Amethyst Jetaime Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 Just browsed throught the Madstyle items. A tiny percent percent of what i saw has anything do to with Madstyle let alone the 60's. Of the two designers of the avatars on the banner, one doesn't have a store on MP the other has 6 items that are actually variations fo the same thing that has nothing to do with the 60's, If the goal is to attract people into SL with this style they are going to be sadly disappointed. Other than an occasional club event for best of the 60's i don't really see many people wearing or using 60's style clothing items. It wasn't all that attractive the first time around and it hasn't improved with time. Its just kitsch. Madstyle looks like a massive fail to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marcus Hancroft Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Just browsed throught the Madstyle items. A tiny percent percent of what i saw has anything do to with Madstyle let alone the 60's. Of the two designers of the avatars on the banner, one doesn't have a store on MP the other has 6 items that are actually variations fo the same thing that has nothing to do with the 60's, If the goal is to attract people into SL with this style they are going to be sadly disappointed. Other than an occasional club event for best of the 60's i don't really see many people wearing or using 60's style clothing items. It wasn't all that attractive the first time around and it hasn't improved with time. Its just kitsch. Madstyle looks like a massive fail to me. ^ This! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Czari Zenovka Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Other than an occasional club event for best of the 60's i don't really see many people wearing or using 60's style clothing items. It wasn't all that attractive the first time around and it hasn't improved with time. Its just kitsch. Ain't that the truth!! And it didn't get much better until maybe the mid-late 70's. Polyester leisure suits. *Shudders* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kampu Oyen Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 >Once upon a time, in a land far far away, someone got banned. One should be very cautious about discussing people using alts. If you can show persuasively for example, that a Linden is using an alt on the Merchants Forum, it can get you banned from the forum, and worse, even if there is never any denial by Linden, or by the alt. Assuming someone has been banned, would anyone here be able to cite the specific action that warranted the ban? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kampu Oyen Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 >Madstyle looks like a massive fail to me. For the Second Life Marketplace store that is actually named Madstyle, probably no so much, huh. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dartagan Shepherd Posted April 19, 2012 Author Share Posted April 19, 2012 Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Just browsed throught the Madstyle items. A tiny percent percent of what i saw has anything do to with Madstyle let alone the 60's. Of the two designers of the avatars on the banner, one doesn't have a store on MP the other has 6 items that are actually variations fo the same thing that has nothing to do with the 60's, If the goal is to attract people into SL with this style they are going to be sadly disappointed. Other than an occasional club event for best of the 60's i don't really see many people wearing or using 60's style clothing items. It wasn't all that attractive the first time around and it hasn't improved with time. Its just kitsch. Madstyle looks like a massive fail to me. It would seem so, although I'm sure some people made something extra from it. The take-away should be as with all things that doing something properly on a professional level, with proper tools is the way to go. Would love to do a proof of concept and challenge the commerce team to let any decent merchant pick a promotion out of a hat and see if it didn't get the same or better results ... and then to try it again with tools dedicated to promotions where everyone can track results of their promoted items. But ... you know a leisure suit with just the right nylon shirt and platform shoes was a Studly Spewright in the making. Confess! Edit: Mistake, it's Czari that needs to come clean about the leisure suits, but it still applies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kampu Oyen Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 >What you have done is suggest to other merchants to is to use this LL promotion for getting visibility for their underperforming items. Yes, much as the promotion, itself, is being used to get more performance out of specific products offered by specific merchants. Anything that is underpromoted can underperform. Moreover, a borked market is an essentially underperfoming market. If LL wants the weaker products to perform, maybe they could just fix the whole market instead of helping out specific merchants with specific products? Maybe? >You stimulate them to abuse the promotion. The promotion is impossible to abuse because there is no clear criterion for what it intends to promote. Moreover, the promotion, itself, is abusive in terms of what it excludes and how it excludes things; the important criterion of inclusion is not product type, but merchant identity. So, really, I'm stimulating merchants to make the promotion less abusive by making it less exclusive., >This will lead to irritation of customers who do want to shop with this LL choosen keyword. Why should they want to shop with it at all? Only because LL tells them that they want to. If they wanted 60's items, they would already be able to find them with no special problem. So what is LL telling them that they want instead? Why would LL tell them that they want something different from what they want, and then arbitrarily constrain how that other thing is defined? Does this not sound the least bit Orwellian to you? They have effectively replaced a common search word with a different search word they intend to heavily regulate. Just think about that for a second. Please? >I looks like you find it more important to get some sand in the LL machine, than to give your customers a pleasant shopping experience. My customers have only ever had very positive things to say. All the complaints I'm seeing about the shopping experience are related to things LL has either decided to do or have stupidly allowed to happen. There is no amount of sand I could throw into LL's machine, ever that would be significant in comparison to what they are throwing every day that there's an open promotion and a stack of open JIRA's into my own machine, and yours. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WADE1 Jya Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 This "madstyle" debacle is just mad embarrassing I think. They should have taken the resources used to plan this "marketing opportunity" and use instead for fixing marketplace so it is actually functional for shoppers, not a scrambled mess that is scaring customers away - unless that is the plan to break marketplace so bad for excuse to close it down - in which case I say carry on, Lindens, you're doing a great job. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kampu Oyen Posted April 19, 2012 Share Posted April 19, 2012 >Would love to do a proof of concept and challenge the commerce team to let any decent merchant pick a promotion out of a hat and see if it didn't get the same or better results The easiest thing to do would seem to be to open something like the JIRA system for promotional concepts. If any user could submit one and all users could vote on them, there might still be some amount of numerical abuse of the voting system, sure. But the whole thing would still be a more market-driven way of setting promotional priorities as compared to simply continuing to ask the same cluster of merchants for new ideas while total SL revenues continue to decline. Of course, that would sadly mean that LL no longer has to pay for a market research person whose work is indistinguishable in effect from the result of doing bong hits while channel-surfing... ... which probably explains why the Lindens "never thought of that". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madeliefste Oh Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 Kampu Oyen wrote: >I looks like you find it more important to get some sand in the LL machine, than to give your customers a pleasant shopping experience. My customers have only ever had very positive things to say. All the complaints I'm seeing about the shopping experience are related to things LL has either decided to do or have stupidly allowed to happen. There is no amount of sand I could throw into LL's machine, ever that would be significant in comparison to what they are throwing every day that there's an open promotion and a stack of open JIRA's into my own machine, and yours. As a regular visitor of this forum you cannot have missed the complaints from customers about keyword spam on the market place. It's a regular issue for customers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Czari Zenovka Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 Dartagan Shepherd wrote: The take-away should be as with all things that doing something properly on a professional But ... you know a leisure suit with just the right nylon shirt and platform shoes was a Studly Spewright in the making. Confess! Edit: Mistake, it's Czari that needs to come clean about the leisure suits, but it still applies. I wouldn't go so far as calling a leisure suit ensemble quite a Studly Spewright (unless I'm misunderstanding the reference...lol)...but the sad thing was we thought it looked good back in the day. When I look at photos from that time I groan at some of the outfits, hairstyles, etc. Actually those were more in the 70's. I checked out my MP store today (yep - same borked listings I can't edit there) and saw the "Madstyle" promo on the MP home page. The female avatar looks vaguely 60ish but I don't see anything at all 60's about the male avatar. That look could be anywhere from the 80's to the present. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kampu Oyen Posted April 20, 2012 Share Posted April 20, 2012 >As a regular visitor of this forum you cannot have missed the complaints from customers about keyword spam on the market place. It's a regular issue for customers. That's exactly why I think it's wrong for LL to set an example by trying to license a select group of merchants to use a proprietary spam keyword. "Madstyle" is not in any academic dictionary, was not originated or registered by Linden Labs and remains in broader public use, despite the fact that it remains essentially undefined. The only rights that LL really asserts by attempting to control how merchants use this word are: 1) LL's right to ambiguously infringe trademarks of other companies without uninvited competition and 2) LL's right to covertly construct an artificial English-based language for their users in which words are to be defined however LL may choose to define them in context, at its own convenience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madeliefste Oh Posted April 21, 2012 Share Posted April 21, 2012 Right, go on with playing the village idiot. It's your party. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kampu Oyen Posted April 21, 2012 Share Posted April 21, 2012 That's a little unnecessarily insulting. When have used such a tone with you? I understand that people disagree with me encouraging merchants to "game the system". But the system is already gaming them. If, by LL constantly ignoring or trying to rewrite the same rules on which they ostensibly rely, LL still can't get the right merchants to lose, maybe those merchants actually deserve to win. Really, why not? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madeliefste Oh Posted April 21, 2012 Share Posted April 21, 2012 When you consider it insulting then I offer my apologies. I wanted to say that I'm going to end the discussion with you, and it came out this way. I guess that is because discussing with you is highly frustrating for me. You don't stick to the subject, you come with all kind of reasoning that is twisted so long till you can blame LL for all. Now you are even putting the blame for your own call for gaming the system on them. But those Lindens you despite so much, there are only a few hunderd of them. Customers on the other hand are with hunderds of thousands. I see it as unresponsable behaviour towards those hunderds of thousands to stimulate merchants to game the system, just because you have issues with those few Lindens. You know how I see it, and I know you see it very different. So there is not much left to say. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kampu Oyen Posted April 22, 2012 Share Posted April 22, 2012 >I guess that is because discussing with you is highly frustrating for me. I appreciate your response. Thanks. I think we all find this frustrating for various reasons, but I don't think people tend to frustrate me because they are stupid. >Now you are even putting the blame for your own call for gaming the system on them. I don't blame LL for people gaming their system as such. I blame LL for making it possible and making it justifiable. Really, I'd rather it was neither possible not justifiable. It's a sad, sad choice on LL's part. >But those Lindens you despite so much, there are only a few hunderd of them. I don't despise Lindens. As far as I know, there might be only one bad egg among them, and that might even be someone who is very badly compromised by some kind of criminal influence from outside the company. If I knew what that person was up against, I might even be a lot more sympathetic. But, from an organizational standpoint, that's not really an excuse to keep allowing that person (or persons) to keep messing things up. Some way needs to be found for the incompetent to leave their positions of incomptetence, nicely if possible (yes, nicely), regardless of whether the incompetence is natural or constructive. >Customers on the other hand are with hunderds of thousands. And I support their right to a free market, rather than a market weighted to a small collection of merchants with inside information about LL promotions. >I see it as unresponsable behaviour towards those hunderds of thousands to stimulate merchants to game the system, just because you have issues with those few Lindens. I do believe that I understand that. There's an upside and a downside to this action, not only for a lot of merchants, but also for the customers. I understand that we may continue to disagree about whether the benefits to customers outweigh the costs and/or risks, but must urge you to try to see that there at least is an upside for customers. The upside is that efforts to manipulate them to support a less competitive market have been undermined. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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