Josh Susanto

If you get good at this kind of thing, it's a service you could probably offer at some kind of nominal fee. I know that if I didn't intend to do it on a regular basis, I'd rather just pay someone else to do it than figure it out.

So weather simulator scripts can only show a rainbow in a mature sim?

So, if LL decides to shut you down, they can then sell your own items without having to compete with you? Interesting.

No one thing is killing sales in SL, but the recurrent pattern is a series of bubbles. The next obvious bubble is breedables animals. Enjoy.

I have seen similar screens often enough to concur absolutely that the problem is more customer-specific than item specific.

Actually, I think it's about as subtle as a cold bucket of sh## in my face.

>Can you explain why all the links for items on our dashboards in the "Shop" and "Merchant Tools" categories all just go to the Marketplace homepage? Obviously so that you'll forget what you're trying to do and just buy something.

They would not, and they DO not. I have gradually deprived LL of a pile of money that my customers get to use to buy more stuff from me. If a combined order is more than 9L, then LL gets something, sure. But a lot of orders are for one item, and some are for 9 items. Exponents of 9 are a statistical sweet spot where the proportion of order payments lost to commissions is minimized. If your metrics are so precise that you know an item should be priced at 11L, then maybe you should price it at 11L, but 10 just doesn't make any sense (to me). Note, though, that pricing categories end in zeroes, not in nines, even though the lowest one also starts with a zero. Why do you think that is?

And the decline in sales is "a coincidence".... right? People may not buy what they can't rez, but you still get charged for the listing enhancements... don't you?

After 265 sales, how many reviews should an item have? Zero or more?

[Paying linden to an account that will never use them because they are ban will simply pull that linden out of the SL economy and shrink the economic base.] It doesn't necessarily do anything in particular to the economic base. What is does to the monetary base is to help keep it from inflating. The reasons not to like it, though, are: A) The mitigation of inflation occurs at your personal expense. B) No additional utility is provided to consumers for the money removed from circulation.

If you charge 10L you should get paid the same amount as if you charge 9L. Because of the 5% thing, the 10th L paid just goes to LL. Why are you charging your customers that 10th L if you'll never receive it?

People who complain about what's not available and then don't even try to make it are amusing... briefly.

[i think that the biggest problem in sculpty making is not mastering the 3D software, but understanding how sculpties realy work. ] Seeing the way most people are continuing to make rocks and plants with "better" sculpting tools than mine, the above statement cannot possibly be very far from the truth.

Yep. More examples of why my plan is set up less to make money than to avoid losing money. I don´t pay for listing enhancements because the products might not be available often enough to cover the enhancements. I don't have multiple magic boxes, either, because I don't see any point in paying extra rent that ultimately goes to LL; that's just rewarding them for making additional magic boxes "necessary". I don't have any offerings that will create a big difference between delivery and non-delivery. If a customer orders, I make sure they get what they ordered one way or another. If I get paid, too, that's great. Customers come back because they got what they ordered. But trying to track down every loose $L would be working for the system when I can (and DO) make the system work for me instead. Also, being stingy with confused customers makes LL's problem your problem and your customer's problem. Why do that? I just send the thing. And I also usually something else, free, just to show who they can really trust. I realize that opens the door to getting ripped off here and there by LL if they want to try to confuse me (or just can't help doing it) with inconsistent payment and delivery data, but my products are so cheap that for that to warrant any effort on their part, they'd probably have to do it with so many transacions that they could not possibly explain them all as "anomaly". The rules explain how the system is supposed to work, but there is another set of rules that explains how it actually works. If you play by the second set of rules (as I do), you might make a little less money, but you might also lose a lot less money. Either way, you'll spend less time hitting your head against your computer desk... and no one is paying you for such trouble.... are they? What is your time worth per hour? If you let this place turn play into work, you lose whether someone else wins or not. I'd rather just get paid to play (and I DO).

I might ask if any Lindens have an alt offering a competing product. You know... just ask...

A large number of positive reviews is something I would automatically regard as suspicious due to my experience as a merchant. Customers who have actually contacted me (roughly 100?) have almost always been VERY satisfied with the product, and yet I have practically nothing for reviews. Nothing AT ALL for written reviews, as far as I know, since the change-over from XStreet, even though I have almost 600 products and get never less than a page of multiple-item orders every day. I can imagine someone getting a written review. Sure. But when I see more than 2 on the same recently-offered item, it's only natural for me to think there's something fishy, or at least political going on.

I have had some luck modifying templates just by moving data around on enlarged versions of sculpt maps. If you take a torus, for example, you can use functions like implode/explode to move more of the verts to the interior or the exterior, but not in a very uniform way. I expect the unbalance effect can be mitigated, though, but offsettting the map 50% horizonatally, applying the same effect, resolving the offset and then morphing with the altered template that had not been offset during the operation. More generally, if you have a sculpt map and you do things like liquefy it, the basic shape of the sculpt will not change, but the distribution of verts will change, causing some areas to be more resolved and others less resolved. Where there is more resolution, there will also be more image data when you drop the surface image on it. At the simplest level, exploding the image will cause parts of the shape close to the center of the map to suck up vert space from parts of the shape closer to the edge of the map. In principle, this will tend to reduce total resolution, but it may be a good trade-off if you're making carved beads with a torus template, for example. The templates I start with are usually 128x128, and SL uses 64x64 but actually produces 32x32, so at 128, there actually is some extra resolution data for me to exploit if I want to, and if I'm cautious. I kick things up to 512 anyway, to reduce noise from the editing apps. If I were editing with a 32x32 template, the argument could be made that anything I do will just smudge the pixels and produce spurious position data, but I'm actually playing with 16 pixels of default sculpt data on each vert (at 128x128), so there is realy a substantial amount of flexibility in vert redistribution before the total sculpt shape loses resemblance to the original as it would appear when rezzed in SL.

I suspect Blender would be the best for the cost, but not everyone can get it to work. Every time someone mentions that I should use Blender, I reinstall it, reopen it, and see again that every single button appears to be disabled. If this is also your experience, I can recommend Sculptypaint.

The core of my backup system is simply the assumption that, given enough time, LL eventually get everything wrong.

Check TOU. I think you might be able to buy a similar item from a competitor and write a positive review specifically citing the service as better, and why it was better.

I have occasionally had the same problem with both Phoenix and Imprudence, and, before that, Emerald. The fact that it happens with multiple 3rd-party viewers but apparently not with LL's own viewer seems awfully convenient to me.

That didn't change when they changed the center of gravity of link sets?

As touched-upon elsewhere, they can't roll out DD until they also have "Magic Box Classic" ready for when they agree to "go back" to the "previous system".

I think it's gonna be "New Coke"... 1) They bring us Direct Delivery, simultaneously shutting down the Magic Box system. 2) It sucks and we complain. 3) The respond amicably by agreeing to bring back the Magic Boxes. 4) When they "bring back" the "Magic Box Classic", it is less profitable for us and more profitable for them than were the original Magic Boxes, but at least works better than Direct Delivery, so enough people will be suffciently fooled by that. You think I'm joking? Laugh while you can.