Posts Tagged ‘mainland’
28 March 2009 by ElanthiusThe History of LandBots Part 1
Well, I always figured the day would come. LL are considering taking action to curb land bots. See the latest blog for more details. For the first few years I ran my landbots I always figured LL were going to ban them within the next few weeks and yet it never came. We’ll see where the blog leads us but this seems as good a time as ever to post…
The History of LandBots Part 1
It was September 2006 when I first decided to give land trading a try. I’d been in SL a few months and played around with this and that so I was already very familiar with getting around and land and everything else. I’m generally a pretty cautious guy so I started by flipping 16s. It was amazingly easy to make money. You’d just buy the cheapest 16s you could find. Stick them up for sale for L$4 or L$10 or some nominal amount higher than you paid and people would buy them within a day or two.
Of course the land-landscape was much different back then. The market was totally opaque to non-land traders. All estate and mainland sales were mixed together in the search and there was no way to separate them luckily the search was also one big page. You’d have to hit search and then scroll past tons of sales for L$1 and other bits that looked like they might be estates. You really only had the name and description of the land to go by, and maybe you had memorised the names of some sims. As a result no normal person had any idea what land was worth and land traders would regularly miss certain types of parcels.
Well after a few weeks of hunting through the crappy search I soon got fed up with that and wrote a little bot to search for me, filter out the estate stuff and present the data on an automatically refreshing website. I was apparently the first person who had ever considered automatically filtering land sales. I knew I was the only one doing it because some days at work I’d see an awesome deal and then 6 hours later I’d get home and buy it. That’s not to say there weren’t other land flippers. In fact there were dozens but they just weren’t that smart. They would scramble and fight over every 512 that came up such that a 512 that was 10% cheap would be gone in seconds but massive sims or very tiny parcels would just sit idling forever.
I ain’t gonna lie, we CLEANED UP for the next few months. Flipping massive amounts of land. I distinctly recall very early on buying an entire sim for US$1000 and flipping it later that day for US$2000. That’s probably still the biggest trade I ever did. Now don’t forget although we had automatic searching I was still looking at a website, waiting for something to come up, teleporting to it and buying it manually. Many of the things we bought were invisible to everyone in SL. Other people wouldn’t even see this stuff because it was totally hidden in the crappy search window.
Things stayed like this for a while, until late January in fact. During that time I had improved things a bit, I was receiving IMs about parcels that came up instead of using a website with slurls. I had invited a few of my friends and family to have access to the website so we were all chasing each other and collectively printing kizash. No-one had any idea what we were doing and nobody was even close to coming up with a similar solution.
In January of 2007 LL upgraded the search so you could filter out estate parcels. It was a catastrophe for me of course. For a few weeks I muddled along chasing other land flippers. We’d still win often because my system was more efficient but once or twice we’d see a great deal and miss it. The situation was totally unacceptable. That was when the first landbot was written. It was pretty primitive, just a single bot searching and teleporting around trying to buy land. I always jokingly said that LL had forced my hand. I couldn’t possibly put up with these button mashers beating me to MY parcels.
Unfortunately since the market was a little more transparent and my bots were very slow many land flippers could see what I was doing because something would come up in search, they’d teleport to it and I’d always beat them. Yet somehow I wasn’t even on the parcel. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time whether landbots would be illegal or not. I always represented that I was confident it was legal but you never did know. Really I felt like LL could have decided at any time to outlaw landbots and destroy my business. I felt like I was one or two weeks away from being banned for the whole of 2007.
Everyone knew what I was doing and it wasn’t even that clever. To me it was the obvious move. Why sit around hitting search, search, search, teleport, buy all day long when you can get computers to do that boring crap. Yet no-one thought of doing the same thing. Other land flippers knew how much money was in the land market yet they were all too clueless to create something similar. Of course there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth during this time. Several land flippers were driven out of business by my new system. It was all very sad and everything to hear Sarah Nerd complaining that her livelihood was destroyed or Joy Iddinja complaining that she couldn’t afford to visit her sick mother or whatever. I mean sure, that’s sad, but welcome to capitalism ladies. They all seemed to think that land trading should be like some sort of collective commune where everyone shared the profits equitably and competition was somehow unfair or something. Some of these people were highly regarded by the general population and so they succeeded in drumming up a great deal of hatredduring this year. Bot threads on the forums were a vitriolic bloodbath for me during 2007. I always stood my ground and argued my case, probably to my detriment to be honest but it’s not in my nature to take that kind of shit lying down.
In January of 07 Landbot Hax gained notoriety as some kind of evil demonic landbot from hell. I’m not sure why everyone hated him so much, he had this trick of buying land and instantly setting it back for sale which caused a few people to accidentally pay the higher price. For us it was no big deal though. He beat us occasionally but he mostly focussed on very high priced parcels we didn’t care about anyway.
Somewhere around March of 2007 Zor Zeddmore started his operation which was a touch better than mine. I think it was about April of 2007 when Chikaa Masala, Instant Voom, Bot Hax and maybe a few others started up. This was really the beginning of the Great Bot Wars. I couldn’t believe I’d got away with it for so long so I wasn’t too upset when competitors started challenging me. I had been so heartless towards the other land flippers when I pushed them out of the market that it would have been quite hypocritical to complain about these newcomers. Up until this point I had hardly bothered improving my bots at all there had been no point in it. As I recall I was generally on top during 2007 but never really won 100% of the land I was going for. Besides we all had different parameters. Mine tended to be the most cautious. i.e. I’d only buy 90% under market value. There were other bot runners buying land that was marginally cheap so they’d get plenty of land to keep them busy that I was ignoring. For the next two years various bots came and went some better than others. I kept improving my system, sometimes I was on top, sometimes I cearly wasn’t. Overall we did pretty well keeping up with the competition and the title of “best” went back and forth amongst us all on a fairly regular basis. As far as I know we’re the only name still going from this time.
Lots of people tried stupid stuff to get back at bots during 2007. A popular move was to shoot them or ban them or whatever. All very yawn. There were two attacks that really stuck out in my mind though. Seargent Crossair in May wrote, or paid someone else to write a small bot that would rapidly change land prices between something that was cheap and some ridiculously expensive price. The plan was that bots would see the cheap price, try to buy it and instead pay the expensive price. Unluckily for me he rolled it out while I was asleep and succesfully tricked my bots into paying L$200,000 each for 2 16s. It was a pretty massive loss for me, well it would be for anyone of course. I think I sucked it up pretty well though, although I did write a number of snotty emails to Linden Lab for not giving me my money back. Seargent got a few other bot runners and a couple of real people too with this trick. Eventually he got banned I believe but I’m sure he kept his ill-gotten gains. At least I never saw my money again. LL eventually patched the issue but not before a number of people got ripped off.
The other attack was much more serious and I still suffer from the effects now. Weedy Herbst and perhaps a few other crappy scripters freely distributed “anti landbot” devices. Several land flippers placed them under the ground in tiny invisible prims on every parcel they bought. Many of these things are still around now transferring from land owner to land owner and never getting auto returned. Some are even quite close to my store in Steamboat. The goal of this script was to just teleport home any bots or bot runners whenever they came on the parcel. Unfortunately if a script tries to teleport you home while you are not on the scripts parcel then it throws up a dialog box in the viewer that says something like “Teleport failed”. The pernicious scripts will hammer my viewer with these boxes multiple times a second and the dialog boxes queue up. The result is I either need to shut the viewer down and log in somewhere else or quickly close all the boxes so I can teleport home, then close many more boxes that are still in the queue until I can finally continue about my business.
On the upside for me 2007 was the year when LL adjusted their TOS to make it explicitly clear that modifed clients and therefore bots were absolutely allowed. They practically codified their legitimacy in law. People refused to believe it and put their own little spin on the TOS but I felt like I could relax a little if not completely.
Adult Ghetto
In a flurry of publicity LL have announced in not one, not two but 5 forum threads and 1 massive blog post that they are going to be forcefully evicting all adult oriented businesses and herding them onto a new continent built specially for the purpose, presumably with a non-stick coating and plastic sheeting over all the couches.
Firstly though, I firmly believe that the decision is made, the plan decided. LL have shown on several very significant occasions that they are really only pretending to listen to user input on significant policy changes like this. Indeed, they’re a business they have to do what they can to maximise profit and the mob mentality of the forums is not a great place to get your business strategies from. Besides, they’ve already defined and described everything in the past tense in the knowledge base. Why put this in place if the whole thing wasn’t a done deal?
The implications of such a move are so mind boggling that it’s hard to get your head around. Certainly predicting the future is going to be an exercise in futility but I like to try anyway.
Land Market
Of course this is just a side issue to most people but to me it’s the most critical factor of all.
Short Term
Prices on the new continent will be absurdly high as speculators and businesses buy the land up hoping to flip it for a profit. The whole continent will be very well landscaped and so will have a high value like Nautilus or Bay City. Mainland prices will drop sharply in the first week or so since people will be abandoning their land and getting the hell out of dodge. Printing new sims will cause panic in the mainland market that will crush prices. Eventually we could see prices drop below L$1/sqm if there is significantly more land than people.
Medium Term
The collapse in mainland prices will start to negatively affect the estate market as mainland starts to look more attractive due to super cheap prices. Of course at the same time mainland prices will start to come back or at least stabilise. At this point it will be hard for mainland prices to rise but they can certainly stop going down. Prices on the new continent will begin to fall and equalize with the rest of the mainland.
Basically we’re going to be looking at a long period of extreme volatility plus two totally separate mainland markets where the prices won’t correlate well at all. There’s going to be a lot of gouging and speculating and all the other fun stuff that capitalism brings.
Adult Industry
It’s not just that all adult businesses will have to move, lose all their picks, adjust their classifieds, fix all their notecards and landmarks, rebuild their entire stores from scratch etc. It’s also that the entire porn ghetto and all adult estate sims will be unaccessible to anyone except Payment Info On File/Age verified accounts. Presumably people selling sex toys and clothes will be able to rely on XStreet to sell but clubs and hangouts will have to clean up their acts and stay on the old mainland or they will end up being almost entirely empty. What I suppose will happen is that only an elite few adult businesses will even be able to own land. Most will resort to selling through websites, either XStreet if it continues to allow adult goods or some other site that will be sure to spring up if they don’t. In my own case I suppose we’ll have to evict a few residents who engage in adult behaviour. I certainly can’t afford to lock any of my sims to payment-info-on-file residents only. I’ll resist it as long as possible of course but if LL are serious about enforcing this then I woneventually ‘t have a choice.
In The End
I suppose SL will survive. As has been stated elsewhere this is certainly the end of LLs dream to make SL the new internet. The internet has grown and thrived and expanded /because/ of the adult industry not despite it. I suppose this is all part of LLs plan to attract big business to SL. I’ve explained before why I think this plan is doomed. SL is still utterly worthless for all business uses and even cleaned up and Disney-fied it will still be just as useless but a whole lot less popular. Let us not weep for the adult industry though. Those guys are some of the most innovative people in the world. Porn will survive.
Posted in Adult, Land, SL | Comments (1)
Univeral 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.
Posted in Land | Comments (0)
Svarga is saved
As reported everywhere but most notably by Chey on her blog Svarga has gone offline. Really Svarga is the reason I joined SL. I’ve always been fascinated with Artificial Life and it’s been a big dream of mine to fill a sim up with plants and animals just like Svarga, but obviously not as good. Sadly my meagre building talents have really held me back. The scripts are easy and fun but my creations always look like badly joined together cubes.
Anyway, in a last minute panic I contacted Laukosargas to see if the sim was still available for sale. She sent this reply:
“Svarga has been sold, I’ve actually been paid and I’m waiting for an incredibly sloth-like LL to implement the transfer ! I’ve been asked not to reveal who the new owner is at this stage, but I believe some kind of announcement will be made in the near future. Svarga sim will be kept more or less “as-is” even possibly improved a bit and will be put to good productive use within the SL community :)”
So it looks like good news. My plan would never have worked out anyway. The best I could come up with was to buy the sim for $1500ish and then beg Jack to let me join it on to the mainland. Then I could have taken tier donations from the public to maintain upkeep of the sim for free. It seems almost plausible but realistically was never gonna happen. Not least because she was asking some outrageous price I couldn’t possibly have matched.
Posted in Land | Comments (0)
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!
Posted in Land, SL | Comments (0)