Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
It's been a little over a week since a handful of PayPal accounts were stuffed with hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in accidental payments from Linden Lab. Unfortunately for many users who tried to cash out a few days before the incident, credit processing times were significantly higher than usual. Maintenance on the credit processing system has been ongoing, and there are no doubt a great deal of man hours going into checking and double checking the transactions that are going through, but it can still feel like forever for many Second Life users waiting on their funds.
Yet it wouldn't really be so bad... If we still had any choice at all when it comes to where we cash out.
Last I heard, Linden Lab's credit processing is done manually, meaning that long wait times are pretty much de rigueur. However, the difference between a five day and an eight day wait is significant when you have bills waiting to be paid, especially when you take into account the fact that PayPal isn't exactly instantaneous either. It's understandable then that this has many users pining for a time before Linden Lab clamped down on cashing out elsewhere, and late last week my SL social networks were flooded with just that. It's anecdotal of course, but from where I was sitting there were lots of people waiting, lots of people impatient, and lots of people truly missing those third-party exchanges.
Earlier this year, Virwox was king of cashing out among many savvy SL business owners. The exchange rate wasn't always always as favorable as the LindEx, but it made up for that with slightly faster processing times. Then in May, Linden Lab changed the Second Life Terms of Service to specifically restrict these kinds of transactions. In short:
[T]o better protect Second Life users against fraud, the updated Terms of Service make it clear that trading of Linden dollars (L$) on exchanges other than the LindeX, Second Life’s official L$ exchange, is not authorized or allowed.
The goal was likely legal compliance and a better way to monitor suspicious activity, as Hamlet mentioned at the time. I'm perhaps overly optimistic, but I bet the current manual (and mandatory) credit processing system has helped to catch its fair share of virtual fraudsters before they could make off with the spoils of their activity. And that's excellent, really.
Shortly after the ToS change, LL launched a program to specifically authorize L$ resellers so that sites like Virwox could continue to sell L$, but not buy them. Those Linden dollars could only be purchased through the LindEx, with no selling allowed, which has means that sites like Virwox are still around but no longer have as much to offer as they once did.
It's a frustrating position to be in. On the one hand, cashing out may be more secure than ever (at least in terms of fraud, not that whole "accidentally-paying-out-thousands-of-dollars" thing). On the other, waiting over a week for a pay out with little warning, even when it already feels like it takes literally forever either way, doesn't do much to engender sympathy for a system that may have bit off much more than it could chew.
What do you think? Can you stomach the wait if it theoretically means a more secure virtual economy, or are you pining for the Wild West glory days of the virtual currency exchangers?
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TweetIris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.
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