Ah, a sight for sore eyes:
"There are no auctions at this time."
Already for 3 days now, the Lindens have finally stopped their ceaseless land glut. I thought they'd NEVER get it. Of course, knowing our Lindens, this could be sheer accident, and not related to hiring an economic guru, and not related to listening to the advice of your humble correspondent (likely true, since I can't post to the forums, and they regular announce that they do not read users' blogs, except of course Gwyn's.)
Let's go over it again, shall we?
Inflation, or too many Lindens chasing too few dollars is not caused by the stipend of $500. (I'll just deal with that stipend, since the sectarian Forum FIC only bang on these Lindens, coming from the most productive part of SL, and never the $50 stipends, which, collectively, in their millions, pose a greater threat to "inflation" -- if you buy that theory that printing of money creates inflation in this particular toy world, which I don't, given other factors.
Has there been a land glut? Yes. First, they had the extraordinary lack of planning to offer both the brand-new legendary Magellan-discovered northern new continent with no telehubs, right at the same time they made available new tools for estates that got Anshe to buy 100 private islands or so. So both these new continents, Dreamland and the Moth Continent as some call it (all the sims are named for various types of moths), came at the same time, and without telehubs, the Moth sims languished, after first bubbling. Finally some telehubs came in that helped quicken the pace of sales, but by that time the Lindens were beavering away adding huge numbers of southern sims, many with sim-boundary crossing problems that slowed sales, but what do they care? What matters is that people buy at the auction, then they pay tier. That they can't then sell that land later, and are forced to sell it for less than what they pay, is not their concern.
In the old, what I like to call "normal" auction, where bidding opened at some reasonable figure, say, $775, and went from there, and many smaller pieces shy of a sim were also bid over. This created more bidding and higher prices -- people valued a sim like Ravenglass that had gently sloping green land down to a rocky broad waterfront and an island, and they paid $1501 US for such a hand-fashioned Linden sim.
After June 2005, the Lindens began banging out uglier sims, faster, flatter, many with that chemical-waste toxic-coloured sand up north. They posted the price at $1000, and no smaller parcels were offered from new sims -- only abandoned and recycled old land from sims where someone didn't pay their account or left the game. They claimed this new auction was "on demand" but it was nothing of the sort. It was a game of chicken and the method was "psy war". They put long lists of sims out -- and that forced anshechung.com to buy them just because they were there. If they weren't there, Anshe didn't buy. So much for the supply and demand theory! She didn't need to buy them, ordering up huge loads of private islands and capturing some 40 percent of all sales, including huge swathes of liquidated land sold for $2-3/meter.
With these new auctions, they might as well have said "add to my shopping cart" and just had people "click to pay $1000" because they put out such a whack of sims that that's all people had to bid -- sometimes being the sole bidder -- to get a sim. The Lindens were still lost in their fantasies of people needing sims to do "group projects" instead of pragmatic real estate barons and wealthy couples, and they didn't care if every single person and their brother AND their dog got a sim for $1000. "Komu ne len'" as the Russians said -- anybody who wasn't lazy.
The problem is, a lot of very energetic baby barons bought up sims at this low cost -- a good $200 or even $500 lower than we used to pay for them in 2004-2005 anyway -- and they marked them up, sometimes rather clumsily, and then...waited.
A lot of land was lying out there in the sun by that time!
Some were able to sell to the rush of middle-class, wealthier members who came in with the coverage in The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, and some other papers which weren't the usual gamerz or left-wing rags, but more mainstream or even conservative. These people came in a blazin', with $20,000 in Lindens in their newbie hands, wishing to skip all the 512 struggles, the Ivory Tower lessons, the anguished seminars with mentors where they were instructed how You Don't Need Land to Have Fun, and they just wanted to have fun. These people would think nothing of buying 16,000 for a house, of renting 10k for a few days to try it out before offering to buy it, or buying a sim and naming it after their girlfriend. That's why you see names of sims these days like "I LOVE U KIMMY" instead of complicated Latin names for larvae (*shudders*). Gah, I need to add to favourites Lepitopterology.com not only to *remember the name of* that sim that I just bought land in, but be able to *spell it* in the map list!
Meanwhile, Anshe kept buying up sims and making very pretty themed areas, even as the Moth sims kept reproducing like larvae, each one flatter and more hastily terraformed than the last, with giant patches of water that they once romantically imagined would fill up with Eric Linden's Atoll houses (they would have, if he had gotten the camera angles better and raised the roof on them when they were put in everyone's inventory). Today, acre after acre of water is not filled with weatherbeaten docks and stilts but miles of those prim lawns that are the unnatural green of a bottle of Odwalla VegMashMonster or whatever that high-protein thingie is you buy at Gristede's.
Then came the telehubs' buy-back, the flushing of loads of Lindens into the existing toilet of printed money, and even the mistaken reposting of that land on the auctions, not for Lindens, as had been promised, but US dollars. I spotted them and shrugged...but then when one of them went by, with a huge dollar price on it even more than fresh new land sims, I objected...and the Lindens actually claimed it was a "mistake" and switched it to a Linden price (much lower in value lol). Can't blame one department there for trying to get the whole place out of the red, I guess.
Anyway, next thing we know there are 40, count 'em 40 bulk auction sims. I don't know if anyone noticed the tea party that was held in the bay of the BulkAuctions. Damn, I wish my computer hadn't crashed -- I had the greatest picture of Super Bling Fox Shaun Altman, Land Baron, sitting on one of those tea crates floating in the sea, that one of the communists had thrown around in disgust at all the obscene land-buying.
The Lindens said this auction in bulk -- if you thought the other ones were mere "add to my shopping cart" price tags with no real auction, you didn't see the bulk auctions for $40,000 LOL -- was an experiment to "test the market". No doubt they thought IBM and the University of California were going to buy the sims but...instead it was Anshe and Guni lol, flush with all their telehub buyback funds, some of which they got with some creative date placements.
Within 3 shakes of a lamb's tail, these all sold out. People tried to slam Anshe in the forums for selling white blini (what those land pankcakes look like) and oladushki (flat doughy things) but in fact, these rich sugary white confections were beautifully shaped, once Anshe got their names -- they did an experiment to name them by artists like Cezanne and even offered people free land to build on but...well, we know where that goes, see No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
So land keeps a coming, and what happens? People buy lots of Lindens. Now, you think, wouldn't that lead to them going UP in value? No, because they take those "lots o' Lindens" and give them to other people who then are in a hurry to cash them out -- so the sell side is flooded too. The velocity and volume has no friction -- and the entire mess is made worse because you can't set a restricted buy order, you can only put out restricted sell orders, but people often don't realize that, and type in whatever number is lower than the number the Lindens helpfully (and stupidly, in terms of the economy) automatically put into their boxes when they log on. (This leads to TERRIBLE mistakes as you could be refreshing the page, looking at 280, and it might suddenly turn to 580 if someone dumps a shitload of Lindens out at that price -- which periodically happens).
The other thing happening is that content must be selling at 4 times its rate -- Cristiano is crowing about his sales in the forums -- and that means lots of people are buying...but then the camp chairs are working too. Lots of people are buying Lindens, flushing them into casinos while they pretend that paying casinos is going to give them MORE in camp chairs, the camp chair kings are then hurrying to the exits to cash out on LindEX as Dwellopers' is ending this month.
Not a pretty sight!
The casino effect on the economy, the constant rushing of the content-barons to cash out, but never keep any Lindens in the game, let alone invest them in people who might then use them to live or buy land at a slower pace -- well, it all catches up. All of it is to blame as much, if not more than the stipends (more on them later).
By putting out lots and lots of land to sale, the Lindens speed up purchase -- and spending -- of Lindens, but they also make the price go down.
If you ever had any illusions that this auction is "a market" or "free" or "run on the demand system" then read the Lindens' own publication, where they show on their graph, despite all the fluctuations that land...remains at $5/meter. Always and everywhere. Because...that's how they like it. They want it to be "affordable" (more on their Better World mythologizing later).
The problem with the socialist concept of making land free, or cheap, or "always $5" and rolling it out endlessly like toilet paper is that it isn't valued and then...whoops! YOU can't sell it when you want to. You'd like to sell your free first land and move out...no one wants crappy lagged up ugly land -- and why should they? When (until the locusts came) for a mere $2500 they could go buy a better one somewhere else on a bulk sim or for $1/meter in Ansheland to get a "deed".
So..you're stuck...tier date is coming...so you dump. There are always liquidators willing to pay you $2/meter so that they can hold the whole pricing system up, and they cash you out quick -- with often those very cheap Lindens they just bought on a Tuesday when they sell for the best price. Wait a day or two, and make off the day-trading.
Or you sit there, and never sell your land...just like the baby barons who bought those $1000 sims...just like Anshe Chung, who leaves parcels out for months at high prices and never sells them...because at her tier level, she can afford to.
And yet the land keeps coming.
Now that it is shut off for 3 days, what next? Stay tuned...
Lord, I missed you!
And I remember Gristede's. Used to get my groceries there.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | 03/08/2006 at 04:02 PM
oops this article isn't finished yet.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 03/08/2006 at 06:44 PM
if you buy that theory that printing of money creates inflation in this particular toy world, which I don't, given other factors.
Posted by: refurbished computers | 03/07/2010 at 11:11 AM