SL screws me for the last time. Rant about groups and land.

If you're renting land, the renters will all want to be able to set Home to their apartment/condos. But you can't do it unless you're in a group that owns the land.

Easy enough, you create a group, and deed the land to the group.

Now you invite all your renters to the group, and they are happy.

While I was careful to make sure I only invited users as members, and not officers, the system is setup so that when you sell the land, ALL members of a group get an equal cut of the money. Being the first time I sold land, this was news to me. So now I have over $300 USD worth of $L equally split among 20 of my renters.

Maybe some will give it back, others will pretend they didn't get the message... who knows.

Live Help? They tell you tough luck, even though you can show that you were the owner, only your accounts were officers and every single member was a renter. There is no customer service, only 'fuck you' coming from the Lindens.

Sorry you got screwed out of your money when you sold your land. Though if you look at this from their PoV this was a player mistake and not a program error. My understanding is that technically this was, unfortunatly, your mistake.

Like all other MMO realms unless their software caused the problem they I assume under their policy can't and more then likely won't do anything to resolve it. Yes I am playing devils advocate here. LL didn't screw you out of anything nor are they doing so now. You made a bad mistake

I do hope you get all the funds back. Knowing people in general thats all wishful thinking. Again sorry this happened to you, but LL isn't "screweing"you out of anything. You unfortunatly did it to yourself.

Chalk it up to experience

Thats why you segment off the land you are selling, set it to sell for 0L to yourself only, buy it -then sell- with all the profits going to you only.

oh man im so sorry to hear that, second life support is pretty lame on that. They don't really warn you about much like that and no one would really know about this until someone told them. I almost did the exact same thing but my friend gave me a heads up because he did the exact same thing you did. Second Life really really REALLY lacks out on warning boxes, it is so easy to accidentally buy land and then it takes from your credit card, or it's so easy to accidentally click one button while browsing land, you click purchase and BOOM, your tier is upgraded with out much warning. It would be nice if they gave a little warning box saying "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS". Of course Linden is always ready to take your money and never really happy to give it back. If linden was eager to give money back, they would also input a "sell linden" feature in game but no they only put a "buy linden currency" feature in game. Most places have a warning before you buy something to confirm you know what you're doing, but linden really missed out on that. It is pretty sad they are like that, lame i might add but i guess thats life. Linden the Lame. They have a great game but they are just so happy to take your money with it that it really does hurt a lot of players. THe world could be a lot happier if they added little things like warning dialogs so you can confirm what you are actually doing. Too many people just click.

Warnings do take place now on land purchase.

Useful tip. This should go into the notecards folks give out on how group land works.

You now get a warning and some indication on what will happen to tier when buying land. That's a welcome change. I once went over tier for about 10 seconds because I had to juggle personal land and group owned land. Of course that put me into the $125/mo tier (from $75/mo).


Some may chide me for my own actions, but there is no indication that land sold would be split up among members. Officers is another matter - but when users NEED to be in the group that owns the land to set Home to an area, this is a really really bad thing and is poorly implimented. As I said, I've been buying land, but this is the first time I've sold land that was group owned. 17,000m of land is not something to shrug off.

Also consider that the Lindens know everything about my account. They know that I put in $450 USD to buy the L$ that was later used to buy the land. They can see that I put the land up for sale and they can see that the money was then split up among my renters. It's one thing if they can't help because they have no way of knowing who's right and who's wrong, but in my situation it's very clear cut.

They can't expect users to stay loyal and continue when the game has hidden gotchas that take away several hundred of your dollars without any indication.

That whole deal where members of a group get proceeds from the sale of group land seems to me to be a remnant of the way LL was thinking/hoping groups would be used, as opposed to the way they're really utilized by residents nowadays.

Has anyone ever used this little feature for the purpose it seems to be intended for? i.e. sold group land with the intent that the proceeds be split evenly amongst the members of the group?

One way around this that I saw someone use once for rental properties is to section off a little bit of land - say, in the corner of the property - and make THAT group owned. Have the renters set home to that section - make it like a mini gathering spot or something. The rest of the property can then still be owned by the landlord, as long as he doesn't mind cleaning up random prims on a regular basis (since he won't be able to clean up via what's set to group or not).

Is it? How are the Lindens to know you hadn't made some agreement with your renters to split the profit? Granted this would be unusual but they can't be expected to determine that it never happened.

They could even ask the renters. The group description is listed as "Rental group", and no one has put in any land into the group besides my account.

When renters are paying $25/week for an apartment - they aren't going to help me break even on tier fees, nevermind getting $300 of my money.

4 renters have now given me back my money. At least two of them haven't been on for a few months...

The problem with asking the renters - even assuming there's time to do it - is that they could come up with a different story.

anyway, it was important for me to sell the land to someone who would continue the rentals.

I needed to keep the group in tact so that the members could return home. But also because the objects on the land (Home, pool, furnishings) were group owned. When the land was sold, I'd invite the new owner in as an officer and quit the group on my accounts. This is the logical steps to take when you want to change hands but leave all the residents in place. At least that's what I thought..

Maybe then transfer the money manually then transfer the land to him using the selling tools allowing only him to buy it, say for L$0 or a small deposit.

But then you didn't know at the time, you do now, unfortunatly not much can be done as there isn't much evidence to say this was an accident. And recouping funds from other players can lead to all sorts of problems. For the players and possibly for the Lindens.

Something else you can do to help avoid this, and it is done for those who rent in the elfclan sims, is you can:

1) invite them to the group
2) let them set their home point
3) have them leave the group (or boot them)

They will keep the current home point.

This does require 3 people to keep the group active, but that's easier then the current mess.

(I know it's to late for this case, but it could help others)

Some background:

My first account was created on 12/19/2005 - basically to test out SL. Within a few days, I had upgraded my account to prem and had my wife sign up too.

I then found a really great plot of land, and started buying all available land in the sim as it became available.

Almost all of the work I put in, was done during the first month of playing. I've invested a lot of time and effort into the game - when you consider how much I earn at my daily job, the $300 doesn't even pay for a few hours of my time. I'm developing content for the Lindens. And paying them $75/mo tier fee plus $22/quarterly * 3 accounts for that pleasure.


I also run a few websites that generate about 1.2 million page views a day. I put up a signup link to SL on the front page for a day and managed to get several dozen people to sign up. I did this because I could honestly recommend SL to others. It was a pretty cool place.


Here's some pics of the property that I got screwed on:

http://proxy.searchirc.com/4.jpg
http://proxy.searchirc.com/5.jpg
http://proxy.searchirc.com/7.jpg
http://proxy.searchirc.com/8.jpg


I'm done ranting about this. It's not going to do me any good, and I doubt the issue will be resolved, I just need to sell off the rest of my land and downgrade my accounts to free.

At least you won't make the same mistake witht he rest of your land. hopefully recoup some funds and not come out of this empty-handed. Be positive!

Just an update. The Linden's wrote back to my email and said I had to call their 800 number.

So I called it and was transfered to a "land expert".

After I explained the situation to the expert, I was told in a matter-of-fact voice that had I called him BEFORE I had sold the land, he would have gladly helped me. But now that the land is sold, they don't like to get involved and there is nothing he can do.

So you've heard it here first - call the Lindens up *before* you have a problem to report and they will help you, otherwise you're SOL.

We used it in Jouppi to split the proceeds from half a sim of land we sold equally among all the family.

Whoops!

That's an expensive mistake, but as far as I can recall it does warn you about this when you deed land to a group.

I'm not sure you have a beef with Linden labs, any more than I have a beef with paypal for the $300 I'm out from when I bought a laptop from a guy and he reneged on the deal.

It's even easier than that for group-owned land.

You make the buyer an officer in the group, have them transfer tier into it and pay you the money, then pull your tier out and leave the group.

One can also set land to group, that way people in the group can set their home there, but the ownership of the land is not transfered to the group.

Interesting to know one have to call support and tell them one is planning to make a mistake.....