land barons

There was a strange moment tonight at Jack Linden's office hour, it was all going fairly peacefully, everything seemed fine and then someone asked a pertinent question, and we didn't get a straight answer, which left us with more questions than answers. The long and the short of it is that Linden Lab are upto something with 75-80 estates but they won't tell us what they're upto because it's all beta testing, allegedly.

The pertinent question came from Equinox Pinion: "Jack, how can Dreamland still put grandfathered homesteads on the grid..did you make a special deal with them?"

Then before Jack could answer, a follow up comment from Driftwood Miles: "Over 150 Homesteads dumped onto the grid . All at Grandfathered rates."

Interesting stuff, is this happening? Are Dreamland getting a deal, well we don't know, Jack was vague: "Equinox, as you know I can't comment on specific residents and what they choose to sell or not sell. We've a number of programs in place and in the works (we mentioned this in a blog post a while ago), to help estates. Some of those are still being defined, some are further on. In time we want all estates to get additional benefits and plans that allow them to grow more easily etc"
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The Land Expo has started and it seems to be a busy event full of positives and negatives, which is what we should expect in a developing platform.

The first negative, how long textures take to load. I waited at the welcome area to see the information but gave up in the end, the text wasn't loading, people kept landing, someone wanted to sell a house so I wandered off on my own.

The problems of textures loading, walking seeming to be impeded by invisible objects and bloody automated spam continued. However when I could see clearly there were some nice builds with good attempts at marketing....with the exception of the automated greeters, seriously, these things bug me. However in such an environment where textures aren't loading I guess it's a good way of getting your information across.

I sat in on the start of a presentation by Josue Habana; "Developing Land for rentals", this was about estate land rentals. There was some good advice about terraforming, making spaces between plots, utilising extra prims, all good information and there was also a notecard with said information on. A healthy sized audience was in attendance so the presenter wasn't wasting their time.

The Land Expo runs until June 13th so hopefully people will withdraw some of their automated greeters and utilise lower intensive textures on their builds before this is up. Some of these problems could of course be at my end, but that's not the point really and others have stated they're having similar issues. Any busy Second Life event has such issues and it's something the platform will eventually have to overcome.

However the fact that such issues are happening is an indication that the Expo can be seen as a success, people want to present and people want to listen. { Read more }

I decided to take a trip to Nautilus today. Boldly going where many men had gone before I found myself slap bang in the middle of what appeared to be the yellow brick road. However on second glance I discovered that it was just because so many parcels are for sale.

There's a quandry here, the hype is in the newness, but when you scratch underneath the surface you don't see being much done with the moles efforts. The landscape could be green flat fields with double prims, as far as those who have won the majority of parcels at auction are concerned.

The splattering of advertising policy violating yellow for sale boxes, coupled with a couple of other decorative (but still advertising violating) for sale signs doesn't exactly endear one to the area.

There's something wrong with this area, the opportunity is lost, the buzz is gone by the time things settle and the land isn't all yellow, I stopped by Bay City too today, the buzz is definitely gone. The only things really reminding you that it's Bay City are the high prices of the land for sale, the tram, theatre and river. Now I've heard that the the theatre will be used. That may generate some buzz again.

These places aren't the sort of places the average resident is going to have a home in. Now that's fine, that's how life works. I'd love to live in a swanky neighbourhood but I can't afford to but surely these showpiece sims should offer a little more than nice builds, there are other sims around with nice builds, mainland sims too, for example Liome built by Avion Raymaker has a lot of style, as do  all of the builds I've seen by Avion to be honest.
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