I have a neighbor in SL that I have never met, and something tells me that I never will. I know her name and a few details of her SL past from the items she left behind in a parcel that she hasn’t visited since 2011. It’s a small 512 sq.m. lot on the western coast of Satori. By the date on the land, she claimed it on December 2009. Since then she’s been paying for a plot that gets no use and receiving a weekly stipend she’s not really benefiting from. Based on that 300L fee, her account must have accumulated some 50,000L since the last day she logged inworld, more than four years ago. That’s a small fortune for whenever she decides to come back, if that ever happens. But maybe she no longer remembers SL at all.
There are no sculpts or mesh objects among her forgotten belongings. Her oldest rezzed possession, a sofa, dates back to October 2006, just two months after she was born. It is chronologically followed by a chair and a room divider four months the sofa’s junior, and a Mediterranean pot from early 2007. From that same year are two clumps of golden bamboo that compliment the ensemble. The furniture is suspended above the sandy ground, suggesting a construction of some sort may have housed them sometime in the past.
This lady was last seen inworld the 13th of December of 2011. I know that because we have one group in common, from where it was easy to corroborate that fact. What happened after that day, maybe no one else –but her– knows.
I guess her RL self is still somewhere out there, if there’s a credit card backing up the premium subscription… or else that parcel wouldn’t be on her name this long. That, or the Lab hasn’t taken the time to clear the record even when it’s not getting any money to lock the lease.
How many accounts are there in SL just like hers? To how many disembodied customers LL keep charging a subscription fee for a premium account that is obviously inactive, if that were the case? Or how many parcels are showing a pretended ownership that only tells of a former tenancy? Does LL contact these ghostly residents to inquire what is going on and maybe try to attract them inworld once more? How many ex-residents still populate the ranks of the so-called active users? Are these inert people still holding onto SL expecting to resurface someday? Is my neighbor one of them? What about yours?
Comments
kinda mysterious isn’t it. great detective work tho !
Yep. My guess is LL hasn’t cleared the record for that piece of land. In 4 years, the credit card she has on her LL account probably expired, and though maybe the new one kept the same number, the date on the card and even the security code must be different. I would think that even if LL try to charge the monthly subscription, payment should be blocked (hence, LL don’t get any money). Who knows how much of all that apparently “occupied” land (with buildings so old that you wonder if people still really like that “crap”) is actually Governor Linden’s unclaimed property.
I left SL in 2009 due to work and RL issues. But, I came back in 2013 because I missed the people I knew here. I’m not as active now as I was before 2009, but I’m here. I can, however, confirm that LL does not reach out to such residents at all (or didn’t in the four years I was gone). I’m sure, had there been an issue with my PayPal account and they couldn’t fund the premium account, I would have heard from them. lol Something along the lines of “We’re cancelling your Premium account because you can’t pay” or something like that. But, as long as they had my money, I don’t think they cared, nor care anymore than that about those still absent now.
Thanks for confirming LL does nothing to try to reach out to former or inactive customers. Did you own land during your premium days? Did you sell or abandon the land before giving up premium? When you abandon land (something I’ve done already) the land says something as “Land abandoned by [insert avatar name here]”. So now I wonder, what happens when you cancel your premium subscription while still owning some land? Does the land get a message like that, keep your name as owner until Governor Linden reclaims it (if that ever happens), or what? It would be kind of absurd if this lady were paying a premium subscription and not logging in…