Well the surprises have arrived quickly, Inara Pey (via a shout out to Mona Eberhardt) reports that Land Bots are no longer allowed to be used to purchase mainland parcels. This would have been pretty hot news four or five years ago, I’m not sure what good this policy is in an age when land in Second Life is going for peanuts.
The official policy can be found here : http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Inworld_policy_on_bots
The relevant sections of this quiet update state:
Mainland parcel sales and bots
Some bots are used to automate the purchase of Mainland parcels priced below fair market values.
Policy
Using bots to purchase Mainland parcels is not allowed
The use of bots, autonomous software, scripting (manual or automated), scripted agents, or any systems or software internal or external to the Second Life service that circumvent, automate and/or remove the human interaction required to purchase a Land parcel within Second Life on the Linden Lab owned Mainland is prohibited.
When I was a lad in Second Life I used to regularly go to the Jack Linden office hour, where land bots were often a hot topic. Land at the time would regularly be sold for L$10 – L$15 per square meter, if you’re new to Second Life those figures are probably eye popping, land has dropped way below L$1 per square meter in many parts of the mainland. Land prices are so low that land bots at this stage are probably more of a help than a hindrance as people can find the price to make some small income from selling, rather than abandoning their land.
I’m really puzzled as to what the motivation behind this policy is today. The part about purchasing parcels below fair market value has my spidey senses tingling, and not in a good way. I hope they are not going to try and set a minimum price for selling land or hoping for a new land bubble from people manually flipping parcels.
However maybe there’s a surprise policy change in the works, maybe tier prices are going to drop and the lab expect a free for all with people trying to buy more parcels. The policy would actually make sense were tier prices to drop, or people were allowed more tier free land as part of their premium membership.
The issue with Land Bots used to be that they would buy land that people were trying to sell to a friend, people would be unaware of the existence of land bots, they’d set their land for sale cheap, but forget to put a named person in the box and before the person stood next to them had time to purchase it, a land bot had swooped. This happened a lot. Sarah Nerd used to write about land bots over at Your2ndPlace, here’s an example from an archived post:
A few days ago I recieved this instant message from a resident who had lost her 4096 meter parcel and all contents for $1L to infamous land bot runner another resident. Like most people taken by another resident, a resident was totally unaware that such bots exsisted and could buy Your land in a split second until it happened to her. Linden Labs refuses to take notice or help the residents this has hurt and in my opinion if they will not help people then they should at least make this danger well known with blogs and warnings.
This happened way too often and someone who knows a lot about this is Jezebel Bailey, who has been known to write here, someone go and poke Jezebel! However all those years ago, Linden Lab did pretty much nothing about the horrible situations that arose. They did change the warning message in the selling land box, but people kept falling prey to land bots.
I’m really finding this odd. I’ve already speculated that this could be due to an impending lowering of tier, another explanation may be that bots are causing chaos with performance, this isn’t the first time the bot policy has been quietly updated, it was updated quietly to limit the number of messages a bot could send in a day.
Back in the day we’d have all been looking forward to Jack’s next office to try and get to the bottom of this, Jack would also have probably blogged about the policy and there would be commentary in the forum, today, people probably won’t notice much, unless Linden Lab do surprise people with something like lowering tier or increasing the tier free allowance.
Very interesting post, Ciaran.
Thank you Mona.
Gee, Ciaran, if this new bot policy is related to something big, like a drop in tier prices…should we read anything into it happening on the heels of the CEO’s departure?
Maybe Rod disagrees with lowering tier, so he split or was shown the door.
However, based on past performance, if the Lab were going to cut tier, it would be more likely they would jump in with both feet – and then discover later that the bots were screwing it up…..and then take forever to fix that.
Still, I like your speculation better. 🙂
Well you have to speculate to accumulate 😉 Nothing should really surprise me about Linden Lab’s thought process, I’ve been around long enough now so maybe I’m reading between lines that don’t exist, but the timing seems odd.
“another explanation may be that bots are causing chaos with performance”
If this were the case they would have just throttled the search queries back even more than they are currently; no policy needed. Also, it does not appear that bots are prohibited from running search or teleporting to the location to gain intel on the parcel. They are just prohibited from making the purchase.
Fair points, I saw someone else make the point about bots still being able to do the searches. I wouldn’t have thought there were that many land bot runners these days anyway.
They do seem to be making policies on the fly, the limit to the number of messages a bot can send was done quietly.
this would have been helpful many years ago when people *coughs* such as me and my partner lost about 500.00 usd because of a landbot.
yay! Someone poked you! I know, I thought of you when I was writing this post, it’s what, seven years too late? Maybe more?
eh 5 or 6 years. I can still find my “Make some noise” stuff. I can remember asking Phillip Linden if he had signed my petition (of course that was before I even knew who he was) and he said of course not but thanked me for asking him! (someone had forged his type). The good ole days! I am still waiting for you to poke me Mr. Laval!