Buying land for a grou while account is downgrading

Hi all

I started the downgrade process back to a basic account recently as me and my rl partner realized it would be cheaper for just one of us to be premium with a higher tier and have all our land set to a group.

All the land is set to the group and it was all working out fine until I tried to buy some more land for the group today, despite being set as an "owner" in the group and having permission to buy land for the group I can't.

When I attempt to "buy for group" I just get a message saying that the buying information could not be retrieved as my account is in the process of downgrading (it's not due to be downgraded until August 30th).

Out of curiosity I tried to buy for myself rather than group thinking i could transfer it later by setting it for sale to my partner, but it won't let me do this either.

Surely as my account is paid up until August 30th I should still be able to buy land within my tier until then? And why would downgrading affect buying for a group which has plenty of available land usage and that I am the owner of?

Starting to think I should have waited until nearer the end of the month to start the downgrade process

Once you've initiated the downgrading process, you can't purchase any more land. It doesn't matter how long ahead you've paid already. And no, they won't refund you the money paid already for the rest of the month.

Yes that is true. I had the same problem when I tried to downgrade after finding out that I didn't need to be Premium to buy in a private estate. I had already purchased land as a Premium member but got that message as I tried to buy 12000m on the other side of the river in front of my property. I ended up having to call up LL and cancel the downgrade request. This took effect the next day and I was immediately able to complete the transaction.

You might want to try it that way and then downgrade again when you are sure you won't need anymore land. It is annoying that there is no warning that account level still ends up affecting your ability to buy in a private sim, but ultimately that is the sim owner's failure for implying that premium membership is not necessary for private purchase.

Yeah i figured a refund would be out of the question, least they could do is let you know that will be the case though

It's the buy for group thing that gets me though, i thought as long as i had the perms set in the group I could buy land for the group (assuming the group has available land) whether I was premium or not, i take it that isn't the case?

Didn't realise that either, i'm talking mainland but still interesting to know.. if the only way to buy land for a group is to be premium i guess i'll have to cancel my downgrade, even though the tier is handled under my partners account she prefers I do the buying and land management for her most of the time, any way to cancel the downgrade without calling? (i'm not in the us)

I would love to be able to point you to an e-mail address that promises quick response, but unfortunately I can't. I had to just call their billing support line like 5 times and finally got through. The guy must have immediately modified the account because by the time I logged in like an hour later it already said I was Premium again.

Ok thanks anyway, just submitted a support ticket, no idea if that will work but i'll give it a couple of days and see, if not I guess an expensive phone call is the answer

They really should make it clearer on the site though, it says "If you change your plan, it will become effective at your next billing date." that's pretty misleading.

It is a known bug (well, LL knows about it and says they are working on it) that while your account is in the status of downgrading you can't buy *any* land at all (not for yourself, not for a group), neither mainland nor estate (even though you wouldn't need to be premium to buy estate land anyways).

Someone interested in land on a SIM I manage had the same problem, the only way to help him was to join his group and buy the land for the group myself (well he gave me the money of course, hehe). When his account is "stable" again, we will transfer the land to him.

Send an email to billing. I did this and they were pretty quick, of course.

I had the same issue, though it was island property, not mainland, and no group involved.

I simply submitted a support ticket basically saying that I was attempting to purchase land, that I got an error message (quoted word for word), and that my account was in the downgrade process.

The situation was resolved in under 12 hours vis a vis my account downgrade being reversed.

I got the land, figured "before I forget..." and went back and initiated the downgrade again, only to be told there was more land available, and I had to do it all over again lol

It got resolved the 2nd time in the same time-frame. Thankfully, both instances were at a time of evening where it was nearing my time to go sleep anyway.

Hope that helps

Dea

Support ticket got picked up pretty quickly, downgrade was canceled earlier and my accounts back to normal.

Thanks for your help all

well LL sure seem to be quick when it involves stopping a downgrade :\

What's even funnier is... during the time when we couldn't buy Lindens... Paypal was erroring out, they shut down purchasing L's in world, was the time I decided to buy some mainland... and it required me upgrading to prem.

It failed to purchase the Lindens... however SUCCESSFULLY billed my credit card for my premium

About 3 months later it's still the same problem. I'm in downgrade process and can't buy back land from my group (on a private SIM). Fortunately downgrade will take place in 3 days.

See but that's what I thought too (thanks to my estate covenant). Fact of the matter is, I was not able to buy on my estate because of the downgrade process.

Best bet seems to be to wait until a day or two before billing date and then do it, that way at least it won't be a problem for too long