlying parcels and extort with them.

I’ve seen sim after sim blighted and ruined in this way, especially in the old world area — and even with ad farms on the run now, extortion is still a problem.

Perhaps there’s a fair way to devise bidding systems that let majority land owners on a sim — or even just *any* land owner on a sim — have first dibs when a land is abandoned or put to sale. That would relieve a lot of the uglies that people suffer.

With no new full sims coming on the mainland auction since last July, the pressure for small time barons to grab reauctioned parcels abandoned on older sims is much greater, and so they do, to much havoc. But it’s a free market — free, except, it isn’t really, as any market in which such extortion takes place is a market with some kind of artifically-induced socialist scarcity somewhere in the mix — and here, it’s the Lindens’ authoritarian unwillingness to exercise good governance and zoning rules that sets the stage for these practices.