DartAgain

Cart before the horse seems apt. Seems to be a solid consensus that other issues need fixing first that affect bad search results before search itself is tackled. Doing it the other way around means double work on a search revamp later.

True, there is that.

CommerceTeam Linden wrote: First, please rest assured that we're closely following the feedback in this forum. You're not spilling ink in vain. We haven't asked you to test specific things precisely because we need generalized feedback on various aspects of your experience with search both as merchants and as shoppers. Based on the feedback you have given, we're working on making incremental changes. We'll promptly notify you of each new deploy (and yes, we'll list the changes made) and ask for additional responses. While it's clear even from discussions in just this thread that it's impossible to satisfy everyone all the time, we do this beta process and ask for your time and feedback precisely because we want to avoid the doomsday scenarios colorfully presented here. I know you guys listen to the forums, I haven't turned in my secret Linden card quite yet. And because of the hairs on the back of my neck. But listen, as unspecific as it might have been, you still could have given an inkling. For instance, last I knew you were using Solr for search. If that's what you're using and you're doing a "reset" by tuning the rulesets you could have phrased that in a more specific way. Because now you've got people making suggestions about related things you don't(?) even intend on touching like frontend changes, or overhauling reviews, how you handle demo's, etc. And then you got hit with some angst along with suggestions that you kind of go deaf on no matter how long or how hard theyr'e requested. You parried: "While it's clear even from discussions in just this thread that it's impossible to satisfy everyone all the time" And that's true, but this thread is indicitive of something that's always boggled me with LL. I look at this thread and I see far more commonality than I see differences. The way this thread is going, like some of the other threads where we boiled down feedback, you could build an entire roadmap of work from. If I could be so bold, you're developing for residents, not customers. And residents (at least in commerce) want to be treated like customers and not residents. If you were developing for customers you'd be building the features and functionality that they want, not what you want. That including sticking to functionality that makes sense, but leaving the marketeering to the merchants. If you could turn around your culture, you could solve almost all of the gripes and CUSTOMERS would have the features that makes them giddy with joy and you'd be their best friend and I'd shave my legs and don the cheerleader uniform again. Things just flow differently when you're customer-centric. Appreciate the bravery in communication and wanting to improve search. And the ability to take a punch. And a pitchfork and umm, what's a little pyre-play among friends? But also, please keep up. When you're done with the stuff in this thread I want spiffy graphical charts, buying trends and other goodies before 2018.

My favorite highlights thus far: Grumpity: "This may seem counterintuitive, but Beta Search will be slow at first because it's not getting enough traffic." Translation: We'll get it off my laptop when it goes live. Some Martian said: "A search for MARTIAN items also gives us everything made by Loretta Martian, Samantha62 Martian, Arletta Martian, etc, etc. If I wanted to find these Merchants I'd search under rhe Merchants tab. Merchants are NOT an item." This one speaks for itself, and all Martians I think. Hunnihope deduced: "A pair of Blue Boots shouldnt come up in searches for Pink Fluffy pillow, but thats the reality we get." This is so much deeper than it appears at first glance. Athena asked: "Why LL aren't you just addressing the specific things that people have asked for?" This one only hurts when I laugh. Pam swore: "And stop $#@%ing with my business, LL." Indeed. I'm guessing the privilege will cost somewhere between 25%-40% in Sansar. Nethya of the bulging vein and a mere 36 posts said: "Whoever comes up with these revolutionary marketplace 'ideas' is a moron," You get used to it after a while. Personally I blame it on a lack of good management and substance abuse in the workplace. Sassy enquired: "What business problem are you trying to solve here?" This gets points for getting to the heart of the matter with a bone saw. ChinRey used a more blunt object: "Or to put it another way: will suggestions, ideas and other feedback posted in this thread be considered at all or are we just wasting our time arguing here?" It goes like this, please test ideas we already decided upon and we'll skim your answers for the lowest hanging fruit that are the latest bugs we introduced. Silly Chin. Spica whispered: "Is L.L. deliberately trying to further bork the SLM to force peeps to migrate over to Sansar where that marketplace will work much better? Is that the plan? Hmmmmmm!?" Just because it's been far too long since we had a conspiracy theory. polysail resigned to: "I'm just going to assume this behavior is unintended behavior." For the mental health tip.

ChinRey wrote: In modern computer tech lingo it generally means "adequate" - that is nothing spectacular but good enough to keep. It's great to be held in such high esteem. I think we already guessed that we were in maintenance mode. Although why this has to be such a Super Sekrit thing, I have no idea. The last time they wanted to keep their powder dry for a release was Viewer 2, where by the time they let alpha testers in, decisions were already made. Testing groups loved it, users hated it. Out with it LL, don't be shy now. Two screenshots don't even count as a peck on the cheek..

It could be worse. LL charged money for their beta of Patterns only to shut it down before it came out of beta. Imagine paying $10 bucks for a demo that never did have a finished product to back it. And that's all the optimism I'm giving for free today.

As far as business meetings go, I think some merchants were scarred by commerce team office hours. To be lured with concern for the lowly merchant, uplifted by lofty feature chats such as improved search, color choices, integrated demos and miracle delivery services only to be thrown a piece of moldy bread that is a Facebook like button. And the odor of those meetings. Have you ever smelled a sweatshop? But we press on, meetingless and unionless. Unless of course there are free donuts and a revolution to take back our marketplace from our evil overlords.

Good points. They're not getting away from the land model though, they're adding commission as extra revenue and then finding the balance where cheaper land is offset by the commissions and whatever other fees and sinks they're planning on adding. End result is that they're making more money than the land model alone. It looks like what they're going after is something that runs in the browser. So basically they're just pushing a combination of Cloud Party and Google Lively ... web based client with VR support and adding in their currency and sales of virtual goods through their own marketplace. This stuff is not really that difficult to implement, both Samsung and Occulus support is pretty trivial as development goes, especially in game development. This is probably why they're not after SL'ers, it's web based and a step down from SL which is a heavy client/heavy experience. But hey, they can go back to pimping it as the next best thing for virtual conferences and events, etc. As far as land pricing goes, they've had their chances to lower land prices for SL'ers. They had the opportunity to pass down cost savings to us when they laid off a third of the employees at LL, they had it again when they started putting more sims onto less servers, or when servers started only spinning up if they were in use, they had it when they closed down a datacenter and offices in Europe and Boston and on it goes. Looks like land prices in SL will continue to equate to a car payment. I joke about it, but I've literally bought undeveloped land in RL for less than the upfront price of a region and pay less taxes on that RL land than tier. And sold Christmas trees on it so it paid for itself. You're right though, without the understanding of community and focusing on monetization more than community and horrible transparency with existing customers Sansar is just going to be one of many, many contenders for web based VR assuming the hype wave the companies are trying to create actually works. Users aren't hyped about VR, companies are. Time is almost up on the current CEO though, onto the next CEO and phase of LL.

Ah, we're still the low rent crowd then. Mark Kingdon kind of had that view when he was CEO, we don't want 'you' we want corporate and facebook folks. That didn't work out so well, because there's a finite interest in virtual worlds and they already had us. Someone said game developers are the intended market. Or maybe they think millions will come if they build a Google Lively kind of thing others will draw in millions for them. Or that they can do a better Cloud Party. We know they want to ressurect custom entry points, which we already tried with SL long ago and that didn't draw in developers pulling in millions on their own. People looking to build custom projects aren't that interested in developing under someone elses umbrella when their users are already monetized and bled half dry. @mgjackson Who knows with the VR thing? Game developers are "meh" about it in general ... saw it, got the t-shirt, we'll see if there's a demand. LL could be banking on another hype wave. The thinking certainly seems to be that if the hardware is a hit, it'll put virtual worlds on the map in a big way. LL Could be anything, overly optimistic views about dorky headgear and nausea inducing VR, or it could be a hype tool to pull in some investors, get a sizable loan ... my Magick 8-Ball is non committal. Phil (Don't worry, it'll scale) Rosedale's company is banking on it, who has LL as an investor and then the antics of the space.cadets venture joined in. It's like VR/virtual worlds corporate polyamory at the moment. Ah well, an SL re-write and strengthening the core product would have been the start of the path forward for LL, if they were generous enough to enable opportunity rather than try to own everything and monetize your pocket lint

Magic 8-ball says it is decidedly so. There are some clues here and there, such as our current CEO making comments in interviews. One comment earlier on was that he hoped Sansar would be more appealing and that people would "want" to move to Sansar. In the Interview " aptly titled "Project Sansar: The Forthcoming Successor to Second Life Will Focus On VR", it doesn't smack of anything about running two parallel but different worlds. Assuming Sansar does work out, which will take some time to be ready for prime time, in the interim the schtick will be "we have no plans to close Second Life". Until of course Sansar begins to earn more than SL. If the population begins to drop in SL, then it will be closed. Although it won't happen in the near future, there may be signs of that happening. For instance, LL started working more aggressively on maturity ratings. We asked "are you going to close the teen grid?". LL replied "We have no plans to close the teen grid at this time.". Six months later, the teen grid was closed. Like that.

HunniHope wrote: according to the blog, final day for exporting your xstreet data is today https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Commerce/Magic-Box-and-Xstreet-Shut-Down-Dates/ba-p/2953286 So the Direct Delivery teal-magic-box-burning-bear is finally relevant from way back. But talk about premature immoliation, sheesh.

Pamela Galli wrote: Always so good to see you here Dart, stick around! Yes'm.

Apparently they're living in a prim past that allowed more triangles per sim than land impact. This deep and immensly complex issue should probably be submitted to Jira in triplicate ASAP. It's also why allowing beer on the job is not such a great idea.

Q: Why is it so difficult to build a working marketplace? A: If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Q: Isn't everyone else doing it? A: Your time is up, please check back next Thursday.

Holger Gilruth wrote: and you really believe Lindenlab will count what we say? This is a american company. Smile, agree and then do what ever they want. Wasted time to think about it They allready destroyed inworld sales with buying this marketplace and now comes the rest. But destroying inworld sales won't be very popcorn worthy when they split the marketplace between 3 different marketplaces and virtual worlds, a niche that will consist of 3 worlds with the same userbase. SL1, SL2 and High Fidelity. All vested in and owned by LL. Then you'll have to list in 3 worlds to make the same amount you're making now. I've invested in pocorn and porta-potties for that day. Going to be rich, I tell you.

OK, I don't mean to keep singling you out here, but a Sassy Linden was only just now created. I knew it all along ... you are a secret Linden! Just when I started believing my therapist that my paranoia was unfounded.

Reading your analysis, apparently there is more work to be done on the intuitive bits. I'm coining a new phrase in honor of your rapid fire critique ... sassified. The urban dictionary says otherwise, but what do they know? The good news is that there may yet be a direct delivery burning bear. The only thing I would request here for bears as well as the next iteration of Second Life though is to nix the teal. Teal, as well as orange are institutional colors from the 1970's. Teal should be avoided at all costs though, and generally is, in branding and bears.

/me waves back and wishes you a happy holiday season. That brings up a good question, whether third party viewers will be able to add this functionality. And from what I understand, the new system is still not coping well with no copy items, so it'll be interesting to see if it actually does do away with magic boxes, unlike direct delivery which couldn't manage those unique items after all was said and done. @Medhue: True, that. And hopefully this time around they'll test it much better before rolling it out. And by that I mean the bugs that only they can or should identify and fix when they make these changes, like the mis-matched listings that still persist after direct delivery. I'm still amazed that they can manage to rework the inventory/sale system and not fix the recurring billing problem with marketplace enhancements. And this while they're working on Second Life 2. Or 2.5 Life. Maybe it's far too soon to think about feature freezes and that the system is going to change yet again at that point. Off to shovel some snow.

Do we get a burning direct delivery bear to match magic box burning bear? Third time is the charm, or so they say. My Magic 8-Ball won't commit on this one.

Sassy Romano wrote: DartAgain wrote: But while you're at it, perhaps you can file a Jira for accounts that are deactivated as in my case rather than bumped down to basic when you don't opt out of premium. Something like this JIRA from 2008 that is marked as fixed? Slghtly different but it seems that they still haven't figured out the sensible way to deal with it. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2647 I am sooo tempted to call support and record them telling me to file a Jira about it. It only hurts when I laugh.

Ohjiro Watanabe wrote: If you have a problem or suggestion about the marketplace you should create a jira at https://jira.secondlife.com. It is easy to do and you can follow the progress to see if it is being worked on. If you already did that you could post a link to it and maybe others could back you up by making comments on your jira. You seem to have missed the bits where our latest CEO that can't manage to increase the user base has pretty much stated that a rewrite of SL is in the works, which puts this one pretty much squarely in maintenance mode. Or that what they're after in the "version 2" of SL is that they're going after user content as their new revenue stream. My magic 8-ball says that the new marketplace is going to be upwards of 30-40% commission on user goods, because after years of steady decline the land model is a fail. You would assume that these bits are easy to put together, and that the Jira is going to be only minimally attended to over the next year or more that it'll take for them to produce some workable beta. Apparently this is not so easy to grok for some. But while you're at it, perhaps you can file a Jira for accounts that are deactivated as in my case rather than bumped down to basic when you don't opt out of premium. Not that I have any further use for the "old Dart" in this or a future version of SL, or any LL product for that matter. Or perhaps you can file a Jira for those broken market enhancements that for the past year or more have been over-charging customers. I'm sure that because LL values their customers money and so intimately understands that a commerce environment depends on trust with funds, that they'll get right on that for you. With that I leave you with a healthy dose of horse sense ... "Remember though, your best weapon is between your ears and under your scalp -provided it's loaded." -- Robert A. Heinlein