One of the big rules of business is “Don’t make it hard for customers to give you money.”

Well, whoopsie!

Linden Lab’s new “local payments” system seems to be having some distinct teething problems, and potentially a whole bunch of sims might disappear if the Lab cannot get on top of it quickly.

Second Life customers in Europe (and possibly in other parts of the world) find themselves in the position of having to resubmit their billing information.

Only… that’s not working.

You’d think a blog post would go up about this, apologising and explaining the problem – perhaps assuring people that their sims will be preserved rather than deleted – at least for the duration of the problem, plus a few percent.

Apparently nothing of the sort has happened.

Here are a few quotes about the subject from Linden Lab’s billing support:

“Its a bug in that part of our site, we’ve had loads of calls from Europe, England, France, Germany.” “Ah ok, well that’s what they said last week. Now my account has been cancelled, I use SL for work what do I do? I tried Paypal and now that’s not working.” ”No nothing works. You have to wait for the bug to be fixed, we are telling people to try again in 24 to 48 hours.”

At least the Lab is reassuring people that their sims won’t go offline as a result of this glitch, right?

Well, no.

“if the billing system is down, can I be assured that my sim won’t be taken offline due to non payment?” ”I can not assure you of this at this time”

Of course, it’s not just sims that are at risk, but accounts as well – some of which have already been suspended/cancelled as you may have gathered. And we’re hard up against the end of the month.

Not a good time for silence.

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Tags: Customer service, European Union, Fail, Linden Lab / Linden Research Inc, Second Life, Second Life Local Payments, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds