Caution! Don't Trust the Game Engine:Ownership not always transferring with purchase

The problem I am about to describe does not affect all transactions. I am not saying you will not receive ownership of land you buy in SL. In fact, I'm fairly certain this only affects a small percentage of all land buying/selling. However, I've seen it 4 times in 3 days, so it's more frequent at this time and if you buy and sell land, you could be affected.

Each day for the past 3 days, I've bought at least one parcel in which "ownership" did not transfer to me. One case was that 2.5/sqm plot in Schilli that remained in the search for hours on hours Saturday.

I have filed support tickets which haven't had any response. I am not confident I will get my money back because the 1 of the 3 times I've seen this situation happen before, LL refused a refund. (the two times we *did* get refunds it was because the amount of money was staggering)

I now have someone telling me they tried to buy one of my parcels of land and they didn't get ownership, the next person who bought it did. IF I HAD AN EFFING GROUP TRANSACTION HISTORY and could verify their claim, I would gladly refund their money. As it is, I pointed them to the growing queue of people filing tickets with support to get their money back.

So, word to the wise - don't trust the game engine to work properly on the really important stuff - like buying and selling land.

Bump with a link to the blog post about the bug: http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/08/11/more-info-on-this-weeks-grid-problems/#more-1140

I was the one!
Paid and did not receive the land.
Contacted lindens and had no response, submitted a ticket, and nothing so far.
Hope someone is taking care of it.

Um? How about dont buy land (or perform any sort of transactions, or rez no copy items) when SL is borked? It's not paticularly difficult to figure out when it is. Check the blog, read the forums here, (God knows when SL is borked the forums explode with complaints imediately), talk to friends who are on already, etc.

In your post you said you bought land every do for the last 3 days... well, lately SL's had major issues, and it hasnt been difficult to figure out since everything was borked on and off during this time.

There are times when a sim can crash right after a transaction, and should that be the case, submit a ticket, and within a few days your issue will be resolved. Your all caps headline post makes it seem like you're warning people about some major meltdown of SL.

Well, that's the problem Johan. No one KNOWS it's borked until it doesn't work.

Also, it's always borked in some way or another.

So how about: Nobody buy anything ever at all any more, or do any transactions which might not go through (or which will result in your being kicked out of SL for supposedly "gambling" - i.e., tranferring funds to anyone for any reason).

But I do find it interesting how you manage to make this the resident's fault.

coco

Nope, can't have that personal responsibility, nope. Can't have that.

ll love to bump bad news off the blog with fluff for starters, so its no wonder someone might not see some 'issues' blog entry, especially if the arent logging in every day.
most people dont participate in the forums either. when was the last time 50,000 ppl were logged into the forum? you realise the guy youre scolding has been here many months and had never posted to the forum before today?

and considering ll's reputation for dealing with L$ between customers it is no shock that this is a very worrying thing. u really have faith the lindens are going to rummage through data trying to verify your story and are going to come thru at the end and save the day?

cant image a company taking responsibility for the problems their code is causing. cant imagine that. all hail the ToS

Please note that I'm not letting LL off the hook. But no one was BLAMING the customer, just suggesting folks fall into a trap far too easily, and take no responsibility for using a platform that is well known for its instability and bugginess.

1. The system is always crashing in one way or another

2. it's been suggested that people don't rez, buy, sell, create, xfer when the system is buggy.

3. even when there's no official announcement yet, bugs can happen with no announcement.

ergo, no one should ever rez an object, buy, sell, transfer, build, modify, or script.

I think that's a fair summation of events so far.

I'd add "Without knowing that things go horribly wrong without any warning, and therefor to take steps to protect one's self." So far all these problems are detectable even without LL's help. Gotta keep an eye and an ear open. Not that closing an ear is easy.

Jillian, excuse me, but just what steps to protect oneself can one take except the obvious, and unworkable, "never buy anything"?

These problems are intermittent. You never know if something is going to work right or go terribly wrong. Of course, most people can tell if the grid is acting really wonky, but inventory transfers can go wrong even when everything else appears to be running smoothly.

LL says they found the problems and have fixed them, but I wouldn't hold my breath. We'll have to wait at least a few days and see if the stability improves.

Use copybot to copy items to a copyable format so that you don't ever lose them..and then steal all textures available to make clothing you cannot permanently lose. O.o

It's pretty sad that to hold on to the things you have in world, you have to be a thief.

"For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky."

jillian arent we at least entitled to the expectation that when we click 'buy land' and see money leave our account that we will receive the land in return? reading your quote i have no option but to believe you are suggesting we _never_ conduct a transaction in sl. of course i realise that you dont believe that, but lag, low fps, tp issues etc arent really an unusual occurance anymore, its business as usual and does not indicate to anyone that the land buy function is likely borked. LL needs to face up to their obligation as either a service provider, or a software outfit, or a simulated economy, ANYTHING. but this constant assertion that LL owes its customers nothing, is immune by virtue of the tos, and has no responsibility for the service we pay for has got to stop.

Checking to see if the search function works, and works in a timely manner before buying. Taking a copy of a creation into inventory before removing the item from the sim. Peeking at the blog before doing anything you might regret.

I'm not saying there's a perfect way to avoid the problems, but please, people know there are problems. I lost hours of scripting work a few days ago. But I'm not going to whine about things everyone already knows is badly screwed up, mostly because I know the risks I was taking before it bit me.

I'm not an extremist, and that is an absurd extremist view.

I just belive we can take steps to protect ourselves, and in that we can we must accept responsibility for taking the risks we are taking.

The only reasonable protection we can take is to never do business on SL.
I for one find that an unreasonable step, however nothing else would guarantee me protection from losing money.

That's self contradictory.

We can mitigate the problems. I've left a few examples how in a previous post. If you're looking for guarantees... well, good luck: I've yet to find any anywhere, RL and SL.

We can and obviously we DO operate pretty darn well under the ugly circumstances LL presents us with.

its interesting that its only us that need to accept responsibilty for our actions (or inaction)


ok this thread is not about somebody losing an ao or a landbot, or failing to take a copy of something.
its about LAND SALES not going through even though you are charged for it. obviously he searched for the land, obviously he tp'd there. your argument has sweet fuck all to do with the op.
if youre going to talk down your nose at least stay on topic mate.

You are putting words into my mouth. I've not let LL off the hook in any way for thier crappy service.I am on topic. I suppose I appear to be "talking down my nose" because you don't like what I have to say.

It was intended to be. In other word, the only action that would have a reasonable chance of preventing lost money is an action that I find unreasonable to take.

When I pay real money for a thing, I expect to take possesion of that thing.

It's a reasonable expectation, that. Sadly it is not a reasonable expectation that every transaction be 100% trouble-free.

(Again, for all those who have a case of the black-and-whites, this isn't intended to let LL off the hook for thier problems.)

Well again, what lies at the end of that sort of reasoning is that one is a fool to try to use the platform at all. And people tend to reject that idea, because it means we should all quit SL.

Assuming we concede that we're all idiots to be here at all, we still have the fact that it is not our fault that one aspect of another isn't working at any given time, and we can't know ahead of time what that is going to be.

Which again leads us to - if you try to use SL, you're a fool anyway, so quitcherbitchin.

Now, personally, I will still continue to try to use it and hope I don't fall into one of these black holes. Sometimes I think those of us who spend a lot of time in SL, like me, tend to completely lose sight of the fact that things like transactions actually do work in other games. It's really NOT a good thing when transactions become an iffy proposition (or might result in your being kicked off the game just for using the feature).

And those transactions becoming an iffy proposition are not at all our fault. We are, after all, the ones who alert LL to these problems in the first place, then wait for them to actually mention them on the blog.

coco

It may not be reasonable to expect every transaction to be perfect but It is reasonable to have the issue corrected when there is trouble. Linden Lab must step up and fix these things being it is their service that is causing the trouble.

Reductio ad absurdum.