Purged of Intellectual Property... Is this fair?!

Actually as a Landlord you use your discretion and its based on case by case history.
I have had some residents that have been with me between 1 to 2.5 yrs...and who always pay their tiers on time. Recently 1 of those "established" residents hadn't made their payment on the due date, and I didn't hear from either of them, they hadn't logged in for a few weeks......so what do I do?
It ended up being nearly 4 weeks over due......it transpires they move homes and it took an age to have the ISP connected as their new farm (Canada) as it was out in the middle of nowhere.
I'm glad i gave them the benefit of the doubt and they promptly paid 2 months upon their return. I wasn't trigger happy....i didn't reclaim the land, I didn't return objects.....common sense prevailed which told be something abnormal had happened.

By contrast if it had happened with a new'ish resident with a track record of not making prompt payments and then one day they disappear......i would not give them 4 weeks grace.
In fact this too happened recently with 2 very new'ish residents just going awol and pass their due dates.....in the end i reclaimed 1 land after 8/9 days and the other 2 weeks. Neither ever returned or IM me....actually not quite true, 1 has recently sneaked back in, but refuses to reply to any IM's sent. Here my judgement wasn't too smart.....i should have reclaimed both lands after say 4 or 5 days and thus minimise my tier loss.

I understand - as a RL landlord I use the same discretion.

Well of course they are with their current (excessive) Land Tier structure......plus all the money generating gimmicks they get involved in.

Cough, splutter.....Open Space sims.....cough, splutter...choked!

I've read through an old thread "Introducing T Linden: What would you do to improve premium subscriptions?" at

/352/6f/293887/1.html

In it someone cited M Linden as saying that LL doesn't make money on premium subscriptions. Meaning the $72/year or however you break it down, not the tier payments.

It made me wonder why LL wants us to have premium accounts.

I propose that LL do away with premium accounts, and allow basic accounts to buy land.

LL wants what every landlord wants: that rent (tier) be paid each month.

I don't think that premium members are more likely to make timely payments, but I guess LL does. In other words, what they get from us buying premium memberships is a sense of reassurance: that we are good at paying our rent.

Without the complication of premium memberships, land ownership and tier would be simpler, and LL could do something like what RL landlords do:

When a user defaults on their payments, LL could cut off all access to their land. No one can enter until payments are brought up to date. Maybe a fine could be assessed. But no property (inventory) is destroyed.

Then, after 30 days, if payments aren't brought up to date, all objects are returned and the land reverts to LL ownership.

.

Seven, that makes too much sense.

That kind of thing makes sense whether you call the landowners premium residents or not.

As long as it doesn't cost LL anything to do that. In RL, the landlord has to pay for someone to move the items to storage, then pay for storage.

But as far as a "message".....you are telling premium subscriptions that they may come and go as they please, and that there are no ramifications if you pay one month, and not the next.....and that cycle could continue on and on. Having to deal with each person on retrieving their inventories every time that happens, certainly involves some manpower. Also by requiring that they continue to pay with ramifications for not paying...sort of ensures that they will continue on with "activity."

Good suggestion Seven!

This is how I see a sensible scenario: you don't pay, your account gets locked, after a month your land gets reclaimed. You pay within a month, in full, you aren't getting a "free month". You pay that month after then, you get back in, but you lost your land... but you keep the account and inventory. You wait any later, you still have to pay the back pay, plus you have to pay $10.00 to re-open the account. But you still don't lose the inventory.

The problem isn't "nobody wants any consequences", they don't think a metaphorical death sentence is *reasonable* consequences.

There's no "retrieving the inventories". There's no technical reason for them to be deleted in the first place. IF they pay everything to get the account back, including the standard reinstatement fee, you just flip the switch to turn it on again.

Now if they don't do anything for a YEAR, maybe that's different, but we're looking at people getting wiped after a couple of months. That's just bad business.

Well, again, speculation....but definitely a service fee to re-open the account. The consequences certainly keep me logging in every day, and that's what I'm trying to say as far as to why it might make sense to have the premium accounts - to keep the activity and commitment level up. Would be nice to take a month off - but just can't do that.

As far as "retrieving the inventories"....I do realize that could be done with a click of the button, but you still have to pay the customer service rep handling the issue for time spent in communication. And what if someone does it in January.....then again in May....then again in November.

No, I don't mean "it can be done with a click of the button", I'm saying "there's no reason it's necessary to design things so they NEED to be recovered". All they need to do is re-enable the account, WHICH THEY ALREADY DO, for a $10.00 fee WHICH THEY ALREADY DO.

And yes, there's consequences. Losing your land is a consequence.

To be honest this is another fail on LL's behalf given the state of the Mainland landscape (i.e amount of Land for Sale or Abandoned lands). Even lands at 2L per sqm are not shifting.

I have 2 premium a/c Avatars for Mainland owning purposes.....to be honest there's no real benefit of having them.....for the poxy little stripends? nope! The Concierge support for having over 1/2 SIM? Nope...I'd get that anyway as an EstateOwner. There's no real reason to have these Premium subscription imo.......in fact one could argue if they abandoned it completely it might encourage many more people to buy Mainland plots...afterall the Mainland tier structure is pretty favourable when compared to Estate Tiers or rents.........and surely an increase in take up of Mainland plots would ultimately increase their overall Tier income ........and maybe, just maybe adequately compensating the Lab for the loss Premium a/c fees.

I foresee more Mainland being abandoned as people find it increasingly difficult to sell. I mean if it got to the stage, whereby you couldn't sell the land in that given month at fairly low price...why hold on to it?......surely there are bigger savings to be had from being Tier-free and going back to a Basic a/c (i.e simply abandon the land if its not a large plot)

I puzzled on this one for a bit then the light bulb dawned. (Been a long day ) Sounds like a good idea and one I might adopt if I decide to continue being premium when my renewal period arrives.

I think they should open mainland ownership to all people who can pay for it,PIOF is all that is required. I never liked the elitism of only Premiums can own land. Give a basic landowner the right to buy land, even give him the free 512. And that's it. Give Premiums maybe 1024 free, the stipend, and whatever else they can think of, maybe free texture uploads or something.

I'm just making an argument for Consistency. No consequences would lead to inconsistency on whether or not premium accounts continue to log in and continue to pay. Continuing to pay, more or less motivates you to some level of activity...even if minimal...otherwise you would let it slide.

Losing inventory for most people, is a much bigger consequence than losing land.

I don't mean to sound heartless to the OP - - would bum me out totally to lose everything, and I've not really made a huge effort to back it up. But I know that I may log in on any given day, and it could all be gone for a number of reasons, so anything that I didn't do to prepare reasonably for this, is my fault. And I certainly know to watch the SL account when payment due date is coming around, and to make sure that CC info is current. Not even saying that is a guarantee, because Ironically - my account has stated that CC info is in the (update pending) mode for one whole year, (although it still works)....and LL reps keep telling me that if it isn't broke, don't fix it. Maybe I will be crying in my beer next week.

So am I. If you don't pay you lose the benefits of premium membership (the land) and you lose some money (the $10.00 reinstatement fee), but you don't lose the stuff you had if you never upgraded to premium (the account an inventory)... on that you're at par with the Basic account.

OK....make it $25.00 and you have a deal.

Why $25.00?

The charge for reinstating a canceled account is $10.00. That seems a reasonable baseline.

Chris, I did not get an e-mail every time the ToS changed, and it's not that I refused to pay the bill, the card on file was dated, and I didn't realize it.

Yes, I agreed to a ToS over 6 years ago. Did they send me notice every time it changed in the last 6 years? Nope, nor have they ever.

The fact of the matter is, this is unjustified regardless of the fact it's "Policy".

Another note, no one cares if LIFE is or is not fair, so stop stating the obvious. The question in the first post of the thread was is THIS fair. Enough of your "Life isn't fair" statements, and null & void comparisons which have absolutely no barring to the virtual world.

Why charge anything?

If a premium member misses a payment, drop them back to basic automatically. If they have land, lock them out of it until they pay up their tier and premium fees. If they don't within a reasonable time, return their stuff and auction it.

Unless they actually owe Linden Lab money, is there any reason to even lock the account?

Would anyone know if there is somewhere I could possibly obtain the ToS from 2003? And as an added bonus, the ToS revisions in between?

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://secondlife.com is probably your best shot.

From 2003:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030419133118/lindenlab.com/TOS.pdf

The "two months" figure has been mentioned several times in this thread -- but there is no two months. We're not talking about people sliding for a couple of months, getting services that they're not paying for. If you miss a payment, you have one week to make it up. One week, and then your account is locked and you can't get in-world. Thirty days after that, if you haven't paid up, your stuff gets deleted. If they've changed that policy, it must have been in the past 3 weeks.

And no, Chris, we're not talking about people skipping out in the middle of the night. I went back and forth with support for two weeks last month, once I knew I might have to miss a payment, trying to get clear information about whether my premium alt would also be in danger given that she'd paid a year in advance and so couldn't downgrade. (Because their policy is that if you've been honest about identifying your alts, they'll be locked too even if they're still in good standing.) And Linden Lab was the only company I do business with who didn't think keeping my business and continuing to get my money in the future was worth negotiating to make payment arrangements for this one difficult month. Landlords? Believe me, they'd much rather keep a proven customer around than kick me out over one late bill and _hope_ they can find someone else in this economy to take my expensive apartment.

Yes, enforcing a policy is perfectly fair. The policy itself is unfair, however, when compared to the policies for basic accounts. And all notions of fairness are irrelevant next to the fact that it's simply stupid and bad business to take historically good customers who are having a temporary hardship or accidental billing mishap, piss them off, and remove any reason they might have had to give you more money once their hassle has cleared up. It's just... stupid. Throwing away thousands of dollars over the next few years for the sake of $40 that's not even six weeks late? Supremely inexpressibly stupid.

OK, that's inexcusably stupid. Seven days in arrears and you get locked, 30 days and your account is terminated? I'm pretty sure that if someone said to Chris "I'm sorry, I can't pay for the kitchen until December" he might not install it in November but he'd be an idiot if he threw the cabinet out after 30 days.

Chance, nobody gets an email when the ToS changes, but each time it changes, you can't log into SL unless you agree to the new ones. It comes with the login screen. So...

Just how long is it since you last used your account before you discovered that you were locked out of it? It's no good going back to the 2003 ToS. If you've been logging in, then you've been agreeing to ToS changes all along, and if you haven't been logging in since back then, why would you imagine that your inventory should be intact?

When was the last time you were asked to agree to a TOS change when you logged in?