llTransferLindenDollars should return INVALID_UUID if you attempt to pay a player that is perma-banned from Second Life
RavieDragon SLSGC
Category should probably be Server/Scripting.
In the skill gaming space (and perhaps in other spaces too!), often times we have contest boards that a player can earn a spot on but not get paid for a month or two such as a New Years contest that starts in October, or a contest that might pay them every single day until they are kicked out of the spot by another player.
In the event a player gets on this kind of contest board, and later gets banned in Second Life, when the system makes payments, the banned player is still paid. While they did earn a spot at the time on the contest, paying banned players should ultimately not be permitted. Gifting to a banned player should also not function.
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Talvin Muircastle
This inserts other users into a matter that is between Linden Labs and an individual user. Legally and ethically messy.
If anything special is going to be done with a permabanned user's Linden$, that's something we should not see or be aware of directly in any way.
99% sure this is gonna get closed, and with good reason.
Timothy McGregor
Why not just hold winnings in an escrow system of some sort (across the board) and require everyone to collect them from an onsite kiosk? If a winner is banned, you've defacto prevented them from collecting. Put in the contract/game rules that players must collect their winnings within 30 days or they're forfeited.
Coyote Enthusiast
A account, whether it is banned or not, is still an account. Consider the following scenario:
- Person A sets up a kickstarter like funding for a project (People are refunded if the goal isn't met)
- Person B pays into the pool, then gets banned
- Person A's project doesn't get fully funded, refunds everyone
- Person B appeals their ban, their ban appeal is accepted
In this scenario, Person B will never have received the funds they paid back in.
Despite being an edge case scenario, I don't think this is a good idea. If you don't want to pay the account, don't pay the account. If you intended to pay them, they are entitled to that money. Whether or not they are banned shouldn't be a concern here.
Cloud Python
You already admitted in the comments LL sees this as a privacy violation... So...
You might not care, as you stated, but you don't set SL policy.
Better question is why would you care if those funds go to an account that cannot access them... ? You had to pay them so it's their money, if an account is deactivated or banned should not be of your concern, unless of course your primary motive with this suggestion is to find new ways to avoid paying the earnings of gamblers.
There's no reason for you to concern yourself with the status of someone else's account.
RavieDragon SLSGC
I want to also state, based on some discussions with others on the matter, that people that closed their accounts should also have the same result (INVALID_UUID should be returned).
Nelson Jenkins
I don't work in the gaming space but I do run some payment processing stuff where I can see the utility here, I just question how the business logic and accounting would work when a payment
cannot
be sent because the recipient probably (but not necessarily!) won't be able to access the funds.From a legal perspective, there's a valid point to be made that the account holder may be entitled to those funds irrespective of their ban - IIRC LL has been sued before to recover held balances on permabanned accounts, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that I may indeed want to pay a banned account to satisfy a contractual obligation. Hell, people have been perma'd before due to age bans and those bans have been lifted later - it happened to me back in the stone ages, they lifted it once I verified my ID - so a perma is not necessarily permanent. SL's terms try to escape this liability in a few ways as to LL themselves - no clue if that'd be enforceable - but I wouldn't want to litigate it as a third party, personally.
Maybe instead we should add a new
DATA_*
flag to llRequestAgentData
that returns the banned/suspended status of an agent? Then you could check that before sending the payment if you want to be sure, and you could optionally hold or redirect payments to suspended accounts, too.RavieDragon SLSGC
Nelson JenkinsThanks for the well thought out response. Not a lawyer, but it's my opinion that if there was a legal right to have the Linden, then that makes Linden Dollar very clearly not a "token" and would upend SL. The legal issues come into play once you sell L$ for USD or whatever real currency. The reason I recommended INVALID_UUID was to avoid being able to "verify" if an account was banned or not (privacy issue).
Nelson Jenkins
RavieDragon SLSGC Well, as a lawyer, no, it would not. Contracts are by no means limited to monetary transactions. There's nothing stopping anyone from entering into a contract to send L$ to a specific account for whatever reason. In fact, every L$ sale you make in SL is, by definition, a contract - it's just that nobody is going to sue over 4 USD spent on something in SL if, say, it doesn't get delivered.
In my case, we do this out of simplicity between SL business partners to minimize overhead. We move a fair bit of L$ around for region costs and other business support services for SL projects. If we did that all in USD, that's a huge compliance headache and would require a lot of treadmill work to keep running, not to mention that some of us are international and the tax consequences would be a nightmare for us to handle. Instead, we just rez an object that transfers the L$ as needed, and it's sorted. (Heck, if this were illegal, it'd have come up during my audit when I started working for the IRS long after we started doing this!)
Why do you think an account's ban status is a privacy issue? And more specifically, if you can verify that a UUID is valid (which is trivial), couldn't you accomplish that by just sending it L$1 and seeing if it failed? Wouldn't someone interested in figuring this out be willing to pay less than a penny to do it?
RavieDragon SLSGC
Nelson JenkinsYes I am fully aware of the tax implications here and deal with identical issues. But that doesn't change the fact that your L$ are not USD and if Linden wants to take L$ away from you for any reason, they can. I'm not gonna debate that here though. The account ban being a privacy isn't my belief, but I'm quite sure Linden feels that knowing if an account is banned or not IS a privacy issue.
RavieDragon SLSGC
Nelson JenkinsLOL, if you're going to put it for transparency, that's fine. Would you be transparent and re-post what you edited out and deleted which was the basis of my original IM to you? Thought not. What I told you in IM is exactly what was said in the Skill Gaming meeting publicly today.
I sent you an IM because this kind of back and forth is counter-productive to the purpose of this feature request. Your arguing with me back and forth over a subtle nuance around the "privacy issue", making uneducated comments about "why not just pay them L$1" to check -- you obviously being COMPLETELY oblivious that doing so is a policy violation for skill gaming avatars that would get us in trouble. The "Privacy issue" is completely unimportant to me, and was mentioned ONLY because Linden themselves has mentioned it, and I felt that comment needed to be part of the feature request so that Linden would understand that I took their prior comments around it in consideration for the request.
This is a feature request, not a hill to die on.
Nelson Jenkins
RavieDragon SLSGC This feature request is not limited to skill gaming, and the privacy issue in question would also not be rationally limited to uses in skill gaming, so whatever policy you're referring to with respect to skill gaming avatars specifically is irrelevant imo. Your proposal also admits that this would be useful for applications other than skill gaming, where that policy - whatever it is - wouldn't apply.
It is either against policy for
any
user to obtain information on the ban status of any other
user, in which case your policy cannot
be implemented as-is, or it's not, in which case your concerns as to the privacy issues are moot as to both your proposal and my alternate proposal of a llRequestAgentData
flag.Whether it is a violation or isn't is something that only LL can decide. I posted your IM only because it contains an important admission that you spoke with Corky Linden, who told you that this implicates privacy concerns, which you didn't admit was the Lindens' position in the proposal - up until that point you only claimed that you're "quite sure Linden feels that knowing if an account is banned or not IS a privacy issue", not any concrete citation to a policy that would prohibit disclosure of the ban status of an account. I'd consider "this proposal is admittedly unworkable on privacy grounds" an important fact that you'd need to address.
If there is a policy document somewhere that specifically states that skill gaming accounts (or any accounts!) are bound to specific privacy rules around the ban status of SL users and regular accounts aren't, just post it already so we can come up with alternative solutions instead of going around in circles on this. Maybe another error flag, or some other solution, who knows.
ZenGames SLSGO
This is absolutely right it should not be possible to send L$ to an avatar that is not allowed to participate in second life