Land contribution to Group and Tier fees

Well, I'm yet another person confused by deeding land to a group and how it can affect tier fees. I thought I understood this process but now that I seem to have jumped to the next tier I guess I don't.

I started by owning 8704m of land personally (8192 + a 512m "bonus" which kept me nice and comfy at the upper threshold of the $40 tier level. Then I decided to get fancy and ending up deeding some land to a group I made so that someone that was renting from me could have some administrative control over his parcel. At first it seemed to be ok, but I kept having to sell land back to myself and re-deeding it to the group so that he would have enough prims. I think that's where I messed up but I'm not sure how.

The land I still personally own is 6432m

The land I have contributed to the group is 2272m

this still totals 8704m

When I click on the group inworld and look under the L$ tab, I have set my contribution to total 2272m--because I read in the knowledge base that if the contribution didn't equal the land deeded to the group that Lindens would swoop down and reclaim it! I definitely don't want that to happen. There are no other groups I have contributed land to.

Somehow I jumped to the next tier level and I'm afraid I'm perplexed. It says I can now hold 16,896m--eeek! It also says that 8192m of land is available for purchase. My billing cycle is in a few days too. I have read and re-read the articles about deeding land to a group and I can't seem to perceive where I made my mistake but I'm sure its something simple that I will have to slap myself for later. Help! Please! )

i think the problem u ran into was that u donated land tier to the group first and then deeded the land

for future refference, when u want to donate land to ur own group:
cut the parcel out(say 1024)
enable "owner contributes) in the genral tab and then deed the land to the group, ur personal land tier will be transferd automaticly with the amount of land u deeded


ran into that damn popup box to many times aswell, it`s kinda a pain and u don`t get it when u donate tier to a group grr

Thanks Alicia! I'll check that out next time I do this. I'm new to group land--at least it's a learning experience. I'm more worried about losing my land somehow. I've read the horror stories on the forums so I've tried to take the precautions(making sure the number of members don't slip below 2, making sure there is tier to cover the land--I think I did that right).

Just a side note. If you buy back your land from the group it counts as a new lot and can make you jump a tier lever too.

I didn't quite understand why you had to keep buying your land to make sure there were enough prims. Flipping the land back and forth should have no affect on that.

However, I'm guessing you left tier donated to the group and bought the parcel into your personal land. That meant you were using 2272+2272+6432qsm which caused your tier to bump.

It's worth noting that when you buy land it ALWAYS tells you right there on the page in big red letters that your tier is going to be increased if you buy the parcel so pay attention to that.

Further, look in the group panel, Land and L$ tab and you'll see how much donated tier you have Available. You can keep removing tier until the Available amount is 0. You get a 10% bonus for group land so you probably only need to donate around 2045sqm.

Hi Plato,

Here is some information I *think* would have helped you before you began swapping land in and out of group:

Swapping land in and out of a group will not affect the number of prims available on any one particular parcel. However, if all of your land is owned by you and in the same SIM, you can share prims across all the land. When you break off one rental parcel and put it in a group, it is a stand alone parcel (SL sees that group as a different owner from the individual people in that group) and the parcel has only as many prims as it can hold (e.g. 117 prims for 512 sqm).

If you were maxed out on land you could own, when you took land OUT of your group you would have needed to put your group into negative tier for a few minutes to swap the land out. Here are the steps for doing that: /327/3d/174599/1.html

In this scenario, if you do not put your group into negative tier, you will get a message saying you don't have enough tier to buy this parcel and a big red X instead of a green check on the box selling the land back to yourself. If you go ahead with the transaction, you bumped yourself up to the next tier level.

So, what do you do? If you still own the same amount of land and do not want to stay at the higher tier level, you can downgrade to the tier level you wanted to stay at, but SL is going to charge you for your "peak" usage on your next bill date.

Thanks Skye,

I did manually downgrade my tier level again. However, since this was a "clerical" error on my part and I didn't actually use or buy more land than my tier--what do you think the chances are that I can get LL to not bill me $40 on the next charge rather than $75?

Anyway, I'll call customer service and find out I guess. Wish me luck.

I do indeed wish you luck.

Programming is more difficult than Luddites like myself can truly appreciate (or so I am told by a certain someone on a daily basis). From the human point of view, you never had anything more than your X sqm of land, and if you can reach a sympathetic ear, I think any reasonable customer service staff would agree.

I'm curious as to whether you can resolve this issue. Please let us know how it turns out.

The key four non-obvious points to remember about dealing with group land are:

a) tier that you donate to a group is gone, and always counts as "in use", even if the group does not actually have enough land to be using the tier. (This is to prevent disputes along the lines of, person A puts in 512sqm, person B puts in 512sqm, the group owns 512sqm but how do we decide how much of that counts against A's and how much counts against B's? By just counting their entire contributions against them all the time, this is avoided.)

b) the "owner makes contribution with deed" box will make a contribution _even if it isn't necessary_. I have tried to raise a feature request to have this changed before, or to have a second box that says ".. even if contribution isn't needed", but haven't had any luck so far

c) contributions to group land tier are not automatically removed when you take land out of a group.

d) you can safely remove your land contribution from a group, even if it leaves the group with insufficient tier. When you do, you'll get a warning that the group is short of tier but you have a limited amount of time (a few hours) to sort things out. So if you want to take land out of a group, you *can* safely take the contribution out first, and this is actually recommended to avoid being pushed into the next tier by point a).

It turns out I was lucky. I filled out a support ticket and just now I got an email saying my tier charge will be $40 next month. They did say this was a one time courtesy so I'll be more careful next time. I guess the new system works. Yay!