Real estate (Second Life)

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Second Life, an online world owned by Linden Lab has been operating since 2003[1]. Both Linden Lab and Second Life's Residents make money from Second Life through the trading and use of virtual real estate.[2] Residents use the virtual real estate feature when they require permanent in-world storage of the content they have created or otherwise own.[citation needed]

   
Real estate (Second Life)
How we resell our computing resources is using the proxy of virtual real estate. We sell land. So if you want more of our CPU horsepower, you need to buy more land.
   
Real estate (Second Life)

—Cory Ondrejka, [2]

Contents

[edit] Land Ownership

Premium members also have the ability to own land (up to 512m2 without additional fees). Owning larger areas of land attracts an increasing additional fee (what Linden Lab calls "tier") ranging from US$5 a month up to US$195 a month for an entire 65,536m2 of land or individual island.[3] [4]

[edit] Land sales system

Linden Lab usually sells land in small 512m2 blocks (16 by 32 meters) through its First Land program, or as entire 16 acre (65,536m2) regions. Residents also buy and sell land to other Residents, generally intending to make a profit by selling the plots of land at a price higher than the original purchase cost.[citation needed]

[edit] First Land

The First Land program is used to reserve small blocks of land for first time land buyers, intending Residents to purchase their first parcel of land below the current market value.[5] This program also serves as an incentive for new Residents with free accounts to upgrade to premium accounts. A Resident pays a fixed fee of L$1 per 1m2 for a 512m2 plot.[5]

These First Land plots are frequently consolidated into larger plots when the original owners sell them to other residents.[citation needed]

[edit] Regions

  • Regions put up for auction are usually accessible from the main continent (e.g. by crossing the simulator boundary) of Second Life.[citation needed]
  • Regions purchased privately are not allowed to be accessible directly from the main continent of Second Life, multiple regions can be purchased and placed next to each other creating their own island or small continent.[citation needed]

The high land tier fees (US$195 a month) associated with owning a 16 acre region have resulted in many privately purchased simulators being focused solely on content that can return a profit, reducing the variety available.[citation needed] There are exceptions to this behavior, such as Svarga (an artificial eco system driven by LSL, created by Second Life Resident Laukosargas Svarog.[6]

A region can theoretically hold up to 100 users at a time,[7] but performance can severely degrade at these numbers, and factors such as the amount of prims and active scripts running on the server also factor into performance.

[edit] Openspaces

Whereas normal private islands run on their own dedicated CPU, the Openspace regions run four per CPU: this limits their performance. Each of the four is limited to only 1875 prims. Openspaces only ever share with other openspaces on a server. Openspaces must be anchored to a normal existing Island or be used in a series to create space between islands. In other words, they cannot be used to “float” space on their own.[8]

[edit] Issues and criticisms

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[edit] Lack of zoning

With minor exceptions, Linden Lab has not placed any zoning or content restrictions on what land owners can place on their real estate. This has resulted in a wide variety of architectural variations and buildings of different purposes being fitted into nearby spaces, frequently with mixed success. Additionally, since land is paid for per square metre, residents are pressured to use all their available space to maximise value, leading to buildings being placed right up against each other with no intervening access or spacing. In extreme cases, "land griefing", "vandalism", or "graffiti" has occurred, in which residents place deliberately obstructive and/or offensive content near to others with the intent of defacing the local view. Such proneness to vandalism has been leveraged on occasion as a low-level form of extortion, destroying the quality of the local view in an attempt to force neighbors to buy the offending parcel of land at greatly overpriced value.

[edit] Budgeting of server resources

The amount of land a resident owns in a region determines how many objects they may place in the region and within what area they may be placed. However, other resources of the region server, such as CPU time and network bandwidth, are not budgeted in this way, creating problematic situations. A typical example is that a person may buy a large area of land in a particular region and build an area, only to have someone else buy a smaller area in the same region and use it to build a nightclub or other popular business. The popular area consumes all the region servers' CPU time and network connections, leading to the large landowner suffering greatly reduced performance on their land or even being unable to access it at all because all available connections to the region are taken up by patrons of the club.

[edit] Land cost

SL real estate is limited in terms of primitive count and parcel size for a contiguous parcel of land, the largest being 65,536m2 (a "sim"), which can contain up to 15,000 primitives. The cost for purchasing an entire sim is US$1,675 to set up, and US$295 a month to maintain[4].

[edit] Land hosting restrictions

A common criticism of the Second Life land system is that it is a closed network [citation needed]. Currently simulators are restricted in that only Linden Lab hosts the servers that Second Life land is hosted on.[citation needed] Many users wish for Linden Labs to open up the "grid" and allow privately owned servers to run the simulator programs, and be accessible from the grid.[citation needed]

Due to the way the Second Life world is currently designed, with a central secure asset server controlling all of the objects in Second Life, and the way the simulators and the asset server interact, hosting your own simulator is impossible unless a major redesign of the "grid" is implemented.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Parker, Sam (June 23, 2003). Second Life goes live. Yahoo!. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
  2. ^ a b Cory Ondrejka, Dr. James Purbrick. User Creation and Scripting in Second Life (WMV). Retrieved on 2006-12-08.
  3. ^ Land Pricing & Use Fees. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  4. ^ a b Land: Islands. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  5. ^ a b Linden, Jeska (November 18, 2006). How to Find and Purchase First Land. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-18.
  6. ^ Zonk (May 31, 2006). Playing God in Second Life. Slashdot. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  7. ^ simulator. SL History Wiki. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  8. ^ Linden, Jack (September 21, 2006). Information about Openspaces (void regions). Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.

[edit] See also