The marketplace has been rigged!!!

[Rowan Amore]

33 minutes ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

I have used "the duck" almost since it was available publicly. I was also an early contributor to the UX/UI design of the product, offering my professional feedback on what was being released when it was just a handful of people working on it. The results are more than "good enough" and since it's a far less invasive product that delivers the results 99.9% of the time with many less privacy concerns, good enough for me.

That's what we "hire" apps and online services to do for us, work. If you don't use or want 90% of the features of A and B offers the same experience minus those, then use B. Why anyone outside of a business environment wants the bloat and spying that comes along with MS Word, for example, why would you bother when there are a half dozen other products that offer a cleaner, more efficient, cheaper UX? Honestly, look at the ribbon, I bet you would personally use less than 10% of what's there outside of it being the defacto corporate standard.

It's why in my professional life I left Adobe behind at something like CS3. Yes, the subscription model have always bothered me, but other products now do the same things I can do in Adobe much much cheaper and better and more stable and no annual fee, and therefore, "good enough". Some of the new products designers now use en masse run rings around the former Adobe products when it comes to speed, stability, features, etc.

Do you use the DDG browser?  

[Persephone Emerald]

5 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Some details you posted reminded me of the "bad old days", when if you went to a "Mall" you could expect it to take forever to load, for your avatar to freeze in place, etc.  Things have gotten better! Or, "Malls" have just died (like in RL).

Malls have become shopping events.

I went to Cosmopolitan yesterday and the textures and objects just would not load for me. I couldn't even see half the vendors before I gave up. Just everything white and grey, except for the cute little fish and sea life underneath a floor that wasn't even transparent. I went back later, and this time it eventually loaded enough that I could use Area Search to find the store I was looking for. Shop and Hop is literally the biggest mall around, but it doesn't have problems loading like that.

I enjoy shopping inworld because it feels immersive and fun for me, but if I want to find a particular type of item quickly, SL Marketplace is kind of like the Amazon.com of SL.

Edited February 8 by Persephone Emerald

[Clem Marques]

9 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I went to Cosmopolitan yesterday and the textures and objects just would not load for me. I couldn't even see half the vendors before I gave up. Just everything white and grey, except for the cute little fish and sea life underneath a floor that wasn't even transparent. I went back later, and this time it eventually loaded enough that I could use Area Search to find the store I was looking for. Shop and Hop is literally the biggest mall around, but it doesn't have problems loading like that.

On top of those issues, sometimes you're also unable to even get into the shopping events due to the sheer amount of people that are in the region, filling it up completely. I always wait a few days before trying to visit them.

[Rowan Amore]

7 hours ago, Clem Marques said:

On top of those issues, sometimes you're also unable to even get into the shopping events due to the sheer amount of people that are in the region, filling it up completely. I always wait a few days before trying to visit them.

For me, it's been a couple years since I haven't been able to get into a shopping event on the first day.  The only places I've had trouble getting into were Linden Lab events.  YMMV of course.

[Clem Marques]

48 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

For me, it's been a couple years since I haven't been able to get into a shopping event on the first day.  The only places I've had trouble getting into were Linden Lab events.  YMMV of course.

In general, it tends to be about luck and also what time of the day it is. If you show up right as the event opens, its more likely for it to be full. If you wait a bit, the odds of getting in are much better.

But there's one factor that influences how often that might happen: Whether or not you are premium. I used to deal with full regions fairly often when going to events or special sales/gift events, but that reduced drastically after I got a premium membership.

Not saying that this is your case. I just thought it'd be a good idea share this since it's an interesting perk that not everyone knows about.

Edited February 9 by Clem Marques