Linden Lab recently announced changes to the island transfer system. Taking great care to point out that they weren’t getting involved in resident to resident disputes they will now assist the process and ensure that party a and party b aren’t trying to rip each off. A very welcome moved indeed. However, they need to do more in other areas to improve integrity in their product.
As someone who participates in the land game I read about disputes over land scams with some disdain. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is being economic with the truth? Estate owners have a big reclaim land button and they can use it any time they like and so can Linden Lab on mainland, and yet, how often do you hear a complaint from a mainland resident that Linden Lab reclaimed their land on the basis of any reason and no reasons?
This isn’t to say that all tenants are angels. There are cases I’m sure where the reclaim land button is used with complete justification and there are times where tenants mis-represent the facts to try and paint themselves in a better light.
However let’s get one thing straight here. If you’re reclaiming land, you should refund outstanding tier payments. There really isn’t any excuse to take money for a service, cancel the service and then keep the money. That is dishonourable. I guess there may be extreme cases where the bad tenant has caused some financial loss but generally then, generally there’s no excuse.
There have been a few threads over on the official forums complaining of a certain estate owner. Two of these threads have been locked and one has been deleted. In one of those threads someone posted four links to SLExchange with threads from different people complaining of being scammed by the same estate owner. Were they all scammed? Who knows. Maybe the estate owner has upset some people and their running a campaign of ruining the estate owner’s reputation. The complaints however are not all recent.
Now the problem with the official LL forums silencing these posts to me is that it encourages people to say “There’s nothing you can do about it, LL don’t get involved in resident to resident disputes.”
I agree with the policy of not naming names, it would be easy for a rival to besmirch the reputation of an estate owner if that were not the case. However, LL cannot keep burying their head in the sand when people are losing so much money an they sure as hell shouldn’t be aiding the silencing of the complaints. Estate owners are LL’s land franchise owners, they provide facilities for tenants, they collect money and pay LL, they help to cut LL’s operating costs. However they also need to ensure the integrity of the product is upheld and whilst there are wails about paying for land and having it reclaimed and then sold to someone else, they are undermining integrity.
Jack Linden and co need to look at this situation closely because it doesn’t just harm those directly involved, it harms me too as it paints all of us who deal in land in a bad light.
So what are the solutions? Some are suggesting estate land shouldn’t be sold at all. I disagree there. I have sold estate land, I won’t do it again. Nothing went wrong with it, but I don’t like the idea of reclaiming land if someone doesn’t pay tier for any reason when they’ve parted with an up front fee. I’ve paid back residents in that situation, I had no obligation to do so and have been called an idiot for doing it, but I didn’t like it and I don’t do it anymore. I’m much more comfortable with the straight rental situation.
Should LL get involved? Absolutely, transaction histories are there for all to see. It would be harder for someone to claim the payment was for something other than land use. The estate owner should refund outstanding payments, that really does deal with the scam. The tenant may still not be happy but they won’t be complaining so much that they are out of pocket.
Meanwhile, the estate owner at the centre of this current storm can be rest assured that the sky isn’t falling on her estates, especially not with moderators on the official forums locking threads that allude to the problem due to the numerous emails they are receiving 🙂