Mad Men promotion: land subsidy?

[Kampu Oyen]

As you can see from perusing the Mad Men promotion, the items of high relevance which remain undelisted at this point do not have in common that they especially evoke the 1960's.

But they do at least appear to have some other interesting stuff in common from a statistical standpoint.

I'm not done crunching all the numbers, but I can already tell you what they're going to say about the top 100 most "relevant" items which no one has succeeded in getting LL to delist.

Out of the 53 merchants who offer these 100 items, 45 show in-world shops; in-world shops that are are lands owned by a surprisingly small number of people.

Next looking at the number of items offered by each of these 53 merchants which turn up on a "madstyle" keyword search, it sort of looks like something approaching or possibly exceeding half of the items in the promotion are situated so as to provide revenue likely to be used to pay rent to a very small number of land owners.

Or I could be wrong.

If I happen to be right, though, will anyone even care?

Should I even bother to post what I finally find?

 

 

[WADE1 Jya]

Sure, please share your findings. I think more people should investigate... not just this one odd thing... but all the weird things going on.

[Kampu Oyen]

Well there are some limits to how deeply I can dig for something by the end of the day.

So, in the short term, I'm focusing a group of 12 merchants who account for 585 of the items, which is over 22% of the promotion.

 

[Kampu Oyen]

I'm still waiting on one piece of data.

But it so far looks like the promotion was probably offered as a concession to people who LL was worried would stop paying for land if LL didn't do something help them generate more income.

This is not to say that the process would necessarily have been spelled out to people in this way; they may have just taken what was offered as a promotion without much thought to why it was offered, or whether it would be administered in a way that would end up favoring some merchants unfairly.

 

[Kampu Oyen]

The last piece of data is that one of the merchants has had a tough time making sales since LL pushed his adult business to a different part of the map.

If he was turning a profit before and is now in danger of not paying for the land, I can see how a little help on the Marketplace might be seen as a way to try to render him more complacent.

I'm gonna' ask some more people now...

[Rosemaery Lorefield]

Really?

[Sassy Romano]

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Kampu Oyen wrote:

If I happen to be right, though, will anyone even care?

Should I even bother to post what I finally find?

 

---

No.

No.

Easily explained as "a bunch of merchants spammed all their listings with a keyword"

[Kampu Oyen]

>Really?

Yes. Really.

Please feel free, though, to conduct your own analysis for comparison.

The promotion, for all its spamminess, has been pared down to fewer than 2700 items.

Considering what we know about what was removed by LL and what remains as not removed by LL, the only visible criterion that would explain why a merchant providing more than 1% of the promoted listings does not have them removed is that such a merchant is either an owner or partial owner of a sim on which that owner also has an in-world shop shown linked on the promoted listing.

The only exception out of the 12 investigated is a guy who didn't link his store because he's still not done building it.

Removed items include rainbows. Unremoved items include even some pretty weird, futuristic stuff.

This supports my earlier claim that LL defines "madstyle" not in terms of the desription provided, but simply in terms of who is allowed to use the keyword; priority given to people who might not renew their sim ownerships if they don't start to show more income.

In the spirit of classic tokenism, shopless merchants are naturally allowed to list one item, and may be able to get away with more than that in some cases. Just don't think that the fact that they match the promotional description will offer them any special protection from being delisted - and, when the promotion continues to show them even after removing the keyword - delisted a second time and permanently removed from the marketplace.

Of course, if you don't feel this is fair, all you have to do is buy a sim and set up an in-world shop linked on your promoted listings.

Go ahead.

List all you want of whatever you want.

After all, the money for that sim has to come from somewhere, am I right?

 

[Kampu Oyen]

>Easily explained as "a bunch of merchants spammed all their listings with a keyword"

... and were permitted (if not encouraged) to do so if they also owned land with an in-world shop on it, linked in the spam listing.

[Rosemaery Lorefield]

To be honest, the only spam about the promotion I have seen is your posts about it

I bet that there really are a limited number of land owners who are benefiting from the promotion. That's because we have mega land barons, not because it's a conspiracy.