DartAgain
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Jacob Cagney wrote:DartAgain wrote:Well, no point in making points that others have made about your post, they've covered some of it pretty well.My take on it is that unless LL changes course in the way they do business, in 5 years you won't be here for me to tell you that i told you so.
Sorry, but that really isn't saying much. If you go back to the old SLExchange archived forums, and old SL Archived forums from 5-7 years ago, the same thing was being said then as you are saying here.And yet Second Life is still around.Oh sure, it's not a new prediction. I myself however, do not suffer from premature extrapolation.
Your argument seems to be that we don't have the right to feel the way that we do, which is strange to me. Nevertheless as I said we decline. So some complainer(s), somewhere is spot on in describing why that decline is happening. If not us and these many varied arguments in this thread then who is rightly identifying the reasons for the decline?
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I think anyone that does well here will be able to manage "out there".
But you said Unreal Engine and to that I say yum, my personal favorite, the newest, lastest, greatest and yes, all the VR you want to work with as well. And no upfront cost until I'm ready to launch.
I'm holding out some hope for Sansar, but with a dose of skepticism. I can build any experience that Sansar will be capable of with UE without a doubt, so what would Sansar bring to the table for me? Certainly not L$ ... I can make my own currency, or none and go with real money. Same for any feature Sansar can come up with because if UE doesn't do it, I can modify the source and make it possible.
So Sansar must provide two things: Buying power and users. That's it. But if LL's monetization is still heavy like it is here, then I'm going to give 5% of my gross to Epic and call it a day. It won't cost me anything for content that I make myself, there's simply no commission to pay at all on my own models for my own project.
Another deal breaker for me is the ToS. I stopped creating for SL with the last major ToS change before this one when they decided to make this ludicrous grab of rights to do just about anything with my content, including licensing, sub-licensing, etc.
Not sure if it was Ebbe or Rod that said they didnt' see what the big deal was about users not liking the ToS changes. That for me was the straw ... turned to my wife and we both said the same thing: As if LL would EVER sign an agreement with anyone like their own ToS ... that's the big deal. But right, play dumb and take me for a fool. Besides that, legally it prohibits me from doing certain things with content and ventures, so no go.
You're right that other places have higher commissions, although 70% is on the very high end and I've never had to pay anyone a 70% commission for selling models. They also don't have a ToS that's as restrictive.
The plus side is that it's a different team on Sansar, so maybe they can get past this "you're a player and we're game gods" culture that LL has had going on. Hopefully it will include an entirely different marketplace as well. And one that doesn't play favorites or take 2 YEARS to get a single feature done.
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ChinRey wrote:DartAgain wrote:25+ sims lost thus far after a setup fee reduction announcement by LL.Carry on.
A bit off topic but that's actually a positive sign. Normally there would have been close to 100 sims lost during that time span.Not really. Check Tyche Shepherds twitter feed. It's not updated every week these days but you can go back and see the losses. The bleeding had actually slowed for a while.
ETA: Actually I've been sloppy a few times with my wording, so I've got to apologize for not being more precise sometimes. I was just trying to point out that it didn't make a difference all told that the price is reduced, which isn't a good sign. Factoring that in with some Ebbe comments that alluded that there's a critical point that LL can't fall under and maintain the operating costs.
You're right, a bit off topic. Hoping Pam doesn't whack me with a ruler for occassionally veering off topic.
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Well, no point in making points that others have made about your post, they've covered some of it pretty well.
My take on it is that unless LL changes course in the way they do business, in 5 years you won't be here for me to tell you that i told you so.
I'm guessing some people in the virtual world There thought that some people were just complaining for no reason as it declined too. I don't think you want here to become There and that's why I complain vehemently.
Something else you missed here too. For months before we started talking recently this forum was mostly dead. In the last few weeks it's seen more conversation than it has in months. You know what the alternative is? Apathy.
SL was vibrant when people both praised and complained. These days finding a good debate beyond fluff is hard to come by as people become apathetic.
25+ sims lost thus far after a setup fee reduction announcement by LL.
Carry on.
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Ok, best I can do for ToS-safe feedback ...
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Oh jeez. Sorry, that was an unsolicited reaction.
ETA: Just finished reading the posts over there. Would it be too personal if I said their legal team is just going to piss off any judge that reads it over. It's already happened once that a judge admitted that the LL ToS is overreaching. Now it's just ... well, more overreaching.
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Thanks for those links. That one list was spot on and there's some great wisdom there.
In honor of the new ToS changes yesterday protecting LL employees I offer my own ToS and disclaimers.
If you are an LL employee you don't have to agree to the following conditions and realities.
1) I do not know any of you personally, if you feel that I do, please check your paranoia at the door.
2) I will not personally disparage any of you personally. It isn't personal. It's called customer feedback. Please check your paranoia at the door.
3) You will be expected to maintain the same level of anonymity that your Linden last names afford you. This applies to all Lindens including the god complex Linden known as Linden Lab and the multiple personality Linden known as CommerceTeam Linden.
4) You understand that it is extremely difficult to direct a personal volley against a pseudonym. You agree not to bend reality to spawn a virtual reality.
5) Arbitration will take place in my living room and you will be required to bring a decent micro-brew in sufficient quantity, During said arbitration you agree to maintain your current anonymity by placing a paper sack over your head.
Disclaimer: That wasn't a real TOS, any more than a judge would consider an LL ToS a contract.
But seriously, what brought that on, LL?
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Pamela Galli wrote:I have always believed the MP was lucrative, even in its crippled state. 5% of sales is a lot. Add to that LLs fee when cashing out, and tier (esp for those like me that need to pay to keep rezzed thousands of demo objects), and LL is making a lot from merchants already.But will I want to move over to Sansar to be further abused, neglected -- and unselected? Not looking likely at this point.
I've got some wrangled numbers on an old hard drive about somewhere. I think the last bits that I put together were that LL had estimated some $75 million (real dollars) worth of annual sales of user goods, modified a bit to reflect a reality that they weren't publishing. At any rate my projections came out to be something like a total of somewhere between $4-$7 million per year that their 5% commission generates.
So say conservatively some $3 million real dollars annually of L$ that never gets cashed out by users that LL gets to keep from the marketplace. More than enough to pay salaries of the marketplace team and then some. More than enough to treat merchants like customers and develop for their needs.
And right, that doesn't include all the other sinks, tier, advertising, etc.
ETA: Feel free to correct those numbers, LL. Anytime now.
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ChinRey wrote:Reading through yesterday's posts, I'm actually shocked.I'm still fairly new to Second Life and I thought this was an isolated one-time blunder. But if they've done it before and not learned from their mistake, that's bad, really, really bad.And I thought the reason why they've been neglecting the Marketplace was that it contributed so little to their income,,,This is no way to run a serious business of course, anybody can see that. It explains why the big RL corporations pulled out, they certainly wouldn't want to deal with a bunch of amateurs like that. I mean, there are big companies who pay taggers to spread their brand names where regular ads won't work and even they don't want to have anything to do with Second Life. Somebody once told me that somebody from Mercedes Benz explained why they pulled out of Second Life with "You don't advertise in a latrine". I'm actually beginning to wonder if that story is true.It doesn't bode well for the future of Second Life and it looks even worse for Sansar.
Linden Lab really have a strong need to explain themselves now, to their business partners and prospective business partners big and small. But they probably don't even realize the problem. Most likely they are busy congratulating themselves for creating the perfect textbook example how to become your own worst enemy in business.
Heh, no the marketplace is pretty lucrative.
As far as corporations feeling like they were advertising in a latrine? They did feel that way and they had some reason. At the time it was the wild west and anything went. It was not at all unusual to shop in an SL mall alongside a bunch of nekkid slaves or some nekkid noob with a wooden err ... extremity hanging out and all manner of things. Because LL didn't really do much about that stuff. And to many people that kind of anything goes freedom was part of the charm of SL.
LL has always looked down on its "residents" as second class citizens who just complain a lot for no reason, etc.
Mitch Kapor, the original investor and chairman of the board of LL at the time said this about residents during his SLB5 speech:
"So the first is, in the earliest wave of pioneers in any new disruptive platform, the marginal and the dispossessed are over represented, not the sole constituents by any means but people who feel they don't fit, who have nothing left to lose or who were impelled by some kind of dream, who may be outsiders to whatever mainstream they are coming from, all come and arrive early in disproportionate numbers."
And then went on to say in so many words that they were seeking a better class of resident, because you know ... all of us early adopters are well, undesireables.
Reference: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SL5B/Transcripts
Only later after the corporations were gone did they really start enforcing maturity ratings, and the only reason they did that is because they wanted to close the separate teen grid and let 13 year olds into SL.
But by the time they made these moves, the corporations were gone. And they still resent us to this day. One ex Linden calls us wackadoodles. It's not like our money pays their salaries or anything though, right?
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Phoebe Avro wrote:"Rosedale at one point even partnered with a few people on breedables"Yes i read years ago on another forum an Ex Linden stated that LL make more from the MP and Breedables than they do from tierAnd LL have said time and time again they don't compete with residents!So they have been lying all along!
I think most people don't understand exactly how much monetization there is or exactly how it equates to real money. That's true that land and tier make up only a portion of LL revenue. And then there are Lindens and ex-Lindens with SL businesses, which is something that should never happen. Yes, LL does compete with their own customers in various ways directly or indirectly.
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Sassy Romano wrote:One thing that I am surprised at with this thread is that so far nobody has mentioned the great BunnyGate scandal when LL pulled a stunt like this before.I forget now, was that one of Pink Linden's clangers?Refresher:-(Not wishing to derail the thread but LL has form in this area)
Bunnygate ... right. That was a piece of work, no one was exempt from that particular push. Other breedable creators were not too happy about that one either, trust me. Our breedable fairies survived that one and Petable turtles who we were working loosely with at the time ... but yes, pitchforks at the ready on that one. We eventually gave up development due to bugs and early mesh/land impact and unreliable HTTP communications.
I'm not sure if that was a Pink-ism or not.
ETA: Actually the main reason we quit was because LL gave my wife the runaround with upping our cashout limit. When you earn money and LL refuses to let you get at it ... not cool in anyones book.
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@Tari: Hey thanks for that info, interesting. I knew it wasn't so free-form with major retailers but that makes more sense.
Blaze Nielsen wrote:Welcome to the weekly Marketplace staff meeting.First on the agenda, how do we increase marketplace purchases to boost income from our 5% cut? Have a big sale! the marketing hipster suggests. But we don’t sell anythingNo problem, we’ll select a few popular merchants and announce marketplace sales for them. Won't that piss off the other merchants? Naaaa, all merchants will benefit by increased marketplace shopping. So, won’t this shifting purchase pattern mean more merchants getting rid of their inworld stores and reduce rental overall income for the Lab?Look, don’t think about the big picture, get with the program, all we care about here in the Marketplace is Marketplace income.
Heheh. Sounds about right, throw in some breakfast burritos and they're masters of the merchant universe selling others stuff.
Could you imagine if it "was" LL's own products that they were dealing with?
12 Days of LL Savings. Tier reduced 50%! No commission during the holidays! No upload fees in SL and marketplace advertising 40% off.
Umm Hmm.
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Pamela Galli wrote:I have customers that have been buying since 2008 and 2009. Do they get special treatment? Of course they do on an individual, ad hoc basis. But what I do not do is publicize it. I would like to have an event where I say, here is a discount or gift just for long time customers, but then I ask myself if I really want newer customers to feel less valued. I don't want anyone to fell less valued.ChinRey wrote:DartAgain wrote:This one instance isn't going to kill SL or the marketplace.You're right of course, this won't have any lasting effect as such and as soon as the sale is over, everything will be back to normal.But the signal effect is immense. Ignoring the very interesting discussions about fairness and economical models for a moment: if you want to run an successful business, honest or dishonest, you do not visibly favor some customers over others!That's one of the most basic rules of commerce and has nothing to do with morals or economical theories or anything like that. It's just bad for business no matter how you look at it - especially when it's B2B which is what we're talking about here.If Linden Lab still haven't learned such a fundamental lesson, they and Second Life and Sansar are all in serious trouble.
True, the most important bit is the messaging you send. As an individual merchant you can make those kind of calls. If you wanted to you could even be blunt about it with concepts like customer loyalty points and giving them L$5 toward a discount for every L$100 they spend and no one would get offended.
The scenario is different for the B2B thing. But marketplace I think doesn't view themselves as a B2B service, they act more like a meta-merchant and take too much credit to themselves for being the point of sale to the customers.
I know I keep going historical on some of these posts, but everything has a context with this world of ours.
When SL Marketplace (pre XStreet) was around I reported a few bugs over the course of a few months. Going back over my transactions (and sales history and charts. Yes charts!) I discovered that I had some thousands of extra L$ unaccounted for. Upon digging I found that Apotheus (the owner of the marketplace) paid me for reporting those bugs without ever saying a word. I was suprised and thankful and made sure to tell that old coot as much. Did it bother me that he might or might not do that all the time for everyone? Not a bit.
But independently owned marketplaces (and SL merchants) can do that and not offend to some extent, where LL being the owner of the entire SL world and services can't. unless they paid everyone. And they should know better.
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Tamara Artis wrote:OK so should we start with this event, saying its unfrair that LL handpicked several merchants and allowed them to have some sort of promotion on the MP (to be honest I didn't even read about it) or it would be better to start with the fact that LL handpicked a group of residents and invited them into the new world that won't replace SL in a few months?Or maybe we should go a bit further in the past and rebel because its some sort of a policy for them to pick a blogger that will represent them or a group of residents that will get the oportunity to participate in the beta testing?
Well, I'm not personally calling for a rebellion or boycott, that just isn't going to work, it'd be herding cats. We just need to keep communicating and hoping that they get it. I'd keep Ebbe informed though. And the next CEO after his shift is over. At some point as SL declines, they'll be more inclined to listen to feedback that's beyond a bug report or trivial issues.
I've actually been on the opposite side of this. I was in the Viewer 2 beta and the marketplace beta for the initial rewrite. I didn't take the opportunities in either that were offered that would have given me a competitive edge because I believed then what I believe now that users should be free from economic tampering and favoritism.
Firstly because they do it badly, do more harm than good and because they bill it as something democratic. Your world, your imagination, right?
The biggest one of all is something that they don't get. SL is only on the map because of the economic opportunities available from back in the days when they didn't interfere. While they were overpricing the tier and not printing enough land at the time, users were all about user driven economy. Stock markets, banks, ad agencies everywhere you looked. Those are the things that managed to pay out a total of millions of L$ a day to users for camping, staff, etc. It kept free users buying stuff.
As things evolved LL acquired anything that began to make 7 figures. (Currency was a user product, the marketplace, advertising, land rental for new users, etc.) Rosedale at one point even partnered with a few people on breedables. They just can't leave it alone when it makes 7 figures. And that's just plain greed at our expense.
And the more they did this, the more SL declined. And with Sansar, they're going for the last grab ... a bigger chunk of the merchant pie and they'll be grabbing with both hands. Sansar will probably be making a play for 30% or more of merchant gross. And if they add all the monetization that LL has then both will spiral down. Because the big opportunities are gone and the ones left become smaller and smaller.
And that will never equate to the mass numbers that LL wants. Not going to happen because they squeeze too much out of the economy.
We've got years of examples of how this plays out. The magic can't be recreated that draws new users until we're back to that free market that used to be all of SL. Without making this a monstrous post of game design and economics their approach to economy is failing and will continue to fail until altered in some major ways.
This one instance isn't going to kill SL or the marketplace, although it will affect some smaller merchants that might have otherwise seen more sales over the holidays. And those are the ones that go away when all their effort is spent. But the marketplace team will pat themselves on the back for how they boosted overall sales with their holiday promotions. This stuff just adds up and if you don't call attention to it, there's no fixing it for everyone.
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Tamara Artis wrote:Best is to enjoy our everyday life and don't think about the things we can't influence.
Seems to be the summary of what you're trying to say. But yes we can and better. We're slowly shrinking and even a discount of setup fees on land couldn't stop losing a dozen more regions since that announcement.
Together we can cure boneheadedness before everyone else votes with their feet over the next few years. We only need management with a clue.
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True, this doesn't fly in RL business. And sometimes there are lawsuits.
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". Not sure how many stores are on the marketplace... Do you know? If there is information please share it here because I am curious to find out... I am also not sure if LL can or are counting how much each merchant earns on the MP? "
You can look at the store ID numbers. The marketplace tends to use incremental ID's. Find the newest store, note the number, this is a broad guess on the number of stores. Same with products. Find the transaction number at the beginning and end of a 24 hour period and you have rough idea of daily volume.
I'm still failing to see how this has any benefit at all to merchants across the board other than the chosen merchants. I see some apologetics without a corresponding rationale. When LL manipulates economy, they're doing it for their own reasons and the sink bottom line, not the merchants.
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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:Theresa Tennyson wrote:...We also don't know anything about the specific deals that were cut to give these stores the exposure. They may have had to pay through the nose to get these slots, or they may be paying an increased commission on these items.
That's true, however, the added exposure of the ad and emails will probably increase their sales over and above whatever they may or may not have paid. So they end up making more money than their competitors.The beef here is that they didn't publish this so that ALL merchants had an equal opportunity to participate if they wished to. They still could have limited the number of merchants that participated by taking them on a first come first served basis. Probably LL would have still made the same amount they are making on this promotion, but the process would have been fairer.My beef goes a bit further than making the list of merchants and choosing transparent.
Aside from picking specific merchants which will muck with the holiday sales of others:
1) Participating merchants must offer a sale. The promotion is "12 days of savings". This screws with the pricing in general of holiday goods. For instance, anyone offering the same item at a higher price is disadvantaged by the sale.
2) Customers finding an item in the sale obviously aren't going to be buying that item from anyone else.
3) Merchants already paying for current advertising are getting a pretty big insult. On the bright side, they're not getting triple billed for advertising that they can't cancel any longer.
4) It's pointless.
By the last I mean what is the goal here? Aside from pumping up the volume of sales commission for LL by trying to boost some volume with cheaper than usual items, that is.
It accomplishes nothing. Is there a discovery problem with finding holiday themed items for customers? No, there isn't. If I want snow, or turkeys or Christmas trees, etc. ... I can find anything i want with absolutely no help from LL or the marketplace team.
It's job security for someone to think this idiocy up. The position itself is a waste of salary given the state of the marketplace and a seemingly obvious need for more developers or a product manager that knows how to build for customers and not whatever geeky goodness the employees want to work on..
Basically if they want to be fair to everyone? Stay out of it.
Or if they want to make a graphical seasonal doohicky, then make something generic on the front page with a bunch of random holiday products to spur the imagination and a reminder not to forget to shop with all of our fine merchants this holiday season.
If I were needing to trim staff at LL, this would be one of the first positions I'd pick for the ax. The market has little need of manipulation. Only solid tools and preventing gaming the system.
At least it isn't another Mad Men promotion that no one cared about or wanted in the first place.
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It isn't Walmart.
It isn't Walmart competing with Target for sales. SL has no outside competition.
It is LL talking some merchants into selling for less, while causing other merchants to make less.
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Yes, I'm going to breathe the incompetence word again. And mention that anyone dumb enough to do this to merchants should be fired.
There is no reason to have a marketeer on staff pulling the sales strings. Just build a decent shopping cart and leave the marketeering to the merchants. Another boneheaded move.
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That's just great. Now some blogger somewhere is going to pick up that word and spread it like, well, something communicable.
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It is more clunky than it ever needed to be. From the start it involved all the wrong decisions. When LL first decided to acquire the marketplace from XStreet and then do a rewrite, their first talks involved questions like "what is your favorite shopping site on the internet?" and discussions about how it can be like Amazon, or other RL sales sites.
I think what they really should have designed for was more game-ish, that could have been integrated more tightly with SL and then building the web based services out from that integration.
The delivery system would have been one of the first things tackled and we wouldn't have it finished only recently some years later.
Why? Because they decided to mangle Spree, an open source (and immature at the time) shopping cart, which just isn't a fit, to do the job of handling all sales. Bear in mind that they already had a working shopping site before they decided to do the rewrite.
So here we are, years later, still hacking at the wrong tool for the job, with something that doesn't include the kinds of features suited to individual merchants and stores for virtual products.
Working on a new machine learning search currently rather than the core problems of the underlying shopping cart.
You aptly stated: "Viewing transaction history is easier for the buyer than for the seller but only in the same way a tortoise is faster than a snail."
That one gets a prize. And a reminder that back before LL bought out the resident-run and operated marketplaces, XStreet, developed and maintained by ONE person had better reporting than we have today some years later. And charts, we actually had charts.
If I'm going to be posting here again, I'm going to need a new rotating signature source. I usually match my signature quotes to current conditions. Since I've worn Heinlein out over the years, here we go ... Stephen King and B movies
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@Darrius: Just wanted to give you a shout-out, ltns.
Agree about the way they handle customers, which tends to be a game company approach. It's just not a fit for commerce. They're treating the userbase as if we're players just whining about the latest nerfs to paladins or warriors, and a we-know-better-than-you-about-game-balance so we're not going to give you better weapons. The next expansion will be out when we get to it.
@polysail:
Commerce on the other hand is pretty straightforward. There's nothing about commerce with LL's technology that can't be explained to a layman, especially those who have experience in using the mechanics of buying and selling using the applications.
And the development world has changed, while LL moves in slow motion on the dev front. It's never been easier to solve problems than it is now. We're in a a cloud, multi-device, multi-technology world where we can deal with big data more easily. Everything is more scalable, more modular, more asynchronous, etc.
LL, not once in its lifetime has been able to publish and stick to a roadmap. Meanwhile even the open source front has generally moved to a faster paced and more reliable ecosystem. And you don't see many companies these days floundering over commerce solutions.
You don't see many companies that take 2+ years to fully implement a delivery system even in game development.
Last night I upgraded my ASP.NET.stuff. Beta 8 was last month, RC1 this month and a final RTM by end of first quarter next year. I removed one framework by another company from my stack because they published a roadmap and did nothing on it for almost a year. The same for most software. If it moves along and makes deadlines, the team is competent, if it doesn't, they're not, or there's some other issue at play hobbling progress.
For instance: From all indicators on the types of feature requests that are ignored, it would appear that search-from-scratch is far easier for them than it is to wrangle the shopping cart into treating demos as an entity of their own. From scratch work is always easier. But in this case a from scratch solution in search to filter out demos isn't really a solution, it just masks an underlying problem with demos.
I remember when we got Rod Humble in here after making a comprehensive list. He agreed, the team gave us a smaller version of the requests in a cheesy bulleted list rather than a solid roadmap. We got 2 of those things or so done. Rod went poof and so did the list and the work.
These kind of things are why you're not hearing explanations, not because the tech will go over our heads.
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"Perhaps only the low ratings should be made to leave a review - this is fair to all."
Or eliminate low ratings altogether and replace ratings with something like "likes"? If something has many likes and good reviews, it's good. If it doesn't have any, you'd look for reviews. With reasonable restrictions on reviews. There's a certain degree of redundancy between ratings and reviews.
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"Select" merchants
in Merchants
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Traffic to the web site means nothing. Page hits mean nothing. Extra revenue to LL for running a promotion from the sales of those products on sale means something only to LL and the selected merchants, no one else.
Customer spending is finite, you can squeeze it a little but you can only increase it so much. And when you do, someone is going to miss out on sales. Usually smaller merchants. Smaller merchants are the first to leave having no consistent profit to keep them here.
Aside from LL making more commission off these sales, what other positive effect does it have? None. So why not stay out of the market manipulation and let a generic "shop for the holidays" graphic take over and let the free market run its own course. A simpler approach that didn't manipulate would have a boost without favoritism.