Did a Particular Thread Poof for Anyone Else?

I'd guess however that very, very few people realize that they risk complete loss of inventory from a missed Premium payment. Very few people contemplate, "What happens if I miss a payment?" or "What happens if I don't log in for a month?" or "What happens if Linden Lab screws up the billing?" Anyone who doesn't read these forums regularly just simply doesn't know. So while the downgrading or avoidance of Premiums might be significant if people were aware of what might happen, since very few people are aware, the loss of a handful of Premium accounts becomes insignificant.

Mistakes happen. Like when Zero Point was mistakenly razed by LL when someone erroneously thought there was an underpayment. That can never be recovered. Oopsie.
That could still occur even if the system changed, of course, but the point was to show that mistakes do happen.

What's wrong with selling all land and downgrading the account to basic?

Which, to be honest, if the user is just going to create an alt and not bother paying, then they don't care about the account anyways and so aren't going to really care if it's gone. Rather like the clunker that was left in that parking lot. There's no way for LL to MAKE someone pay off their negative balance and very little for them to keep indebted residents from coming back as an alt.

*shrugs* They gotta have something to encourage timely payments. I do think LL's current excuse of a "policy" is pure male bovine excrement. They need to have it clearly marked, and from their stupid support thingy, under Delinquency, and the ToS, it doesn't say anything more than after 7 days, they'll put your account on hold.. and then it's on hold for 30 days. But then I have to do too much link-hopping. The stupid thing links to the "Can be deleted/altered/transfered for any reason," but doesn't specifically say that this is what happens.

And one month = deletion of inventory. I agree is also male bovine excrement.

I think if LL is going to use a policy like this, then as I said earlier:

1. If after 7 days of attempting to draft a payment fails, email the user about the lack and that the account and alts are on hold. BUT allow the user to log in to the website and sell off their L$ to bring the account into the clear. I imagine that it's not hard to disable the withdraw buttons... (I have no idea why they disabled that ability.. they get fees off the LindeX too!)

2. If after 3 months of trying to contact the account's owner, no payment is made, then the land is sold and if that's not enough the L$ is converted to USD. Any proceeds, minus an administrative fee, are applied to the account. If the amount clears the debt, the account is reopened, though as a basic.

3. If the debt is not cleared by the selling of L$ and land, then the account is marked for deletion a year from that period, with monthly email attempts made. Why am I not saying, phone or snail-mail? Because LL stopped requiring that for a long time.. but for those that have it, they can try it too.

4. If no payment is made before the year is out, then the account is deleted, but a backup will be made, in case it is truly in error or other circumstances.

5. Make sure this policy is LISTED CLEARLY on the sign up page, the premium account sign up page and the knowledge base. And train staff on it.

Honestly, if after a year and three months, the account is still delinquent, that's pretty much proof the user isn't coming back to it.

Now what's to make us want to become premiums.. I think there's already discussions about it here and on the flogorums. But I think LL would rather we sold off the land and go back to basic rather than have us go delinquent on our accounts.

And Phil is right. This is actually for ANY account, but it's just easier for premiums to go delinquent. Estate owners might have an easier time too, I think. Not all of them are premium accounts.

Of course they care about the bleeding account. Until it gets crushed. After that, of course they don't.

No, they left a Porsche in the parking lot, and got a clunker after the Porsche was crushed.

Land and L$.

If Linden Lab is deleting inventory after an account goes delinquent for 30 days, that's really saying, "We never want you as a customer again." It provides no incentive to catch up the account after the 30 days has passed, and it is not welcoming to have someone come back to spend more money with SL once their financial situation has improved.

I know of no other industry or business for which that would be a standard practice. Many impose penalties are suspend services after 30 days, or even less, of nonpayment, but I can think of none that burn bridges with customers after 30 days.

Going by the SLU thread, it sounded like she had enough L$ to cover the tier/premium. This isn't the first time we've heard of LL nuking an account like that.

/me wonders what reasons there could be for them to not take the L$ and call it even.

Because they would have to establish a monetary value to attach to Linden dollars, and they don't want to do that. Remember, they maintain that Linden dollars merely represent a limited license to trade with other residents.

That's true: the risk would only be avoided by people who are aware of it. As you say, that limits its effect as a disincentive to becoming or staying Premium, but it also limits its effectiveness as an incentive to be sure payment doesn't lapse.

Because those L$ don't have *any* value to LL.

Let's say that the L$ balance of suspended-and-then-deleted (and banned accounts I guess) equals L$1 million in a month.

If Supply Linden sold that L$1 million then LL would have $3850 in revenue.

If Repo Linden sold that L$1 million then Supply Linden sells L$1 million less than it could have that month since LL wants to keep the exchange rate stable so it can't just dump extra heaps of L$ onto the LindeX.

Some accounts will have more L$ than they owe LL so their revenue from that L$1 million will be less than $3850 since they can't just seize US$ funds because they feel like it and have to credit the account with any US$ that's left over.

In addition the amount of money owed to them declines as well: if someone has L$100k in their account and they owe US$50 then LL could take $50 and - as an imaginary number - say another $50 as a penalty fee but that means it still has to credit $285 to that account.

If that account come back somewhere down the line and cashes out that $285 then LL's net gain at that point is a mere $100. If they just wipe the L$ balance then they'll have $385 because Supply Linden sold it rather than "Repo Linden" *and* that $100 in fees if the account pays up.

It's in LL's best interest to simply wipe those L$ away.

It's not our business to consider LL's bottom line and argue that they are doing something wrong because of *their* bottom line. They can take care of themselves. I'm only talking about our point of view, and I find that what LL does regarding debtors is perfectly fair from our point of view.

Yes, mistakes happen. They'll always happen and doing as you suggest is good way to partially recover from one, as long as the account is also locked until the debtor pays up. I haven't said that there aren't other ways of doing things. I'm saying that (mistakes aside ) the way that LL deals with those who owe them money is perfectly fair to users. All the posts that talk about what's better for LL are irrelevant. The people at LL are old enough to make their own minds up about it.

They are not doing that. After the first month's (~30 days) non-payment, they send an email reminder. After the second consecutive month's non-paymeny, they send another. It's only after that that they remove the account if the person shows no signs of paying up. It may even be after the third month that the account is removed.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong about that, but I'm certain that there's a lot more leeway that 30 days.

That account was rightly nuked. She knew very well that LL don't take L$ to pay real money bills but she didn't bother converting her L$ to US$ - something that would only have taken a few minutes of her time, of which she had plenty to use in the forum.

Sure it's our business to consider their bottom line, because they have repeatedly shown that they can't take care of themselves.

People have reported their accounts being cleared after less than 30 days of non-payment, even as little as seven days after the missed payment.

We can discuss their bottom line, but I thought this discussion was about whether or not they treat delinquent accounts fairly and their bottom line has nothing to do with it.

Btw, you shouldn't be sending invoices out 3 times. After the first invoice, you should send statements. It's a normal practise for businesses to pay on statements and not on invoices.

I haven't seen any such reports, and I'm inlcined to believe that the reporter reported in a somewhat biased way. I.e. apart from a mistake, which can happen, I don't believe they do that.

Umm.. you do realize you're putting entirely more worth on having a premium account than LL does, right?

Not being sarcastic, but how does locking the account and then selling the L$ and land encourage a user to pay up? What is there for them to return to if they have no L$ to sell/spend and no land to live on? Even if they do return to the account, what will encourage them to go premium again?

No, I'm putting more worth on the inventory of an account than LL does. Whether the account is premium or not isn't what I'm talking about, it's the stuff that the account owns in their inventory.

Yes, we all know that LL underestimates the importance of inventory.

Well, first, selling the land gets LL money, as soon as it sells. If that's enough to pay the debt, they may not even need to keep the account locked. Otherwise, because paying up is the only way to recover the inventory.

You can buy L$ and land again. Inventory is often irreplaceable, if the creator's no longer in-world. For example, if I lost my account I'd lose my avatar, I could never be a ferret again.

So I make sure I always have at least two months worth of US$ credit in my account, so I don't have to worry about LL pissing off Paypal or my bank, or just screwing up a transaction.

The fact that going premium again won't put them at risk of losing all their stuff.

And overestimates the value of land to the resident. That's natural enough, I suppose, because land is how LL gets revenue, and the land and the stuff rezzed on it is what costs LL something to operate. Land is 90% of their business.

I expect Lindens would be almost universally dumbstruck to learn that most Premium account holders would gladly forfeit their land and everything on it if it were the only way to preserve their Inventory, and would never make the opposite trade.

That might encourage them OR they might go, "Screw it, no point in going premium. It's too much hassle and LL will just take my land and L$ balance anyways." They might value the land and L$ more. Especially business owners, who just had their SL business land sold out from underneath them and their L$ converted. It's a hard slog to get a business started the second time around.

Mind you, I honestly don't care if LL deleted my inventory for failure to pay. What _I_ want is a clear guideline that LL will follow. I want there to be a reasonable amount of time passing before they go deleting or selling anything, especially given how many issues LL has with properly billing people. If after that, I failed to pay LL the past due, well, then it's my own fool fault.

I think anything less than a year is too short before going and deleting ANYTHING, except selling off the L$ and land. A year is plenty of time to resolve almost any form of payment issue. Even those caused by LL, though if it doesn't, you're pretty much screwed, but you'd be screwed even if all they did was lock the account and alts up.

What LL needs to do is clearly define the stick, no matter WHAT they ultimately chose to do. And they need to make the carrot more attractive in the first place.

I get what people say about this but it still seems a little silly to me. Maybe LL could update LindeX so people could setup automatic sells. Something like "if I have over L$10k, do a sell order at L$260/US$1" or something.

What happens to basic accounts holding islands, if they go into arrears? Are their inventories wiped?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Currently. Linden Lab deletes everything. I'm not suggesting they should delete the land and L$ any quicker than they do now. I'm suggesting that whether they do or not, they shouldn't delete the inventory any quicker for premium accounts (or any other accounts) that go into debt than they do for idle accounts, because for the majority of people land is a *cost*, but inventory is an *asset*.

I would. At this point the user-generated content that I have in my inventory is one of the biggest reasons I'm uninterested in running off to [brand X].

Yes, I can see the advantage to a better and longer term process for land (and L$), but I can see some problems with implementing that, for land at least. They either have to archive the land (which would be a cost to them... they'd have to implement it, whereas archiving the inventory would happen more or less automatically through their ongoing garbage collection process), or block access to it at all heights (requiring work on the servers to implement that) or else it'll still be there and the defaulting account's compatriots would still have access to it.

The particular slice of this that is the inventory is something they can easily do without immediate development cost and without significant long term storage costs over what they're already paying.

The crappy article in the knowledge base only says "delinquent accounts," so I'm assuming ANY account that goes into arrears.


Argent: What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter whether or LL deletes inventories and/or sells the L$ and Land to cover the arrears. There is going to always be some who are ticked off that LL does ANYTHING that affects them in a negative manner. Either way, there's a risk of losing *something* that doesn't doesn't exist with regular basic accounts. If someone suffered the loss of either, they'd be a lot less likely to go back to being a premium.

To be honest, they could simply delete the account and keep backups of the account and it's inventory contents. And when the person pays off the account, restore the account's avatar and inventory from back up for a fee.

But I don't think LL will do this.. because it will hurt their number of users.