WADE1 Jya

Really? Maybe networks are slowing down - all the new wiretapping governments doing - might really chew up bandwidth :catsad:

JohnMiddlefield wrote: It is time for Rodvik to start cleaning house, I believe, and the sooner the better. I just hope upper management at the lab has not already concluded that SL is a failed/failing product to let die quietly while they cannibilize its resources in attempt to build more effective VC lures.

Yeah, I don't know what triggered the current decline, but SL population has been declining for about 2 years now. I think it started when the past CEO fired some rather massive percentage of the staff. Almost every smart good Linden got canned. Since then the lab has seemed kind of incapable & pretty amateurish. Its like the brain of LL fell out. Really seems like Lindens not making any good moves any more to grow the world, and just lately I really get the impression Lindens gave up on SL, seeing more potential in diversifying & working on developing new products, products that are not related to their SL product.

Ouch... I'm seeing a little downturn last couple months but not 70% :catsurprised: Concurrency is slowly falling & that must be part of losses you're seeing. Can't really do anything much about that. Lindens are the only ones can promote & grow SL? Thing is population of SL any given day used to hit above 80,000. Until a month or two ago, population would hit above 60,000 consistently every day. Since then, SL often doesn't even reach to 60,000 anymore. At this rate, by end of summer, SL could have shrunk to 50,000 concurrency :catsad:

Pamela Galli wrote: ...I do not think they can fix it. Our choice is a broken or no MP, I suspect. I hope I am wrong. Yes, given time for customers to give up on it, a broken marketplace = no marketplace. LL won't keep MP running unless it is highly profitable for them, so I'm thinking no marketplace at this point. A real fix to make all good is quite unlikely here. I am talking a damage control 'fix', if LL cares to salvage anything from their MP product, there is one fix needed. FIX REQUIRED: Find the source of data corruption to stop that process from happening. Then identify & purge all that bad data! Outsource poor workers somewhere to run through all MP listings & flag all images that seemed (in their eye) to not match title. Hey, maybe some residents would eagerly jump to do the labor unpaid if LL put a link to MP from the SL Login Screen "Help us clean up SL Marketplace - Join us now for this most epic flagfest!". Yeah I do not think they can fix it either :catsad:

Vick Forcella wrote: 99/100 customers won't notice the problems. 100/100 Merchants are very worried. Yes. Thinking beyond shortterm needs, what I'm worried about is site attrition from this. I think you are right that maybe 1% customers will encounter these problems. These customers stop using marketplace. Rinse. Repeat. So over time we see erosion of the customer base. Marketplace is kinda wierd anyways because it cannibilizes the value of inworld locations. I could understand if LL destroys marketplace 'accidentally' intentionally. If that's the case, probably only upper management will know this was the directive. At the bottom, customer service workers like Brooke and Dakota will just wonder why it all went wrong & deal with the brunt of merchant/customer backlash as MP collapses.

Oh but.. but.. the Lindens won't get their commissions & 'feature enhancement' monies while its frozen/stopped! Can't stop the machine :catsurprised: Yeah I agree its thoughtless.... what they are doing here is an example of myopic planning at its worst. *sighs*

True, its a matter of priorities. Everything is broken ( *ahem* ...except their obvious #1 priority, the getting money to Lindens bit works perfectly... *ahem* ) so first they should fix the big stuff. TOP PRIORITY FIXES SHOULD BE: Correct images & listing information to ensure trustworthy non-confusing shopping experience. Reliable transactions that ensure merchants are paid 100% of time. Reliable transactions that ensure customers receive item 100% of time. After these fixes, everything else is BONUS (if they ever complete the three above fixes) :catsad:

I'm happy to see Lindens clamping down a bit on this kind of thing lately... if indeed that is happening. So it appears anyway. Cool :catvery-happy: I've always found sloppy treatment of IP & prevalent graymarket culture around SL to be quite repugnant.

Yeah sooner they get rid of the Mad Men promotion the better anyway! Only way they can mess up this Masquerade promotion is if they start randomly removing listings of everyone that uses feathers in their products, or something similarly random as saying psychadelic stuff not being 60s enough. Don't want to guess which TV show 'Masquerade' is codeword for :catlol:

oh everybody has unassociated items issues... i thought it was just me that messed my things up at first. but i have dozens of those for a long time & no idea how to ditch them its just impossible due to bugs huh? :cathappy:

Anyone following WEB-4587 can see the ruins of MP are still burning. This isn't a case of a fire that ripped through & is now safely extinguished. We are not in the calm clean up phase of just mopping up the damage. Last example on JIRA was someone (who had put all their stuff on Direct Delivery & did nothing new to their store, yet) confirm seeing scrambling happened new just today! Nice the Emporers broke the utter silence on the topic, but sad to notice the facts. They have not solved the most crucial thing here. Fire is still spreading. Marketplace data is still actively decaying. They have not stemmed the source of corruption, yet keep running the site live each day? They can keep it open & keep trying to fix it until August, but this is a very bad holding pattern to be stuck in. Big question is will anyone still be shopping at MP by August. Of course once traffic fall off, then its a simple statement of "due to resident demands..." for Lindens and MP is gone. I know this is simply human error based, but if this had been a strategy to lead softly into site closure, its an effective one :catindifferent:

Edited - Solved

Lasher Oh wrote: Sassy Romano wrote: Or how about not interfering with commerce and just provide the tools that permit effective advertising and promotion without someone at LL deciding what does and what doesn't qualify to be boosted? +1 for that sugestion! ^L^ +2 :catembarrassed:

Vick Forcella wrote: on what way could Gus ever get his reputation back? He can't. He could however request compensation for his loss. Although Linden Lab -- even in the face of the most extreme breeches -- is never friendly enough to proactively grant even the smallest of recompense , compensation can be legally pursued. Simply by Linden Lab never offering to make amends, they put the onus on residents to suggest appropriate settlements.

Czari Zenovka wrote: Thanks, Wade. ..... Do you rename your MBs? Yes I rename them.... They are all named as "LOLO Server 1", "LOLO Server 2", etc :catembarrassed:

LOL I know its not okay for me to do that :catlol: Somehow Linden Lab has rights over Disney stuff? I guess they got special rights with Marvel stuff also? Possible..... :catfrustrated: I know they'd be smarter than to use trademarked characters without license so I'm sure it must be some special deal that they set up with the companies, something like this Coke agreement but for Linden Lab's promotional use only. Some of this stuff we see today is likely just detrius from SL's corporate heyday, left behind by the corps themselves? Who knows anymore?

Wow... cool link Kenbro, I'm surprised Coke would sublicense this way to SL. The gap here may be that although creative use of the brand is allowed, Coca-Cola does not want others profiting off the brand, or selling Coca-Cola branded products. I believe allowing commercial use would weaken their IP rights :cattongue:

Disney is okay... according to the Linden Lab employee who uses Disney IP as both their avatar & profile picture :catsurprised:

Using multiple magic boxes becomes more essential the more items you have. My delivery solution with MB is using layered redundancy, combined with not overloading the boxes. I find more than 50 items per box causes issues. So for 300 items you need at least 6 magic boxes, but optimally you would use 18. Sometimes there would still be mass failures with 6 magic boxes. This is where redundancy comes in to save the day :catembarrassed: In this example I copy these 6 boxes into locations at two other regions. Being able to receive orders from separate regions is important. This way if one sim is very slow, or maybe even two sims have crashed or something awful, at least one location should be able to get a delivery through somewhere.

Well better late than never..... :catindifferent: Wonder which ones of us gave the "information provided by Merchants on the forum and directly to the Marketplace development team helped greatly in identifying the root cause of these issues. Thanks to those who provided information." Nice of them to recognise the help when they're assisted. Thank you Lindens for addressing these major issues. The important bit is "as we get close to June 1, is around Direct Delivery migration dates. We will not be requiring Merchants to migrate to Direct Delivery before August 1, 2012, and will give at least a 4 week notice for any shutdown dates." Great they relented. Continuing on the current path was crazy. Everything would have imploded. I wish them good luck on it and hope they manage to salvage this wreck and restore marketplace to at least previous operating level. Hopefully they have some extremely talented people working on it now :matte-motes-stress:

Gavin hits the crux of the matter. Nobody wants rumor marketplace is shutting down, its just what we think is most likely to happen next. Trends are easy to predict.

Vick Forcella wrote: We are supposer to remove our Magic boxes to move to Direct Delivery but with no sales, why would I? Agreed. I'm still somehow pulling good sales out of marketplace. Amazed how much shoppers I had yesterday (thanks guys!) :catvery-happy: Yet it has been erratic lately since data corruption began, and I don't expect it to last much longer before marketplace is abandoned. Scrambled listings must be extremely customer repellant, shoppers will just bleed off slowly. Hopefully they will rediscover inworld, and not just cease trusting SL commerce all together. Anyways, looking ahead yes I see no motivation to pour many unpaid hours of labor down into this blackhole timesuck.

Correct. Linden Lab passively allows even the very worst con-artists to operate with complete impunity & continue selling junk forever. Coincidentally, Lindens do get a USD cut somehow on every sale, even when items are outright scams, broken, or nonexistent. Linden Lab would want us to believe the market will always just 'sort itself out' when there is zero oversight, no regulation or consumer protections... or is this just the least effort way for Linden to monetize everyone? I'm guessing the latter. Linden Lab provides no delineation between honest pro merchants, junk sellers, scammers & theives. So we have a horrid graymarket where dishonest people can & do actually win, even if all they sell is plywood cubes & their model of 'customer service' uses the insult-mute-ban method. Thus lowest common denominator reigns supreme, taking up a lot of shelf space. This reduces the success of good merchants & makes it less likely customers will discover & receive good products. Thus, unsatisfied customers continue to bleed away from SL, & the best merchants spend the majority of their creative time working in more rewarding environments, if they do not just leave outright. Obviously not a winning strategy for Linden. Not a winning strategy for anybody.

At least they finally have full facebook integration.... just in time, as facebook is going down in flames over their avid support of CISPA spying laws :catlol: Leading instead of chasing trends would be nice.