Darrius Gothly is one of those tiresome mediocrities you see posting on the forums all day in Second Life -- that is, if you have no life and can spend all day yourself sparring with him. I do have a life, and don't have the time, but if I've checked off a post to be delivered in my mail box, I will see it fill up in thread after thread with the pious geeky diatribes of this middle-aged bore. Several times I have found him challenge me and harass me to describe my real life occupations on the forums (!) and behave like you'd expect some loser on the forums to behave whose main preoccupation in life is being a legend in his own mind and beating what he perceives as "trolls" on a software company's forums. Not having time to answer him line by line as I once might have (and less inclination even when I have time to waste it on people like that), I just tell him simply -- hey, come fight like a man on my blog, asshole, instead of hiding behind the Lindens' skirts. Because he'd be the first to abuse report you if you responded to any of his outrageous posts in kind or with any kind of effective pushback.
Now this non-land-dealer (who might sell a parcel or two, but it isn't visible on this account) has a Great Idea to upset the land market again with the usual geeky technocommunism.
He wants to create a category of cheap land that is for non-commercial use and both force the Lindens to take less tier, give some people an undeserved advantage in SL, and undercut the land market in general as inevitably, such a system will be gamed as it always is gamed.
I've proposed in the past that the Lindens sell mainland on the auction with various categories of zoning -- commercial, residential, experimental. I think having these three basic categories would do enormous amounts to sort out the chronic vexations of SL -- the club that puts up a black box next to you and fills it with 40 no-show avatar bots or pole-dancers and Zyngo games on an otherwise pretty waterfront residential sim; the die-hard residential holdout on a sim that has already gone commercial and is heavily trafficked; the assholery with sandboxers building giant ugly spinning bullshit they call "art" and inflicting it for miles on people who want either residences or businesses that look nice. So I'm all for selling sims consciously with those labels and requiring they be kept with those labels voluntarily. I think even if the Lindens don't have time to police them, the voluntary labelling and physical labelling with a colour would help mitigate the usual mainland disaster.
But this plan isn't a plan to make land cheaper or give some people a pass. Non-commercial residential land in fact would only grow in value if people could be assured they'd have no Club Lagg or My Traffic Gimmicks Store next to them.
If you make these zoned sims, they need to be able to accept ARs if the Lindens won't proactive police them. Example: in Brown, the rare Linden-zoned legacy sim where I have some land, very expensive plots went up for sale that were on the market for something like a year, by one of those alts of one of those forums agitators (I think related to Deltango Vale). These fantastically-priced plots -- $100 a meter or more -- were bought by a German gallery owner for whom this play money denomination with dollar exchange posed no serious expense. He took over a good chunk of the sim, but then put up a gallery with a disco floor with a strobe light -- and left off autoreturn. Then, having indulged his passions for virtuality somewhat briefly, he -- or his group, there seemed to be more than one of them -- completely disappeared for the next year, never to be seen (and presumably with tier paid up).
So this operation, which was clearly not a home, but a public gallery, with even a club in it, in violation of the zoning, was allowed to sit there -- possibly the high-priced land dealer who made the fortune in sales and the Lindens related to him/her as well as some art Lindens or German Lindens somewhere were providing cover for this. I know that whenever one of my tenants so much as temporarily puts out a dance ball on their roof, the Lindens have come running complaining to me that my tenants are violating the zoning. So it's the usual chronic Linden situation about which I have no time to bother. Buy my land next to the disco club if you like -- and yes, it's still going to cost you $50 a meter.
Darrius idea not only sucks -- it's sinister, having all the earmarks of the usual stealth Linden operation to "soften up public opinion" on a subject. Once we thought the people clamouring for free art sims and a panel of their friends to give out art land were just forums agitators that would never convince the miserly Lindens to give out free server space. Whoops, we were wrong, as they did -- well, maybe not 70, as M Linden once promised, but...some number.
Hamlet nee Linden Au is flogging Darius' odious proposal -- and not surprisingly, as he often leads the technocommunist pack, wanting virtual worlds to be free or cheap, but of course, not the payment for those who blog about these free and cheap virtual worlds ROFL.
Darrius starts first with the entirely dubious proposition that the Lindens have "shut off the spigot" on homesteads, which represent a cheap island option that in fact the market really did want, because people obviously want $345 for a sim and a $95 maintenance fee, not $1000 and a $295 maintenance fee, because it's like a computer -- most people don't need the computing power and many of the applications, they just need some of the socializing functions like email or Facebook. They'd be better off buying some cheap appliance that brought those functions to them. In the same way, people get maximum privacy and ability to set land the way they want out of the humper bunkers, so why rent half a sim on somebody else's island? And why buy 8192 of laggy and ugly mainland for 1875 prims when you can have those 1875 prims spread out across 65,000 landscaped meters you decide yourself, utterly owning the view?
It's just pure ignorance and idiocy to imagine the Lindens "shut off the spigot" on a product that anyone can just go to the website and buy by clicking the buttons and putting the land into MY SHOPPING CART. What has always been the case, but Darrius may be ignorant about, is that Lindens have a brake on endless purchase and flipping of these landlords' dreams by insisting that you can only buy them if you already own a $1000 island. So there is a buy-in to get access to this cheaper product to somewhat stem the re-rental market the Lindens hate -- because it means the customers paying the landlords, to whom the landlords give full estate rights and disappear to collect profits -- become the Lindens' maintenance/customer service headaches as they can then call up Concierge and bitch about lag and paying fees to tow their islands around to their friends' area -- and then away again when they have a fight.
Darrius is like a lot of overly thinky geeks who can't see the obvious: the Lindens pulled the plug on the old homesteads for one simple reason. That was because landlords were buying up 100s of them and flipping them and packing 16 people to a sim and creating not only resource but customer service burdens. The Lindens didn't see why landlords should make a profit and not them. So they revised the product to sustain more use and encourage more direct purchases -- weeding out the cheaper land flippers by making the product more expensive. All reasonable, and all necessary from their perspective because it prevents real estate bubbles and stems irresponsible behaviour from landlords.
I see absolutely no reason why Lindens should create a "low cost model" that privileges some residents and not others. Those that spent top dollar for their homes are obviously the first to be screwed under this plan, because now they can't resell -- the market is already terribly low, and with new low-cost land no one will be able to sell old land whatsoever. To someone like Darrius who apparently just rents island parcels now and then, this doesn't pose a problem, but it's a factor fucking over tens of thousands of people.
The issue is frankly that there is *already* a two-tier cost system in SL of low-cost and higher-cost land. and that is the system of "rented land" that is lower in cost than what you have to pay in tier to Lindens and pay to Lindens for access to the land, i.e. a land purchase, and then land that you buy directly from Lindens and pay directly to them the tier.
Naturally, Darrius, as a typical heedless but aggressive technocommunists has no concern for destroying the rentals market, and would only claim that anybody raising this concern was some kind of greedy capitalist.
But the reality is, rentals landlords aren't greedy capitalists. They are people who fit in various categories. Some might be roughly equivalent to real-life tycoons, but not really -- they are more likely to be average middleclass couples in Florida with the virtual equivalent of a bed-and-breakfast operation. Some are retired or disabled or underemployed and this supplements their income. Many more are people who want to live and work and create in SL, but lower the cost by renting out some of their land to friends or strangers -- which is something they in fact enjoy as it allows them to play one of the three games people love to play most online -- playing store (the other two are playing war and playing house).
I've loved playing store myself for years on Second Life, but if they destroy the land market further, I don't have to play it. I would rather do my RL jobs than risk involvement in this crazy set-up, and most small businesses would be of that opinion.
The reality is, the Lindens are ambivalent about the land arbitrage business and seek to trim and even savage it on occasion, but they also need it. The landlords take care of the customers they can't or won't take care of. They provide people with "something to do" that the Lindens are bad at providing, and really, we don't need them to provide.
Rentals businesses are the life's blood of the economy. It's what makes for a more accessible and egalitarian economy that otherwise would be, as Chip Midnight inimitably once described it, a RenFaire economy, with craftsmen at the Renaissance Faire making all the money, and everybody else put in the role of passive consumer. Rentals enable people to be flexible with their land by renting it out; it enables them to start little businesses; and it enables people who aren't 3-D graphics artists or geeks and scripters to be able to function in a trade. It's the only reason I'm in Second Life, the ability to get costs paid and run a small business in this fashion that can in turn sustain other people who are artists or geeks -- or just plain socializers.
Of course, someone like Gothly is utterly oblivious to the many connections and benefits of this second-tier cheaper land market of rentals that are significantly lower cost for the individual than the Linden offerings, except for possibly Linden Homes, but they are limited in the style of home and opportunity for expansion. Technocommunists want to take an organic market like that which is already amply serving people and doing just fine, kill it, destroy livlihoods, harm people benefiting from it as buyers and sellers, and then turn it all over to the Linden state-like entity to parcel out as yet another offering competitive to existing merchants in SL. No thanks -- in fact, fuck no, and if this portends an actual Linden program, I and others will riot.
The Commerce Disabled plots (!!!) are the technocommunists' dream. Of course, they hate commerce -- except their own businesses, like whatever little goth biz that Darrius himself runs in SL lol. They hate *other people they don't like* to make money unless they are in their tribe. And they also show an absolutely outrageous ignorance of how people live in SL.
Nearly everybody in SL for any length of time has some kind of caper going. They might sell things out of a vendor to their friends in their living room -- like Tupperware ladies. They might put some chair they made out on the lawn and set it to sell copies in case any of their friends like it. They might have an art work or a book or used item they put for sale. They might simply like to work on their vendors while at home, or test their sale products at home. All of this normal, organic human and NEEDED activity that makes SL FUN is shut off under this vicious communist regime. Ugh. Darrius also imagines that the Lindens can parse the "give as gift" and "sell" functions which they've told us many times are too hard to do.
Another really stupid, geeky and retarded idea that Gothly perpetrates is the idea that sims should be cheaper,and the Lindens are only selling electricity, basically. It's really obdurate, ignorant *stubborn* bullshit, this literalization of what a sim is.
The Lindens don't sell sims. They sell connections to other sims. They don't sell land. They sell contiguous geographical space. They don't sell server space, they sell the ability to transfer inventory to other people as gifts or sales. They don't sell land *only*. They sell places for display and interactivity sustaining teleports and searchability of agents and objects. So it's really fucking *stupid* to keep referring to the "land problem" in SL -- and literal in the way the RL communists were as well -- completely destroying everything else that happens in and around "land" -- which is *a world*. The sim isn't just some rack space; it's a world of interactivity upon which you can generate content and view other content and interact with each other and the content. That's what virtuality is. Virtuality costs money. And let it. Let it be in a free market, and let the communists who imagine they can sustain worlds for $75 sims go over there someplace and see how far they get with that plan.
So rejecting the communist idea, as I absolutely much for reasons not only of intelligence and common sense but conscience, what, then, is to be done about the land market in SL?
I'm not sure that anything can or should be done. One can hope the Lindens don't glut it with more fresh printing of sims. We can hope more newbie landlord suckers won't come along and imagine they can still make a killing in homestead flipping, and glut and undermine the confidence in the market at the same time as they flip and then spectacularly fail. The market has trouble teaching people lessons faster who should learn them precisely because it is a hobbyists market where hobbyists afford the costs and losses and don't run a bottom-line profit-oriented model of costs and expenses and revenue and profits.
The market doesn't need land now, because there is too much of it for sale. It will sell better when there are more people, but there won't be as long as Viewer 2 is imposed on newbies and Search remains broken so people can't shop, buy land (!!!),
So the solution is first and foremost to fix the Search that will fix the Buy Land option, currently crippled and unusable, and the search for mainland and island rentals and island "purchases". And of course then fix the Search for events. Did I mention the Search needs fixing?!
When will Sea Linden confess that he has been vandalizing it? You would think at least a blog apology would go up for having kept "rentals" searches in search broken for weeks on end. Currently, any search under the word "rentals" turns up absolute incoherent junk -- parcels and sims and avatars without that key word, and then random sims which may or may not happen to have rentals on them with no relevance. Outrageous. If the Lindens think that by putting up the "Rent land" Message of the Day they are fixing this with a workaround, they couldn't be more silly -- or sinister. That MOTD doesn't take you to actual rental offerings, but a wiki page with the usual incoherent Torleyisms. I'd much rather see the Lindens offer rentals to the top rental companies hemorraging sales now due to the broken search -- it's a tide that will lift all boats -- then continue with this public service message that goes nowhere and doesn't lead to any actual sales. What is somebody supposed to do after reading that retarded page, Torley? Go and um...search under the word rentals inworld to find one???
Magnet Homewood hit the nail on the head in responses to Gothly's terrible communist idea -- people (like me) who rent out land in residential areas they help keep residential still have to put up rental boxes, and if you make sims Commerce Disabled you will not be able to have rental boxes, duh.
Darrius wants to put in prims that would "redirect" people to some office or store where they'd pay -- geez, is that fucking stupid. People will not pay when they have to teleport somewhere else to do it. It's hard enough to have them pay on time with this system. You have to offer them every convenience, and also the convenience of checking days left or prims or refunding easily if they need to get out. I would never force them to come to some office to do all this.
In short, Darrius has a lot of very bad ideas of how I should run my business, and how numerous other people should run their businesses and hobbies -- and he himself doesn't have one, or doesn't have one affected by these communist ideas.
