Posts Tagged ‘blog’

13 February 2009 by Elanthius

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!