The whole idea of a holiday is to relax and recharge your batteries. Unfortunately this often isn’t the case and I’ve returned from a fortnight in Majorca and find myself pretty much cream crackered. However it’s a holiday weekend so by my return to work on Tuesday I should be relaxed and have my batteries recharged… alternatively I may just be cream crackered.
Whilst I have been away I notice that Linden Lab seem to have realised that people used third party exchanges for reasons other than just the sheer hell of it and in a blog post they talk of people buying Linden Dollars in different currencies and a new pilot scheme whereby authorised third party sites will be able to sell Linden Dollars, in a variety of currencies if they so wish. This deals with some of the concerns of residents because those third party sites offer more payment options than the LindeX does.
Paypal does not work for everyone, in some countries you can’t withdraw from Paypal to a local bank account, that’s one of the reasons why everyone doesn’t use Paypal and whereas these changes do not deal with cashing out to local currencies, they do deal with purchasing Linden Dollars, progress of a sort there.
The blog post does state:
“We know that users are also concerned about the length of the LindeX’s cashout process and the limited choice of currencies when selling L$. We’re currently investigating ways to improve that experience for users while still providing superior fraud protections, and hope to hasten the cashout process and offer new currency options in the future.”
The above statement really should have came first, before the TOS change and it should have been discussed at senior management level because the cash out delay and lack of currency options are the two major factors that caused third party exchanges to thrive. I’m still not sure why it takes quite so long to cash out from Second Life to Paypal when you’re using details you have previously used. I can understand delays the first few times you cash out and I can certainly understand a delay if you’re trying to cash out to a different Paypal account than you usually use, but in general, it should not be so slow.
The lack of alternative currencies to cash out to remains a problem because there are fees associated with using a different currency, quite why that is still an issue in this day and age is a bit of a mystery, there really shouldn’t be fees for electronic transfers of numbers but that’s an issue for the banking sector as a whole, not Second Life.
There are some positives here, but it’s still a shame that Linden Lab didn’t investigate why people are using third party exchanges before they made the TOS change and it’s a shame that the first step in the change wasn’t to announce the new authorised reseller program, but at least Linden Lab now seem to be starting to understand why third party exchanges had value, so good things may come out of all this.
Only good thing i can see, besides more users found alternatives to Second Life, is that finnaly Rod “not so” Humble shown Inworld!
Aha I’m now investgating the sightings of Mr H!