Elf Clan, a popular Second Life group with over 2,000 members announced that they would be ceasing operations in Second Life on May 18th and that a sim called Elvenmyst would be closing on this date due to billing difficulties. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of these sort of announcements as the billing issues with Linden Lab are becoming absurd, one of my tenants hasn’t been able to buy Linden Dollars for a while now and these issues have been acknowledged by Linden Lab in this blog post.
However there are deeper issues behind the Elf Clan unhappiness, the openspace fiasco, of which I was an extremely vocal critic and still believe that you don’t treat customers the way Linden Lab did back then. LL employed great spin to try and deflect the decision back on customers who had been abusing resources, but first of all the abuse was pointed out to LL during the explosion, secondly people reported that they had asked LL for permission to use those sims in that fashion and LL had apparently agreed, the only warning against Openspace misuse had been that you would not get support for performance issues on your sim if it was found that you weren’t using them as suggested, nowhere did they state you could not use them for purposes other than open waterways and forests, who on earth was going to put an open waterway or forest in the middle of nowhere?
However that’s all ancient history, the puzzling thing about the Elf Clan issue now is their response to Linden Lab’s response. Rod Humble got wind of the billing issues via Twitter, billing contacted the person responsible for paying tier and it turns out they’ve been offered two months worth of free tier, as posted here, and Elf Clan are still stamping their feet.
Continue reading “Tier and Loathing”
