Cookie-Cutter Corporate Sims – But No First Land for Residents?
by Pixeleen Mistral on 21/12/06 at 12:24 pm
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
New Second Life residents are enticed to upgrade their accounts to “premium” status with the promise that paying for a premium account allows purchase of virtual land. But in the official Linden answers forum, complaints about the difficulty finding discounted “first land” are rising as residents remind LL that promises of more first land “in a few weeks” last september are still not being honored for many new premium account holders. Why is there a land shortage?
It is possible that a corporate sim land rush is to blame. A quick look around the world map shows some interesting patterns. While it used to be enough for a corporate foothold to be a single spot in the metaverse – the fashion today is to create half a dozen or more sims – in many cases cookie-cutter identical. Cookie cutter corporate continents advance the business of push-media passive event consumption for Second Life tourists – but may come at the cost of in-world diversity and creativity as new residents who want to create something are squeezed out of the land market.
Here are some examples of the cookie cutter at work:
sine wave sims
ABN AMRO sims
NBC sims
IBM sims
Prokofy Neva
Dec 21st, 2006
Yes, it’s more lucrative for the Lindens to set up a server to be one server in a corporate cookie sheet netting $1695 and $295 tier in the private islands, rather than to set it up with no compensation at all, and in fact a subsidy of money sinks — newbies use the $512 out of their stipends to buy the land and then can sell it these days even for as much as $20,000 (though more often for $3000-6000.)
If you were LL, and had a choice to stick out a whole server bringing loads of cash to your needy bottom line, or to stick out a server bringing only losses — and as many as 120 or more little newbies each with separate billing — which, while automatic, is a signal to expect X percentage more trouble tickets.
If the Lindens provided first-land sims in bulk on the auctions, and let land barons buy them either at a discount, or with an incentive like “take 60 days to pay tier, not 30), then barons might take on the chore of buying and also parceling in nice ways the sims that could still be flagged as governor Linden land. That would mean having less of it though, so that the barons could still make a profit. Or making the land be reclaimable by barons. Or thinking up some system that incents barons taking on the chore of handling 120 newbies.
As someone who takes on these chores of the 120 newbies daily, I have to say that it’s an endlessly thankless task. The newbs are getting young and poorer when it comes to 512s. By the same token, there’s a smaller percentage of them overall because many new people coming in skip over silly first land and buy or rent quarter or even full sims. They don’t full around with the ghettos.
There’s the usual chorus of socialists and frustrated newbies whining and wailing now on the forums about the lack of first land and the huge cost of 512s that have skyrocketed as Lindens raised island prices.
The Lindens have even been pressured now into announcing that suggestions can be sent to Cyn Linden for how to fix this system, and that they’re going to change it.
We know what that means — it means they already have something cooked up. What could it be? More Shermervilles?
I say give the socialists their head, stop with the elaborate plans of toggling, flagging, deadlining, and just create erasable lots. When you buy an account, the first time you log in, you log in directly on the next available 512 slot, which will have been wiped clean of whoever had it before you when their 30 days are up.
You stay on it for 30 days — twirling giant pink penises, making awkward little newbie-lean-tos — whatever rocks your boat in first land hell. Then your land is erased. You pay nothing. And you get what you pay for: 0.
You do, however get 512 free tier to apply anywhere. This will be a great boon in buying land of your own that will be in a nicer area, and yes, as a result will cost more — but you can save like anybody else has to in RL.
This way, the socialists get their way, and have absolutely pure, free, valueless, removable free land, like toilet paper.
The newbs who opt for this toilet roll can learn how to use land and see if any of them can band together in hardy posses to cooperate, pool their 512s, and break out of the ghetto.
Giving free tier to start people off makes great sense. Giving free or heavily subsidized land merely is a loss for the Lindens, as they end up giving not a $512 gift but as much as a $20,000 gift out of their system to every newb. It also creates endless dramas and sagas for people constantly fussing about whether someone has “taken too much” by having 3 accounts or someone is a “gold farmer” for grabbing accounts and flipping them or whether someone is “swooping down on poor newbies and bilking them out of the lunch money” etc. — the usual “what about the children” and “think of the children” stuff.
So let it go. Those who think of elaborate plans to further socialize land need to face the consequences of their ideology: huge ghettos of erasing, devaleud land with the appearance of used toilet paper.
Otherwise, except that this is a world with a free land market. The market rises and falls. It rewards some, it punishes others. Plan accordingly.
John Endwahl
Dec 21st, 2006
I wonder about all the claims of new land scarcity and also about the practicality of building anything meaningful on 512 lots. 512 lots are a little over 100 prims and you have to be very creative.
One avie I know stayed up late, heard from her rental apartment neignbor that she just bought first land. So she started searching for it and found some plots, tp’d to them and found 5-6 other avatars there and the land already sold. But within another hour she found vacant plots, and immediattely switched to her web browser to upgrade her account. She was able to buy a plot and was immediately pushed by one avatar and given a buy offer from another.
She decided to keep her land, and build on it. She even designed and built a relatively classy two level house in 10 prims, by keeping everything in a 10x10x10 cube. It was nice enough that she kept a model one on the ground level of her plot for selling and one up as a skybox for living in. But her taste in furniture is high detail/high prim and she filled up the plot very quickly, and the region had a lot of lag from, among other things, animated for sale signs on adjacent properties. Even the skybox had lag.
Plus, her previous situation was renting an apartment with double the prim count for a few hundred Lindens a week. With a Ginko account and stripping, her rent was pretty much paid for in-world. Plus she had more prims to play with, and access to public sandboxes to build on.
So after about two weeks of being a Premium Account land holder, she sold her plot – for a price in the low 5 figures – and downgraded her account.
DireLobo
Dec 21st, 2006
FYI – the IBM sims, as can be seen in the jpg image posted, are not ‘cookie cutter’ or mirrored like the other examples. The 12 SIMs appear to be arranged in 3 distinct groups of 4 SIMs each. Each of these three groups appears to have a common central area (which is an outdoor auditorium I think) and are linked by roads.
Beyond that even a casual examination shows that other then that central, round theatre everything else is different.
Lordfly Digeridoo
Dec 21st, 2006
On LL’s side…
A private sim goes for about $300/month, and a $1600 setup fee.
In the first six months, a private sim will net 1600 + 1800 (300 * 6), or $3400 in tier.
A mainland sim cut up, ghetto-style, into 128 512m chunks nets about $1280 per month, or $7680 per six months, assuming first land doesn’t get consolidated.
Even if it did, they’d net more from First Land sims than estate sims.
Prokofy Neva
Dec 21st, 2006
Lordfly, I think you have to judge them by what they do, not what people imagine is in their interests.
What they do is put out islands like hotcakes because they have lots of orders for them; they’ve stopped selling whole mainland sims as a routine $1000 as they were doing before Sept.; and the few they do sell are fetching $3300 on the auction; they seem to prefer to put out bunches of corporate and individual private islands and collect the known fee for them, then have the people who buy them take care of them themselves, and the people on them.
Every first-land 128 ghetto sim they put out is one THEY have to take care of — bill, police, trouble-shoot.
They can’t net that amount you indicate unless they plan in year terms; surely they’d rather get the big upfront payment of $1695 per sim, not $0 for sim, which is what they get for putting out a sim to be turned to first land. Furthermore, they only get $512 per parcel as a sink, and what they do, as I explained, is give each person another windfall for their sale of a free good, fetching $3600-$20,000. So instead of getting $1695 for a server up front, they get $0, then they let someone else get paid for selling that $0.
All the tier on that $0 sim gives them $0 as 512 is included for free. You could turn it around and say that they’ll get $1235.50 in recurring monthly subscdription costs with $9.95 x 128, but don’t forget that is offset by the stipends they’ll have to give out, too, about $538. So let’s call it $697, more than twice the tier of an island sim, and yet a very hard, hard way to get it. Half of those 128 or more never keep the land and flake out. It can take awhile before the governor picks it up again — spending more staff time to process it, etc.
If the Lindens truly had an incentive to put out first land, they would. Even if only to fulfill their utopian socialist dreams. But…they don’t. They get only very delayed payback, lots of trouble tickets and management issues, etc. They don’t need to be doing this anymore.
Artemis Fate
Dec 21st, 2006
I think someone needs to tally the number of times Prokofy says “socialist”, so far we’re up to 4.
lastboheme
Dec 22nd, 2006
I wonder how many LL employees and their friends and relatives own and sell land on the LL servers. Could they be holding out on the first “free” land so that the current land prices remain high? And when they do find the first land will be issued they sell their land to some sucker and that sucker soon finds that the land is worthless. If there was unlimited land would the land price bubble burst. I would like to see how much insider trading takes place at the LL Labs.
Nacon
Dec 24th, 2006
So she got bored looking at the map?
Come on…. that’s not a real report. I already gave her a clue to look at something bigger than this crap to worry about.
I’m even amazed that Prok is nowhere close.
Ever thought about getting on SL and get out of your fake home/hangout area more often?
And as for this issue. wtf, that’s not an issue.
Jaylynn
Mar 7th, 2007
I love the sims pc