WADE1 Jya

One thing all merchant should be aware is LL seeing YTD loss of 10.5%. That is rate of grid shrink, net loss of private regions this year is now 2,500. LL's primary revenue source is quite rapidly slipping away. Unfortunately, this loss rate is part of a larger gloomy picture, a year-on-year pattern of accelerating decline. Q1 & Q2 of this year being less severe decline and less consistent decline than Q3 & the beginnings Q4 (where we are now) bring purely steep sustained attrition. For how long is that pattern sustainable? Where is the profitibility margin to server costs? Don't think LL will keep the doors open for a minute longer once they are approaching that margin. As we approach this, LL execs will have already established their comfort zone, choosing when a certain number is hit, this number represents the predecided time to close shop. Make your own plans accordingly. I for sure know I have. =()=

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: Dear Rodvik and LL team -- your last answer in this thread has been long time ago.... -- my marketplace displays 4 wrong pics since march 2012..... .....it took me 4 hours to be able to log in SL, and 8 hours to be able to log in the website, and in the market place... of course in the meantime, i didnt even tried to rezz anything, because im bored to loose items after your unsheduled rollbacks.... When its a matter of taking my monthly money, there is never glitches... I want to have updates when it s needed. You owe to us updates..... Since 2 monthes now, there are periodical major issues,..... ....You know Rodvik, im really sad to see how you dont care about us... One word describes it all. Abandonware. SL is arguably abandonware, or at least most of the way there. All LL resources, time & effort (including any profit SL continues to generate for LL) is being rolled into other LL projects, not SL. LL doesn't believe in SL anymore. The longer they don't believe in it, the faster it all slides into the gutter, which only proves to them more so not to believe in the product anymore, and they work on their new non-SL projects all the more feverishly. LL is a generic-thinking corporation now, they lost (or fired) all the magic they once had. Feels sad for me having successful business here since 2007 (& still continues to be so to this day!), yet knowing my business is built on a small shrinking island, (LL is that island) an island of quicksand that is eroding fast & soon to be vanishing underwater. =()=

the obvious lesson here is always be original & then you have no worries! =(^-^)=

Nefertiti Nefarious wrote: I want SKULLS! It's as much laziness and cut and paste description creation as it is deliberate keyword spam, but dammit, if I'm searching for a "skull", don't show me motorcycle parts with no skulls on them, or "kawai" critters with no skulls on them, or Valentine's candles with no skulls on them! some or all of them might be skulls? remember LL scrambled many listing info. many items show the pic of some other random item. who knows what you might get! its exciting purchasing blind from a random grab bag of... who knows what??? you might even get nothing at all! its just like a big gacha machine only much more broken!

The lame thing is yes some people still can't see mesh! This is directly due to LL's terrible half-***ed implementation. Shared immersive experience of a virtual world? That went out the window the day they launched mesh in this screwed up way! :catmad: As with everything LL does nowadays, I expected the introduction of mesh to be a little suck, but never thought LL would implement mesh so poorly this way & even the CEO announce happily months later that mesh has 16% adoption or some such pathetic amount, as if that is a good thing! It is worse than a joke & remains so til this day. Until everyone is guarenteed to see mesh with no issues (which might be happening never since LL is now focused entirely on their non-SL products & nearly abandoned SL) it is needed to label mesh for your customers.

Yes, I agree this is a great idea. I am a non-breedable pets seller and I suggested the same exact idea to LL many many months ago. At that time most major SL pet merchants signed onto the initiative in agreement this is a good idea. Then LL did nothing... the usual :catindifferent: The category is too big and a bad mix since customers typically want breedables, or they just want an animal or pet. In my experience customers want breedables, or they want animals. The two crowds don't mix because they are so different of category. Mixing the two incongruent businesses together only creates much confusion where customers lose track of what is breedable & what is not breedable. It is too bad LL never listens to this type of easy small suggestion that is good for everyone's business, or if they implement it they will somehow do it very wrong & in a backward way to create a worse situation *sighs* :catsad: Good luck on seeing any good changes :catindifferent: Speaking of breedables anyone play Pocket Frogs? It's not in SL but that's a breedable game I like. Add me if you like, I play as "GiantRoboCat" :catvery-happy:

astute observations Pamela . i think the difference was the original Xstreet staff did it more for the love & were happy with less , not trying primarily to make silly amounts of money ! LL is aiming for silly amounts of money ! thinking corporately you just decide a project must hit a certain $$$$$ target & if it does not acheive your goal , you cut resources to the project to dustbin it. this i think is the difference why it was engaging & worthwhile for xStreet staff to do , and it doesn't 'work' for LL - corporate mindset vs. individual mindset .

In my eyes, efficiency, regularity, & speed of communication are vastly secondary issues. Who cares if we're all up & chatty day in & day out, or if this iron curtain remains standing between LL and SL's end users? If nothing much works correctly & the platform continues to shrink, nothing else matters. If everything works semi-okay at least, & the platform is growing, I am perfectly happy with essentially zero communication. I do not believe LL is interested at this point in making the MAJOR INVESTMENTS into SL that it needs to survive. Their vision is entirely focused on the new non-SL products while SL flounders in semi-abandonment. The only changes SL sees anymore are very poorly implemented & are things nobody asked for or wants. Most of these changes are quite arguably only done for cost-cutting measures to make SL cheaper to operate. I view the present situation as a big red flag that at the executive level at LL, SL is viewed as a product failure. They feel they've tried everything, and now feel SL is something only to cost-cut & monetize, not something worth investing resources into... they think it is only useful to them at this point as a revenue source to scoop cash out of into emergency diversification. You would not see things as they are today if they truly believed in a future for SL. This long-term executive viewpoint that there is no sense in trying anymore has coalesced into the nasty reality of SL we see today.

Well well... Rodvik actually dropped by. I guess it is premature to classify SL as abandonware today. Since Lindens are at least pretending to read our requests & I am bored with not much to do having just completed a big year-long non-SL creative project, I will supply them a little feedback just in case this is really getting read. The concept of L$ erodes trust. Call me a heretic but I'd like to see the L$ scrapped. Make it simple. Use only real money & have all the item sellers follow tiered pricing like the App Store. So you either give your item away or you sell it for 99¢, $1.99, $2.99, $3.99 etc. No price increments between allowed. There is a reason Apple does this smart move. It stops price erosion dead. If you aren't confident to sell an item for 99¢, work on it more to make it good. Good for customers too so they aren't looking at page after page of hastily built trash. A marketplace where everyone continually races to the bottom to charge 0.4¢ (1 L$) is a worthless joke of so-called "commerce". The L$ is just an enabler to trick people into working for fractional pennies. First things first though! LL must buck up & hire some real professionals who can actually build a real commerce site. Cheap out & you get cheap results. This is what is wrong with marketplace primarily. If they can't afford to do this now for whatever reason might as well shutter it now. Cost-cutting kills. Okay now here is the REALLY IMPORTANT stuff LL must do very soon at all costs, if they do not actually already plan to simply abandon SL. LL needs to find new ways to bring more people in the door & keep them around. Part of this is they need to go mobile (Rodvik pls hire people to make it happen!). Desktop is getting left behind, and thus SL will be left behind. Concurrency is dropping like a stone month after month, at this rate there will come a time when SL is no more unless LL does the required work (boring I know) to pull off some innovative ideas to really promote SL. Once again, pay the big money & hire real professionals to start properly promoting SL. I've handed LL a few great ideas to do with effective & affordable product placement, so far no progress being made in that regard. The population of SL continues to decline due to these two showstopper issues: not going mobile & the ineffective promotion of product.

*bumps* so.... did rodvik answer yet? :catlol: i bet he's too busy launching their "hot" new non-SL projects to even spend 1 second looking at this old abandonware :catlol:

Pamela Galli wrote: Today I heard back from the last of them -- all cheerfully paid in full :-) Oh really? i'd never thought to ask. i'm not so audacious i guess. proof SL residents are always more surprisingly good natured than thought. really nice people here, if only Lindens hadn't become so shabby over the years... Next time I see these payment errors pop up again maybe I will pipe up & ask them nicely to pls pay me. its a shame nothing works consistently here anymore (except for inworld shopping) what a failure of commerce (and everything else) Linden Lab turned out to be :catindifferent:

I know, it really sucks how they doing that. I notice this happen before too quite a few times. You only seen first time today? LIndens do nothing just keeping our money, just another their many ways of ripping us off *sighs* :catsad: In other news my latest creation (not for SL) is 'waiting for review' :catvery-happy: exciting times! :catvery-happy:

I got refunded today & then they took it away again. Not one clue anymore what is going on with my money here. Maybe that is the idea? A little bit more of the old "creative accounting" to hide something bad? It is not the first time bizarro stuff like this goes down here with money so color me not surprised. Accordingly, I de-invested all my big ventures here quite long ago. Learned not to trust LL with anything except chump change! WHATEVER :catlol:

The best I can assume is this is negligence. Two years ago, I was investing heavy [lots of money, effort & time] with Linden Lab & had big expansion plans for here, but now just my hobby stuff remains... like an old museum frozen in time. Why? Precisely because they do this kind of move repeatedly. Forms a predictable pattern of incompetence that cannot be trusted.

Aw... I would say that is too bad, but I am sure Sea immediately found a much better job. I haven't been keeping up on comings & goings here, that is true. Central trend is LL is shrinking which I no longer believe is just for some attempt at cost-efficiency gains. The failure is systemic, their profit margin in decline & whenever execs & VPs grow uncomfortable their SL product will be abruptly ditched. Wether or not that would mean the end of LL is debatable..... their other products don't look ready for prime time & will face heavy competition from highly similar (some pre-existing) applications. I can't begin to guess their intentions with marketplace, but if they meant well... they sure flubbed it & might as well close it. Scrambling wide swaths of their product dataset makes marketplace effectively worthless so I'd expect it to be folded soon. The mess there sure can't be helping with retention of residents... if they are even trying to keep people onboard still? Anyone know how many Lindens are left?

Not sarcastic totally. I think your comments are helpful Kampu & more people should express their emotions as to the situation honestly as you do. Thank you for that. Your theory does seem a little too detailed, thats the bit that makes some people think its off the wall... unless of course you have access to LL offices to see inner workings. Are you a janitor at LL or somethin? :catvery-happy: I am curious why you refer to CTL as 'she' when they could easily be a he, or most likely CTL represents a group of Lindens. As for 'Malefactor Linden' I think most of whatever is left of LL falls into that category at this point. Either that or 'Incompetent Linden' or 'WeCantAffordToHireQualityPeopleAnymore Linden'. Only good Lindens left are Dakota and Sea in my opinion. I think almost all the good ones were fired or quit by now.

Thanks Kampu for saving the day! :cattongue:

Porky Gorky wrote: Yay.....another victory for the lazy! /me starts a mexican wave. Woohoo yes this victory is good news! My avatar here has been very lazy lately! Myself, I've been too busy in real life, launching my first real tech product into real world. So meanwhile my av here gets some well needed rest. Lately all she does is sleep 99% of the time :matte-motes-asleep-2: Anyway yes it is very nice Linden Lab relented from jamming us into their hectic work schedules. Only fair though when they are demanding we take time out of our lives to do 100% of the transition work as free labor! I simply do not have time to relist and rebox 300+ items, don't know when I will. Every other company does transitions like this seamlessly where all we might do is click an 'okay' button or something like that. I wish LL got smarter & automate this type of thing in future.

Echo Hermit wrote: These 'new' ideas neither impress me, nor depress me. I shall watch from a distance as only the most hardcore of LL sheep get on board (bored) with them. I too would watch from a distance, if it wasn't all so boring. ...and if I didn't have better stuff to do. Doesn't depress or impress me either. I have become 100% apethetic :catindifferent: The novelty to watch Linden's slow-motion train wreck wore off for me.

Huh? Why would I pull my stuff when people still buy my stuff every day & enjoy? I choose to continue serving my customers, not let people down. That's why I'm upset is I have a good little thing going here & it sucks seeing Linden give up on the platform it sits within one step at a time. I know enough about how corporations work to know this is an immutable process --[disregarding the unlikelyhood of a miracle turn around, a philanthropic angel investor, or some such]-- they will not reverse their decision.

Rodvik oversaw the winddown of 'The Sims Online' product. A winddown must be expertly managed to go smooth & not be a disaster ending with monstrous liabilities and bad PR at the end of the line. Rodvik did the job expertly to disassemble & dismantle 'The Sims Online' slowly & shut it down at minimal cost to the company. All with nice PR to make it all look not like a product failure. It is my belief this is why he was hired, because SL's profits & growth -- by corporate thinking -- have always been disappointing. The logic is that SL equals a boring level of profits as of running a small town plaza, not the enormous cash cow of a cutting edge tech firm the investors targetted. So this is what the top execs & VCs are looking to be done. Scrap it & develop new products. Rodvik is their man.

I agree. Three words describe this type of thing: Product Wind Down. The 'product' being wound down is Second Life for people who don't understand executive lingo. I saw this coming more than a year ago. The signs have been small but EVERYWHERE. Quite simply LL execs & VCs gave up on SL. Action I took immediately back then was beginning to spend my creative development time elsewhere & only being here to provide customer service on my existing products. This I will continue to do until the day I see LL's closing notice. Back then I also took the action Darrius now suggests as I had major investments here at the time. So I minimized my risk. My remaining sims are somehow still self-sufficient so I keep them open. I am glad I stopped putting effort in here. It would have been such a waste to spend all this year chasing diminishing returns off the cliff this is all heading towards. You can't win the game when the gamemasters are busy trying to pack the game up & put it away. [bTW your escape is not to the cloud LOL. Trust me that is destined to fail. Think different.]

Hah seems that as SL population diminishes, all manner of LL ridiculousness increases! Predictable. Yet interesting to observe. However none of this matters. Onwards & upwards I go. Escape velocity achieved!

Mr. Linden is laughing all the way to the bank. That's what's up.

Josh Susanto wrote : But why should they even care if they're just losing their current customer base anyway? The reason they should care is because their current customer base is simply not replaceable. It's the same problem AOL face - unsustainable business due to irreplaceable customer base. Linden Lab's business model doesn't make sense anymore here in 2012, sitting against the current ecology of amazing possibilities for business-minded creatives. Nor does SL satisfy hardcore gamers - nor casual gamers. SL also doesn't really work very well as a virtual conference room for enterprise users. Quite simply, SL just doesn't work & it is fun or useful for very few people. So very few that advertising it is equivalent to pouring money down the toilet. So they gave up on the web banners & stuff which is why concurrency is in decline. I believe Rodvik understands the situation. I think Lindens care very deeply & realize the unsolvable nature of this issue, which is why they are busy developing other products now & letting SL hang to dry.