Sunday, March 30, 2008

War Zone

All has not been well in Second Life these past two weeks. We've been able to deal with failed deliveries, failed transactions, the consistent announcements on the blogs that have said "In world money transactions not working right now: {RESOLVED} (oh, wait, nevermind)" that have caused a big rise in customer service requests and refunded money. I'm sort of used to that, I can deal. But today we got this message from the blog:

In World Services Down

Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 2:05 PM by: Kate Linden

Our database has crashed and caused in world services to go down. We expect it will be ten minutes minimum before we are up and running again.


This caused a lot of people to say "the sky is falling the sky is falling!". It also caused me to realize why my sales have been so bad recently. I've been making about half of what I normally do, because people are terrified to go shopping in this climate, where they can't even rez a cube. It's just inexcusable. It's been feeling like a war zone, where you're not sure what is going to be hit next, what services are going to go down or who's going to become a victim of these "outages".


I'm rather stressed out about this, as good ol' April 15th is coming up, and since this is my first full year of being in business, I have to pay my taxes in one lump sum (which I really don't have). I was going to throw a large sale for spring cleaning in this, the last week of March and have it go 'till tax day, but at this rate I will have to ask for a loan from my mother.
So I say to you Lindens:

FIX IT!


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have to pay taxes on an SL based business now?

Nef said...

Only if you're making enough money, if your income is barely supplemental I wouldn't worry about it. But SL happens to be my primary source of income, and rather than risk an audit, I figured it would be best to take care of it.

Jen Shikami said...

Anonymous, all the real-life governments require you to pay taxes on income, wherever it comes from. Of course by "income" I mean actual dollars withdrawn from SL, not Linden dollars.

So yeah, it's all about profitability; if you make a profit in SL, then you'll presumably be withdrawing some of that as real dollars. I file my withdrawals with my taxes, too.