Sage Waverider

That's good to know. Thank You!

Well we are all supposed to be reasonable, I never verbally attack such customers or something. But the attitude that the merchants should just take the insults is not okay. Maybe it's really a time for me to close my MP since I think it's an absolute waste of my time to try to talk sense to such customers. What sort of customer service should some difficult customer recieve when they pay like 100L$? Sometimes it can take an hour or so to discuss their delusions. I mean if a customer is reasonable I have no trouble providing customer service, but in the case of really difficult ones it's really not worth my time.

I'm absolutely sick of cancerous customers in the marketplace, that has no clue how stuff works an keeps leaving 1 star reviews. The first thing I saw this morning was a review left by some absolute knob calling my creations crap and rip offs just because his delivery failed, this particular person later writes messages calling merchants names on his profiles wall. And this has been happening for years. For example it's common that people don't read the description before buying and after that would be bashing you with reviews and DMs. I mean if you can afford an in-world store, you can ban customers like that, but if you're running a marketplace store there's no way to ban these lunatics. Or is the official policy of LL is that content creators just have to deal with this?

This shouldn't be hard to implement and would be really helpful. I have a full perm item store and sometimes people buy something by mistake, I can't really refund it, because there's no way for me to know it that customer have deleted the item. But by assigning some sort of an unique ID to particular instance to specific item it would be possible to wipe it of the servers, even if that person transfered that item to someone esle. This could be abused by some people that would try to resell the item and then would try to get a refund for it, so there should be a warning stating that if an item is still returnable it might get deleted or something like that.

Selling it as 0L$ won't get your item upranked. I think It does not affect listing rank at all. Unless they changed it. Most important factor is number of sales that is somehow multiplied by price. So if you multiply it by 0 you'll get 0. That's my main problem with the way ranking works, for some reason 10 sales at 1L$ is greater( >) than 5 sale at 100L$. Rankings gets updated every twelve or 24 hours. So items that are bought by the users that maybe don't have a lot of lindens (possibly new players) are more valuable than these items that are bought by players that can afford items that actually took days or even weeks to make. At least it looks this way by seeing that top ranking items are 1L$. At the end of the day, I've spend at least a year (probably more) modelling for SL as a full time job, trying to get a successful store (have couple of them) running. But I can't really compete with 10 pages of 1L$ items, my builds and assets are just not seen by customers... I did similar epreriment myself I had at least 5 buildings that I've sold for 1L$ and managed to get 3 of them to top 12. It kind of boosted my overall sales, because I got more exposure, some items with normal price tag became more popular, but the same time it was a financial suicide... So if I want to run a successful store I should probably "sell"(give away?) 50 % of my content at 1L$ just to boost remaining half of my store. Which not really ideal...

Well, I don't really create much for SL nowadays. There's no point spending a week to create some quality asset, just to get wieghted down by 1L$ crap it's nearly impossible to get up above these items. It's clear that other 3D and game related markets are more appealing for serious 3D artists... Honestly 1-10L$ should be separeted to a different category, because these items oversaturates the market and makes it look amateur.

Well you have to go through a pile of overpriced items then. But that's a lesser problem IMHO. Problem is the default "most relevant" item listing. A common customer might be just fine with the default display of search results. For example Internet Explorer was so popular in back in the days, just because people didn't know or didn't bother to install Chrome or Firefox. Same applies to marketplace

Thanks for your reply. I know doesn't that doesn't mean bad. I think the reason why we have first 10 pages in almost any category filled with 1L$ is that the content creators are thinking that having some popular 1L$ items will drive more traffic to their stores, this works to some degree, but at the same time is driving all the prices down, customers are affected by this as well, because there there's so many 1L$ items, they think that more expensive content is not worth the price. Many years ago, first pages in the marketplace were filled with 10L$, but now situation is even worse. Ny mentioning new artist I just meant that the marketplace with most poplar items that are not even worth a cent is really unattractive, therefore I don't think that talented artist will be willing to start creating for SL.

It's really annoying that the marketplace is littered with top ranking 1L$ items. Something should finally be done about that, it's absolutely unfair how default item listing works. Been a merchant for a while and I've experiment with 1L$, so for example you'll be able to sell 20-50 copies of 1L$ and it gets a better ranking compared to an item that sells 4-5 copies at 200L$... What I get from this whole situation it that LL favours poorly made models that was made in 10-30 minutes instead of the ones that took days or weeks to make. If you feel similar, please let yourself be heard. And let's get this mess sorted finally. I don't think I'll waste more of my time creating content for SL, because it's nearly impossible to get through the garbage on marketplace. And I feel it's really discouraging for the new artists that potentially would be willing to contribute their content to the marketplace. If anyone is in favour of the way that marketplace currently operates it would be interesting to hear your opinion as well...

I have some mesh ones in my marketplace store, if you're interested.

Yeah, keep going - give V-Ray or Mental Ray a chance, if it's possible... I love Blender and Cycles, but these guys blows Cycles to pieces.

Chic Aeon wrote: Perhaps you will be happier in Sansar! Hope so but what puzzles me is what's next for SL, stuff like Light Probes might get implemented into Sansar, if so; I don't see why it couldn't be implemented into SL, just to test things before Sansar goes live.

Chic Aeon wrote: Demos solve much of the problem for sales as people can see what items will look like in THEIR viewer. I find that very few people think about what it might look like to others . I use Cycles Render and make my textures within the program so there are no AO maps. I find that with careful lighting in Blender I get get a realistic look of AMBIENT light. I avoid cast shadows on object or in buildings as I always use viewer shadows and have known for years how problematic those hard cast (Blender Render mostly) shadows can be. They drive me nuts. I find that with Cycles render materials ala SL specular and normal maps are rarely needed. The beauty of cycles is that even the folks without advanced lighting on see a lovely texture. I occassionaly add a normal map on items that would be very rough texture (like rocks) but stay away from them in general as the lighting can indeed give some nasty effects. We work within the programs and the confines of what we can do. That's pretty much our only choice if we want to keep creating . I used to render using HDRi skyboxes, that brings most realistic AMBIENT light as you mentioned, which gets baked into textures instead of plain AO, but main thing is that it STILL is affected by SL shadows which makes it unrealistic, that's why some creators go for full bright builds, because for now it's only way you get realism by paying the price of light dynamics. which is not great. The truth is that the way SL handles these things are realllllly outdated and I'm not sure if there's anything coming to fix this.

You can't go wrong with baking AO maps, it's affected that much by SL Viewer's AO. Since it affects only interacting corner pieces, there's AO equivalent in real life, but it's not considered realistic lighting solution in the world of 3D rendering. My main point was about stuff like Light Probes, which would bring much needed realism into SL. There's the Issue of rendered AO and realtime AO ovelapping, but even worse thing is when lets say your building gets roof shadow so whole interior unrealisticly dark, no matter that it's sunny day outside your building. You can adjust your presents how dark shadows are, but end customer might be stuck with default preset which makes shadows 50% grey and it's completely unrealistic.

Just google "3ds max second life" there's a lot of tutorials on Youtube dealing with the workflow to solve your problems.