Posts Tagged ‘ad farm’
2 March 2009 by ElanthiusUniveral Network Abandoned
When I first started universal network I had this dream that I would get a 16 in as many sims as possible and then I’d open the group up so scripters could use the parcels for whatever they wanted. I imagined there were tons of uses people would find for a great big network of parcels like that. The collection of parcels grew but there were only ever a couple of people that used it and it didn’t seem like it was very popular at all. We did use it though for a few things like the w-hat name2key scanner which my bots heavily rely on even now that the new search techniques exist. Also Max case’s Sim neighbours project which now seems to be totally defunct.
After a while we changed the way we looked at the group. It started growing much more rapidly as Skye worked tirelessly to find more 16s but at the same time we started shutting other people out of the group. Eventually the ad farm policy made it impossible to trust anyone else with access to the group. We couldn’t risk someone putting up ads or prims that looked like ads since it would just get us AR’d.
In all this time we never really put the network to any serious use apart from a few pointless scanners. It always seemed to me like the thing would be extremely valuable if the right idea ever came along but I guess it never did. In the last few months we haven’t been adding any parcels to it at all. The number of parcel move requests seems to have grown considerably though. It was pretty obvious that the whole thing was a waste of money and has been for the whole two years we’ve kept it. On the other hand it was still pretty awesome. Like owning some sort of wonderfully landscaped mainland sim it’s awesomeness was fundamentally valuable even if there was no real use for it.
I pretty much knew Linden Lab would contact me about the group and talk about their new land cutting policy. Harmony did ask me what I planned to use the parcels for and I explained some of the uses we had for it. To be honest, I kinda BSed and represented that it was much more useful than it really is. In the end she didn’t leave me with the impression she was going to force me to do one thing or the other. Nonetheless I get a lot of ARs and a lot of people dislike various aspects of my business. I don’t want any more attention from Linden Lab than is absolutely necessary. Not because I’m doing anything particularly wrong it’s just better if LL don’t immediately associate me as that asshole with all the 16s whenever they get an AR for some bot related thing.
Anyway, with all that in mind I’ve decided to donate the whole thing to Arbor project. All 20,000sqm worth of 16sqm parcels. It’s perhaps a touch evil of me to just dump the whole mess on those guys. The trouble is, of course, that the whole thing is like a massive pile of toxic waste. If I dispose of it in the wrong way, i.e. by selling it for very low prices, then it will become a big problem for everyone. Who knows what crap will end up on these parcels and it’ll just make a lot of people unnecesarily angry. By donating it all to Arbor Project I avoid a lot of those problems. Those guys will run around handing the parcels out to whoever deserves them most. Bless their hearts. I’ve donated the tier to their group so there’s no need to worry about that. I’ll probably try to draw down the tier as I get the chance but I appreciate it might be a long time, maybe years, before I can take it all out.
All in all, it’s surely the right business decision for me as well as a great PR move. Plus it’s obviously a good thing for the grid as a whole. So I think everyone’s a winner.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Well the blog that I have been so nervously waiting for has arrived. And the winner is…. ME! Of course I can see that what is best for me is not at all the same as what is best for everybody. Nonetheless, this policy decision is great for me and seems perfectly adequate for everybody else.
Of course there were any number of things they could have decided that would have really screwed me over and there were a lot of cockamamie plans being bandied around on the forums. Ideas like force reclaiming everthing under 512sqm, price limits on small parcels and any number of even crazier things. I even found myself trying to work with the price fixing guys to come up with a workable solution. In the end it wasn’t necessary though and I can breath a sigh of relief.
I’m sure there’ll be lots of arguments from everyone about how vague the blog is, how confusing it is. People usually complain about those things not because they are legitimately confused but because they wish it said something different. You’ll see, the violators, the land cutters, they’ll be the ones complaining about confusion, vagueness and how unfair it all is. I, on the hand, find the whole thing very clear and satisfactory. Land cutting, the very root problem, is going to be addressed. Land prices are not. This is great for me because as I mentioned previously I’ve been buying a shit ton of 16s recently from land cutters liquidating. Worse still I have the ever-controversial Universal Network which is a collection of 16s I’m making, one from every sim. It doesn’t represent a lot of money of course. It’s hard to have a lot of land when it’s all 16s. 100 16s is only 1600sqm, 1000 is only a quarter sim. Very small in the scheme of things. But if I had to give them all away or put in some kind of price limits it would be annoying and would affect my bottom line.
Many people don’t agree but to my mind if I own a 16 that I legitimately bought from someone else then I really should have the right to keep it forever or sell it for whatever amount I choose. It really doesn’t hurt anyone. People would argue against this position by crying that it blocked them from joining a sim together. I certainly agree that rejoining sims into contiguous squarish parcels is a noble cause and one I work on every day. But I don’t agree that other people should be able to bully me around and steal my land in order to achieve it. Hell, I could probably do a lot more bullying than most people if it came down to that and I was a petty small minded man (don’t bet against it!) In the end, if my parcel is in your way it is ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED that I was there first. I can’t steal bits in the middle of your parcel and make you sell them.
Of course, that’s not to say I don’t work with people on parcel joining. Almost every day I’m rearranging my land to help someone out or swapping land to “heal the mainland” I just object to being forced into it against my will.
Unfortunately, the secret truth is that I think the mainland would be better served if there was a brief period of aggressive cleanup. One that involves massive parcel reclamation and reorganising. It will take years for some of these sims to heal even in the most optimal situation. With the rules the way they are now we probably won’t see very much rejoining. We’ll just see an end to the aggressive dickish cutting. So even if they had forced me to abandon all the 16s I own I still wouldn’t have grumbled too much. Anyway, it didn’t come to that. The sun is shining, the land is healing, the bank balance increasing, the world is good!
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