Elvina Ewing

could you please point to the post where anybody has threatened to leave. Thank you. you are totally describing klytyna now, aren't you the absolute loudest voices here were definitely not looking for discussion on how to make things better. Period. Or even, the absolute loudest voices here were definitely not looking for discussion. come on, it doesn't have to be over. We are all still here, we can continue discussing whatever we want and ignore the vile ones. You shouldn't have let klyt upset you so much. That person clearly is delusional because she sees many things that aren't there and then assumes that is the only One and Universal Truth. It is absolutely useless to argue with someone like that. You have wasted a lot of time replying to her. What i think all concerned people in this thread should do, is to report Klytyna on this forum. I don't know how exactly to do that yet, i see how to report a post, but i think what we need to do is to report the person in question, not just her single posts. If everybody who clicked Ignore this user on her also reports her, maybe Dakota Linden (or some other Linden) will at least give her a warning. This vile and nasty insulting should really stop.

personally i invite everybody to whine about whatever they want. It is certainly not the sole privilege of only Alwin and Klytyna, even though they might feel it is.

just did the balance for the month June and it is indeed so far the worst month of the year for me. Now, comparing it with the last year - then June was my second worst month of the year, and strangely enough almost the exact same amount, so everything seems to look normal so far. Although i do release new stuff all the time. So I too blame the summer.

i also don't understand this persistent urge to shut us up. Almost like they are afraid... Don't like this thread, feel irritated by what is being discussed in it - don't follow it, don't click the link to read it, don't participate yourself. I don't see the problem.

@Majestic Kohime I am one of those stores with 1000+ items. However i am neither big nor have i even any help from anywhere at all. It is just old me, one RL person, doing everything myself, and i don't own land but rent from a landlord for my store. 4/5 of my listings are old stuff, having been there from the very start. I don't delete them because they still sell, believe it or not, like maybe once a year. So if anything like you suggest would come to pass i would (have to) delete my old listings, to keep the count low. Maybe that's a good thing, i don't know... My point is - the number of listings is definitely not representative of how good the business is doing, so you might be taxing the wrong people in the end. Plus, what Cindy said. What i think would have been a much better system and much fair to everybody, is to look at each item/listing individually, regardless of the brand/shop. It would count how many copies of each item has been sold in a certain amount of time (say, 10 copies per day, 100 per week, you name it). The higher the number, the higher the tax/fee on this particular item. Basically, the Best Selling items would be ones with the highest fees. Also, it would be fair if this per-item-tax would be dynamic and would also work backwards, so when an item is best selling the tax on it would go up, and if the same item doesn't sell in a while, the tax on it would go down. Would that work?

i think somebody is projecting here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection hahahaha i exist by permission of my customers? i wonder what you meant by that... I create because i have the need to, and rather than to keep the creations just to myself i choose to share it with others, because i know it brings joy to a lot of people and makes a lot of people just a little bit happier. I know this because of all the fanmail i have received in the course of 10+ years of creating for SL, and each and every time i get it it brings tears in my eyes to know that my creations have made somebody somewhere feel a little bit better... And before your obvious snappy remark, I sell my creations rather than just give them away for free because LL (bless them!!) have made it possible. If one fine day for some reason i cannot do that here in SL i most certainly will continue to exist doing the exact same thing elsewhere. but thank you for your concern.

it's idiocy that people who are no SL merchants themselves (are trying to) preach on MERCHANTS forum to the actual SL merchants. No, your input here is indeed much less relevant than you obviously would have liked because you cannot know what it's like to be in our shoes because you are not one of us. Your livelihood doesn't depend on it, like ours does. And it has absolutely nothing to do with being far up above or under, it's about having different interests. And it is even more ridiculous that you and Klytyna think to gain anything here with your condescending and insulting tone. It is not us who need to get off our throne, but you, who seem to believe you will teach us anything like this. Oh and thanks for the hover tip, i will put it to good use. Personally i believe that LL are scrambling to stay afloat. I guess Sansar is the biggest reason/problem, but there are probably more. All these fee increases and plans to try and milk more revenue out of SL are not a good sign. Not all is well at all in the realm of SL...

Does it mean you have to be so damned nasty all the time??? I know you like to think of yourself as Cynic, but what you are is just downright RUDE. You will teach nobody nothing with a vile condescending super arrogance of yours, you will only hurt their feelings or make them angry, which is i am guessing IS your true goal here. If none of the Lindens tick you on your fingers any time soon i personally will have to find out how it works here to block somebody's posts from showing.

pardon my ignorance, but what is that about?

Klytyna likes to whine about other residents whining about LL. Each to their own.

it's not about the percentages. It's about the amount left over *after* the said percentages have been taken. If there is any platform that can earn me a RL living like SL has been all these years i would gladly move there. There WAS at least one such (SL). There might very well be none such left soon enough.

to make the long story short: LL CAN charge, and WILL charge us, whatever they want. Nothing anybody of us can do about it, other than suck it up. Or leave. Eventually all of us making a sole RL living here in SL will need to consider returning to other, RL means to earn money. Everything comes to an end, it's been 10 Golden years (for me) here, i have made peace with the fact that it couldn't have lasted forever. It was too good to be true to begin with, yet it lasted 10 wonderful years. I thank LL from the bottom of my heart for providing me this amazing chance. Personally I will stay until i hit a certain low monthly number. Then i will wait another few months for it to get better. When it doesn't i will call it quits. The question is not IF it will happen but WHEN it will happen. I just hope there are still a few years left for me here...

because they can. here is an extensive thread about this, looks like you managed to miss it somehow...

my thoughts exactly!

i was just told by a friend that Azure Estates has apparently lowered their rent. He said he got an email from them congratulating him with 15th SL birthday and informing him that his rent has gone down. That's how you do business! I can only hope my landlord will follow... i would really hate having to move my store yet again...

then who will profit from these new changes? only the landlords? so the rich will get richer while the poor will get poorer?

but will landlords also drop their prices accordingly? if not, then who cares

i am not pulling that from anywhere. Don't get so wound up, i was talking in general about customers who "expect top notch customer service" just because they pay a few bucks in SL. Those "daddy's little princess" kind of customers, you know, who seem to go by the rule "customer is king". I personally have had plenty of those, and yes they do get genuinely shocked when they realize i don't go by the same rule. words "top-notch" customer service have been thrown here and there, so we were not talking about just any customer service, or mediocre customer service. We were talking about top-notch customer service. Again, i have not attacked neither you, nor Pamela, nor anyone else here, so i don't understand why you get so defensive and feel the need to attack me personally for having an opinion based on my personal experience/belief that is apparently different to yours. Neither you, nor anybody else here needs to extensively prove to me or anyone else that YOU for one DO have excellent customer service. I personally couldn't care less how you or Pamela or Bob the Builder treat your customers. Because it's not what got me posting here in the first place. If you want to argue with me about customer service in SL, or the lack thereof, i kindly pass, this subject doesn't interest me. Again, the subject that got me posting here was SL vs RL, from the business point of view. Now, considering the fact that this thread is about something else entirely, i personally will not derail it any further.

you all seem to have missed my point entirely. And strangely enough you seem to feel addressed personally. It's not about you Tari, it's not about Pamela, it's not about me. The point i was trying to make: you cannot compare SL to RL. SL businesses vs RL businesses in particular (which i was talking about), but also in other aspects (of which i will not speak). A lot of merchants do strive to be professional, yet even Pamela wants to reserve the right to ban people from her shop/Marketplace. Imagine IKEA scanning every customer at the door and keeping the doors closed for difficult customers who proved to be a major problem in the past... Because IKEA and most other RL businesses have tens/hundreds/thousands employees whose only job is customer service. They get hired for this purpose and when they go to the job interview they get selected because they qualify. And when they are rude to the customer or don't provide good customer service they risk of losing their job. Nobody will fire you or me if we are having a bad day and just don't want to deal with a particularly difficult customer. Again, i don't question your customer service, you can do your best to be professional, or always expect top notch customer service in SL, and more power to you. Just don't be shocked when you sometimes don't get it. PS. I really fail to understand people of this forum. You justify not answering to a customer who paid US$ 1200 (!!!!!!) and see no problem with that (see the other thread), yet you demand top notch customer service to each and every 1$ customer in SL... where is the logic in that...

There are obviously responsible and sensible (and honest) merchants like you Pamela, but i am just being realistic and reasonable. I am also sure quite a large part of all SL merchants don't pay taxes either, because if they don't report their SL income nobody will find it out anyway, so why should they report it. I'm just reminding you all that most people running SL "businesses" are not professionals, even though they might even have professional 3D/texture schooling. Most are doing it as a hobby, pocket money, and are a "one-man-business", therefor it's just unreasonable to expect the same kind of service from them for your 1.5$ as you do from professional RL shops for the 50x-100x (compared to SL) the amount you pay them.

exactly. In other words, your expectations is not somebody else's problem.

The comparison of SL demos to trying out clothes in RL doesn't hold: do you get to keep a copy of a designer dress when you try it on? No you don't, not even one with DEMO sprayed all over it in neon paint. What would those boutiques charge for giving you even a ruined copy of the actual dress (if that was to be a normal thing in RL) i dread to think... when you decide to spend money in a game you should understand/accept the consequences. You cannot expect the same customer service/treatment in SL as you might in RL, by a simple reason that in SL 99.9% "businesses" are run by common people, like yourself. Most likely they didn't aspire to become a professional businessman/woman, never had any customer service training, with 0 finance background, little (if any) knowledge of trading and markets etc etc. They just happen to have certain skills - 3D modeling skills, talent for drawing (texture artist), or know how to script/code. They can use their skills to make stuff that is useful in this game (and in this game only, because you can't use it outside of it), and LL provided them the chance to sell it to other people. That's all. YOU make a choice to buy it/spend you money on it. You can also choose to live you SL without any money involved, and i know many people manage to do that just fine.

i could maybe give it a try... could you post/link some reference images of what you have in mind?

of course the bank will take its part. The point is to find the option with the lowest possible fee. If the OP's bank only takes 0.05% for conversion that's obviously a better deal than 3.5%. The question is: does it also allow to have US$ balances on the same account? As i'm guessing it's a European bank. I don't think my bank allows it...

have your Paypal in both Euro and US$ balances. Have RL bank account in both Euro and US$. Withdraw US$ from your Paypal's dollar balance to your US$ bank account without conversion. Would that work?