Is it Broken Again?

[Medhue Simoni]

Seriously LL, how the heck do you expect us to pay our tiers when you can't even keep the MP up and running? This is reaching the point of complete ridiculousness. Maybe, the smart thing for all of us to do is stop paying our tiers until LL can provide a working MP. LL, you are pushing us all away from this platform and forcing us to seek out other options. Personally, I'm announcing right here to my customers that I'm haulting all production of products for SL until LL addresses the issues with MP. Of course, I would never neglect my customers and they can contact me anytime of the day and I will be there as soon as I can to help them.

I have to make money to live and eat, and right now, I have better options to do that elsewhere. Let's not even go into why 5 year old bugs still aren't fixed.

[Medhue Simoni]

Please forgive me, as I feel this needs to be said.

Besides SL, I've never used a program where major bugs never get fixed. I've used alot of different programs.

The norm to me is -

 I find a bug

 I report it to the devs

 The very next day I get an email, thanking me for reporting it.

 Within the week, the bug is fixed.

 I get an email, thanking me again, and asking that I check the fix.

 I report back that it works perfectly.

End of the problem.

Not in SL tho. We have bugs everywhere that no1 at LL gives a crap about.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

They gave the all clear (on grid status and of course Twitter), but it was still slow for me afterwards.

Agree on the bugs and treatment, customer service ... only in SL, or projects that are duds out of the gate.

Don't know, they measure success in terms of revenue in the context of startups, have heard Phil rave about how SL bucked the odds and very recently that it's a $75 million success. A leading virtual world has never had to buck startup odds. It's a given in this industry that the newest virtual world with the best features takes the prize.

Which is why I never, ever take any success advice from one hit wonder-preneurs.

Meanwhile it lacks in just about every area on a pro level, support included. It's an experiment in how much you can push on people.

Still working on getting enthusiasm back, even for pathfinding as a feature, these are the kind of things that should have been in place years ago. But that either isn't unique. In this case, it's a page out of Unity's handbook.

They'll start waking up one day, whether they have the revenue left to recover is another story. Needs a serious re-investment into top notch development and support and if they're not willing to part with their profit, it's not happening.

[Medhue Simoni]

It is seriously like they just put comments on the jiras and then go off to the beach. Some months ago, I saw a change on the jira that stated that an animation bug was fixed, or whatever their wording is. I came inworld to check it, then looked for a veiwer update, and there was none. I went back to the jira and change it to open. Immediately it was changed back and I was told not to touch the jira as it would take longer to fix. That was months and months ago on a 5 year old bug, and I have no hope they actually will fix it. Why? Because almost this exact same thing happened with this exact jira not 2 years ago.

It's fricken sad.

[Flea Yatsenko]

I have been considering getting some sort of sim with someone I know, and I'm specifically not doing it because marketplace's sale performance is so unstable.

I barely made any L$ today. In fact, I made over 18 times as much yesterday as I did today with the marketplace broken.

LL really, really needs to fix things ASAP. They should disable adding new items until things are fixed, lock relevancy results, and basically just freeze the marketplace so it's read only for now. It's nearly impossible to fix something when it's constantly being updated and modified. They should also consider buying more power in the cloud. A lot of these issues with marketplace performance could be because the servers that SLMP is hosted on isn't giving it enough resources. LL should consider providing more resources to the cloud virtual private servers. It might cost more in the short term, but considering the lost revenues from SLMP commission and the people who won't be able to afford tier this month because of SLMP performance, it should be worth it.

Things need to change. A lot of people depend on SLMP sales to pay for land, and since SLMP income is no longer anywhere near reliable, a lot of people are going to start thinking twice about getting a sim or keeping one.

LL needs a better system for fixing things. The entire structure of the company is disorganized and you can see it by the fact that they don't communicate very well with us in these forums. If anything, I'd say that a lot of these marketplace problems come from the fact that they don't have enough staff to code (and LL is hiring Ruby on Rails developers for SLMP) and that they're cutting corners on hosting costs.

We shouldn't be mad at the commerce team, we should be mad at management for not giving them what they need to fix the situation. I think that we should start to see some sort of effort to convince Rodvik that SLMP is an extremely valuable resource to the Second Life economy. To under staff it, cut corners on cloud hosting, and to not have communication with merchants is to kill a key component to Second Life. Second Life's success is entirely dependent on content creators. If it wasn't for us, there would be no AO, clothes, landscapes, caves, mountains, space ships, houses, buildings, jewelery, etc. that all bring in users who spend real money on the game which ends up in LL's hands.

Rodvik has lots of game experience, which is going to be awesome for Second Life. Path finding is going to be a killer feature, and I have no doubt that with him leading we will see more features like that. However, game companies don't have to worry about keeping their players creating content and making sure that they provide new content and have an incentive to do so, and Second Life is entirely dependent on that. No one would buy a sim and use the default things SL gives you. It wouldn't be SL anymore, it'd be a big, empty unthemed chat room with 3D avatars.

I'm tired, and half awake. I've probably ranted on and I doubt anyone is going to read this and I'm pretty sure I've made some typos, but the fact remains that if we want to see changes on the SLMP we need to get more people fixing the problems and we need better hardware for the SLMP platform to run on. I know it's popular to sit here and blame Linden Labs for everything, but standing around pointing fingers never solves and problem and it just makes a volitile environment.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Spot on, half awake or no.

I think you just hit all the vital bits. It's not about the commerce team, just the product.

Does seem like they need to throw more hardware/resources at it. Also agree that Rod really needs to see the sense of how important this is.

Cutting corners is what gets them into lots of messes. From the start after acquiring XStreet they should have gone straight for developing shops and products as an integrated part of SL proper. Had they gone that route (and they still could), they could have then mashed up shops and products on the web, in-world, multiple storefronts, as a products/shop tab in profiles and a thousand other ways.

But right, Spree was free and there for the taking. Never heard of Spree before that. Heard of everyone else from ZenCart to OSCommerce to Magento. They need to learn how to read a list of existing clients before they pick a technology at the very least. Stop cutting corners.

Also your point being if I could paraphrase a bit that "content is king". Amen to that.

If I could babble for a bit, that's something that's always gotten to me about LL. They didn't come into this game/virtual worlds industry, they stumbled onto it. Some of the employees have come from game companies but I'm still hoping that Rod gets some of the basics and that this has nothing to do with social algorithms and the data they spend too much time analyzing. But never in their history have they really understood it, which is what people have been trying to tell them for years.

Come on Rod, you know this stuff. Gemstone IV is one of the last commercial MUD holdouts that has history longer than the internet. People still pay $100 bucks for a wedding over there and $60 bucks to get into special shopping events to buy staff/user created content.

Rod mentioned MUSH from the old days (LSL looks about as much like modem line noise as MUSH code there, Rod, think it might be time to drop in a modern language?) But the same thing in the 90's ... users creating their own homes, objects currencies.

Rod gets the evolution from Interactive Fiction in the 80's to here (I'm hoping). It's all about the content and when it has value it's even better. The new Little Text People venture LL is doing shows that he understands the correlation between old style Interactive Fiction and virtual goods.

Clue Rod ... you guys finally bring in mesh and neglect clothing and rigging? Did you miss the part where since the 90's wherever user content is, wearables rank number one?

@Rod ... you were brought into LL to bring your understanding of this stuff into SL, right? Forget this lab thing, time to bring it out of the petri dish and grow it up. Don't control it, just an abstract framework that sings and dances, we'll do the rest.

Need to stop saying you're listening and coding like you're not.

[Ela Talaj]

It is indeed strange to say the least that The Lab which pioneered a 3D environment of such complexity cannot efficiently debug a trivial e-commerce application. However you must agree that The Lab has no obligation expressed or implied to support income for its users. SL was originally envisioned, designed and implemented as a game and a means of social interaction not as an income opportunity.

[Kampu Oyen]

>LL needs a better system for fixing things

What they need is any system at all for not breaking them in the first place.

>Rodvik has lots of game experience, which is going to be awesome for Second Life.

OK, sure. But is it going to be awesome before or after Second Life has had to go out of business because of the way he has been managing things?

[Kampu Oyen]

> "content is king".

Practically any industry loses more users to bad service than to limited content.

 

[Pamela Galli]

I'll be damned if I can't get in AGAIN today!

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Ela Talaj wrote:

 SL was originally envisioned, designed and implemented as a game and a means of social interaction not as an income opportunity.

---

While I respect your views, this mean nothing. If LL doesn't fix the MP asap, eventually they will feel it in their own pockets. What they envisioned doesn't mean a dang thing when they are no longer profitable. Plus, don't you think that it is precisely these types of constant problems that has caused their decline in profits?

 

[Kampu Oyen]

>Ela Talaj wrote:

 >SL was originally envisioned, designed and implemented as a game and a means of social interaction not as an income opportunity.

It is what it is when it is what it is.

If it's not supposed to be an income opportunity, then maybe, in addition to not allowing it to work as an income opportunity, they should stop marketing it as one.

Marketing aside, though, LL wilfully allows people to enter into commerce agreements which LL does not compellingly show any intention to honor by their actions.

Regardless of what SL is "supposed to be", what LL is doing is just plain wrong.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

---

Ela Talaj wrote:

It is indeed strange to say the least that The Lab which pioneered a 3D environment of such complexity cannot efficiently debug a trivial e-commerce application. However you must agree that The Lab has no obligation expressed or implied to support income for its users. SL was originally envisioned, designed and implemented as a game and a means of social interaction not as an income opportunity.

---

Must also respectfully disagree, partially. Obligation no. That they've expressed or implied income opportunity, absolutely and in many ways.

When they first started figuring out what to charge for they saw the value of virtual goods. When they started charging for prims instead of land first they were looking at the value of virtual goods.

They saw the value of "us" sharing and selling when someone cooked up a currency exchange for SL so that people could buy and sell. They saw, implied and expressed it when they acquired the currency exchange.

Even moreso when they bought the marketplace, talked about improving our sales and visibility, sold us advertising, Colossus starting a forum post asking for RL sucess stories.

They knew it when a little ad in Business Week created a boom and a huge hype curve that lasted for 3 years. And it was about one person making more than a million dollars USD in SL.

Rod implied and expressed when he said that 2012 will include plans to help merchants specifically with better tools.

I think he's starting to see that you can't move forward if the resources aren't there, or the methodology is wrong and that your own people are holding you up. 2 years and counting with this mess, Rod. Since the day you guys put your hands on it.

[Medhue Simoni]

With any relationship, there is give and take. If a good balance is not kept intact, then all parties will have to accept the problems that arise from that. If I got nothing from the relationship at all, then I'd likely seek out a better relationship. Same goes for the other side. In this case, between LL and us, it has been extremely 1 sided for a very long time. I'm not saying anything is intentional. What is intentional is when 1 side refuses to see the imbalance, nor do anything to actually correct it.

This is a good time to talk about karma. Of course it's real, that should be obvious, IMO. But... it's not some kind of super power or hand of god. It is more akin to the law of averages, or a spiritual reputation. For Example, If a merchant decides he is gonna screw every customer, how many returning customers will he get? If LL keeps us in constant frustration, how many will continue to stay? That's karma!

[Kampu Oyen]

I don't think the issue is whether or not they have an obligation to support income.

I think the issue is that they keep saying one things and doing something different, and that this behavior creates costs to users which otherwise would not be created.

Even in cases where the user money they destroy is merely a portion of the user money they allow to be earned, they are still destroying user money, so whether it is merchant income or money that users paid to load in is irrelevant.

[Ela Talaj]

I cannot speculate on The Lab's profits because I don't have the data. If you have I'd appreciate having a link to your source.

I suppose most income comes from subscription fees and bandwidth fees (tiers). From the last available published report for the 3rd quarter of 2011 it could be calculated that The Lab's income from 10% marketplace commissions comes to about 32K per month USD. This looks like a drop in the bucket.

[Flea Yatsenko]

The marketplace is how Linden Labs gets their content for their "game". You can argue that it's not meant to be a place to sell things for income, but without this, the only content that would be in the game would be things that Linden Labs created themselves.

Before Second Life, Linden Lab was working on Linden World. There is no user created content and that's not what the purpose of the "game" was.

That's the kind of Second Life we would have if it wasn't for content creators and the marketplace and economy. Procedurally generated buildings, no ability to terraform, Linden Lab changed their approach to Second Life and decided it needed to be a user generated world.

Linden Lab changed their mind in 2003.

Giving creators a reason to create and spread their creations (I.E. real world income) provides the people who would use Second Life as a game and means of social interaction more things to do because they can buy the things.

If it weren't for the marketplace, we would all be buying DLC packs a la Sims 3 for our Second Lives that were made by Linden Lab. If you think LL has a user retention issue now, imagine if all we had were Linden Labs produced DLC we'd have to buy for $20 a pack.

An e-commerce website wasn't what LL originally planned, but it helps the grid and it helps non-content creators enjoy Second Life, gives them things to do, and gives them reasons to keep coming back.

As a challenge to you, try building a sim with your friends and creating everything yourself. Get rid of all the clothes you've bought, the trees, homes, caves, landscapes, off-sim rocks, cars, roads, danceballs, animations, hair, etc. When you take away all of that, there's not much of a game or a product that LL has. They depend on us to stay alive, there's no way someone in their right might would spend $400 a month to have a big empty grass field and a ruth avatar to chat with their friends.

The CEO needs to start valuing what we do for the grid and realize that the marketplace website is extremely important for keeping users engaged and actived in Second Life. The people in charge of the business decisions also need to realize that the more high quality, good products that are sold the more satisfied users Second Life will have and the longer people will stay in Second Life before abandoning it.

Some of us make a decent amount of real life money from Second Life, and that's great. But LL doesn't keep everything around just so we can make money. Before Rodvik starts giving us the tools to make SL more like a game with things like pathfinding, content creators need a reliable way to deliver their products to the people who want and need them. That's the best way to get Second Life to grow and improve user retention. Tons of people want to make games, and if Second Life could turn into a place where people could come here, make games with Second Life as a game engine, and then profit from it, it would be a fantastic product.

The bottom line is that if someone created something that had the popularity of a game like Minecraft and it worked in Second Life, there is no way it could become as popular as minecraft because Second Life lacks a reliable and consistent way to provide a potential customer with products.

[Kampu Oyen]

>about 32K per month USD.

Couldn't they make a lot more than that on land if they could just get every marketplace merchant to open an in-world shop?

I'm just asking about the numbers, here.

[Marcus Hancroft]

---

Pamela Galli wrote:

I'll be damned if I can't get in AGAIN today!

---

I can't either, Miss Pamela.  It's ridiculous.

[Medhue Simoni]

---

Ela Talaj wrote:

I cannot speculate on The Lab's profits because I don't have the data. If you have I'd appreciate having a link to your source.

I suppose most income comes from subscription fees and bandwidth fees (tiers). From the last available published report for the 3rd quarter of 2011 it could be calculated that The Lab's income from 10% marketplace commissions comes to about 32K per month USD. This looks like a drop in the bucket.

---

I think I already pointed this out, but .... If 60%, which is a conservative number, of all transactions takes place on the MP, and every merchants sees a 50% or more drop in sales, how many tiers won't be paid next month? Really, this has been going on for a very long time, just extremely slowly. Massive boikage for any extented amount of time will eventually have a big impact on inword land, rental, private sims, and more. Most of us have already endured some of the worst over the last 2 years, and barely hanging on as it is. These recent mess ups could easily send a bunch more merchants right over the edge. It would be different if customers could shop inworld, but how are they going to find anything with that nutty search engine?

[Kampu Oyen]

>The marketplace is how Linden Labs gets their content for their "game".

There was plenty of content happening in SL before Xstreet... content AND merchants paying for land.

>Linden Lab changed their approach to Second Life and decided it needed to be a user generated world.

That's a good decision if it means getting people to pay them to create content rather than paying people to create content. I not only approve of that, but I strongly support it philosophically as win-win. It's the whole reason I came to Second Life in the first place.

>Giving creators a reason to create and spread their creations (I.E. real world income) provides the people who would use Second Life as a game and means of social interaction more things to do because they can buy the things.

Yes and no. A lot of people come to SL just to experience a creative environment where they can participate in the evolution of content as it changes hands among users. In my case, the ability to also make money was important because it allowed me to produce more free content for fellow users. It has never been vital to me to make huge amount of money with the marketplace, and if it consistently worked only well enough to cover my creative costs, I would still use it. The part that ticks me off is that LL has turned play into work by constantly breaking the commerce tools and changing the rules, and ignoring the rules they themselves write or subscribe-to. Really, they've done the impossible; they've turned me from someone who would gladly pay to upload free content for other people into someone who doesn't even much feel, anymore, like getting paid to upload content. It's like they just don't want any more content or something. And I'm starting to understand how that really just might be possible.That explanation is a bit complicated, and I expect I'll get into it more when I have clarified in my own mind how best to order the explanatory elements.

>An e-commerce website wasn't what LL originally planned, but it helps the grid and it helps non-content creators enjoy Second Life, gives them things to do, and gives them reasons to keep coming back.

I'm hesistant to use terms like non-content creators, although this is not a criticism of your usage.

The commerce website can help consumers find reasons to keep coming back, yes. But not if there's no grid to come back to, and it's at least very unclear at this point how the commerce website helps the grid. By making it possible for consumers to pick up tons of free or cheap stuff without it having to be displayed in-world, the commerce website makes it harder for merchants to get the same sales they would from in-world stores that they might get if the commerce site either didn't exist, or didn't work well enough to produce the Fast Freebies effect.And if merchants can't compete with the MP, they may not be able to pay tier.

Some people with whom I have strongly disagreed in the past have come to this forum to complain specifically about how the marketplace freebies are destroying Second Life. In recent weeks, I have come to think that they may have a point worth considering in earnest, although I need to paraphrase and slightly elaborate in order to make this point intelligible in a way that might have made any sense to me the first time; something like: if the market depends on the grid, and yet kills the grid, maybe there's no point in trying to preserve anything more than the minimum functionality of the market needed for LL to be able to continue claiming they've replaces Xstreet rather than simply shutting it down.

>As a challenge to you, try building a sim with your friends and creating everything yourself. Get rid of all the clothes you've bought, the trees, homes, caves, landscapes, off-sim rocks, cars, roads, danceballs, animations, hair, etc. When you take away all of that, there's not much of a game or a product that LL has. They depend on us to stay alive, there's no way someone in their right might would spend $400 a month to have a big empty grass field and a ruth avatar to chat with their friends.

I'm not sure that's the appropriate test at this point. The appropriate test might be to block SL to new uploads and see if the total appeal increases or decreases over time. Not to seem to agree with ralph, but I think someone wouldn't necessarily have to be crazy to think that doing this could actually improve total appeal. Especially if, at some point, new content is allowed to a group of licensed content creators who are well-selected and well-directed. That's not philosophically or aesthetically what I'd prefer. Not even close. But from a business standpoint, it might actually work better than trying to micromanage crowdsourced content and content marketing.

>The CEO needs to start valuing what we do for the grid and realize that the marketplace website is extremely important for keeping users engaged and actived in Second Life. The people in charge of the business decisions also need to realize that the more high quality, good products that are sold the more satisfied users Second Life will have and the longer people will stay in Second Life before abandoning it.

That has been essentially my own thinking until recently, and I wish I could say that I haven't come to have doubts about it, but I have. The bottom line is that if valuing content creation by allowing the marketplace to work correctly doesn't also provide payment for the land on the grid, it's futile to do anything that is not strictly directed to driving people back to paying for land by whatever means necessary. Decisions that look too insane to be merely accidental could also be explained as a kind of deserate experimentation to find something - anything - that might work any better than what has already been tried. And what has been tried is allowing a functional market system not-in-world to suck commerce off the grid.

>Some of us make a decent amount of real life money from Second Life, and that's great. But LL doesn't keep everything around just so we can make money. Before Rodvik starts giving us the tools to make SL more like a game with things like pathfinding, content creators need a reliable way to deliver their products to the people who want and need them. That's the best way to get Second Life to grow and improve user retention. Tons of people want to make games, and if Second Life could turn into a place where people could come here, make games with Second Life as a game engine, and then profit from it, it would be a fantastic product.

And, again, I wish I could be certain that I agree. But it also occurs to me that any user retention efforts related to commerce are probably a lot less promising at this point than simply adding some low-maintenance gizmos that make the in-world experience more appealing to people who wouldn't bother to come to SL otherwise. Maybe Rodvik is right to focus more on making it easier to drive cars over zombies and shoot them with flamethrowers and such. But I'm going to have to start seeing a lot more of that before I'm fully convinced that that's what he's even doing. After 8 months of basically breaking every single component related to the commerce system (except, the boxes, which have to be shut off because they can't be broken, apparently), I need to see a lot more than a path finding function to think Rod has any way at all to patch up the hull of this ship and steer it away from the icebergs that have always been somehow invisible to the Lindens, no matter how emphatically I keep pointing them out.

>The bottom line is that if someone created something that had the popularity of a game like Minecraft and it worked in Second Life, there is no way it could become as popular as minecraft because Second Life lacks a reliable and consistent way to provide a potential customer with products.

That's easy to solve, actually. A solution is for LL to block further content creation by general users, and to offer contests to existing content creators to produce content which LL will be able to take in exchange for a pre-stated prize amount to which the designer agrees by entering the contest. Then LL controls the content is gets on the cheap with some assurance that it's at least better than something else possible, and controls all sales of same.

The very thought of such a shift in business model makes me sick to the stomach as a long-time SL fan, but I must admit that it seems like it might be at least as viable as what else has been tried in recent years.

[Kampu Oyen]

>I can't either, Miss Pamela.  It's ridiculous.

But if you could get in, it would be a really efficient experience compared to before the last 2 months' updates.

And isn't that what really matters?

[Flea Yatsenko]

I definitely agree with you on some points. Don't get me wrong, I do think that the idea of having users generate content and getting paid for it is great, but I too have been concerned about the marketplace personally. With the removal of Magic Boxes, LL has removed any barriers to entry to becoming a merchant.

This might sound great on paper, but in the real world I think it isn't very good. Posting things requires no cost or risk at all. Thus, you get people who create lower quality things and sell them since they have nothing to lose.

Then, the marketplace gets clogged up, search results get awful because of keyword abuse, and no one can find what they're looking for simply because there's too many items. Then, the price of products drops, LL stops making as much money off of the marketplace as they used to, and performance of the marketplace degrades because too many people are trying to sell things.

That is what scares me the most. If you are competing against a ton of L$10 items and you're a new merchant with a quality product, you're going to get burried, and you're not going to want to sell something for pennies. If you make mesh and you're skilled, you could not bother with Second Life and just post mesh on places like TurboSquid.

I do want marketplace to perform well, and I would love to see some sort of factor set in place that requires people to at least be able to have in world stores, even if they're just floating skyboxes or smaller parcels.

Before XStreet, it was pretty impossible to find anything. A web based commerce solution is superior to just looking at an item name, TPing to the place, trying to find the item, seeing it, finding out it's not as good as you thought, and then moving on.

What would be fantastic is if there was a marketplace that listed in world items for sale. The site would be the same, but instead of buying things on a website, you'd teleport to the place in world and buy it.

Also, I agree completely. It is good to have a free and open environment. My problem is that there's too low of a risk (virtually none) with getting started on marketplace, and it's negative for the entire economy.

I want a marketplace that works, but I don't want it to overly encourage people to the point where it comes flooded, performance degrades, and no one can find what they're looking for. Marketplace is a great merchant tool, but it shouldn't be the only one. Right now, it's a tool that works poorly and that's what my concern is.

I don't know if in world stores need to remain relevant. On one hand, people are still making L$ and they could very well turn around and get land with it for a club, park, whatever. Then again, it completely locks out the people who would buy a sim to run it and pay for it via opening shops for merchants to sell goods. However, I think a good solution to that problem would be to find merchants to sponsor sims and hang outs. I could see that as a very good business opportunity for a merchant.

They help pay for the land and get a free store, and their products are plastered everywhere. You are right, marketplace is going to seriously disrupt the way the grid works now, and it's going to disrupt it more and more the more popular it gets. I don't think it's the end. People will still want to come here and run clubs, parks, role plays, etc. But, the means to do things like that are definitely going to change if things keep going the way they are.

The problem with marketplace right now is it seems to be turning into a place where Linden Labs is putting all of its eggs in a single basket. When XStreet was around, you would look for things in world and then try XStreet. Now, no one seems to bother with in world at all and they head right to the marketplace. You had multiple, good options. More than anything, the fact that LL is putting so much of their merchant's commerce into the marketplace when it performs so poorly is extremely worrying. I could very well see marketplace crashing at some point in the future and wiping out a ton of merchants, only leaving the ones with viable in world stores left.

[Kampu Oyen]

>With the removal of Magic Boxes, LL has removed any barriers to entry to becoming a merchant.

That's not really the complete picture. DD has made merchant access to the MP more evenly available by providing an alternative to renting a box space. I approve of that in principle. But shutting off the boxes mean fewer technical options for merchants, and I disapprove of that in principle. Why is it so important to shut off the boxes if DD doesn't actually work any better? That they still have not given a reason would seem to suggest that the reason is a reason they can't give us. I think I've mentioned what I really think about that.

>Thus, you get people who create lower quality things and sell them since they have nothing to lose.

That's a trade-off I think has to be accomodated in order to provide an alternative to in-world shops that is demographically different enough in terms of who can make use of it. The marketplace does nothing to constrain value of products beyond simply trying to assure that they are legal to sell as sold. Some shoppers won't want to see all the kipple, sure. But if they want to shop a bit upscale, they can stick to the enhanced listings or shop in-world. As cynical as it sounds, the option to go slumming is a valuable feature for a lot of users; especially newer users (which SL needs). If that is to be eliminated, though, I'd hate to see it eliminated as anything other than an intensely well-calculated decision to protect LL from operating at a loss or creating potentially unmanageable legal problems.

>Then, the marketplace gets clogged up, search results get awful because of keyword abuse, and no one can find what they're looking for simply because there's too many items. Then, the price of products drops, LL stops making as much money off of the marketplace as they used to, and performance of the marketplace degrades because too many people are trying to sell things.

I think there is some of that happening. But I think it's also a problem we shouldn't confound with the other problems which may be a lot more important. That is: we can't really properly assess the user end of marketplace performance unless the administrator end is first essentially cleared up for some appreciable period of time. The system may be set up to encourage systemically counterproductive types of use, but to turn to that matter at all while there's a stack of JIRAs open which are not requests for new features but mere requests to get things to work passably in the first place, is applying a much higher standard of behavior from users than from those who should be setting examples for them.

>That is what scares me the most. If you are competing against a ton of L$10 items and you're a new merchant with a quality product, you're going to get burried, and you're not going to want to sell something for pennies. If you make mesh and you're skilled, you could not bother with Second Life and just post mesh on places like TurboSquid.

I'm not totally unsympathetic to that. But if the other choice is to start cutting off the lower rungs of the ladder, I'm pretty sure it can't be that much better. LL either needs to commit to supporting opportunity for the least experienced in spite of the endless stream of useless crap that will result, or LL needs to commit to a building and commerce culture that is much more unmistakably infused with a values system that includes elitism and exclusion. The middle path will leave people at all parts of the continuum disgruntled, so it's better to try to please at least some of them instead. In principle, I prefer the idea of leaving the doors to commerce flung wide open to the hordes of the the great unwashed, partly because it's consistent with the basic philosophy espoused to maintain a pool of long-term users who believe similarly, and who are already providing some amount of consistent repeat business. But again, if the numbers just aren't there to back it up, LL needs to try something different; and if so, probably something close to the opposite.

>I do want marketplace to perform well, and I would love to see some sort of factor set in place that requires people to at least be able to have in world stores, even if they're just floating skyboxes or smaller parcels.

I remain convinced that help for in-world merchants is on the way as soon as LL is done crippling the MP. It's not the help to in-world merchants to which I object. I just think LL should be sure that it's really necessary to also cripple the MP in order to make that other thing work.

>Before XStreet, it was pretty impossible to find anything. A web based commerce solution is superior to just looking at an item name, TPing to the place, trying to find the item, seeing it, finding out it's not as good as you thought, and then moving on.

It's superior for customers, so it should also be superior for most merchants. But it isn't superior for LL if it kills their land revenues.

>What would be fantastic is if there was a marketplace that listed in world items for sale. The site would be the same, but instead of buying things on a website, you'd teleport to the place in world and buy it.

As someone who is not interested in opening an in-world store, I would nonetheless support that. It's another useful option for customers, so I have to support it, at least in principle.

>My problem is that there's too low of a risk (virtually none) with getting started on marketplace, and it's negative for the entire economy.

Would it not make sense to thoroughly explore options for some more reasonable amount of risk at various points in the process? Solving one problem is often not worth the trouble if it creates 2 or more problems which are even slightly larger. I agree something could be done, but I think it's the type of decision that warrants a good deal of caution and a real kind of analysis rather than hitting a screw with a hammer just because it's sticking up.

>Marketplace is a great merchant tool, but it shouldn't be the only one. Right now, it's a tool that works poorly and that's what my concern is.

Yes. Even assuming LL really is trying to help in-world merchants by crippling the MP, it's not worth the trouble if, at some point, the MP borking has failed to produce any stimulus to demand for land. I really, really hope they have some kind of schedule for deciding that it hasn't worked. Otherwise, they won't move on to the next desperate experiment until they have no choice at all, and then it might be too late.

>I don't know if in world stores need to remain relevant.

I think some of them might. Even a lot of my products only sell as well as they do because people have seen them in-world. And some in-world merchants make good money by selling them. I'm just not into that, myself.

>You are right, marketplace is going to seriously disrupt the way the grid works now, and it's going to disrupt it more and more the more popular it gets.

I think it already has, or, rather, Xstreet already did. Before Xstreet, most of SL looked like a huge shopping mall. After Xstreet came, the malls started to empty out, and then a lot of them disappeared. I was happy about that. I wasn't happy about nothing coming to take their place. 

But a lof of in-world shops still fo just fine. What they have are products that sell better when marketed in-world, partly just because of the kinds of things they are. There was a lot of stuff in those malls that people should have been able to buy out-of-world, from among numerous pages of competing options. That stuff, I'm glad has moved to the MP. In fact, one reason we percieve the MP as beign so full of crap is that the crap that would have been in 96 shops in-world can now all be viewed on one web page. You can now see how much crap was really already kicking around to begin with. Granted, the MP has allowed for a lot more, too. If that's bad, I'm not sure it's bad enough to want to fix the problem by creating some other problem.

>More than anything, the fact that LL is putting so much of their merchant's commerce into the marketplace when it performs so poorly is extremely worrying. 

LL isn't forcing merchants to choose the MP. The comparative cost is what people say (possibly rightly in many cases) forces them to go to the MP in order to compete with other merchants keeping costs low with the MP. I do think there's something to that, but I think the issue is not nearly as simple as some people want to make it, and at least part of this phenomenon is actually a good thing.

Ultimately, if LL can stay afloat by doing it, I will always prefer more useful options for consumers. That would almost certainly mean both in-world and MP, and it would also mean continuing to offer magic box use as an alternative to DD.

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Flea Yatsenko wrote:

Posting things requires no cost or risk at all. Thus, you get people who create lower quality things and sell them since they have nothing to lose.

Then, the marketplace gets clogged up, search results get awful because of keyword abuse, and no one can find what they're looking for simply because there's too many items.

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Keyword abuse should be punished. That will be the an effective way to stop it, and make the marketplace a better place to shop for consumers.

There should be set a certain date, till when people can clean up their listing, and take out the irrelevant keywords. When after that date keyword spam is found, people get a warning, and are asked to get rid of all keyword spam in their store. People get a second warning when still keyword spam is found. The third time the marketplace will be shut down for a week. After x time a shut down for a week, the merchant loses his marketplace store, he is permanent banned from the marketplace as a merchant, including all his alts.