Marketplace Update - Is this a joke?

[Sassy Romano]

Over a month later, not a peep, then we have this:-

So lets open up the Marketplace Beta Release notes:-

I don't see either of these two "features" coming up in the top pain points for merchants, what about the showstoppers?

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/web-4587

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/web-4600

Lack of support for objects with no copy permission to the owner being included in Direct Delivery?

C'mon CTL, there's no point doodling around with things such as the above on the beta grid until the important killers are addressed.  Plus I think you'll find that nobody, absolutely NOBODY here is going to go to Aditi to test "check out performance".  It's just not relevant in any way, nor can it be suitablty loaded by anyone here to validate any testing.

Similarly, "testing" something such as a sort order on a test grid, that's great for you but again, nobody here is likely to be interested.  If it works on the live site, great, if a sort order on the live site didn't work?  Well it's just not a showstopper is it?

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Yes it's a joke with no punchline.

A large number of Jira's already submitted that totals thousands of hours of contributions by users, only to be asked to contribute more hours to test low hanging fruit fixes. Which can be tested by the team themself with no help whatsoever.

It's make-work for users.

The other issues are a "can't fix" or "won't fix", because they're obviously not getting done. Either should be cause for the unemployment line. A CEO unwilling or incapable of bringing the hammer down on this situation.

Maybe it's just a holding pattern until one of their other ventures actually takes off. In which case most of LL will see the unemployment line anyway.

Merchants trying to run a business here, no one is asking for milk and cookies but thanks.

Not sure if they can be any more insulting.

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Sassy Romano wrote:

Plus I think you'll find that nobody, absolutely NOBODY here is going to go to Aditi to test "check out performance".

---

Thank you for updating us, Sassy.   The above line is QFT (quoted for truth).  In addition to being inept, I'm starting to wonder if certain members of the CTL are just stupid!  They have multitudes of merchants filing jiras, especially on the show stoppers; said merchants getting angrier and more frustrated by the day, no appreciable change in the major MP boondoggles...and they seriously think we are going to go beta test non-essentials while critical  parts of our online businesses are not working?????

Best example of sticking one's head in the sand I've seen lately.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Sadly none of the LL Commerce Team inept actions, mind-bogglingly crackerjack box internal operations, decision making, and total disconnect from the SL service they run and customers they service are of any surprise to any of us.

We have seen countless examples of this team's complete inability to run the LL Commerce Team and its critical MP service since Brook and company showed up Jan 2011.  How they handled the maturity filters into MP.  How they - to date - have still not restored some of the functions in MP from what we had in Xstreet.  How they have completely thrown away almost any MP service feature improvements except from a rare few token improvements that pretty much they decided on their own was important for us.  And of course their entire handling of the DD architecture and its wayy wayy wayy longer than normal development, testing, deployment, and cleanup of all the mistakes that their poor testing did not catch.

The on-going saga of how long it is still taking them to resolve critical DD related issues is - as you all said - an utter joke.  Combine that with Brook and company not communicating at all with the largest user base impacted by their failings... and it gives everyone the impression that LL's Commerce Team has pretty much given up on fixing anything more with the mess they made because of a poor DD architecture they deployed and likely cannot back out of.

They simply have thrown their hands up behind the scenes and are starting to work on new things to screw up... and in their proven level of immaturity.... they hope that no one will notice.  My teenagers do this all the time when they screw up and just walk away from the problem they need to deal with.  Too bad PAID PROFESSIONALS of a company that are doing work that impacts 1000's of people and their virtual businesses take the same immature handling of problems they created as my teenagers do.

BUT... this is not a surprise to me nor any of you.  I said all the way thru the secret DD development process that its not if LL will screw up DD but more a matter of how bad.  I remember a couple people (one person whom I never see posting here anymore when she was one of the biggest defenders of LL's development of DD - no Sassy I am not talking about you) whom were in the inner circle of the LL DD development posting how we should give LL a break and that this time they were sure that LL would get it right.  ROFL.... well LL Commerce Team's long history did not fail my prediction.

I suspect that since Brook and team seem to have abandoned any further correction of the critical DD screwups that are JIRA recorded, there is some good news in my prediction that likely LL will leave MB's in place in perpetuity - as their promised the viewer makers back in 2011 in the first place.  LOL ironically they kept their promise only because they screwed up DD so fundamentally that MB has to stay in place.

What is truly sad is that from DAY 1, the CEO of LL has taken the approach of this long ongoing utter mismanagement of his LL Commerce Team by simply sticking his head in the sand and avoiding any handling of the disaster and lack of skills within this team.  He simply does not know how to deal with it and is handling the entire problem within his responsibility in the same manner as my Teenagers.  PRETEND THERE IS NO PROBLEM.

 

So the question some of you might want to ponder.....  is it possible to return some of your more important MP products back to a MB delivery method?   Thankfully my critical sellers are still on MB !

I will admit that I have not had any of the problems described in the JIRAs but maybe its because the sales volumes on my DD items are so low that they avoid many of the JIRAs.  Who knows...

My rant for this thread.

[Josh Susanto]

http://www.google.com.co/search?hl=es&rlz=1C1SNNT_enCO408CO408&q=google+turd+polish&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1092&bih=514&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=mHMAUNHAG-m56AGbmvX3Bg#um=1&hl=es&rlz=1C1SNNT_enCO408CO408&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=turd+polish&oq=turd+polish&gs_l=img.12..0i19l2.1639.1639.0.7981.1.1.0.0.0.0.142.142.0j1.1.0...0.0...1c.yzznW6kcm0k&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=c652da4f037c376e&biw=1092&bih=514

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Toysoldier Thor wrote:

I suspect that since Brook and team seem to have abandoned any further correction of the critical DD screwups that are JIRA recorded,

there is some good news in my prediction that likely LL will leave MB's in place in perpetuity - as their promised the viewer makers back in 2011 in the first place. 

LOL ironically they kept their promise only because they screwed up DD so fundamentally that MB has to stay in place.

<snip>

So the question some of you might want to ponder.....  is it possible to return some of your more important MP products back to a MB delivery method?   Thankfully my critical sellers are still on MB !

 

---

(Emphasis mine)  I've been thinking the same thing, Toy, especially given this recent announcement instead of anything resembling an update (ie. "We're STILL aware of the issues and STILL working on it).  Leaving MBs alone would be perfect for and with me.

As far as others going back to MB; if I'm not mistaken, I've seen a few posts here where some merchants switched to DD, had problems getting it initialized (generally people, it appeared, who hadn't read the directions) but for whatever reason tried to go back to the MB and found they couldn't.  I'm not exactly why that would be from a coding standpoint, but seems a few could not.

 

[Sassy Romano]

In fairness to the actual Direct Delivery process, as i've said before, the delivery part works, once you can get there.  Even the recent issues where items don't show in Received Items until a relog, were actually delivered.

On this basis, there's not really much of a reason for keeping things in Magic Boxes or even reverting to Magic Boxes although it can be done. (other than for those who are not able to run a viewer that requires SSE2 instruction set).

I'm still astonished (but not surprised) that nothing has apparently progressed while effort has been expended doodling in things that just aren't relevant.

"Hey, I notice my pay increase didn't appear in my pay this month?"

"Oh yeah, we know about that process bug but instead we added some code that draws pretty flowers on the pay slip, it's cool right?"

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Sassy Romano wrote:

 

I'm still astonished (but not surprised) that nothing has apparently progressed while effort has been expended doodling in things that just aren't relevant.

---

On a different note, from reading the General forum apparently LL made a change in how age verification is done which has many people in a dither.  So while apparently nothing (as far as we know) has progressed with some major show stoppers in the MP *and* a notice comes out to go try out MP in beta...LL is fiddling around with other areas of SL.

I'm with you, Sassy...incredulous that a business operates in this fashion, but having been around awhile, not surprised.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

How about inviting us to this beta for one of their new ventures?

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2012/07/linden-lab-patterns-3d-sandbox-game.html

Apparently most of their employees aren't invited to this party either.

I'm betting this commerce team isn't going to be working on the marketplace for the new ventures. Or for that matter, most current employees won't be working on new ventures. New employees, new customers. Do-over time.

Of course I'm always up for new and interesting irony.

[Josh Susanto]

>On a different note, from reading the General forum apparently LL made a change in how age verification is done which has many people in a dither. 

Was this part of the announced updates or was it part of the unannounced update that also borked the mods permission button?

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

>

On a different note, from reading the General forum apparently LL made a change in how age verification is done which has many people in a dither. 

Was this part of the announced updates or was it part of the unannounced update that also borked the mods permission button?

---

No clue but this was the thread where I first saw this discussed.

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Major-change-to-Age-Verification/td-p/1594703

[Sassy Romano]

---

Czari Zenovka wrote:

On a different note, from reading the General forum apparently LL made a change in how age verification is done which has many people in a dither.  So while apparently nothing (as far as we know) has progressed with some major show stoppers in the MP *and* a notice comes out to go try out MP in beta...LL is fiddling around with other areas of SL.

---

I'm actually quite happy about that change to adult assertion.  (It NEVER was verification so I refuse to use the word, one merely asserted that one was of a certain age and there never was a requirement to send documented proof if you found a way to pass the assertion methods.)

Adult content merchants are at a disadvantage both inworld and on Marketplace.  What's the point paying for a MP listing enhancement if people have to log in to MP be worthy of seeing it?  Immediately the value of that listing enhancement is slashed by not being visible to all.

Inworld, newbs had to jump through hoops, they couldn't even see that such adult content shops existed before they could get to them.

At this point, i'd be quite happy for the G, M, A settinging in the viewer to go away and access be determined on database registered age, it's not hard and for anyone that says "but i'm an adult and I don't ever want to go there", it would be easy to have the viewer pop a dialog that said "xxx region is adult, do you want to visit?" with a 'Save setting' checkbox.

Anyway, I digress.  Where's the *REAL* MP update CTL?

[Czari Zenovka]

Oh I'm happy if anything "real" is done re: age verification as well as the maturity level settings, but with seemingly everything LL does, there were initial glitches where people who were definitely adults, had been "age verified," etc. suddenly found ban lines around their own house.  Somehow during instituting the new system, it reverted some age verified people back to unverified.  It started to get confusing but the person who posted the above thread is a forum "Helper" or "Moderator" and seemed to be the type that is out in SL trying to help with questions and such. 

So the idea was good, but apparently the actual implementation has been glitchy.  Why am I not surprised?

[Inara Pey]

If you want to have a play, you might try this:

Beta Products sign-up

It's been up since around the start of the year, but not heavily-advertised to SL users. 

RL info probably works best, plus an e-mail addy divorced from your SL presence, etc. 

 

:matte-motes-wink:

[Dartagan Shepherd]

---

Inara Pey wrote:

If you want to have a play, you might try this:

Beta Products sign-up

It's been up since around the start of the year, but not heavily-advertised to SL users. 

RL info probably works best, plus an e-mail addy divorced from your SL presence, etc. 

 

:matte-motes-wink:

---

Thanks for that, didn't know that existed. Of course that's kind of the point, they're not openly including participation of their existing customers in their new ventures, which sends the message that they want a new crowd for these products.

Just an extention of the way things have always been that they'd rather have the millions they can't reach more than the ones they have.

I've been in a couple of their betas. One was a blast, lots of fun, lots of Lindens excited. Unfortunately an utter failure with users and we knew that'd be the case, but we were told emphatically from day one that we weren't evaluating it for existing users, only new ones. Go figure.

The other and I suspect most are mostly exercises in bug reporting, which to be fair is the gist of any beta, but in light of pushing everyone at a public Jira anyway, these closed beta's s seem to be redundant. Once they hit public beta, they seem to change things around even more to slightly adapt to public outcry so part of the closed beta time was wasted.

Even if they would accept me at this point, it's too late. I'm in a handful of non LL beta's that'd I consider to be a conflict of interest.

These other projects have something LL doesn't. Daily changelogs. More "do" and less "thinking stuff up".

Thanks for the info though, hopefully they're really not just seeking a new customer base and excluding the old one, but that's the way it appears.

 

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Just an extention of the way things have always been that they'd rather have the millions they can't reach more than the ones they have.

Thanks for the info though, hopefully they're really not just seeking a new customer base and excluding the old one, but that's the way it appears.

 

---

A friend and I were talking about this just the other day.  What LL doesn't seem to grasp is that, as opposed to when SL began and was pretty much the only game in town, consumers now have a buffet of VW's and "social media" from which to choose.  Some may find something within SL that keeps them here long term, but a great many, generally the younger set who LL seems to be trying to reach, will hop around from venue to venue - either looking for what interests them, or just because the mindset is to do the "next cool thing."

Those of us "oldbies" who have ties to SL - businesses, friends, etc. - are more apt to grit our teeth over all the LL picadillos and soldier on.  LL *should* be addressing their marketing efforts (if they have any) to not only reach new customers but hang on firmly to those that have been loyal customers through all the bad LL decisions.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Right. The really strange thing about all those flighty users that LL wants to catch ... it goes against everything LL is to be able to simplify it enough to catch them.

A glimmer of hope back when Phil said "Fast, Easy and Fun", but suspected it was just another Phil-ism before he bailed as CEO again a few months later for some other overly-idealistic-enough-not-to-be-realistic project.

Their nature is to overthink everything to the point that they convolute everthing they touch and can't come up with a solid 2 year roadmap.

I mean jeez, SL would be best served at this point by gutting large chunks of it in order to simplify. Dismantle everything in their "social" tools to twitter-like messages with no ranking and love and horse pooky.

Get rid of mainland in favor of limited, sharded large land masses, reduce and simplify a tiered pricing structure. Simplify the interface to a widget.

Nix the economy and sinks in favor of packaged pricing, different sized lands with solid entry level prices for more limited product offerings.

Land impact is a joke, users shouldn't need a freaking calculator to contribute content. Just overhaul and simplify, work off averages that are user friendly.

Phil says SL is on the order of an operating system as projects go. No kidding, there Phil ... you guys complicated it that much.

The features and level of quality that go into making a virtual world are seriously a no brainer. It's like if they can't turn it into rocket science or wrap it up into startup concepts they're incapable of understanding or accepting it.

All they ever had to do is look at the nearest game engine to know what the platform should do. If they did "that" well from the beginning, entire markets they lost would have stayed and they would have lived up to expectations. It would have been a platform capable of building killer apps that these customers wanted. They just wanted a cool engine upon which to build stuff and mash up data.

But no, LL hires people without a lick of experience in the thing they're actually putting their hands on in many cases. This commerce team aren't commerce people, the joke of an implementation of mesh isn't done by a crack team of people experienced in this stuff, the people working on the social stuff probably never touched a social site before.

Pathfinding is this hard for you guys? Jeez.

Partial mesh and you need to beg for example meshes? One of your developers mentioned you don't even have anyone familiar with Maya on the team. Jeez again.

Blah, this is the point I realize I've slipped into a rant and probably off topic as well.

Seriously though LL, get with the program here. You can salvage all of this with an overhaul and a couple of clues and dose of reality. I wouldn't fault you for another major re-org, some new hires and fires. Really. I'd be thanking you profusely.

[Josh Susanto]

It's not that weird to me that LL prefers to deal with a new bunch of users, rather than people who have already reached an informed opinion about the condition of things. 

Part of the basic strategy of people with most forms of self-destructive behaviors is to move on to a new crowd of acquaintances with enough regularity that almost no one who finally sees through their BS stands a chance of calling them on it in any way that produces a practical consequence. 

Like junkies or crackheads, LL is nosing about for even more well-meaning people, as yet unprepared for what LL hopes will be a more polished, more plausible set of lies and deceptions.

Assuming we could perform some kind of intervention, what form might it take?

[Dartagan Shepherd]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

Assuming we could perform some kind of intervention, what form might it take?

---

Shock treatments and medication.

 

 

Seriously though, don't know, a board that allows leadership that has the capacity to get things under control.

So for all their creativity they can have light bulb moments like:

We've battled region crossings for years. Let's admit that having neighbors isn't the draw for most people to own small plots of land. Let's eliminate the NEED for region crossings and implement smaller plots on regions or give it all to the land barons to resell. Let us then create large land masses that are dynamically loaded that handle up to 30 people and build sailing and racing sims that are for the people. Because this is fixed content, we actually CAN pre-render it like a game. And have zero region crossings. Then we can figure out how to load regions faster when users teleport from one VARIABLE SIZED region to another.

We can also nix having to maintain land auctions and other related functionality. And we save money!

OR

Hey, I know, we can run a more robust economy by not having an economy. All prices are simplified, $L are at an easy to understand fixed rate and in the end, not overtapping the economy means it's healthier all around, especially in lean times. And because we don't have to maintain these systems any longer, it saves us money!

More people that roll up their sleeves at LL and less supporting positions. Pretty much what Phil actually said "we're going to make SL more accessable by tearing down the walls that prevent them". Nice thought, and then came land impact and friends and Phil left the building.

Stuff like that.

[Ricky Zhichao]

I cant see much sense in these few cryings about this and that.After we changed all about 800 items to DD, it has been amazing.   100% perfect deliveries, not even one redelivery after first weeks. It has really worked better than could ever believe. Anyway this is just my few cents as I am mostly annoyed about those raging or even insulting comments about everything. Also after new marketplace was launched, there was also lot of crying about everything but after all sales only increased dramatically with it.

 

But sure we all pay huge state taxes to our governments for all incomes so sure everything should work even better to compare if we only paid LL 5% fee "tax"..how much in your country you must pay tax? And do you pay it?

 

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

---

Ricky Zhichao wrote:

But sure we all pay huge state taxes to our governments for all incomes so sure everything should work even better to compare if we only paid LL 5% fee "tax"..how much in your country you must pay tax? And do you pay it?

 

---

I don't think the dispute is that direct delivery doesn't work, I'm sure it does (except for no-copy items which says it's not ready to handle goods that might be lost forever yet). It's more that marketplace doesn't do basic stable ecommerce as well as any other commerce site.

Sales tax in RL? Yes 5% is comparable. Should it be? No.

I've also (and still can) buy a few acres of undeveloped land in RL for less than the setup fee for an island here and pay less taxes a year in RL than $300/month.

Factor in all the sinks, upload fees, mesh fees and decreased triangle count (resources) and you've got costs more comparable to RL than a virtual world.

Not to worry, some of us complain about RL taxes, inefficiency in government and things that need changing in RL too. I tend to be more critical of someone with their hands in both my pockets and handling my money for me.

 

[Josh Susanto]

My own fee structure gripe isn't about some kind of a fee that LL charges or might yet charge.

My fee structure gripe is that what they do and what they say they do are not really the same, and that the difference tends to be a value loss to users as a whole, and to merchants more specifically. 

I also don't have a complaint about the mere existence of direct delivery, which I think, as an additional utility for users, is at least great in principle.

My issue with DD is that it seems to have other purposes behind it, and that indirect promotion of DD for those purposes has included the scapegoating of magic boxes for problems that are really website problems; that is: problems created by the same people who created DD, and problems which mostly continue with DD, even as they continue to be intentionally misconstrued as the same magic box problems that were initially used to rationalize an intended complete transition to DD. 

 

[Ayesha Askham]

This response is to a comment on JIRA WEB-4587 by Bonadea Avedon.

No Bonadea I did not "like" your comment.  My comment was placed there quite deliberately because I did not wish to start a "flame war".  Merchants like Sassy, D'Artagnan and many others have tried to glean some significant information about the continuing Marketplace issues for some 4 months now, largely without success.

Some Merchants, who do not monitor these JIRAs and Forum threads, only find out about their issues with their Marketplace stores when a customer finds nonsensical pictures of clearly wrong products on the pages they visit.  Such was my experience and introduction to this issue.  I am not a merchant but I did occasionally buy from the Marketplace.

I do NOT think it likely that you have any special knowledge about what "Commerce Team Linden" are doing about this issue, and the evidence here and on other Merchant threads leads me to suspect that it is very little.

I repeat my point.  We have to keep nudging Linden Lab to remind them that this issue is not going to go away, although this, along with several other "issues" probably mean the still more of Linden Lab's customers will be going away.  I know from bitter experience that with organisations such as Linden Lab, you have to keep biting at their flanks to keep them moving.   These days I try to do it politely.

 

[Darrius Gothly]

I have my JIRA Dashboard configured to show two charts. One shows the Average Age of Open Issues, the other shows the Created vs. Resolved Issues. I keep them there because they point out one thing about the JIRA ...

CTL doesn't use the JIRA to be notified of issues, they use it to hide issues and salve their own conscience.

Here are the two graphs:

Since the day the Marketplace opened, the Average Age has done nothing but grow. And the ratio of Open to Resolved Issues?

Pretty much the same. More issues get created than get resolved. And so it goes. More issues found, after all we ARE doing our job as unpaid beta testers. But fixed? Resolved?

Not so much.

[Josh Susanto]

Not that the general shape of the data is especially encouraging in itself, either...

But there is a conspicuous gap that emerges and seems to remain of fixed size.

When, precisely, does this gap open, and what, precisely opens it?