Earn your 10% MP Fee LL

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

All great point. As for the quoted part: Yes, the Internet is international, but as far as I know, Linden Lab proper is not. This may be a key factor in things.

Maybe. I don't know.

There is another factor that can explain it all though. according to the nwn blog LL's gross revenue was about $100M in 2009. Today Crunchbase estimates it to be $42.7M. It's very hard to adjust to leab times when you're used to plenty of course

[JUSTUS Palianta]

A factor to consider in the gross revenues decline ... we used to be able to buy lindens with gift cards ... this made it easy to buy lindens to waste on shopping or just for fun, we could even purchase multiple premium accounts without affecting real life any more then buying a pizza does.  I know it is probably not lindens fault that we can not use gift cards it is real life red tape that has affected our economy if we should be upset at anyone about the changes in the last few years its the government.

The solution to all of this could be pre pay cards for sale at the supermarket and bookstore that you can use to buy lindens, (like 100s of other games and gaming platforms) not only is it good advertising, it would boost the economy.

Edited December 12, 2019 by JUSTUS Palianta
i had a great idea!

[ChinRey]

On 12/9/2019 at 8:25 PM, ChinRey said:

I filed a JIRA now. It's here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-227994

 

On 12/10/2019 at 2:05 PM, Rya Nitely said:

I just created 2 jiras, and I'll never create another if my time was wasted doing these.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-228000

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-227999

A week later and LL hasn't even bothered to look at them yet.

I think that says it all: JIRAs are useless for MP merchants. For some weird reason I'm not surprised at all.

Edited December 16, 2019 by ChinRey

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 12/10/2019 at 11:39 AM, ChinRey said:

How much did you enjoy the Marketplace Listing Experience?

Kind of a spill-over for me from the other thread, but, what you listed is the same process that applies to many (if not most) other platforms where you sell individual assets or small groups of them.. except they take 30% or more for the same effort.

Edited December 16, 2019 by Wulfie Reanimator

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

but, what you listed is the same process that applies to many (if not most) other platforms where you sell individual assets or small groups of them..

In principle it's the same but all other platforms I'm on and all I've been on in the past have done a lot to streamline the process. LL has done very little work in that field. As if that wasn't enough, the MP server is horrendously slow and prone to dropouts and that of course makes uploading to it time consuming and frustrating.

I've used image uploads as an example here and in other threads. That's just one part of the listing process but it illustrates very well how everything else is.

The max image size for MP is 700x525 which isn't very large so it shouldn't take much time to upload, yet it does. Be prepared for several minutes for each and every image and then another minute or two waiting for the image to be displayed in the form so you know the upload was succesful (there is no progress bar or anything like that, you just have to wait and see and as I said, dropouts and timeouts are quite common). It takes much, much longer to upload a 700x525 to MP than it takes to upload a 1024x1024 to SL. The listing form is blocked much of the time while an upload is in progress, so you can't do anythng there while you wait, and since there is no bulk upload and no feedback about the upload progress, you can't just start the uploads and go do something else while you wait for them to finish.

Do you see what this means? Let's say 100 listings, each with four pictures and each picture takes only two minutes to upload (it may well take a lot longer). That's actually more than 13 hours of work just to get the images for the listing uploaded.

---

Here's another example, of how awkward the listing form is. Let's say I have a new model in my Keswick series of cottages and I want to add some of the others from the same series as related items. So I click on the add related button and I get a popup window with a simple search form. I search for Kexwick and this is what I see:

An unsorted list of titles and SKUs in a window so small there's a you have to scroll a lot and read a lot to find the one item you're looking for. If it's there at all that is. Sometimes listings that do include the string you search for are missing and others that don't are included. This popup window closes automatically when you select and item so you have to do it all over eight times to fill up the list of related items.

I shuold mention that the illustration here is actually rather flattering for the function. The listings you see there are old ones from before LL changed the search algorithm forcing us to cram as many keywords into the title field as possible. A list with more recent search optimized listings would look even messier.

---

I can't think of any excuse for design blunders like these in something that pretends to be professional software made by paid programmers and developers. And keep in mind that these are only two of the elements in that form. Everything else is just as bad.

----

Edit: I'm not saying the LL developers and programmers are bad at their work, I know they are good. But here's a quote from a review a former Linden posted at glassdoor.com:

Quote

When engineers have specialties they come in to your company with, you need to try hard to make sure they work on something relating to that. It will make them happy, drastically increase the quality and quantity of their work output, and keep them from leaving for the first opportunity that DOES allow them to work on the area they enjoy focusing on. Engineers are not interchangeable cogs, or at least they shouldn't be if you want to get the best work out of them.

I think that's what it's all about. Web commerce and UI design are both fairly specialised fields of software development and LL doesn't have that expertise at hand. It doesn't matter how good a developer you are in general if you don't have the special knowledge required to do the task you're set to do.

Edited December 16, 2019 by ChinRey

[Pamela Galli]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Kind of a spill-over for me from the other thread, but, what you listed is the same process that applies to many (if not most) other platforms where you sell individual assets or small groups of them.. except they take 30% or more for the same effort.

No it is not the same effort. Do they maintain marketplace listings mostly as a search engine linked to inworld location, which must be paid for? That’s what most of us do. 
Do they provide not just wholesale product support, but retail support for how the whole scripted product works in the context of SL, and mostly regarding basic SL skills? No they do not. They just sell an unscripted model and are done with it. That’s the starting point for us.

[Luna Bliss]

How is it these other venues do so much better with policing stolen items?

[OptimoMaximo]

8 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

How is it these other venues do so much better with policing stolen items?

The Unity asset store, just an example, makes you submit your listing to them for approval, both as a quality check (if it's game ready and imports to unity projects correctly) and legitimacy, then it gets listed. It's not an upload and forget. There is someone checking on those items, which justifies the 30%commission on sales (but no other fees applied afterwards) 

[Rya Nitely]

On 12/17/2019 at 12:47 AM, ChinRey said:

 

A week later and LL hasn't even bothered to look at them yet.

I think that says it all: JIRAs are useless for MP merchants. For some weird reason I'm not surprised at all.

The JIRAS have been accepted, so now we wait....

[Flea Yatsenko]

On 12/16/2019 at 1:36 PM, ChinRey said:

Be prepared for several minutes for each and every image and then another minute or two waiting for the image to be displayed in the form so you know the upload was succesful (there is no progress bar or anything like that, you just have to wait and see and as I said, dropouts and timeouts are quite common). It takes much, much longer to upload a 700x525 to MP than it takes to upload a 1024x1024 to SL. The listing form is blocked much of the time while an upload is in progress, so you can't do anythng there while you wait, and since there is no bulk upload and no feedback about the upload progress, you can't just start the uploads and go do something else while you wait for them to finish.

Do you see what this means? Let's say 100 listings, each with four pictures and each picture takes only two minutes to upload (it may well take a lot longer). That's actually more than 13 hours of work just to get the images for the listing uploaded

While your complaints are 100% valid, you are forgetting how much they affect customers. They are spending real life money to buy something, and they don't have confidence that the marketplace will timeout when they go to check out. Maybe if you have a successful store it's easy to write off L$250 or even L$2500 as a small sum. But some people work in SL dancing and doing whatever to scrape up L$250 to buy something. If they go to buy it and the marketplace is having problems, they aren't going to risk spending that L$ they worked for if SLMP can eat it in a time out.

Imagine if you went to buy something on Amazon and the page kept timing out. You would be really nervous when you press that check out button. Will your order go through? Will this turn into a giant mess? Do I contact SL or the seller if the sale doesn't go through? Is the seller even active in SL?

It's horrifying. Every time I buy something on SLMP I cross my fingers when I press that checkout button. I've never had anything go wrong when checking out, but I've had enough problems to cause a major lack of confidence.

And this has always been LL's problem, making things reliable and stable. People have less attention and devotion to something now than ever. When SL was young there was no real competition to them. If it went down, people would wait. Now there are tons of virtual worlds and tons of things to spend your time doing on the internet. And when people are trying to put on new clothing they bought, building with their new builder's kit, and it doesn't work right, they just give up and leave. There's some really good stats in the other thread about the increases about the user base, and a lot of users very rarely sign on. I think it's a combination of not having anything to do (cheap land will fill SL will more stuff to do) and them not having confidence in SL's reliability and stability.

Imagine how you would feel if you were brand new in SL. You drop $20 on L$ to buy stuff to make your AV look good and to learn how to build. You log in, and you instantly start having problems with getting things attached, rezzing, etc. You are brand new, you don't think this is a bad day, you think the whole thing is broken and you give up. And you're angry because you wasted $20 on a game that "doesn't work."

I have experience with running websites. If you have a new user and one thing doesn't work right or confuses them, they are GONE. They will probably never ever come back.

I don't want to get too far off topic but what SL needs is to split between the main viewer and a light version. Make the current version of SL and viewers the editors, then compile them to something more efficient and create a simple, easy to use viewer that can't edit anything, downloads optimized/compiled maps of the current sim, and can run on lower end hardware (like phones).

People are vain, most people in VRChat spend their time in front of a mirror looking at themselves. It wouldn't take much, SL has more content to make avatars look good than any other platform.

[Alyona Su]

3 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

But some people work in SL dancing and doing whatever to scrape up L$250 to buy something. If they go to buy it and the marketplace is having problems, they aren't going to risk spending that L$ they worked for if SLMP can eat it in a time out.

Every time this subject comes up in any discussion, I always chime in to state that these people are, a lot more likely than not, spending more real life money on the electricity used to power the equipment required to be in-world to earn those pitiful amounts of Linden Dollars. Especially when they AFK-camp. The smarter moves would be to just buy L$ directly through the Exchange, or find altruistic others willing to feed their SL wallet. For these people, though I can empathize with their plight, I have no sympathy because of their real life fiduciary negligence.

 

[Flea Yatsenko]

Just now, Alyona Su said:

Every time this subject comes up in any discussion, I always chime in to state that these people are, a lot more likely than not, spending more real life money on the electricity used to power the equipment required to be in-world to earn those pitiful amounts of Linden Dollars. Especially when they AFK-camp. The smarter moves would be to just buy L$ directly through the Exchange, or find altruistic others willing to feed their SL wallet. For these people, though I can empathize with their plight, I have no sympathy because of their real life fiduciary negligence.

 

I never said it was a good idea. It's not. it's absolutely horrible. But it really highlights a problem that new users are intimidated by directly spending real life money on SL. The best solution is to just spend the money and get started, it's obvious to anyone who has been here in SL for any amount of time. Yet people don't. And that's money that people could pump into the SL economy. Instead they idle for pennies a day. 

It really highlights another problem. It costs around L$10,000 to make a good mesh avatar. You're easily looking at $20 to $40 for a good looking avatar. You can buy an actual game for that much money and have more fun. But there's not enough users for content creators to make money selling stuff cheaper.

LL needs to stop treating SL as a PC game and treating it as a social platform. The ratio of content creators to consumers is usually between 1:100 and 10:100. I imagine it's far lower in SL, with mesh you need basic knowledge of Blender, 3ds max, etc and the barrier to entry is much higher than on a site like reddit. It's great SL makes it easy for people to get started building things in a game. But they always market to builders. And the grid is empty because people are building things and not enough people show up. Well at least I think that's one big reason.

[ChinRey]

39 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

While your complaints are 100% valid, you are forgetting how much they affect customers.

No, I'm not forgetting it, merchants are buyers too remember. But since this is a thread about the increased fee merchants have to pay, I thought I should limit it to merchant specific issues. But since you mention it...

41 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Will your order go through? Will this turn into a giant mess? Do I contact SL or the seller if the sale doesn't go through? Is the seller even active in SL?

When that happens, LL gets the money and the seller gets the blame. So contact LL first.

[Paul Hexem]

You think if I go to Unity or Renderosity or whoever else to sell my stuff, and I break the rules, they'll just call it a " buyer/seller dispute that has nothing to do with us"?

If you're taking a commission, it no longer has nothing to do with you. 

[JUSTUS Palianta]

@Alyona Su

You have your right to an opinion but that is awfully mean you have no understanding of the reasons people chose to not spend real money in second life.  That does not make them a any less valuable necessary contributing member to the SL economy then the person who owns 10 sims or a person who burns all there spare cash in SL.  In fact people who work for businesses are helping the economy because they are helping the businesses.  Remember everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.  I have met plenty of people in SL who were well off enough to buy a computer and a phone, but then they fell on hard times and had to work in SL to support themselves.

[Alyona Su]

2 hours ago, JUSTUS Palianta said:

@Alyona Su

You have your right to an opinion but that is awfully mean you have no understanding of the reasons people chose to not spend real money in second life.  That does not make them a any less valuable necessary contributing member to the SL economy then the person who owns 10 sims or a person who burns all there spare cash in SL.  In fact people who work for businesses are helping the economy because they are helping the businesses.  Remember everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.  I have met plenty of people in SL who were well off enough to buy a computer and a phone, but then they fell on hard times and had to work in SL to support themselves.

Sure. But sometimes truth hurts. I know, those darned facts can get annoying, sometimes.