Josh Susanto

>I see Valve kicking LL to the curb in less than a year. That might be just the threat that is needed to make LL shape up. If Valve could compellingly demonstrate with statistics that they had provided 200,000 new users (not my estimate, but,- you know - just for the sake of argument) and then Vlave demanded to have the individual identifying as CTL removed from the organization in order to renew the LL/Valve service contract, what do you think would happen?

>Of course the max they'll ever fit on a sim won't come near the numbers that can play WoW at one time, That's the superficial downside for the foreseeable future. The real upside is that people who feel creatively limited by platforms like WoW can at least get the ball rolling in SL in terms of content generated almost entirely by user interaction. If LL doesn't somehow manage to thwart the potential provided by Steam users, the RP sims can each begin to function as competing GP R&D labs. If there's a demand for some of them to expand, I assume ways can be found to make that happen, eventually. In the meantime, I think we've already seen that making a bigger game space can actually be very counterproductive if there isn't enough appealing content to fill it with users.

You might consider politely contacting whoever bought them to see what was wrong with them. If experience serves, the person who doesn't respond is the one who reported it, and will be selling a competing product.

>If 10% of steam users would try it out and 5% of them stay Out of new users, no more than 20% will ever log in again after 6 months, no matter what. And I think it's pretty safe to say that more than 90% of potential users on Steam have either already tried SL or already decided not to, ever. So, really, we're not talking about 5%, but about 2% or less. But the specific numbers don't necessarily matter. What matters is whether LL is even up to the task of providing to those new users an experience that will be of greater value to them after a year, or of lesser value. And you already know what I think about that, huh. Anyone who thinks SL's problems can be solved simply with better marketing shouldn't even be working at an internet company. The fixes - REAL fixes - need to start falling in place more quickly than new problems are already being created if there's any hope of persuading new users that there's some kind of light at the end of the tunnel they've just been asked to step into. So unless LL simply wants to produce a whole new wave of volunteer spokespersons for never trying SL in the first place, the time to take decisive action on deep-rooted company problems is RIGHT NOW. Not tomorrow; TODAY. Step 1: The individual identifying as CommerceTeam Linden has to go. She's had long enough to fix things that were not broken in the first place, and she's mostly just made them worse. That experiment is over and it's time to move on before all those excited new Steam people end up getting subjected to the same consistently deficient technical utility and abusive customer service style we've all well observed at this point.

What consumers want more than anything else is simply more choices. Making better stuff is naturally a good idea, but you'll sell more if you trust consumers to tell you which things your making are the better ones, simply by buying more of them or buying them at a higher price. But before they can do that, you probably need to help them out by offering them as many different things as you can, given your resources, skill set, and other constrains such as time.

>Maybe that's the real problem with retaining new users. They just can't get back into their accounts. Sure. Anything to keep them from cashing out. How much money, on average, do you think probably happens to be in someone's account when they suddenly "forget" their password?

>Medhue, LL is not going to do without tier for a month. They would not even consider such a thing, not for a second. If everyone just agreed not to pay it, LL wouldn't have to consider anything.

That is interesting, thanks, but it's not exactly the same subject. Nothing about ranking would explain why an order doesn't show for an item that was delivered.

People aren't just still having problems; they're also having NEW problems. So...what is the upside of the "maintenance"? And WHY have "maintenance" at all if there is no upside? Yes, of course, there's an upside for someone or they would just roll it back to remove the new problems. So who stands to benefit both from continuing the old problems and from introducing the new problems? Would that not be the same person or persons who are in the position to decide that there will be no roll-back? How much easier could this possibly be to understand? I think that the owner of the SLM is stealing from the SLM's users. Untrue? OK, if it were true, what would be different from what we see now? Anything?

I can't be certain, but the problem may have passed. I'll test again if it appears to resume, but my point is that I shouldn't have been able to observe such a phenomenon even once, and especially not on my first try. It almost makes we want to intentionally offer problem items as freebies just to see how many people who complain don't even come up on my transactions record.

It'll be hard to top this with the upcoming bork of the 2012 fourth quarter, but I'm sure they can think of something. If they haven't already, they really better get cracking. 16 September is creeping up pretty quick.

I'm having an acceptable sales day in total now, but almost entirely due to one customer. I have 1040 items. So, assuming that the other 1039 items are just fine and nobody appears to be buying them for some other reason, how would I have known which one to buy with my alt in order to produce the invisible order? I can keep testing, sure. But to make what I expected to happen actually happen on the first try is kinda' weird, dontcha' think?

5 sales a day is what I would call a disaster in my own case. If people stop buying stuff (or appear to) it's pretty easy to notice in my case because of the more conspicuously abrupt drop in total sales volume. >perhaps it is a glitch for you? I can't rule that out, except that if a "glitch" affects only CTL's harshest critic, then it's probably not a glitch, exactly. I expected a decline in saled during the Olympics, but my decline seems to be more chronologically related to the SLM update than to the Olympics. AND people seem not even to be buying freebies, which is pretty weird. I have regular customers who normally sweep up any freebie minutes after I offer it, but they don't seem to have touched anything since the update, and that's a very substantial number of items. The fact that my alt's order also didn't show would seem to support the idea that some orders have stopped showing, rather than the idea that even people who rountinely collect all freebies have suddenly stopped that, and at the same time.

I just tested it with my alt and I got the expected result on my first try. Item was delivered and money was taken from my alt. But there's no record of it on this account. NOTHING. Try it yourself. Also, please note that this is not a magic box problem but an SLM problem. As far as I can see, my magic box did everything right. So who stands to accomplish what, exactly, by this SLM update? You already know what I think, don't you.

I don't find it particularly mysterious that people buy less of my stuff when they keep seeing a screen that says "sorry to keep you waiting". That's probably your primary supply chain bottleneck right there.

$4 this time, sure. But how many more such sales do you think there will be before the item has to be deleted and relisted?

I'm not making a living in SL, but I'm making enough now that at least my wife has become supportive of my activity. The first things I try to explain to people about why it's a worthwhile activity are: 1) I buy real stuff with SL money. Real dental work. Real Gymboree fees for my son. Real groceries. Not a lot of stuff, but real stuff, and more of it all the time. 2) It's a simulated environment that continues to develop and is used by a million or more people world-wide. So even if you make a virtual rock, log, or plumbing component, if it's not total crap, a few people will pay something for it eventually. It's almost inevitable to make some kind of money on each product eventually, so it's partly just a question of how many things you can make. 3) It costs almost nothing, except time and a little bit of electricity that I suppose I could otherwise be using for TV or online gambling, pr0n and Zynga games that don't pay anything back or allow me to develop any kind of skills or useful social networks. 4) If I do nothing else with it starting right now, it will probably just continue to accumulate money while I sleep. Do you know a lot of people who have jobs like that? 5) I don't know why people buy the stuff that they buy, but it's also not necessarily my problem. They could be architects or game designers or something like that, exporting the data to use elsewhere as well, but mostly probably not. BUT (and this matters, yes) at least what they buy won't be ending up in a landfill in a few years. If the data becomes functionally obsolete, you just won't keep seeing it around. This allows people to constantly re-engineer things without producing any physical waste, and that's GOOD. It may take decades for your dream home to become a stable concept either in SL or RL, but in SL, it will cost you maybe a million dollars less to keep getting it not-quite-right for a while. 6) Seeming to be someone different can be very therapeutic for some people. The test of whether being taller or thinner or something and seeing whether or how anybody treats one differently can be a pretty important experience, even if it is not totally conclusive. I specifically cite Peter Dinklage as someone who is said to have benefitted from a telephone job on which he talked to thousands of people who had no reason to imagine he might be a dwarf. SL is like that. People are not what they pretend to be in RL, either. But in SL, the pretense is both more complete and more transparent; not more transparent in terms of revealing people as they really are, but in terms of not even seeming to do that. Offering people more and better components in their various simulations enhances the suspension of disbelief and thus potentially offers a more compelling therapeutic vitual experience. Especially for the disabled, or for people who need help to realize that part or all of their disability is in their mind (that's a lot of people, really). 7) N00bs want houses, cars, guns, and shoes. After a while, they have as much as they could want of anything they could want in RL... well, almost. Then maybe they discover that happiness is more a function of doing than of having. This is an important lesson that (like the house thing) costs a lot less to learn in SL than in RL. Offering a lot of different stuff to users allows them to develop the habit of thinking more about why they want something rather than simply whether they can afford it. A big house isn't necessarily interesting or impressive in SL. Neither is a fast car. Etc. I have watched young users think their way out of blind materialism in SL a lot faster than tends to happen in RL. They still buy stuff, but they buy different stuff for different reasons. It's sad that most people in RL will never have the real experience of not caring that they can afford big houses or fast cars or whatnot. 8) People buy all kinds of paintings, furniture and decor in RL, too. And a lot of it is stuff which, if we watched someone making it, we'd say "REALLY???". And that stuff can't be infinitely copied, modified and redistributed around the globe at the click of a button. So how is it better, exactly? It's really even more impermanent in most cases, and it uses up RL resources every single time someone makes another one. Isn't it at least better to practice a little bit with virtual stuff before making and/or buying things in RL? Consider the comparative cost, for example, of dicovering in RL that maybe you don't really want to own a complete SM dungeon after all. Just one more thing to consider before being dismissive of the value of what virtual merchants provide.

I am frequently told that I don't charge enough, but I think that I generally do, really. I have a few permanent or semi-permanent freebies, but my general rule is simply to periodically up the prices of items that have continued to sell. At some point, this probably means items will reach an equilibrium price just beyond what anyone is willing to pay for them, but, by then, I consider that they'll have made enough money for me. If need be, I might lower the price, but I generally lower prices only in response to specific issues. I know some competitors don't like my low prices. But the other option would seem to be to buy listing enhancements in order to persuade people to buy things at higher prices. If I do that, my product will only be more directly competing for the attention of the same shoppers buying stuff from my competitors, by appearing next to theirs more conspicuously. And I have a lot of products. My maketing strategy is not to duplicate the marketing strategy of people offering similar products. And as much as they may not like what I do, I think it's really pretty nice of me not to suck utility out of their listing enhancement by buying any for myself, and instead simply offer lower prices for people who care to investigate a little bit. So, in my case, "greed" doesn't mean trying to squeeze my fellow users, but simply keeping expenses down and being tight-fisted with anything that LL is likely to get out of the process, such as land fees or listing enhancement fees. So, yeah, I'm kinda' greedy, too. Just not with customers. That's where I think it probably wouldn't pay. And even if it did, I think I'd have a less gratifying experience telling thousands of people to f### off instead of just giving them even more than what they expect for their money (as I think I do now).

I think some of the selective enforcement may be explained by the principle of deminimus. If I understand correctly, there is currently no deminimus angle on copyright, but the principle might eventually be indirectly applicable to something at some point. It's not necessarily to DC's advantage to stop fans from producing fan product unless it stands to directly compete; in fact, it may be to their immediate favor to allow the free publicity. But they still have to do something, occasionally, to someone. Otherwise when it comes up in court (once they decide this is necessary) that they've been aware of the more general problem for years and done nothing about it, that doesn't help their case. Much more likely, though, is the same principle being applied within DC's legal department. Some guy is probably assigned to police copyright for a specific collection of IP items and he probably just files one DMCA notice against each violator before moving on to the next. In that sense, it's nonselective enforcement. DC figures they just need to warn everybody often enough to justify one lawyer's retainer. They probably just have list of violators and a list of DMCA notices filed and don't revisit them as long as they have any fresher ones to file. I think it's just bizarre, though, that LL continues to let Boston Linden use the Wall E picture on his profile, especially after Disney has been informed and after LL has been informed that Disney has been informed. If people want to worry about LL enforcing things, I suppose that's their right, but it's probably going to be a very counterproductive use of their mental energy I have plenty of items for which I would not be able to produce proof of IP, but I'm simply not going to lose any sleep over it as long as I keep seeing Wall E on Boston Linden's account picture. We all have legal responsibilities, sure. But if LL is supposed to be providing any kind of ethical exemple, then we might as well assume that, barring an actual DMCA notice, there are practically no rules here at all.

>Translation: "Seller is greedy" = "I don't want to pay the price they are asking" Greed is only excessive when it stands as an actual limiter to legitimate revenue. My caution to other merchants is not that they should not be greedy, but that they should be truthful with themselves about how to maximize legitimate revenue. Asking too much is a problem whether greed it behind it or not. And asking too little is also a problem. We just like it better as buyers, or we think that we do if we don't understand the total consequences to the market.

Everything you need to know about Linden Labs and fairness in copyright enforcement, you can learn from Boston Linden's profile picture.

My own imperfect solution with my own product is to make a point of not assering copyright any time the question comes up. I will always accurately identify myself as the producer of anything I've actually produced, but I'm just not interested in policing or being policed. Resellers may expose themselves to ridicule if they mislead buyers as to the precise provenance of some item, but that's really about as far as I would ever expect to go.

I'm very much in favor of merchants making money, even if they do happen to be motivated by greed. An exception would be where greed or some other thing, regardless of what, causes a merchant not to follow a market capitalist ethic in which making money is intelligible as justified by providing a value to consumer greater than that to which they already assign the money to be spent on the item. Caveat emptor is supposed to empower both buyers and sellers by preventing a certain amount of disappointment. It is not a moral license for merchants to assume that anything they might get away with sets an acceptable standard of fairness. Taking maximum advantage of imperfections built into the system stands to detract from the total degree of trust between buyers and sellers as part of a total climate of confidence. For this reason, when one merchant acts like a d1ck, it potentially reflects on all of us. THAT, I'm against.

Some people may believe that limiting permissions will force people to buy more of their products. I can't say that they're wrong, but even as a policy rooted in pure rationalism and without empirical testing, it lacks the completeness of a more thoroughly considered idea. If someone wants 2 of something, they may buy a second one instead of copying it. Sure. But why might they not simply prefer something similar at a slightly higher price, which they can also copy? And if the no copy item is lost (as all data eventually is, which cannot be functionally duplicated), why should someone prefer to buy exactly the same thing? - and especially if there is, again, something that costs only slightly more but which is less likely to have to be replaced during the lifetime of the user account? If customers actually want to pay more for something with lesser utility just because it's potentially less unrare in some way, that's not really yhe merchant's fault, even if merchants may be doing things to encourage customers to think that way. So, really, if some customer keeps buying stuff even after the learing experience of having it vanish from the system, such a person doesn't really have much basis for complaint. Merchants and LL will tend to do whatever they are enabled to do by merchants. A difference is that merchants ultimately have to follow LL's rules (which do not include replacing things lost by LL) whereas LL seems to have zero accountability even as would be consistent with the terms of sevice which they provide. The crux of the biscuit is that while merchants may or may not be misguided by providing the no copy items which customer effectively ask for by continuing to buy them for whatever reason, LL is ultimately a better position than either the merchant or buyer should an item be lost from the system after a sale is completed; if the item is to replaced by something, another sale will take place and LL will get another commission; if the item need not be replaced because it is not lost, then LL effectively loses a devious commission... so why should LL not want your no-copy stuff to disappear from the system (after some statistically optimized period of time)?

My marketplace inventory has been OK, but my avatar's inventory has been coming short in all kinds of weird ways.