Is Linden Lab about to kill Nexus Burbclave?
crime scene chalk by miikkahoo, on Flickr
When I announced the Mainland Renaissance Project just over a week ago, I had a renewed optimism for Second Life and high hopes about doing something good for the mainland. Unfortunately I didn’t anticipate being locked out of my account the next day, and potentially losing my account, my land, my creations, and a part of my virtual identity altogether on October 26th unless the trouble ticket that I filed a week ago is dealt with quickly.
I’d like to apologize to anyone who has sent me any landmarks to check out for this project. Should I be allowed to return to Second Life, I fully intend to go forward with this project, even though it has now been a bit delayed.
Unfortunately I find myself in a position that is far too common with Linden Lab’s customer support, a sort of limbo where I’ve jumped through every hoop requested to correct a mistake that they partially share the blame for… and waited…wand waited…and waited. That is essentially the TL;DR version of the situation, but for those who are curious, I provide you with all of the sordid details (minus names and other identifying info of course)…
Around June of this year I became the victim of identity theft. An unauthorized charge from a driving school in England showed up on my bank statement from out of nowhere. Of course, when stuff like this happens, you immediately cancel the card, and get a new one issued. When the new card comes, you change all of your automatic debits over to the new card, and check to see if any of your automatic debits failed to go through in the mean time. I did all of those checks and after going through the process, nothing was showing up amiss (more on that later).
Apparently my $10 membership fee on June 20 didn’t actually go through. Between the time of the failed charge and October 15…
- Several charges for both tier and membership went through without issue.
- My account never reflected an outstanding balance.
- I received no email or other notification that I had an outstanding balance.
On October 15, having had no prior knowledge that anything was amiss, I found that my account was locked out, and that worse still my girlfriend had her account locked out for the crime of surfing from the same household and therefore having the same IP. Having no idea what was going on, I didn’t wind up putting in a ticket for the issue until Sunday October 16. As of Monday the 17th at the end of the day the ticket had not been touched. I made a call to Linden Lab, and was finally informed of what the issue was, but was given no easy way to take care of the issue while on the line. In fact I was told that I’d have to jump through many hoops to actually make arrangements to fix this, and repeated requests to speak with a manager that COULD fix the issue were denied. So I jumped through all of the hoops that evening and updated my ticket. That night I was informed on the ticket that I needed to update my billing information and then the bill would go through and the issue would be resolved. On October 18, I updated the requested billing information, made a note of it in the ticket, and I waited…and I waited…and I waited. Two other requests for updates to the ticket have been ignored. Here we are a week after my initial contact, 5 days after my last contact, and I remain in limbo.
This is really not the way to run a company.
Could this be the end of Nexus Burbclave? Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Just got some good news. The issue has been resolved, and I will be able to return in-world. I look forward to getting going on the Mainland Renaissance Project.
Nexus, this is appalling.
I am going to try to ensure that as many people as possible know.
[...] It all stems from a failure to make an automatic debit payment of $10 in June – although his account has been working perfectly ever since and he had no noticethat anything was wrong with his account – in fact, his tier and membership payments, apart from the one in June, went through perfectly. For the last week and a half, ever since he learned about the problem, Nexus has been trying to rectify the error, but with no success – in fact, it’s been six days since he supplied all the information that was required – and his account is still in limbo. You can read all the details here: Is Linden Lab about to kill Nexus Burbclave? [...]
I have no idea why they can’t downgrade a premium account to a basic one when a payment is overdue; as it stands, a premium account seems much too dangerous for me to ever want to get one.
Good to hear, as I think the Mainland Project is great – hey I started off there and still spend a few hours every week wandering happily around:) One thing troubles me though – I’ve had billing issues in the past (one particular 5 buck credit card fail, although my fault, was a pain) but at that time I was able to use an alternate to log in and finish a rush project, yet you say your girl friend was also blocked for having used the same IP? Is this a new Lab procedure? Now that I share an IP with my partner I really don’t want to have to deal with that.
cheers
Saffia, thank you so much for telling my story. I look forward to showing you around some of the mainland’s best offerings for Designing Worlds.
Samm, I agree that this seems like a better idea. My guess (an it is just a guess) is that this would have been easier to implement from the beginning than change because of the different systems they would need to alter to make this happen. It still might be a worthwhile project to undertake, as I suspect the number of people affected by some form of thi has risen since the downturn.
Sirhc, thanks. I’m afraid I can’t really confirm how new the ip cutoff is or how common it is. I can only provide the anecdote that neither my partner’s main nor my alt were accessible during the issue that I had.