The policy of manual updates has gone on for almost a year now, and taken up about 33% of my time in SL this year (keep in mind I work in the game full-time.) Today it’s at about 1% of my time I would say, so clearly a majority of legit collars have been weeded out. I stepped up to do this because I knew it was important to not hurt our paying customers who were being mixed up in all of this. My view was it was a good move to have manual updates for legit customers since it made things more personable, and I was online all the time anyways.

Eventually I was getting overwhelmed with doing updates all day so Amethyst hired on Sparrow to help out with updates. Manual collar updates still go on, but they are rare to the point where a majority of requests are from pirates. We have an entire database on our servers of our customers sales that we check up on requests so we usually know your entire history seconds after you first instant message us. We just look up the name, confirm it, and send a new one.

Once we give you a new update you don’t have to worry about manual updates again. I’d like to add that we do manual updates for cuffs too, but that’s pretty much needed because all cuff sets have 8 in a set, not 4 like there was originally.

Today a majority of people who own an Amethyst Collar pre-version 6.0 have the pirated. Pirated collars are commonly sold in our own store and given out freely in Gorean sims. We’ve found them in reseller store, SLExchange.com, you name it. It’s come to the point where I’ve walked through my own store and two people approached me within 10 minutes and have offered me to purchase a full rights Amethyst Collar at a discount. Can you imagine that? I’m telling you, please have faith in us. We aren’t Evil (and I’m a succubus!), and we aren’t pulling a Sony.

If you are a legitimate customer with us you shouldn’t have any fear of anything. I’ve have had people unhappy with the policies, but just talk to me (Earalia Nolan) and I’ll will do my best to make things right for you. I can’t think of many people who I wouldn’t leave unhappy. If you have an issue that comes up we will address it as soon as possible, answer your questions to the best of our abilities, and treat you better than anyone else will.

My gripe is that you should have a sign at the landing zone “Do not proceed if you wear a V5 collar, or only proceed with your Master… then 21M in have your crasher”

As you now have it, as soon as the unknowing pet TPs into the sim they will be fucked over.

The people I have passed this information onto have also not been able to believe that you would betray valid customers trust in this way.

I already give away a lot of stuff that my competition use to compete against me and I let my competitors sell in my sim against me for free. I just don’t see how anyone can think I am doing it for “greed.” I don’t want people using those old collars… there is a major bug in them… it would be irresponsible to distribute them with knowledge of that.

@ kittyn fuhr – There is a bug in SL that causes them to go missing. If you don’t have concierge support to recover them, then we do complimentary replacement with proof of purchase.

On Wednesday morning, I tried on an outfit. It knocked off my collar…which ended up missing. Master got the comment that it was removed….but it never returned to my inventory. I tried clearing my cache, and restarting…

the next day, we went and bought new Amethyst scripts, new ToKon hud, and placed them into another collar that i took from one of my alts (both of these collars were Ephemeral collars). This was wednesday night…thursday morning, I set it up….Sunday afternoon, I change into my dragon form…about an hour or two later, I go back to wear it….and it was missing. Again, I tried to clear cache, and find it…2 times in one week…it really distressed me.

I contacted concierge support, who found it, and returned it somehow to my inventory. Both of them.

I was worried, if something had happened, since they both had Amethyst, and were both ephemeral collars….then my friend sent this to me. So…i don’t know if this is related or not…but, for those who said it was just pixels…i kept trying to tell myself that, also. But it was a gift. Something that shows a bond…it would be the same if the wedding rings in RL were lost (except for less cost, of course)….they can be replaced. It’s the meaning. Now…I know hopefully it won’t happen again, and can fix it if it does….hopefully.

And im very sure the execs at EA feel the exact same way. That dose little to change the over all results.

The plans of action I had to choose from:

1) Discontinue all support. People will not be happy about not having support.

2) Close down the business. People will not be happy about not having new items or updates to existing items they purchase.

3) Discontinue support for the versions that were exploited and older. This is what I tried to do originally and people were livid… claiming I was doing it to make people rebuy.

4) Allow update with proof of purchase for a period of time until I can phase out as many of the out-of-date items as possible to limit the number of people who will be left supportless after the deadline.

As you can see I picked choice number 4 (although I originally picked 3… but changed to 4).

This campaign is part of the effort to get people up-to-date so I can announce a deadline for support. So you the course of action you suggest is the first one I tried…. it failed with a much bigger backlash than this campaign.

Now perhaps you have more insight into the tough decisions I had to make… I have tried the best I can to find something of a balance.

@ Stephan Peck – Definitely not going to treat legit customers like pirates, I am trying to protect them. If I have to stop providing support or if I call it quits completely… the legitimate customers will be hurt.