estates

Yes sir, I can Boogie, but I need a certain song, I can boogie, boogie woogie, all night long! Yes indeed that is Ciaran doing a happy dance, inspired by the news that grandfathered status is going to end on May 1st, as announced by Jack Linden on the blog. This is a long overdue move and I welcome my influence in the LL hierarchy, why else has this been earmarked to start on the date of my RL birthday! That was a joke by the way, well not about the birthday but you can save all your kisses for May.

Now some people will be unhappy about this. Those who chose to upgrade to a class 5 in the more than three years since grandfathering was first announced have the most reason to be unhappy about this in my view. Those who own grandfathered sims will see a devaluation in their estates worth, I don't want to sound like I have no sympathy for those guys but this was an accidental empire, this was never really supposed to have happened so take advantage of your  savings because if you hold onto your grandfathered islands the price isn't increasing at all this year.

Let's take a trip down memory line and remind ourselves of what happened, the blog post from 15th November 2006, which can be read here. The key points as to why those with grandfathered sims have an accidental empire can be seen here, with these comments in the blog:
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November 15th 2006, almost three years ago and Linden Lab were being faced by angry residents over changes to private island pricing. Tier for new private islands was going up from USD$195 to USD$295, some people had sims on order and were outraged. Linden Lab then made some pricing commitments, they delayed the price rise, they brought in grandfathering. The blog post (and comments) can be found here and pretty interesting reading it makes.

Actually a lot of the blogs from three years ago make pretty interesting reading, not least because arguments about basic accounts and premiums were raging then and still rage today. There were also rumours that certain land barons had been tipped off and Linden's were rumoured to have been playing favourites, not much seems to have changed! However the pricing commitments were:

"First, we announced that going forward, if we plan to change a recurring fee for existing customers, we will provide 60 days notice at a minimum.

Second, as long as you continue to own your Island and its purchased at the grandfathered pricing, we will not raise your recurring fee at least throughout 2007. This was definitely received as good news at the meeting and I’m happy to make that commitment. Islands that are transferred to a new owner before February will also continued to be eligible for grandfathered pricing. After February 1st however, we may make transferred islands subject to the new pricing."
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I had intended to blog about Landmachine months ago when it was still pretty new to me and I was excited about it, but Yohan insisted I wait until he had worked on it more. Well many months later I still use it, and I have learned that Yohan is ALWAYS and I do mean ALWAYS working to improve it and add even more features so I'm blogging about it now! For a few years from when I started dealing mainland up until I got to beta test landmachine, I would spend hours a day cleaning, dividing, decorating, and setting land for sale. I enjoyed it, but the more land I had, the more time it ate up. If I didn't have time to work on it, land would sit for a few days eating tier. I also made mistakes now and then. If sl was buggy, or I was just tired now and then I would miss a number or not realize the 512 I was working on was connected to a 1024 across the sim, I would mis-price the land and lose it to someone without realizing it, or lose it to a landbot. It didn't happen often, but god it's an awful feeling when it happens and it's never fun to lose money.

I knew Yohan was working on a system, but I was never super comfortable about using systems other then the simple one I had that kept back end records of sales and did nothing more. After spending some a good amount of time watching him work on it, and seeing how well it was working for my buddy CP who was using it, I decided I wanted to give it a try. I bugged Yohan to set me up so it was compatible with my www.SarahNerd.com address. He did and I got to be a landmachine Beta tester. { Read more }