Was My Credit Card Charged?!

Don't tell me you charged the credit card I signed up with after giving me only one day freakin notice by email without even telling me how to cancel.

Um, so far as I understand it, you shouldn't have been charged. Did a charge you believe to be from Linden Labs show up on your bill?

I don't know where you get that idea??! If it's about the going commercial thing it only starts in June and it clearly states that you will not be charged automatically. Also when signing up it states something like that.
Obviously you should try to READ a little better before you post stupid question!

Through beta, a credit card is only used for ID purposes. Once SL goes public and is released in June, you will have to sign up again, this time everyone using a credit card to purchase it. Only then will you be charged.

Aurelie is correct.

well I realize that there will be a charge to participate in this game but why a june release? This game is by no means ready for that soon of a release. I figured another 6 months at least, this game is loaded with bugs, how can they think it will be ready by June? There's still crash bugs with uploading images and sounds, camera glitches, login problems and lots of lag in certain Sims. There's linking problems and problems with The Sim crashing if certain actions are performed with scripts. Not saying this game won't be good, but it could be ALOT better. If Sony or some big publisher were to come along and take the game to the new level this would be the way to go. Just some general observations and not comparisons with EA's problems with online games.

Here's an article published in Gamepro May issue. Titled Ea's online woes.



Electronic Arts announced that it will dissolve EA.com, it's online games division. and consolidate its operations into the core outfit, in what amounts to a retreat from its large scale plans for the PC online games marketplace. According to a stetement, the company will take a one time charge of $55 million to $75 million to cover the costs associated with the consolidation. That comes 5 months after EA spent $14 million to lay off 240 EA.com workers and restructure the struggling division.

EA.com lost $3.3 million in the 3 month period ending December 2002, an improvement over the $6.7 million they lost during the same quarter in 2001. The division was planning to turn a profit in the financial quarter ending March 31, but gave up its goal after The Sims Online launched late and didn't sell up to the parent companies expectations. An estimated 85,000 paying customers were playing The Sims Online as of february, a far cry from the 200,000 EA was expecting to storm the servers by April.

The heavily vaunted online division of Electronic Arts began business in 1997 with Ultima Online, a groundbreaking MMORPG and still its most popular title, with approximately 230,000 subscribers. However that's still fewer than for Sony's Everquest which launched in 1999 and currently supports over 400,000 users. Many of EA's other projects- including ambitious psychological thriller Majestic and multiplayer racer Motor City Online- were sales flops (Motor City Online will officially be shut down in August.)

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Ea's online space exploration game Earth and Beyond has sold only 53,000 copies since its launch last Spetember. Now Second Life has the advantage of being just simple download that's free and then all you pay is monthly. The problem with that is that they require users to have a cable modem and many people still don't have cable modems. This game will be great don't get me wrong once all the bugs are worked out I just can't see how they can justify a June release with so many bugs still present.

I don't mean to compare Linden Labs to Ea or Sony or anyone else, but they are the big dogs and I just can't see SL becoming that big. I really truly hope once all the bugs are worked out I'm proven wrong cause I'm totally addicted to Second Life. I just hate to see the game go down really fast because they only will support cable modem users. I guess only time will tell, that's all I had to say. This post was not meant to make people mad, just aware.

Those are some valid issues/concerns, Neo Valen. Your post should probably be its own thread, rather than buried at the end of this one.

Hmm I don't know... the good thing about SL is the amount of servers. They can increase when more people join, or stay the same when there are not many people playing.
The games that go 'down' are usually 'big' games that COUNT ON 200.000 players and buy the servers in advance... I think SL won't go down that fast, even when not too many people come at first.
But I do agree that they should wait until they got all the bugs out of the game.
Maybe they should stop making new features now and start smashing bugs. When they've done that they can go commercial.
But remember big games like UO etc. have bugs all the time. It's not that uncommon in massive online games.