Inadvertent generosity

I just figured out why my monthly payments have been so high the last few times: I've been paying an entire sim's worth of tier.

What happened was this: my neighbour T sold about half of her holding in Mugunghwa, to get down to an eighth of a sim. Her original parcel was irregularly shaped, so she ended up with a narrow stripe of land left over, adjacent to my land and including a strip of riverfront. She offered it to me, and without thinking I turned it down. I guess I thought she'd just keep it, but no: she put it up for auction.

Well, when I saw that I realized that I had to have it, else some jackass would come along and plaster the thing with hundred-metre-high soundfile-blaring porn site ads.

So I put in a bid, and, to make a long story short, won the auction. I paid over ten thousand L$ for 864 square metres. This is quite possibly a record.

Now, when you buy land directly, you have the option to buy for yourself or for a group; and groups get a 10% landholding bonus. Auctions don't work that way, you always buy for yourself. I immediately sold it to one of my alts, who bought for the group. And with that I forgot all about the episode — but the Lindens didn't.

Had my group bought this land directly, all would have been OK because the bonus would have kept my holdings under 36044 sq m. Because it became mine, I had to pay full tier on it, and so for about an hour I owned four square metres more than a half-sim. That automatically increased my tier payments to an entire sim's worth, but when my billable holdings reduced to under 32768 sq m, my tier level did not automatically decrease.

Dear Linden Labs, I just paid you the equivalent of two years' premium account fees. You're welcome.

Big

I just bought 34 thousand square metres of mainland.

I'm feeling somewhere between excited (huge tracts of land!) and terrified (the tier! my gods, the tier!!)

It's not my land as such, it's ex-Play as Being land that a group of us decided to rescue when it was put up for sale; but I am the one who did the work and signed the papers and (right now at least) is going to pay the tier. We'll see how this works out over time.

On being a landowner

I did actually buy land after upgrading to a premium (paid) account, 512 square metres of mainland. It's near the coast, with what should remain an unrestricted view of the sea: the triangle of land between me and the ocean is "protected land." I've started building there, and have already run into the limits on land use.

In the real world, 512 square metres would qualify as a reasonable plot in many European cities; in SL it is tiny. The need for "camming distance" behind and around your avatar means that SL builds have to be at least four times the size of an equivalent space in RL — or have open sides, which is the alternative I chose.

I'm building a kind of tree-less treehouse: Platforms in the air, connected by ramps.

The second limitation is that a plot of this size can only support 117 prims. With two platforms, a sofa, two couples' dances, and a seating arrangement of cushions from the Lost Gardens of Apollo, I am already at 114. Oh noez!

I had noticed that there is a lot of land in this region for sale, three or four large plots going relatively cheaply at L$2.8 per metre, and considered upgrading my alts to premium accounts too, to bundle our tier allowance, but then left the idea there. Next day, the land had been bought up and was for sale again — for L$6 per metre. Bah. Missed my chance to become a low-density suburban-sprawl slum landlord.