DO NOT use SL to buy anything using your bank account, mine got cleared out

Well that part is true .. Since you basically have a running blank check on you SL account all the time, logging on on internet cafe's is really stupid. I see now thats what Conan meant.

I was more referring that for the rest of us .. a system with a few more safeguards would be better than the one we have.

Still If LL required by default that you re-enter payment info for any newly incurred costs ... Chaos might not of have had his bank account drained.

Yes, much better that it be run by geek statists, and a haven for tyrants and thugs.

Even that's still preferable to everyone living in SL from birth to death and being fed by IV drips.

I've noticed a pattern where you are rather easily guiled by sensationalitic media garbage when it suits your purpose.

In doing so you've blown out the metrics and impact of online gaming addiction by astronomical proportions. While there are definitely online gaming addicts, there are no reliable statistics on online gaming addiction because there is no established pathology for it within the medical community. Many of the studies conducted are extremely informal and draw from extremely small study groups to extrapolate out to the whole gaming community. On the whole most of these studies find less than 15% of the online gaming community within any study group (USA, UK, South Korea) might be considered to be addicts and the online gaming community itself only represents a portion of the population as a whole so that number gets even further diminished looking at the broader spectrum of entire generations of people.

Online gaming addiction is an impulsive control disorder so despite all your gloom and doom talk about how it is inevitable that simply is not the case. Impulsive control disorders are treatable and the medical community will have recognized online gaming addiction and catalogued it in the DMS long before it scales to any proportion that could create the kind of crisis you imagine if it ever even begins to approach those levels (which is highly improbable).

Additionally you fail to appreciate the importance of the fact that people are attracted to online gaming for entertainment value, not for work. If you change the approach so that the virtual environment becomes one in which people have to logon to work you change a fundamental element in the equation that draws people in general and online gaming addicts in particular to play online games. For that reason alone your concept of enabling addicts to play by giving them a means to make a living doesn't work. If they have to make a living online rather than just playing online for entertainment value they aren't going to do it.

In future generations, the number of people (not addicts) playing MMOG's will broaden to include a much larger cross-section of the population but that does not entail the kind of depressing environment you are predicting. All it does is change the dynamics of where people go for their entertainment. The world will be no worse off for people spending 20-40 hours aweek in an online game then it was for people spending 20-40 hours a week in front of their television and at movie theatres.

Wow. I missed this gem the first time around. Given that most developed countries have more vacancies than there are people to fill them, this is pretty silly. I don't know what the situation is in the USA, but in the UK and the rest of western Europe there is a shortage of skilled people to fill all the vacancies - most people who are long term unemployed but are well enough to work are unemployed because they lack the skills required of them. This is certainly the case in the UK.

What Dagmar said!

That's not practical. It's deluded, insane and completely unsupportable. I'm convinced that you don't actually believe this and that you are just leading us on because you get your jollies by saying things that are so preposterous that they apall normal people. Either that or you are flat out insane.

Young people are the core of society. Young people are addicted to online gaming. Therefore, LL has a rsponsibility to stabilize the grid, make it totally financially secure, implement some sort of titled ownership to land that doesn't exactly exist, etc... so that the addicts can actually produce an income while feeding their addiction.

Look at what you're saying. It's not as offensive as when you claimed that WoW players went through similar psychological traumas as Iraq war veterans, but it is every bit as insane. INSANE! I wish I could yell at you. It's frustrating even reading this because you seem to be mentally incapable of actually understanding that your position is completely bizarre.

As for me not getting it, I get it just fine. I even admitted that I thought internet addiction/gaming addiction was a real phenomenon. I also get that everything you said after that is just wrong. I honestly don't know what you mean by your comment about pandering.

Really? She said that? hahahaha.

The only psychological traumas WoW players would get is when they realise with horror that a certain someone has joined their raiding party, I imagine.

Unfortunately, yes. When she said that, though, the actual Iraq war veterans on the forums here were deeply insulted and hurt. Frankly, I believe she said it to purposely be hurtful to them, and I just can't comprehend that sort of lack of humanity and compassion, so I gave up and muted her. In a display of stupidity all my own, I took her off of my ignore list because I hate ignoring people. I'll leave her off on the off chance I get an explanation of what the hell she was talking about when she accused me of pandering, or whatever she meant by that, but then she's going right back on.

Why god, why must I sleep??? Four pages of so many opportunities lost.

I get to Rebecca in a minute.

But first it saddens me no one actually answered me about whether secondlife.com has a SPACE in it on people's bills? I had had a small glimmer of hope this thread could still churn out a wee bit of useful information. Without any further info at this time, I'm still left to assume the charges did not even originate from LL hosts, and that "SECOND LIFE.COM" was a spoofed debit name.

My PayPal statement shows "Linden Research, inc". Not sure if it would show the same on a credit card as on paypal though. I'm in the UK like the OP.

I'm beginning think you ARE the OP

The OP R 2 much ov @ l33t haxXxorz 2 B me.

Now for Ms. ProudOne,

I'd like to believe Trout's theory you're making this up just to get a rise. Sadly I've worked with enough academics to know your whole hearted belief in everything that spews from your own mouth is far more likely. Especially anyone who's even looked at a Psych101 course description.

However, much like a troll, you desperately want other people to hear your message too. And I'm sick of wasting my energy on it. But I'll give you a cookie: I will continue playing with you if you answer me but ONE question:

Where would the money come ***FROM***???!???
(damn can somebody loan me a few L$ I need to go buy more punctuation.)

You want people who play online games way too much to be able to earn a livable wage by doing so. Hell sign me up! I'm all for it.

Where would the money come from?

And now you also want their therapists to get paid for treating them too, even there the cause is hopeless and their demise should be expedited. (I sense a glimmer of your underlying motive to sell your cockamamie theory: a growing massive supply of incurable patients, oh oooh splooge). But again I must ask:

Where would the money come from?

You insist LL need to fix up the servers and implement impenetrable security and anti bots/scam/spam/etc ridding it of illegal user content and just generally make your personal experience happier.

Where would the money come from?

Oh and of course immediately reimburse with no questions asked anyone who cries "Linden stole my money" without any valid supporting evidence. But of course, no one should have their billing info on file, because LL are all crooks. So if no users ever give LL payment info...

Where would the money come from?
(bet no one saw that coming)


------
Oh, and if you EVV-AR use the word "practical" in any way shape or form in reference to yourself, your going straight into my ignore list, do not pass go, do not collect L$200, all other offers immediately void and prohibited.

My last payments showed "Second Life.com" with a space. That is from the U.S.

hrm, that furthers the theory then on it being an ingame $L purchase, possibly by someone in the USA. Given that exchange rate of approx 1.9 I had immediately suspected a USD transaction. Chaos, do you normally get billed by SL thru the US??? I wonder how LL determines where to bill thru? Given some past posts, I also hafta wonder if THEY know. :-/

at 1 GPB -> 1.9 USD and 1 USD -> 264 L$ (from LidenX) I get about L$154,000 for 307 pounds.

Given all that I would join with some of those earlier and speculate someone from the US got ahold of Chaos's unhackable password and purchased a freshly rezzed cube with a pricetag of L$150,000...the plot thickens.

My bills come from Second Life.com with a space. Not sure about upper/lowercase. I'm in the US, but was being billed through Ireland due to the payment method business mentioned earlier in the thread. I haven't been billed by the US billing system yet.

US here. I got some lindens the other day and my paypal statement shows:

LINDEN LAB SAN FRANCISCO CA

This thread has been moderated and is on warning that it contains far too much trolling and flaming.

See forum GUIDELINES, link above. "Trolling (...written with the intent of inciting or getting argumentative opinions)...[is] strongly discouraged."

Forum Guidelines state: "Flaming, Spamming, Trolling – Flaming (posting a message that is intended to incite anger or directly attack a person or persons), *Spamming (multiple posts of the same topic or discussion),* and Trolling (a post with an intentionally contrary opinion written with the intent of inciting or getting argumentative opinions) are strongly discouraged. If you think your post might be over-reactive, or that it might fall into one of these definitions, please reconsider posting."

If violations continue and this thread is not a constructive discussion it will be closed.

thank you,
-- Katt Linden

*rubs eyes and peers at post above again*

Hey, moderation!

OK, this might confuse matters a bit.

When I WAS a premium account holder until a few months ago, I paid with my (Australian) American Express card (no foreign transaction fees, and fraud protection ).

The biller for my payments was listed as "SECONDLIFE.COM" ..... NO space.

mine says Linden Lab San Fracisco CA

when i purchase lindens IN world it says Second Life London

Definitely not with the Havoc 4 Engine

Same here - I live in the US and am billed with Second Life.com through the Irish bank. (Which I hope is going to stop or at least the foreign transaction fees when I change payment method.)

I really think that LL needs to get it's billing act together. First off, it should all have the same name with location amended. For example: Linden Research Inc. US or Linden Research Inc Ireland. None of this Secondlife.com/Second Life, or other forms. This way, there is no doubt about who is billing and one can reasonably report all others as fraudulent.

Also, they need to make absolutely sure that they have the North American/South American billing going to their US bank and all else going to their overseas. Also, they need to make sure that the overseas stuff needs to get to the Ireland bank. It's simply unfair to make us pay foreign transaction fees where they have branches.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for this.