Josh Susanto

You might, instead, try obscure words that have well-defined meanings. I might suggest "LULO". http://www.google.com.co/search?rlz=1C1SNNT_enCO408CO408&aq=f&sugexp=chrome,mod=0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=lulo

After working at McD for 5 years, I tend to credit consumers both positively and negatively for almost everything that is decided about what to sell and how to sell it. I credit business operators for providing whatever options they provide to consumers (more options is almost always better), but after that, it's sort of up to consumers to decide what they want more of and what they want less of, and at what price. Consumers continue to use both the Marketplace and the in-world shopping options, and I think that's reasonable because each has certain advantages and disadvantages. But if one thing is producing less revenue per operational cost than is the other, the difference is probably best explained in terms of the utility it provides to consumers as a shopping medium. Of course, seeing only half the picture on this point would seem to be consistent with the thinking of anyone politically affiliated with an organization that cherry-picks from the US Constitution in order to provide an ad-hoc constitutional "basis" for its immediate agenda. Case in point: spending 2 years trying to deprive Hawaii of it's 10th Amendment right to certify births in the absence of any relevant federal legislation. OT? Fine. Who opened that can of worms?

>I don't dislike you. Thanks, and sorry for putting words in your mouth. > Because I don't want to hear you whine when people stop buying things since there's nothing in SL but clubs and houses is why. I don't see the connection between people buying or not buying things and there being or not being more in-world venues for products. If anything, though, I would think that more options in terms of where to rez products and leave them rezzed would just potentiate even more sales, so fewer in-world shops could actually mean more total commerce. > Take a look at the big map....see how many green dots there are. Yeah there's some 50 to 60 K at any given moment but count the green dots on a single sim.......it's often 1 or 2 with an occassional 3. That's very different from just about 3 years ago when there were 10 to 20 on many sims. Those sims were sims with shops and in-world stores. Their gone now........and that, is a shame. It's a shame that less land and bandwidth and user time are being sucked up by the less efficient process of trying to find and buy what they want in-world rather than from a website? You seem to be defining the concurrency problem not in terms of how much value users are able to derive from their time logged in, but merely in terms of how much time they spend logged in for whatever reason. If that's a good standard, though, maybe we shouldn't focus at all on the commerce angle and simply petition LL to make it longer and more complicated for people to log out once they get logged in. Probably more of the lost concurrency is due to the loss of camping opportunities than to anything else. I think camping was probably really a great thing for the economy, but not because it put green dots on the map. The green dots just tell you that server resources are being allocated. It doesn't tell you anything at all about the quality of user experience or a willingness to buy anything. >That gives the impression that SL is empty (that's not true but that's the impression it gives)......... It doesn't give me that impression at all. It gives me the impression that there should be less lag, although, oddly enough, there isn't. People are still not facing the connection between mesh and lag because there "shouldn't" be one, but I think by now we should all be able to see that there is one. I don't suggest getting rid of mesh. I suggest - well - something else, hopefully. And that to be followed by a more responsible testing process for new system features. >that drives away people from SL. And when they are driven away you won't sell a thing to them. I don't doubt that people are being driven away from SL. I just don't think they're being driven away by not enough dots on the map. Clusters of dots are clusters of lag as far as I'm concerned, and little else; less and less every year so far, really. But whoever they are, a lot of them are still buying stuff, at least from me, so I make a point of trying to help everyone feel welcome and appreciated. >Why do you think everyone's sales are down? You mean everyone's but mine? Maybe it's because they set their prices not according to consumer demand (as I do), but instead as a reflection of their costs, which, unlike mine (almost nothing) are much higher than they probably need to be. I'm not going to raise my prices to try to compensate for listing enhancements or land costs if it doesn't improve my bottom line. That sounds like a no-brainer, but when I see what people complain about not being able to sell enough of, and how they are trying to sell it, it's clearly not a no-brainer for everyone. Not even close. >The products sold are the same or better quality and the prices are not any higher for the products, there are more people, (yeah more sellers too....but not any more percentage wise than in 2005). It's not the number of merchants that needs to be considered here, but the variety of products. And the Marketplace is an extremely efficient research tool for anyone considering to offer something. For example, I didn't have to poke around in-world to find out what would be competing with my recent cactus kit product. It all popped up on one page on the SLM. The more limited ability of consumers to do comparison shopping in-world could probably have prevented my cheaper (and better?) cactus from being a competitive threat to the other products that popped if I had to sell it in-world. But because of the SLM format, the other cactus people will likely have to offer something better or cheaper, and they are now also faced with a more complex dilemma in terms of deciding on listing enhancements. Sorry, guys - the consumer's demands come before my appreciation of your own interests. In other words, the marketplace is an intrinsically more pro-competition format than the in-world thing. Consumers like that, and who can blame them? But some merchants don't. Which ones? I probably don't need to explain that much further for you to see the point I would make anyway. Let it suffice to say that the more people are getting a slice of the pie, the thinner the slices will be for the fat cats of yesteryear if they happen to get lazy. I think we can all agree, though, that a bigger pie would be nice. Throwing money down the LL in-world commerce hole just isn't going to magically make that happen, though. Consumers are not interested in playing along with that, and there's no reason they should be. >When all the dots you see on the map are newbies who are trying to make up their mind about staying, They don't leave because of inadequate bombardment with in-world marketing for massively overpriced items. >or oldies like me who probably have everything they want (at least, most of what they want but not shopping for anything new), I buy almost nothing myself. But I think I'm part of a larger and larger demographic segment of people who buy stuff mostly just to build other stuff they can sell. If the world should come to be populated mostly by us, I can see that might be a problem. I wish I could say I have a solution to that, but I don't. Possibly, the inevitable reaching of some maximum consumption threshold by users could be made less important by offering users something more expendable for their money, such an a series of experiences rather than just huge piles of stuff. Museums (for some fee) may not sound exciting to a lot of people, but if they were developed and managed properly, I suspect they could be a repeat draw for both newer and older users. >sellers who are scratching their heads wondering why no one is buying much of anything (both in-world and at Market Place), or bots.........you aren't going sell much to any of those. I agree about the bots, certainly. They're just one more reason why I don't think that concurrency stats are a reliable indicator of the general quality of user experience. Camping is a similar problem, but it at least caused money to circulate, which is what it is supposed to do in order to enable production and consumption. Total money spent in-world is at least some kind of a measure of consumer confidence. That is; even if users should happen to be enjoying their experience less, spending more would seem to mean that they value their experience more in at least some way, or that they have greater hopes for the future of the medium. >Yes, LL started this mess (I said that in an earlier post) but the merchants are just as guilty.........they perpetuate it by closing stores in-world (it's too expensive, I can't get search to work, it's laggy, it's........*insert any excuse you choose*). It's a fact of life in SL (and not much different that the same fact of life in real life). I don't see these things as excuses, necessarily. I see them as people facing how the medium has changed and adapting their own behavior to compensate for the change as well as they can. If LL does something to make in-world commerce a less dicey proposition, I intend to take advantage of that if I can. I just don't think the way to do that is to pretend it's possible without LL leading the way with substantive systemic improvements, and I don't think that discouraging customers from going to the marketplace is a good idea either. The money to pay for land has to come from somewhere, regardless of what gets rezzed on it, and if LL has created a situation in which consumers prefer to shop from a website, LL should probably try to fully support both things. Instead, it seems like they think they can just push SLM sales to the grid by making the SLM suck (no, they can't). > Maybe they are but the merchants sure are helping them do that screwing. Sorry, but I still don't understand how merchants making more land and more data resources available for consumers to rez something screws other merchants. If the grid is too big, it's too big, and it isn't, never was, and never should be a merchant's responsibility to fill it in with shops. Especially if they can't be run profitably in any case given all the reasons for which people are not going to come to them. I'm generally sympathetic to users wanting LL to do better in various ways, and I'm sympathetic to merchants wanting help figuring out what their options really are about various things. But our responsibility as merchants is more to consumers than to each other. In that sense I think it's less of a screw to other merchants if I don't open an in-world store I never intended to open in the first place, even before Xstreet, and more of a screw to consumers if I do choose to open that store and then try to generate extra money to sink into that bottomless hole by tweaking my behavior as a merchant in the SLM. My customers are getting as close to the product they want at as close as to the price they are willing to pay as I can offer them, and they're getting it through the SLM. If I open an in-world store, I will no longer be offering them that. That would not be good market capitalism, and it would therefor not be good for the SL economy as a whole.

>Market Place is one big reason SL has become the mundane world for many of us old timers. The "magic" is being thrown away by creators and marketers not being in-world for their business. I'll give this more consideration when you've (instead) successfully directed your energy to getting LL to fix the in-world experience, itself. My own in-world experience, except in the isolated places where I make stuff and load my boxes is mostly just grief and lag at this point, except at those rare moments when things rez well enough for me to be able to see that someone in an "art gallery" is trying to get me to buy women's shoes for a price far higher than what I would be paid by the hour to make them myself. And I mostly don't see the shoes anyway, but just a picture of them. What's that about? If I want to just see a picture of something I'm not going to buy anyway, doesn't it make more sense for me to wait a fraction of a second for the picture to load on the Marketplace website, rather than having to log in and teleport to a place where the posted picture takes 10 or 15 seconds to rez, pointlessly eating up one prim of data (and, gradually, my life; a non-renewable resource)? Lag or no lag, grief or no grief, The Marketplace, it seems, is the only thing that has prevented the in-world experience from becoming basically a big trip to a bunch of shopping malls full of the same stuff I don't want to buy, even if I can actually see it rez. That even the vacant lands are still unable to properly support even the adjacent data from abutting sims doesn't seem like a merely economic challenge best met by putting in more shopping malls. But maybe I'm wrong? OK... how? That being what it is, I really don't know why people are buying my stuff on the Marketplace anyway. Maybe just because it's low-prim and low-lag? I can't think it would be just the low price, or they would just be buying the cheapest stuff I have (that's not the pattern). Wherever they're putting it is probably about as far away as possible from the lag farms that in-world merchants have poured over the surface of SL like a corn-based maple syrup substitute in order to coax the odd Linden Dollar out of any lost n00bs who should not manage to make their way straight to a public sandbox to make their own houses, cars, guns, shoes, or hair. >If you are a Market Place only seller, and you go bust I won't shed a tear...... Why would I go bust if I don't have to rent huge chunks of land just to display items that actually are faster to get a visual sense of by looking at snapshots on the Marketplace? The people for whom I don't shed a tear are the ones going bust with in-world shops who think they have a greater right to profit than I do just because they pay more to push their own kipple in-world, especially to the extent that they're less concerned with their own product quality and more concerned with what they contradict themselves by saying is competition from the Marketplace by mostly very inferior products... and especially especially those who continue turning a net loss in-world while ambiguously suggesting that their land costs should be subsidized by crippling or shutting down the Marketplace. >nor will I be sympathic when your Magic Box screws up your deliveries. My magic boxes don't screw up deliveries. The Marketplace system, itself, screws up deliveries regardless of what's connected to it, and I believe that it does so intentionally, in order to drive merchants back in-world to boost demand for land. >Go open a place in-world. Worst advice ever, thanks. Other than maybe making you dislike us less, what's in it for us? Anything?

The best way to start fresh is with a new user account... ... in a different virtual world.

Heads up, Linden. For every user that makes an announcement like the above, there must inevitably be many others who say nothing at all. Check your numbers. Am I right or wrong?

What's frustrating to me is not the idea that it cannot be fixed. What's frustrating to me is that it obviously CAN be fixed, and yet no one is bothering to fix it.

> However, suddenly, the box is not synching properly with the unassociated items page. I hear you on that, but it's not actually a box problem. A lot of things that we are being encouraged to think of as box problems are problems with things with which the box is connected, which otherwise have nothing to do with box function. Moreover, what you describe is a problem which many of us with boxes have been having specifically since the very day that DD was deployed. As coincidences go, I think we both know that I can show that to be the tip of the iceberg. Someone still seems to be on a mission to convince you that the boxes, themselves, are defective. They aren't defective, and that they can function perfectly if simply allowed to do so has been proven.

>That is weird the post was removed. I don't find that to be weird at all, based on my previous experience with this forum. What's weird to me is that this thread hasn't also been removed, and the person who posted it banned. Or has he been banned (yet)?

>I think it is time to start thinking about plans that no longer include relying on the SLMP or in world search Yes. Such as simply rebuilding Xstreet for example. There's nothing redundant about this idea as long as the SLM significantly fails to provide what Xstreet provided.

>Zoning compliance? I'm out of the loop lately and haven't been following, is this a rumour? Oops... well I guess it is now.

> which in and of itself, if working well, will cause even further erosion of land revenues. Which they could worry about if DD were somehow accidentally deployed without creating a bunch of other problems, or at least first coded in order to support breedables, etc. With the planned box shutoff, the DD deployment would actually be a further downgrade in Marketplace service. Please note that the box shutoff date continues only to be extended, not canceled.

Well, don't worry. When Direct Delivery finally gets deployed, it's going to fix all that.

Maybe they're gearing up the categories for their big up-coming push to zoning compliance. Better think twice before buying that copymod gazebo kit, huh.

>Given the extent of the MP problems, are we giving incompetence too much credit, and that perhaps the MP was sabotaged? I wouldn't say "sabotaged", exactly. I would say "designed and implemented to gradually produce a condition of lesser utility, specifically to eliminate Xstreet as a perceived detriment to land revenues, but while doing the legal minimum necessary to appear to continue providing something like the service which Xstreet provided". Given that enough people now either suspect this or suspect something appreciably similar, it should probably occur to Rodvik that even the appearance of such is a potentially dangerous thing to allow to continue, regardless of who is really responsible for creating this perception or why. That is: his choices at this point are either to fix the marketplace or to draw more and more suspicion onto LL by not fixing it.

>All recent issues with LL seem to be related to network problems that may be out of LL's sphere of control. Because SL and the SLM can only communicate through one tiny fiberoptic line that can be chewed through by a cockroach? I can understand why my viewer might not be able to log me in to SL. But if I can log in to the Marketplace, and yet the Marketplace can't even pull my balance from SL, the problem would seem to be specifically with user accounts, not with the grid... am I right?

>should have been in feb........... Don't worry, though. I bet they'll have the "wedding" promo ready on about 5 July.

>At this point in time, you need an in world store. No, really I don't. And I realize the fact that I still don't, in spite of everything that has been tried to persuade me that I do, must be a bit of annoyance to the person whose job it has been to convince me of such. Sorry, Linden - you'll either have to straight up kill the Marketplace, or I'm going to keep using it.

Well I'm glad to see that they did fix it while I was out having a life. I appreciate this because it saves me the trouble or reducing all my prices to zero and trying to persuade others to do likewise.

"It is time for Rodvik to start cleaning house, I believe, and the sooner the better". I think he may finally have begun to do that just in the last month or so. A lot of what you're seeing at this point is probably due to his failure to remove one specific person on 13 September.

Today: 1) Impossible to log in to Second Life. 2) Marketplace website shows no balance for my account. Really, Linden? Really?

>Check my profile to see how this one-day critic has heavily invested in in-world commerce, the go in-world to make sure. I went to far, and I apologize. Please don't take this too personally. It happens a lot, I'm afraid.

These are strange days, indeed, when I find myself wanting to defend LL against criticism from Dart. Not that I totally disagree with every comment posted by everyone on this thread. I just think it probably says something about the state of SL as a medium that people are suddenly agreeing and disagreeing about different stuff for a change. The marketplace should certainly be more work-safe and school-safe than any of the actual viewers, although the marketplace may be accessible in places where the current banner might be inappropriately suggestive for work or school, and that might be something worth considering in future promotions. Singapore, for example, comes to mind as place where some users would not continue to use the marketplace after logging on and being surprised to have a co-worker or fellow student spot the reclining female figure. Not that I think that's the best explanation for why my own sales have been down a bit since the promotion started. Even if I thought it were, I'd still have to applaud the promotion as a substantial step in the right direction, more generally. >The whole promotion thing is kind of a joke. There's a finite amount of money being spent, and promotions take money away from daily sales and regular selling stable items. I do have to disagree with this part. Madstyle was a joke. But there isn't a finite amount of money being spent. Partly because the amount of money flowing into and out of SL is not constant, and partly because the amounts of L money being spent daily or weekly can include either a portion of the total volume of currency, or it can include some amount that exceeds that, as L currency can be spent repeatedly before it finally gets destroyed in some way. Whoever is spending money in SL, in the marketplace or in-world, and no matter where they're getting the money, this money is a microscopic fraction of what is being spent on anything that might be competing (my favorite examples being, drugs, prostitution and gambling, naturally). How much money gets spent here is at least partly a function of where else it might be getting spent in RL. But, utlimately, if money is spent sooner in the marketplace rather than later, this is better for both merchants and for LL. Promotions stand to cause at least some money to be spent sooner, if the promotions make it easier for shoppers to find something they want in fewer clicks. I support the promotions process, at least in principle, for this reason. That said, there are clearly better ways and worse ways to administer a promotion. I think I've already outlined some of the better ways elsewhere, and I think that LL is so far conforming more to my own model, rather than less. Not that I assume the're following my own model at all; just that I think they're making some better-reasoned decisions than they had been. >I don't know if it's someones job security or if they don't understand that in a declining "economy" taking sales from normal items results in a less stable marketplace in general, with these back to back commercials. Well, there would seem to be little harm in experimentally destabilizing a marketplace which is already losing money. That may not be happening, of course. But replacing one type of instability with a different type of instability can actually be an improvement sometimes, even if the total medium is managing to pay its own way as a rule. Even if we might prefer no promotions at all, better promotions rather than worse promotions should give us a lot less to which to object. That this seems to be happening at all is at least a sign that the whole promotions issue is being treated more seriously than before, so if the real data should finally cause someone to conclude that all promotions are bad, there's at least some hope of such a conclusion eventually being reached (again, not that I think promotions are bad; my immediate point here is about the decisions process behind promotions, not the promotions, themselves). But what we really need to consider is not whether random promotions are helpful or harmful, but whether intelligently planned promotions would probably be helpful or harmful. I think that they could be very helpful. My reasoning is that if shoppers are already searching for something, a promotion can both help them get to it in fewer clicks, and also help merchants more deliberately provide both that thing, and related things which might also be of interest to the same shoppers. I don't have any data on how many shoppers have searched for "masquerade", and I don't expect LL to provide such data, necessarily. But it's easier for me to believe that "masquerade" is viable category of things for which some subtantial number of shoppers have been searching and not quite getting what they were after, than to believe the same thing about something called "madstyle" or "mad men". Maybe they can do better next time, sure. I'm under the impression that they're presently trying to figure how to do even better. In the meantime, any better than madstyle is... well... better, at least. If their choice was between A) running the probably very safe "masquerade" promotion at least until they come up with something else or B) continuing with the "madstyle" promotion until the whole promotions decision process has been perfected, then I have to agree with LL's decision. I know for a fact that plenty of people do want to buy the kind of stuff that's being listed in the masquerade promotion, and that least some merchants would have been capable of offering more of it than they otherwise would have, if they should choose to make maximum use of the promotional opportunity. Whether this means a net gain or a net loss to any specific merchants or even to LL in the final analysis is still a fair question, but I think this is closer than "madstyle" was to the correct model of promotions, assuming that there are going to be promotions anyway. Assuming that any given promotion is good for some merchants and not good for others, though, there's no reason that promotions, as a complete process, must necessarily destabilize more than they stimulate. If promotions are changed often enough and merchants are given the maximum possible amount of time to prepare for them, then maybe the system can be essentially fair, or, perhaps, at least fair enough that the value of total stimulus offsets any uneveness in demand for specific product types which the promitions produce as whole. If there's a promotion for "shoes", for example, I won't get much out of that. But if, during that, there's an advanced announcement for something like a promotion on "rocks", that would give me a chance to focus on getting geared up rather than focus on how to work around the immediate promotion in order to squeeze some kind of business out of it. People who don't want to see any promotions at all might be right that even a properly engineered system for optimizing promotions would still produce either more total problems to the average merchant, or a greater degree of unfairness that ethically outweighs any additional sales. But until I have at least seen it tried, I'm just not convinced.

A solution is obviously for Second Life to start developing its own brands and brand culture. I have toyed with the idea of "Wicker Man Cola", since this is something that would never happen in RL, but I thought that might be legally actionable, so I haven't followed through with that. Something like "Cremaster Soda", I think might possible, since no one owns the word "Cremaster". We'd probably just have to get permission to use the field emblem and/or any other kinds of existing brand indicators. Given the way that corporate emblems and imagery are used in the Cremaster movies, it seems like there might be some wiggle room from the Barney office if we ask. I think these products would look great labeled with flavors like "potato", "bees wax" and "kelp". If nothing else, I can try to introduce my default brand, "Linear Cola". No need to explain that, I hope. I already introduced "Biero Malstruta", which an Esperanto beer import, but it never really caught on. Really, I thought more avatars would like to try something that tastes like the opposite of an ostritch.

>I wasn't quoting you at all & in fact, was replying to someone else's comment. Understood. I just meant to preven anyone reading from extracting the word "stupid" as an insult to LL, whch, in this case, it is not intended to be; only the specific thing that they did was stupid in terms of the result it momentarily produced. I hadn't meant the commentary as a whole to seem to be directed to you at all, but responses are always shown as being toward a particular person, so I am sorry about that. I did cut and paste your text, though, so I credited you with it out of habit. Your points about Breedables/Meroos have been spot on. The only point I had intended to make is that, as sinister as I tend to think a lot of things either are or might be, I don't want anyone assuming that I think the Breedables/Meroos thing is anything like a good example of something I would point to as showing the influence of Malefactor Linden.