ChinRey

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: Marketplace ads are a waste of money. I believe that has changed for the better recently. Darrius Gothly once did some rather extensive tests showing that the system was seriously skewed, displaying some ads far more often than others. I did some casual tests myself confirming Darrius' results but when I redid the tests recently, I could find no such pattern. Even so, last time I tried a Marketplace ad, I paid 399 Lindens to have my ad displayed about 50 times on a category page. The click-through ratio was actualy surprsingly good, more than 5% - I think that may actually be suspiciously good - but even so, each not very prominently disaplayed ad imprint on a web page is worth less than 1 L$. But it may well be that other categories than the ones I have tried are less crowded and give you more displays for your money. As I said in an earlier post, it's very different if you use those ads as part of a brand awareness strategy but for that you need lots of ads and ads in different places. In any case, this discussion is really about classified ads in inworld search results and that's not the same as Marketplace ads.

Tamara Artis wrote: Not sure I understand this... The lowest price we pay is 30L$ and it is for showing the land in search results. So you have to pay for a regular listing first and then you can pay extra for a classified ad?

thimblemunch wrote: It's super super shady in my opinion and completely kills the value of the gacha they are selling If I understand correctly, Gageisgone is planning to be open about it and that's not shady of course. Apart from that, MP and SL is a free, unregulated, out of control market and compared to many other things that go on, it's downright angelic. thimblemunch wrote: but there is so many gacha creators across the grid now that I almost guarantee that some if not lots of them do those things you mentioned. Yes but it's still just an assumption. I guess we'll never know for sure unless somebody accidentally admits they're doing it. I do notice one thing though: I know at least three gacha creators that are much less visible on the resell market than one should expect - fairly well known and popular brands, making the right kind of things and participating in major gacha events, non-gacha items quite popular and collectable - and still you don't see their works for sale second hand very often. Maybe it's because they are the ones who don't do that kind of things? Or maybe not; there are other plausible explanations. Come to think of it, "fake" gacha listing may perhaps explain the extensive keyword spamming some gacha resellers use. I find it hard to believe that all those irrrelevant search results generate enough sales to be worth the effort for the seller but they sure are free advertising for the creator. For the sake of completeness, here's a variant of the method: Make some "fake" gacha listings at unrealistically high prices. You probably won't sell much on MP that way but it is still free advertising and it'll fool genuine resellers and others into believing your items have higher market value than they actually have.

Pamela Galli wrote: Pamela sometimes finds herself off in a neighboring sim while I am building. I really dont know what she is up to half the time. You mean you don't notice the LI of your work suddenly drops to 0 because it's in a different sim than your avatar? There's no way I'll ever fall off the edge of my platform of course. I'm always completely surrounded by the builds I'm going to finish tomorrow so my avatar is bound to bump into something and stop long before she makes it to the edge. Anyway, this is a digression so I won't mention when I put a mouse rezzer on my unnamed friend's platform and it took a week before she noticed the mice running all around her avatar's feet.

I think this branch of the thread has grown so long it's time for a summary. It started with me mentioning that although the Grand Hall featured in the first Sansar video was made by a professional 3D modeller, the version of it that he uploaded to Second Life is not in any way a professional work. I blamed that on a system discouraging builders to strive for quality and quoted another (presumably) professional who had clearly admitted that his SL uploads was left-handed work and explained that making quality mesh for Second Life simply wasn't worth the effort. Pussycat had a more idealistic view, saying that everybody should always try to strive for the best possible result regardless. I agree with her of course. But on the other hand, if you are trying to make a living from your mesh skills and SL is just a marginal part of your income and the time and effort you spend improving the quality of your SL uploads arenn't going to increase neither the number or sales or the price you can charge, well you just can't afford to spend that time and effort, you have to do it the quick and dirty way. This is not about the people who may not be top notch professionals but still try to do their best, it's about the people who can do better but choose not to. There are some builders who can't bring themselves to make such compromises, they do their best and somehow still manage to make a decent income from SL. And there are even more merchants who take a financial risk, commissioning quality works from external makers and uploading them to SL. These people really deserve our admiration. But the makers who decide to take the easy way out, they're just doing what LL tells them to do and I still don't think we can blame them for that.

Chic Aeon wrote: I can't really see your physics model showing in the NICE CLEAR SCREENSHOT (ty) but are you trying to use the same full model for the physics? That's a little confusing. The second screenshot shows the physics tab: custom physics model analyzed to five hulls. Seems a little bit lavish but not that much and certainly not big enough to trigger any kind of error.

Tamara Artis wrote: I went to check statistics, in those 2 days I have sales from that shop from 2 people, it is maybe 1k top. They bought few items. Not much but still enough to pay off the ad lol That's good. Even so, I'm not saying that classified ads and "enhanced listings" on MP are just wasted money but I do believe they are more about building brand awareness than generating instant sales and for that you need massive exposure, you need to plug your brand over and over again until people remember it. In other words: either go all in and do it on a large scale or don't do it at all. A slightly different topic but since we're discussing classified ads, I had a look at the knowledge base and noticed that you set the price you're willing to pay yourself and your rank depends on what you pay. An "unpaid" search listing costs 30 L$/week regardless of your ranking. Does that mean classified ads can actually be cheaper than regular search listings?

Chic Aeon wrote: Also note that if you or an alt make a whole store of nothing but your gacha itmes --- well it doesn't take a reocket scientist. So you may need to actually GO into the gacha resale business to "cover your tracks". That sounds like WAAAAAAAY too much work for me. LOL Yes, the first option, cooperating with a known gacha reseller is probably easier although then of course you'll have to split the profit. The third option is of course to get together with a few other gacha resellers. One of them opens a gacha resell store and everybody sell through it, each getting the income from the items he/she contributed. A fourth option, if you can't find anybody you trust well enough: same scenario only with several gacha creator alts. All these ways of "cheating" are of course very obvious and potentially quite lucrative and I'm sure lots of people have thought of them. But I've always wondered: is anybody actually doing it?

Gageisgone wrote: Well I make trading cards. So I would offer them around same pricem except higher rarity packs for a little more. So pay for better chance in other words Ok. I don't see anything "wrong" about doing it that way but it is a bit risky. Gacha is very much about collecting and I believe that for many collectors the hunt is an important aspect. It simply isn't that exciting when you know you can just go to the creator's store and buy the things directly. But it's your choice and for that you definitely want to go for the limited sales specified in the listing form option.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: So if the builder made something to be ultra-low-land impact at the expense of graphical complexity... that was the right choice. Keeping that land impact low, usually means optimizing for real-time 3D animation. You didn't understand me correctly then. What I was talking about was quick-and-dirty uploads that weren't in any way optimized for low lag. Besides, when the builder reduces the LoD so much that even with LoD factor 4 (which really, really adds to the lag) they still don't render properly at a realistic viewing distance, what's the point? But you still have a very important point because an item's land impact is not a good measurement of the amount of lag it generates. The land impact formula exlucdes some of the biggest lag inducing factors and it also very obviously miscalculates some of the factors that are included. This is what I meant by a system that favors mediocrity over excellence. Pussycat Catnap wrote: so as a consumer even with more land impact available on my land, I still look things that use up less as an easy guage of what is "likely" to have less impact on rendering-speed, and the FPS I get moving around with it in my presence. Land impact does not in any way indicate an item's rendering speed, it does not attempt to do so and it does not pretend to do so. For what it's worth, it's all about server side load. That is, there is some correlation between download weight and render speed but it's very very vague and inexact. Render speed is mainly about textures and sometimes animations (that is anything that moves) and those are factors not included in the LI calculation. Pussycat Catnap wrote: It's generally a position of privilege that allows people to make excuses that say "well, the system is just this way... so I'm just being part of that system." Unless it's been changed recently, there is one sim that is notable for being filled with particularly poor mesh. High LI, high lag, poor LoD, faulty physics - you name it, it has it. It is run by Linden Lab themselves and advertised as "the Home of the Moles". At least one of the worst mesh fakers was recently promoted through a certain Everybody-But-Drax-Knows-It's-Official-LL video blog as a "World Maker". Not entirely without justification because he used to be a very good sculpt maker, but even so... These are the signals Linden Lab sends out and they are unambigious. To the regular user they say: "This is what counts as high quality in SL". To the content creators they say: "This is what we want, no need to waste time doing it better." Pussycat Catnap wrote: The scale and nature doesn't matter - being ethical is simply doing the right thing, regardless. Of course but in this case that often means you have the supreme rulers of this virtual world actively working against you and I really don't think it's fair to expect everybody to handle that pressure.

Ummmm... what you're saying is that you're trying to sell prizes from your own gachas on MP? I do believe gacha creators who want to cash in a little bit extra on the resell market try to be a bit discreet about it because some people may object to it and insist it's not gacha at all. A substantial amount of the sales thrugh a gacha machine is to resellers and once they find out you are seling the same items yourself on MP, they're sure to stay well away from your machines. Two ways to do it in secret is to cooperate with an established gacha reseller or create your own gacha reseller alt. However, if you think it's a good idea to openly offer the same items on MP as you do in your gachas, the easy way is to set the permission to no copy and specify a limited number on the listing setup page. The slightly trickier way is to send a full perm copy to an alt and then tansfer no copy ones back to your main.

MissDeeMeanur wrote: Nah, Ebbe was responsible for the stillborn Vizact 2000 Oh, seems they forgot to mention that. But does being in charge of a project the last few months before the company decides to abandon it mean you're doomed to be a failure 14 years later? Even if you've been working for 11 years in the same company before that happened? MissDeeMeanur wrote: and left Microsoft on the day (April 1st, 2000 - and no, it's not a joke) that it was discontinued. He left in March that year actually, to work for - and eventually replace again - the guy he had succeeded as head of the Vizact team. Edit: This isn't actually about Ebbe Altberg at all, it's about the people who declared him a failure as CEO of LL even before he had started. And of course, consequently about the mentality that makes so many people declare Sansar a failure even before it has launched. I'm sceptical too, I have to say that but I reserve my judgement until I've actually seen it.

Pamela Galli wrote: Most of the time My avi is just ignored while I build and cam around. Off on a tangent but a friend of mine (I won't mention Hattie's name of course) used to have her work platform right above mine. One day she dropped in at my platform and we had a nice long chat. Eventually I asked her why she had come visitng and it turned out she didn't know where she was. She had fallen off her platform without noticing and was still busy working while we were chatting. This happened twice even. I've never fallen off my platform myself without noticing but that's only because it's a full sim one.

Tamara Artis wrote: Here is mine, you can see its working... Mmmmm, yes it is indeed. 8 visitors for 150 L$... How much did those 8 people spend at your store?

Klytyna wrote: ... That after a decade or so, Torley Linden has finally bought a new beard... It's a sculpty... See what I mean? Even Torley is trying his best to update and he's the oldest and most conservative developer Linden. The developers will never ever manage to match Governance though, some of those guys have the coolest and most unusual avatars ever seen on any grid. Edit: Am I the only one who feels that a good retro avatar can often be cooler than 99% of the modern barbie doll ones?

In this case I suspect it's because the mid and low models are too complex. Think about this: At the upload size and with default mid graphics, the Medium LoD model will be displayed at viewing distances between c. 13 and c. 55 m. The Low LoD model will be used for distances between c. 55 and c. 110 m. I know I've been preaching against LoD butchery on many occasions on this forum but it's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. Those two models are crammed full of little details that are never going to be noticeable or even visible at the relevant distances. There's also something funny going on with the Lowest LoD model, it shouldn't have 112 triangles when the limit is set to 0. Something between 3 and 12 would be reasonable, not much more than that. All those excessive triangles add a lot of LI and a lot of lag and are the most likely reason why you get the dreaded MAV block error. The solution: create separate LoD models. In this case you want to make them all since obviously the uploader can't even manage to make a proper "zero model" for this build.

Tamara Artis wrote: Bigger problem is about experiences and adjustments. When I went to visit her place for the first time, with default camera position, I felt uncomfortable and like there is no room to move. Everything seemed stuffed with things, like she wanted to show us how we can put more stuff into certain space - by making them tiny. Everything seemed small and like it was made for little people. Then I changed the camera position and things looked normal. Every now and then I stumble across an old billboard with the old "The Avatar Is You" slogan and I get a bit sad thinking of how much better Second Life would have been if that had ever been more than a poor joke. Fixing the camera position bug would have been by far the biggest change in Second Life ever and in itself probably the biggest single improvement ever. But it seems to me the roots (ummmm... does a bug have roots or am I mixing metaphors here?) are too deep and too wide by now. Removing the bug would be too disruptive. I would still be very happy if I was proven wrong though.

Klytyna wrote: Yeah well, bst way to improve the SL Dev team... Frankly I suspect whats needed is to FORCE all dev team members to throw away their 2003 phil linden clone avis,... I hadn't joined SL in 2003 but I'm fairly sure they didn't have avatars like Oz Linden's Grand Old Man or Dan Linden's skeleton or Nyx Linden's little robot back then. Klytyna wrote: There was that 'amazing new stealth feature' one of them dreamed up, after belatedly noticing that for years, people had used prims more than 10m on a side to build with. I was away for a few years so I missed that one. But I did see how messy the implentations of SSB and Project Interesting were in 2013 so I have noe problems believing you. But! The middle management stuck in a rut I mentioned, left shortly afterwards (only weeks before Ebbe joined), things changed almost overnight and have kept changing since then. The first big project in 2014 was the introduction of CDN and that was a very well executed project. They have slipped back into their old sins a few times of course (remember the first mesh starter avatars?) and I certainly won't say the new LL is perfect. But you can't compare the current SL developer team to what it was before 2014 and any example dating back to the time before that simply isn't relevant to how they perform today.

In this case it has to be an error since you say the land is still there. If you own the parcel, contact Live Chat support and ask them to restart the sim. If you rent, ask the landowner to do it.

Pamela Galli wrote: I think Penny has the right idea -- come up with a better default but make the old one a preset. Not unlike when a viewer offers a default but then allows you to choose from options. I've been wrong before and I'll be more than happy to be wrong again this time. Only one way to find out though.

Parhelion Palou wrote: Garbage in will likely result in worse garbage out. Do computer students still learn about GIGO or is that archaic knowledge long forgotten and buried in the past?

Cyanide often works. If that fails, you can follow the instructions in the Knowledge Base

SAULGOODiE wrote: Still trying to wrap my mind around this whole project. Went to check out Horizons a week or so ago and was not really impressed with what I found. I'm there now. Two observations: Lowest sale price I found at a quick glance is 18,000 Lindens. Since prices are likely to still drop quite a bit, I would expect a level around 10,000 once the newsworthiness has faded. Possibly lower. A few of the inhabitated parcels use the default houses. Apart from those, I can see one that has a building trying to follow the sci-fi theme. The rest are just the regular mix you see everywhere else. So forget everything about Horizon being a themed region, people aren't interested and it's already too late for LL to enforce any kind of building regulations. In other words: no surprises there.

Pamela Galli wrote: Some may not be able to handle a different camera angle but most would love it. That is definitely true. I've recommended Penny's camera settings to lots of people, both newcomers and old-timers, and I've yet to meet somebody who wanted to change back afterwards. But SL'ers are a stubborn race, they're very conservative and they hate being forced. I actually think more people will go for an improved camera setting if it's presented as an option than if they feel it's something they're forced to adapt to.

Theresa Tennyson wrote: Penny asked for the default to be changed in the JIRA Love was referring to, and also she asked the Firestorm developers to change the defaults in a Firestorm JIRA a while ago. Woops, I missed that. She added that comment after I read the JIRA and I didn't notice it when I went there to get the link for my post. Sorry, Penny, I agree with you in principle but I think that train left the station long ago.