Is BOTs traffic gaming SERIOUSLY breaking Second Life search?

[Finite]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

It really is. Most of my sales come from the MP, and others have voiced the same.  There are stores that have no MP presence though...not sure how well they do.

I think that makes perfect sense for what you sell. I think if i were looking for a skybox or a home I'd look at marketplace. But for like 80% of other things in SL I would look there only after running through the mental wikipedia of stores I have gathered throughout the years.

[Solar Legion]

2 minutes ago, Finite said:

Is marketplace really that popular? I feel the longer I have played the game the less I find myself shopping at marketplace.

The answer to that is .... It Depends.

It varies from person to person and even then that variance is further complicated by use cases! If I do not feel like going anywhere on a particular day, I'll peruse the Marketplace (usually poking at shops/merchants I have bought from in the past) to see if they have anything new. I have also started using it more thanks to the redelivery options that Linden Lab added in - it saves me a trip to an in world location to boop either a CasperVend system or, in the case of one anthro vendor i rarely use these days, their in store, custom system (which looks for and attempts to redeliver all of your prior purchases).

[Luna Bliss]

5 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

16 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

To be successful (financially) you need to have good items, comparable to others in your field, and also market well.  Without the latter you sell much less.  Just because someone markets this doesn't mean they have no substance.

Breaking my usual rules here and directly quoting you ....

Read what I wrote a bit more carefully and you'll see I was talking about the average, modern person/user and not the merchant when talking about "popularity".

I will however have to vehemently disagree as the more you emphasize/try to cash in on that reaction to such, the less attention is paid to more important details - this happen so frequently that it is practically a rule these days.

There are certainly merchants who manage to be an exception and I personally tend to gravitate to them. I - personally - don't care how trendy your items are or what meaningless buzzwords you use in your descriptions or even what types/styles of items as a whole you tend to sell, I'll pay far more attention to the item itself (assembly, options, compatibility (for clothing/attachments) and such) when deciding on purchasing or not ... or even to bother much with your store as a whole.

It's fairly easy to tell when a creator focuses too much on making money and sacrifices quality.

I'm really only saying that it's not fair to diss stores that do market as it's necessary if you want to sell.  It's a matter of degree, and some of the smartest stores outsource their marketing so they have time to create quality items.

Never paid attention to 'trendy' so have no comment on that..

[Solar Legion]

Just now, Luna Bliss said:

It's fairly easy to tell when a creator focuses too much on making money and sacrifices quality.

I'm really only saying that it's not fair to diss stores that do market as it's necessary if you want to sell.  It's a matter of degree, and some of the smartest stores outsource their marketing so they have time to create quality items.

Never paid attention to 'trendy' so have no comment on that..

Which in essence means that your response - and this one - were unneeded as nowhere did i say anything close to what you seem to think i did.

[Luna Bliss]

Just now, Solar Legion said:

Which in essence means that your response - and this one - were unneeded as nowhere did i say anything close to what you seem to think i did.

I have no idea what you were really trying to say so just added some thoughts...lol

[Luna Bliss]

12 minutes ago, Finite said:

16 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

It really is. Most of my sales come from the MP, and others have voiced the same.  There are stores that have no MP presence though...not sure how well they do.

I think that makes perfect sense for what you sell. I think if i were looking for a skybox or a home I'd look at marketplace. But for like 80% of other things in SL I would look there only after running through the mental wikipedia of stores I have gathered throughout the years.

A lot of people browse the MP and then pop inworld to see the item 'in person'....so is always good to have a vendor @ an inworld store.  It really depends though on how popular you are on the MP....some merchants do quite well with MP only stores.

[Finite]

2 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

The answer to that is .... It Depends.

It varies from person to person and even then that variance is further complicated by use cases! If I do not feel like going anywhere on a particular day, I'll peruse the Marketplace (usually poking at shops/merchants I have bought from in the past) to see if they have anything new. I have also started using it more thanks to the redelivery options that Linden Lab added in - it saves me a trip to an in world location to boop either a CasperVend system or, in the case of one anthro vendor i rarely use these days, their in store, custom system (which looks for and attempts to redeliver all of your prior purchases).

Yes I understand. I just get annoyed with certain aspects. Like how the ad banner is full stuff I purchased 4 or 5 years ago. Though I do get a laugh when I read a review on said products of someone upset that their 2015 product doesn't fit their 2021 body. I also feel that MP tunnels you into only seeing things you are looking specifically for and really not much else.

I quit the game (took a break really) back in 2017. I came back about this time last year. I was playing on this sim where we could shoot eachother, but they had guns that reminded me of old ones from like 2010. They didn't shoot bullets or anything. Just these really long yellow sticks.

A friend of mine recommended a store so we went to visit it. I bought a gun then looked outside of the store. The sim it was in was literally the most realistic sim I've ever seen in SL. I explored the sim and found one of the builders AFK wearing this pretty hot outfit. I inspected her and found that the store the outfit was from was on another part of the same sim region. I go to that store and find out the outfit is at an event. I got to the event, get the outfit and browse and find 2 more vendors that I like.

This got me interested in events  so I started going to more events which ultimately created this olive branch of things  and places that I like. If I had initially went to the MP to buy the gun, I would have missed out on all of that.

[Solar Legion]

3 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I have no idea what you were really trying to say so just added some thoughts...lol

It's ... right there, in text.

I'll try to make it a bit clearer though: If you're more concerned with remaining popular at the expense of build quality (among other attributes) then you're the sort I was talking about where Merchants are concerned. Same for the purchaser end - the concern with popularity over actual quality is a cancer (of sorts) as far as my views go.

[Luna Bliss]

Just now, Finite said:

If I had initially went to the MP to buy the gun, I would have missed out on all of that.

I hate the MP and wish it never came into existence...it ruined a lot of the inworld experience.   Yet I shop there often...can't beat the convenience.

[Solar Legion]

2 minutes ago, Finite said:

Yes I understand. I just get annoyed with certain aspects. Like how the ad banner is full stuff I purchased 4 or 5 years ago. Though I do get a laugh when I read a review on said products of someone upset that their 2015 product doesn't fit their 2021 body. I also feel that MP tunnels you into only seeing things you are looking specifically for and really not much else.

I quit the game (took a break really) back in 2017. I came back about this time last year. I was playing on this sim where we could shoot eachother, but they had guns that reminded me of old ones from like 2010. They didn't shoot bullets or anything. Just these really long yellow sticks.

A friend of mine recommended a store so we went to visit it. I bought a gun then looked outside of the store. The sim it was in was literally the most realistic sim I've ever seen in SL. I explored the sim and found one of the builders AFK wearing this pretty hot outfit. I inspected her and found that the store the outfit was from was on another part of the same sim region. I go to that store and find out the outfit is at an event. I got to the event, get the outfit and browse and find 2 more vendors that I like.

This got me interested in events  so I started going to more events which ultimately created this olive branch of things  and places that I like. If I had initially went to the MP to buy the gun, I would have missed out on all of that.

Some of my purchases follow a not too dissimilar order of operations - it is how I ended up with a few of the form bases for my RP Character, Atra. Some of those ended up replaced with better ones as time went on as well.

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

It's ... right there, in text.

I'll try to make it a bit clearer though: If you're more concerned with remaining popular at the expense of build quality (among other attributes) then you're the sort I was talking about where Merchants are concerned. Same for the purchaser end - the concern with popularity over actual quality is a cancer (of sorts) as far as my views go.

Yes, and that's why I responded "it's fairly easy to tell when a creator focuses too much on making money and sacrifices quality".   It is the desire to make money that causes one to focus on popularity, usually -- they lose their 'heart' and cease becoming a creator/artist really.

[Solar Legion]

Thing of it is, Luna, the MP is little more than a purchased and repurposed version of two older, third party marketplaces. One of which had very few actual users/customers.

Like it or not, Linden Lab actually made a sound business decision in acquiring them.

[Finite]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

Thing of it is, Luna, the MP is little more than a purchased and repurposed version of two older, third party marketplaces. One of which had very few actual users/customers.

Like it or not, Linden Lab actually made a sound business decision in acquiring them.

Hehe I have a picture somewhere of my previous main avy hugging SLexchange Bigwig.

[Solar Legion]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

Yes, and that's why I responded "it's fairly easy to tell when a creator focuses too much on making money and sacrifices quality".   It is the desire to make money that causes one to focus on popularity, usually -- they lose their 'heart' and cease becoming a creator/artist really.

Except that such creators not only manage to remain in business, they tend to grow thanks to the other half of that equation - the ever increasing number of buyers who pay more attention to vapid popularity and such. Which creates a feedback loop.

Sadly, such is the way of things.

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

Thing of it is, Luna, the MP is little more than a purchased and repurposed version of two older, third party marketplaces. One of which had very few actual users/customers.

Like it or not, Linden Lab actually made a sound business decision in acquiring them.

Agree, they need to make money somehow.

I'd just rather they had a system where they could take their cut inworld. Many interesting sims had shops which supported the sim, but few go to shops anymore, and I've seen sims disappear because of it. 

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

5 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Yes, and that's why I responded "it's fairly easy to tell when a creator focuses too much on making money and sacrifices quality".   It is the desire to make money that causes one to focus on popularity, usually -- they lose their 'heart' and cease becoming a creator/artist really.

Except that such creators not only manage to remain in business, they tend to grow thanks to the other half of that equation - the ever increasing number of buyers who pay more attention to vapid popularity and such. Which creates a feedback loop.

Sadly, such is the way of things.

Yes, it's a superficial world for the most part.

[Solar Legion]

Unfortunately some region closures are simply inevitable, made worse by marrying a shop or club of some sort to the region in some attempt to recoup the cost of maintaining it.

Even in the early days (the ones i was present for - 2006 onward) this was the case.

We've lost a large number of creators with very good potential - and products - over the years thanks to all of that. I have little doubt that if there had been a similar system to the MP in place from the very beginning, a fair few more merchants from that era might still be around.

[Luna Bliss]

5 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

We've lost a large number of creators with very good potential - and products - over the years thanks to all of that. I have little doubt that if there had been a similar system to the MP in place from the very beginning, a fair few more merchants from that era might still be around.

Probably some. However it's very different creating and setting items for sale inworld via placement and a click or 2...vs listing on the MP. Listing on the MP forces one into more of a commercial mindset, and I imagine some would not want to go there. It took me forever to list on the MP as it's simply time-consuming uncreative drudgery -- grunt work with nothing motivational about it for me except a desire to sell.

[Finite]

7 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

Unfortunately some region closures are simply inevitable, made worse by marrying a shop or club of some sort to the region in some attempt to recoup the cost of maintaining it.

Even in the early days (the ones i was present for - 2006 onward) this was the case.

We've lost a large number of creators with very good potential - and products - over the years thanks to all of that. I have little doubt that if there had been a similar system to the MP in place from the very beginning, a fair few more merchants from that era might still be around.

I think that's just the natural flow of things. A lot of things changed in SL that would cause that unrelated to the MP. Like failing to make the conversion from prim to mesh for instance. The oldest store I can think of that's still around is Bare Rose. 

[Janet Voxel]

52 minutes ago, Finite said:

Is marketplace really that popular? 

Yes, it is. A lot of people have pcs or laptops that can't handle a busy event or an event, and sometimes even a store period due to all of the textures and high poly objects loading. So they opt for MP to avoid issues.

[Finite]

7 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

Yes, it is. A lot of people have pcs or laptops that can't handle a busy event or an event, and sometimes even a store period due to all of the textures and high poly objects loading. So they opt for MP to avoid issues.

I would agree except you can lower your settings to pre-2010 graphics and get the same image quality from pictures in game as the ones you see on the MP (72ppi). I don't think the reason people use MP has much to do with their computers (with bitcoin increasing the value and technology of video cards, even basic computers are far more advanced for gaming than they ever were before. Before video cards had a hard time keeping up with games, now games have a hard time of keeping up with what video cards can produce). I think it's more of a convenience thing and general lack of knowing where to look than anything else.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Finite

[Rowan Amore]

Think about for just a moment and stop asking rhetorical questions.

Use those critical thinking skills you're always going on about.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Rowan Amore

[Luna Bliss]

11 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Think about for just a moment and stop asking rhetorical questions.

Use those critical thinking skills you're always going on about.

I guess you're speaking to me...since I did ask you a question an hour ago and have mentioned a lack of critical thinking skills with some people on occasion.

I think I'll be the one who decides if it was a rhetorical question...and no it was not.

You said:

"For what it's worth, if I tp into a region, see a bunch of bots on a platform or people standing around fishing, I leave and never return so put all the traffic building stuff you'd like there.  The only thing it does is to tell me where not to go."

I really did want to know why you would not shop at a store that had fun things to do, like fishing.  Now the bots, I understand...that's illegal...and they add nothing of substance to the world.  But a game would make the store a bad one for you? why?

 

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

I guess you're speaking to me...since I did ask you a question an hour ago and have mentioned a lack of critical thinking skills with some people on occasion.

I think I'll be the one who decides if it was a rhetorical question...and no it was not.

You said:

"For what it's worth, if I tp into a region, see a bunch of bots on a platform or people standing around fishing, I leave and never return so put all the traffic building stuff you'd like there.  The only thing it does is to tell me where not to go."

I really did want to know why you would not shop at a store that had fun things to do, like fishing.  Now the bots, I understand...that's illegal...and they add nothing of substance to the world.  But a game would make the store a bad one for you? why?

 

Wow.  For the same reason as people use bots as has been explained countless times.  Fishing is used for the same purpose 99% of the time as that is how it's advertised.  If a store has to use fishing/bots to increase traffic, already a strike against them.  Sell a better product and they will come.  

Seemed pretty self explanatory.

[Finite]

9 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

I really did want to know why you would not shop at a store that had fun things to do, like fishing.  Now the bots, I understand...that's illegal...and they add nothing of substance to the world.  But a game would make the store a bad one for you? why?

I think some look at the entire picture when deciding where to shop. I myself am probably one of the biggest snobs when it comes to this. A lot of outside things tell me in advance how a product might be on the inside. IE how do they display their products? How much effort did they put into their displays and signage? How skillfully were they made? And also, how do they promote themselves? This is before I've even bothered to look at what they are selling.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Finite