Friday 21 May 2010

Inadvertent generosity

I just figured out why my monthly payments have been so high the last few times: I've been paying an entire sim's worth of tier.

What happened was this: my neighbour T sold about half of her holding in Mugunghwa, to get down to an eighth of a sim. Her original parcel was irregularly shaped, so she ended up with a narrow stripe of land left over, adjacent to my land and including a strip of riverfront. She offered it to me, and without thinking I turned it down. I guess I thought she'd just keep it, but no: she put it up for auction.

Well, when I saw that I realized that I had to have it, else some jackass would come along and plaster the thing with hundred-metre-high soundfile-blaring porn site ads.

So I put in a bid, and, to make a long story short, won the auction. I paid over ten thousand L$ for 864 square metres. This is quite possibly a record.

Now, when you buy land directly, you have the option to buy for yourself or for a group; and groups get a 10% landholding bonus. Auctions don't work that way, you always buy for yourself. I immediately sold it to one of my alts, who bought for the group. And with that I forgot all about the episode — but the Lindens didn't.

Had my group bought this land directly, all would have been OK because the bonus would have kept my holdings under 36044 sq m. Because it became mine, I had to pay full tier on it, and so for about an hour I owned four square metres more than a half-sim. That automatically increased my tier payments to an entire sim's worth, but when my billable holdings reduced to under 32768 sq m, my tier level did not automatically decrease.

Dear Linden Labs, I just paid you the equivalent of two years' premium account fees. You're welcome.

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