Taxes Closing Regions?

I saw a discussion on SLUniverse about a number of regions closing without notice. The discussion centers on the closing of Beach Front. See: Beach Front Realty Closed?

It seems the land owners collected the month’s tier from tenants and then closed the regions. Correspondence with Linden Lab revealed the closing was ‘deliberate’. I suppose that means the region owner contacted the Lab and scheduled the closing. Not having seen the actual correspondence I cannot tell if the phrasing is nuanced spin that might indicate the Lab closed the owners regions for some reason.

The tenants may be able to get their money back via PayPal. The Lab generally considers these things a resident-to-resident matter and stays out of them. 

When a region is shut down, stuff is not returned to owners. That seems odd to me, but that is how things work. Thinking about it, a return on region shutdown could be a problem since all regions shut down about once a week… whatever…

However, tenants can get the Lab to restart the region for 24 hours to allow the tenants to get their stuff. One of the people dealing with this problem describes how to go about this.

  • Go to the SL Support Page and setup a trouble ticket.
  • Make sure you enter your region name and the details.
  • I heard back within 20 minutes and the Sim was reactivated for 24 hours.
  • I went there, gathered my objects then abandoned the land.

Unless region owners tell us why they are shutting down, we can only speculate. Is it caused by the recent but not-so-new-but-improved tax reporting? Maybe. That is the thought in the SLUniverse thread. But, I see no good evidence to prove that is so.

If it is a consequence of the revised tax reporting, we may see more of this type of closing.

8 thoughts on “Taxes Closing Regions?

  1. When I did support for a huge server farm, we’d get a lot of calls from angry clients of resellers who got swindled. But our contract was with the reseller, not the client of the customer, and we had no legal responsibility to that client. Quite a lot of conversations resulted in deranged screaming, empty legal threats, and nice ways of telling them to go pound sand. (TIP: If you’re a client of a reseller for web/application/cloud space, always have a recent local backup of your content in case your reseller or server farm vanishes.)

    Linden Lab, on the other hand, has a different relationship structure… they have a contractual relationship with both the reseller (landbaron/swindler) and the client/resident. However, their ToS make it pretty clear that they have every right to tell the swindled cllient to go pound sand, too. It’s just a bit more difficult for them to do so, because they’re not just losing a reseller (albeit an unethical one), but a potential customer for land in the bilked client, so they have an incentive to let people get their stuff (to move it elsewhere).

    I suppose the comparison fails with regard to the backups… all your stuff belong to Linden Lab’s asset servers and filesystem, and you’re not supposed to make backups of anything you didn’t create yourself.

    -ls/cm

  2. The issue of private regions closing has been with us for as long as there have been private regions. In the 2006/7 rush to make a fortune in SL it happened often. This is the main reason I am a Mainland person, I can be fairly sure Brocade will be around as long as SL is.

  3. I was on a sim from BFR and the only reason I knew is because my neighbour was told and he told me. When I then contacted the owners both gave me a different story. The most believable version was pretty easy to discover seeing one of em had already left the group etc.

    I think it’s very sad. We started at that exact same sim over 5 years ago with 1/16th sim and expanded to half a sim in these 5 years without moving. We were proud of that since there’s so many places moving all the time.

    It’s a shame it had to go the way it did and I’m glad at least one of the owners had the courtesy to be honest and in the end turned out to be the one informing everybody anyway. As the one who’s name was on all the estates was telling fairytails and left everything without even contacting anybody. I was actually told that the person in question asked my neighbour to tell me… It was not his task to tell me and looking back at the actual conversation it wasn’t even asked in the first place.

    I was able to move in time and I’m sorry for those who weren’t. I just hope the correct person gets blamed…

    • It is always personally satisfying to me when people get their just deserts. I am annoyed when drama and confusion allow and escape. But, often all we can do is warn others.

      • Very true and I’m glad I was able to reach a few.

        The weird thing is a notice was sent out 2 days ago saying:
        “All tenants will have until the end of December to relocate to a different company.”

        I guess that didn’t work out well.

  4. I imagine stuff goes down with the sim because that kind of sudden UltraUberMassReturn would cane the inventory cluster for anything except a mostly empty sim with perhaps two people’s combined things on it. Speaking as a programmer of things, it would have probably been easy to implement a toggle in the sim code that would trigger an UltraUberMassReturn of all objects in the case of a non-restart final shutdown… But it would have been very hard to handle bulk auto-returns on a mass scale while a sim is shutting down.

    It’s likely that sims don’t return things because returning things would cause problems for the inventory cluster. This is conjecture on my part, but I’d have designed things that way too, so make of that what you will.

    • Edit: There’s also the fact that objects on a sim are stored by the sim on their own local filesystem. The data will have to be mass-sent to the filesystem. Things would slow down massively.

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