Lindex: 2000 per month limit? Wasn't that 2000 per day before?

Ok explain this one please - what are you talking about? What makes you think that the elligibility has anything to do with land sales/leasing/renting/swapping/borrowing/squatting or whatever the fuck you want to call trading money for virtual real estate?

Yeah, fuck Linden Lab for trying to offer solutions for customers who would be affected adversely by the limits. Just leave the $2000/USD limit in place and be done with it - it's not worth the headache of people complaining about options. Better yet, they should whine and then roll over and play dead and blame it on someone else. That worked wonders for GOM.

PS - did you not read what Lawrence said about why it hadn't been announced yet?

There's a HUGE L$ involved.

What if I bought 20 islands and started selling them off in chunks to people, calling them land sales, when in fact they're just paying me for the right to lease them.

Now LL has told everyone those are not land sales, only LL can sell land.

But I go on marketing it as land sales.

Does that keep me off the FIC tier?

What gave you any indication that it would? If anything, I would think it would establish your elligibility.

WEll I emailed Lawrence about a dozen times to let me beta test Lindex.

He didn't let me on. Why should I expect him to let me on the FIC tier?

I emailed him several times too, and he didn't let me on either - though I wasn't specifically denied, just never heard back. This is what you are basing all of this on?

1st You should email [email]finance@lindenlab.com[/email]

2nd The rules should be clear: as long as you are

a) biding by the TOS
b) are transacting X amount of currency on a weekly basis for the last month
c) haven't had any problems with paying your bills or transfering currency into your account via paypal/cheque

You will automatically get bumped immediately.

I had no problem with the GOM guys and talking to them directly and personally, but they also didn't have the power to shut me down.

If they started acting irresponsibly, they would have gotten in trouble with LL and other customers.

But who watches over LL? Nobody. There are no other games in town, so when LL starts to abuse this position, which they do, I have nothing left to do except express my outrage and frustration.

Blaze, it seems like a stretch that not being able to transfer more than US $2000 in a month is limiting freedom. Does freedom=ability to make or spend money? That's a lot of cash. If I were LL I wouldn't be rushing to put things in writing when dealing with that kind of cash either until I figured out what works.

It's not limiting Blaze's freedom, especially since they already have mechanisms in place to raise the limits on a per customer basis. Blaze just doesn't like that someone gets to approve of whether or not they are allowed to go over that limit.

If I'm reading this quote correctly Blaze also doesn't want his freedom limited.

No one said for them to take their hands off the wheel. If they see something kinky going on, they gotta act! For all of our sakes.

But they don't need to insinuate themselves into the process in order to do that. They can monitor without being personal gatekeepers.

And, to be competely honest, why is a web programmer doing risk analysis? He's a great web programmer, don't get me wrong, but that hardly qualifies him to be making go/no go decisions about my business.

Blaze,

Does it say anywhere that Lawrence alone makes the determination on who gets to go over the limit, or even makes that deterimination at all? I have not seen this anywhere. You seem to just have some personal thing against Lawrence for some reason.

And it's really not just this, it's a long road of a lot of acts of personal arrogance that LL acting out.

Frankly, it started with the Islands and the poor choices they made there - they should have created an auctionable island and allowed for land sales to occur on them. It would have been a minor code change, but a huge improvement.

And then there was screwing over GOM. I didn't mind that so much, because it was in the pipeline, but the fact that Philip refused to offer any olive branches and the arrogant answer he had in the Julian Dibbel article which showed his true face about that. It just showed that he didn't think his community was worth the effort to deal with.

I thought the deal with SLPics was terrible, but Cristiano, you aren't complaining so I obviously can not. I suppose the quid pro quo is holding up there as long as people go to slpics for picture archival material. I still think they owed you more.

And then there was taking the islands off the grid. Apparently this is a bug and when it gets fixed, I'll feel less inclined to think of LL as pure arrogance, but until its fixed .. well, I'm sorry they simply don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore.

And then there was remark regarding not competing with MetaAdverse and then the David Linden remarks about signing up advertising. How do you reconcile the two? Obviously MetaAdverse is going to be competed with and Philip could have been more honest about that.

And then the developer list. Don't get me started there. The lack of object qualifications to get on the Developer list is pure FICCing nonsense, I've seen that in action and it's brutal.

Now there is this setup, where we need to get the blessing of some web programmer at SL in order to get to a FIC tier.

It's just a cascade of problems, one after another, that are coming to a head. It's just proven to me that unless you fit into a very narrow field of content developer (which I do) there is little opportunity or interest on LLs part for you to expand your business.

This saddens me, a lot because of what's already happened, but even more so because of what's likely coming next.

I have nothing against Lawrence, really, he's obviously a very(!) talented and ambitious web programmer. No doubt, I were in his shoes, I might try the same thing.

Hell, who doesn't want to be the gatekeeper?

What I am frustrated with is a company that lets its process be defined in this way.

Another arrogant point: lack of roadmap.

You don't know how many times I begged them for some kind of roadmap about what they were doing do. I always thought it was obvious to anyone they were going to do their own SLExchange ... so why didn't they tell us? They obviously didn't think we were worth their time to warn.

In the end, there really is only one answer, and which is kinda obvious - don't trust LL, don't build anything that you can't plug into there.com or Slcompetitor.com and pray to god a competitor comes along so you can jump ship at the first opportunity, or at least play the two of them off each other.

I suppose at the end of the day, my real frustration here isn't so much at linden labs but the lack of competition.

For the life of me, I have no idea why you stay, let alone operate a business, in an environment you think is so lacking and riddled with hidden agendas and conspiracy.

If you're worried that your paranoia driven attacks on LL and their level of competence is going to preclude you from a business or currency trader tier, I think you know what you need to <not> do.

While I 100% doubt that they would preclude you because of the way you drag them through the mud on a daily basis, there is something to be said for the addage about biting the hand that feeds you.

P.S. You really have no place to talk about arrogance. You reek of it.

Post #29 in this very thread?

Yeah, I got two IMs from you, Philip sent you the testing information and and you never got back to us acknowleging the terms of the beta test.

Your account probably already qualifies for the business tier 1. All you have to do is inquire. Not to satisfy some whim of mine, but so that you follow the same basic process as everyone else. This isn't about playing favorites.

Cheers,
Lawrence

My appologies, I thought we'd sent you an invite, but looking back through my records it appears that was probably not the case.

Sorry,
Lawrence

I agree, there should be an email alias for this... but since I was forced to get info about this out this weekend I couldn't get one setup immediately.



And that's pretty much exactly how it works.



Philip, Cory, our board, our auditors, etc. If we really screw up, our competitors will eat our lunch by better meeting the needs of the market.

Cheers,
Lawrence

Probably because I'm automating checks for most everything we've learned about fraud patterns, and I'm attempting to expand my horizons. I do have experience investigating fraud in MMOs; I did a lot of data analysis to detect and prevent fraud for Ultima Online in my final year and a quarter at EA.

I'm not doing it all myself either, we have other folks in our employ who specialize in handling fraud cases and they're doing an awesome job of assisting me during the week, which in turn helps free up more of my time to automate more of the fraud checks.

Quite frankly the things we're looking at for the tier upgrade decision really aren't that complex. It's really quite straight forward. The review only takes a few minutes, and most of that time is waiting for some of the automated tools to do their job. We're not looking at your business model, and we're not checking every action you've ever taken against the TOS.

And I'm not making go/no-go decisions about your business. LindeX is not the only place you can exchange L$. Some of the other exchanges are listed here.

Cheers,
Lawrence

Well, unfortunately this weekend it is working out that way... but next week I hope to have a feature added to the customer service tools whereby anyone in customer service can do this. This is yet another by-product of rushing this out this weekend since I failed to forsee the uproar about the default tier's monthly sell limit. I was too focused on the positive aspects of increasing the < 45 day buy limits, and effectively removing the daily limits from the default tier.

I really have no desire to be some sort of sole gatekeeper for this process.

Cheers,
Lawrence

After reading this thread, I do feel a little better. Everything you are saying makes sense, so I will just have to believe it

I do want to thank you for all of the work you have done getting LindeX up and running. I hope to see the automated tools that you speak of really soon.

I'm not arrogant, merely confident. Arrogance is when you abuse your power.

Lawrence,

Just to be clear, I wasn't concerned about it in the slightest. I was using it as an example in response to Blaze's reasoning as to why you would have it out for him. It's all just rather silly. Keep up the good work.