As expected, the Email came...

Yes, I got the "We can't bill your account" email... the one threatening to suspend me... but despite the fact that LL themselves have disabled PayPal... despite the fact that they KNOW they cannot bill PayPal users, they did not change ONE word of the email... just the standard canned garbage, right down to the "support portal" link that DOES NOT WORK!

Was there not, in the blog entry dealing with this debacle, a clear quote that "This will not affect your account"...?? I am so disgusted and frustrated I could spit nails! Is this some contest to reach a new level of incompetence? If so, LL gets my vote.

I've replied to the message indicating that if my account is suspended when 100% of the fault lies with LL, I will file a complaint with the appropriate CA BBB... There is simply no excuse for what is currently going on with SL.. and then they have the nerve to signe the message "Best Wishes"...... /pimpslap!

*****RECEIVED MESSAGE BELOW*****

Dear Aromadon Enoch,

This email is notification that we were unable to bill your Second Life account on June 23, 2007. Please review your Second Life membership and billing information, and make sure everything is up-to-date. Some of the more common mistakes are:

* Your credit card may have been declined for insufficient funds.
* Your credit card may be expired.
* You may have entered an incorrect expiration date for your credit card.
* Your billing address may not match the address on your credit card.

If you are using Paypal, check your Paypal account's verification and backing. Your Paypal account must be verified and backed by a funding source other than a credit card. (We are unable to accept Paypal accounts backed by credit cards.) Make sure the Merchant Agreement with Linden Lab is current, and make sure you haven't exceeded your Paypal transfer limits.

If everything looks correct, you may want to contact your credit card issuer (or Paypal as appropriate) to identify the problem.

Don't worry; this billing failure will not prevent you from logging on with your Second Life account. We will simply try to bill your overdue balance again the next day. If we are unable to collect the amount due within seven (7) days, your account will be suspended pending payment for an additional thirty (30) days. During that time, you will not be able to log in to Second Life. Failure to resolve this billing issue by the end of the probation period may result in the cancellation of your account. If you have verified the accuracy of your billing information, and are not aware of other outstanding issues that would prevent billing, please contact us through the support portal (https://secure-web10.secondlife.com/community/support.php)as soon as possible.

To review or modify your account details, or to change or cancel your Second Life membership, visit https://secondlife.com/account.

Best Wishes,

Linden Lab and the Second Life Team
http://www.secondlife.com

LL disabled Paypal and can't bill via Paypal any longer? That is news to me.

It only makes sense that if you cant buy Lindens with PayPal that they cant bill people using said service as there has to be something wrong with their servers for PayPal not to work period. I myself didn't catch that part that it wouldn't affect our accounts but if the emails are going out, who is to say that the computer sending out said email wont program itself to lock out accounts who don't make payments?

Someone correct me if I am wrong and blanked out on all this, but my payment comes out today and I know its in my PayPal account. I wont be too happy should I get an account suspension based on their screwup.

They left out one:*We're a bunch of incompetent morons.

Interesting how all their "excuses" are on the users end. No chance they are mucking things up.

There are already a bunch of consumer complaints against LL at the BBB.

Unfortunately, the BBB is a reporting agency, they hold no legal sway over businesses.

While that is technically true, Snow, it is also true that enough "stink" with the BBB often results in investigations by Federal agencies, especially where billing and "denial of service" are the complaints. Don't get me wrong, I have no grand delusion that anything I as an individual do will make one squat's difference to LL... but if enough of us "piss in the ocean", before long someone may notice the water getting warmer...

At this point, I've about decided that I'm going to go to PayPal and terminate my payment agreement with LL, drop my account back to a non-paid "guest" account ( what am I paying for anyway? I haven't seen one iota of support, and I sure haven't been treated in anything resembling a "premium" way ) and just coast along as one of the masses... I have lots of "toys" already to paly with, and while I'd like to buy more, I can live without them, though I'll probably break down and buy Lindens again... if it is ever possible...

Sometime after midnight LL time, Alex, you too will get.... <bum bum bum buuuuuuum>.... THE EMAIL...... Beware..... beware.......

Note that the OP does have the option of changing from being billed through PayPal and can instead be billed using a credit card, debit card or stored value card. Also note that as the blob pointed out potential problems with billing via PayPal and that Linden Lab was attempting to rectify the problem thus the OP had "fair warning."

The "OP" is not about to give his CC number to people who can't even keep their OWN internal systems in order, Elex, and your superior tone does nothing for me but mark you as yet another of the "LL Apologists" who think that the skies are full of rainbows and the fields full of lollipops where LL is concerned... well, things aren't all "peachy" with LL. I would NEVER have gotten a premium account if not for the ability to use PayPal for payments and the fact that THEY have done something to screw things up does NOT put the burden on me... or any of the other PayPal customers. Stop trying to defend what is clearly total incompetence, and stop doing it with such smug superiority...

That's why I pointed out you can use a stored value card. You purchase the blank card. Fund it. Use it to pay your account. Then discard the card. It's your account. You either want to see it get paid or you don't. If you decline to use an existing payment method that's your choice. If you lose your account, land, objects, etc. for failure to take advantage of an existing payment options it's not Linden Labs fault.

If I point out to someone that after drinking fifty beers they probably shouldn't drive it doesn't make me an agent of the State or an opponent of the brewery industry. If they go ahead anyway and crash into a tree I don't have to show up and hug them.

I'd have to agree on that... If you wont give LL your CC info to bill you, and Paypal is temporarily not working, you just might find that using the refillable debit card option works fine. You can fund them online from a CC or Paypal so in essence it's only another step. I believe you can also transfer funds from Paypal to an Slexchange account, and then withdrawl those to your SL account, but dont quote me on that, I've only done that transfer with lindens, not rl$.

Good suggestions, but it still doesn't mitigate why, for many people, giving money to LL is such an ordeal.

You can also purchase Lindens from SL Exchange via PayPal, then sell them through the Lindex to create a credit on your account sufficient to cover the billed amount. It's a couple extra steps, but at least your account won't be suspended while LL *hopefully* gets the PayPal issue sorted.

Please excuse me for quoting myself from another thread, but this seems even more relevant here than there. I mean, operating a for-profit business and putting up obstacles to people who are trying to give you money?!

"... any businessman used to dealing with the public would look at this controversy and his first reaction would be to do a roflmaocopter until he recovered himself. That might take a while. His second reaction would be to write off SL as any kind of investment and go elsewhere.

Methinks LL needs a good businessman on board.

And maybe adult supervision in general.

And this is from someone who is a great booster of LL and SL and all it aspires to be. Guys, stop pissing in the soup!"

yes one thing that is a problem if people have to turn themselves inside out to use a service they won't they will get fed up and leave. YOu can buy lindens elsewhere I wont I use lindex for buying and selling as I dont see why I should go through more hoops to use a game and then there is the risk of banning and that API thingy that goes off randomly from what I am hearing. This does need to be fixed or second life will becoming to a giant halt very soon its very commercial and no other way to get lindens into the game (new lindens then to purchase them) and paying rent using lindens is an issue however err although I use exactly none of these here is a list of other places that trade lindens that are supposed to be safe aside from the ones mentions


http://dreamland.anshechung.com/
http://slsmart.com

/shrug

I woudlnt' buy lindens from anyone but Linden Labs myself but if you are needing to pay ingame rent using Lindens you can try these as well (which of course use paypal ironicaly) as for the memberships if they can't process payments Linden Labs should be suspending billing of these accounts until such a time as they can bill them not sending out the "you will be in trouble email and payup now" stuff

I would add SLExchange, a third party site run by very conscientous people where you can buy L$. There may be others as good or better. but FWIW, I would swear by these folks.

yeah that is already in the thread 2 posts up so i didn't readd it hehe

Thank you Wilhelm... THAT is my point exactly, though I didn't outright say it. YOU were able to figure out that, if the error is on LLs part, the CORRECT solution is to suspend the BILLING, not the CUSTOMER. I would have NO problem with LL billing me when they could do so through my payment method. I would, in fact, not even have a problem with it if they did not allow me to purchase Lindens, buy land, etc. until such time as they COULD bill me through my chosen payment method (not like I could buy Linden's anyway, though).

It is this attitude of, "Hey, we *$&#^@ up, but YOU have to suffer the consequences" that really chaps my butt. It should not be MY burden to purchase and fill a "gift" card that, despite some people's assertions, is not "free"... there are fees involved which should not be my responsibility (and yes, I know they are minor... quantity isn't the issue, quality is) and I do not HAVE a debit card, having excellent credit and never having had the need of such a thing (and I don't intend to go to the effort of getting one just because LL has a problem).

It is clear to everyone except LL that 1.17 totally cocked up the ENTIRE SL system, but apparently they don't even make provision to "roll back" to an earlier version or SURELY they would have done so until they could straighten out the total mess they've made.

Any company with a legitimate business model would have sent out letters of apoplogy in place of these letters of suspension.... but this is what happens when you take a bunch of brilliant programmers who, by default, have the common and business sense of a large bundle of radishes and put them in charge of the "people pleasing" end of a business...

I agree, LL should have had measures in place for those who were using Paypal for their accounts, rather than just saying, "You'll need to change your payment information." If I'm not mistaken, every time you change your payment time, you run the risk of a bug that sets your trading limit back to that of a newly created account, which makes doing this less than desirable.

While there is a certain amount of give and take in the system, LL has repeatedly shown that their mistakes mean that it's the users fault. We shouldn't have to make changes every time LL has had issues with their billing system. I mean, wasn't it a couple of months ago that they had issues processing credit cards? I don't have a Paypal account and felt no need to get one either.

*sigh* I'm not a coder, but is it really that hard to write a search program that would find all the accounts that use Paypal accounts and postpone the billing cycle for them?

I noticed a couple of people said they had missed the blog post pertaining to his subject, so here it is. Please note the portions of the quote marked with emote faces...

[Update] In-world Lindex purchases with PayPal
Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 11:56 AM PDT by: everettlinden
[Update 6.22.07 11.42 PDT] Purchases and payments with PayPal is still disabled. We are working closely with PayPal (This is a lie... PayPal says they have not heard of any problems from LL) to identify and fix the problem. We know this is an inconvenience for many of you, and we ask your patience–this matter has our full attention. Except while we are off taking pretty pictures, or celebrating our birthday

[Update 12.25 PDT] We have temporarily disabled the ability to purchase or make payments with PayPal. You can still make purchases or payments via credit card or gift credit cards. We continue to investigate with PayPal to and we will update you as soon as the matter is resolved.

You account status will not be affected. (yes, it said "You", not "Your"

Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE:
We have reenabled Linden transactions from within the viewer.

However, PayPal is having issues processing LindeX transactions from the web. We are working with PayPal to resolve the issue.

Also, LindeX transactions using credit cards are slow, but the transactions should complete. If it doesn’t complete for some reason, please retry.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope to resolve these issues promptly.

Categories: Bugs & Fixes, Announcements & News, Economy

I don't think anyone was arguing the point that LL should have handled this better, we were only offering alternatives in light of the actual situation.

If you want to keep your account, get off the high horse and pony up your credit card. LL is not taking pay pal payments at this time. They also don't seem at the least concerned about the plight of those caught in the lurch (not surprising viewed in the historical context).

If you don't "jump through" a few hoops now, think of how many you will need to navigate to reinstate your suspended account.

If I chose to reopen the suspended account, which I will not (and have told LL so). it would be NOTHING compared to the "hoops" involved if their incompetence allowed my credit card to get into the hands of who knows who. My "high horse" has given me a credit score of 874 and it's going to stay that way. You can make all the excuses and apologies for LL you want... the bottom line is this... they created the problem, they refuse to solve the problem and I am no longer going to be a part of the problem. I have, in fact, already cancelled my billing agreement with PayPal for LL so they cannot bill me and, when my account goes dead, so be it... SL is just too buggy, broken and filled with jackasses for me to devote anymore energy or money to it.

It was a nice idea that could have gone somewhere... if it hadn't been hatched in California.... (and you can make any implication you like about that statement)

If i could remove all information i would. But we don`t deal with gift cards credit cards in Japan. We deal with IC debit credit systems ( Which is The Cutting Edge as they say in transaction systems). Gift Cards are out dated in japan and suit no perpose to use here. What surprizes me is LLABS says they are Japanese friend when information and other facts relating ( Clients, exchange, building and money issues )to Japan. But accepting JCB credit card is not the proof enough in this case. I would love to see a better transaction system then what llabs is forcing us non USA based users on sl. Pay Pal? Oh boy look whats going on now?

Usagi

Will this effect Paypal debit cards also which are entered just like a credit card on the billing page?