WADE1 Jya

Kampu Oyen wrote: Maybe by the time they've finally "upgraded" to an all-text format, they'll also finally have purged their user pool of any cynical naysayers who still think that simply committing more processor rescources might have been a better direction to go in from the start. LOL Rodvik so happens to be a huge fan of alltext games so this potentially is a real item on the itinerary. Very cost effective for Linden Lab - its a true win-win. Only trick might be making it look like residents asked for it :matte-motes-confused: Getting people to cough up $300 USD a month for alltext 'sims' might prove tricky as well :catlol:

thanks for posting this report, i hope Lindens look at it too :matte-motes-stress: what do companies typically do when the big megaproject has obviously failed? just keep working on it for years pretending its still going somewhere? do you think its likely they'll come out & admit it utterly failed completely? *sighs* wants Lindens to come out of hiding to admit they messed up & MP is over... sooner we all move on the better. my condolences on Linden's loss.... :catsad:

Since everyones in the dark, might as well share this tiny bit of info from my support ticket with Dakota: I was correct to recognise this issue for what it is -- data corruption is what we see happening. I'd asked if fixing images (the ones I found I was able to edit) was safe (I was scared of causing error cascades) ---: "Fixing the image was the recommendation from the Marketplace Dev Team themselves while they worked to locate the cause of the corruption and address the corrupted data on the product listings. They haven't released any information to Customer Support regarding the exact cause of the corruption, nor have they provided a projected resolution/fix date yet. Hopefully they will have information to release soon and when they do, the Jira Tickets should be updated, and based on past notifications, Brooke has posted to the Merchant Forum when there is an update to the existing Jira Tickets that the Marketplace Dev Team is working on." Based on what she says, Dakota in Customer Support is as in the dark as we are, perhaps Brooke knows nothing yet too. Considering possible motivations for 'Marketplace Dev Team' to not share any info, I see it as a bad sign they can not share info after all this time! I predict no fix will ever be found, because I know basics of what's involved here. I say marketplace is dead & its only a matter of time before Lindens are forced to admit it. I predict they quietly shut it down in near future. Marketplace would have been fixed within same day/hour if they had appropriate safeguards/methodology in place. Fairly obvious they didn't have anything in place to protect against this, so I can infer all original data lost here is most likely just gone, overwritten (and thus lost forever) ,replaced with the scrambled nonsense we now see everywhere.

I think I know what happens next. First we all slowly realize MP has become irreparably damaged, untrustworthy & hazardous. Next some merchants & shoppers alike (for different reasons) begin to apply pressure on Lindens to shut MP down. Then Lindens graciously 'comply' with these demands. After all its what residents want. Finally SL returns to be as it was long before --- an inworld-only shopping experience. I don't see another very likely outcome.

maybe upper management is too busy sewing their golden parachutes to do anythng else?

Kyle Lebed wrote: After 5+ years in SL - I think the sky finally IS falling. Just a heads up :-) :catsad: me too, me too..... & i been here since 2006.

Sure, please share your findings. I think more people should investigate... not just this one odd thing... but all the weird things going on.

Maybe what happened is they sold off or closed down one of their datacenters on the 30th as a cost cutting measure?

Ann Otoole wrote: ...the army of people reporting LL getting 5% off of ripped content from games and reporting it to the IP owners will swell untill a judge orders SL closed . There will be crazy action happening soon. A lot of eyes are on this already. I'm probably the least of their worries, but obviously going to protect my own from this rip-for-profit operation. I live within blocks of a few big game studios. It's a small close knit scene in Vancouver. Yes, I'll be talking to these guys about the situation, every time I see anything ripped off because I don't think it's right that LL (or anyone else) profits from transfers of blackmarket IP into Second Life.

I too will delay as much as possible Ab. I don't trust this new system for a second, but must use it or I can't sell anymore. I think the only part that will work consistently is getting money to Lindens. Also it is verifiably broken & not ready for prime time yet so why is it being dumped on us??? For example, you can't sell transfer-only items anymore (unless you don't mind it spitting out multiple deliveries of the same item) which destroys control over exclusive sets. So with this 'upgrade' we lose functionality, losing control over permissions & instead have permissions dictated to us by Linden Lab. Also a message to Linden Lab. I can't work within your deadlines. I'm not an employee of Linden Lab, neither do I get a paycheck from Linden Lab, so I do not see why your deadlines apply to me! I have much more important design work outside SL that must take priority over getting preoccupied with this free labor **** for the next two weeks. Out of respect for us, why can't existing Magic Boxes remain until sometime way into 2013, or even be grandfathered out of respect to your customers! I don't do scrum. I'm self-employed & I don't really even do deadlines. I'm not part of your system of move fast & break things to impress VCs. Beginning the enormous task of transitioning my 300+ items in the current extremely buggy & broken environment of your platform enrages me to the point I can't even focus on the task, partly because I know with more thought & respect for end user this could have been a laborless task. It could probably have been reduced to a single click process. That's what other companies everywhere do all the time! Yet I've heard enough of the 'big guys' nonsense at the top of Linden Lab to know your philosophy is free labor of masses is something to be exploited to avoid doing the work yourself to implement an elegant solution so this **** is what we get. Whatever man we're just herd animals eager to work for free right??? I'm sick of it all & if it wasn't for customers inworld needing my help & my loyalty to them I would quit your platform today.

WEB-4587 brings new meaning to the JIRA status of "Showstopper" making it literal. It's stopping the entire show as in stopping Marketplace. I think they might as well shut down this scrambled mess now. "So either the customer has received the item and not paid for it - which I can live with. Or the customer has received the item and LL has pocketed the payment - which is completely unacceptable." This is just my opinion, but I would think its a certainty LL has pocketed the payment. Payments to Linden are the only thing that works around here anymore, their priority looks pretty clear to me. After all, us herd animals don't need money. We just want to be safe :catmad:

:matte-motes-bashful: Yes, hopefully the captain puts this ship on good path to not crash into rocks! Graphs do show there is a community of people (with some unknown % bots) who like to login everyday. Seeing a platform going down a little bit for a very long time is a bad sign, since when/if costs > profitability, Linden Lab will be forced to pull the plug on SL. (More probable: This decision is made at a set margin quite a bit above 'costs > profitability' where they will have predecided to initiate a wind down of the product when/if that margin is hit. At the end of the line, there is liabilities, payroll and stuff to clear books properly. Of course top management will want to pay themselves 'golden parachutes' in the exit as well. There is many things they must pay at the very end of the line, so good strategy is to plan ahead a 'wind down strategy' & not hit the wall at 100 mph. However, some companies do not plan ahead & just crash & burn!) They aren't going to run it in the red just out of some abject loyalty to us. Even if they tried, creditors would stop the operation at that point anyway. Sounds discouraging, but the upside is the above doom scenario (unless they already hit margin) is lots of incentive for them to try everything to push SL forward, establish strong growth & make this work. @Ann: Yep that's another big issue. I hope they have solid plan! Must be crazy time at the lab right now, I can only imagine.

Simplest explanation of seeing increasingly erratic statistics is marketplace (or maybe all of SL) is just dying? The readouts we see are like heartbeat & stuff. Even if we are all pulling decent numbers sometimes, if it is getting less synced & more arrhythmic that likely signifies poor health of platform. I can only assume that's why they stopped releasing quarterly reports. There's few motivations to suddenly hide information.

Yeah totally! BTW i should probably state that I don't agree with these laws. i do like the idea of improved IP protections, but these new laws are not the answer! Its going to go way overboard. Even spying on people 24/7... government keeping permanent records of ALL electronic communications.. its really creepy stuff... a complete loss of rights. The new laws have a very deep elite-serving agenda, going far beyond the surface excuses of 'IP protections'. Anyway, the landscape upon which some companies (like Linden Lab) have laid the foundation of their business is about to be upended. Just trying to warn Lindens, as I see SL sailing into a danger zone, unless everything here is picked up a notch.

I think top-level Lindens intended it to unfold this way. DMCA, as you may have experienced already, is a joke. By contrast, for corporations which choose to behave like the lab, its easy to skirt the current liability loophole & make bank. My guess is part of the current roadmap is to attract these "more diverse usergroups" to SL. Linden Lab makes money every time these goods are transfered on marketplace. Welcome to the new SL economy. SL = Pirates Bay for 3D models soon. However, I wonder what feds will think of SL, when IP laws tighten up... just a bit. :catindifferent: won't affect me personally as I've uplifted my core business out of SL, into the global marketplace, but it will be interesting to watch.

You do realize Commerce 'Team' Linden represents multiple Lindens right? Hence the word Team in the name. This new name allows them to launch unpopular initiatives without any particular Linden getting 'shot for being the messenger', as is prone to happen around here. Thinking back, I believe it was me that suggested this exact name quite some long time back (noticing the trouble of individual Lindens getting targeted with blame as scapegoats) and they adopted it, unless I'm hallucinating. Funny how they uptake quite a lot of my insignificant ideas (like adding cat emoticons), they just don't take on the gamechanger big things I suggest (like making L$ cards that would be buyable in real-life public places, or an Apple-like developer application process to make 'merchant' signify something concrete). I guess they can't do all of my ideas, or that would make me CEO, no? hehehe :catvery-happy: Anyway, just like when everyone was mad at 'Jack Linden' it wasn't he was a maverick either. He was just following orders. All directives will originate from the top. Remember your "stinky fish" quote?

Flea Yatsenko wrote: it's really clear something bad happened on the 30th and the grid still hasn't recovered. maybe they sold off half their servers to pay rent on the office building. so now we have "deploys" until they can afford to buy them back from the pawn shop down the street.

"Reviews should not be written for pay, or for other rewards or compensation unless both positive and negative reviews are rewarded." Agree ^^ The part I bolded & underlined makes it lame.... Pretty much suggests the creation of a lame gaming system which will obviously garnish tons of unwarrented positive reviews. Totally.... How many people are actually gonna leave a nasty review & then ask to get rewarded for it? Nope they will all clap it up to get their treat. Much better policy (IMHO) would be to have just stopped the sentence short: "Reviews should not be written for pay, or for other rewards or compensation" PERIOD. FULL STOP.

phaedra Exonar wrote: back a week or so ago when we had that big crash and the system down the next Monday too for more fixes, when no one could log in, I thought it was strange that the concurrency both days bottomed out at around 12,000. Made me wonder if LL has that many bots. Yeah! Really who knows? Bots can crash too & automated systems will boot them back up. At least we know they don't have more bots than 55,000 because then there would be almost no other humans findable to talk to anywhere on the grid. Without quarterly reports with stats like PMLF, new signups etc, & zero other communication as to product direction... the most ludicrous scenarios could be happening & we are none the wiser. When even their blog falls silent, we have to wonder what's up? If they'd had a recent history of awesome, I'd think they must be doing something awesome, but I can't push myself to be that optimistic judging from current state of SL & when I know they are working on non-SL-related projects.

It's difficult to plan ahead when there is zero transparency. Thanks for the links! Any info is useful in trying to decrypt what's going on. This site is useful for tracking daily concurrency. Although when I hear lately Lindens doing 'stress tests' with bot software on some sims, potentially invalidates even this simple metric :catindifferent:

Glad they are working on this issue. Maybe they will work on their "employment"/"hire" open liabilities next. That's actually a really serious one too! The fact that they've had it running under the radar for such a long time -- so did the company I used to work for, for years -- shouldn't bring them any false comfort that it is safe business practice. It's extremely unwise to ignore federal labor laws by providing misleading links that give illusion there is some sort of job bank here, when reality is the links only lead to insufficient pay & exploitation of poor jobhunters. Personally, I'm sick of being asked several times a day sometimes if I can help someone find a 'job'. Sure. most people don't get stuck in this loop -- understanding its all virtual. Yet, all too often, new people are coming inworld & seeking real 'employment'. These people need jobs in real life & shouldn't get caught up wasting time in here. I refuse to be part of this misleading scenario. In current economic conditions, it is just cruel to bring people inworld this way. I wouldn't judge them with ill intent, I think Philip Rosedale & Co. truly believe this is 'workplace of the future' material -- all great disruptive/disassembly social engineering stuff for the 'herd animals' -- but federal justice will disagree & call it criminal. They just haven't got stung on it yet.

Flea Yatsenko wrote: So, either LL is eating people's money or LL is just not taking it. Oh they're taking it. This is the one part of the platform Lindens have down to a flawless science. They have perfected the art of taking. Giving back or sharing with others, they are not so good at this.

lol :catvery-happy: all jokes (punctuation returned to normal, its good!)... thanks for the reminder too by the way! It is a great idea to remind people every quarter there is no report coming from the lab. Residents didn't want to see any economy information apparently. It's just too confusing for our poor little minds. So its always a relief to know its not coming. If I see you forget in some future quarter to remind everyone, I'll be sure to remind them :catwink:

Shouldn't the thread title just read: 'No Second Life Economy in 2012'? I can imagine that written on a whiteboard in some boardroom there as management directive. Maybe a bit hush-hush so certain lower level Lindens don't know. We're all just 'herd animals' anyway. We just want to be safe. An economy is only for 'big guys'... much too good for us. We don't need it because everyone loves working for free.

*whispers* hey psst... in case you didn't notice... this thread is heavily using sarcasm, we're just as concerned & annoyed about it as you...