March 2016 – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

Linden Lab yesterday announced : Faster Credit Processing & Upcoming Changes to Fees. The devil really is in the detail with this one, first the good news :

We’re happy to announce that we will significantly improve how quickly we’re able to process a majority of credit requests.
Based on current data, we estimate that the upgrades we’ve made will allow approximately 75% of process credit requests to be completed within 2 business days.

For a minority of requests, the process may still take 5 business days. Because we’re dealing with sending real money to users around the world, we may require additional information and perform other processes that could impact the time needed. A good rule of thumb is that the better we know you as a customer, the more likely it is we’ll be able to quickly process your credit requests.

Many will say that this still isn’t quick enough and other online services do offer faster cash outs. I used to be able to get money out of Diablo III faster than this. However, Linden Lab have procedures and are compliant with laws and regulations, those pesky things can slow matters down. I’m sure plenty of people will be happy about being able to cash out in two working days instead of five.

On the other hand, there’s some bad news :

In addition to taking time, processing credit and paying real money to users’ PayPal and Skrill accounts incurs costs to Linden Lab. Each transaction actually costs us more than the $1 (USD) fee we have been charging. To address that and in light of the significant investments we’ve made to improve the related systems and processes, we will be making some adjustments to the fee structure, beginning next month.

As of April 5, 2016, instead of charging a flat fee of $1 (USD) per transaction, we will charge a fee of 1.5% of the transaction value, with a minimum fee of $3 (USD) and a maximum of $15 (USD). Additionally, the fee for purchasing L$ on the LindeX will increase 10¢, from $0.30 (USD) to $0.40 (USD) per transaction.

People do not like paying increased fees and here we are talking about fees for buying and cashing out Linden Dollars being on the rise. The increased fee for buying Linden Dollars probably won’t raise much of an eyebrow, the rise in fees for cashing out will most certainly raise eyebrows as well as raising ire.

Continue reading “Fee Fights For Some, I Smell The Blood Of A Long Term Plan”

A couple of weeks ago Second Life was subject to a Grid Roll, on a Friday of all days. Friday is not a good day for doing work like this, for a start, if it all goes wrong, people might have to work on Saturday and people generally don’t want to have to work on a Saturday when they could be at home relaxing.

However the reasons for the Grid Roll and the inevitable disruption it caused have been carefully explained by April Linden in a blog post : Why the Friday Grid Roll? Why indeed, it’s a good question and April provides a good answer. The brief answer is that there was a bit of a security storm, which needed to be fixed quickly, but which also need to be handled in a quiet manner to enable the Grid Roll to be completed with enough care and attention that it didn’t cause further disruption.

The post also gives us a useful insight into how different teams at Linden Lab work together. The Security team handed the issue over to the Operations Team, who submitted the fixes to ensure the security issue was dealt with. However at that stage, the fixes aren’t live.

The Development and Release teams then do their stuff and pull the fixes into the server image but Linden Lab aren’t finished yet.

Continue reading “April’s No Fool When It Comes To Grid Rolls”