@Sling: Good point re. shipstone, will take note of that and see what we can do.

@Argent: Totally agree, which is why the eastern continents were placed close together. So, yesterday we added connecting ocean between Kinrara and Strangways (connecting the corsican continent to Nautilus), and also between Arianti and Maat (connecting Nautilus with the japanese continent to the south).

@Cristalle: Yep, we know a few auction features are missing at present and will look at providing those soon - the closed auction listings particularly.

@Accasbel: We’ll be getting those water regions on the newer continents cleaned up, named etc over the next few weeks. I agree, it isn’t useful having their status unclear like that.

By the way, there is a simple grid map on the wall of my office on the Linden Estate Services region. I’ll be putting some more fun grid maps out over the next couple of weeks for those that are interested.

Firstly, the gambling ban was inevitable. I knew, when I first logged on over a year ago, that it was only a matter of time. What all you who are saying, “just move offshore” fail to realize is that the result of such a move would be that the credit card companies would simply revoke Linden Labs merchant account, because that is the law in the US. Secondly, that’s a *good thing*, not so much the stupid law, but the fact that it resulted in the removal from SL of the horrible, unregulated, lag-inducing gambling objects. Like I said, I knew from day one that the gambling wasn’t going to last long. Even the European countries that have no problem with online gambling would have eventually come down like a ton of bricks on it once they realized that what was completely unregulated and subject to fraud and abuse by money laundering operations.

Secondly, all the people bitching about VAT need to redirect their anger to their elected representatives because that is the only way that that situation has any chance of changing. If you expect LL to simply continue to absorb the cost of VAT, then you are more foolish than the people who liked to put their extra linden dollars into a sploder or some other black box virtual slot machine with no trusted oversight to determine if the thing is programmed to ever pay out at all.

Thirdly, to the person who brought up the issue of all the estate owners who are still paying the old, lower price, making it impossible to compete with them, yes #67 OddesE Oh that’s you, I agree 100%. I had one land baron brag to me that they only ever pay the educational price for islands (presumably for a commercial use.) For that reason my partners and I haven’t gotten into estates. We are doing pretty well with mainland, and without cutting land any smaller than 512. The problem with the mainland is the adjacency model is not ideal. I mean, it does help with the land baron business because adjacency effects the value of a parcel quite a bit, and you can find parcels that are priced too low, and profit from that knowledge. But it could be so much better if it was dynamic. By that, I mean, what if you owned a parcel that was adjacent to a bunch of spinning porn ads, and you could just respond to that by *moving the parcel someplace else*? What if you could develop a parcel to the point that other people would want to be adjacent to you, and you could auction off the rights to be attached to each of your four sides? I have a pretty detailed idea of how to implement something like that in my head, so, Lindens, if you want to hire me I’ll be happy to reveal it all to you, LOL. Seriously, though, if LL wants to sell me some islands, the best thing it could do is un-grandfather the old pricing. That would be awesome.