Josh Susanto

If you're in the US, you can file against them in small claims with no lawyer. If they are as responsive to that as they are to other things, they won't even show up or send anyone, and the case will almost inevitably go in your favor, and very quickly. If they neither pay nor show up to explain why, they will become subject to arrest for that. I took my last US employer to small claims court for a comparable amount with no lawyer. It took the system over a year to get him to pay up, but he finally paid up. Your favorable outcome will likely only be a lot quicker. Judges are mostly not totally stupid. When you're wrong you're wrong and there's just no way around it. And, if the situation is as described, they are wrong.

[but there will be plenty of bad builders that will compensate for that benefit.] I'm counting on that. I'm counting on a period of massive mesh disillusionment as an opportunity to get my own mesh chops together, using money from the inevitable revival of interest in decent sculpts. Laugh while you can.

I actually agree with LL's resistance to advertising as long as they are ahead of their competitors, provided that it is a considered strategic decision and not merely an expression of complacency. I have pointed out elsewhere that the concurrency stats do not reflect people leaving SL so much as they reflect less over-all use by those who are using it., regardless of whether the total number of regular users is increasing or decreasing. If people are using SL more efficiently, they may not need to use it as much, or they may choose to use it more for the same reason. I, for example, spend more time sculpting when things are working correctly, and I spend most of my sculpting time logged off; I imagine that something similar would be true for a lot of other content developers, including some of the most harcore users. (Also...) If people have less money in RL, they may turn to SL more frequently for cheap entertainment, or they may do so less, depending on whether they need to spend RL money in SL to have a good time. People who find or lose regular jobs may end up having more time for SL or less time for SL when that happens, and just the opposite situation might eventually result from that over some period of unemployment. How the SL economy relates to the RL economy is a really complicated question, but I submit that if LL manages to maintain ANY profitability both in growth quarters and in recessions, they shouldn't be in a big hurry to change anything about the way they are doing things unless there is some very clear and specific threat of mass defection to competing services. Explosions of use by competitors are clearly consequent to advertising campaigns, and may therefore be understood as potentially dependent upon advertising in terms of sustaining those concurrency numbers. If they at some point have to cut their advertising budget, they may lose concurrency. LL may have other problems, but they at least don't really have that problem. To reiterate/clarify, though... my essential gripe about the apparent plummeting of sales after system updates is 1) that LL actively dismisses the possibility of any causal relationship by dismissing any possible chronological correlation 2) continues to withhold previously existing analytic tools which could otherwise be used to address the issue scientifically and 3) thwarts data utility in a way that vexes users attempting to provide the needed statistical analysis, themselves. If LL could just say "our update screwed up your sales, and we are sorry", I think most of the whiners would just drop it. But, instead, LL hides all the globes and tells us the Earth is flat. I mean, really, guys... "WTF"?

[if they're getting removed it means someone at LL agrees with the report.] OR it means that someone simply has not bothered to disagree with the report.

[A typical "Beta" period for a brand new (nearly) from scratch product like Marketplace would be much longer than one week.] I bet I can keep a bull in a china shop that long... if I never blink.

I finally put challenges to flaggers right in my listings, telling them right up front that I would not tolerate spurious flagging and would take action. That, and a few other things, seemed to help a lot.

My apologies. I somewhat misunderstood the graph after having had it incorrectly explained by some of the pertinent text. If I understand correctly (?), the graph does not show either how many users or how many avatars use SL in the course of a day, as the accompanying analysis seems to suggest. What is shows is merely the "average" (median) number of people logged on over the courses of the individual dates graphed. That is: it is not necessarily any more a reflection of the number of daily users than it is a reflection of the number of hours of daily use by the average user. Moreover: it does not show that fewer people are using SL; it only shows that SL is receiving less total use, which is not necessarily inconsistent with an increase in total number of daily users. People don't need to stop using SL to produce this graphic result; they only need to spend less time logged in... ... and time logged in could mean anything from building and buying to simply not bothering to log out. The graph means SOMETHING. But what, exactly? When we eliminate what it does not (necessarily) mean, what is left?

To try to be fair to LL, I should point out that changes in user concurrency presumably also reflect whether or not someone is using alt accounts, and how often. Alt accounts are common enough that their use or disuse, alone, could explain, theoretically, in principle, most of the variation in the stats as shown... IF multiple accounts have not been resolved as representing single users prior to producing the graph. Has user data been consolidated across accounts for the purposes of the graph? What are some variables we might choose to associate with alt use, and when should we expect them to be reflected in such a graph?

I can't tell people that it will be more profitable or less profitable to sell with or without specific permissions on specific items. What I can tell you is that selling with full perms will make your customers happy and your competition unhappy. All else being equal, who should you prefer to please?

I think this problem has been provided to us recently in order to sell us on a solution in the form of direct delivery.

[Like Carnies bend the sight on the rifles in their shooting games, eh?] No, Carnies are a lot more subtle than Lindens.

[ there has NEVER been a time where a group of merchants did not claim there was a slump.] But there WAS a time when the claim could be disproved with metrics, if it were not valid. And now LL no longer provides metrics as such, and actually makes it extra difficult to produce them, which makes me wonder what it is they don't want us to see.

my spam is still the best https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/keyword-spam-texture-prim/1857316

moreover... please DO modify and resell my items there's nothing ridiculous about good product development

it has happened to me, but not for a long time as far as i know the best thing to do is simply subject the seller to open ridicule, which is also not against the rules if done correctly OTOH, i consider that if someone has added some kind of value to one of my products before reselling it, they are selling something i didn't really create, so the price and permissions are really not any of my concern

SL users in Saudi Arabia or what?

for my part... if i can't trust someone to fix existing inventory and delivery problems, i don't see any reason to encourage them to become more involved with my personal inventory just a thought, eh

send me the texture and i'll send you a better barrel and i won't make it mysterious

I would expect sales to be down in the US during said period, but half or less of my sales usually come from the US anyway. I assume that most nations have a similar tax season, but I don't know what all the tax days are. My own sales are dismally slow today, but they had actually increased for a couple of days after the Japan earthquake after a more gadual increase in early March. Then they dropped sharply right in the middle of March and were making a bit of a comeback until a little over a week ago, when they dipped again and have not come up. If we had any reliable metrics at all (anymore), we could then argue about whether or not recurrent events, such as various national tax due dates and/or LL system updates, affect or do not affect sales. But until then, LL seems to content to leave the door open to various types of criticism against which they could have better defended themselves when we had some graphs... better defended, that is, assuming that the position were at all defensible.

[Why do they mess up their own spreadsheet?] Failing to mess it up would seem to defeat the only purpose yet plausibly hypothesized for removing the previously analytic tools. I therefore am compelled to point out that this further supports the sole hypothesis; that LL does not want us to be able to effectively track changes in market behavior in a way that would allow statistically indisputable criticism of their changes to the system.

I expect mesh will be more effective at replacing some types of items than at replacing others. I'm not that worried about it. In fact, I'm eager for mesh to come out so that everyone can shrug and go back to buying my sculpts.

you can always at least blur it for free in Lunapic :-/

[your google skills are good, but did you notice that page was already linked in the mentioned resource above? heh] Yes, thanks. I wanted to show how to find things without opening the door to demotivational efforts by people with unrelated issues.

The problem occurred in multiple regions and multiple accounts on both Phoenix and Imprudence. I haven't tested the problem textures again today yet. If I post one of them somewhere, should the problem also post with it ? I'm not technical enough to know how that works, but if that's how it works, how close could we then be to identifying the problem?

Don't get discouraged by people who assume they have better creative ideas than you do simply because they have more technical experience. Finding such things has become second-nature to me, but I still know jack diddlysquat about computer technology, and it seems that even to people who should be able to give you an easy answer, it either isn't at all obvious to them, or they simply choose to be difficult because it provides them with a tiny portion of the feeling of control that otherwise feels utterly lacking in some other part or parts of their life. It's really amazing what kind of stuff you'll find if you set Google image search to 1024x1024. http://www.google.com.co/images?as_q=templates&um=1&hl=es&rlz=1C1SNNT_enCO408CO408&biw=1639&bih=720&output=search&tbm=isch&btnG=Buscar+con+Google&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_sitesearch=&safe=off&as_st=y&tbs=isz:ex,iszw:1024,iszh:1024 With a little patience, you'll scroll down to this... http://www.google.com.co/imgres?imgurl=http://annotoole.com/CMFF/CMFF-Master_Template-Lower.jpg&imgrefurl=http://annotoole.com/CMFF/&usg=__qy0yXgl07C2BNx4T5tVctaMg2T0=&h=1024&w=1024&sz=253&hl=es&start=260&zoom=1&tbnid=88ctWLUQJchPRM:&tbnh=121&tbnw=121&ei=6HCjTeiNK82YOrXIhDU&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dtemplates%26um%3D1%26hl%3Des%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG%26rlz%3D1C1SNNT_enCO408CO408%26biw%3D1639%26bih%3D720%26as_st%3Dy%26tbs%3Disz:ex,iszw:1024,iszh:1024%26tbm%3Disch1%2C3781&chk=sbg&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=1018&vpy=160&dur=118&hovh=224&hovw=224&tx=98&ty=123&oei=5XCjTae6KIOK0QGZ0bSfBQ&page=7&ndsp=44&ved=1t:429,r:40,s:260&biw=1639&bih=720 And get this... http://annotoole.com/CMFF/