Are individual SL businesses fungible?

Except for the fact that when you pull it out it's all wet.

If the fault is clearly not LL's fault - they merely followed the standard procedures that everyone else is bound by - I don't see why they should get the flak from renters for the landlord's mistake.

Lewis

Lewis,

Excellent post (the long one).

I think all customers should be treated equally...BUT this doesn't mean that I think that I should be given the same resources/treatment as she who was suspended. But it should be open and obvious, and available to all.

I see it like the tier system: you pay X amount, you get Y amount of land, you pay Z amount, you get Q amount of land. No unfairness, just a scale of charges and a level of access to land. This should be the same. Scale of spending, you get a level of access to the company, (*begin edited addition*) BUT the rules should be the same for everybody. One of the frustrating parts about she who was suspended and her business has been watching the rules bend drastically for her only, while everyone else has had to keep within them. I don't think that sort of differentiation is acceptable, and it is very confusing.

She who was suspended began "selling" land on private islands which is specifically not sellable. She tells me that LL was fully in agreement with this even though it was in contravention of the rules applying to everyone else in the game. THAT sort of special treatment just muddies the rules, and can be seen to maintain unfair practices. Even knowing if it is true that LL endorse the behaviour, seems difficult.(*end edited addition*)

That having been said, I think that there are few companies who are going to offer to manage your funds for you unless you pay them a hefty fee in addition. I really *don't* think that any special treatment would extend to overlooking this sort of shortfall, and I'm not sure that it ever should.

My thoughts were with the customers of she who was suspended, but also with the potential damage to the platform and (lastly) to her, through anger and maybe impatience. I expect we have all done it, firing off emails or postings in the heat of the moment and then regretted it later.

Maybe it isn't regretted by she who was suspended...but I certainly felt that some of the things which were being said in that thread might damage the companies involved...and I don't think that it is in our interests to destabilize either, frankly.
Cali

For sure Lewis, I agree, however people aren't always logical. They'll be frustrated, and looking to blame someone, and it's not always the person at fault that wears the blame.

I read something else totally different into that the first time

Yes, I agree, that's highly likely.

If it was purely game money, then I would work hard to earn it, obtain an island, landscape it, put in a transport network and subdivide it to sell plots on to other players, playing the market against everyone else in the same business. I'd go for Lewisville but there's already a similar named place in Kentucky.

But it's not game money, it's real money, and a lot of it, so I can't. Even though the US$ > UK£ exchange rate works very much in my favour, it's still less than I can comfortably lose. It's like gambling, you go to a casino with $50, if you lose it all it's not a big deal because thats what you went expecting to lose. If you come out of it with $20 in your pocket, you lost some, but it wasn't all bad. You might come out with $75 in your pocket, which is even better.

But one thing that many people do forget with gambling - for every winner, there are hundreds of losers, and more often than not you'll be one of the hundreds.

Lewis

Lewis, surely you can treat it as game money if that's how you want to treat it. Just start small with the $L you have, and see if you can parlay that into something larger. Only risk the 'game money' you made, and if you lose it, don't think about the US$ it could have been. As long as you're not pulling out money from your RL pocket, you're only risking so much. If you see it as game money, then it shouldn't matter if you lose some.
It's exactly what I've done. I've continuously reinvested what I've earnt, and haven't let myself put any more RL money in since. I have a strict rule that I won't spend more than my stipend on fun stuff, everything else I save or reinvest.

And FYI, I'm not by nature a gambler, I loathe it. I won't even buy a lottery ticket.

There is no way that the loss of an in-game business could really hurt LL.

If they had to permanently ban Anshe for some reason, they'd have to ask all the residents to transfer paying their land fees from Anshe to LL, and to pay in US$ (although I think Anshe mostly takes the money in US$ now - is that right...?

You can't consider it purely game money because you need the US$ for tier .

Just make paying tier part of the game.

There's no reason not to take it at face value, I don't see any big issues that suggest a hidden agenda and "a simple billing error" on a friday is a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything that's happened. I've seen much worse.

And if it is some kind of anti-Anshe tactic, I think you're too sanguine about it.At the same time, they have to wonder if they can trust a Linden Labs who's willing to burn a big customer like that.

And Anshe isn't so big as to squash competition. There's several large island complexes now, like the dAlliez and Azure islands. Anyone who's hanging back for fear of competing with Anshe isn't thinking straight.

Again, going by public statements made, this was a 1% error or delay in payment over the course of a couple years due to a firm that has - seemingly "net payable in zero days" - terms, which is quite unusual in arrangements of this magnatude. If I saw this happen between any other two firms I would call it an absurdity, even more so if the claim of five times that pending payment from party B to A against that due A to B is true. International accounts receivable often does require a little more patience than none.

I don't disagree that there would probably be entrepreneurs that would fill the gap, but as you suggest that would happen in the "long term" as described in SL terms; if player X agreed to "buy out" player A, how long - using historic examples - would it take that transfer to effect?

I don't disagree that all would settle in some matter of months, and I can't even say if the new configuration would be better or worse for any of the parties. What I do see as almost inevitable is that much ill-will would have been bred somewhere.

Please don't infer that any of this means that I have any particular sympathies toward any of the primary parties involved. I certainly do have an interest in the short-term "fates" of the players who would have been displaced through no fault of their own and for the furtherance of the "platform" as a whole, especially as an arena for relatively secure experiments in commerce.

I gotta say it

"Me, too!"

I agree, actually. My account was once suspended when my credit card exp date didn't match (got a new card, forgot to update my info) and I owed a tier fee for a really small amount of land. (which I didn't even own anymore, but it was my mistake for not tiering down). I'm glad to see LL finally treat everyone the same.

So long as you never cash out, and do it entirely on in-game funds, then it is game money. You would never have real funds at risk.As long as you never cash out and convert L$ to US$ only within Linden's accounting system, you're still aren't risking any real money.

i have to say, posting a private billing problem to the forum was a great marketing move by anshechung.com.

[imbedded plug]
i wish larsenshops.com had some dhrama to post in the forum...
[/imbedded plug]

to voice my opinion on this. It doesn't NECESSARILY become real money until you have the money sent to your paypal or a check mailed. An example

A group of people working very hard in game managed to save enough L$ to sell on Lindex to turn around and buy an island. They now do the same and pay their tier the same way. But because they do it this way there is NO out of pocket expense. By this I mean no credit card is ever billed.

It is possible to do this. In this case even putting the money through LINDEX its still not real cash, its still game money in another form.