Such a sight as this Becomes the field but here shows much amiss. Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

As a consequence of the unreliability of the Marketplace, and the inability of Linden Labs to supply the delivery service for which they are paid, I have closed my Marketplace Store, de-listing all items. It isn't worth the effort to deal with the complaints.

The rest is silence.

 

[Marcus Hancroft]

---

WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote:

As a consequence of the unreliability of the Marketplace, and the inability of Linden Labs to supply the delivery service for which they are paid, I have closed my Marketplace Store, de-listing all items. It isn't worth the effort to deal with the complaints.

The rest is silence.

 

---

I'm really really sorry to hear this, Wolf.  But I completely understand how you feel.  Hopefully, they will get all the crap fixed soon and you can reopen with no fears.  I wish I could tell you how long that will take, but, who knows?  I don't think even the commerce team knows how long it will take. 

[Deej Kasshiki]

Since the esteemed CEO of LL very rarely reads or responds to anything posted here be sure to Tweet him as well. Maybe if enough merchants take similar action some changes will be made.

[Nalates Urriah]

Anyone that follows Rodvik on Twitter know better...

https://twitter.com/#!/rodvik

[Nalates Urriah]

I can understand the frustration. Fortunately you are free to do what you want. 

[Kampu Oyen]

>Since the esteemed CEO of LL very rarely reads or responds to anything

The people to whom we should try more directly appeal are LL's legal department.

If they understood how really close the whole company is to being legally dismantled, they would surely try to impress this point upon The Rod.

No?

[Ela Talaj]

Maybe the CEO of LL does not respond because of you and your fellow drama queens around here. The CEO of LL could've perhaps spared some time for a productive discussion but surely not for mindless drivel.

[Canoro Philipp]

is closing your store going to fix the problems with the Marketplace? probably not, the problems will be solved later as the Lindens work on it.

there are many like me who only buy things from the Marketplace, so you just hurt your business by decreasing the range of potential customers. people are gonna buy a similar item that will provide for their needs, the only one who will have a disadvantage here is your business.

[Kampu Oyen]

>Maybe the CEO of LL does not respond because of you and your fellow drama queens around here.

And this isn't flaming when you do it - why, exactly?

>The CEO of LL could've perhaps spared some time for a productive discussion but surely not for mindless drivel.

If it were mindless drivel, it should be pretty easy for him to shut us up with a transparent explanation of the process, rather than expecting CommerceTeam Linden's loyal circle of all-female avatars to collectively condescend to LL's critics here with dismissiveness, rather than with any substantive discussion of the issue (which you continue not to offer).

[Super String]

"Silence for silence leaves the whole virtual world bleak."

Ghandi would say that if he were a second life resident.

 

However, I can understand how exhausted and frustrated you feel,  maybe you just make a wise decision. Take care.

[Deej Kasshiki]

But he sure seems to always have time to reply to shills and fangurls...

[Ilyra Chardin]

---

Kampu Oyen wrote:

>Since the esteemed CEO of LL very rarely reads or responds to anything

The people to whom we should try more directly appeal are LL's legal department.

If they understood how really close the whole company is to being legally dismantled, they would surely try to impress this point upon The Rod.

No?

---

In order for that to occur, you'd have to have some semblance of knowledge of the law.  I've been reading your posts the past few days - the ones that contain the legal lawsuit sabre rattling.  On what legal basis do you think you're going to sue them?

1 - There is contractual, legally binding consideration between a merchant and LL.  The consideration is as follows: merchant builds products and is provided a vehicle from which to sell from and receive payment for said products.  LL, as the vehicle provider, receives a percentage of each sale.  That is consideration.

2 - If the vehicle - MP - is broken or unavailable, both parties suffer (LL doesn't get their percentages and the merchants don't get the sales)

3.  When there have been errors, goods sold but payment to the merchant not rendered, LL has pushed those through to see that the merchant gets paid.  (This I know from personal experience on two support tickets)

Exactly how do you plan to make a case?

There is NO conspiracy here.  There is NO intention on the part of LL to sabotage MP, shut it down, or make people shop in-world only.  Why would they?  They make money on marketplace.

*head desk*

“Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.”

 

[Kampu Oyen]

>In order for that to occur, you'd have to have some semblance of knowledge of the law.  I've been reading your posts the past few days - the ones that contain the legal lawsuit sabre rattling.  On what legal basis do you think you're going to sue them?

I have neither claimed to be a lawyer, nor said that I would sue them, personally.

>1 - There is contractual, legally binding consideration between a merchant and LL.  The consideration is as follows: merchant builds products and is provided a vehicle from which to sell from and receive payment for said products.  LL, as the vehicle provider, receives a percentage of each sale.  That is consideration.

A percentage of sales revenues, yes. A multiple of an enhancement fee, or an enhancement fee for an undeliverable product because LL has made it undeliverable while continuing to encourage others to buy listing enhancements? No.

>2 - If the vehicle - MP - is broken or unavailable, both parties suffer (LL doesn't get their percentages and the merchants don't get the sales)

That's very simplistic. The percentage of sales they would be getting instead by allowing things to work correctly is a tiny fraction of what they should already expect not to get from land sales if the Marketplace is allowed to continue providing a preferred venue for a majority of merchants.

>3.  When there have been errors, goods sold but payment to the merchant not rendered, LL has pushed those through to see that the merchant gets paid.  (This I know from personal experience on two support tickets)

Token gestures, yes. Like replacing Xstreet with anything at all in the first place when they bought it out. Admirable, at least in some way.

>Exactly how do you plan to make a case?

That's not really my problem unless I will also sue them for something, or unless they sue me (and try to prove with things like records they already more or less claim do not even exist, that there's no basis to anything I've described? Yarite).

People who have lost more money than I'd be able to show are those who should first be threatening to sue, which, personally, I have not done. What I've done here is to show motive, means, and opportunity. That's actually procedure for criminal investigation. But as the evidentiary burden in civil court will only be lower, the two smoking guns of 13 September and 14 February are two things for which it is reasonable to demand better explanation than what has been provided. Those and a bunch of other things; especially the fact that transaction errors oddly never seem to favor merchant and/or customer at a loss to LL.

The argument (among those of us who bother to argue) at this point is essentially intentional sabotage versus mere coincidence. Linden has not even claimed mere coincidence, or at least not officially. The dates and other data do not plausibly add up to mere coincidence in any universe constrained by basic laws of statistical probability.

If there is a 3rd explanation better than the other two, I would like to hear it, either from LL or from someone else. Simple incompetence is not a 3rd explanation; it is one of the "mere coincidence" arguments.

Really there are any possible number of hypotheses that could explain the 13th & 14th, but almost all of them would be even scientifically weaker than mere coincidence. Being hacked by time-traveling cyborgs in some convoluted plan to prevent Hitler from being cloned, for example, is arguably below the chance level for selecting those deployment dates because there would seem to be no precedent for it, either in SL or in other companies. I concede that this doesn't mean it can't be what really happened. OTOH, there's plenty of precedent for sabotage in the histories of other types of companies, and no specific reason to assume that LL would be especially immune. Surely you've heard of corporate corruption at some point. No? How many people at the now dead corrupt companies you hear about do you think would have found it easy to believe that their company would be one of them? The historical list of corporate abuses is a list of things that most people either found or would have found practically impossible to believe if not first proved.

The chance events angle is also not totally unviable. But even where such an explanation is to be concluded, such as in the death of Brandon Lee, it's unethical to conclude such a thing without first investigating. Moreover, I expect you can take for granted that the Brandon Lee death was suspicious enough to warrant a thorough investigation before anyone could state with legal authority that it was a convergence of chance events. And yet the chance events that led to Lee's death are collectively far less improbable than what is being posited here as "obviously" mere coincidence. That's why the movie  industry now has procedures in place specifically to prevent it from happening again while LL has essentially proved that they don't care if they do repeat their mistakes (and why would that be?).

A 3rd explanation sounds possible to me, but, so far, nobody has been offering anything. What it would require in order to compete probabilistically with an intentional sabotage theory would be at least one variable that incidentally both correlates to optimization of release dates (independently of risk consideration) and correlates to daily utility value for listing enhancements.

If you have such a variable, please tell me what it is.

The only thing of that sort which comes to my mind is that there could be calendar days on which a release is either impossible or approaches impossibility for some reason. And even that doesn't really satisfy the question of how such a 3rd explanation would be any more scientifically valid than a sabotage theory.  Moreover, even if releases were only possible one day a week, that would only close the probability gap between sabotage theory and mere coincidence theory by a factor of about 50, still leaving a gap of absolutely no less than 1320 to 1 in favor of sabotage.

But I know... even that would just mean that the company you happen to really like is the one in 1320 that was just really, really unlucky.

Guess what... people favoring 1329 other companies mostly think exactly the same thing, and they can't all be right, can they?

In fact though, there seems to be no specific day of the week for code release. So even the best numerical angle I can provide in favor of mere coincidence is both still inadequate and overstated to LL's favor by some factor approaching 50.

>There is NO conspiracy here. 

And on what evidentiary basis can you make such a statement? Do you have any numerical data?

And why would it have to be a conspiracy anyway? Couldn't it just be one person exercising control over others?

>There is NO intention on the part of LL to sabotage MP, shut it down, or make people shop in-world only. 

The overwhelmingly preponderant pattern of Linden action toward the Markeplace over the last 8 months says that there is. Official communications could say anything and it wouldn't matter, because what LL says they're going to do and what they ultimately do have only some kind of incidental region of overlap which I think probably also would show as being below the chance level if subjected to more rigorous scrutiny. OTOH, if they even ever bothered to deny anything I've described, that might change the way I'm approaching things here. But, so far, what have they even bothered to deny?

>Why would they? 

Because they are desperate to find any possible way of getting merchants to start paying for land again.

Without the word "because", what part of the above sentence can you possibly tell me is untrue?

The "because" just explains that, whereas they otherwise seem to be doing absolutely nothing about this immense and apparently insoluble problem, they at least appear to be doing one thing about it; forcibly pushing merchants back to the grid.

Here's what I think is pretty reasonable question for you, specifically, Ilyra:

If they shut off the boxes on 1 June as planned, without first fully supporting the permissions to deliver breedables with DD, what meaning should we assign to that?

Please feel free to bookmark this question to review on 1 June if you don't see any reason to answer it today, because I'm betting you'll have very good reason to answer it then.

>They make money on marketplace.

They make a lot less on the marketplace than they lose on unwanted land by allowing the marketplace even to work as well as it does.

So the simple monetary question is not why they should try to shut down or marginalize the marketplace; the simple monetary question is how they can possibly dare to risk making it even more useful.

So what do I want them to do?

I want them to either REALLY fix the marketplace system and stop tampering with it irresponsibly, OR simply admit that they need to shut down the marketplace in order to keep their company alive.

Either thing would satisfy me.

It's this in-between stuff that I have a problem with.